A possible victory seen from above
The flying stages no longer present the same pattern of enemy control. Graham sees activity where there had been stubborn defence and begins to interpret it as the people breaking through. Gunfire from the city seems to confirm that the preparations for which he needed time have become effective.
His response is immediate relief and exhilaration. He believes the people have won. The belief belongs to his position in a rapidly changing battle, not to an authoritative account supplied after it. He cannot see everything or know how every struggle will end.
Then another monoplane rises from Blackheath and turns away. Graham understands it as Ostrog's escape. He leaves the broader view of the city's resistance for a direct pursuit of the man who tried to govern through his name.
The pursuit exposes his limitations. Ostrog's aeronaut is experienced and composed. Graham's attacks fail, and he recognises the awkwardness of his own flying. Determination does not make every movement effective.
The air itself becomes dangerous
Behind the pursuit, the fighting on the stages reaches a destructive conclusion. Graham sees enormous explosions and understands them as the people destroying positions rather than allowing them to remain available to the enemy.
The consequences do not stop at the site of the blast. A pressure wave strikes his monoplane and throws it sideways. Another follows before he can fully recover. His attempt to remain in control gives way to a more basic effort to hold on.
The machine and the air cease to offer the stable relationships he has been trying to manage. He finds himself clinging to its structure, with the sensation of wind rushing upward past him. Recognition comes slowly and then becomes unavoidable: he is falling.
There is no further manoeuvre that restores the adventure to a manageable course. The public world contracts into the experience of a man holding tightly with his hands.
What remains in the fall
His thoughts race through the short life he has lived since awakening: uncertainty, power, Ostrog's betrayal and the attempts to find a purpose within it all. The interval begins to feel unreal, as though another awakening might still be possible.
Helen returns to his mind. The thought of seeing her again seems more comprehensible than the finality approaching him. She represents a human connection within a world that so often made him a title, a fortune or an instrument.
The text ends as Graham becomes aware that the earth is very near. It does not supply a rescue, a subsequent government or an account of how the population remembers the completed conflict.
Reading the record
The uncertainty is deliberate. In the preface to the revised novel, Wells explains that Graham dies without knowing whether the people or Ostrog prevail. The momentary conviction of victory inside the battle should not be mistaken for a final verdict outside it.
That distinction gives the last record its force. Graham's choices matter without being guaranteed success. He has tried to make ownership answerable to the people, publicly committed what he possesses and accepted a danger he would not delegate. None of those actions entitles him to know the result.
The ending also reverses the beginning without merely repeating it. The man who once could not bear continued consciousness now clings to life and imagines another meeting. He has found reasons to remain in a world that initially offered only loss and confusion.
Archive 001 closes at that boundary. It does not turn the fall into a promise of resurrection or insert an answer that Wells withheld. The final question is left with the reader: can the people make a different order from the systems built to govern them, or will those systems find another master? Graham has acted. He does not get to see which future follows.