The Time Ships (27 page)

K
urt Gödel stood at the uncurtained window of his office, his arms folded. ‘At least the gas hasn’t come yet,’ he said without preamble. ‘I once witnessed the result of a gas attack, you know. Delivered by English bombers on Berlin, as it happens. I came down the
Unter den Linden
and along the
Sieges Allee
, and there I came upon it … So undignified! The body corrupts so quickly, you know.’ He turned and smiled sadly at me. ‘Gas is very
democratic
, do you not think?’

I walked up to him. ‘Professor Gödel. Please … We know you have some Plattnerite. I saw it.’

For answer, he walked briskly to a cupboard. As he passed a mere three feet from Nebogipfel, Gödel did no more than glance at him; of all the men I met in 1938, Gödel showed the coolest reaction to the Morlock. Gödel took a glass jar from the cupboard; it contained a substance that sparkled green, seeming to retain the light.

Moses breathed, ‘
Plattnerite
.’

‘Quite so. Remarkably easy to synthesize from Carolinum – if you know the recipe, and have access to a fission pile for irradiation.’ He looked mischievous. ‘I wanted you to see it,’ he said to me; ‘I hoped you would recognize it. I find it delightfully easy to tweak the nose of these pompous Englishmen, with their Directorates of This and That, who could not
recognize the treasure under their own noses! And now it will be your passage out of this particular Vale of Tears – yes?’

‘I hope so,’ I said fervently. ‘Oh, I hope so.’

‘Then come!’ he shouted. ‘To the CDV workshop.’ And he held the Plattnerite up in the air like a beacon, and led us out of the office.

Once more we entered that labyrinth of concrete corridors. Wallis had been right: the guards had universally left their posts, and, although we came across one or two white-coated scientists or technicians hurrying through the corridors, they made no attempt to impede us, nor even to inquire where we were going.

And then –
whump!
– a fresh shell hit.

The electric lights died, and the corridor rocked, throwing me to the ground. My face collided with the dusty floor, and I felt warm blood start from my nose – my face must have presented a fine sight by now – and I felt a light body, I think Nebogipfel’s, tumble against my leg.

The shuddering of the foundations ceased within a few seconds. The lights did not return.

I was taken by a fit of coughing, for concrete dust was thick on the air, and I suffered a remnant of my old terror of darkness. Then I heard the fizz of a match – I caught a brief glimpse of Moses’s broad face – and I saw him apply the flame to a candle wick. He held up the candle, cupping the flame in his hands, and its yellow light spread in a pool through the corridor. He smiled at me. ‘I lost the knapsack, but I took the precaution of loading some of those supplies you recommended in my pockets,’ he said.

Gödel got to his feet, a little stiffly; he was (I saw with gratitude) cradling the Plattnerite against his chest, and the jar was unbroken. ‘I think that one
must have been in the grounds of the College. We must be grateful to be alive; for these walls could easily have collapsed in on us.’

So we progressed through those gloomy corridors. We were impeded twice by fallen masonry, but with a little effort we were able to clamber through. By now I was disoriented and quite lost; but Gödel – I could see him ahead of me, with the Plattnerite jar glowing under one arm – made his way quite confidently.

Within a few more minutes we reached the annexe Wallis had called the CDV Development Division. Moses lifted his candle up, and the light glimmered about the big workshop. Save for the lack of lights, and one long, elaborate crack which ran diagonally across the ceiling, the workshop remained much as I remembered it. Engine parts, spare wheels and tracks, cans of oil and fuel, rags and overalls – all the paraphernalia of a workshop – lay about the floor; chains dangled from pulleys fixed to brackets on the ceiling, casting long, complex shadows. In the centre of the floor I saw a half-drunk mug of tea, apparently set down with some care, with a thin layer of concrete dust scumming the liquid’s surface.

The one almost-complete Time-Car sat in the centre of the floor, its bare gun-metal finish shining in the light of Moses’s candle. Moses stepped up to the vehicle and ran a hand along the rim of its boxy passenger compartment. ‘And this is it?’

I grinned. ‘The pinnacle of 1930s technology. A “Universal Carrier,” I think Wallis called it.’

‘Well,’ Moses said, ‘it’s scarcely an elegant design.’

