Still we flew on. Two hours later we were over what should have been the Ural mountains. The level plain was unbroken. There was neither hill nor valley. There was always the iridescent plain below us. We discussed the possibility of landing. There was no problem about finding a flat place, it was all flat. What we didn’t know was whether the surface was firm or soft. If it were soft we should simply bog in. Take-off would be impossible even if the pilot managed the landing safely. To be marooned in this trackless waste was certain death. We were well into Siberia by now, more than a thousand miles from the nearest inhabitation. We could never cross this great plain on foot. Nor was it easy to see how we could possibly be rescued if we got ourselves into trouble. If a landing was impossible for us, it would be impossible for any plane sent out to our help. Yet we all felt something had to be done. Somehow we had to find out what this thing below us was. We could go back to base, of course, and make plans for tomorrow, or for the following week, but it was hard to see how this would get us any further.
One thing was favourable, there was almost no wind. This meant we could go down in a smooth gentle glide if we wanted to. Our Australian pilot was not to be put off. ‘I’m going to have a crack at the bastard,’ he said. ‘We’ll go down until our wheels touch, then I’ll bring her up again. We ought to be able to tell from the hydraulic shock on the wheels whether we’re dealing with soft or hard ground.’
Now we were down to a thousand feet, then quickly down to five hundred. The last seconds seemed interminably long. The jolt was much harder than I expected, really because the pilot didn’t quite know where the surface was. As we came up again it needed no examination of the hydraulic system to know that we had hit hard ground.
Our line was to the north so as to avoid the glare of the Sun. After stabilizing the aircraft and checking the instruments we came down again. This time we made a normal landing. There would be nobody here to wheel a flight of steps out to the plane. We would have to hang a ladder of some sort. The crew got out a lightweight metal job. I was glad of this, because the rigidity of the metal would make the climb back into the plane reasonably easy. We opened the front hatch and let out the ladder. A couple of minutes later I was swinging down it.
I stepped gingerly on to the ground, then away from the ladder, and down on to my hands and knees. I ran a hand over the surface. It was completely smooth. I tried to dig into it with a fingernail, but it was quite resistant. The colours were more vivid down here. By turning round in a circle from the direction of the Sun in the south to the anti-sun in the north, and then back again in the south, it was possible to go through a whole cycle of changes. It was a vivid yellow towards the Sun, then green as one swivelled round towards the west, then a pale blue in the north-west, purple in the north, and back through the same colours in a reverse order as one turned through east to the south again. It was the same wherever one stood.
I walked away from the plane to a distance of about three hundred yards. The difference between looking towards the plane and looking away from it was quite fantastic. Looking away from it one had no impression of scale whatsoever. It was impossible to know whether you were looking ten yards, a hundred yards, or even a hundred miles. The effect was bewildering and distinctly frightening. It was far more weird than the kind of white-out you sometimes get on a snowfield in the mountains. Yet as soon as you turned round, there was the plane—the whole scene jumped instantly into scale.
John came up to me.
‘What do you make of it?’ I asked.
‘It’s a kind of glass. We’re on a huge glass plain stretching for thousands of miles.’
‘But how, how the hell did it happen?’
‘Heat. Heat from outside. The surface has been melted and fused. It’s a kind of glass, rather like a tektite. Except it’s much more homogeneous, and far less brittle.’
‘You said heat from the outside. What could cause that?’
‘It’s a bit like the glass you get after the explosion of a nuclear weapon. But there doesn’t seem to be any radioactivity, from the Geiger counters in the plane.’
This explained the equipment I had seen John fiddling with during the flight.
‘How far do you think it goes?’
‘God knows. Perhaps all the way to China.’
‘That’s going to take out a big slice of the land area.’
‘You know it’s very strange….’
John stopped, as he always did, when he was in the middle of some important statement. Now he went on, ‘How smooth it all is. You’d expect the surface to be scratched, by blown sand or bits of grit. It should have a sort of sand-blasted, matt finish.’
‘You think that’s important?’
‘Well, it must mean there’s never been any bits of sand or grit, there’s no other explanation. The point I think is that everything’s been melted, every damn last bit of surface rock. Nothing was left over.’
‘If we follow up your idea about different parts of the Earth belonging to different ages, do you think this could refer to a time after a disastrous nuclear war?’
‘It could, I suppose. If it were a few centuries or more afterwards, I suppose the radioactivity would mostly have died down. We’d better dig up a chunk of the stuff and take it back with us for analysis. That should tell us if there’s any long-lived artificial radioactivity in it. Probably it isn’t much good speculating until we know the facts.’
When we attempted to quarry the material we found the ground quite extraordinarily hard. We laughed at our fears about making a landing. The whole plain, millions of square miles of it, was just one ideal, perfect airstrip.
It began to grow chilly as the Sun fell lower in the west. We decided to eat a meal before taking off. After a short argument it was decided to have it out of doors. The food was handed down the ladder by the crew. Soon we were munching sandwiches and drinking hot coffee. We took a last walk around the plane. A quarter of an hour later we were back in the air. Turned towards the Sun we were on our homeward journey.
We managed just about to hold our own with the rotation of the Earth, so the Sun maintained its position pretty well constant in the sky as we flew westward. Scattered clouds began to appear, then there was a thicker cover below us. An hour and a half later we were back over eastern Germany. I wondered what furious interchange of messages was going on down there, what diplomatic activity.
It was about six o’clock when we landed at London airport. We were almost smothered by reporters and cameramen. A posse of police managed to make a way for us. It occurred to me that not one of the newshounds around us could have suspected, eerie and odd as this new world might seem to them, that we had come back from something still stranger and more remote.
We discovered there was no possibility of getting the plane serviced soon enough for us to be able to make another exploratory voyage the following day. So I returned for the night to my own apartments in London. I found Alex Hamilton glued to the television set. He asked me what I knew about the situation. I told him a little, not too much. Then I asked him for his opinion. He said it was very interesting that, with America out of the way and with Europe back in 1917, we were way ahead of Webern and Schoenberg. All we had to do was to murder all the musicians in Britain, to destroy all the libraries, and we would be made. I said I thought he was completely on the wrong lines. These new events called for an epic style, not for abstractionalism. At this he fell into one of his laughing fits. ‘So you’re thinking of reviving the Cologne piece.’