The War in the Air | Page 7

disaster. There seemed no possible trusting to them. The breeze upset them, the eddies
near the ground upset them, a passing thought in the mind of the aeronaut upset them.
Also they upset--simply.
"It's this 'stability' does 'em," said Grubb, repeating his newspaper. "They pitch and they
pitch, till they pitch themselves to pieces."
Experiments fell away after two expectant years of this sort of success, the public and
then the newspapers tired of the expensive photographic reproductions, the optimistic
reports, the perpetual sequence of triumph and disaster and silence. Flying slumped, even
ballooning fell away to some extent, though it remained a fairly popular sport, and
continued to lift gravel from the wharf of the Bun Hill gas-works and drop it upon
deserving people's lawns and gardens. There were half a dozen reassuring years for
Tom--at least so far as flying was concerned. But that was the great time of mono-rail
development, and his anxiety was only diverted from the high heavens by the most urgent
threats and symptoms of change in the lower sky.
There had been talk of mono-rails for several years. But the real mischief began when
Brennan sprang his gyroscopic mono-rail car upon the Royal Society. It was the leading
sensation of the 1907 soirees; that celebrated demonstration-room was all too small for its

exhibition. Brave soldiers leading Zionists, deserving novelists, noble ladies, congested
the narrow passage and thrust distinguished elbows into ribs the world would not
willingly let break, deeming themselves fortunate if they could see "just a little bit of the
rail." Inaudible, but convincing, the great inventor expounded his discovery, and sent his
obedient little model of the trains of the future up gradients, round curves, and across a
sagging wire. Itran along its single rail, on its single wheels, simple and sufficient; it
stopped, reversed stood still, balancing perfectly. It maintained its astounding equilibrium
amidst a thunder of applause. The audience dispersed at last, discussing how far they
would enjoy crossing an abyss on a wire cable. "Suppose the gyroscope stopped!" Few of
them anticipated a tithe of what the Brennan mono-rail would do for their railway
securities and the face of the world.
In a few, years they realised better. In a little while no one thought anything of crossing
an abyss on a wire, and the mono- rail was superseding the tram-lines, railways: and
indeed every form of track for mechanical locomotion. Where land was cheap the rail ran
along the ground, where it was dear the rail lifted up on iron standards and passed
overhead; its swift, convenient cars went everywhere and did everything that had once
been done along made tracks upon the ground.
When old Smallways died, Tom could think of nothing more striking to say of him than
that, "When he was a boy, there wasn't nothing higher than your chimbleys--there wasn't
a wire nor a cable in the sky!"
Old SmallWays went to his grave under an intricate network of wires and cables, for Bun
Hill became not only a sort of minor centre of power distribution--the Home Counties
Power Distribution Company set up transformers and a generating station close beside
the old gas-works--but, also a junction on the suburban mono-rail system. Moreover,
every tradesman in the place, and indeed nearly every house, had its own telephone.
The mono-rail cable standard became a striking fact in urban landscape, for the most part
stout iron erections rather like tapering trestles, and painted a bright bluish green. One, it
happened, bestrode Tom's house, which looked still more retiring and apologetic beneath
its immensity; and another giant stood just inside the corner of his garden, which was still
not built upon and unchanged, except for a couple of advertisement boards, one
recommending a two-and-sixpenny watch, and one a nerve restorer. These, by the bye,
were placed almost horizontally to catch the eye of the passing mono-rail passengers
above, and so served admirably to roof over a tool-shed and a mushroom-shed for Tom.
All day and all night the fast cars from Brighton and Hastings went murmuring by
overhead long, broad, comfortable-looking cars, that were brightly lit after dusk. As they
flew by at night, transient flares of light and a rumbling sound of passage, they kept up a
perpetual summer lightning and thunderstorm in the street below.
Presently the English Channel was bridged--a series of great iron Eiffel Tower pillars
carrying mono-rail cables at a height of a hundred and fifty feet above the water, except
near the middle, where they rose higher to allow the passage of the London and Antwerp
shipping and the Hamburg-America liners.

Then heavy motor-cars began to run about on only a couple of wheels, one behind the
other, which for some reason upset Tom dreadfully, and made him gloomy for days after
the