Captain Korzeniowski shrugged, turning towards a cabinet containing a number of bottles and glasses. 'What will you have, Captain Bastable?'
'Whisky with a splash of soda, if you please. You are very kind.'
Korzeniowski took out the whisky decanter, gesturing casually with it as he extracted a glass from the rack. 'Poland is not at war with anyone now. First Germany broke her, then Russia extinguished her, then Russia herself ceased to exist, as a nation at least. Poor Poland. Her struggles are over for all time. Perhaps something less ill-fated will emerge from the ruins.' He handed me a full glass, made as if to toss off his own, in the Polish manner, then restrained himself and sipped it almost primly, tugging at the lobe of his left ear, seeming to reprove himself for having been about to make a flamboyant gesture.
'But you and your crew are Polish,' I said. 'The ship is Polish.'
'We belong to no nation now, though Poland was the birthplace of most of us. The ship was once the finest in our navy. Now it is the last survivor of the fleet. We have become what you might call "privateers". It is how we survive during the apocalypse.' His eyes held a hint of sardonic pride. 'I think we are rather good at it - though the prey becomes scarce. We had our eye on your ship for a while, but it did not seem worth the waste of a torpedo. You might be glad to know that the ship which attacked you was called the Mannanan and that she belonged to the Irish navy.'
'Irish?' I was surprised. Home Rule, then, was a fact in this world.
'We could not stop to pick you up right away, but decided that you would have to take your chances. The Mannanan was a well-equipped ship and we were able to wound her and force her to the surface quite easily. She was a "fine prize", as the buccaneers would say!' He laughed. 'We were able to take stores aboard which will keep us going for three months. And spare parts.'
She had deserved whatever Captain Korzeniowski had done to her. Doubtless he had shown more mercy in his treatment of the Mannanan than she had shown to our poor, battered steamer. But I could not bring myself to voice these sentiments aloud and thus condone what had been, after all, a similar act of piracy on the part of the Lola Monte^.
'Well, Captain Bastable,' said Korzeniowski, lighting a thin cheroot and signalling for me to help myself from his humidor, 'what do you want us to do with you? It's normally our habit to put survivors off at the nearest land and let them take their chances. But yours is something of a special case. We're making for the Outer Hebrides, where we have a station. Is there anywhere between here and there that we can put you off? Not that there is anywhere particularly habitable on land, these days.'
I told him how I had planned to try to reach England and that if there was any chance of being put off on the South Coast I would more than welcome it. He raised his eyebrows at this.
'If you had said Scotland I might have understood - but the South Coast! Having been the agent of your escape from death, I am not sure I could justify to my conscience my becoming the instrument of your destruction.’ ‘
Have you not heard? Have you any idea of the hell which Southern England has become?'
'I gather that London sustained some very heavy bombing…'
Evidently Korzeniowski could not restrain a bleak smile at this. 'I have always appreciated British understatement,' he told me. 'What else have you gathered?'
'That there is a risk of catching disease - typhus, cholera, and so on.'
'And so on, yes. Do you know what kind of bombs the air fleets were dropping towards the end, Captain Bastable?'
'Pretty powerful ones, I should imagine."
'Oh, extremely. But they were not explosives - they were bacteria. The bombs contained different varieties of plague, captain. They had a lot of scientific names, but they soon became known by their nicknames. Have you seen, for instance, the effects of the Devil's Mushroom?'
'I haven't heard of it.'
'It is called by that name after the fungus which begins to form on the surface of the flesh less than two hours after the germs have infected the victim. Scrape off the fungus and the flesh comes away with it. In two days you look like one of those-jfotten trees you might have seen in a forest sometimes, but happily by that time you are quite dead and you have known no physical pain at all. Then there's Prussian Emma, which causes haemorrhaging from all orifices - that death is singularly painful, I'm told. And there's Eye Rot, Red Blotch, Brighton Blight. Quaint names, aren't they? As colourful as the manifestations of the diseases on the skin. Aside from the diseases, there are roving gangs of cut-throats warring on one another and killing any other human being they find (not always prettily). From time to time you might set foot on a gas bomb which is triggered as you step on it and blows a poison gas up into your face. If you escape those dangers, there are a dozen more. Believe me, Captain Bastable, the only clean life now - the only life for a man - is on the high seas (or under them). It is to the sea that many of us have returned, living out our lives by preying upon one another, admittedly. But it is an existence infinitely preferable to the terrors and degradations of the land. And one still has a certain amount of freedom, is still somewhat in control of one's own fate. Dry land is what the medieval painters imagined Hell to be. Give me the purgatory of the seal'
'I am sure I would agree with you,' I told him, 'but I would still see it for myself.'
Korzeniowski shrugged. 'Very well. We'll put you off at Dover, if you like. But if you should change your mind, I could use a trained officer, albeit an army officer, aboard this vessel. You could serve with me.'
This was indeed a case of history repeating itself (or was it prefiguring itself). Korzeniowski did not know it, but I had already served with him - and not in the army either, but in airships. It would be second nature for me to sail with him now. But I thanked him and told him that my mind was made up.
'None the less,' he said, 'I'll leave the berth open to you for a bit. You never know.'
A few days later I was put ashore on a beach just below the familiar white cliffs of Dover and waved good-bye to the Lola Monte^ as she sank below the surface of the waves and was gone. Then I shouldered my knapsack of provisions, took a firm grip on the fast-firing carbine I had been given, and turned my steps inland, towards London.
4. THE KING OF EAST GRINSTEAD
If I had considered Korzeniowski's description of post-War England to be fanciful, I soon had cause to realize that he had probably restrained himself when painting a picture of the conditions to be found there. Plague was, indeed, widespread, and its victims were to be seen everywhere. But the worst of the plagues were over, largely because most of the population remaining had been killed off by them and those who survived were resistant to most of the strains - or had somehow recovered from them. Those who had recovered were sometimes missing a limb, or a nose, or an eye, while others had had parts of their faces or bodies eaten away altogether. I observed Several bands of these poor, half-rotted creatures, in the ruins of Dover and Canterbury, as I made my way cautiously towards London.
The inhabitants of the Home Counties had descended from the heights of civilization to the depths of barbarism in a few short years. The remains of the fine towns, the clean, broad highways, the monorail systems, the light, airy architecture of the world O'Bean had created, were still there to speak of the beauty that had come and gone so swiftly, but now bands of beast-men camped in them, tore them down to make crude weapons and primitive shelters, hunted each other to death among them. No woman was safe and, among certain of the 'tribes' roving the ruins, children were regarded as particularly excellent eating! Former bank managers, members of the stock exchange, respectable tradesmen, had come to regard vermin as delicacies and were prepared to tear a man's jugular from his throat with their teeth if it would gain them the possession of a dead cat. Few modern weapons were in evidence (the production of rifles and pistols had been on the decline since the invention of airships and subaquatic boats), but rudely made spears, bows and arrows, knives and pikes could be found in almost every hand. By day I lay hidden wherever there was good cover, watching the savages go by, and I travelled at night, risking ambush, since I regarded my chances as being better at night when most of the 'tribesmen' returned to their camps. The country had not only sustained the most horrifying mass aerial bombardment, but had also (in this area in particular) received huge punishment from long-range guns firing from across the Channel. Twice the Home Counties had been invaded by forces coming from sea and air, and these had ravaged what remained, taking the last of the food, blowing up those buildings which still stood, before being driven back by the vestiges of our army. At night the hills of Kent and Surrey sparkled with points of light indicating the locations of semi-nomadic camps where huge fires burned day and night. The fires were not merely there for cooking and heating, but to burn the regular supply of plague-created corpses.