The Time Ships
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 1995
Copyright © Stephen Baxter 1995
Illustrations © Les Edwards
Cover design by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover images © Shutterstock.com (shapes); NASA (background texture)
Stephen Baxter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Author and Publisher acknowledge the consent of the Literary Executors of the Estate of H.G. Wells for the use of characters and plot from The Time Machine and other works by H.G. Wells. The Time Machine, The Plattner Story and other works of H.G. Wells are copyright the Literary Executors of the Estate of H.G. Wells.
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Source ISBN: 9780008134549
Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007397549
Version 2019-10-28
Dedication
To my wife Sandra,
and the memory of H.G.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Editor’s Note
Prologue
Book One: Dark Night
Chapter 1: Time Travelling
Chapter 2: A New Vision
Chapter 3: In Obscurity
Chapter 4: The Dark Night
Chapter 5: The Well
Chapter 6: My Encounter With the Morlocks
Chapter 7: The Cage of Light
Chapter 8: A Visitor
Chapter 9: Revelations and Remonstrances
Chapter 10: A Dialogue With a Morlock
Chapter 11: Out of the Cage
Chapter 12: The Morlocks of the Sphere
Chapter 13: How the Morlocks Lived
Chapter 14: Constructions and Divergences
Chapter 15: Life and Death Among the Morlocks
Chapter 16: Decision and Departure
Chapter 17: In the Interior
Chapter 18: The New Eloi
Chapter 19: How I Crossed Inter-Planetary Space
Chapter 20: My Account of the Far Future
Chapter 21: On Richmond Hill
Chapter 22: Rotations and Deceptions
Book Two: Paradox
Chapter 1: The Chronic Argo
Chapter 2: Home
Chapter 3: Moses
Chapter 4: The Experiment
Chapter 5: Honesty and Doubt
Chapter 6: Persuasion and Scepticism
Chapter 7: The Juggernaut Lord Raglan
Chapter 8: Old Acquaintance Renewed
Chapter 9: Into Time
Book Three: The War With the Germans
Chapter 1: A New Vision of Richmond
Chapter 2: A Train Journey
Chapter 3: London at War
Chapter 4: The House in Queen’s Gate Terrace
Chapter 5: The Many Worlds Interpretation
Chapter 6: Hyde Park
Chapter 7: The Babble Machine
Chapter 8: The Uplands of the Future
Chapter 9: Imperial College
Chapter 10: Professor Gödel
Chapter 11: The New World Order
Chapter 12: The German Assault on London
Chapter 13: The Shelling
Chapter 14: The Rota-Mine
Chapter 15: The Time-Car
Chapter 16: Falling Into Time
Chapter 17: The Watcher
Book Four: The Palaeocene Sea
Chapter 1: Diatryma Gigantica
Chapter 2: The Palaeocene Sea
Chapter 3: How We Lived
Chapter 4: Illness and Recuperation
Chapter 5: The Storm
Chapter 6: Heart and Body
Chapter 7: Pristichampus
Chapter 8: The Encampment
Chapter 9: The Chronic Expeditionary Force
Chapter 10: The Apparition
Chapter 11: The Bomb
Chapter 12: The Aftermath of the Bombing
Chapter 13: Bond’s Account
Chapter 14: Survivors
Chapter 15: A New Settlement
Chapter 16: The Establishment of First London
Chapter 17: Children and Descendants
Chapter 18: The Feast, and Later
Chapter 19: Lights in the Sky
Chapter 20: The Orbital City
Chapter 21: Instabilities
Chapter 22: Abandonment and Arrival
Book Five: White Earth
Chapter 1: Confinement
Chapter 2: Experiments and Reflections
Chapter 3: The Universal Constructor
Chapter 4: The Billiards Room
Chapter 5: White Earth
Chapter 6: The Multiplicity Generator
Chapter 7: The Mechanical Heirs of Man
Chapter 8: A Proposition
Chapter 9: Options and Introspections
Chapter 10: Preparations
Chapter 11: Forward in Time
Chapter 12: The Ship
Book Six: The Time Ships
Chapter 1: Departure
Chapter 2: The Unravelling of Earth
Chapter 3: The Boundary of Space and Time
Chapter 4: The Nonlinearity Engines
Chapter 5: The Final Vision
Chapter 6: The Triumph of Mind
Chapter 7: Emergence
Chapter 8: A Circle Is Closed
Book Seven: Day 292,495,940
Chapter 1: The Vale of Thames
Chapter 2: A Walk
Chapter 3: In the Darkness
Epilogue
Keep Reading
About the Author
Also by Stephen Baxter
About the Publisher
EDITOR’S NOTE
The attached account was given to me by the owner of a small second-hand bookshop, situated just off the Charing Cross Road in London. He told me it had turned up as a manuscript in an unlabelled box, in a collection of books which had been bequeathed to him after the death of a friend; the bookseller passed the manuscript on to me as a curiosity – ‘You might make something of it’ – knowing of my interest in the speculative fiction of the nineteenth century.
