Moses was pallid, and his skin was covered by a sheen of fine sweat and dust; his eyes were huge and flickered about, staring. I glanced at Nebogipfel. Behind his goggles, his large eyes were unblinking as he surveyed that awful carnage; and I wondered if he had begun to believe that I had transported him — not into the past — but to some lower Circle of Hell.
[14]
The Rota-Mine
We struggled through the last few dozen yards to the walls of Imperial College; and there we found, to my dismay, our way blocked by a soldier, masked and with a rifle. This fellow — stout-hearted, but evidently quite without imagination — had stayed at his post, while the gutters of the street before him had turned red with blood. His eyes became huge, behind their protective discs of glass, at the sight of Nebogipfel.
He did not recognize me, and he adamantly would not let us pass without the proper authority.
There was another whistle in the air; we all cringed — even the soldier clutched his weapon to his chest like a totemic shield — but, this time, the shell fell some distance from us; there was a flash, a smash of glass, a shudder of the ground.
Moses stepped up to the soldier with his fists clenched. His distress at the bombing seemed to have metamorphosed into anger. “Did you hear that, you confounded uniformed flunky?” he bellowed. “It’s all chaos anyway! What are you guarding? What’s the point anymore? Can’t you see what’s happening?”
The guard pointed his rifle at Moses’s chest. “I’m warning you, chappy—”
“No, he doesn’t see.” I interposed myself between Moses and the soldier; I was dismayed by Moses’s evident lack of control, regardless of his distress.
Nebogipfel said, “We may find another way. If the College walls are breached—”
“No,” I said with determination. “This is the route I know.” I stepped up to the soldier. “Look, Private, I don’t have authority to pass you — but I have to assure you I’m important for the War Effort.”
Behind the soldier’s mask, his eyes narrowed.
“Make a call,” I insisted. “Send for Dr. Wallis. Or Professor Gödel. They’ll vouch for me — I’m sure of it! Please check, at least.”
At length — and with his gun pointed at us — the trooper backed into his doorway, and lifted a light telephone receiver from the wall.
It took him several minutes to complete the call. I waited with mounting anguish; I could not have borne to be kept away from an escape into time by such a pettifogging obstacle — not after having made it through so much! At last, grudgingly, he said: “You’re to go to Dr. Wallis’s office.” And with that our simple, brave soldier stood aside, and we stepped out of the chaos of that street and into the comparative calm of Imperial College.
“We’ll report to Wallis,” I told him. “Don’t worry. Thank you…!”
We entered that maze of enclosed corridors I have described earlier.
Moses let out a grunt of relief. “Just our luck,” he said, “to come up against the only soldier still at his post in all of confounded London! The hopeless little fool—”
“How can you be so contemptuous?” I snapped. “He is a common man, doing the job he’s been given as best he can, in the middle of all this — a madness not of his making! What more do you want from a man? Eh?”
“Huh! How about imagination? Flair, intelligence, initiative—”
We had come to a halt and stood nose to nose.
“Gentlemen,” Nebogipfel said. “Is this the time for such navel-gazing?”
Moses and I stared at the Morlock, and at each other. In Moses’s face, I saw a sort of vulnerable fear which he masked with this anger — looking into his eyes was like peering into a cage at a terrified animal — and I nodded at him, trying to transmit reassurance.
The moment passed, and we moved apart.
“Of course,” I said in an attempt to break the tension, “you never do any navel-gazing, do you, Nebogipfel?”
“No,” the Morlock said easily. “For one thing I do not have a navel.”
We hurried on. We reached the central office block and set off in search of Wallis’s room. We moved through carpeted corridors, past rows of brass-plated doors. The lights were still burning — I imagined the College had its own, secured supply of electricity and the carpet deadened our footsteps. We saw no one about. Some of the office doors were open, and there were signs of hasty departure: a spilled cup of tea, a cigarette burning down in an ash tray, papers scattered across floors.
It was hard to believe that carnage reigned only a few dozen yards away!
