"The Time Ships" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

[3] London at War

The London Dome!

Nothing in my own time had prepared me for this stupendous feat of construction. Picture it: a great pie-dish of concrete and steel almost two miles across, stretching across the city from Hammersmith to Stepney, and from Islington to Clapham… The streets were broken everywhere by pillars, struts and buttresses which thrust down into the London clay, dominating and confining the populace like the legs of a crowd of giants.

The train moved on, beyond Hammersmith and Fulham, and deeper into the Dome. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I began to see how the street-lights traced out an image of a London I could still recognize: “Here is Kensington High Street, beyond this fence! And is that Holland Park?” — and so forth. But for all the familiar landmarks and street names, this was a new London: a London of permanent night, a city which could never enjoy the glow of the June sky outside — but a London which had accepted all this as the price for survival, Filby told me; for bombs and torpedoes would roll off that massive Roof, or burst in the air harmlessly, leaving Cobbett’s “Great Wen” unmarked beneath.

Everywhere, Filby said, the cities of men — which had once blazed with light, turning the night-side of our turning world into a glowing jewel — had been covered by such brooding, obscuring Shells; now, men hardly moved between the great Dome-cities, preferring to cower in their man-made Darkness.

Our new train line appeared to have been slashed through the old pattern of streets. The roads we passed over were quite crowded, but with people on foot or on bicycles; I saw no carriages, drawn either by horse or by motor, as I had expected. There were even rickshaws! — light carriages, pulled by sweating, scrawny Cockneys, squirming around the obstacles posed by the Dome’s pillars.

Watching the crowds from the window of my slowing train, I caught a sense, despite the general bustle and busy-ness, of despondency, downheartedness, disillusion. I saw down-turned heads, slumped shoulders, lined, weary faces; there was a certain doggedness, it seemed to me, as people went about their lives; but there seemed to me — and it was not surprising — little joy.

It was striking that there were no children, anywhere to be seen. Bond told me that the schools were mostly underground now, for greater protection against the possibility of bombs, while the parents worked in the munitions factories, or in the huge aerodromes which had sprung up around London, at Balham, Hackney and Wembley. Well, perhaps that was a safer arrangement — but what a bleak place the city was without the laughter of running children! — as even I, a contented bachelor, was prepared to concede. And what kind of preparation for life were those poor subterranean mites receiving?

Again, I thought, my travels had landed me in a world of rayless obscurity — a world a Morlock would have enjoyed. But the people who had built this great edifice were no Morlocks: they were my own species, cowed by War into relinquishing the Light which was their birthright! A deep and abiding depression settled over me, a mood which was to linger for much of my stay in 1938.

Here and there, I saw rather more direct evidence of the horror of War. In Kensington High Street I saw one chap making his way along the road — he had to be helped, by a thin young woman at his side — his lips were thin and stretched, and his eyes were like beads in shrunken sockets. The skin of his face was a pattern of marks in purple and white on the underlying gray.

Filby sniffed when I pointed this out. “War Burns,” he said. “They always look the same… An aerial fighter, probably — a young gladiator, whose exploits we all adore when the Babble Machines shout about them! — and yet where is there for them to go afterwards?” He glanced at me, and laid a withered hand on my arm. “I don’t mean to sound unfeeling, my dear chap. I’m still the Filby you used to know. It’s just — God! — it’s just that one has to steel oneself.”

Most of the old buildings of London seemed to have survived, although, I saw, some of the taller constructions had been torn down to allow the concrete carapace to grow over — I wondered if Nelson’s Column still stood! — and the new buildings were small, beetling and drab. But there were some scars left by the early days of the War, before the Dome’s completion: great bombsites, like vacant eye-sockets, and mounds of rubble which no one had yet had the wit or energy to fill.

The Dome reached its greatest height of two hundred feet or so directly above Westminster at the heart of London; as we neared the center of town, I saw beams of brilliant lights flickering up from the central streets and splashing that universal Roof with illumination. And everywhere, protruding from the streets of London and from immense foundation-rafts on the river, there were those pillars: rough-hewn, crowding, with splayed and buttressed bases — ten thousand concrete Atlases to support that roof, pillars which had turned London into an immense Moorish temple.

I wondered if the basin of chalk and soft clay in which London rested could support this colossal weight! What if the whole arrangement were to sink into the mud, dragging its precious cargo of millions of lives with it? I thought with some wistfulness of that Age of Buildings which was to come, when the glimpses I had seen of the mastery of gravity would render a construction like this Dome into a trivial affair…

Yet, despite the crudity and evident haste of its construction, and the bleakness of its purpose, I found myself impressed by the Dome. Because it was all hewn out of simple stone and fixed to the London clay with little more than the expertise of my own century, that brooding edifice was more remarkable to me than all the wonders I had seen in the Year A.D. 657,208!