The manuscript itself was typewritten on commonplace paper, but a pencil note attested that it had been transcribed from an original ‘written by hand on a paper of such age that it has crumbled beyond repair’. That original, if it ever existed, is lost. There is no note as to the manuscript’s author, or origin.
I have restricted my editing to a superficial polishing, meaning only to eliminate some of the errors and duplications of a manuscript which was evidently written in haste.
What are we to make of it? In the Time Traveller’s words, we must ‘take it as a lie – or a prophecy … Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction …’ Without further evidence, we must regard this work as a fantasy – or as an elaborate hoax – but if there is even a grain of truth in the account contained in these pages, then a startling new light is shed, not merely on one of our most famous works of fiction (if fiction it was!), but also on the nature of our universe and our place in it.
I present the account here without further comment.
Stephen Baxter
PROLOGUE
On the Friday morning after my return from futurity, I awoke long after dawn, from the deepest of dreamless sleeps.
I got out of bed and threw back the curtains. The sun was making his usual sluggish progress up the sky, and I remembered how, from the accelerated perspective of a Time Traveller, the sun had fair hopped across heaven! But now, it seemed, I was embedded in oozing time once more, like an insect in seeping amber.
The noises of a Richmond morning gathered outside my window: the hoof-steps of horses, the rattle of wheels on cobbles, the banging of doors. A steam tram, spewing out smoke and sparks, made its clumsy way along the Petersham Road, and the gull-like cries of hawkers came floating on the air. I found my thoughts drifting away from my gaudy adventures in time and back to a mundane plane: I considered the contents of the latest Pall Mall Gazette, and stock movements, and I entertained an anticipation that the morning’s post might bring the latest American Journal of Science, which would contain some speculations of mine on the findings of A. Michelson and E. Morley on certain peculiarities of light, reported in that journal four years earlier, in 1887 …
And so on! The details of the everyday crowded into my head, and by contrast the memory of my adventure in futurity came to seem fantastical – even absurd. As I thought it over now, it seemed to me that the whole experience had had something of a hallucinatory, almost dreamlike quality: there had been that sense of precipitate falling, the haziness of everything about time travel, and at last my plunge into the nightmarish world of A.D. 802,701. The grip of the ordinary on our imaginations is remarkable. Standing there in my pyjamas, something of the uncertainty which had, in the end, assailed me last night returned, and I started to doubt the very existence of the Time Machine itself! – despite my very clear memories of the two years of my life I had expended in the nuts and bolts of its construction, not to mention the two decades previous, during which I had teased out the theory of time travel from anomalies I had observed during my studies of physical optics.
I thought back over my conversation with my companions over dinner the evening before – somehow those few hours were far more vivid, now, than all the days I had spent in that world of futurity – and I remembered their mix of responses to my account: there had been a general enjoyment of a good tale, accompanied by dashes of sympathy or near-derision depending on the temperaments of individuals – and, I recalled, a near-universal scepticism. Only one good friend, who I shall call the Writer in these pages, had seemed to listen to my ramblings with any degree of sympathy and trust.
