by H. G. Wells
He put the torn wrapper with his unanswered letters and opened out the newspaper.
The title of the paper was printed in large slightly ornamental black-green letters that might have come from a kindred fount to that responsible for the address. But, as he read it, it was the Evening Standard! Or, at least, it was the “Even Standrd.” “Silly,” said Brownlow. “It’s some damn Irish paper. Can’t spell—anything—these Irish…”
He had, I think, a passing idea, suggested perhaps by the green wrapper and the green ink, that it was a lottery stunt from Dublin.
Still, if there was anything to read he meant to read it. He surveyed the front page. Across this ran a streamer headline: “WILTON BORING REACHES SEVEN MILES: SUCCES ASSURED.”
“No,” said Brownlow. “It must be oil… Illiterate lot these oil chaps—leave out the ‘s’ in ‘success.’ ”
He held the paper down on his knee for a moment, reinforced himself by a drink, took and lit a second cigarette, and then leant back in his chair to take a dispassionate view of any oil-share pushing that might be afoot.
But it wasn’t an affair of oil. It was, it began to dawn upon him, something stranger than oil. He found himself surveying a real evening newspaper, which was dealing, so far as he could see at the first onset, with the affairs of another world.
He had for a moment a feeling as though he and his armchair and his little sitting-room were afloat in a vast space and then it all seemed to become firm and solid again.
This thing in his hands was plainly and indisputably a printed newspaper. It was a little odd in its letterpress, and it didn’t feel or rustle like ordinary paper, but newspaper it was. It was printed in either three or four columns—for the life of him he cannot remember which—and there were column headlines under the page streamer. It had a sort of art-nouveau affair at the bottom of one column that might be an advertisement (it showed a woman in an impossibly big hat), and in the upper left-hand corner was an unmistakable weather chart of Western Europe, with coloured isobars, or isotherms, or whatever they are, and the inscription: “Tomorrow’s Weather.”
And then he remarked the date. The date was November 10th, 1971!
“Steady on,” said Brownlow. “Damitall! Steady on.”
He held the paper sideways, and then straight again. The date remained November 10th, 1971.
He got up in a state of immense perplexity and put the paper down. For a moment he felt a little afraid of it. He rubbed his forehead. “Haven’t been doing a Rip Van Winkle, by any chance, Brownlow, my boy?” he said. He picked up the paper again, walked out into his hall and looked at himself in the hall mirror. He was reassured to see no signs of advancing age, but the expression of mingled consternation and amazement upon his flushed face struck him suddenly as being undignified and unwarrantable. He laughed at himself, but not uncontrollably. Then he stared blankly at that familiar countenance. “I must be half-way tordu,” he said, that being his habitual facetious translation of “screwed.” On the console table was a little respectable-looking adjustable calendar bearing witness that the date was November 10th, 1931.
“D’you see?” he said, shaking the queer newspaper at it reproachfully. “I ought to have spotted you for a hoax ten minutes ago. ’Moosing trick, to say the least of it. I suppose they’ve made Low editor for a night, and he’s had this idea. Eh?”
He felt he had been taken in, but that the joke was a good one. And, with quite unusual anticipations of entertainment, he returned to his armchair. A good idea it was, a paper forty years ahead. Good fun if it was well done. For a time nothing but the sounds of a newspaper being turned over and Brownlow’s breathing can have broken the silence of the flat.
3
Regarded as an imaginative creation, he found the thing almost too well done. Every time he turned a page he expected the sheet to break out into laughter and give the whole thing away. But it did nothing of the kind. From being a mere quip, it became an immense and amusing, if perhaps a little over-elaborate lark. And then, as a lark, it passed from stage to stage of incredibility until, as any thing but the thing it professed to be, it was incredible altogether. It must have cost far more than an ordinary number. All sorts of colours were used, and suddenly he came upon illustrations that went beyond amazement; they were in the colours of reality. Never in all his life had he seen such colour printing—and the buildings and scenery and costumes in the pictures were strange. Strange and yet credible. They were colour photographs of actuality forty years from now. He could not believe anything else of them. Doubt could not exist in their presence.
