The Time Ships (14 page)

At last we dipped into the atmosphere of the earth. The hull blazed with frictional heat, and the capsule shuddered – it was the first sensation of motion I had endured for days – but Nebogipfel had warned me, and I was ready braced against the supporting poles.

With this meteoric blaze of fire we shed the last of our inter-planetary speed. With some unease I watched the darkened landscape which spread below us as we fell – I thought I could see the broad, meandering ribbon of the Thames – and I began to wonder if, after all this distance, I would, after all, be dashed against the unforgiving rocks of the earth!

But then –

My impressions of the final phase of our shuddering descent are blurred and partial. Suffice it for me to record a memory of a craft, something like an immense bird, which swept down out of the sky and swallowed us in a moment into a kind of stomach-hold. In darkness, I felt a deep jolt as that craft pushed at the air, discarding its velocity; and then our descent continued with extreme gentleness.

When next I could see the stars, there was no sign of the bird-craft. Our capsule was settled on the dried, lifeless soil of Richmond Hill, not a hundred yards from the White Sphinx.

N
ebogipfel had the capsule dilate open, and I stepped from it, cramming my goggles onto my face. The night-soaked landscape leapt to clarity and detail, and for the first time I was able to make out some detail of this world of
A.D.
657,208.

The sky was brilliant with stars and the scar of obscurity made by the Sphere was looming and distinct. There was a rusty smell coming off the ubiquitous sand, and a certain dampness, as of lichen and moss; and everywhere the air was thick with the sweet stink of Morlock.

I was relieved to be out of that lozenge, and to feel firm earth beneath my boots. I strode up the hill to the bronze-plated pedestal of the Sphinx, and stood there, half-way up Richmond Hill, on the site that had once, I knew, been my home. A little further up the Hill there was a new structure, a small, square hut. I could see no Morlocks. It was a sharp contrast to my impressions of my earlier time here, when – as I stumbled in the dark – they had seemed to be everywhere.

Of my Time Machine there was no sign – only grooves dug deep into the sand, and the queer, narrow footprints characteristic of the Morlock. Had the machine been dragged into the base of the Sphinx again? Thus was History repeating itself! – or so I thought. I felt my fists bunching, so rapidly had
my elevated inter-planetary mood evaporated; and panic bubbled within me. I calmed myself. Was I a fool, that I could have expected the Time Machine to be waiting for me outside the capsule as it opened? I could not resort to violence – not now! – not when my plan for escape was so ripe. Nebogipfel joined me.

‘We appear to be alone here,’ I said.

‘The children have been moved from this area.’

I felt a renewed access of shame. ‘Am I so dangerous? … Tell me where my machine is.’

He had removed his goggles, but I could not read those grey-red eyes. ‘It is safe. It has been moved to a more convenient place. If you wish you may inspect it.’

I felt as if a steel cable attached me to my Time Machine, and was drawing me in! I longed to rush to the machine, and leap aboard its saddle – be done with this world of darkness and Morlocks, and make for the past! … But I must needs be patient. Struggling to keep my voice even, I replied, ‘That isn’t necessary.’

Nebogipfel led me up the Hill, to the little building I had noticed earlier. It followed the Morlocks’ usual seamless, simple design; it was like a doll’s house, with a simple hinged door and a sloping roof. Inside, there was a pallet for a bed, with a blanket on it, and a chair, and a little tray of food and water – all refreshingly solid-looking. My knapsack was on the bed.

I turned to Nebogipfel. ‘You have been considerate,’ I said, sincere.

‘We respect your rights.’ He walked away from my shelter. When I took my goggles off, he melted into shadow.

I closed the door with some relief. It was a pleasure to return to my own human company for a while. I
felt shame that I was planning, so systematically, to deceive him and his people! But my scheme had brought me across hundreds of millions of miles already – to within a few hundred yards of the Time Machine – and I could not bear the thought of failure now.

I knew that if I had to harm Nebogipfel to escape, I would!

By touch I opened the knapsack, and I found and lit a candle. A comforting yellow light and a curl of smoke turned that inhuman little box into a home. The Morlocks had kept back my poker – as I might have anticipated – but much of the other equipment had been left for me. Even my clasp-knife was there. With this, and using a Morlock tray as a crude mirror, I hacked off my irritating growth of beard, and shaved as close as I could. I was able to discard my underwear and don fresh – I would never have anticipated that the feeling of truly clean socks would invoke such feelings of sensual pleasure in me! – and I thought fondly of Mrs Watchets, who had packed these invaluable items for me.

Finally – and most pleasurably – I took a pipe from the knapsack, packed it with tobacco, and lit it from the candle flame.