Standing by the window, I stretched – and my doubts about my memories took a jolt! The ache of my back was real enough, acute and urgent, as were the burning sensations in the muscles of my legs and arms: protests from the muscles of a no-longer-young man forced, against his practice, to exert himself. ‘Well, then,’ I argued with myself, ‘if your trip into the future was truly a dream – all of it, including that bleak night when you fought the Morlocks in the forest – where have these aches and pains come from? Have you been capering around your garden, perhaps, in a moonstruck delirium?’
And there, dumped without ceremony in a corner of my room, I saw a small heap of clothes: they were the garments I had worn to their ruin during my flight to the future, and which now were fit only to be destroyed. I could see grass stains and scorch marks; the pockets were torn, and I remembered how Weena had used those flaps of cloth as impromptu vases, to load up with the etiolated flowers of the future. My shoes were missing, of course – I felt an odd twinge of regret for the comfortable old house-shoes which I had borne unthinking into a hostile future, before abandoning them to an unimaginable fate! – and there, on the carpet, were the filthy, bloodstained remnants of my socks.
Somehow it was those socks – those comical, battered old socks! – whose rude existence convinced me, above anything else, that I was not yet insane: that my flight into the future had not been entirely a dream.
I must return to time, I saw; I must gather evidence that futurity was as real as the Richmond of 1891, to convince my circle of friends and my peers in my scientific endeavours – and to banish the last traces of my own self-doubt.
As I formed this resolve, suddenly I saw the sweet, empty face of Weena, as vivid as if she had been standing there before me. Sadness, and a surge of guilt at my own impetuosity, tore at my heart. Weena, the Eloi child-woman, had followed me to the Palace of Green Porcelain through the depths of the resurgent forest of that distant Thames valley, and had been lost in the confusion of the subsequent fire, and the bleak assaults of the Morlocks. I have always been a man to act first and allow my rational brain to catch up later! In my bachelor life, this tendency had never yet led anyone into serious danger except myself – but now, in my thoughtlessness and headlong rush, I had abandoned poor, trusting Weena to a grisly death in the shadows of that Dark Night of the Morlocks.
I had blood on my hands, and not just the ichor of those foul, degraded sub-men, the Morlocks. I determined I must make recompense – in whatever way I could – for my abominable treatment of poor, trusting Weena.
I was filled with resolve. My adventures, physical and intellectual, were not done yet!
I had Mrs Watchets run me a bath, and I clambered into it. Despite my mood of urgency, I took time to pamper my poor, battered bones; I noted with interest the blistered and scarred state of my feet, and the mild burns I had suffered to my hands.
I dressed quickly. Mrs Watchets prepared me breakfast. I dug into my eggs, mushrooms and tomatoes with vigour – and yet I found the bacon and sausages lying heavy in my mouth; when I bit into the thick meat, its juices, full of salt and oil, filled me with a faint disgust.
I could not help but remember the Morlocks, and the meat I had seen them consume at their foul repasts! My experiences had not dulled my appetite for mutton at dinner the previous evening, I recalled, but then my hunger had been so much greater. Could it be that a certain shock and disquietude, unravelling from my misadventures, were even now working through the layers of my mind?
But a full breakfast is my custom; for I believe that a good dose of peptone in the arteries early in the day is essential for the efficient operation of the vigorous human machine. And today could become as demanding a day as I had faced in my life. Therefore, I put aside my qualms and finished my plate, chewing through my bacon with determination.
Breakfast over, I donned a light but serviceable summer suit. As I think I mentioned to my companions at dinner the previous evening, it had become evident to me during my plummeting through time that winter had been banished from the world of A.D. 802,701 – whether by natural evolution, geogonic planning or the re-engineering of the sun himself I could not say – and so I should have no need of winter greatcoats and scarves in futurity. I donned a hat, to keep the future sun from my pale English brow, and dug out my stoutest pair of walking boots.
I grabbed a small knapsack and proceeded to throw myself about the house, ransacking cupboards and drawers for the equipment I thought I would need for my second journey – much to the alarm of poor, patient Mrs Watchets, who, I am sure, had long since resigned my sanity to the mists of mythology! As is my way, I was in a fever to be off, and yet I was determined not to be quite so impetuous as the first time, when I had travelled across eight thousand centuries with no more protection than a pair of house-shoes and a single box of matches.
