The Time Ships (38 page)

T
here was a further evolution of our equatorial Orbital City. The chaotic arrangement of those artificial lights had become significantly more regular, I saw. Now there was a band of seven or eight stations, all dazzling bright, positioned at regular intervals around the globe; I imagined that more such stations must be in position below the horizon, continuing their steady march about the waist of the planet.

Now threads of light, fine and delicate, grew steadily down from the gleaming stations, reaching towards the earth like tentative fingers. The motion was even, and slow enough for us to follow, and I realized that I was watching stupendous engineering projects – projects spanning thousands of miles of space, and occupying whole millennia – and I was awed by the dedication and grasp of the New Humans.

After several seconds of this, the leading threads had descended into the obscuring mist of the horizon. Then one such thread disappeared, and the station to which it had been fixed was snuffed out like a candle-flame in a breeze. Evidently the thread had fallen, or broken loose, and its anchoring station was destroyed. I watched the pale, soundless images, wondering what immense disaster – and how many deaths – they represented! Within moments, though,
a new station had been fixed into the vacant position in the equator-girdling array, and a fresh thread extended.

‘I’m not sure I believe my eyes,’ I told the Morlock. ‘It looks to me as if they are fixing those cables from space to the earth!’

‘So I imagine is happening,’ the Morlock said. ‘We are witnessing the construction of a Space Elevator – a link, fixed between the surface of the earth and the stations in orbit.’

I grinned at the thought. ‘A Space Elevator! I should relish riding such a device: to rise up through the clouds, and into the silent grandeur of space – but, if the Elevator were glass-walled, it would not be a ride for the vertiginous.’

‘Indeed not.’

Now I saw that more lines of light were extending
between
the geosynchronous stations. Soon the glowing points were linked, and the traces thickened into a glowing band, as broad and bright as the stations themselves. Again – though I had no real wish to curtail our time-travelling – I wished I could see more of this huge, world-girdling City in the sky.

The development of earth over the same period was scarcely so spectacular, however. Indeed, it seemed to me that First London had become static, perhaps abandoned. Some of the buildings became so long-lived that they seemed almost solid to us, although they were dark, squat and ugly; while others were falling into ruin without replacement. (We saw this process as the appearance, with brutal abruptness, of gaps in the complex sky-line). It seemed to me that the air was becoming still thicker, the patient Sea a drabber grey, and I wondered if the battered earth had been abandoned at last, either for the stars or, perhaps, for more palatable havens beneath the ground.

I raised these possibilities with the Morlock.

‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But you must recognize that already more than a million years have passed since the establishment of the original colony, by Hilary Bond and her people. There is more evolutionary distance between you and the New Humans of
this
era, than between you and me. So we can make nothing but educated guesses about the way of living of the races extant here, their motives – even their biological composition.’

‘Yes,’ I said slowly. ‘And yet –’

‘Yes?’

‘
And yet the sun still shines
. So the tale of these New Humans has diverged from your own. Even though they evidently have Space Machines like yours,
they
have no wish to cloak about the sun, as you Morlocks did.’

‘Evidently not.’ He raised his pale hand to the heavens. ‘In fact, their intent seems altogether more ambitious.’

I turned to see what he was indicating. Once again, I saw, that great Orbital City was showing developments. Now, huge shells – irregular, obviously thousands of miles across – were sprouting around the glowing linear town, like berries on a cane. And as soon as a shell was completed it cast off from earth, blossomed with a fire that illuminated the land, and vanished. From our point of view, the development of such an artefact, from embryonic form to departing fledgling, took a second or less; but each dose of flaring light must, I thought, have bathed the earth for decades.

It was a startling sight, and it continued for some time – for several thousand years, by my estimation.

The shells were, of course, huge ships in space.

‘So,’ I said to the Morlock, ‘men are travelling from the earth, in those great space yachts. But
where are they
going
, do you think? The planets? Mars, or Jupiter, or –’

Nebogipfel sat with his masked face tilted up at the sky, and his hands in his lap, and the lights of the ships playing on the hairs of his face. ‘One does not need such spectacular energies as we have seen here to travel such petty distances. With an engine like that … I think the ambition of these New Humans is wider. I think they are abandoning the solar system, much as they appear to have abandoned the earth.’

