The Time Ships
My nausea and vertigo returned with a rush. I was forced to grip hard at the rails of the machine, and I swallowed, fighting for control of my own body.
It is difficult to convey the impact this simple change in my surroundings had on me! First, I was shocked by the sheer audacity of the engineering involved in the removal of the seasonal cycle. The earth’s seasons had derived from the tilt of the planet’s spin axis compared to the plane of its orbit around the sun. On the earth, it seemed, there would be no more seasons. And that could only mean – I realized it instantly – that the axial tilt of the planet had been corrected.
I tried to envisage how this might have been done. What great machines must have been installed at the Poles? What measures had been taken to ensure that the surface of the earth did not shake itself loose in the process? – Perhaps, I speculated, some immense magnetic device had been used, which had manipulated the molten and magnetic core of the planet.
But it was not just the scale of this planetary engineering which disturbed me: more terrifying still was the fact that I had not observed this regulation of the seasons during my first jaunt into time. How was it possible that I could have missed such an immense and profound change? I am trained as a scientist, after all; my business is to observe.
I rubbed my face and stared up at the sun-band where it hung in the sky, defying me to believe in its lack of motion. Its brightness stung my eyes; and it seemed to me that the band was growing still brighter. I wondered at first if this was my imagination, or some defect of my eyes. I dropped my face, dazzled, wiping tears against my jacket sleeve and blinking to rid my eyes of stripes of bruised light-spots.
I am no primitive, and no coward – and yet, sitting there in my saddle before the evidence of the immense feats of future men, I felt as if I were a savage with painted nakedness and bones in my hair, cowering before gods in the gaudy sky. I felt a deep fear for my own sanity bubbling from the depths of my consciousness; and yet I clung to the belief that – somehow – I had failed to observe this staggering astronomical phenomenon, during my first pass through these years. For the only alternative hypothesis terrified me to the roots of my soul: it was that I had not been mistaken during my first voyage; that the regulation of the earth’s axis had not taken place there – that the course of History itself had changed.
The near-eternal shape of the hill-side was unchanged – the morphology of the ancient land was unaffected by these evolving lights in the sky – but I could see that the tide of greenery which had coated the land had now receded, under the steady glare of the brightened sun.
I became aware now of a remote flickering above my head, and I glanced up with my hand raised. The flickering came from the sun-band in the sky – or what had been the sun-band, for I realized that somehow, once again, I was able to distinguish the cannonball motion of the sun as it shot across the sky on its diurnal round; no longer was its motion too rapid for me to follow, and the passage of night and day was inducing the flickering I saw.
At first, I thought my machine must be slowing. But when I glanced down at my dials, I saw that the hands were twisting across the faces with just as much alacrity as before.
The pearl-grey uniformity of the light dissolved, and the flapping alternation of day and night became marked. The sun slid across the sky, slowing with every arcing trajectory, hot and bright and yellow; and I soon realized that the burning star was taking many centuries to complete one revolution around the sky of earth.
At last, the sun came to a halt altogether; it rested on the western horizon, hot and pitiless and unchanging. The earth’s rotation had been stilled; now, it rotated with one face turned perpetually to the sun!
The scientists of the nineteenth century had predicted that at last the tidal influences of sun and moon would cause the earth’s rotation to become locked to the sun, just as the moon was forced to keep one face turned to earth. I had witnessed this myself, during my first exploration of futurity: but it was an eventuality that should not come about for many millions of years. And yet here I was, little more than half a million years into the future, finding a stilled earth!
Once again, I realized, I had seen the hand of man at work – ape-descended fingers, reaching across centuries with the grasp of gods. Not content with tilting up his world, man had slowed the spin of the earth itself, banishing at last the ancient cycle of day and night.
