Yet these men had recently been in a fight, that was clear. Had another band of Sharan Kang's men attacked the fort while I had been on my expedition into the old hill fox's territory?
I called out: 'Are you British?'
I received the stout reply: 'I certainly hope we are!'
And then I fell fainting on the dry dust of the compound.
2. THE DREAM - AND THE NIGHTMARE - OF THE CHILEAN WIZARD
Naturally enough, my first words on regaining consciousness, lying on a truckle bed in what remained of the barracks' dormitory, were:
'What's the year?'
'Thejear, sir?' The man who addressed me was a young, bright-looking chap. He had a sergeant's stripes on his dusty scarlet tunic (it was a Royal Londonderry uniform, a regiment having close connections with my own) and he held a tin cup of tea in one hand while the other was behind my head, trying to help me sit up.
'Please, sergeant, humour me, would you? What's the year?'
'It's 1904, sir.'
So I had been 'lost' for two years. That would explain a great deal. I was relieved. Sipping the rather weak tea (I was later to discover it was almost their last) I introduced myself, giving my rank and my own regiment, telling the sergeant that I was, as far as I knew, the only survivor of a punitive expedition of a couple of years earlier - that I had been captured, escaped, wandered around for a bit and had only just managed to make it back. The sergeant accepted the story without any of the signs of suspicion which I had come to expect, but his next words alarmed me.
'So you would know nothing of the War, then, Captain Bastable?'
'A war? Here, on the North-West Frontier? The Russians…'
'At the moment, sir, this is one of the few places scarcely touched by the war, though you are right in supposing that the Russians are amongst our enemies. The war is world-wide. Myself and less than a score of men are all that remains of the army which failed to defend Darjeeling. The city and the best part of these territories are either under Russian control or the Russians have been, in turn, beaten by the Arabian Alliance. Personally I am hoping that the Russians are still in control. At least they let their prisoners live or, at worst, kill them swiftly. The last news we had was not good, however…'
'Are there no reinforcements coming from Britain?'
A look of pain filled the sergeant's eyes. 'There will be little enough coming from Blighty for some time, I shouldn't wonder, sir. Most of Europe is in a far worse plight than Asia, having sustained the greatest concentration of bombs. The war is over in Europe, Captain Bastable. Here, it continues - a sort of alternative battleground, you might call it, with precious little for anyone to win. The power situation is grim enough - there's probably not one British keel capable of lifting, even if it exists…'
Now his words had become completely meaningless to me. I was aware of only one terrifying fact and I had become filled with despair: this world of 1904 bore even less relation to my own world than the one from which I had sought to escape, I begged the sergeant to explain recent history to me as he might explain it to a child, using my old excuse of partial amnesia. The man accepted the excuse and kindly gave me a breakdown of this world's history since the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. It was radically different either from your world, Moorcock, or from the world of the future I described to you.
It appears that, by the 1870’s, in Chile of all places, there had emerged the genius who had, in a few short years, been responsible for altering the lot of the world's poor, of providing plenty where once there had been famine, comfort where there had been only grinding misery. His name was Manuel O'Bean, the son of an Irish engineer who had settled in Chile and a Chilean heiress (perhaps the wealthiest woman in South or Central America). O'Bean had shown signs of an enormous capacity to learn and to invent at an extraordinarily young age. His father, needless to say, had encouraged him and O'Bean had learned everything his father could pass on by the time he was eight years old. With the resources made available by his mother's wealth, O'Bean had nothing to thwart this flowering of his mechanical genius. By the time he was twelve he had invented a whole new range of mining equipment which, when applied to his family's holdings, increased their wealth a hundred-fold. Not only did he have an enormous talent for planning and building new types of machine, he also had the ability to work out new power sources which were less wasteful and infinitely cheaper than the crude sources up to that time in use. He developed a method of converting and reconverting electricity so that it did not need to be carried through wires but could be transmitted by means of rays to almost anywhere in the world'from any other point. His generators were small, efficient and required the minimum of power, and these in turn propelled most of the types of machinery he invented. Other engines, including sophisticated forms of steam-turbine depending on fast-heating liquids other than water, were also developed. As well as the mining and farming equipment he developed in those early years, O'Bean (still less than fifteen years old) invented a collection of highly efficient war-machines (he was still a boy and was fascinated, as boys are, with such things), including underwater boats, mobile cannons, airships (in collaboration with the great flying expert, the Frenchman La Perez) and self-propelled armoured carriages sometimes called 'land ironclads'. However, O'Bean soon abandoned this line of research as his social conscience developed. By the time he was eighteen he had sworn never to put his genius to warlike purposes again and instead concentrated on machines which would irrigate deserts, tame forests, and turn the whole world into an infinitely rich garden which would feed the hungry and thus extinguish what he believed to be the well-spring of most human strife.
By the beginnings of the new century, therefore, it seemed that Utopia had been achieved. There was not one person in the world who was not well-nourished and did not have the opportunity to receive a good education. Poverty had been abolished almost overnight.
Man can live by bread alone when all his energies are devoted to attaining that bread, but once his mind is clear, once he has ceased to labour through all his waking hours to find food, then he begins to think. If he has the opportunity to gather facts, if his mind is educated, then he begins to consider his position in the world and compare it with that of other men. Now it was possible for thousands to understand that the world's power was in the hands of a few the landowners, the industrialists, the politicians and the ruling classes. All these people had welcomed O'Bean's scientific and technical advances - for they were able to lease his patents, to build their own machines, to make themselves richer as those they ruled became better off. But twenty-five years is enough time for a new generation to grow up - a generation which has never known dire poverty and which, unlike a previous generation, is no longer merely grateful that it has leisure time and more than enough to eat. That generation begins to want to control its own fate in myriad ways. In short, it seeks political power.
By 1900, in this world, civil strife had become a fact of life in almost every nation, large and small. In some countries, usually those which had been the most backward, revolutions succeeded, and, attended by a fanatical nationalism, new power groups were formed. The Great Powers found their colonial territories snatched from them - in Asia, in Africa, in the Americas - and since the sources of power were cheap and O'Bean's patents were distributed everywhere, since military power no longer depended so much on large, well-trained armies (or even navies), these older nations were wary of starting wars with the newer nations, preferring to try to retain their positions by means of complicated diplomacy, by building up 'spheres of influence'. But complicated diplomatic games played in the far corners of the world tend to have a habit of creating stronger tensions at home, so in Europe, in particular, but also in the United States and Japan, nationalism grew stronger and stronger and fierce battles of words began to take place between the Great Powers. Trade embargoes, crippling and unnecessarily unfair tariff restrictions were applied and returned. A madness began to fill the heads of those who ruled. They saw themselves threatened from within by their young people, who demanded what they saw as more social justice, and from without by their neighbouring countries. More and more resources were devoted to the building up of land, sea and air fleets, of large guns, of armies which could control dissident populations (and at the same time, hopefully, absorb them). In many countries enforced military service, after the Prussian model, became the norm - and this in turn brought an increasingly furious reaction from those who sought to reform their governments. Active, violent revolutionary methods began to be justified by those who had originally hoped to achieve their ends by means of oratory and the ballot box.