It was in this condition, with my few possessions around me, and the rich scent of my finest tobacco still lingering, that I lay down on the little bed, pulled the blanket over me and slept.

I awoke in the dark.

It was an odd thing to wake without daylight – like being disturbed in the small hours – and I never felt refreshed by a sleep, the whole time I was in the Morlocks’ Dark Night; it was as if my body could not calculate what time of day it was.

I had told Nebogipfel that I should like to inspect
the Time Machine, and I felt a great nervousness as I went through a brief breakfast and toilet. My plan did not amount to much in the way of strategy: it was merely to take the machine, at the first opportunity! I was gambling that the Morlocks, after millennia of sophisticated machines which could change their very shapes, would not know what to make of a device as crude, in its construction, as my Time Machine. I thought they would not expect that so simple an act as the reattachment of two levers could restore the machine’s functionality – or so I prayed!

I emerged from the shelter. After all my adventures, the levers to the Time Machine were safe in my jacket’s inside pocket.

Nebogipfel walked towards me, his thin feet leaving their sloth-like footprints in the sand, and his two hands empty. I wondered how long he had been near, waiting for my emergence.

We walked along the flank of the Hill together, heading south in the direction of Richmond Park. We set off without preamble, for the Morlocks were not give to unnecessary conversation.

I have said that my house had stood on the Petersham Road, on the stretch below Hill Rise. As such it had been halfway up the shoulder of Richmond Hill, a few hundred yards from the river, with a good westerly prospect – or it would have had, if not for the intervening trees – and I had been able to see something of the meadows at Petersham beyond the river. Well, in the Year A.D. 657,208, all of the intervening clutter had been swept away; and I was able to see down the flank of a deepened valley to where the Thames lay in its new bed, glittering in the star-light. I could see, here and there, the coal-hot mouths of the Morlocks’ heat-wells, puncturing the darkened land. Much of the hill-side was bare sand, or given over to moss; but I could see patches
of what looked like the soft glass which had carpeted the Sphere, glittering in the enhanced star-light.

The river itself had carved out a new channel a mile or so from its nineteenth-century position; it appeared to have cut off the bow from Hampton to Kew, so that Twickenham and Teddington were now on its east side, and it seemed to me that the valley was a good bit deeper than in my day – or perhaps Richmond Hill had been lifted up by some other geological process. I remembered a similar migration of the Thames in my first voyage into time. Thus, it seemed to me, the discrepancies of human History are mere froth; under it all, the slow processes of geology and erosion would continue their patient work regardless.

I spared a moment to glance up the Hill towards the Park, for I wondered for how long those ancient woodlands and herds of red and fallow deer had survived the winds of change. Now, the Park could be no more than a darkened desert, populated only by cacti and a few olives. I felt my heart harden. Perhaps these Morlocks were wise and patient – perhaps their industrious pursuit of knowledge on the Sphere was to be applauded – but their neglect of the ancient earth was a shame!

We reached the vicinity of the Park’s Richmond Gate, close to the site of the Star and Garter, perhaps half a mile from the site of my house. On a level patch of land, a rectangular platform of soft glass had been laid; this platform shimmered in the patchy star-light. It appeared to be manufactured of that marvellous, glassy material of which the Sphere Floor was composed; and from its surface had been evoked a variety of the podiums and partitions which I had come to recognize as the characteristic tools of the Morlocks. These were abandoned now; there was nobody about but Nebogipfel and I. And there – at
the heart of the platform – I saw a squat and ugly tangle of brass and nickel, with ivory like bleached bone shining in the star-light, and a bicycle-saddle in the middle of it all: it was my Time Machine, evidently intact, and ready to take me home!

I
felt my heart pump; I found it difficult to walk at a steady pace behind Nebogipfel – but walk I did. I dropped my hands into my jacket pockets and I grasped the two control levers there. I was already close enough to the machine to see the studs on which the levers must be fitted for the thing to work – and I meant to launch the machine as soon as I could, and to get away from this place!

‘As you can see,’ Nebogipfel was saying, ‘the machine is undamaged – we have moved it, but not attempted to pry into its workings …’

I sought to distract him from his close attention. ‘Tell me: now that you’ve studied my machine, and listened to my theories on the subject, what is your impression?’

‘Your machine is an extraordinary achievement – ahead of its age.’

I have never been one with much patience for compliments. ‘But it is the Plattnerite which enabled me to construct it,’ I said.

‘Yes. I would like to study this “Plattnerite” more closely.’ He donned his goggles, and studied the machine’s shimmering quartz bars. ‘We have talked – a little – of multiple Histories: of the possible existence of several editions of the world. You have witnessed two yourself –’

‘The history of Eloi and Morlock, and the History of the Sphere.’