We came to an opened door; a bluish flicker emanated from it. When we reached the doorway, the single occupant — it was Wallis — was perched on the corner of the desk. “Oh! it’s you. I’m not sure I expected to see you again.” He wore his wire spectacles, and a tweed jacket over a woolen tie; he had one epaulet attached and his gas-mask on the desk beside him; he was evidently in the midst of preparations to evacuate the building with the rest, but he had let himself be distracted. “This is a desperate business,” he said. “Desperate!” Then he looked at us more closely — it was as if he was seeing us for the first time. “Good God, you’re in a state!”
We moved into the room, and I could see that the blue flickering came from the screen of a small, glass-fronted box. The screen showed a view down a stretch of river, presumably the Thames, in rather grainy detail.
Moses leaned forward, with his hands on his knees, the better to see the little set. “The focus is pretty poor,” he said, “but it’s quite a novelty.”
Despite the urgency of the moment, I too was intrigued by the device. This was evidently the picture-carrying development of the phonograph which Filby had mentioned.
Wallis snapped a switch on his desk, and the picture changed; it was the same in its broad details — the river, winding through built-over landscape — but the lighting was a little brighter. “Look here,” he said, “I’ve been watching this film over and over since it happened. I really can’t quite believe my eyes… Well,” he said, “if we can dream up such things, I suppose they can too!”
“Who?” Moses asked.
“The Germans, of course. The blessed Germans! Look: this view is from a camera fixed up at the top of the Dome. We’re looking east, beyond Stepney you can see the curve of the river. Now: look here — in she comes—”
We saw a flying machine, a black, cross-shaped craft, sweeping low over the shining river. It came in from the east.
“You see, it’s not easy to Bomb a Dome,” Wallis said. “Well, that’s the point, of course. The whole thing’s pretty much solid masonry, and it’s all held together by gravity as much as by steel; any small breaches tend to heal themselves…”
Now the flying machine dropped a small package towards the water. The image was grainy, but the package looked cylindrical, and it was glinting in the sunlight, as if spinning as it fell.
Wallis went on, “The fragments from an air-burst will simply hail off the concrete, by and large. Even a Bomb placed, somehow, directly against the face of the Dome won’t harm it, in ordinary instances, because so much of the blast goes off into the air — do you see?
“But there is a way. I knew it! The Rota-Mine — or Surface Torpedo… I wrote up a proposal myself, but it never progressed, and I had no energy — not with this DChronW business as well… Where the Dome meets the river, you see, the carapace extends beneath the surface of the water. The purpose is to keep out attack by submersibles and so forth. Structurally the whole thing is like a dam.
“Now — if you can place your Bomb against the part of the Dome beneath the water…” Wallis spread his large, cultured hands to mime it. “Then the water will help you, you see; it contains the blast and directs the energy inward, into the structure of the Dome.”
On the screen, the package — the German Bomb — struck the water. And it bounced, in a mist of silvery spray, and leapt on, over the surface of the water, towards the Dome. The fly
ing machine tipped to its right and swept away, quite graceful, leaving its Rota-Mine to stride on towards the Dome in successive parabolic arcs.
“But how to deliver a Bomb, accurately, to such an inaccessible place?” Wallis mused. “You can’t simply drop the thing. Sticks end up scattered all over the shop… If you drop a mine even from a modest height of, say, fifteen thousand feet, a crosswind of just ten miles an hour will create two hundred yards’ inaccuracy.
“But then it came to me,” he said. “Give it a bit of back-spin, and your Bomb could bounce over the water — one can work out the laws of ricochet with a bit of experiment and make it all quite accurate… Did I tell you about my experiments at home on this subject, with my daughter’s marbles?
“The Mine bounces its way to the foot of the Dome, and then slides down its face, under the water, until it reaches the required depth… And — there it is. A perfect placement!” He beamed, and with his shock of white hair and those uneven glasses, he looked quite avuncular.
Moses squinted at the imprecise images. “But this Bomb looks to me as if it’s going to fail… Its bounces will surely leave it short… ah.”
