H. Wells - The World Set Free

came, and when at last he glanced round, three great planes were

close upon him, and his companion, thrice hit, lay dead across

his bombs. His followers manifestly did not mean either to upset

or shoot him, but inexorably they drove him down, down. At last

he was curving and flying a hundred yards or less over the level

fields of rice and maize. Ahead of him and dark against the

morning sunrise was a village with a very tall and slender

campanile and a line of cable bearing metal standards that he

could not clear. He stopped his engine abruptly and dropped flat.

He may have hoped to get at the bombs when he came down, but his

pitiless pursuers drove right over him and shot him as he fell.

Three other aeroplanes curved down and came to restamidst grass

close by the smashed machine. Their passengers descended, and

ran, holding their light rifles in their hands towards the debris

and the two dead men. The coffin-shaped box that had occupied

the centre of the machine had broken, and three black objects,

each with two handles like the ears of a pitcher, lay peacefully

amidst the litter.

These objectswere so tremendously important in the eyes of their

captors that they disregarded the two dead men who lay bloody and

broken amidst the wreckage as they might have disregarded dead

frogs by a country pathway.

'By God,' cried the first. 'Here they are!'

'And unbroken!' said the second.

'I've never seenthe things before,' said the first.

'Bigger than I thought,' said the second.

The third comer arrived. He stared for a moment at the bombs and

then turned his eyes to the dead man with a crushed chest who lay

in a muddy place among the green stems under the centre of the

machine.

'One can take no risks,' he said, with a faint suggestion of

apology.

The other two now also turned to the victims. 'We must signal,'

said the first man. A shadow passed between them and the sun,

and they looked up to seethe aeroplane that had fired the last

shot. 'Shall we signal?' came a megaphone hail.

'Three bombs,' they answered together.

'Where do they come from?' asked the megaphone.

The three sharpshooters looked at each other and then moved

towards the dead men. One of them had an idea. 'Signal that

first,' he said, 'while we look.' They were joined by their

aviators for the search, and all six men began a hunt that was

necessarily brutal in its haste, for some indication of identity.

They examined the men's pockets, their bloodstained clothes, the

machine, the framework. They turned the bodies over and flung

them aside. There was not a tattoo mark… Everything was

elaborately free of any indication of its origin.

'We can't find out!' they called at last.

'Not a sign?'

'Not a sign.'

'I'm coming down,' said the man overhead…

Section 7

The Slavic fox stood upon a metal balcony in his picturesque Art

Nouveau palace that gave upon the precipice that overhung his

bright little capital, and beside him stood Pestovitch, grizzled

and cunning, and now full of an ill-suppressed excitement. Behind

them the window opened into a large room, richly decorated in

aluminium and crimson enamel, across which the king, as he

glanced ever and again over his shoulder with a gesture of

inquiry, could seethrough the two open doors of a little azure

walled antechamber the wireless operator in the turret working at

his incessant transcription. Two pompously uniformed messengers

waited listlessly in this apartment. The room was furnished with

a stately dignity, and had in the middle of it a big green

baize-covered table with the massive white metal inkpots and

antiquated sandboxes natural to a new but romantic monarchy. It

was the king's council chamber and about it now, in attitudesof

suspended intrigue, stood the half-dozen ministers who

constituted his cabinet. They had been summoned for twelve

o'clock, but still at half-past twelve the king loitered in the

balcony and seemed to be waiting for some news that did not come.

The king and his minister had talked at first in whispers; they

had fallen silent, for they found little now to express except a

vague anxiety. Away there on the mountain side were the white

metal roofs of the long farm buildings beneath which the bomb

factory and the bombs were hidden. (The chemist who had made all

these for the king had died suddenly after the declaration of

Brissago.) Nobody knewof that store of mischief now but the king

and his adviser and three heavily faithfulattendants; the

aviators who waited now in the midday blaze with their

bomb-carrying machines and their passenger bomb-throwers in the

exercising grounds of the motor-cyclist barracks below were still

in ignorance of the position of the ammunition they were

presently to take up. It was time they started if the scheme was

to work as Pestovitch had planned it. It was a magnificent plan.

It aimed at no less than the Empire of the World. The government

of idealists and professors away there at Brissago was to be

blown to fragments, and then east, west, north, and south those

aeroplanes would go swarming over a world that had disarmed

itself, to proclaim Ferdinand Charles, the new Caesar, the

Master, Lord of the Earth. It was a magnificent plan. But the

tension of this waiting for news of the success of the first blow

was-considerable.

The Slavic fox was of a pallid fairness, he had a remarkably long

nose, a thick, short moustache, and small blue eyes that were a

little too near together to be pleasant. It was his habit to

worry his moustache with short, nervous tugs whenever his

restless mindtroubled him, and now this motion was becoming so

incessant that it irked Pestovitch beyond the limitsof

endurance.

'I will go,' said the minister, 'and seewhat the trouble is with

the wireless. They give us nothing, goodor bad.'

Left to himself, the king could worry his moustache without

stint; he leant his elbows forward on the balcony and gave both

of his long white hands to the work, so that he looked like a

pale dog gnawing a bone. Suppose they caught his men, what

should he do? Suppose they caught his men?

The clocks in the light gold-capped belfries of the town below

presently intimated the half-hour after midday.

Of course, he and Pestovitch had thoughtit out. Even if they

had caught those men, they were pledged to secrecy… Probably

they would be killed in the catching… One could deny anyhow,

deny and deny.

And then he became aware of half a dozen little shining specks

very high in the blue… Pestovitch came out to him presently.

'The government messages, sire, have all dropped into cipher,' he

said. 'I have set a man--'

'LOOK!' interrupted the king, and pointed upward with a long,

lean finger.

Pestovitch followed that indication and then glanced for one

questioning moment at the white face before him.

'We have to face it out, sire,' he said.

For some moments they watched the steep spirals of the descending

messengers, and then they began a hasty consultation…

They decided that to be holding a council upon the details of an

ultimatesurrender to Brissago was as innocent-looking a thing as

the king could well be doing, and so, when at last the ex-king

Egbert, whom the council had sent as its envoy, arrived upon the

scene, he discovered the king almost theatrically posed at the