The Time Ships (13 page)

O
n the second day of our flight, Nebogipfel asked me once again about my first journey into futurity.

‘You managed to retrieve your machine from the Morlocks,’ he prompted. ‘And you went on, further into the future of that History …’

‘For a long period I simply held onto the machine,’ I remembered, ‘much as now I am clinging to these poles, uncaring where I went. At last I brought myself to look at my chronometric dials, and I found that the hands were sweeping, with immense rapidity, further into futurity.

‘You must recall,’ I told him, ‘that in this other History the axis of the earth, and its rotation, had not been straightened out. Still day and night flickered like wings over the earth, and still the sun’s path dipped between its solstices as the seasons wore away. But gradually I became aware of a change: that, despite my continuing velocity through time, the flickering of night and day returned, and grew more pronounced.’

‘The earth’s rotation was slowing,’ Nebogipfel said.

‘Yes. At last the days spread across centuries. The sun had become a dome – huge and angry – glowing with its diminished heat. Occasionally its illumination brightened – spasms which recalled its former brilliancy. But each time it reverted to its sullen crimson.

‘I began to slow my plummeting through time …’

When I stopped, it was on such a landscape as I had always imagined might prevail on Mars. The huge, motionless sun hung on the horizon; and in the other half of the sky, stars like bones still shone. The rocks strewn across the land were a virulent red, stained an intense green, as if by lichen, on every west-facing plane.

My machine stood on a beach which sloped down to a sea, so still it might have been coated in glass. The air was cold, and quite thin; I felt as if I were suspended atop some remote mountain. Little remained of the familiar topography of the Thames valley; I imagined how the scraping of glaciation, and the slow breathing of the seas, must have obliterated all trace of the landscape I had known – and all trace of Humanity …

Nebogipfel and I hovered there, suspended in space in our shining box, and I whispered my tale of far futurity to him; in that calm, I rediscovered details I may not have recounted to my friends in Richmond.

‘I saw a thing like a kangaroo,’ I recalled. ‘It was perhaps three feet tall … squat, with heavy limbs and rounded shoulders. It loped across the beach – it looked forlorn, I remember – its coat of grey fur was tangled, and it pawed feebly at the rocks, evidently trying to prise free handfuls of lichen, to make its miserable repast. I got a sense of great degeneration about it. Then, I was surprised to see that the thing had five feeble digits to both its fore and hind-feet … And it had a prominent forehead and forward-looking eyes. Its hints of humanity were most disagreeable!

‘But then there was a touch at my ear – like a hair, stroking me – and I turned in my saddle.

‘There was a creature just behind the machine. It
was like a centipede, I suppose, but wrought on a huge scale! – three or four feet wide, perhaps thirty feet in length, its body segmented and the chitin of its plates – they were crimson – scraping as it moved. Cilia, each a foot long, waved in the air, moist; and it was one of these which had touched me. Now this beast lifted up its stump of a head, and its mouth gaped wide, with damp mandibles waving before it; it had a hexagonal arrangement of eyes which swivelled about, fixing on me.

‘I touched my lever, and slipped through time away from this monster.

‘I emerged onto the same dismal beach, but now I saw a swarm of the centipede-things, which clambered heavily over each other, their cases scraping. They had a multitude of feet on which they crawled, looping their bodies as they advanced. And in the middle of this swarm I saw a mound – low and bloody – and I thought of the sad kangaroo-beast I had observed before.

‘I could not bear this scene of butchery! I pressed at my levers, and passed on through a million years.

‘Still that awful beach persisted. But now, when I turned from the sea, I saw, far up the barren slope behind me, a thing like an immense white butterfly which shimmered, fluttering, across the sky. Its torso might have been the size of a small woman’s, and the wings, pale and translucent, were huge. Its voice was dismal – eerily human – and a great desolation settled over my soul.

