The Time Ships (28 page)

T
he bleak, wintry cold passed, and the sky took on a more complex, mottled texture. Occasionally the rocking sun-band would be blotted out by a shell of dark cloud, for as long as a second. New species of trees flourished in this milder climate: deciduous types, as best I could make out, maple, oak, poplar cedars and others. Sometimes these antique forests lapped over the car, shutting us into a twilight of flickering green-brown, and then receded, as if a curtain had been drawn aside.

We had entered a time of powerful earth movements, Nebogipfel said. The Alps and Himalayas were being forced out of the ground, and immense volcanoes were spewing ash and dust into the air, sometimes obscuring the sky for years on end. In the oceans – the Morlock said – great sharks cruised, with teeth like daggers. And in Africa, the ancestors of Humanity were shrivelling back into primitive mindlessness, with shrinking brains, stooping gait and blunted, clumsy fingers.

We fell through that long, savage Age for perhaps twelve hours.

I tried to ignore the hunger and thirst that clawed at my belly, while centuries and forests flickered past the cabin. This was the longest journey through time I had taken since my first plunge into the remote future beyond Weena’s History, and the immense,
futile emptiness of it all – for hour after unchanging hour – began to depress my soul. Already the brief flourishing of humanity was a remote sliver of light, far away in time; even the distance between man and Morlock – of whatever variety – was but a fraction of the great distance I had travelled.

The hugeness of time, and the littleness of man and his achievements, quite crushed me; and my own, petty concerns seemed of absurd insignificance. The story of Humanity seemed trivial, a flash-lamp moment lost in the dark, mindless halls of Eternity.

The earth’s crust heaved like the chest of a choking man, and the Time-Car was lifted or dropped with the evolving landscape; it felt like the swell of an immense sea. The vegetation grew more lush and green, and new forests pressed up against the Time-Car – I thought they were deciduous trees by now, though flowers and leaves were reduced to a uniform green blur by our velocity – and the air grew warmer.

The ache of those aeons of cold left my fingers at last, and I discarded my jacket and loosened the buttons of my shirt; I abandoned my boots and flexed the circulation back into my toes. Barnes Wallis’s numbered security badge fell out of my jacket pocket. I picked it up, this little symbol of man’s suspicious fencing-off of his fellow man, and I do not think I could have found, in that primeval greenness, a more perfect symbol of the narrowness and absurdity on which so much human energy is wasted! I threw the badge into a dark corner of the car.

The long hours, suspended in that cloaking greenery, passed more slowly than ever, and I slept for a while. When I woke, the quality of the greenness around me seemed to have changed – it was more translucent, with something of the shade of Plattnerite, and I thought I saw a hint of star-fields –
it was like being immersed in emeralds, rather than leaves.

Then I saw it
: it hovered in the moist, gloomy air of the cabin, immune to the rocking of the car, with its huge eyes, fleshy ‘V’ of a mouth, and those articulated tentacles which trailed towards, but did not touch, the floor. This was no phantasm – I could not see
through
it, to details of the forest beyond – and it was as real as me, Nebogipfel, or the boots I had set on the bench.

The Watcher regarded me with a cool analysis.

I felt no fear. I reached out towards it, but it bobbled away through the air. I had no doubt that its grey eyes were fixed on my face. ‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘Can you help us?’

If it could hear, it did not respond. But the illumination was already changing; that light-suffused quality of the air was fading back to a vegetable greenness. I caught a sensation, then, of
spinning
– that great skull was like some improbable toy, turning on its axis – and then it was gone.

Nebogipfel walked up to me, his long feet picking over the floor’s ribs. He had discarded his nineteenth-century clothes, and he went naked, save for his battered goggles and the coat of white hair on his back, now tangled and grown out. ‘What is it? Are you ill?’

I told him of the Watcher, but he had seen nothing of it. I returned to my rest on the bench, uncertain if what I had witnessed was real – or a lingering dream.

The heat was oppressive, and the air in the cabin grew stifling.

I thought of Gödel, and of Moses.

That unprepossessing man, Gödel, had
deduced
the existence of Multiple Histories, purely from ontological principles – while I, poor fool that I am, had
needed several trips through time before the possibility had even occurred to me! But now, that man who had dreamed his magnificent dreams of the Final World, a world in which all Meaning is resolved, lay crushed and broken under a heap of masonry – killed by the narrowness and stupidity of his fellow men.

‘The Watcher regarded me with a cool analysis.’

And as for Moses: for him, I simply grieved. It was something of the desolation one might feel if a child is killed, I think, or a younger brother. Moses was dead at twenty-six; and yet I –
the same person
– breathed on at four-and-forty! My past had been cut out from under me; it was as if the ground had evaporated, leaving me stranded in the air. But beyond this I had come to know Moses, if briefly, as a person in his own regard. He had been cheerful, erratic, impulsive, a little absurd – just like me! – and immensely likeable.

It was another death on my hands!

All Nebogipfel’s double-talk of a Multiplicity of Worlds – all the possible arguments that the Moses I had known was never, in the end, destined to be
me
, but some other
variant
of me – none of that made any difference to the way it felt to have lost
him
.