His mind had swung back, away from the stunt-number idea altogether. This paper in his hand would not simply be costly beyond dreaming to produce. At any price it could not be produced. All this present world could not produce such an object as this paper he held in his hand. He was quite capable of realising that.
He sat turning the sheet over and—quite mechanically—drinking whisky. His sceptical faculties were largely in suspense; the barriers of criticism were down. His mind could now accept the idea that he was reading a newspaper of forty years ahead without any further protest.
It had been addressed to Mr. Evan O’Hara, and it had come to him. Well and good. This Evan O’Hara evidently knew how to get ahead of things…
I doubt if at that time Brownlow found anything very wonderful in the situation.
Yet it was, it continues to be, a very wonderful situation. The wonder of it mounts to my head as I write. Only gradually have I been able to build up this picture of Brownlow turning over that miraculous sheet, so that I can believe it myself. And you will understand how, as the thing flickered between credibility and incredibility in my mind, I asked him, partly to justify or confute what he told me, and partly to satisfy a vast expanding and, at last, devouring curiosity: “What was there in it? What did it have to say?” At the same time, I found myself trying to catch him out in his story, and also asking him for every particular he could give me.
What was there in it? In other words, What will the world be doing forty years from now? That was the stupendous scale of the vision, of which Brownlow was afforded a glimpse. The world forty years from now! I lie awake at nights thinking of all that paper might have revealed to us. Much it did reveal, but there is hardly a thing it reveals that does not change at once into a constellation of riddles. When first he told me about the thing I was—it is, I admit, an enormous pity— intensely sceptical. I asked him questions in what people call a “nasty” manner. I was ready—as my manner made plain to him—to jump down his throat with “But that’s preposterous!” at the very first slip. And I had an engagement that carried me off at the end of half an hour. But the thing had already got hold of my imagination, and I rang up Brownlow before tea-time, and was biting at this “queer story” of his again. That afternoon he was sulking because of my morning’s disbelief, and he told me very little. “I was drunk and dreaming, I suppose,” he said. “I’m beginning to doubt it all myself.” In the night it occurred to me for the first time that, if he was not allowed to tell and put on record what he had seen, he might become both confused and sceptical about it himself. Fancies might mix up with it. He might hedge and alter to get it more credible. Next day, therefore, I lunched and spent the afternoon with him, and arranged to go down into Surrey for the weekend. I managed to dispel his huffiness with me. My growing keenness restored his. There we set ourselves in earnest, first of all to recover everything he could remember about his newspaper and then to form some coherent idea of the world about which it was telling.
It is perhaps a little banal to say we were not trained men for the job. For who could be considered trained for such a job as we were attempting? What facts was he to pick out as important and how were they to be arranged? We wanted to know everything we could about 1971; and the little facts and the big facts crowded in on one another and offended against each other.
The streamer headline across the page about that seven-mile
Wilton boring, is, to my mind, one of the most significant items in the story. About that we are fairly clear. It referred, says Brownlow, to a series of attempts to tap the supply of heat beneath the surface of the earth. I asked various questions. “It was explained, y’know,” said Brownlow, and smiled and held out a hand with twiddling fingers. “It was explained all right. Old system, they said, was to go down from a few hundred feet to a mile or so and bring up coal and burn it. Go down a bit deeper, and there’s no need to bring up and burn anything. Just get heat itself straight away. Comes up of its own accord—under its own steam. See? Simple.
“They were making a big fuss about it,” he added. “It wasn’t only the streamer headline; there was a leading article in big type. What was it headed? Ah! ‘The Age of Combustion Has Ended!’ ”
Now that is plainly a very big event for mankind, caught in mid-happening, November 10th, 1971. And the way in which Brownlow describes it as being handled, shows clearly a world much more preoccupied by economic essentials than the world of today, and dealing with them on a larger scale and in a bolder spirit.