‘I don’t think elegance is the point,’ I said. ‘This is a weapon of war: not of leisure, exploration or science.’

Gödel moved to the Time-Car, set the Plattnerite jar on the floor, and made to open one of the steel flasks welded to the hull of the vehicle. He wrapped
his hands around the screw-cap lid and grunted with exertion, but could not budge it. He stepped back, panting. ‘We must prime the frame with Plattnerite,’ he said. ‘Or –’

Moses set his candle on a shelf and cast about in the piles of tools, and emerged with a large adjustable wrench. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Let me try with this.’ He closed the clamps about the cap’s rim and, with a little effort, got the cap unstuck.

Gödel took the Plattnerite jar and tipped the stuff into the flask. Moses moved around the Time-Car, unfixing the caps of the remaining flasks.

I made my way to the rear of the vehicle, where I found a door, held in place by a metal pin. I removed the pin, folded the door downwards, and clambered into the cabin. There were two wooden benches, each wide enough to take two or three people, and a single bucket seat at the front, facing a slit window. I sat in the driver’s bucket seat.

Before me was a simple steering wheel – I rested my hands on it – and a small control panel, fitted with dials, switches, levers and knobs; there were more levers close to the floor, evidently to be operated by the feet. The controls had a raw, unfinished look; the dials and switches were not labelled, and wires and mechanical transmission levers protruded from the rear of the panel.

Nebogipfel joined me in the cabin, and he stood at my shoulder; the strong, sweet smell of Morlock was almost overpowering in that enclosed space. Through the slit window I could see Gödel and Moses, filling up the flasks.

Gödel called, ‘You understand the principle of the CDV? This is all Wallis’s design, of course – I’ve had nothing much to do with the construction of it –’

I brought my face up against the slit window. ‘I am at the controls,’ I said. ‘But they’re not labelled. And
I can see nothing resembling a chronometric gauge.’

Gödel did not look up from his careful pouring. ‘I’ve a suspicion such niceties as chronometric dials aren’t yet fitted. This is an incomplete test vehicle, after all. Does that trouble you?’

‘I have to admit the prospect of losing my bearings in time does not appeal to me very much,’ I said, ‘but – no – it is scarcely important … One can always ask the natives!’

‘The principle of the CDV is simple enough,’ Gödel said. ‘The Plattnerite suffuses the sub-frames of the vehicle through a network of capillaries. It forms a kind of circuit … When you close the circuit, you will travel in time. Do you see? Most of the controls you have are to do with the petrol engine, transmission, and so forth; for the vehicle is also a functioning motor-car. But to close the time-circuit there is a blue toggle, on your dashboard. Can you recognize it?’

‘I have it.’

Now Moses had fixed the last of the flask caps back into place, and he walked around the car to the door at its rear. He clambered in and placed his wrench on the floor, and he pounded his fists against the cabin’s inner walls. ‘A good, sturdy construction,’ he said.

I said, ‘I think we are ready to depart.’

‘But where –
when
– are we going
to
?’

‘Does it matter?
Away from here
– that’s the only significant thing. Into the past – to try to rectify things …

‘Moses, we are done with the Twentieth Century. Now we must take another leap into the dark. Our adventure is not over yet!’

His look of confusion dissolved, and I saw a reckless determination take its place; the muscles of his jaw set. ‘Then let’s do it, or be damned!’

Nebogipfel said: ‘I think we quite possibly will be.’

I called: ‘Professor Gödel – come aboard the car.’

‘Oh, no,’ he said, and he held his hands up before him. ‘My place is here.’

Moses pushed into the cabin behind me. ‘But London’s walls are collapsing around us – the German guns are only a few miles away – it’s hardly a safe place to be, Professor!’

‘I do envy you, of course,’ Gödel said. ‘To leave this wretched world with its
wretched
War …’

‘Then come with us,’ I said. ‘Seek that Final World of which you spoke –’

‘I have a wife,’ he said. His face was a pale streak in the candlelight.

‘Where is she?’

‘I lost her. We did not succeed in getting out together. I suppose she is in Vienna … I cannot imagine they would harm her, as punishment for my defection.’