My thoughts dissolved into half-coherent fragments – I struggled to keep my eyes open, fearing I should not wake again – but, once more, consumed by confusion and grief, I slept.

I was woken by my name, pronounced in the Morlock’s odd, liquid guttural. The air was as foul as before, and a new throb, caused by the heat and lack of oxygen, was jostling for room in my skull with the residue of my earlier injuries.

Nebogipfel’s battered eyes were huge in that arboreal gloom. ‘Look around,’ he said.

The greenery pressed about us with as much persistence as before – and yet now the texture seemed
different. I found that – with care – I was able to follow the evolution of single leaves on the crowding branches. Each leaf sprang from the dust, went through a sort of reverse withering, and crumpled into its bud in less than a second, but even so –

‘We are slowing,’ I breathed.

‘Yes. The Plattnerite is losing its potency, I think.’

I uttered a prayer of thanks – for my strength had recovered sufficiently that I no longer wished to die on some airless, rocky plain at the dawn of the earth!

‘Do you know where we are?’

‘Somewhere in the Palaeocene Era. We’ve been travelling for twenty hours. We are perhaps fifty million years before the present …’

‘Whose present? – mine, of 1891, or yours?’

He touched the blood still matted over his face. ‘On such timescales it scarcely matters.’

The blossoming of leaves and flowers was now quite slow – almost stately. I became aware of a flickering, of impermanent intrusions of deeper darkness, superimposed on the general green gloom. ‘I can distinguish night and day,’ I said. ‘We’re slowing.’

‘Yes.’ The Morlock sat on the bench opposite me and gripped its edge with his long fingers. I wondered if he was afraid – he had every right to be! I thought I saw a motion in the floor of the car, a gentle, upward bulging below Nebogipfel’s bench.

‘What should we do?’

He shook his head. ‘We can only wait on events. We are hardly in a controlled situation …’

The flapping of night and day slowed further, until it became a steady pulse around us, like a heartbeat. The floor creaked, and I saw stress-marks appear in its steel plates …

Suddenly I understood!

I cried, ‘Look out!’ I stood, reached over and
grabbed Nebogipfel by the shoulders. He did not resist. I lifted him as if he were a skinny, hairy child, and stumbled backwards –

– and a tree accreted out of the air before me, ripping the car’s metal like paper. One immense branch probed towards the controls like the arm of some huge, purposeful man of wood, and smashed through the casing’s front panel.

We were evidently arriving in the space occupied by this tree, in this remote era!

I fell backwards against a bench, cradling Nebogipfel. The tree shrank a little, as we receded towards the moment of its birth. The flapping of night and day grew slower, still more ponderous. The trunk narrowed further – and then, with an immense crack, the cabin of the car broke in two, snapped open from within like an egg-shell.

I lost hold of Nebogipfel, and the Morlock and I tumbled to the soft, moist earth, amid a hail of metal and wood.

I
found myself on my back, peering up at the tree which had riven through our Time-Car as we fell out of diluted presentation. I heard Nebogipfel’s shallow breathing close by, but I could not see him.

Our tree, now frozen in time, soared up to join its fellows in a canopy, thick and uniform, far above me, and shoots and seedlings sprouted from the ground around its base, and through the wrecked components of the car. The heat was intense, the air moist and difficult for my straining lungs, and the world around me was filled with the coughs, trills and sighs of a jungle, all overlaid on a deep, richer rumble which made me suspect the presence of a large body of water nearby: either a river – some primeval version of the Thames – or a sea.

It was more like the Tropics than England!

Now, as I lay there and watched, an animal came clambering down the trunk towards us. It was something like a squirrel, about ten inches long, but its coat was wide and loose, and hung about its body like a cloak. It carried a fruit in its little jaws. Ten feet from the ground this creature spotted us; it cocked its sharp head, opened its mouth – dropping its fruit – and hissed. I saw that its incisor teeth divided at their tips, into five-pronged combs. Then it leapt headlong from its tree trunk. It spread its arms and legs wide and its cloak of skin opened out with a snap, turning
the animal into a sort of fur-covered kite. It soared away into the shadows, and was lost to my view.

‘Quite a welcome,’ I gasped. ‘It was like a flying lemur. But did you see its teeth?’

Nebogipfel – still out of my sight – replied, ‘It was a
planetatherium
. And the tree is a
dipterocarps
– not much changed from the species which will survive in the forests of your own day.’

I pushed my hands into the mulch under me – it was quite rotten and slippery – and endeavoured to turn so that I could see him. ‘Nebogipfel, are you injured?’

The Morlock lay on his side, his head twisted so that he was staring at the sky. ‘I am not hurt,’ he whispered. ‘I suggest we begin a search for –’

But I was not listening; for I had seen – just behind him – a beaked head, the size of a horse’s, pushing through the foliage, and dipping down towards the Morlock’s frail body!

For an instant I was paralysed by shock. That hooked beak opened with a sort of liquid pop, and discshaped eyes fixed on me with every evidence of intelligence.