‘Then I noticed a motion across the landscape close to me: a thing like an outcropping of Mars-red rock which shifted across the sand towards me. It was a sort of crab: a thing the size of a sofa, its several legs picking their way over the beach, and with eyes – a greyish red, but human in shape – on stalks, waving towards me. Its mouth, as complex as some bit of
machinery, twitched and licked as the thing moved, and its metallic hull was stained with the green of the patient lichen.

‘As the butterfly, ugly and fragile, fluttered above me, the crab-thing reached up towards it with its big claws. It missed – but I fancy I saw scraps of some pale flesh embedded in that claw’s wide grasp.

‘As I have since reflected on that sight,’ I told Nebogipfel, ‘that sour apprehension has confirmed itself in my mind. For it seems to me that this arrangement of squat predator and fragile prey might be a consequence of the relationship of Eloi and Morlock I had observed earlier.’

‘But their forms were so different: the centipedes, and then the crabs –’

‘Over such deserts of time,’ I insisted, ‘evolutionary pressure is such that the forms of species are quite plastic – so Darwin teaches us – and zoological retrogression is a dynamic force. Remember that you and I – and Eloi and Morlock – are all, if you look at it on a wide enough scale, nothing but cousins within the same antique mudfish family!’

Perhaps, I speculated, the Eloi had taken to the air in that species’ desperate attempt to flee the Morlocks; and those predators had emerged from their caves, abandoning at last all simulation of mechanical invention, and now crawled across those cold beaches, waiting for a butterfly-Eloi to tire and fall from the sky. Thus that antique conflict, with its roots in social decay, had been reduced, at last, to its mindless essentials.

‘I travelled on,’ I told Nebogipfel, ‘in strides a millennium long, on into futurity. Still, that crowd of crustaceans crawled among the lichen sheets and the rocks. The sun grew wider and duller.

‘My last stop was thirty million years into the future, where the sun had become a dome which
obscured a wide arc of sky. Snow fell – a hard, pitiless sleet. I shivered, and was forced to tuck my hands into my armpits. I could see snow on the hill-tops, pale in the star-light, and huge bergs drifted across the eternal sea.

‘The crabs were gone, but the vivid green of the lichen mats persisted. On a shoal in the sea, I fancied I saw some black object, which I thought flopped with the appearance of life.

‘An eclipse – caused by the passage of some inner planet across the sun’s face – now caused a shadow to fall over the earth. Nebogipfel, you may have felt at ease there! – but a great horror fell upon
me
, and I got off the machine to recover. Then, when the first arc of crimson sun returned to the sky, I saw that the thing on the shoal was indeed moving. It was a ball of flesh – like a disembodied head, a yard or more across, with two bunches of tentacles which dangled like fingers across the shoal. Its mouth was a beak, and it was without a nose. Its eyes – two of them, large and dark – seemed human …’

And even as I described the thing to the patient Nebogipfel, I recognized the similarity between this vision of futurity, and my odd companion during my most recent trip through time – the floating, green-lit thing I had called
the Watcher
. I fell silent. Could it be, I mused, that my Watcher was no more than a visitation to me, from the end of time itself?

‘And so,’ I said at last, ‘I clambered aboard my machine once more – I had a great dread of lying there, helpless, in that awful cold – and I returned to my own century.’

On I whispered, and the huge eyes of Nebogipfel were fixed on me, and I saw in him remnant flickers of that curiosity and wonder which characterizes humankind.

Those few days in space seem to have little relation to the rest of my life; sometimes the period I spent floating in that compartment is like a momentary pause, shorter than a heartbeat in the greater sweep of my life, and at other times I feel as if I spent an eternity in the capsule, drifting between worlds. It was as if I became disentangled from my life, and able to look upon it from without, as if it were an incomplete novel. Here I was as a young man, fiddling with my experiments and contraptions and heaps of Plattnerite, spurning the opportunity to socialize, and to learn of life, and love, and politics, and art – spurning even sleep! – in my quest for an unattainable perfection of understanding. I even supposed I saw myself
after
the completion of this inter-planetary voyage, with my scheme to deceive the Morlocks and escape to my own era. I still had every intention of carrying that plan through – you must understand – but it was as if I watched the actions of some other, littler figure than I was.