I looked around at England’s new desert. The land was scoured clean of grass, leaving exposed a dried-out clay. Here and there I saw the flicker of some hardy bush – in shape, a little like an olive – which struggled to survive beneath the unrelenting sun. The mighty Thames, which had migrated across perhaps a mile of its plain, shrank within its banks, until I could no longer see the sparkle of its water. I scarce felt these latest changes had done much to improve the place: at least the world of Morlocks and Eloi had seen the retention of the essential character of the English countryside, with its abundant greenery and water; the effect, looking back on it, had been rather like towing the whole of the British Isles to somewhere in the Tropics.
I pictured the poor planet, one face held in the sunlight forever, the other turned away. On the equator at the centre of the day-side, it must be warm enough to boil the flesh off a man’s bones. And air must be fleeing the overheated sunward side to rush, in immense winds, towards the cooler hemisphere, there to freeze out as a snow of oxygen and nitrogen over the ice-bound oceans. If I were to stop the machine now, perhaps I should be knocked off at once by those great winds, the last exhalations of a planet’s lungs! The process could stop only when the day-side was parched, airless, quite without life; and the dark side was buried under a thin shell of frozen air.
I realized with mounting horror that I could not return home! – for to turn back I must stop the machine, and if I did so I would be tipped precipitately into a land of vacuum and searing heat, as bleak as the surface of the moon. But dare I carry on, into an unknowable future, and hope that somewhere in the depths of time I would find a world I could inhabit?
Now I was sure that something was badly wrong with my perceptions, or memories, of my time travelling. For it was barely conceivable to me that during my first voyage to the future I might have missed the banishing of the seasons – though I found it hard to believe – but I could not countenance that I had failed to notice the slowing of the earth’s spin.
There could be no doubt about it: I was travelling through events which differed, massively, from those I had witnessed during my first sojourn.
I am by nature a speculative man, and am in general not short of an inventive hypothesis or two; but at that moment my shock was such that I was bereft of calculation. It was as if my body still plummeted onwards through time, but my brain had been left behind, somewhere in the glutinous past. I think I had had a veneer of courage earlier, a facade that had come from the complacent consideration that, although I was heading into danger, it was at least a danger I had confronted before. Now, I had no idea what awaited me in these corridors of time!
While I was occupied by these morbid thoughts, I became aware of continuing changes in the heavens – as if the dismantling of the natural order of things had not yet gone far enough! The sun was growing still brighter. And – it was hard to be sure, the glare of it was so strong – it seemed to me that the shape of the star was now changing. It was smearing itself across the sky, becoming an elliptical patch of light. I wondered if the sun was somehow being spun more rapidly, so that it had become flattened by rotation …
And then – it was quite sudden – the sun exploded.
3
IN OBSCURITY
Plumes of light erupted from the star’s poles, like immense flares. Within a handful of heartbeats the sun had surrounded itself with a glowing mantle of light. Heat and light blazed down anew on the battered earth.
I screamed and buried my face in my hands; but I could still see the light of the enhanced sun, leaking even through the flesh of my fingers, and blazing from the nickel and brass of the Time Machine.
Then, as soon as it had begun, the light storm ceased – and a sort of shell closed up around the sun, as if an immense Mouth was swallowing the star – and I was plunged into darkness!
I dropped my hands, and found myself in pitch blackness, quite unable to see, although dazzle-spots still danced in my eyes. I could feel the hard saddle of the Time Machine beneath me, and when I reached out I found the faces of the little dials; and the machine still swayed as it continued to forge through time. I began to wonder – to fear! – if I had lost my sight.
Despair welled up within me, blacker than the external darkness. Was my second great adventure into time to end so soon, so ignobly? I reached out, groping, for the control levers, and my feverish brain began to concoct schemes wherein I broke off the glass of the chronometric dials, and by touch, perhaps, worked my way home.
… And then I found I was not blind: I did see something.
In some ways this was the queerest aspect of the whole journey so far – so queer, that at first I was quite beyond fear.