Now a plume of smoke, brilliant white even in the poor image, had burst from the back of the Rota-Mine: The Bomb leapt across the water, as if invigorated.
Wallis smiled. “Those Germans — you have to admire them. Even I never thought of that little wrinkle…”
The Rota-Mine, its rocket-engine still blazing, passed beneath the curve of the Dome and out of sight of the camera. And then the image shuddered, and the screen filled with a formless blue light.
Barnes Wallis sighed. “They’ve done for us, it looks like!”
“What about the German shelling?” Moses asked.
“The guns?” Wallis scarcely sounded interested. “Probably hundred-and-five-mil Light-Gun 42s, dropped in by paratroop units. All in advance of the Invasion by Sea and Air that’s to follow, I don’t doubt.” He took off his glasses and began to polish them on the end of his tie. “We’re not finished yet. But this is a desperate business. Very bad indeed…”
“Dr. Wallis,” I said, “what about Gödel?”
“Hum? Who?” He looked at me from large, fatigue-rimmed eyes. “Oh, Gödel. What about him?”
“Is he here?”
“Yes, I should think so. In his office.”
Moses and Nebogipfel made for the door; Moses indicated, urgently, that I should follow. I held up my hand.
“Dr. Wallis — won’t you come with us?”
“Whatever for?”
“We might be stopped before we reach Gödel. We must find him.”
He laughed and thrust his glasses back over his nose. “Oh, I don’t think security and any of that matters very much any more. Do you? Anyway — here.” He reached up to his lapel and tugged free the numbered button that was clipped there. “Take this — tell them I’m authorizing you — if you meet anyone mad enough to be at his post.”
“You might be surprised,” I said with feeling.
“Hum?” He turned back to his television set. Now it was showing a random assortment of scenes, evidently taken from a series of cameras about the Dome: I saw flying machines take to the air like black gnats, and lids in the ground which were drawn back to reveal a host of Juggernaut machines which toiled out of the ground, spitting steam, to draw up in a line which stretched, it seemed to me, from Leytonstone to Bromley; and all this great horde pressed forward, breaking up the earth, to meet the invading Germans. But then Wallis pressed a switch, and these fragments of Armageddon were banished, as he made his record of the Rota-Mine run through again.
“A desperate business,” he said. “We could have had it first! But what a marvelous development… even I wasn’t sure if it could be done.” His gaze was locked on the screen, his eyes hidden by the flickering, meaningless reflection of the images.
And that was how I left him; with an odd impulse towards pity, I closed his office door softly behind me.
[15]
The Time-Car
Kurt Gödel stood at the uncurtained window of his office, his arms folded. “At least the gas hasn’t come yet,” he said without preamble. “I once witnessed the result of a gas attack, you know. Delivered by English bombers on Berlin, as it happens. I came down the Unter der Linden and along the Sieges Allee, and there I came upon it… So undignified! The body corrupts so quickly, you know.” He turned and smiled sadly at me. “Gas is very democratic, do you not think?”
I walked up to him. “Professor Gödel. Please… We know you have some Plattnerite. I saw it.”
For answer, he walked briskly to a cupboard. As he passed a mere three feet from Nebogipfel, Gödel did no more than glance at him.; of all the men I met in 1938, Gödel showed the coolest reaction to the Morlock. Gödel took a glass jar from the cupboard; it contained a substance that sparkled green, seeming to retain the light.
Moses, breathed, “Plattnerite.”
“Quite so. Remarkably easy to synthesize from Carolinum — if you know the recipe, and have access to a fission pile for irradiation.” He looked mischievous. “I wanted you to see it,” he said to me; “I hoped you would recognize it. I find it delightfully easy to tweak the nose of these pompous Englishmen, with their Directorates of This and That, who could not recognize the treasure under their own noses! And now it will be your passage out of this particular Vale of Tears — yes?”
“I hope so,” I said fervently. “Oh, I hope so.”
“Then come!” he shouted. “To the CDV workshop.” And he held the Plattnerite up in the air like a beacon, and led us out of the office.
