This was the happiest I had seen people in this benighted time; save for the universal epaulets and masks — and the deadness of the ground beneath, and that awful, looming Roof over all our heads — this might have been a Bank Holiday crowd from any age, and I was struck again by the resilience of the human spirit.

To the north of the Round Pond rows of dingy canvas deck-chairs had been set out, for the use of those wishing to view the news projected on the roof above us. The chairs were mostly occupied; Wallis paid an attendant — the coins were metal tokens, much smaller than the currency of my day — and we settled in two seats with our heads tipped back.

Our silent soldier-attendants moved into place around us, watching us and the crowd.

Dusty fingers of light reached up from Aldis lamps situated (Wallis said) in Portland Place, and splashed gray and white tones across the roof. Amplified voices and music washed down over the passive crowd. The Roof had been white-washed hereabouts and so the kinematographic images were quite sharp. The first sequence showed a thin, rather wild-looking man shaking hands with another, and then posing beside what looked like a pile of bricks; the voices were not quite lined up with the movements of the mouths, but the music was stirring, and the general effect was easy to follow.

Wallis leaned over to me. “We’re in luck! — it is a feature on Imperial College. That’s Kurt Gödel — a young scientist from Austria. You may meet him. We managed to retrieve Gödel recently from the Reich; apparently he wished to defect because he has some crazy notion that the Kaiser is dead, and has been replaced by an impostor… Rather an odd chap, between you and me, but a great mind.”

“Gödel?” I felt a flicker of interest. “The chap behind the Incompleteness of Mathematics, and all of that?”

“Why, yes.” He looked at me curiously. “How do you know about that? — It’s after your time. Well,” he said, “it’s not his achievements in mathematical philosophy we want him for. We’ve put him in touch with Einstein in Princeton” — I forbore to ask who this Einstein was — “and he’s going to start up on a line of research he was pursuing in the Reich. It’ll be another way into time travel for us, we hope. It was quite a coup — I imagine the Kaiser’s boys are furious with each other…”

“And the brick construction beside him? What’s that?”

“Oh, an experiment.” He glanced around with caution. “I shouldn’t say too much — it’s only on the Babble for a bit of show. It’s all to do with atomic fission… I can explain later, if you’re interested. Gödel is particularly keen, apparently, to run experiments with it; in fact I believe we’ve started some tests for him already.”

We were presented, now, with a picture of a troop of rather elderly-looking men in ill-fitting battle-dress, grinning towards the camera. One of them was picked out, a thin, intense-looking chap. Wallis said, “The Home Guard… men and women out of serviceable age, who nevertheless do a bit of soldiering, in case the Invasion of England ever comes. That’s Orwell — George Orwell. A bit of a writer — don’t suppose you know him.”

The news seemed to be finished for now, and a new entertainment blossomed over our heads. This turned out to be a cartoon — a kind of animated drawing, with a lively musical backing. It featured a character called Desperate Dan, I gathered, who lived in a crudely-drawn Texas. After eating a huge cow pie, this Dan tried to knit himself a jumper of wires, using telegraph poles as needles. Inadvertently he created a chain; and when he threw it away in the sea, it sank. Dan fished the chain out and found that he had snagged no less than three German undersea Juggernauts. A naval gentleman, observing this, gave Dan a reward of fifty pounds… and so forth.

I had supposed this entertainment to be fit only for children, but I saw that adults laughed at it readily enough. I found it all rather crude and coarsely imagined propaganda, and I decided that the common slang epithet of “Babble Machine” suited this kinematographic show rather well.

After this entertainment we were treated to some more snippets of news. I saw a burning city — it might have been Glasgow, or Liverpool — where a glow filled the night sky, and the flames were gigantic. Then there were pictures of children being evacuated from a collapsed Dome in the Midlands. They looked like typical town children to me, grinning into the camera, with their outsize boots and dirty skin-waifs, quite helpless in the tide of this War.

Now we entered a section of the show entitled, according to a caption, “Postscript.” First there was a portrait of the King; he was, disconcertingly for me, a skinny chap called Egbert, who turned out to be a remote relation of the old Queen I remembered. This Egbert was one of the few members of the family to have survived audacious German raids in the early days of the War. Meanwhile a plum-voiced actor read us a poem:

“…All shall be well and/ All manner of thing shall be well/ When the tongues of flame are in folded/ Into the crowned knot office/ And the fire and the rose are one…”

And so on! As far as I could make out the piece was representing the effects of this War as a kind of Purgatory, which in the end would cleanse the souls of Humanity. Once I might have agreed with this argument, I reflected; but after my time in the Sphere’s Interior, I think I had come to regard War as no more or less than a dark excrescence, a flaw of the human soul; and any justification for it was just that justification, after the fact of it.

I gathered Wallis didn’t make much of this sort of stuff. He shrugged his shoulders. “Eliot,” he said, as if that explained it all.

Now there came an image of a man: a rather careworn, jowly old fellow with an unruly moustache, tired eyes, ugly ears and a fierce, frustrated sort of manner. He sat with his pipe in his hand, by a fire-place — the pipe was rather obviously unlit — and he began to proclaim in a frail voice a kind of commentary on the day’s events. I thought the chap looked familiar, but at first I couldn’t place him. He wasn’t much impressed by the efforts of the Reich, it seemed — “That vast machine of theirs can’t create a glimmer of that poetry of action which distinguishes War from Mass Murder. It’s a machine — and therefore has no soul.”

He evoked us all to still sterner efforts. He worked the myths of the English countryside — “the round green hills dissolving into the hazy blue of the sky” — and asked us to imagine that English scene torn apart — “to reveal the old Flanders Front, trenches and bomb craters, ruined towns, a scarred countryside, a sky belching death, and the faces of murdered children” — all this last pronounced with something of an apocalyptic glee, I thought.

In a burst of realization, I remembered him. It was my old friend the Writer, withered into an old man! “Why, isn’t that Mr.—?” I said, naming him.

“Yes,” he said. “Did you know him? I suppose you could have… Of course you did! For he wrote up that popular account of your travels in time. It was serialized in The New Review, as I recall; and then put out as a book. That was quite a turning point for me, you know, to come across that… Poor chap’s getting on now, of course — I don’t think he was ever all that healthy — and his fiction isn’t what it was, in my view.”

“No?”

“Too much lecturing and not enough action — you know the type! Still, his works of popular science and history have been well received. He’s a good friend of Churchill — I mean the First Lord of the Admiralty — and I suspect your pal has had a great deal of influence on official thinking on the shape of things to come, after the War is done. You know — when we reach the ’Uplands of the Future.’ “ Wallis said, quoting some other speech of my former friend’s. “He’s working on a Declaration of Human Rights, or some such, to which we all must adhere after the War — you know the sort of dreamy affair. But he’s not so effective a speaker. Priestley’s my favorite of that type.”