As the War had dragged on, Wallis’s evidently fertile brain had turned to schemes of how its end might be accelerated. He had considered, for instance, how one might go about destroying the enemy’s sources of energy-reservoirs, dams, mines and such-like — by means of massive explosives to be dropped from the stratosphere by “Monster Bomber” flying machines. To this end he had gone into studies of the Variation of Wind Speed with Height, the Visibility of Objects from Great Heights, and the Effect of Earth Waves on Coal-mine Shafts, and so forth. “You can see the possibilities of such things, can’t you? One just needs the right sort of imagination. With ten tons of explosives one could divert the course of the Rhine!”
“And what was the reaction to these proposals?”
He sighed. “Resources are always scarce during wars — even for priority schemes — and for unproven ventures like this… ’Moonshine,’ they called it. ’Tripe of the wildest description…’ and there was a lot of talk from the military types about ’inventors’ like me ’throwing away’ the lives of ’their boys.’ “ I could see he was hurt by this memory. “You know that men such as you and I must expect skepticism… but still!”
But Wallis had persevered with his studies, and at last he had been given the go-ahead to build his “Monster Bomber.” “It is called the Victory,” he said. “With a bomb-load of twenty thousand pounds, and operating at forty thousand feet, it can travel at over three hundred miles per hour and has a range of four thousand miles. It is a magnificent sight at take-off — with its six Hercules engines blazing away, it takes no less than two-thirds of a mile to lumber into the air… and the Earthquake Bombs it can deliver have already begun to wreak havoc, deep in the heart of the Reich!” His deep, handsome eyes gleamed behind his dusty glasses.
Wallis had thrown himself into the development of the Victory air machine for some years. But then his track had turned, for he came across that popular account of my time travels, and he had immediately seen the possibilities of adapting my machine for War.
This time his ideas had received a decent hearing — his stock was high, and it didn’t take much imagination to see the limitless military potential of a Time Machine — and the Directorate of Chronic-Displacement Warfare was set up with Wallis as the civilian head of research. The first action of the DChronW was to sequester my old house, which had stood abandoned in Richmond since my departure into time, and the relics of my research were dug out.
“But what do you want of me? You have a Time Machine already — the Juggernaut that brought me here.”
He clasped his hands behind his back, his face long and serious. “The Raglan. Of course — but you’ve seen that beast for yourself. As far as its time-traveling abilities go, it was constructed solely with the scrap that was found in the ruins of your laboratory. Bits of quartz and brass, doped with Plattnerite — impossible to balance or calibrate — the Raglan is a lumbering beast which can reach barely a half-century away from the present. We dared risk the ’Naut for no more than to try to ensure that there was no anachronistic interference by our enemies with the development of your original machine. But now — by chance! — it has brought us you.
“Already we can do more, of course: we have stripped the Plattnerite from your old machine, and have lodged the hull in the Imperial War Museum. Would you like to see it? It will be an honored exhibit.”
I was pained at the thought of such an end for my faithful chariot — and disturbed at the destruction of my only route away from 1938! I shook my head stiffly.
Wallis went on, “We need you to generate more of the substance you called Plattnerite — tons of it — show us how!” So Wallis thought I had manufactured the Plattnerite?… I kept the thought to myself. He went on, “We want to take your Time Machine technology, and extend it — put it to uses beyond, perhaps, your most extraordinary dreams…
“With a CDV one might bomb History and change its course — it is just like my scheme to divert the Rhine! Why not? — if it can be conceived, it should be done. It’s the most exciting technical challenge you can imagine — and it’s all for the benefit of the War Effort.”
“Bomb History?”
“Think of it — one might go back and intervene in the early stages of the War. Or assassinate Bismarck — why not? — what a prank that would be — and put a stop to the formation of Germany in the first place.
“Can you see it, sir? A Time Machine is a weapon against which there can be no defense. Whoever first develops a reliable Chronic-Displacement technology will be the Master of the World — and that Master must be Britain!”
His eyes shone, and I began to find his high-altitude enthusiasm for all of this destruction and power rather disturbing.
[8]
The uplands of the Future
We reached the Lancaster Walk and began our stroll back to the southern boundary of the park. We were still flanked by our discreet soldiers.
I said, “Tell me more of what will be done when Britain and her Allies win this Time War — tell me about your ’Uplands of the Future.’ “
He rubbed his nose and looked uncertain. “I’m no politician, sir. I can’t.”
“No, no. Give me your own words.”
“Very well.” He looked up at the Dome. “To begin with — this War has stripped away a lot of our fond illusions, you know.”
“It has?” I thought that an ominous preamble — and my fears were soon justified!
“The Fallacy of Democracy, for one thing. You see, it is now clear that is no good asking people what they want. You have first to think out what they ought to want if society is to be saved. Then you have to tell them what they want and see that they get it.
“I know this may seem odd for a man of your century,” he said, “but it’s the modern thinking — and I’ve heard your famous friend espouse much the same views on the phonograph before! — and he’s of your time, isn’t he?