There was a question in his voice, and I realized that this supremely logical man was looking to me, in that extreme moment, for the most illogical reassurance! ‘No,’ I said, ‘I am sure she –’

But I never completed my sentence, for – without even the warning of a whistle in the air – a new shell fell, and this was the closest of all!

The last flicker of our candle showed me, in a flashbulb slice of frozen time, how the westerly wall of the workshop burst inwards – simply that; it turned from a smooth, steady panel into a billowing cloud of fragments and dust, in less than a heartbeat.

Then we were plunged into darkness.

The car rocked, and – ‘
Down!
’ Moses called – I ducked – and a hail of masonry shards, quite lethal, rattled against the shell of the Time-Car.

Nebogipfel climbed forward; I could smell his
sweet stink. His soft hand grasped my shoulder. ‘Close the switch,’ he said.

I peered through the slit-window – and into utter darkness, of course. ‘What of Gödel?’ I cried. ‘Professor!’

There was no reply. I heard a creak, quite ominous and heavy, from above the car, and there was a further clatter of falling masonry fragments.

‘
Close the switch
,’ Nebogipfel said urgently. ‘Can you not hear? The roof is collapsing – we will be crushed!’

‘I’ll get him,’ Moses said. In pitch darkness, I heard his boots clump over the car’s panels as he made his way to the rear of the cabin. ‘It will be fine – I’ve more candles …’ His voice faded as he reached the rear of the cabin, and I heard his feet crunch on the rubble strewn floor –

– and then there was an immense groan, like a grotesque gasp, and a rushing from above. I heard Moses cry out.

I twisted, intending to dive out of the cabin after Moses – and I felt a nip of small teeth in the soft part of my hand – Morlock teeth!

At that instant, with Death closing in around me, and plunged into primal darkness once more, the presence of the Morlock, his teeth in my flesh, the brush of his hair against my skin: it was all unbearable! I roared and drove my fist into the soft flesh of the Morlock’s face.

… But he did not cry out; even as I struck him, I felt him reach past me to the dash-board.

The darkness fell from my eyes – the roar of collapsing concrete diminished into silence – and I found myself falling once more into the grey light of time travel.

T
he Time-Car rocked. I grasped for the bucket seat, but I was thrown to the floor, clattering my head and shoulders against a wooden bench. My hand ached, irrelevantly, from the Morlock’s nip.

White light flooded the cabin, bursting upon us with a soundless explosion. I heard the Morlock cry out. My vision was blurred, impeded by the mats of blood which clung to my cheeks and eyebrows. Through the rear door and the various slit-windows, a uniform, pale glow seeped into the shuddering cabin; at first it flickered, but it soon settled to a washed-out grey glow. I wondered if there had been some fresh catastrophe: perhaps this workshop was being consumed by flames …

But then I recognized that the quality of light was too steady, too neutral for that. I understood that we had already gone far beyond that War-time laboratory.

The glow was, of course, daylight, rendered featureless and bland by the overlaying of day and night, too fast for the eye to follow. We had indeed fallen into time; this car – though crude and ill-balanced – was functioning correctly. I could not tell if we were falling into future or past, but the car had already taken us to a period beyond the existence of the London Dome.

I got my hands under me and tried to rise, but
there was blood – mine or the Morlock’s – on my palms, and they slid out from under me. I tumbled back to the hard floor, thumping my head on the bench once more.

I fell into a huge, bone-numbing fatigue. The pain of my rattling about during the shellings, deferred by the scramble I had been through, now fell on me with a vengeance. I let my head rest against the floor’s metal ribs and closed my eyes. ‘What’s it all for, anyhow?’ I asked, of no-one in particular.
Moses was dead
… lost, with Professor Gödel, under tons of masonry in that destroyed lab. I had no idea whether the Morlock was alive or dead; nor did I care. Let the Time-Car carry me to future or past as it would; let it go on forever, until it smashed itself to pieces against the walls of Infinity and Eternity! Let there be an end to it – I could do no more. ‘It’s not worth the candle,’ I muttered. ‘Not worth the candle …’

I thought I felt soft hands on mine, the brush of hair against my face; but I protested, and – with the last of my strength – pushed the hands away.