‘You must think of these versions of History as parallel corridors, stretching ahead of you. Your machine allows you to go back and forth along a corridor. The corridors exist independently of each other: looking ahead from any point, a man looking along one corridor will see a complete and self-consistent History – he can have no knowledge of another corridor, and nor can the corridors influence each other.

‘But in some corridors conditions may be very different. In some, even the laws of physics may differ …’

‘Go on.’

‘You said the operation of your machine depended on a twisting about of Space and Time,’ he said. ‘Turning a journey in Time into one through Space. Well, I agree: that is, indeed, how the Plattnerite exerts its effects. But how is this achieved?

‘Picture, now,’ he said, ‘a universe – another History – in which this Space-Time twisting is greatly pronounced.’

He went on to describe a variant of the universe almost beyond my imagining: in which
rotation
was embedded in the very fabric of the universe.

‘Rotation suffuses every point of Space and Time. A stone, thrown outward from any point, would be seen to follow a spiral path: its inertia would act like a compass, swinging around the launch point. It is even thought by some that our own universe might undergo such a rotation, but on an immensely slow scale: taking a hundred thousand million years to complete a single turn …

‘The rotating-universe idea was first described some decades after your time – by Kurt Gödel, in fact.’

‘Gödel?’ It took me a moment to place the name. ‘The man who will demonstrate the imperfectibility of mathematics?’

‘The same.’

We walked around the machine, and I kept my stiff fingers wrapped around the levers. I planned to manoeuvre myself into precisely the most propitious spot to reach the machine. ‘Tell me how this explains the operation of my machine.’

‘It is to do with axis-twisting. In a rotating universe,
a journey through space, but reaching the past or future
, is possible. Our universe rotates, but so slowly that such a path would be a hundred thousand
million
light years long, and would take the best part of a million million years to traverse!’

‘Of little practical use, then.’

‘But imagine a universe of greater density than ours: a universe as dense, everywhere, as the heart of an atom of matter. There, a rotation would be complete in mere fractions of a second.’

‘But we are not in such a universe.’ I waved my hand through empty space. ‘That is evident.’

‘But perhaps you are! – for fractions of a second, and thanks to your machine – or at least to its Plattnerite component.

‘My hypothesis is that, because of some property of the Plattnerite, your Time Machine is flickering back and forth to this ultra-dense universe, and on each traverse is exploiting that reality’s axis-twisting to travel along a succession of loops into the past or future! So you spiral through time …’

I considered these ideas. They were extraordinary – of course! – but, it seemed to me, no more than a somewhat fantastic extension of my preliminary thoughts of the intertwining of Space and Time, and the fluidity of their relevant axes. And besides, my subjective impression of time travel
was bound up with feelings of twisting – of rotation.

‘These ideas are startling – but I believe they would bear further examination,’ I told Nebogipfel.

He looked up at me. ‘Your flexibility of mind is impressive, for a man of your evolutionary era.’

I barely heard his dismissive remark. I was close enough now. Nebogipfel touched a rail of the machine, with one cautious finger. The device shimmered, belying its bulk, and a breeze ruffled the fine hairs on Nebogipfel’s arm. He snatched his hand back. I stared at the studs, rehearsing in my mind the simple action of lifting the levers out of my pockets and fitting them to the studs. It would take less than a second! Could I complete the action before Nebogipfel could render me unconscious, with his green rays?

The darkness closed in around me, and the stink of Morlock was strong. In a moment, I thought with a surge of irrepressible eagerness, I might be gone from all this.

‘Is something wrong?’ Nebogipfel was watching my face with those great, dark eyes of his, and his stance was upright and tense. Already he was suspicious! – had I betrayed myself? And already, in the darkness beyond, I knew, the muzzles of countless guns must be raised towards me – I had bare seconds before I was lost!

Blood roared in my ears – I hauled the levers from my pockets – and, with a cry, I fell forward over the machine. I jammed the little bars down on their studs and with a single motion I wrenched the levers back. The machine shuddered – in that last moment there was a flash of green, and I thought it was all up for me! – and then the stars disappeared, and silence fell on me. I felt an extraordinary twisting sensation, and then that dreadful feeling of plummeting – but I welcomed the discomfort,
for this was the familiar experience of time travel!

I yelled out loud. I had succeeded – I was journeying back through time – I was free!

… And then I became aware of a coolness around my throat – a softness, as if some insect had settled there, a
rustling
.

I lifted my hand to my neck – and touched Morlock hair!