I crammed my knapsack with all the matches I could find in the house – in fact, I dispatched Hillyer to the tobacconist’s to purchase more boxes. I packed in camphor, and candles, and, on an impulse, a length of sturdy twine, in case, stranded, I should need to make new candles of my own. (I had little conception of how one goes about such manufacture, incidentally, but in the bright light of that optimistic morning I did not doubt my ability to improvise.)
I took white spirit, salves, some quinine tabloids and a roll of bandage. I had no gun – I doubt if I should have taken it, even if I had possessed one, for what use is a gun when its ammunition is exhausted? – but I slipped my clasp-knife into my pocket. I packed up a roll of tools – a screwdriver, several sizes of spanner, a small hacksaw with spare blades – as well as a range of screws and lengths of nickel, brass and quartz bars. I was determined that no trivial accident befalling the Time Machine should strand me in any disjointed future, for want of a bit of brass: despite my transient plan to build a new Time Machine when my original was stolen by the Morlocks in 802,701, I’d seen no evidence in the decayed Upper-world that I should be able to find the materials to repair so much as a sheared screw. Of course, the Morlocks had retained some mechanical aptitude, but I did not relish the prospect of being forced to negotiate with those bleached worms for the sake of a couple of bolts.
I found my Kodak, and dug out my flash trough. The camera was new-loaded with a roll of a hundred negative frames on a paper-stripping roll. I remembered how damned expensive the thing had seemed when I had bought it – no less than twenty-five dollars, purchased on a trip to New York – but, if I should return with pictures of futurity, each of those two-inch frames would be more valuable than the finest paintings.
Now, I wondered, was I ready? I demanded advice of poor Mrs Watchets, though I would not tell her, of course, where I was intending to travel. That good woman – stolid, square, remarkably plain, and yet with a faithful and imperturbable heart – took a look inside my knapsack, crammed as it was, and she raised one formidable eyebrow. Then she made for my room and returned with spare socks and underwear, and – here I could have kissed her! – my pipe, a set of cleaners, and the jar of tobacco from my mantel.
Thus, with my usual mixture of feverish impatience and superficial intelligence – and with an unending reliance on the good will and common sense of others – I made ready to return into time.
Bearing my knapsack under one arm and my Kodak under the other, I made towards my laboratory, where the Time Machine waited. When I reached the smoking-room, I was startled to find that I had a visitor: one of my guests of the previous evening, and perhaps my closest friend – it was the Writer of whom I have spoken. He stood at the centre of the room in an ill-fitting suit, with his tie knotted about as rough as you could imagine, and with his hands dangling awkward by his side. I recalled again how, of the circle of friends and acquaintances whom I had gathered to serve as the first witnesses to my exploits, it was this earnest young man who had listened with the most intensity, his silence vibrant with sympathy and fascination.
I felt uncommon glad to see him, and grateful that he had come – that he had not shunned me as eccentric, as some might, after my performance of the evening before. I laughed, and, burdened as I was with sack and camera, I held out an elbow; he grasped the joint and shook it solemnly. ‘I’m frightfully busy,’ I said, ‘with that thing in there.’
He studied me; I thought there was a sort of desperation to believe in his pale blue eyes. ‘But is it not some hoax? Do you really travel through time?’
‘Really and truly, I do,’ I said, holding his gaze as long as I could, for I wanted him to be convinced.
He was a short, squat man, with a jutting lower lip, a broad forehead, wispy sideboards and rather ugly ears. He was young – about twenty-five, I believe; two decades younger than myself – yet his lank hair was already receding. His walk had a sort of bounce and he had a certain energy about him – nervous, like a plump bird’s – but he always looked sickly: I know he suffered haemorrhages, from time to time, from a soccer-game kicking to the kidneys he had received when working as a teacher in some Godforsaken private school in Wales. And today, his blue eyes, though tired, were filled, as ever, with intelligence and a concern for me.