Then, with a heavy swoop, the great head ducked down and clamped its beak over the Morlock’s leg. Nebogipfel screamed, and his small fingers scrabbled at the ground, and bits of leaf clung to his coat of hair.

I scrambled backwards, kicking at the leaves to get away, and finished up against a tree trunk.

Now, with a crackle of smashed branches, the beast’s body came lumbering through the greenery and into my view. It was perhaps seven feet tall, and coated with black, scaly feathers; its legs were stout, with strong, clawed feet, and covered with a sagging yellow flesh. Residual wings, disproportionately small
on that immense torso, beat at the air. This bird-monster hauled its head back, and the poor Morlock was dragged across the mulchy ground.

‘Nebogipfel!’

‘It is a
Diatryma
,’ he gasped. ‘A
Diatryma Gigantica
, I –
oh!
’

‘Never mind its phylogeny,’ I cried, ‘get away from it!’

‘I am afraid – I have no way to –
oh!
’ Again his speech disintegrated into that wordless yowl of anguish. Now the creature twisted its head from side to side. I realized that it was endeavouring to club the Morlock’s skull against a tree trunk – no doubt as a preliminary to making a feast of his pale flesh!

I needed a weapon, and could think only of Moses’s wrench. I got to my feet and scrambled into the wreckage of our Time-Car. A profusion of struts, panels and wires lay about, and the steel and polished wood of 1938 looked singularly out of place in this antique forest. I could not see the wrench! I plunged my arms, up to the elbows, into the decaying ground cover. It took long, agonizing seconds of searching; and all the while the
Diatryma
dragged its prize further towards the forest.

And then I had it! – my right arm emerged from the compost clasping the handle of the wrench.

With a roar, I raised the wrench to shoulder height and plunged through the mulch.
Diatryma’s
bead-like eyes watched me approach – it slowed its headshaking – but it did not loosen its grip on Nebogipfel’s leg. It had never seen men before, of course; I doubted that it understood that I could be a threat to it. I kept up my charge, and tried to ignore the awful, scaly skin around the claws of the feet, the immensity of the beak, and the whiff of decaying meat that hung about the thing.

In the manner of a cricket stroke, I swung my
makeshift club –
thump
– into
Diatryma’s
head. The blow was softened by feathers and flesh, but I felt a satisfying collision with bone.

The bird opened its beak, dropping the Morlock, and squawked; it was a noise like sheet-metal tearing. That huge beak was poised above
me
now, and every instinct told me to run – but I knew that if I did we should both be done for. I raised my wrench back over my head, and launched it towards the crown of the
Diatryma’s
skull. This time the creature ducked, and I caught it only a glancing blow; so, after completing my swing, I lifted up my wrench and smote against the underside of the beak.

There was a splintering noise, and
Diatryma’s
head snapped back. It reeled, then it gazed at me with eyes alight with calculation. It emitted a squawk so deep-pitched it was more like a growl.

Then – quite suddenly – it shivered up its black feathers, turned, and hobbled away into the forest.

I tucked the wrench into my belt and knelt beside the Morlock. He was unconscious. His leg was a crushed, bloody mess, the hair on his back soaked by the bird-monster’s looping spittle.

‘Well, my companion in time,’ I whispered, ‘perhaps there are occasions when it is useful to have an antique savage on hand, after all!’

I found his goggles in the mulch, wiped them clear of leaves on my sleeve, and placed them over his face.

I peered into the forest’s gloom, wondering what I should do next. I may have travelled in time, and across space to the Morlocks’ great Sphere – but in my own century, I had never journeyed to any of the Tropical countries. I had only dim recollections of travellers’ tales and other popular sources to guide me now in my quest for survival.

But at least, I consoled myself, the challenges that
lay ahead would be comparatively
simple!
I would not be forced to face my own younger self – nor, since the Time-Car was wrecked, would I have to deal with the moral and philosophical ambiguities of Multiple Histories. Rather, I must simply seek food, and shelter against the rain, and to protect us against the beasts and birds of this deep time.

I decided that finding fresh water must be my first mission; even leaving aside the needs of the Morlock, my own thirst was raging, for I had had no sustenance since before the shelling of London.

I placed the Morlock in the midst of the Time-Car’s wreckage, close to the tree trunk. I thought it as safe a place as anywhere from the predations of the monsters of this Age. I doffed my jacket and placed it under his back, to protect him from the moisture of the mulch – and anything that crawled and chewed that might live therein! Then, after some hesitation, I took the wrench from my belt and laid it over the Morlock, so that his fingers were wrapped around the weapon’s heavy shaft.

Reluctant to leave myself weaponless, I cast about in the car’s wreckage until I found a short, stout piece of iron ribbing, and I bent this sideways until it broke free from the frame. I hefted this in my hand. It did not have the satisfying solidity of my wrench, but it would be better than nothing.

I decided to make for that sound of water; it seemed to lie in a direction away from the sun. I rested my club on my shoulder and struck out through the forest.