I fell into a deep, dreamless, comfortless darkness.

I was woken by a severe buffeting.

I was rattled against the floor of the cabin. Something soft lay under my head, but that slipped away, and my skull banged against the hard corner of a bench. This renewed hail of pain brought me to my senses, and, with some reluctance, I sat up.

My head ached pretty comprehensively and my body felt as if it had been through a gruelling boxing-bout. But, paradoxically, my mood seemed a little improved. The death of Moses was still there in my mind – a huge event, which I knew I must confront, in time – but after those moments of blessed unconsciousness I was able to look away from
it, as one might turn away from the blinding light of the sun, and consider other things.

That dim, pearly mixture of day and night still suffused the interior of the car. It was quite remarkably cold; I felt myself shiver, and my breath fogged before my face. Nebogipfel sat in the pilot’s bucket seat, his back turned to me. His white fingers probed at the instruments in the rudimentary dash-board, and he traced the wires which dangled from the steering column.

I got to my feet. The car’s swaying, together with the battering I had endured in 1938, left me uncertain on my feet; to steady myself I had to cling to the cabin’s ribbed framework, and found the metal ice-cold under my bare hands. The soft item which had been cushioning my head, I found, was the Morlock’s blazer. I folded it up and placed it on a bench. I also saw, dropped on the floor, the heavy wrench which Moses had used to open the Plattnerite flasks. I picked it up with my fingertips; it was splashed with blood.

I still wore my heavy epaulettes; disgusted by these bits of armour, I ripped them from my clothes and dropped them with a clatter.

At the noise, Nebogipfel glanced towards me, and I saw that his blue goggles were cracked in two, and that one huge eye was a mess of blood and broken flesh. ‘Prepare yourself,’ he said thickly.

‘What for? I –’

And the cabin was plunged into darkness.

I stumbled backwards, almost falling again. An intense cold sucked the remaining warmth out of the cabin air, and from my blood; and my head pounded anew. I wrapped my arms around my torso. ‘What has happened to the daylight?’

The voice of the Morlock seemed almost harsh in that swaying blackness. ‘It will last only a few seconds. We must endure …’

And, as quickly as it had come, the blackness receded, and the grey light seeped into the cabin once more. Some of the edge of that immense cold was blunted, but still I shivered violently. I knelt on the floor beside Nebogipfel’s seat. ‘What is happening? What was that?’

‘
Ice
,’ he said. ‘We are travelling through an Age of Periodic Glaciation; ice-sheets and glaciers are sweeping down from the north and covering the land – overwhelming us in the process – and then melting away. At times, I would hazard, there is as much as a hundred feet of ice above us.’

I peered through the slit-windows in the car’s front panel. I saw a Thames valley made over into a bleak tundra inhabited only by tough grass, defiant blazes of purple heather, and sparse trees; these latter shivered through their annual cycles too fast for me to follow, but they looked to me like the hardier varieties: oak, willow, poplar, elm, hawthorn. There was no sign of London: I could make out not even the ghosts of evanescent buildings, and there was no evidence of man in all that grey landscape, nor indeed of any animal life. Even the shape of the landscape, the hills and valleys, seemed unfamiliar to me, as it was remade over and again by the glaciers.

And now – I saw it approach in a brief flood of white brilliance, before it overwhelmed us – the great Ice came again. In darkness, I cursed, and dug my hands into my arm-pits; my fingers and toes were numb, and I began to fear frostbite. When the glaciers receded once more, they left a landscape inhabited by much the same variety of hardy plants, as far as I could see, but with its contours adjusted: evidently the intervals of Ice were remaking the landscape, though I could not tell if we were proceeding into future or past. As I watched, boulders taller than men seemed to migrate across the landscape, taking
slow slithers or rolls; this was clearly some odd effect of the erosion of the land.

‘For how long was I unconscious?’

‘Not long. Perhaps thirty minutes.’

‘And is the Time-Car taking us into the future?’

‘We are penetrating the past,’ the Morlock said. He turned to face me, and I saw how his graceful movements had been reduced to stiff jerks by the fresh pummelling I had inflicted on him. ‘I am confident of it. I caught a few glimpses of the recession of London – its withering, back to its historical origins … From the intervals between Glaciations, I should say we are travelling at some tens of thousands of years every minute.’

