CHAPTER II
The Coming of “The Blight”
Next morning I still felt the effects of the shock; and decided not to go to my office. I stayed indoors all day. When the evening papers came, I found in them brief accounts of the fire-ball; and in one case there was an article by Wotherspoon under the heading: “Well-known Scientist’s Strange Experience.” One or two reporters called at my house later in the day in search of copy, but I sent them on to Cumberland Terrace. In some of the reports I figured as “a well-known motor manufacturer,” whilst in others I was referred to simply as “a friend of Mr. Wotherspoon.” I had little difficulty in surmising the authorship of the latter group.
In the ordinary course of events, the fire-ball would have been much less than a nine days’ wonder, even in spite of Wotherspoon’s industry in compiling accounts of it and digging out parallel cases from the correspondence columns of old volumes of Nature and Knowledge; actually its career as a news item was made briefer still. An entirely different phenomenon shouldered it out of the limelight almost immediately.
After staying indoors all day, I felt the need of fresh air; and resolved to walk across the Park to Cumberland Terrace to see whether Wotherspoon had quite recovered from the shock. I had not much doubt in my mind upon the point; for the traces of his journalistic activity were plain enough; and showed that he was certainly not incapacitated. However, as I wanted a stroll and as I might as well have an object before me, I decided to go and see him.
Twilight was coming on as I crossed the suspension bridge. Even after the thunder-storm on the previous night there had been no rainfall; and although the temperature had fallen until the air was almost chilly, there was as yet no dew on the ground. I stopped on the bridge to watch the tints of the western sky; for these London after-glow effects always pleased me.
As I leaned on the rail, I heard the low drone of aerial engines; and in a few seconds the broad wings of the Australian Express swept between me and the sky. Even in those days I could never see one of these vast argosies passing overhead without a throb in my veins.
The great air-services had just come to their own; and aeroplanes started from London four and five times daily for America, Asia, Africa, and Australia. In the windows of the air-offices the flight of these vessels could be followed hour by hour on the huge world-maps over which moved tiny models showing the exact positions of the various aeroplanes on the globe. Watching the dots moving across the surface of the charts, one could call up, with very little imagination, the landscapes which were sweeping into the view of travellers on board the real machines as they glided through these far-distant spaces of the air. This one, two days out from London, would be sighting the pagoda roofs of Pekin as the night was coming on; that one, on the Pacific route, had just finished filling up its tanks at Singapore and was starting on the long course to Australia; the passengers on this other would be watching the sun standing high over Victoria Nyanza; while, on the Atlantic, the Western Ocean Express and the South American Mail were racing the daylight into a fourth continent.
I think it was these maps which first brought home to me distinctly how the spaces of the world had shrunk on the “time-scale” with the coming of the giant aeroplanes. The pace had been growing swifter and ever swifter since the middle of the nineteenth century. Up to that day, there had been little advance since the time of the earlier sailing-vessels. Then came the change from sail to steam; and the Atlantic crossing contracted in its duration. The great Trans-continental railways quickened transit once more; again there was a shrinkage in the time-scale. Vladivostok came within ten days of London; from Cairo to the Cape was only five days. But with the coming of the air-ways the acceleration was greater still; and we reckoned in hours the journeys which, in the nineteenth century days, had been calculated in weeks and even months. All the outposts of the world were drawing nearer together.
It was not this shrinkage only which the air-maps suggested. In the early twentieth century the telegraphs and submarine cables had spread their network over the world, linking nation to nation and coast to coast; but their ramifications dwindled in perspective when compared with the complex network of the air-ways which now enmeshed the globe. London lay like a spider at the centre of the web of communications, the like of which the world had never seen before; and along each thread the aeroplanes were speeding to and from all the quarters of the earth.
Rapid communication we had had since the days of the extension of the telegraph; but it had been limited to the transmission of thoughts and of news. The coming of the aeroplanes had changed all that. These tracks on the air-maps were not mere wires thrilling with the quiverings of the electric current. Along them material things were passing continually; a constant interchange of passengers and goods was taking place hourly over the multitudinous routes. For good or ill, humanity was becoming linked together until it formed a single unit.