“I know little of History, but it seems to me that the Modern State which we’re developing in Britain and America the form of things we intend to share with the rest of the world — is more like the Republics of antiquity — Carthage, Athens, Rome — which were essentially aristocratic, you see. We have Members of Parliament still, but they are no longer nominated by anything so crude as popular suffrage.
“And all that old business of Opposition — well! We’ve given all of that up. Look, men like you and me know that about most affairs there can be no two respectable and opposed opinions. There is one sole right way and endless wrong ways of doing things. A government is trying to go the right way, or it is criminal. That is all there is to it. The Opposition of the past was mostly just a spoiling job done for advancement. And the sabotage must cease.
“And some of the younger folk are going much further, in their thinking on the future. The family, for instance, is dissolving — so they say. It was the common social cell, if you like, through all our agricultural past. But now, in our modern world, the family is losing its distinctness, and has been dissolving into larger systems of relationships. The domestication of all our young people, including the women, is diminishing greatly.”
I thought, at that, of Captain Hilary Bond. “But what’s to replace the family?”
“Well, the outlines aren’t clear, but the youngsters are talking of a re-nucleation of society around different seeds: teachers, writers, talkers, who will lead us into a new way of thinking — and get us away from this old tribalism and into a better way.”
“ ’Uplands,’ indeed.” I doubted that much — or any! — of this philosophizing originated with Wallis himself; he was acting simply as a mirror of his times, as molded by the chattering opinion-makers in Government and beyond. “And how do you feel about all this?”
“Me?” He laughed, self-deprecating. “Oh, I’m too old to change — and,” his voice was uneven, “I’d hate to lose my daughters… But, likewise, I don’t want to see them growing up in a world like” — he waved a hand at the Dome, the de
ad Park, the soldiers — “like this! And if that means changing the heart of man, then so be it.
“Now,” he said, “can you see why we need your cooperation? With such a weapon as a CDV — a Time Machine — the establishment of this Modern State becomes, not trivial, but more achievable. And if we fail—”
“Yes?”
He stopped; we were approaching the south wall of the Park now, and there were few people around. He said in a low voice, “We have rumors that the Germans are building a Time Machine of their own. And if they succeed first — if the Reich gets functioning Chronic-Displacement Warfare capabilities…”
“Yes—”
And he painted, for my benefit, a brief but chilling portrait, evidently informed by years of propaganda, of the Time War to come. The old Kaiser’s cold-eyed staff officers would be planning how to project into our noble History their half-doped, crazy lads — their Time Warriors. Wallis portrayed these soldiers as if they were bombs with legs; they would swarm forward into a hundred of our ancient battles like death-dealing dolls…
“They would destroy England — strangle it in its cot. And that’s what we have to stop,” he said to me. “You see that, don’t you? You see it?”
I gazed into his deep, earnest face, quite unable to respond.
Wallis returned me to the house in Queen’s Gate Terrace. “I don’t want to press you for a decision on working with me, old man — I know how difficult all this must be for you; after all, it isn’t your War — but time is short. And yet, what does ’time’ mean, in such a circumstance? Eh?”
I rejoined my companions in the smoking-room. I accepted a whisky-and-water from Filby and threw myself into a chair. “It’s so close out there,” I said. “More like Burma! — that damned Dome. And doesn’t it feel odd? Pitch dark outside, and yet it’s only lunch-time.”
Moses glanced up from the volume he was reading. “ ’Experience is as to intensity and not as to duration,’ “ he quoted. He grinned at me. “Wouldn’t that be a perfect epitaph for a Time Traveler? Intensity — that’s what counts.”
“Who’s the author?”
“Thomas Hardy. Close to a contemporary of yours, wasn’t he?”
“I’ve not read him.”
Moses checked the preface. “Well, he’s gone now… 1928.” He closed the book. “What did you learn from Wallis?”
I summarized my conversations for them. I concluded, “I was glad to get away from him. What a farrago of propaganda and half-baked politics… not to mention the most perfect muddle about causality, and so forth.”
Wallis’s words had deepened the sense of depression I had endured since my arrival here in 1938. It seems to me that there is a fundamental conflict in the heart of man. He is swept along by the forces of his own nature — more than anyone, I have witnessed the remorseless action of the evolutionary currents which pulse through Humanity, deriving even from the primal seas — and yet here were these bright young Britons and Americans, hardened by War, determined to Plan, to Control, to fight against Nature and set themselves and their fellows in a sort of stasis, a frozen Utopia!
If I were a citizen of this new Modern State they intended, I knew, I should soon have become one of the protesting spirits who squirmed in its pitilessly benevolent grip.
But, even as I reflected thus, I wondered, deep in my heart, to what extent I would have fallen into Wallis’s way of thinking — of this Modern State, with its Controls and Plans — before my time-traveling had opened up my eyes to the limitations of Humanity.
“By the way, Nebogipfel,” I said, “I came across an old friend of ours — Kurt Gödel—”
And the Morlock uttered a queer, gurgling word in his own language; he spun in his chair and stood up in a rapid, liquid movement that made him seem more animal than human. Filby blanched, and I saw Moses’s fingers tighten around the book he held.
“Gödel — is he here?”