‘Perhaps we should work out how we might stop this car’s headlong drive into time. If we find an equable age –’

‘I do not think we have any way
of
terminating the flight of the car.’

‘
What
?’

The Morlock spread his hands – I saw how the hair on the back of them was sprinkled with a light frost – and then we were plunged once more into a darkened sepulchre of Ice, and his voice floated out of the obscurity. ‘This is a crude, unfinished test vehicle, remember. Many of the controls and indicators are disconnected; those that
do
have connections largely appear non-functional. Even if we knew how to modify the workings without wrecking the vehicle, I can see no way for us to get out of the cabin and to reach the inner mechanism.’

We emerged from the Ice into that reshaped tundra once more. Nebogipfel watched the landscape with some fascination. ‘Think of it: the fjords of Scandinavia are not yet cut, and the lakes of Europe and North America – deposited by melting ice – are phantasms of the future.

‘Already, we have passed beyond the dawn of human history. In Africa we might find races of Australopithecines – some of them clumsy, some gracile, some carnivorous, but all with a bipedal gait and ape-like features: a small brain-case and large jaws and teeth …’

A great, cold loneliness descended on me. I had been lost in time before, but never, I thought, had I suffered quite this intensity of isolation! Was it true –
could
it be true – that Nebogipfel and I, in our damaged Time-Car, represented the only candle-flames of intelligence on the whole of the planet?

‘So we are out of control,’ I said. ‘We may not stop until we reach the beginning of time …’

‘I doubt it will come to that,’ Nebogipfel said. ‘The Plattnerite must have some finite capacity. It cannot propel us deeper into time,
forever
, it must exhaust itself. We must pray that it does so before we pass through the Ordovician and Cambrian time-layers – before we reach an Age in which there is no oxygen to sustain us.’

‘That’s a cheerful prospect,’ I said. ‘And things may become worse still, I suppose.’

‘How?’

I got my stiff legs out from under me and sat on the cold, ribbed metal floor. ‘We have no provisions, of any kind. No water, no food. And we’re both injured. We don’t even have warm clothing! How long can we survive, in this freezing time-barque? A few days? Less?’

Nebogipfel did not reply.

I am not a man to submit easily to Fate, and I invested some energy in studying Nebogipfel’s controls and wires. I soon learned he was right – there was no way I could find to build this tangle of components into a dirigible vehicle – and my energy,
sapped as it was, was soon spent: I reverted to a sort of dull apathy.

We passed through one more brief, brutal Glaciation; and then we entered a long, bleak winter. The seasons still brought snow and ice flickering across the land, but the Age of Permanent Ice lay in the future now. I saw little change in the nature of the landscape, millennium on millennium: perhaps there was a slow enrichment of the texture of the blur of greenery that coated the hills. An immense skull – it reminded me of an elephant’s – appeared on the ground not far from the Time-Car, bleached, bare and crumbled. It persisted long enough for me to make out its contours, a second or so, before it vanished as fast as it had appeared.

‘Nebogipfel – about your face. I – you have to understand …’

He regarded me from his one good eye. I saw he had reverted to his Morlock mannerisms, losing the human coloration he had adopted. ‘
What
? What must I understand?’

‘I didn’t mean to injure you.’

‘You do not
now
,’ he said with a surgeon’s precision. ‘But you did
then
. Apology is futile – absurd. You are what you are … we are different species, as divergent from each other as from the Australopithecines.’

I felt like a clumsy animal, my huge fists stained once more with the blood of a Morlock. ‘You shame me,’ I said.

He shook his head, a brief, curt gesture. ‘Shame? The concept is without meaning, in this context.’

I should no more feel
shame
– I saw he meant – than should some savage animal of the jungle. If attacked by such a creature, would I argue the morals of the case with it? No – without intelligence, it could not help its behaviour. I should merely deal with its actions.

To Nebogipfel, I had proved myself – again! – to be little better than those clumsy brutes of the African plains, the precursors of men in this desolate period.

I retreated to the wooden benches. I lay there, cradling my aching head with my arm, and watched the flicker of Ages beyond the still-open door of the car.