The Time Ships

16

DECISION AND DEPARTURE

I stumbled out of that grisly birthing-hut and stared around at the huge city-chamber, with its ranks of patient Morlocks pursuing their incomprehensible activities. I longed to shout at them, to shatter their repulsive perfection; but I knew, even in that dark moment, that I could not afford to allow their perception of my behaviour to worsen once more.

I wanted to flee even from Nebogipfel. He had shown some kindness and consideration to me, I realized: more than I deserved, perhaps, and more, probably, than men of my own age might have afforded some violent savage from a half-million years before Christ. But still, he had been, I sensed, fascinated and amused by my reactions to the birthing process. Perhaps he had engineered this revelation to provoke just such an extreme of emotion in me! Well, if such was his intention, Nebogipfel had succeeded. But now my humiliation and unreasoning anger were such that I could scarcely bear to look on his ornately-coiffed features.

And yet I had nowhere else to go! Like it or not, I knew, Nebogipfel was my only point of reference in this strange Morlock world: the only individual alive whose name I knew, and – for all I knew of Morlock politics – my only protector.

Perhaps Nebogipfel sensed some of this conflict in me. At any rate, he did not press his company on me; instead, he turned his back, and once more evoked my small sleeping-hut from the Floor. I ducked into the hut and sat in its darkest corner, with my arms wrapped around me – I cowered like some forest animal brought to New York!

I stayed in there for some hours – perhaps I slept. At last, I felt some resilience of mind returning, and I took some food and performed a perfunctory toilet.

I think – before the incident of the birth farm – I had come to be intrigued by my glimpses of this New Morlock world. I have always thought myself above all a Rational man, and I was fascinated by this vision of how a society of Rational Beings might order things – of how Science and Engineering might be applied to build a better world. I had been impressed by the Morlocks’ tolerance of different approaches to politics and governance, for instance. But the sight of that half-formed homunculus had quite unhinged me. Perhaps my reaction demonstrates how deep embedded are the basic values and instincts of our species.

If it was true that the New Morlocks had conquered their genetic inheritance, the taint of the ancient oceans, then, at that moment of inner turmoil, I envied them their equanimity!

I knew now that I must get away from the company of the Morlocks – I might be tolerated, but there was no place for me here, any more than for a gorilla in a Mayfair hotel – and I began to formulate a new resolve.

I emerged from my shelter. Nebogipfel was there, waiting, as if he had never left the vicinity of the hut. With a brush of his hand over a pedestal, he caused the discarded shelter to dissolve back into the Floor.

‘Nebogipfel,’ I said briskly, ‘it must be obvious to you that I am as out of place here as some zoo animal, escaped in a city.’

He said nothing; his gaze seemed impassive.

‘Unless it is your intention to hold me as a prisoner, or as a specimen in some laboratory, I have no desire to stay here. I request that you allow me access to my Time Machine, so that I might return to my own Age.’

‘You are not a prisoner,’ he said. ‘The word has no translation in our language. You are a sentient being, and as such you have rights. The only constraints on your behaviour are that you should not further harm others by your actions –’

‘Which constraints I accept,’ I said stiffly.

‘– and,’ he went on, ‘that you should not depart in your machine.’

‘Then so much for my rights,’ I snarled at him. ‘I am a prisoner here – and a prisoner in time!’

‘Although the theory of time travel is clear enough – and the mechanical structure of your device is obvious – we do not yet have any understanding of the principles involved,’ the Morlock said. I thought this must mean that they did not yet understand the significance of Plattnerite. ‘But,’ Nebogipfel went on, ‘we think this technology could be of great value to our species.’

‘I’m sure you do!’ I had a sudden vision of these Morlocks, with their magical devices and wondrous weapons, returning on adapted Time Machines to the London of 1891.

The Morlocks would keep my Humanity safe and fed. But, deprived of his soul, and perhaps at last of his children, I foresaw that modern man would survive no more than a few generations!

