Dystopian Novels of H. G. Wells. H. G. Wells
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have heard the vague outline of these things.”
“I wondered.”
“I came upon a garrulous old man.”
“I see…. Our masses — the word comes from your days — you know, of course, that we still have masses — regard you as our actual ruler. Just as a great number of people in your days regarded the Crown as the ruler. They are discontented — the masses all over the earth — with the rule of your Trustees. For the most part it is the old discontent, the old quarrel of the common man with his commonness — the misery of work and discipline and unfitness. But your Trustees have ruled ill. In certain matters, in the administration of the Labour Companies, for example, they have been unwise. They have given endless opportunities. Already we of the popular party were agitating for reforms — when your waking came. Came! If it had been contrived it could not have come more opportunely.” He smiled. “The public mind, making no allowance for your years of quiescence, had already hit on the thought of waking you and appealing to you, and — Flash!”
He indicated the outbreak by a gesture, and Graham moved his head to show that he understood.
“The Council muddled — quarrelled. They always do. They could not decide what to do with you. You know how they imprisoned you?”
“I see. I see. And now — we win?”
“We win. Indeed we win. Tonight, in five swift hours. Suddenly we struck everywhere. The wind-vane people, the Labour Company and its millions, burst the bonds. We got the pull of the aeroplanes.”
“Yes,” said Graham.
“That was, of course, essential. Or they could have got away. All the city rose, every third man almost was in it! All the blue, all the public services, save only just a few aeronauts and about half the red police. You were rescued, and their own police of the ways — not half of them could be massed at the Council House — have been broken up, disarmed or killed. All London is ours — now. Only the Council House remains.
“Half of those who remain to them of the red police were lost in that foolish attempt to recapture you. They lost their heads when they lost you. They flung all they had at the theatre. We cut them off from the Council House there. Truly tonight has been a night of victory. Everywhere your star has blazed. A day ago — the White Council ruled as it has ruled for a gross of years, for a century and a half of years, and then, with only a little whispering, a covert arming here and there, suddenly — So!”
“I am very ignorant,” said Graham. “I suppose — I do not clearly understand the conditions of this fighting. If you could explain. Where is the Council? Where is the fight?”
Ostrog stepped across the room, something clicked, and suddenly, save for an oval glow, they were in darkness. For a moment Graham was puzzled.
Then he saw that the cloudy grey disc had taken depth and colour, had assumed the appearance of an oval window looking out upon a strange unfamiliar scene.
At the first glance he was unable to guess what this scene might be. It was a daylight scene, the daylight of a wintry day, grey and clear. Across the picture, and halfway as it seemed between him and the remoter view, a stout cable of twisted white wire stretched vertically. Then he perceived that the rows of great wind-wheels he saw, the wide intervals, the occasional gulfs of darkness, were akin to those through which he had fled from the Council House. He distinguished an orderly file of red figures marching across an open space between files of men in black, and realised before Ostrog spoke that he was looking down on the upper surface of latter-day London. The overnight snows had gone. He judged that this mirror was some modern replacement of the camera obscura, but that matter was not explained to him. He saw that though the file of red figures was trotting from left to right, yet they were passing out of the picture to the left. He wondered momentarily, and then saw that the picture was passing slowly, panorama fashion, across the oval.
“In a moment you will see the fighting,” said Ostrog at his elbow. “Those fellows in red you notice are prisoners. This is the roof space of London — all the houses are practically continuous now. The streets and public squares are covered in. The gaps and chasms of your time have disappeared.”
Something out of focus obliterated half the picture. Its form suggested a man. There was a gleam of metal, a flash, something that swept across the oval, as the eyelid of a bird sweeps across its eye, and the picture was clear again. And now Graham beheld men running down among the wind-wheels, pointing weapons from which jetted out little smoky flashes. They swarmed thicker and thicker to the right, gesticulating — it might be they were shouting, but of that the picture told nothing. They and the wind-wheels passed slowly and steadily across the field of the mirror.
“Now,” said Ostrog, “comes the Council House,” and slowly a black edge crept into view and gathered Graham’s attention. Soon it was no longer an edge but a cavity, a huge blackened space amidst the clustering edifices, and from it thin spires of smoke rose into the pallid winter sky. Gaunt ruinous masses of the building, mighty truncated piers and girders, rose dismally out of this cavernous darkness. And over these vestiges of some splendid place, countless minute men were clambering, leaping, swarming.
“This is the Council House,” said Ostrog. “Their last stronghold. And the fools wasted enough ammunition to hold out for a month in blowing up the buildings all about them — to stop our attack. You heard the smash? It shattered half the brittle glass in the city.”
And while he spoke, Graham saw that beyond this area of ruins, overhanging it and rising to a great height, was a ragged mass of white building. This mass had been isolated by the ruthless destruction of its surroundings. Black gaps marked the passages the disaster had torn apart; big halls had been slashed open and the decoration of their interiors showed dismally in the wintry dawn, and down the jagged walls hung festoons of divided cables and twisted ends of lines and metallic rods. And amidst all the vast details moved little red specks, the red-clothed defenders of the Council. Every now and then faint flashes illuminated the bleak shadows. At the first sight it seemed to Graham that an attack upon this isolated white building was in progress, but then he perceived that the party of the revolt was not advancing, but sheltered amidst the colossal wreckage that encircled this last ragged stronghold of the red-garbed men, was keeping up a fitful firing.
And not ten hours ago he had stood beneath the ventilating fans in a little chamber within that remote building wondering what was happening in the world!
Looking more attentively as this warlike episode moved silently across the centre of the mirror, Graham saw that the white building was surrounded on every side by ruins, and Ostrog proceeded to describe in concise phrases how its defenders had sought by such destruction to isolate themselves from a storm. He spoke of the loss of men that huge downfall had entailed in an indifferent tone. He indicated an improvised mortuary among the wreckage, showed ambulances swarming like cheese-mites along a ruinous groove that had once been a street of moving ways. He was more interested in pointing out the parts of the Council House, the distribution of the besiegers. In a little while the civil contest that had convulsed London was no longer a mystery to Graham. It was no tumultuous revolt had occurred that night, no equal warfare, but a splendidly organised coup d’état. Ostrog’s grasp of details was astonishing; he seemed to know the business of even the smallest knot of black and red specks that crawled amidst these places.
He stretched a huge black arm across the luminous picture, and showed the room whence Graham had escaped, and across the chasm of ruins the course of his flight. Graham recognised the gulf across which the gutter ran, and the wind-wheels where he had crouched from the flying machine. The rest of his path had succumbed to the explosion. He looked again at the Council House, and it was already half hidden, and on the right a hillside with a cluster of domes and pinnacles, hazy, dim and distant, was gliding into view.
“And the Council is really overthrown?” he said.
“Overthrown,” said Ostrog.
“And I — . Is it indeed true that I —?”
“You are Master of the World.”
“But