Once more we entered that labyrinth of concrete corridors. Wallis had been right: the guards had universally left their posts, and, although we came across one or two white-coated scientists or technicians hurrying through the corridors, they made no attempt to impede us, nor even to inquire where we were going.
And then — whump! — a fresh shell hit.
The electric lights died, and the corridor rocked, throwing me to the ground. My face collided with the dusty floor, and I felt warm blood start from my nose — my face must have presented a fine sight by now — and I felt a light body, I think Nebogipfel’s, tumble against my leg.
The shuddering of the foundations ceased within a few seconds. The lights did not return.
I was taken by a fit of coughing, for concrete dust was thick on the air, and I suffered a remnant of my old terror of darkness. Then I heard the fizz of a match — I caught a brief glimpse of Moses’s broad face — and I saw him apply the flame to a candle wick. He held up the candle, cupping the flame in his hands, and its yellow light spread in a pool through the corridor. He smiled at me. “I lost the knapsack, but I took the precaution of loading some of those supplies you recommended in my pockets,” he said.
Gödel got to his feet, a little stiffly; he was (I saw with gratitude) cradling the Plattnerite against his chest, and the jar was unbroken. “I think that one must have been in the grounds of the College. We must be grateful to be alive; for these walls could easily have collapsed in on us.”
So we progressed through those gloomy corridors. We were impeded twice by fallen masonry, but with a little effort we were able to clamber through. By now I was disoriented and quite lost; but Gödel — I could see him ahead of me, with the Plattnerite jar glowing under one arm — made his way quite confidently.
Within a few more minutes we reached the annex Wallis had called the CDV Development Division. Moses lifted his candle up, and the light glimmered about the big workshop. Save for the lack of lights, and one long, elaborate crack which ran diagonally across the ceiling, the workshop remained much as I remembered it. Engine parts, spare wheels and tracks, cans of oil and fuel, rags and overalls — all the paraphernalia of a workshop — lay about the floor; chains dangled from pulleys fixed to brackets on the ceiling, casting long, complex shadows. In the center of the floor I saw a half-drunk mug of tea, apparently set down with some
care, with a thin layer of concrete dust scumming the liquid’s surface.
The one almost-complete Time-Car sat in the center of the floor, its bare gunmetal finish shining in the light of Moses’s candle. Moses stepped up to the vehicle and ran a hand along the rim of its boxy passenger compartment. “And this is it?”
I grinned. “The pinnacle of 1930s technology. A ’Universal Carrier,’ I think Wallis called it.”
“Well,” Moses said, “it’s scarcely an elegant design.”
“I don’t think elegance is the point,” I said: “This is a weapon of war: not of leisure, exploration or science.”
Gödel moved to the Time-Car, set the Plattnerite jar on the floor, and made to open one of the steel flasks welded to the hull of the vehicle. He wrapped his hands around the screw-cap lid and grunted with exertion, but could not budge it. He stepped back, panting. “We must prime the frame with Plattnerite,” he said. “Or—”
Moses set his candle on a shelf and cast about in the piles of tools, and emerged with a large adjustable wrench. “Here,” he said. “Let me try with this.” He closed the clamps about the cap’s rim and, with a little effort, got the cap unstuck.
Gödel took the Plattnerite jar and tipped the stuff into the flask. Moses moved around the Time-Car, unfixing the caps of the remaining flasks.
I made my way to the rear of the vehicle, where I found a door, held in place by a metal pin. I removed the pin, folded the door downwards, and clambered into the cabin. There were two wooden benches, each wide enough to take two or three people, and a single bucket seat at the front, facing a slit window. I sat in the driver’s bucket seat.
Before me was a simple steering wheel — I rested my hands on it — and a small control panel, fitted with dials, switches, levers and knobs; there were more levers close to the floor, evidently to be operated by the feet. The controls had a raw, unfinished look; the dials and switches were not labeled, and wires and mechanical transmission levers protruded from the rear of the panel.
The Time Ships Page 25