My horror at this prospect got the blood pumping through my neck – and yet even at that moment, some remote, rational corner of my mind was pointing out to me certain difficulties with this picture. ‘Look here,’ I told myself, ‘if all modern men were destroyed in this way – but modern man is nevertheless the ancestor of the Morlock – then the Morlocks could never evolve in the first place, and so never capture my machine and return through time … It’s a paradox, isn’t it? For you can’t have it both ways.’ You have to remember that in some remote part of my brain the unsolved problem of my second flight through time – with the divergence of Histories I had witnessed – was still fermenting away, and I knew in my heart that my understanding of the philosophy behind this time travelling business was still limited, at best.

But I pushed all that away as I confronted Nebogipfel. ‘Never. I will never assist you to acquire time travel.’

Nebogipfel regarded me. ‘Then – within the constraints I have set out for you – you are free, to travel anywhere in our worlds.’

‘In that case, I ask that you take me to a place – wherever it might be in this engineered solar system – where men like me still exist.’

I think I threw out this challenge, expecting a denial of any such possibility. But, to my surprise, Nebogipfel stepped towards me. ‘Not precisely like you,’ he said. ‘But still – come.’

And, with that, he stepped out once more across that immense, populated plain. I thought his final words had been more than ominous, but I could not understand what he meant – and, in any event, I had little choice but to follow him.

We reached a clear area perhaps a quarter-mile across. I had long since lost any sense of direction in that immense city-chamber. Nebogipfel donned his goggles, and I retained mine.

Suddenly – without warning – a beam of light arced down from the roof above and skewered us. I peered up into a warm yellowness, and saw dust-motes cascading about in the air; for a moment I thought I had been returned to my Cage of Light.

For some seconds we waited – I could not see that Nebogipfel had issued any commands to the invisible machines that governed this place – but then the Floor under my feet gave a sharp jolt. I stumbled, for it had felt like a small earthquake, and was quite unexpected; but I recovered quickly.

‘What was that?’

Nebogipfel was unperturbed. ‘Perhaps I should have warned you. Our ascent has started.’

‘Ascent?’

A disc of glass, perhaps a quarter-mile wide, was rising up out of the Floor, I saw now, and was bearing me and Nebogipfel aloft. It was as if I stood atop some immense pillar, which thrust out of the ground. Already we had risen through perhaps ten feet, and our pace upwards seemed to be accelerating; I felt a whisper of breeze on my forehead.

I walked a little way towards the lip of the disc and I watched as that immense, complex plain of Morlocks opened up below me. The chamber stretched as far as I could see, utterly flat, evenly populated. The Floor looked like some elaborate map, perhaps of the constellations, done out in silver thread and black velvet – and overlaying the real star vista beneath. One or two silvery faces were turned up to us as we ascended, but most of the Morlocks seemed quite indifferent.

‘Nebogipfel – where are we going?’

‘To the Interior,’ he said calmly.

I was aware of a change in the light. It seemed much brighter, and more diffuse – it was no longer restricted to a single ray, as might be seen at the bottom of a well.

I craned up my neck. The disc of light above me was widening, even as I watched, so that I could now make out a ring of sky, around the central disc of sun. That sky was blue, and speckled with high, fluffy clouds; but the sky had an odd texture, a blotchiness of colour which at first I attributed to the goggles I still wore.

Nebogipfel turned from me. He tapped with his foot at the base of our platform, and an object was extruded – at first I could not recognize it – it was a shallow bowl, with a stick protruding from its centre. It was only when Nebogipfel picked it up and held it over his head that I recognized it for what it was: a simple parasol, to keep the sun from his etiolated flesh.

Thus prepared, we rose up into the light – the shaft widened – and my nineteenth-century head ascended into a plain of grass!

17

IN THE INTERIOR

‘Welcome to the Interior,’ Nebogipfel announced, comical with his parasol.

Our quarter-mile-wide pillar of glass ascended through its last few yards quite soundlessly. I felt as if I were rising like some illusionist’s assistant on a stage. I took off my goggles, and shaded my eyes with my hands.