I peered after the departing ships in awe. ‘What remarkable people these must be, these New Humans! I don’t want to be rude about you Morlocks, old chap, but still – what a difference of grasp, of ambition! I mean – a Sphere around the sun is one thing, but to hurl one’s children to the stars …’

‘It is true that
our
ambition was limited to the careful husbandry of a single star – and there was logic to that, for more living space for the species is to be obtained by that means than through a thousand, a
million
interstellar jaunts.’

‘Oh, perhaps,’ I said, ‘but it’s scarcely so
spectacular
, is it?’

He adjusted his grubby skin-mask and stared around at the ruined earth. ‘Perhaps not. But the husbandry of a finite resource – even this earth – seems to be a competence not shared by your New Humans.’

I saw that he was right. Even as the star-ships’ fire splashed across the sea, the remains of First London were decaying further – the crumbling ruins seemed to bubble, as if deliquescing – and the sea became more grey, the air still more foul. The heat was now intense, and I pulled my shirt away from my chest, where it had stuck.

Nebogipfel stirred on his bench, and peered
about uneasily. ‘I think – if it happens, it will come quickly …’

‘What will?’

He would not reply. The heat was now more severe than I remembered ever suffering in the jungles of the Palaeocene. The ruins of the city, scattered over the hills of brown dirt, seemed to shimmer, becoming unreal …

And then – with a glare so bright it obscured the sun – the city burst into flames!

T
hat consuming fire swallowed us, for the merest fraction of a second. A new heat – quite unbearable – pulsed over the Time-Car, and I cried out. But, mercifully, the heat subsided as soon as the city’s torching was done.

In that instant of fire, the ancient city had gone. First London was scoured clean of the earth, and left behind were only a few outcroppings of ash and melted brick, and here and there the tracery of a foundation. The bare soil was soon colonized once more by the busy processes of life – a sluggish greenery slid over the hills and about the plain, and dwarfish trees shivered through their cycles at the fringe of the Sea – but the progress of this new wave of life was slow, and seemed doomed to a stunted existence; for a pearl-grey fog lay over everything, obscuring the patient glow of the Orbital City.

‘So First London is destroyed,’ I said in wonder. ‘Do you think there was a war? That fire must have persisted for decades, until there was nothing left to burn.’

‘It was not a war,’ Nebogipfel said. ‘But it
was
a catastrophe wrought by man, I think.’

Now I saw the strangest thing. The new, sparse trees began to die back, but not by withering before my accelerated gaze, like the
dipterocarps
I had watched earlier. Rather, the trees burst into flame –
they burned like huge matches – and then were gone, all in an instant. I saw, too, how a great scorching spread across the grass and shrubs, a blackening which persisted through the seasons, until at last no more grass would grow, and the soil was bare and dark.

Above, those pearl-grey clouds grew thicker still, and the sun- and moon-bands were obscured.

‘I think those clouds, above, are ash,’ I said to Nebogipfel. ‘It is if the earth is burning up … Nebogipfel – what is happening?’

‘It is as I feared,’ he said. ‘Your profligate friends – these New Humans –’

‘Yes?’

‘With their meddling and carelessness,
they have destroyed the life-bearing equilibrium of the planet’s climate
.’

I shivered, for it had grown colder: it was as if the warmth was leaking out of the world through some intangible drain. At first I welcomed this relief from the scorching heat; but the chill quickly became uncomfortable.

‘We are passing through a phase of excess oxygen, of higher sea-level pressure,’ Nebogipfel said. ‘Buildings, plants and grasses – even damp wood – will combust, spontaneously, in such conditions. But it will not last long. It is a transition to a new equilibrium … It is the instability.’

The temperature plummeted now – the area took on an air of chill November – and I pulled my jungle shirt closer around me. I had a brief impression of a white flickering – it was the seasonal blanketing and uncovering of the land by winter’s snow and ice – and then the ice and permafrost settled over the ground, unyielding to the seasons, a hard grey-white surface which laid itself down with every impression of permanence.

The earth was transformed. To west, north and south, the contours of the land were masked by that layer of ice and snow. In the east, our old Palaeocene Sea had receded by some several miles; I could see ice on the beach at its fringe, and – far to the north – a glint of steady white that told of bergs. The air was clear, and once more I could see the sun and green moon arcing across heaven, but now the air had about it that pearly-grey light you associate with the depths of winter, just before a snow.

