The Warlord of the Air (9 page)

He began to walk towards the door.

Then something happened. A dull
thump
which seemed to shake the whole building. In the distance I heard sirens sounding, bells ringing.

Major Powell’s face was suddenly grim and white and his dark eyes blazed with anger.

“What is it, major?”

“Bomb.”

“Here?”

“Anarchists. Madmen. European troublemakers, almost certainly. Not the Indians at all. Germans—Russians—Jews, they’ve all got a vested interest in the disruption of order.”

He ran from the room. Duty was indeed calling him now.

The sudden change from tranquility to violence had taken my breath away. I lay back in the bed trying to see what was happening outside. I saw an army motor race across the airpark. I heard the sound of another far-off explosion. Who on earth could be insane enough to plot the destruction of such a Utopia as this?

T
here was little point in speculating about the causes of the explosions, any more than there was in brooding about how I had managed to fall through Time to 1973. The events which followed the bomb incidents in Katmandu moved rapidly for me as I was shifted about the world, a bit like a rare museum specimen. The next morning I was bundled aboard the “monorail” train for Calcutta. The train was shaped rather like an airship itself—though this was truly of steel, all gleaming with brasswork and new paint—and it pulled fifty carriages behind it at a terrifying speed touching almost a hundred miles an hour on some straight sections of its raised track. The motive power for this incredible machine was, I learned, electricity. Making a few short stops, we had reached Calcutta within the day! My impression of Calcutta was of a vast city—much larger in area than the Calcutta we know—with gleaming towers of concrete, glass and steel dwarfing anything I had earlier marveled at in Katmandu. In Calcutta General Hospital I was tested by a score of experts, all of whom pronounced themselves baffled, and it was decided to ship me, post-haste, to England by the first available airship. The thought of sailing such a huge distance through the sky filled me with some perturbation—I still could not get used to accepting that a material lighter than steel could yet be stronger than steel and it was also difficult to conceive of Man’s ability to fly six thousand miles without once landing.

The authorities preferred me in England for a number of reasons, but one of them was, of course, that they had been unable to trace a Captain Oswald Bastable as missing from any British regiment in the last decade. They had, however, checked the records of my own regiment back to 1902 and discovered, naturally, that a Captain Bastable
had
been killed at Teku Benga. I was not, now, just a puzzle for the doctors but a problem for army intelligence, who were curious to know how the “Mystery Man” (as they called me) could have assumed the identity of someone who had been dead for seventy years. I think they suspected that I might be some sort of foreign spy, but their notions were as vague as mine on that score, I later learned.

And so I took passage on the great liner of the clouds, the A.S. (for Air Ship)
Light of Dresden,
a commercial vessel owned jointly by the German firm of Krupp Luftschifahrt A.G. and the British firm of Vickers Imperial Airways. As far as registration was concerned, the
Light of Dresden
was completely British and bore the appropriate insignia on her tail-fins, but the captain was a German as were at least half the crew. The Germans, it had emerged, had been the first to develop airship flight on any sort of scale and for some time the now defunct Zeppelin Company had led the world in airship development, until Britain and America, working together, had invented the boron-fibre hull and a method of raising and lowering the ships in the air without recourse to ballast, as such. The
Light of Dresden
was equipped with this device, which involved both heating and cooling the helium gas at great speed and intensity. The massive liner also had the latest example of an electrically powered mechanical calculating machine which the people of 1973 called a “computer” and which was capable of correcting the ship’s trim automatically, without recourse to human involvement. The nature of the engine I could never quite determine. It was a single huge gas turbine engine which powered a gigantic single screw—or more properly “propeller”—at the back of the ship. This screw was housed within the span of the great tail-fins. There were subsidiary oil-driven engines which helped adjust the ship’s trim, could swivel through 360 degrees, and were variably pitched and reversible, able to push the ship upward or downward.

But I have not really described the most immediately impressive feature of this mighty ship of the air and that was that she was well over a thousand feet long and three hundred feet high (much of this bulk being, of course, her great gas-container). She had three decks, one beneath the other, arranged with the first-class deck at the bottom and the third-class deck at the top. This single great gondola was, in fact, indivisible with the “hull” (as the gasbag was called). At the front, in the ship’s tapering nose, was the control bridge where, for all the delicate machinery ‘thinking’ for the ship, there were more than a dozen officers on duty at any one time.

The
Light of Dresden
needed three mooring masts to keep her safely near the ground and, when I first glimpsed her at the Calcutta Airpark (which was, in fact, about ten miles from the city) I gasped, for she made all the other ships—and there were some largish ones moored nearby—look like minnows surrounding a whale. I had already heard that she could carry four hundred passengers and fifty tons of cargo without trouble. When I saw her, I believed it.

I went aboard the airship via a lift which bore me and several other passengers up through the metal cage which was the mooring mast and set us off level with a covered catwalk leading into the passage below the ship’s bridge. I was traveling first class with my ‘guide’, a Lieutenant Jagger, into whose keeping I had been put until we reached London. The amenities on the ship were astonishingly luxurious and put to shame anything to be found on the finest ocean liners of our own time. I began to relax somewhat as I looked around me. And when, later, the
Light of Dresden
let go her moorings and began to sweep with magnificent dignity into the sky, I felt almost safer than I had felt on land.