The platform slowed to a halt, and its edge merged with the meadow of short, wiry grass which ringed it, as seamless as if it were some foundation of concrete which had been laid there. My shadow was a sharp dark patch, directly beneath me. It was noon here, of course; everywhere in the Interior, it was noon, all day and every day! The blinding sun beat down on my head and neck – I suspected I should soon get burned – but the pleasurable feel of this captive sunlight was worth the cost, at that moment.

I turned, studying the landscape.

Grass – a featureless plain of it – grass grew everywhere, all the way to the horizon – except that there was no horizon, here on this flattened-out world. I looked up, expecting to see the world curve upwards: for I was, after all, no longer glued to the outer surface of a little ball of rock like the earth, but standing on the inside of an immense, hollow shell. But there was no such optical effect; I saw only more grass, and perhaps some clumps of trees or bushes, far in the distance. The sky was a blue-tinged plain of high, light cloud, which merged with the land at a flat seam of mist and dust.

‘I feel as if I’m standing on some immense tabletop,’ I said to Nebogipfel. ‘I thought it would be like some huge bowl of landscape. What a paradox it is that I cannot tell if I am inside a great Sphere, or on the outside of a gigantic planet!’

‘There are ways to tell,’ Nebogipfel replied from beneath his parasol. ‘Look up.’

I craned my neck backwards. At first I could see only the sky and the sun – it could have been any sky of earth. Then, gradually, I began to make out something beyond the clouds. It was that blotchiness of texture about the sky which I had observed as we ascended, and attributed to some defect of the goggles. The blotches were something like a distant water-colouring, done in blue and grey and green, but finely detailed, so that the largest of the patches was dwarfed by the tiniest scrap of cloud. It looked rather like a map – or several maps, jammed up together and viewed from a great distance.

And it was that analogy which led me to the truth.

‘It is the far side of the Sphere, beyond the sun … I suppose the colours I can see are oceans, and continents, and mountain ranges and prairies – perhaps even cities!’ It was a remarkable sight – as if the rocky coats of thousands of flayed earths had been hung up like so many rabbit furs. There was no sense of curvature, such was the immense scale of the Sphere. Rather, it was as if I was sandwiched between layers, between this flattened prairie of grass and the lid of textured sky, with the sun suspended like a lantern in between – and with the depths of space a mere mile or two beneath my feet!

‘Remember that when you look at the Interior’s far side you are looking across the width of the orbit of Venus,’ Nebogipfel cautioned me. ‘From such a distance, the earth itself would be reduced to a mere point of light. Many of the topographic features here are built on a much larger scale than the earth itself.’

‘There must be oceans that could swallow the earth!’ I mused. ‘I suppose that the geological forces in a structure like this are –’

‘There is no geology here,’ Nebogipfel cut in. ‘The Interior, and its landscapes, is artificial. Everything you see was, in essence, designed to be as it is – and it is maintained that way, quite consciously.’ He seemed unusually reflective. ‘Much is different in this History, from that other you have described. But some things are constant: this is a world of perpetual day – in contrast to my own world, of night. We have indeed split into species of extremes, of Dark and Light, just as in that other History.’

Nebogipfel led me now to the edge of our glass disc. He stayed on the platform, his parasol cocked over his head; but I stepped boldly out onto the surrounding grass. The ground was hard under my feet, but I was pleased to have the sensation of a different surface beneath me, after days of that bland, yielding Floor. Though short, the grass was tough, wiry stuff, of the kind commonly encountered close to sea shores; and when I reached down and dug my fingers into the ground, I found that the soil was quite sandy and dry. I unearthed one small beetle, there in the row of little pits I had dug with my fingers; it scuttled out of sight, deeper into the sand.

A breeze hissed across the grass. There was no bird song, I noticed; I heard no animal’s call.

‘The soil’s none too rich,’ I called back to Nebogipfel.

‘No,’ he said. ‘But the –’ a liquid word I could not recognize ‘– is recovering.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I mean the complex of plants and insects and animals which function together, interdependent. It is only forty thousand years since the war.’

‘What war?’