Nebogipfel had huddled over on himself, with his hands tucked into his armpits and his legs folded under him. When I touched his shoulder his flesh was icy to the touch – it was as if his essence had retreated to the warmest core of his body. The hairs over his face and chest had closed over themselves, after the manner of a bird’s feathers. I felt a stab of guilt at his distress, for, as I may have indicated, I regarded Nebogipfel’s injuries as my responsibility, either directly or indirectly. ‘Come now, Nebogipfel. We have been through these Glacial periods before – it was far worse than this – and we survived. We pass through a millennium every couple of seconds. We’re sure to move beyond this, and back into the sunshine, soon enough.’

‘You do not understand,’ he hissed.

‘What?’

‘This is no mere
Ice Age
. Can’t you see that? This is qualitatively different … the
instability …
’ His eyes closed again.

‘What do you mean? Is this lot going to last longer than before? A hundred thousand, half a million years?
How long
?

But he did not answer.

I wrapped my arms around my torso and tried to keep warm. The claws of cold sank deeper into the earth’s skin, and the thickness of the ice grew,
century on century, like a slowly rising tide. The sky above seemed to be clearing – the light of the sun-band was bright and hard, though apparently without heat – and I guessed that the damage done to that thin layer of life-giving gases was slowly healing, now that man was no longer a force on the earth. That Orbital City still hung, glowing and inaccessible, in the sky over the frozen land, but there were no signs of life on the earth, and still less of humanity.

After a million years of this, I began to suspect the truth!

‘Nebogipfel,’ I said. ‘It is
never
going to end – this Age of Ice. Is it?’

He turned his head and mumbled something.

‘What?’ I pressed my ear close to his mouth. ‘What did you say?’

His eyes had closed over, and he was insensible.

I got hold of Nebogipfel and lifted him from the bench. I laid him out on the Time-Car’s wooden floor, and then I lay down beside him and pressed my body against his. It was scarcely comfortable: the Morlock was like a slab of butcher’s meat against my chest, making me feel still colder myself; and I had to suppress my residual loathing of the Morlock race. But I bore it all, for I hoped that my body heat would keep him alive a little longer. I spoke to him, and rubbed at his shoulders and upper arms; I kept at it until he was awake, for I believed that – if I let him remain unconscious – he might slip, unknowing, into Death.

‘Tell me about this
climatic instability
of yours,’ I said.

He twisted his head and mumbled. ‘What is the point? Your New Human friends have killed us …’

‘The point is that I should prefer to know
what
is killing me.’

After rather more of this type of persuasion, Nebogipfel relented.

He told me that the atmosphere of the earth was a dynamic thing. The atmosphere had just two naturally stable states, Nebogipfel said, and neither of these could sustain life; and the air would fall into one of these states, away from the narrow band of conditions tolerable by life, if it were too far disturbed.

‘But I don’t understand. If the atmosphere is as unstable a mixture as you suggest, how is it that the air has managed to sustain us, as it has, for so many millions of years?’

He told me that the evolution of the atmosphere had been heavily modified
by the action of life itself
. ‘There is a balance – of atmospheric gases, temperature and pressure – which is ideal for life. And so life works – in great, unconscious cycles, each involving billions of blindly toiling organisms – to maintain that balance.

‘But this balance is inherently
unstable
. Do you see? It is like a pencil, balanced on its point: such a thing is ever likely to fall away, with the slightest disturbance.’ He twisted his head. ‘
We
learned that you meddle with the cycles of life at peril, we Morlocks;
we
learned that if you choose to disrupt the various mechanisms by which atmospheric stability is maintained, then they must be repaired or replaced. What a pity it is,’ he said, heavily, ‘that these New Humans – these star-faring heroes of yours – had not absorbed similar simple lessons!’

‘Tell me about your two stabilities, Morlock; for it seems to me we are going to be visiting one or the other!’

In the first of the lethal stable states, Nebogipfel said, the surface of earth would burn up: the atmosphere could become as opaque as the clouds over
Venus, and trap the heat of the sun. Such clouds, miles thick, would obstruct most of the sunlight, leaving only a dull, reddish glow; from the surface the sun could never be seen, nor the planets or stars. Lightning would flash continually in the murky atmosphere, and the ground would be red-hot: scorched bare of life.

‘That’s as may be,’ I said, trying to suppress my shivers, ‘but compared to this damned cold, it sounds like a pleasant holiday resort … And the second of your stable states?’

‘
White Earth
.’

He closed his eyes, and would speak to me no more.