The Time Ships (32 page)

I
t transpired that Gibson was not alone. He shouldered his rifle, turned and made a beckoning gesture towards the shadows of the jungle.

Two soldiers emerged from that gloom. Sweat had soaked through the shirts of these laden fellows, and, as they stepped into the growing light of the day, they seemed altogether more suspicious of us, and generally uncomfortable, than had the Wing Commander. These two were Indians, I thought – sepoys, soldiers of the Empire – their eyes glittered black and fierce, and each had a turban and clipped beard. They wore khaki drill shirts and shorts; one of them carried a heavy mechanical gun at his back, and bore two heavy leather pouches, evidently holding ammunition for this weapon. Their heavy, silvery epaulettes glittered in the Palaeocene sunlight; they scowled at the corpse of
Pristichampus
with undisguised ferocity.

Gibson told us that he and these two fellows had been involved on a scouting expedition; they had travelled perhaps a mile from a main base camp, which was situated inland from the Sea. (It struck me as odd that Gibson did not introduce the two soldiers by name. This little incivility – brought on by an unspoken recognition, by Gibson, of differences of rank – seemed to me altogether absurd, there on that isolated beach in the Palaeocene, with only a handful of humans anywhere in the world!)

I thanked Gibson again for rescuing the Morlock, and invited him to join us for some breakfast at our shelter. ‘It’s just along the beach,’ I said, pointing; and Gibson peaked his hand over his eyes to see.

‘Well, that looks – ah – as if it’s going to be a jolly
solid
construction.’

‘Solid? I should say so,’ I replied, and began a long and rather rambling discourse on the details of our incomplete shelter, of which I felt inordinately proud, and of how we had survived in the Palaeocene.

Guy Gibson folded his hands behind his back and listened, with a set, polite expression on his face. The sepoys watched me, puzzled and suspicious, their hands never far from their weapons.

After some minutes of this, I became aware, rather belatedly, of Gibson’s detachment. I let my prattle slow to a halt.

Gibson glanced around brightly at the beach. ‘I think you’ve done remarkably well here. Remarkably. I should have thought that a few weeks of this Robinson Crusoe stuff would pretty much have driven me batty with loneliness. I mean, opening time at the pub won’t be for another fifty million years!’

I smiled at this joke – which I failed to follow – and I felt rather embarrassed at my exaggerated pride at such mean achievements, before this vision of dapper competence.

‘But look here,’ Gibson went on gently, ‘don’t you think you’d be better off coming back with us to the Expeditionary Force? We have travelled here to find you, after all. And we’ve some decent provisions there – and modern tools, and so forth.’ He glanced at Nebogipfel, and added, a little more dubiously, ‘And the doc might be able to do something for this poor chap as well. Is there anything you need here? We can always come back later.’

Of course there was not – I had no need to return
through those few hundred yards along the beach ever again! – but I knew that, with the arrival of Gibson and his people, my brief idyll was done. I looked into Gibson’s frank, practical face, and knew that I could never find the words to express such a sense of loss to him.

With the sepoys leading the way, and with the Morlock supporting himself against my arm, we set off into the interior of the jungle.

Away from the coast, the air was hot and clammy. We moved in single file, with the sepoys at front and back, and Gibson, the Morlock, and myself sandwiched between; I carried the frail Morlock in my arms for much of the journey. The two sepoys kept up their suspicious, hooded glares at us, although after a time they allowed their hands to stray from their webbing holsters. They said not a single word to Nebogipfel or me, in the whole time we travelled together.

Gibson’s expedition had come from 1944 – six years after our own departure, during the German assault on the London Dome.

‘And the War is still continuing?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ he said, sounding grim. ‘Of course we responded for that brutal attack on London. Paid them back in spades.’

‘You were involved in such actions yourself?’

As he walked, he glanced down – apparently involuntarily – at the service ribbons sewn to the chest of his tunic. I did not recognize these at the time – I am no military buff, and in any case some of these awards hadn’t even been devised in my day – but I learned later that they constituted the Distinguished Service Order, and the Distinguished Flying Cross and Bar: high awards indeed, especially for one so young. Gibson said without drama, ‘I saw a bit of
action, yes. A good few sorties. Pretty lucky to be here to talk about it – plenty of good chaps who aren’t.’

‘And these sorties were effective?’

‘I’ll say. We broke open their Domes for them, without much of a delay after they did us the same favour!’

‘And the cities underneath?’

He eyed me. ‘What do you think? Without its Dome, a city is pretty much defenceless against attack from the air. Oh, you can throw up a barrage from your eighty-eights –’

‘“Eighty-eights”?’