Now Nebogipfel shrugged – his shoulders lurched, causing his body hair to rustle – a gesture he could only have copied from me! ‘Who knows? Its causes are forgotten, the combatants – the nations and their children – all dead.’

‘You told me there was no warfare here,’ I accused him.

‘Not among the Morlocks,’ he said. ‘But within the Interior … This one was very destructive. Great bombs fell. The land here was destroyed – all life obliterated.’

‘But surely the plants, the smaller animals –’

‘Everything. You do not understand. Everything died, save the grass and the insects, across a million square miles. And it is only now that the land has become safe.’

‘Nebogipfel, what kind of people live here? Are they like me?’

He paused. ‘Some mimic your archaic variant. But there are even some older forms; I know of a colony of reconstructed Neandertalers, who have reinvented the religions of that vanished folk … And there are some who have developed beyond you: who diverge from you as much as I do, though in different ways. The Sphere is large. If you wish I will take you to a colony of an approximation of your own kind …’

‘Oh – I’m not sure what I want!’ I said. ‘I think I’m overwhelmed by this place, this world of worlds, Nebogipfel. I want to see what I can make of it all, before I choose where I will spend my life. Can you understand that?’

He did not debate the proposal; he seemed eager to get out of the sunlight. ‘Very well. When you wish to see me again, return to the platform and call my name.’

And so began my solitary sojourn in the Interior of the Sphere.

In that world of perpetual noon there was no cycle of days and nights to count the passage of time. However, I had my pocket watch: the time it displayed was, of course, meaningless, thanks to my transfers across time and space; but it served to map out twenty-four-hour periods.

Nebogipfel had evoked a shelter from the platform – a plain, square hut with one small window and a door of the dilating kind I have described before. He left me a tray of food and water, and showed me how I could obtain more: I would push the tray back into the surface of the platform – this was an odd sensation – and after a few seconds a new tray would rise out of the surface, fully laden. This unnatural process made me queasy, but I had no other source of food, and I mastered my qualms. Nebogipfel also demonstrated how to push objects into the platform to have them cleaned, as he cleansed even his own fingers. I used this feature to clean my clothes and boots – although my trousers were returned without a crease! – but I could never bring myself to insert a part of my body in this way. The thought of pushing a hand or foot – or worse, my face – into that bland surface was more than I could bear, and I continued to wash in water.

I was still without shaving equipment, incidentally; my beard had grown long and luxuriant – but it was a depressingly solid mass of iron grey.

Nebogipfel showed me how I could extend the use of my goggles. By touching the surface in a certain way, I could make them magnify the images of remote objects, bringing them as close, and as sharp, as life. I donned the goggles immediately and focused them on a distant shadow which I had thought was a clump of trees; but it turned out to be no more than an outcropping of rock, which looked rather worn away, or melted.

For the first few days, it was enough for me simply to be there, in that bruised meadow. I took to going for long walks; I would take my boots off, enjoying the feeling of grass and sand between my toes, and I would often strip to my pants in the hot sunlight. Soon I got as brown as a berry – though the prow of my balding forehead got rather burned – it was like a rest cure in Bognor!

In the evenings I retired to my hut. It was quite cosy in there with the door closed, and I slept well, with my jacket for a pillow and with the warm softness of the platform beneath me.

The bulk of my time was spent in the inspection of the Interior with my magnifying goggles. I would sit at the rim of my platform, or lie in a soft patch of grass with my head propped on my jacket, and gaze around the complex sky.

That part of the Interior opposite my position, beyond the sun, must lie on the Sphere’s equator; and so I anticipated that this region would be the most earth-like – where gravity was strongest, and the air was compressed. That central band was comparatively narrow – no more than some tens of millions of miles wide. (I say ‘no more’ easily enough, but I knew of course that the whole of the earth would be lost, a mere mote, against that Titanic background!) Beyond this central band, the surface appeared a dull grey, difficult to distinguish through the sky’s blue filter, and I could make out few details. In one of those high-latitude regions there was a splash of silver-white, with sea-shapes of fine grey embedded in it, that reminded me somewhat of the moon; and in another a vivid patch of orange – quite neatly elliptical – whose nature I could not comprehend at all. I remembered the attenuated Morlocks I had met, who had come from the lower-gravity regions of the outer shells, away from the equator; and I wondered if there were perhaps distorted humans living in those remote, low gravity world-maps of the Interior’s higher latitudes.