That excitement about tapping the central reservoirs of heat, Brownlow was very definite, was not the only symptom of an increase in practical economic interest and intelligence. There was much more space given to scientific work and to inventions than is given in any contemporary paper. There were diagrams and mathematical symbols, he says, but he did not look into them very closely because he could not get the hang of them. “Frightfully highbrow, some of it,” he said.
A more intelligent world for our grandchildren evidently, and also, as the pictures testified, a healthier and happier world.
“The fashions kept you looking,” said Brownlow, going off at a tangent, “all coloured up as they were.”
“Were they elaborate?” I asked.
“Anything but,” he said.
His description of these costumes is vague. The people depicted in the social illustrations and in the advertisements seemed to have reduced body clothing—I mean things like vests, pants, socks and so forth—to a minimum. Breast and chest went bare. There seem to have been tremendously exaggerated wristlets, mostly on the left arm and going as far up as the elbow, provided with gadgets which served the purpose of pockets. Most of these armlets seem to have been very decorative, almost like little shields. And then, usually, there was an immense hat, often rolled up and carried in the hand, and long cloaks of the loveliest colours and evidently also of the most beautiful soft material, which either trailed from a sort of gorget or were gathered up and wrapped about the naked body, or were belted up and thrown over the shoulders.
There were a number of pictures of crowds from various parts of the world. “The people looked fine,” said Brownlow. “Prosperous, you know, and upstanding. Some of the women—just lovely.”
My mind went off to India. What was happening in India?
Brownlow could not remember anything very much about India. “Ankor,” said Brownlow. “That’s not India, is it?” There had been some sort of Carnival going on amidst “perfectly lovely” buildings in the sunshine of Ankor.
The people there were brownish people but they were dressed very much like the people in other parts of the world.
I found the politician stirring in me. Was there really nothing about India? Was he sure of that? There was certainly nothing that had left any impression in Brownlow’s mind. And Soviet Russia? “Not as Soviet Russia,” said Brownlow. All that trouble had ceased to be a matter of daily interest. “And how was France getting on with Germany?” Brownlow could not recall a mention of either of these two great powers. Nor of the British Empire as such, nor of the USA. There was no mention of any interchanges, communications, ambassadors, conferences, competitions, comparisons, stresses, in which these governments figured, so far as he could remember. He racked his brains. I thought perhaps all that had been going on so entirely like it goes on today—and has been going on for the last hundred years—that he had run his eyes over the passages in question and that they had left no distinctive impression on his mind. But he is positive that it was not like that. “All that stuff was washed out,” he said. He is unshaken in his assertion that there were no elections in progress, no notice of Parliament or politicians, no mention of Geneva or anything about armaments or war. All those main interests of a contemporary journal seem to have been among the “washed out” stuff. It isn’t that Brownlow didn’t notice them very much; he is positive they were not there.
Now to me this is a very wonderful thing indeed. It means, I take it, that in only forty years from now the great game of sovereign states will be over. It looks also as if the parliamentary game will be over, and as if some quite new method of handling human affairs will have been adopted. Not a word of patriotism or nationalism; not a word of party, not an allusion. But in only forty years! While half the human beings already alive in the world will still be living! You cannot believe it for a moment. Nor could I, if it wasn’t for two little torn scraps of paper. These, as I will make clear, leave me in a state of—how can I put it?— incredulous belief.
4
After all, in 1831 very few people thought of railway or steamship travel, and in 1871 you could already go round the world in eighty days by steam, and send a telegram in a few minutes to nearly every part of the earth. Who would have thought of that in 1831? Revolutions in human life, when they begin to come, can come very fast. Our ideas and methods change faster than we know.
But just forty years!
