Free The Warlord of the Air by Michael Moorcock Page A

bomb incidents in Katmandu moved rapidly for me as I was shifted about the world, a bit like a rare museum specimen. The next morning I was bundled aboard the “monorail” train for Calcutta. The train was shaped rather like an airship itself—though this was truly of steel, all gleaming with brasswork and new paint—and it pulled fifty carriages behind it at a terrifying speed touching almost a hundred miles an hour on some straight sections of its raised track. The motive power for this incredible machine was, I learned, electricity. Making a few short stops, we had reached Calcutta within the day! My impression of Calcutta was of a vast city—much larger in area than the Calcutta we know—with gleaming towers of concrete, glass and steel dwarfing anything I had earlier marveled at in Katmandu. In Calcutta General Hospital I was tested by a score of experts, all of whom pronounced themselves baffled, and it was decided to ship me, post-haste, to England by the first available airship. The thought of sailing such a huge distance through the sky filled me with some perturbation—I still could not get used to accepting that a material lighter than steel could yet be stronger than steel and it was also difficult to conceive of Man’s ability to fly six thousand miles without once landing.
    The authorities preferred me in England for a number of reasons, but one of them was, of course, that they had been unable to trace a Captain Oswald Bastable as missing from any British regiment in the last decade. They had, however, checked the records of my own regiment back to 1902 and discovered, naturally, that a Captain Bastable had been killed at Teku Benga. I was not, now, just a puzzle for the doctors but a problem for army intelligence, who were curious to know how the “Mystery Man” (as they called me) could have assumed the identity of someone who had been dead for seventy years. I think they suspected that I might be some sort of foreign spy, but their notions were as vague as mine on that score, I later learned.
    And so I took passage on the great liner of the clouds, the A.S. (for Air Ship) Light of Dresden, a commercial vessel owned jointly by the German firm of Krupp Luftschifahrt A.G. and the British firm of Vickers Imperial Airways. As far as registration was concerned, the Light of Dresden was completely British and bore the appropriate insignia on her tail-fins, but the captain was a German as were at least half the crew. The Germans, it had emerged, had been the first to develop airship flight on any sort of scale and for some time the now defunct Zeppelin Company had led the world in airship development, until Britain and America, working together, had invented the boron-fibre hull and a method of raising and lowering the ships in the air without recourse to ballast, as such. The Light of Dresden was equipped with this device, which involved both heating and cooling the helium gas at great speed and intensity. The massive liner also had the latest example of an electrically powered mechanical calculating machine which the people of 1973 called a “computer” and which was capable of correcting the ship’s trim automatically, without recourse to human involvement. The nature of the engine I could never quite determine. It was a single huge gas turbine engine which powered a gigantic single screw—or more properly “propeller”—at the back of the ship. This screw was housed within the span of the great tail-fins. There were subsidiary oil-driven engines which helped adjust the ship’s trim, could swivel through 360 degrees, and were variably pitched and reversible, able to push the ship upward or downward.
    But I have not really described the most immediately impressive feature of this mighty ship of the air and that was that she was well over a thousand feet long and three hundred feet high (much of this bulk being, of course, her great gas-container). She had three decks, one beneath the other,