“He’s in the Dome, yes. In fact, he’s not a quarter-mile from this spot in Imperial College.” I described the Babble Machine show I had seen.
“A fission pile. That is it,” hissed Nebogipfel. “I understand now. He is the key — Gödel is the key to everything. It must have been him, with his insights into rotating universes—”
“I don’t see what you’re talking about.”
“Look: do you want to escape from this dreadful History?”
I did — of course I did! — for a thousand reasons: to escape this dreadful conflict, to try to get home, to put a stop to time traveling before the inception of the insanity of Time War… “But for that we must find a Time Machine.”
“Yes. Therefore you must get us to Gödel. You must. Now I see the truth.”
“What truth?”
“Barnes Wallis was wrong about the Germans, Their Time Machine is more than a threat. It has already been built!”
Now we were all on our feet, and talking at once. “What?” “What are you saying?” “How—”
“Already,” the Morlock said, “we are in a strand of History which has been engineered by the Germans.”
“How do you know?” I demanded.
“Remember that I studied your era in my history,” he said. “And — in my history — there was no such European War as this, which has already spanned decades. In my History, there was a War in 1914 — but it finished in 1918, with a victory for the Allies over the Germans. A new War started up in 1939, but under a new form of government in Germany. And—”
I felt odd — dizzy — and I felt behind me for a chair and sat down.
Filby looked terrified. “Those confounded Germans — I told you! I told you they’d cause trouble!”
Moses said, “I wonder if that final battle which Filby described — the Kaiserschlacht — was somehow modified in the Germans’ favor. Perhaps the assassination of an Allied commander might have done it…”
“The bombing in Paris,” Filby said, confused and wondering. “Could that have been it?”
I remembered Wallis’s horrid descriptions, of robotic German soldiers dropping into British History. “What are we to do? We must stop this dreadful Time War!”
“Get us to Gödel,” the Morlock said.
“But why?”
“Because it can only be Gödel who has manufactured the Germans’ Plattnerite!”
[9]
Imperial College
Wallis called for me again after lunch. Immediately he started pressing me for a decision as to whether I would throw in my lot with his Time War project.
I requested that I be taken into Imperial College, to visit this Kurt Gödel. At first Wallis demurred: “Gödel is a difficult man — I’m not sure what you’d gain out of the meeting — and the security arrangements are pretty elaborate…” But I set my jaw, and Wallis soon caved in. “Give me thirty minutes,” he said, “and I’ll make the arrangements.”
The fabric of Imperial College seemed largely untouched by the intervening years, or by its reestablishment from the constituent colleges I remembered. Here was Queen’s Tower, that central monument of white cut stone flanked by lions, and surrounded by the rather dowdy red brick buildings that comprised this functional place of learning. But I saw that some neighboring buildings had been appropriated for the College’s expanded War-time purposes: in particular the Science Museum had been given over to Wallis’s Directorate of Chronic-Displacement Warfare, and there were several newer structures on the campus — mostly squat, plain and evidently thrown up in haste and without much regard for the architectural niceties — and all of these buildings were joined together by a new warren of closed-over corridors, which ran across the campus like huge worm-casts.
Wallis glanced at his watch. “We’ve a short while yet before Gödel will be ready for us,” he said. “Come this way — I’ve got clearance to show you something else.” He grinned, looking boyish and enthusiastic. “Our pride and joy!”
So he led me into the warren of worm-cast corridors. Inside, these proved to be w
alled with untreated concrete and illuminated at sparse intervals by isolated light bulbs. I remember how the uneven light caught the lie of Wallis’s clumsy shoulders and his awkward gait as he preceded me deeper into that maze. We passed through several gates, at each of which Wallis had his lapel-badge checked, was required to produce various papers, provide thumb- and finger-prints, have his face compared to photographs, and so forth; I, too, had to be validated against pictures; and we were both searched, bodily, twice.
We took several twists and turns on the way; but I took careful note of my bearings, and built up a map of the College’s various annexes in my head.
“The College has been expanded quite a bit,” Wallis said. “I’m afraid we’ve lost the Royal College of Music, the College of Art, and even the Natural History Museum — this damned War, eh? And you can see they’ve had to clear a lot of ground for this new stuff.
“There are still a good few scientific facilities scattered around the country, including the Royal Ordnance factories at Chorley and Woolwich, the Vickers-Armstrong facilities at Newcastle, Barrow, Weybridge, Burhill and Crawford, the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, tire Armament and Aeronautical Experimental Establishment at Boscombe Down… and so forth. Most of these have been relocated into Bunkers and Domes. Nevertheless, Imperial — enhanced as it has been — has become Britain’s primary center for scientific research into Military Technology.”
After more security checks, we entered a kind of hangar, brightly lit, about which there was a healthy smell of engine grease, rubber and scorched metal. Motor vehicles sat about on the stained concrete floor in various states of disassembly; overall-clad men moved amongst them, some of them whistling. I felt my spirits lift a little from my habitual Dome-induced oppression. I have often observed that nothing much perturbs a man who has the opportunity to work with his hands.
“This,” Wallis announced, “is our CDV Development Division.”
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