It was not only that there was this absence of national politics from that evening paper, but there was something else still more fundamental. Business, we both think, finance that is, was not in evidence, at least upon anything like contemporary lines. We are not quite sure of that, but that is our impression. There was no list of Stock Exchange prices, for example, no City page, and nothing in its place. I have suggested already that Brownlow just turned that page over, and that it was sufficiently like what it is today that he passed and forgot it. I have put that suggestion to him. But he is quite sure that that was not the case. Like most of us nowadays, he is watching a number of his investments rather nervously, and he is convinced he looked for the City article.
November 10th, 1971, may have been Monday—there seems to have been some readjustment of the months and the days of the week; that is a detail into which I will not enter now—but that will not account for the absence of any City news at all. That also, it seems, will be washed out forty years from now.
Is there some tremendous revolutionary smash-up ahead, then? Which will put an end to investment and speculation? Is the world going Bolshevik? In the paper, anyhow, there was no sign of, or reference to, anything of that kind. Yet against this idea of some stupendous economic revolution we have the fact that here forty years ahead is a familiar London evening paper still tumbling into a private individual’s letter-box in the most uninterrupted manner. Not much suggestion of a social smash-up there. Much stronger is the effect of immense changes which have come about bit by bit, day by day, and hour by hour, without any sign of revolutionary jolt, as morning or springtime comes to the world.
These futile speculations are irresistible. The reader must forgive me them. Let me return to our story.
There had been a picture of a landslide near Ventimiglia and one of some new chemical works at Salzburg, and there had been a picture of fighting going on near Irkutsk. (Of that picture, as I will tell presently, a fading scrap survives.) “Now that was called—” Brownlow made an effort, and snapped his fingers triumphantly. “—‘Round-up of Brigands by Federal Police.’ ”
“What Federal Police?” I asked.
“There you have me,” said Brownlow. “The fellows on both sides looked mostly Chinese, but there were one or two taller fellows, who might have been Americans or British or Scandinavians.
“What filled a lot of the paper,” said Brownlow, suddenly, “was gorillas. There was no end of a fuss about gorillas. Not so much
as about that boring, but still a lot of fuss. Photographs. A map. A special article and some paragraphs.”
The paper, had, in fact, announced the death of the last gorilla. Considerable resentment was displayed at the tragedy that had happened in the African gorilla reserve. The gorilla population of the world had been dwindling for many years. In 1931 it had been estimated at nine hundred. When the Federal Board took over it had shrunken to three hundred.
“What Federal Board?” I asked.
Brownlow knew no more than I did. When he read the phrase, it had seemed all right somehow. Apparently this Board had had too much to do all at once, and insufficient resources. I had the impression at first that it must be some sort of conservation board, improvised under panic conditions, to save the rare creatures of the world threatened with extinction. The gorillas had not been sufficiently observed and guarded, and they had been swept out of existence suddenly by a new and malignant form of influenza. The thing had happened practically before it was remarked. The paper was clamouring for inquiry and drastic changes of reorganisation.
This Federal Board, whatever it might be, seemed to be something of very considerable importance in the year 1971. Its name turned up again in an article on afforestation. This interested Brownlow considerably because he has large holdings in lumber companies. This Federal Board was apparently not only responsible for the maladies of wild gorillas but also for the plantation of trees in—just note these names!—Canada, New York State, Siberia, Algiers, and the East Coast of England, and it was arraigned for various negligences in combating insect pests and various fungoid plant diseases. It jumped all our contemporary boundaries in the most astounding way. Its range was world-wide. “In spite of the recent additional restrictions put upon the use of big timber in building and furnishing, there is a plain possibility of a shortage of shelter timber and of rainfall in nearly all the threatened regions for 1985 onwards. Admittedly the Federal Board has come late to its task, from the beginning its work has been urgency work; but in view of the lucid report prepared by the James Commission, there is little or no excuse for the inaggressiveness and overconfidence it has displayed.”