First of all, I made out a lightening in the darkness. It was a vague, suffused brightening, something like a sun-rise, and so faint that I was unsure if my bruised eyes were not playing some trick on me. I thought I could see stars, all about me; but they were faint, their light tempered as if seen through a murky stained-glass window.
And now, by the dim glow, I began to see that I was not alone.
The creature stood a few yards before the Time Machine – or rather, it floated in the air, unsupported. It was a ball of flesh: something like a hovering head, all of four feet across, with two bunches of tentacles which dangled like grotesque fingers towards the ground. Its mouth was a fleshy beak, and it had no nostrils that I could make out. I noticed now that the creature’s eyes – two of them, large and dark – were human. It seemed to be making a noise – a low, murmuring babble, like a river – and I realized, with a stab of fear, that this was exactly the noise I had heard earlier in the expedition, and even during my first venture into time.
Had this creature – this Watcher, I labelled it – accompanied me, unseen, on both my expeditions through time?
Of a sudden, it rushed towards me. It loomed up, no more than a yard from my face!
I was unhinged at last. I screamed and, regardless of the consequences, hauled at my lever.
The Time Machine tipped over – the Watcher vanished – and I was flung into the air!
I was left insensible: for how long, I cannot say. I revived slowly, finding my face pressed down against a hard, sandy surface. I fancied I felt a hot breath at my neck – a whisper, a brush of soft hair against my cheek – but when I moaned and made to get up, these sensations vanished.
I was immersed in inky darkness. It felt neither warm nor cold. I was sitting on some hard, sandy surface. There was a scent of staleness in the still air. My head ached from the bump it had received, and I had lost my hat.
I reached out my arms and cast about all around me. To my great relief, I was rewarded almost immediately by a soft collision with a tangle of ivory and brass: it was the Time Machine, pitched like me into this darkened desert. I reached out with both hands and fingered the rails and studs of the machine. It was tipped over, and in the dark I could not tell if it was damaged.
I needed light, of course. I reached for some matches from my pocket – only to find none there; like a blessed fool I had packed my entire supply into the knapsack! A moment of panic assailed me; but I managed to suppress it, and I stood, shaking, and walked to the Time Machine. I investigated it by touch, searching between the bent rails until I found the knapsack, still stowed secure under the saddle. Impatient, I pulled the pack open and rummaged through it. I found two boxes of matches and tucked them into my jacket pockets; then I took out a match and struck it against its box.
… There was a face, immediately before me, not two feet away, glowing in the match’s circle of light: I saw dull white skin, flaxen hair draping down from the skull, and wide, grey-red eyes.
The creature let out a queer, gurgling scream, and disappeared into the darkness beyond the glow of my light.
It was a Morlock!
The match burned down against my fingers and I dropped it; I scrabbled for another, in my panic almost dropping my precious box.
4
THE DARK NIGHT
The sharp sulphur smell of the matches filled my nostrils, and I backed across the sandy surface until my spine was pressed against the brass rods of the Time Machine. After some minutes of this submission to terror, I had the wit to retrieve a candle from my knapsack. I held the candle close to my face and stared into its yellow flame, ignorant of the warm wax which flowed over my fingers.
I gradually began to discern some structure in the world around me. I could see the tangled brass and quartz of the upturned Time Machine, sparkling in the candlelight, and a form – like a large statue, or a building – which loomed, pale and huge, not far from where I stood. The land was not completely without light. The sun might be gone, but in patches above me the stars still shone, though slid about by time from the constellations of my boyhood. There was no sign of our friendly moon.
In one part of the sky, though, no stars shone: in the west, protruding over the black horizon, there was a flattened ellipse, unbroken by stars, spanning fully a quarter of the sky. This was the sun, shrouded in its astonishing shell!
As I came out of my funk, I decided my first action should be to secure my passage home: I must right the Time Machine – but I would not do it in the dark! I knelt down and felt about on the ground. The sand was hard, the grains fine-packed. I dug into it with my thumb, and pushed out a little depression; into this improvised holder I popped my candle, confident that in a few moments sufficient wax would melt to hold it more firmly in place. Now I had a steady light to guide my operations, and my hands were free.