The journey from Calcutta to London took, with short stops at Karachi and Aden, seventy-two hours! Three days in which we had sailed over India, Africa and Europe, over three great oceans, through most kinds of weather. I had seen cities laid out before me. I had seen deserts, mountains, forests, all speeding past below. I had seen clouds which resembled organic objects. I had been
above
the clouds when it had rained, drifting tranquilly in a blue, sunny sky while the people below were drenched! I had eaten luncheon at a table as steady as a table at the Ritz (and laid with a meal almost as good as one would receive there) while we crossed the Arabian Sea and I had enjoyed my dinner while flying high above the burning sands of the Sahara Desert!

By the time we got to London, I had become quite blasé about flying. It was certainly the most comfortable form of travel I had ever experienced—and also the most civilized.

I was, I will admit, beginning to count myself the luckiest man in the history of the world. I had been taken from the grip of a deadly earthquake in 1902 and placed in the lap of luxury in 1973—a world which appeared to have solved most of its problems. Was not that the best kind—the most unbelievable kind—of good fortune. I thought so then, I must admit. I was yet to meet Korzeniowski and the others...

I apologize for the digression. I must try to tell my story as it happened, give you an idea of my feelings at the time things were happening, not what I felt about everything later.

A
t sunset of our third day, we crossed the Channel and I had the experience of seeing the white cliffs of Dover far below me. Shortly after that we circled over the indescribably immense airpark at Croydon in Surrey and began our mooring manoeuvres. Croydon was the main airpark for London because, naturally, a big airpark can hardly be placed in the middle of Piccadilly. The Croydon Airpark was, I discovered later, the largest in the world and had a circumference of nearly twelve miles. The airpark was crowded, needless to say, with scores of airships both large and small, commercial and military, old and new. Those of us who had journeyed all the way from India had no need to pass the Customs inspection and we went through the reception buildings and took our places on the special monorail train for London. Once again I was dazed by all that was going on and was grateful for the steady, solid presence of Lieutenant Michael Jagger, who steered me to my seat and took his place beside me.

Lieutenant Jagger had purchased a newspaper at Croydon and he offered it to me. I accepted gratefully. The size of the paper and the type were unfamiliar, as were some of the abbreviations, but I gathered the gist of most that was printed. It was the first newspaper I had seen since arriving in 1973. I had ten minutes to scan it before we reached London. In that time I learned of a new treaty which had been signed by all the Great Powers, guaranteeing a fixed scale of tariffs on many goods (how those Free Traders would have hated this!) and the recognition of various general laws, applying to all countries and their citizens. It would no longer be possible in the future, the newspaper told me, for a criminal to commit a crime in Taiwan and escape across the sea to, for instance, Japanese Manchuria or even British Canton. The law, it appeared, had been agreed on unanimously by all the Great Powers, and had been inspired by the increasing incidence of lawlessness created by groups of nihilists, anarchists or socialists who, the paper informed me, were bent only upon destruction for its own sake. There were other news reports, some of which I could barely understand and others of a slight nature. But I read over the reference to nihilists for it had some relation to what I had experienced on my first day in the hospital at Katmandu. As the paper suggested, these acts of violence seemed totally without logical point in a world which was steadily marching towards peace, order and justice for all. What could these madmen want? Some, of course, were native nationalists who demanded dominion status rather before they were ready for it. But the others—what did they demand? How is it possible to improve Utopia? I thought wonderingly.

And then we had arrived at Victoria Station which, in its main features, was little changed from the Victoria Station I had known in 1902.

As we disembarked from the monorail train and walked towards the exit I saw that, though it was night, the city was alive with light!

Electrical illuminations of all imaginable colours and combinations of colours blossomed from every slender tower and massive dome. Brightly lit ramps bore motor traffic around these towers on many levels, winding up and down as if supported on the very air itself.

In this London there were no ugly billboards, no illuminated advertisements, no tasteless slogans and, as we climbed into the steam-brougham and began to move along one of the ramps, I realized that there were no seedy slums of the sort found in many parts of the London I had known in 1902. Poverty had been banished! Disease had been exiled! Misery must surely be unknown!

I hope I have managed to convey some of the elation I experienced when first encountering the London of 1973. There is no question of its beauty, its cleanliness, its marvelously ordered civic amenities. There is no question that the people were well fed, cheerful, expensively dressed and, all in all, very much satisfied with their lot. During the next day or so I was taken around London by a Doctor Peters who hoped that some familiar sight might awaken my brain from its sleep. I went through with this charade because there was precious little else I could do. Eventually, I knew, they would give up. I would then be free to choose a profession—perhaps rejoin the army, since I was used to army life. But until that time I was a man without a purpose and I might just as well do what others wanted me to do. Everywhere I went I was amazed at the change which had taken place in that once dirty, fog-bound city. Fog was a thing of the past and the air was clean and sharp. Trees and shrubs and flowers grew wherever there was a space to plant them. Butterflies and birds flew about in great profusion. Fountains played in pretty squares and sometimes we would come upon a brass band entertaining the public, or a conjuror, or a Punch and Judy show, or some nigger minstrels. Not all the old buildings had gone. As fresh and clean as if they had just been built I saw Tower Bridge and the Tower of London itself, St. Paul’s, the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace (where a new King Edward—King Edward VIII, now quite an old man—had his residence). The British people were, as always, accepting the best of the new and conserving the best of the old.

I began to see my visit to 1973 as a wonderful holiday. A holiday which, if I were lucky, might go on for ever.