At last I had the idea that I was becoming something outside not only the world of my birth – but
all
worlds, and Space and Time as well. What was I to become in my own future but, once again, a mote of consciousness buffeted by the Winds of Time?

It was only as the earth grew perceptibly nearer – a darker shadow against space, with the light of the stars reflected in the ocean’s belly – that I felt drawn back to the ordinary concerns of Humanity; that once again the details of my schemes – and my hopes and fears for my future – worked their life-long clockwork in my brain.

I have never forgotten that brief inter-planetary interlude, and sometimes – when I am between waking and sleeping – I imagine I am again adrift between Sphere and the earth, with only a patient Morlock for company.

Nebogipfel contemplated my vision of the far future. ‘You said you travelled thirty million years.’

‘That or more,’ I replied. ‘Perhaps I can recall the chronology more precisely, if –’

He waved that away. ‘Something is wrong. Your description of the sun’s evolution is plausible, but its destruction – our science tells us – should take place over
thousands
of millions of years, not a mere handful of millions.’

I felt defensive. ‘I have recounted what I saw, honestly and accurately.’

‘I do not doubt you have,’ Nebogipfel said. ‘But the only conclusion is that in that other History – as in my own – the evolution of the sun did not proceed without intervention.’

‘You mean –’

‘I mean that some clumsy attempt must have been made to adjust the sun’s intensity, or longevity – or perhaps even, as we have, to mine the star for habitable materials.’

Nebogipfel’s hypothesis was that perhaps my Eloi and Morlocks were
not
the full story of Humanity, in that sorry, lost History. Perhaps – Nebogipfel speculated – some race of engineers had left the earth and tried to modify the sun, just as had Nebogipfel’s own ancestors.

‘But the attempt failed,’ I said, aghast.

‘Yes. The engineers never returned to the earth – which was abandoned to the slow tragedy of Eloi and Morlock. And the sun was rendered unbalanced, its lifetime curtailed.’

I was horrified, and I could bear to speak of this no more. I clung to a pole, and my thoughts turned inward.

I thought again of that desolate beach, of those hideous, devolved forms with their echoes of
Humanity and their utter absence of mind. The vision had been foul enough when I had considered it a final victory of the inexorable pressures of evolution and retrogression over the human dream of Mind – but now I saw that it might have been Humanity itself, in its overweening ambition, which had unbalanced those opposing forces, and accelerated its own destruction!

Our capture by the earth was elaborate. It was necessary for us to shed some millions of miles per hour of speed, in order to match the earth’s progress around the sun.

We skimmed several times, on diminishing loops, around the belly of the planet; Nebogipfel told me that the capsule was being coupled with the planet’s gravitational and magnetic fields – a coupling enhanced by certain materials in the hull, and by the manipulation of satellites: artificial moons, which orbited the earth and adjusted its natural effects. In essence, I understood, our velocity was
exchanged
with that of the earth – which, forever after, would travel around the sun a little further out, and a little more rapid.

I hung close to the wall of the capsule, watching the darkened landscape of earth unfold. I could see, here and there, the glow of the Morlocks’ larger heating-wells. I noted several huge, slender towers which appeared to protrude above the atmosphere itself. Nebogipfel told me that the towers were used for capsules travelling from the earth to Sphere.

I saw specks of light crawling along the lengths of those towers: they were inter-planetary capsules, bearing Morlocks to be borne off to their Sphere. It was by means of just such a tower, I realized, that I – insensible – had been launched into space, and carried to the Sphere. The towers worked as lifts
beyond the atmosphere, and a similar series of coupling manoeuvres to ours – performed in reverse, if you understand me – would hurl each capsule off into space.

The speed acquired by the capsules on launch would not match that imparted by the Sphere’s rotation, and the outward journey thereby took longer than the return. But on arrival at the Sphere, magnetic fields would hook the capsules with ease, accelerating them to a seamless rendezvous.