I set my teeth, drew my breath, and grappled with the weight of the machine. I wedged my wrists and knees under its framework, trying to wrestle the thing from the ground – its construction had been intended for solidity, not ease of handling – until, at last, it gave under my onslaught and tipped over. One nickel rod struck my shoulder, quite painfully.
I rested my hand on the saddle, and felt where its leather surface was scuffed by the sand of this new future. In the dark of my own shadow, I reached out and found the chronometric dials with my probing fingertips – one glass had shattered, but the dial itself seemed in working order – and the two white levers with which I could bring myself home. As I touched the levers, the machine shivered like a ghost, reminding me that it – and I – were not of this time: that at any moment now, of my choosing, I only had to board my device to return to the security of 1891, at the risk of nothing more than a little bruised pride.
I lifted the candle from its socket in the sand and held it over my dials. It was, I found, Day 239,354,634: therefore – I estimated – the year was A.D. 657,208. My wild imaginings about the mutability of past and future must be correct; for this darkened hill-side was located in time a hundred and fifty millennia before Weena’s birth, and I could not envisage a way in which that sunlit garden-world could develop from this rayless obscurity!
In my remote childhood, I remember being entertained by my father with a primitive wonder-toy called a ‘Dissolving View’. Crudely coloured pictures were thrown onto a screen by a double-barrelled arrangement of lenses. A picture would be projected first by the right-hand lens of the contraption; then the light would be shifted to the left-hand side, so that the picture cast from the right faded as the other grew in brightness. As a child I was deeply impressed by the way in which a bright reality turned into a phantom, to be replaced by a successor whose form was at first visible only as an outline. There were exhilarating moments when the two images were exactly in balance, and it was hard to determine which details were advancing and which were receding realities, or whether any part of the ensemble of images was truly ‘real’.
Thus, as I stood in that darkened landscape, I felt the sturdy description of the world I had constructed for myself growing misty and faint, to be replaced only by the barest bones of a successor, and with more confusion than clarity!
The divergence of the twin Histories I had witnessed – in the first, the building of the Eloi’s garden world; in the second, the extinguishing of the sun, and the establishment of this planetary desert – was incomprehensible to me. How could events be, and then not be?
I remembered the words of Thomas Aquinas, that: ‘God cannot effect that anything which is past should not have been. It is more impossible than raising the dead …’ So I had believed, too! I am not much given to philosophical speculation, but I had thought of the future as an extension of the past: fixed and immutable, even for a God – and certainly for the hand of man. Futurity, in my mind, was like a huge room, fixed and static. And into the furniture of the future my Time Machine could take me, exploring.
But now, it seemed, I had learned that the future might not be a fixed thing, but something mutable! If so, I mused, what meaning could be given to the lives of men? It was bad enough to endure the thought that all of one’s achievements would be worn away to insignificance by the erosion of time – and I, of all men, knew that well enough! – but, at least, one would always have the feeling that one’s monuments, and the things one had loved, had once been. But if History were capable of this wholesale erasure and alteration, what possible worth could be ascribed to any human activity?
Reflecting on these startling possibilities, I felt as if the solidity of my thought, and the firmness of my apprehension of the world, were melting away. I stared into my candle flame, seeking the outlines of a new understanding.
I was not done yet, I decided; my fear was subsiding, and my mind stayed resilient and strong. I would explore this bizarre world, and take what pictures I could with my Kodak, and then return to 1891. There, better philosophers than I could puzzle over this conundrum of two futurities exclusive of each other.