When I considered that inner, earth-like central belt, much of that, even, appeared to be unpopulated; I could see immense oceans, and deserts that could swallow worlds, shining in the endless sunlight. These wastes of land or water separated island-worlds: regions little larger than the earth might have been, if skinned and spread out across that surface, and rich with detail.

Here I saw a world of grass and forest, with cities of sparkling buildings rising above the trees. There I made out a world locked in ice, whose inhabitants must be surviving as my forebears had in Europe’s glacial periods: perhaps it was cooled by being mounted on some immense platform, I wondered, to lift it out of the atmosphere. On some of the worlds I saw the mark of industry: a complex texture of cities, the misty smoke of factories, bays threaded by bridges, the plume-like wakes of ships on land-locked seas – and, sometimes, a tracing of vapour across the upper atmosphere which I imagined must be generated by some flying vessel.

So much was familiar enough – but some worlds were quite beyond my comprehension.

I caught glimpses of cities which floated in the air, above their own shadows; and immense buildings which must have dwarfed China’s Wall, sprawling across engineered landscapes … I could not begin to imagine the sort of men which must live in such places.

Some days I awoke to comparative darkness. A great sheet of cloud would clamp down on the land, and before long a heavy rain start to fall. It occurred to me that the weather inside that Interior must have been regulated – as, no doubt, were all other aspects of its fabric – for I could readily imagine the immense cyclonic energies which could be generated by that huge world’s rapid spin. I would walk about in the weather a bit, relishing the tang of the fresh water. On such days, the place would become much more earth-like, with the Interior’s bewildering far side and its dubious horizon hidden by rain and cloud.

After long inspections with the telescopic goggles, I found that the grassy plain around me was just as featureless as it had looked at first sight. One day – it was bright and hot – I decided to try to make for the rocky outcrop I have mentioned, which was the only distinguishable feature within the mist-delineated horizon, even on the clearest day. I bundled up some food and water in a bag I improvised from my long-suffering jacket, and off I set; I got as far as I could before I tired, and then I lay down to attempt to sleep. But I could not settle, not in the open sunlight, and after a few hours I gave up. I walked on a little further, but the rocky outcrop seemed to be getting no nearer, and I began to grow fearful, so far from the platform. What if I were to grow fatigued, or somehow become injured? I should never be able to call Nebogipfel, and I should forfeit any prospect of returning to my own time: in fact, I should die in the grass like some wounded gazelle. And all for a walk to an anonymous clump of rock!

Feeling foolish, I turned and hiked back to my platform.

18

THE NEW ELOI

Some days after this, I emerged from my hut after a sleep, and became aware that the light was a little brighter than usual. I glanced up, and saw that the extra illumination came from a fierce point of light a few degrees of arc from the static sun. I snatched up my goggles and inspected that new star.

It was a burning island-world. As I watched, great explosions shattered the surface, sending up clouds which blossomed like lovely, deadly flowers. Already, I thought, the island-world must be devoid of life, for nothing could live through the conflagration I witnessed, but still the explosions rained across the surface – and all in eerie silence!

The island-world flared brighter than the sun, for several hours, and I knew that I was watching a titanic tragedy, made by man – or descendants of man.

Everywhere in my rocky sky – now I started looking for it – I saw the mark of War.

Here was a world in which great strips of land appeared to have been given over to a debilitating and destructive siege warfare: I saw brown lanes of churned-up countryside, immense trenches, hundreds of miles wide, in which, I imagined, men were fighting and dying, for year after year. Here was a city burning, with white vapour arcs scored over it; and I wondered if some aerial weapon was being exploited there. And here I found a world devastated by the aftermath of war, the continents blackened and barren, with the outlines of cities barely visible through a shifting pile of black cloud.