Free The Warlord of the Air by Michael Moorcock

their teeth into, I must say!”
    I smiled. “You don’t make it sound very attractive for me.” I gestured towards the window. “Would you mind raising the blind?”
    He tapped a little box which lay on the bedside table. The box had three switches mounted on it. “Press this one,” he said. I did as he suggested and was amazed to see the blind wind itself slowly up, revealing a view of the white towers of Katmandu and, beyond them, a section of the airship park.
    “Those ships are magnificent,” I said.
    “Why, yes,” he said. “I suppose they are. Take ’em a bit for granted, you know. But the airship has done a lot for India. For the Empire, come to that—for the whole world, if you like. Faster communications. Swifter trade exchanges. Greater mobility of troops.”
    “What surprises me,” I said, “is how they can stay up. I mean, those gas-bags seem made of metal.”
    “Metal!” he laughed heartily. “I wish I could think you were having a joke with me, Bastable. Metal! The hulls are made of boron-fibre. It’s stronger than steel and infinitely lighter. The gas is helium. There’s some metal in the gondola sections, but mainly it’s plastic.”
    “‘Plastic’—plastic what?” I asked curiously.
    “Um—plastic material—it’s made of chemicals—Good God, you must have heard of plastic, man. I suppose it’s sort of rubber, but it can be made to harden at different strengths, in different forms, different degrees of pliability...”
    I gave up trying to understand Major Powell. I was never much of a scientist at the best of times. I accepted the mystery of this “plastic” as I had accepted, while a schoolboy, the mysteries of electrical lighting. Still, it was a comfort to me, in the face of all these new wonders, that some things had not changed a great deal. Indeed, they had improved.
    The carping critics of Imperialism in my own day would have been silenced pretty sharply if they had heard what I had just heard—and seen the evidence of prosperity and stability which I could now see from my window. I warmed with pride at that moment, and thanked Providence, for this vision of Utopia. Over the past seventy years the White Man had shouldered his burden jolly well, it seemed to me.
    Major Powell stood up and went to the window, echoing my own thoughts as he stared out, his hands clasped over his swagger stick behind his back. “How those Victorians would have loved to see all this,” he murmured. “All their ideals and dreams realized so fully. But there’s still work for us to do.” He turned and looked hard at me, his face half in shadow. “And a proper study of the lessons of the past, Bastable, helps us with that work.”
    “I’m sure you’re right.”
    He nodded. “I know I am.” He came to attention and saluted me with his swagger stick. “Well, old chap, I must be off. Duty calls.”
    He began to walk towards the door.
    Then something happened. A dull thump which seemed to shake the whole building. In the distance I heard sirens sounding, bells ringing.
    Major Powell’s face was suddenly grim and white and his dark eyes blazed with anger.
    “What is it, major?”
    “Bomb.”
    “Here?”
    “Anarchists. Madmen. European troublemakers, almost certainly. Not the Indians at all. Germans—Russians—Jews, they’ve all got a vested interest in the disruption of order.”
    He ran from the room. Duty was indeed calling him now.
    The sudden change from tranquility to violence had taken my breath away. I lay back in the bed trying to see what was happening outside. I saw an army motor race across the airpark. I heard the sound of another far-off explosion. Who on earth could be insane enough to plot the destruction of such a Utopia as this?

CHAPTER SIX
A Man Without a Purpose
    T here was little point in speculating about the causes of the explosions, any more than there was in brooding about how I had managed to fall through Time to 1973. The events which followed the