I reached over the bars of the Time Machine, unscrewed the little levers that would launch me into time, and stored them safe in my pocket. Then I felt about until I found the sturdy form of my poker, still lodged where I had left it in the structure of the machine. I grasped its thick handle and hefted it in my hand. My confidence grew as I imagined cracking a few of the Morlocks’ soft skulls with this piece of primitive engineering. I stuck the poker in a loop of my belt. It hung there a little awkward but hugely reassuring, with its weight and solidity, and its resonance of home, and my own fireside.
I raised my candle into the air. The spectral statue, or building, which I had noticed close by the machine, came into shadowy illumination. It was indeed a monument of some kind – a colossal figure carved of some white stone, its form difficult to discern in the flickering candlelight.
I walked towards the monument. As I did so, on the edge of my vision, I fancied I saw a pair of grey-red eyes widen, and a white back which shivered away across the sandy surface with a shushing of bare feet. I rested my hand on the club of brass tucked in my belt, and continued.
The statue was set on a pedestal which appeared to be of bronze, and decorated with deep-framed, filigreed panels. The pedestal was stained, as if it had once been attacked by verdigris, now long dried out. The statue itself was of white marble, and from a leonine body great wings were spread, so that they seemed to hover over me. I wondered how those great sheets of stone were supported, for I could see no struts. Perhaps there was some metal frame, I mused – or perhaps some elements of that mastery of gravity, which I had hypothesized in my latest jaunt through the Age of Great Buildings, lingered on in this desolate era. The face of the marble beast was human, and was turned towards me; I felt as if those blank stone eyes were watching me, and there was a smile, sardonic and cruel, on the weather-beaten lips …
And with a jolt I recognized this construction; if not for fear of Morlocks I would have whooped with the joy of familiarity! This was the monument I had come to call the White Sphinx – a structure I had become familiar with, in this very spot, during my first flight to the future. It was almost like greeting an old friend!
I paced around the sandy hill-side, back and forth past the machine, remembering how it had been. This spot had been a lawn, surrounded by mauve and purple rhododendrons – bushes which had dropped their blossoms over me in a hail storm on my first arrival. And, looming over it all, indistinct at first in that hail, had been the imposing form of this Sphinx.
Well, here I was again, a hundred and fifty thousand years before that date. The bushes and lawn were gone – and would never come to be, I suspected. That sunlit garden had been replaced by this bleak, darkened desert, and now existed only in the recesses of my own mind. But the Sphinx was here, solid as life and almost indestructible, it seemed.
I patted the bronze panels of the Sphinx’s pedestal with something resembling affection. Somehow the existence of the Sphinx, lingering from my previous visit, reassured me that I was not imagining all of this, that I was not going mad in some dim recess of my house in 1891! All of this was objectively real, and – no doubt, like the rest of Creation – it all conformed to some logical pattern. The White Sphinx was a part of that pattern, and it was only my ignorance and limitation of mind that prevented me from seeing the rest of it. I was bolstered up, and felt filled with a new determination to continue with my explorations.
On impulse, I walked around to the side of the pedestal closest to the Time Machine, and, by candlelight, I inspected the decorated bronze panel there. It was here, I recalled, that the Morlocks – in that other History – had opened up the hollow base of the Sphinx, and dragged the Time Machine inside the pedestal, meaning to trap me. I had come to the Sphinx with a pebble and hammered at this panel – just here; I ran over the decorations with my fingertips. I had flattened out some of the coils of the panel, though to no avail. Well, now I found those coils firm and round under my fingers, as good as new. It was strange to think that the coils would not meet the fury of my stone for millennia yet – or perhaps, never at all.
I determined to move away from the machine and proceed with my exploration. But the presence of the Sphinx had reminded me of my horror at losing the Time Machine to the clutches of the Morlocks. I patted my pocket – at least without my little levers the machine could not be operated – but there was no obstacle to those loathsome creatures crawling over my machine as soon as I was gone from it, perhaps dismantling it or stealing it again.
And besides, in this darkened landscape, how should I avoid getting lost? How should I be sure of finding the machine again, once I had gone more than a few yards from it?