I had not heard of this college, but I did not inquire further.

Oldfield was carrying a box of gas-masks and metallic epaulets. “Here,” he said to us, “you’d better put these on.”

Moses held up a gas-mask with distaste. “You cannot expect me to insert my head into such a contraption.”

“Oh, you must,” Filby said anxiously, and I saw he was already buttoning his own mask about his jowly face. “We’ve a little way to go in the open out there, you know. And it’s not safe. Not safe!”

“Come on,” I said to Moses, as I grimly took a set of mask and epaulets for myself. “we’re not at home anymore, I’m afraid, old man.”

The epaulets were heavy, but clipped easily to my jacket; but the mask Oldfield gave me, though roomy and well-fitting, was most uncomfortable. I found the twin eye-goggles fogging up almost immediately, the rubber and leather ridges of its construction soon pooling with sweat. “I shall never get used to this.”

“I hope we’re not here long enough to have to,” Moses hissed with feeling, his voice muffled by his own mask.

I turned to Nebogipfel. The poor Morlock — already trussed up in his schoolboy’s uniform — was now topped by a ridiculous mask several sizes too big for him: when he moved his head, the insectile filter on the front of the thing actually wobbled.

I patted his head. “At least you’ll blend with the crowds now, Nebogipfel!”

He forbore to reply.

We emerged from the metallic womb of the Raglan into a bright summer’s day. It was around two in the afternoon, and the sunlight splashed from the drab hull of the ’Naut. My mask immediately filled with perspiration and fog, and I longed to take the heavy, tight thing off my head.

The sky overhead was immense, a deep blue and free of cloud although here and there I could see thin white lines and swirls, tracings of vapor or ice crystals etched across the sky. I saw a glint at one end of such a trail — perhaps it was sunlight shimmering from some metal Flying Machine.

The Juggernaut was perched on a version of the Petersham Road which was much changed from 1873, or even 1891. I recognized most of the houses from my day: even my own still stood behind an area-rail that was corroded and covered in verdigris. But the gardens and verges seemed uniformly to have been dug over, and given up to a crop of a vegetable I did not know. And I saw that many of the houses had suffered great damage. Some had been reduced to little more than fascia, with their roofs and interior partitioning blasted in: here and there, buildings had been blackened and hollowed out by fire; and others were reduced quite to rubble. Even my own house was broken up, and the laboratory was quite demolished. And the damage was not recent: resurgent life, green and vital, had reclaimed the interior of many of the houses; moss and young plants carpeted the remnants of living-rooms and hall-ways, and ivy hung like bizarre curtains over the gaping windows.

I was able to see that the trees still fell away down the same sylvan slope to the Thames, but even the trees showed signs of damage: I saw the stumps of snapped-off branches, scorched boles, and the like. It was as if a great wind, or fire, had passed by here. The Pier was undamaged, but of Richmond Bridge only the haunches remained now, blackened and truncated, with the span quite demolished. Much of the river-side meadows towards Petersham had been given over to the same peculiar crop which had inhabited the gardens, I saw, and there was a brown scum floating down the river itself.

There was nobody about. No traffic moved; the weeds pushed through the broken-up road surfaces. I heard no people — no laughing or shouting, no children playing — no animals, no horses, no birds singing.

Of the gaiety which had once characterized a June afternoon from this prospect — the flashing of oars, the laughter of pleasure-seekers floating up off the river — none of that remained.

All of that was gone now, in this grim Year; and perhaps forever. This was a deserted Richmond, a dead place. I was reminded of the splendid ruins in the garden — like world of A.D. 802,701. I had thought all of that remote from me; I had never imagined to see my own familiar England in such a state!

“Great God,” Moses said. “What a catastrophe — what destruction! Is England abandoned?”

“Oh, no,” Trooper Oldfield put in brightly. “But places like this just aren’t safe any more. There’s the gas, and the aerial torpedoes — most people have gone in, to the Domes, do you see?”

“But it’s all so broken-down, Filby,” I protested. “What’s become of the spirit of our people? Where’s the will to set to and repair all this? It could be done, you know—”

Filby rested a gloved hand on my arm. “One day — when this wretched business is done — then we’ll revive it all. Eh? And it shall be just as it was. But for now…” His voice broke off, and I wished I could see his expression. “Come on,” he said. “We’d better get out of the open.”

We left the Raglan behind and hurried along the road towards the town center: Moses, Nebogipfel and I, with Filby and the two soldiers. Our companions from 1938 walked in a kind of crouch, with endless, nervous glances at the sky. I noted again how Bond walked with a pronounced limp favoring her left leg.

I glanced back with longing at the Juggernaut, for within, I knew, was my Time Machine — my only possible way home, out of this unfolding nightmare of Multiple Histories — but I knew there was no prospect of reaching the machine now; all I could do was to wait on events.

We walked along Hill Street, and then turned into George Street. There was none of the bustle and elegance which had characterized this shopping street in my Year. The department stores, like Gosling’s and Wright’s, were boarded up, and even the planks which sealed up their windows had faded with years of sunlight. I saw how one corner of Gosling’s window had been pried open, evidently by looters; the hole that had been made looked as if it had been gnawed by a rat the size of a human. We passed a squat shelter with a beetling cover, and a pillar beside it with checkered markings and a glass face, now cracked. This too looked abandoned, and the bright yellow-and-black paintwork of the pillar was chipped and peeling.

“It is a shelter against air-raids,” Filby told me in answer to my query. “One of the early designs. Quite inadequate — if ever a direct impact had come… Well! And the pillar marks a first-aid point, equipped with respirators and masks. Hardly used, before the great retreat into the Domes began.”

“Air-raids… This is not a happy world, Filby, to have coined such terms.”

He sighed. “They have aerial torpedoes, you see. The Germans, I mean. Flying machines, which can go to a spot two hundred miles away, drop a Bomb and return! — all mechanical, without the intervention of a man. It’s a world of marvels, for War is a terrific motivation for the inventive mind, you know. You’ll love it here!”

“The Germans…” Moses said. “We’ve had nothing but trouble with the Germans since the emergence of Bismarck. Is that old scoundrel still alive?”

“No, but he has able successors,” Filby said grimly.

I had no comment to make. From my perspective, so detached now from Moses’s, even such a brute as Bismarck scarcely seemed to warrant the loss of a single human life.

Filby was telling me, in breathless fragments, of more of the marvelous Warfaring gargantua of this benighted age: of raider submarines, designed to prosecute the gas battles, with practically unlimited cruising range, and containing half a dozen missiles each, all packed with a formidable supply of gas bombs; of a torrent of ironmongery which I imagined tearing its way across the battered plains of Europe; of more “Juggernauts” which could go underwater, or float, or burrow; and all of it was opposed by an equally formidable array of mines and guns of all sorts.


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