We traveled on, but we were evidently close to journey’s end, for the train moved at little more than walking pace. I saw there were shops open, but their windows were scarcely a blaze of light; I saw dummies wearing more of the drab clothes of the day, and shoppers peering through patched-up glass panes. There was little left of luxury, it seemed, in this long and bitter War.

The train drew to a halt. “Here we are,” said Bond. “This is Canning Gate: just a few minutes’ walk to Imperial College.” Trooper Oldfield pushed at the carriage door — it opened with a distinct pop, as if the pressure in this Dome were high — and a flood of noise burst in over us. I saw more soldiers, these dressed in the drab olive battle-dress of infantrymen, waiting for us on the platform.

So, grasping my borrowed gas-mask, I stepped out into the London Dome.

The noise was astonishing! — that was my first impression. It was like being in some immense crypt, shared with millions of others. A hubbub of voices, the squealing of train wheels and the hum of trams: all of it seemed to rattle around that vast, darkened Roof and shower down over me. It was immensely hot — hotter than the Raglan had been. There was a warm array of scents, not all of them pleasant: of cooking food, of ozone from some machinery, of steam and oil from the train — and, above all, of people, millions of them breathing and perspiring their way through that great, enclosed blanket of air.

There were lights placed here and there in the architecture of the Dome itself not enough to illuminate the streets below, but enough that one could make out its shape. I saw little forms up there, fluttering between the lights: they were the pigeons of London, Filby told me — still surviving, though now etiolated by their years of darkness — and the pigeons were interspersed with a few colonies of bats, who had made themselves unpopular in some districts.

In one corner of the Roof, to the north, a projected light-show was playing. I heard the echoing of some amplified voice from that direction, too. Filby called this the “Babble Machine” — it was a sort of public kinematograph, I gathered — but it was too remote to make out any details.

I saw that our new light rail track had been gouged, quite crudely, through the old road surface; and that this “station” was little more than a splash of concrete in the middle of Canning Place. Everything about the changes which had wrought this new world spoke of haste and panic.

The soldiers formed up into a little diamond around us, and we walked away from the station and along Canning Place towards Gloucester Road. Moses had his fists clenched. In his bright-colored masher’s costume he looked scared and vulnerable, and I felt a pang of guilt that I had brought him to this harsh world of metal epaulets and gas-masks.

I glanced along De Vere Gardens to the Kensington Park Hotel, where I had been accustomed to dine in happier times; the pillared porticoes of that place still stood, but the front of the building had become shabby, and many of the windows were boarded up, and the Hotel appeared to have become part of the new railway terminus.

We turned into Gloucester Road. There were many people passing here, on the pavement and in the road, and the tinkling of bicycle bells was a cheerful counterpoint to the general sense of despondency. Our tight little party — and Moses in his gaudy costume in particular were treated to many extended stares, but no body came too close, or spoke to us. There were plenty of soldiers hereabouts, in drab uniforms similar to those of the ’Naut crew, but most of the men wore suits which — if rather plain and ill-cut — would not have looked out of place in 1891. The women wore delicate skirts and blouses, quite plain and functional, and the only source of shock in this was that most of the skirts were cut quite high, to within three or four inches of the knee, so that there were more feminine calves and ankles on display in a few yards than, I think, I had ever seen in my life! (This latter was not of much interest to me, against the background of so much Change; but it was, apparently, of rather more fascination to Moses, and I found the way he stared rather ungentlemanly.)

But, uniformly, all the pedestrians wore those odd metal epaulets, and all lugged about, even in this summer heat, heavy webbing cases bearing their gas-masks.

I became aware that our soldiers had their holsters open, to a man; I realized that the weapons were not intended for us, for I could see the thin eyes of the soldiers as they surveyed the crush of people close to us.

We turned east along Queen’s Gate Terrace. This was a part of London I had been familiar with. It was a wide, elegant street lined by tall terraces; and I saw that the houses here were pretty much untouched by the intervening time. The fronts of the houses still sported the mock Greco-Roman ornamentation I remembered — pillars carved with floral designs, and the like — and the pavement was lined by the same black-painted area rails.

Bond stopped us at one of these houses, halfway along the street. She climbed the step to the front door and rapped on it with a gloved hand; a soldier — another private, in battle-dress — opened it from within. Bond said to us, “All the houses here were requisitioned by the Air Ministry, a while ago. You’ll have everything you need — just ask the privates — and Filby will stay with you.”

Moses and I exchanged glances. “But what are we to do now?” I asked.

“Just wait,” she said. “Freshen up — get some sleep. Heaven knows what hour your bodies think it is!… I’ve had instructions from the Air Ministry; they are very interested in meeting you,” she told me. “A scientist from the Ministry is taking charge of your case. He will be here to see you in the morning.

“Well. Good luck — perhaps we’ll meet again.” And with that, she shook my hand, and Moses’s, in a manly fashion, and she called Trooper Oldfield to her; and they set off down the Mews once more, two young warriors erect and brave — and every bit as fragile as that War-Burned wretch I had seen earlier in Kensington High Street.