I avoided Nebogipfel’s eyes; I could not face his judgment! For this was no patch on a Sphere in the sky, populated by abhuman descendants remote from me: this was my world, my race, gone mad with War! For my part, I retained something of that greater perspective I had acquired in the Interior of that great construct. I could scarcely bear to see my own nation given over to such folly, and it pained me to hear Moses’s contributions, bound up as they were by the petty preconceptions of his day. I could hardly blame him! — but it distressed me to think that my own imagination had ever been so limited, so malleable.

We reached a crude rail station. But this was not the station I had used in 1891 to ride from Richmond into Waterloo, through Barnes; this new construction was away from the center of the town, being located just off the Kew Road. And it was an odd sort of station: there was nothing in the way of ticket collection points or destination boards, and the platform was a bare strip of concrete. A new line was crudely laid out. A train waited for us: the locomotive was a drab, dark affair which puffed steam mournfully about its soot-smeared boiler, and there was a single carriage. There were no lights on the locomotive, nor any insignia of the governing Railway Company.

Trooper Oldfield pulled open the carriage door; it was heavy, with a rubber seal around the edge. Oldfield’s eyes, visible behind their goggles, flicked about. Richmond, on a sunny afternoon in 1938, was not a safe place to be!

The carriage was plain: there were rows of hard wooden benches — that was all — nothing in the way of padding, or any decoration. The paint-work was a uniform dull brown, without character. The windows were sealed shut, and there were blinds which could be pulled down over them.

We settled into our places, facing each other rather stiffly. The heat inside the carriage on that sunny day was stifling.

Once Oldfield had closed the door, the train started into motion immediately, with something of a lurch.

“Evidently we’re the only passengers,” Moses murmured.

“Well, it’s a rum sort of train,” I said. “Rather bare amenities, Filby — eh?”

“It isn’t much of an age for comforts, old man.”

We passed through some miles of the desolate sort of countryside we had seen around Richmond. The land had been given over almost entirely to agriculture, it seemed to me, and was mostly deserted of people, although here and there I saw a figure or two scraping at some field. It might have been a scene from the fifteenth century, not the twentieth — save for the ruined and bombed-out houses which littered the countryside, with, here and there, the imposing brow of bomb shelters: these were great carapaces of concrete, half-submerged in the ground. Soldiers with guns patrolled the perimeters of these shelters, glaring at the world through their bug-faced gas-masks, as if daring any refugee to approach.

Near Mortlake I saw four men hanging from telegraph poles by a road-side. Their bodies were limp and blackened, and evidently the birds had been at them. I remarked on this horrifying sight to Filby — he and the soldiers had not even noticed the presence of the corpses — and he turned his watery gaze in that direction, and muttered something about how “no doubt they were caught stealing swedes, or some such.”

I was given to understand such sights were common, in this England of 1938.

Just then — quite without warning — the train plunged down a slope and into a tunnel. Two weak electric bulbs set in the ceiling cut into operation, and we sat there in their yellow glow, lowering at each other.

I asked Filby, “Is this an Underground train? We are on some extension of the Metropolitan Line, I imagine.”

Filby seemed confused. “Oh, I imagine the line has some Number or other…”

Moses began to fumble with his mask. “At least we can be shot of these terrible things.”

Bond laid a hand on his arm. “No,” she said. “It isn’t safe.”

Filby nodded his agreement. “The gas gets everywhere.” I thought he shuddered, but in that drab, loose outfit of his it was difficult to be sure. “Until you’ve been through it—”

Then, in brief, vivid words, he painted a picture of a gas raid he had witnessed in the early stages of the War, in Knightsbridge, when bombs had still been tipped by hand from floating balloons, and the population was not yet accustomed to it all.

And such ghastly scenes had become commonplace, Filby implied, in this world of endless War!

“It’s a wonder to me that morale hasn’t cracked altogether, Filby.”

“People aren’t like that, it seems. People endure. Of course there have been low moments,” he went on. “I remember August of 1918, for instance… It was a moment when it seemed the Western Allies might get on top of the damn Germans, after so long, and get the War completed. But then came the Kaiser’s Battle: the Kaiserschlacht, Ludendorff’s great victory, in which he smashed his way between the British and French lines… After four years of Trench War, it was a great breakthrough for them. Of course the bombing in Paris, which killed so many of the French general staff, didn’t help us…”

Captain Bond nodded. “The rapid victory in the West enabled the Germans to turn their attentions to the Russians in the East. Then, by 1925—”

“By 1925,” said Filby, “the blessed Germans had established their dreamed — of Mitteleuropa.”

He and Bond sketched the situation for me. Mitteleuropa: Axis Europe, a single market stretching from the Atlantic coast to beyond the Urals. By 1925 the Kaiser’s control extended from the Atlantic to the Baltic, through Russian Poland as far as the Crimea. France had become a weakened rump, shorn of much of its resources. Luxemburg was turned, by force, into a German federal state. Belgium and Holland were compelled to put their ports at German disposal. The mines of France, Belgium and Rumania were exploited to fuel further expansion of the Reich, to the East, and the Slavs were pushed back, and millions of non-Russians were “freed” from Moscow’s dominance…

And so on, in all its meaningless detail.

“Then, in 1926,” said Bond, “the Allies — Britain with her Empire, and America — opened up the Front in the West again. It has been the Invasion of Europe: the greatest transportation of troops and material across water, and through the air, ever seen.

“At first it went well. The populations of France and Belgium rose up, and the Germans were thrown back—”

“But not far,” Filby said. “Soon it was 1915 all over again, with two immense armies bogged down in the mud of France and Belgium.”

So the Siege had begun. But now, the resources available to make War were so much greater: the life-blood of the British Empire and the American continent on the one hand, and of Mitteleuropa on the other, was all poured into that awful sink of War.

And then came the War on Civilians, waged in earnest: the aerial torpedoes, the gassing…

“’The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings,’” Moses quoted grimly.

“But the people, Filby — what of the people!”

His voice, obscured by the mask, was at once familiar, yet removed from me. “There have been popular protests — especially in the late Twenties, I remember. But then they passed Order 1305, which made strikes and lockouts and the rest of it illegal. And that was the end of that! Since then — well, we’ve all simply got on with things, I suppose.”

I became aware that the walls of the tunnel had receded from the window, as if the tunnel were opening out. We seemed to be entering a large, underground chamber.

Bond and Oldfield unbuttoned their masks, with every expression of relief; Filby, too, released his straps, and when his poor old head came free of its moist prison, I could see white marks in his chin where the seal of the mask had dug into him. “That’s better,” he said.