‘The Germans have an eight-point-eight centimetre Flat 36 anti-aircraft gun – pretty useful as a field gun and anti –’Naut, as well as its main purpose: good bit of design … Anyway, if your bomber pilot can get in under such flak he can pretty much dump what he likes into the guts of an unDomed city.’

‘And the results – after six more years of all this?’

He shrugged. ‘There’s not much in the way of cities left, I suppose. Not in Europe, anyway.’

We reached the vicinity of South Hampstead, I estimated. Here, we broke through a line of trees into a clearing. This was a circular space perhaps a quarter-mile across, but it was not natural: the tree-stumps at its edge showed how the forest had been blasted back, or cut away. Even as we approached, I could see squads of bare-chested infantrymen hacking their way further into the undergrowth with saws and machetes, extending the space. The earth in the clearing was stripped of undergrowth and hardened by several layers of palm fronds, all stamped down into the mud.

At the heart of this clearing sat four of the great Juggernaut machines which I had encountered before, in 1873 and 1938. These beasts sat at four sides of a square a hundred feet across, immobile,
their ports gaping like the mouths of thirsty animals; their anti-mine flails hung limp and useless from the drums held out before them, and the mottled green and black coloration of their metal hides was encrusted with guano and fallen leaves. There were a series of other vehicles and items of materiel scattered around the encampment, including light armoured cars, and small artillery pieces mounted on thick-wheeled trolleys.

This, Gibson gave me to understand, would be the site of a sort of graving-yard for time-travelling Juggernauts, in 1944.

Soldiers worked everywhere, and when I walked into the clearing beside Gibson, and with the limping Nebogipfel leaning against me, to a man the troopers ceased their labouring and stared at us with undiluted curiosity.

We reached the courtyard enclosed by the four ’Nauts. At the centre of this square there was a white-painted flag-pole; and from this a Union Flag dangled, gaudy, limp and incongruous. A series of tents had been set up in this yard; Gibson invited us to sit on canvas stools beside the grandest of these. A soldier – thin, pale and evidently uncomfortable in the heat – emerged from one of the ’Nauts. I took this fellow to be Gibson’s batman, for the Wing Commander ordered him to bring us some refreshment.

The work of the camp proceeded all around us as we sat there; it was a hive of activity, as military sites always seem endlessly to be. Most of the soldiers wore a full kit of a jungle-green twill shirt and trousers with anklets; on their heads they had soft felt hats with puggrees of light khaki, or else bush hats of (Gibson said) an Australian design. They wore their divisional insignia sewn into their shirts or hats, and most of them carried weaponry: leather bandoliers
for small-arms ammunition, web pouches, and the like. They all bore the heavy epaulettes I remembered from 1938. In the heat and moisture, most of these troopers were fairly dishevelled.

I saw one chap in a suit of pure white which enclosed him head to foot; he wore thick gloves, and a soft helmet which enclosed his head, with an inset visor through which he peered. He worked at the opened side-panels of one of the Juggernauts. The poor fellow must have been melting of the heat in such an enclosure, I surmised; Gibson explained that the suit was of asbestos, to protect him from engine fires.

Not all the soldiers were men – I should think two-fifths of the hundred or so personnel were female – and many of the soldiers bore wounds of one sort or another: burn scars and the like, and even, here and there, prosthetic sections of limb. I realized that the dreadful attrition of the youth of Europe had continued since 1938, necessitating the call-up of those wounded already, and more of the young women.

Gibson took off his heavy boots and massaged his cramped feet with a rueful grin at me. Nebogipfel sipped from a glass of water, while the batman provided Gibson and me with a cup of traditional English breakfast tea –
tea
, there in the Palaeocene!

‘You have made quite a little colony,’ I said to Gibson.

‘I suppose so. It’s just the drill, you know.’ He put down his boots and sipped his tea. ‘Of course we’re a jumble of Services here – I expect you noticed.’

‘No,’ I said frankly.

‘Well, most of the chaps are Army, of course.’ He pointed to a slim young trooper who wore a khaki tag at the shoulders of his Tropical shirt. ‘But a few of us, like
him
and myself, are RAF.’

‘RAF?’

‘Royal Air Force. The men in grey suits have finally worked out that we’re the best chaps to drive these great iron brutes, you see.’ A trooper of the Army passed by, goggling at Nebogipfel, and Gibson favoured him with an easy grin. ‘Of course we don’t mind giving these foot-sloggers a lift. Better than leaving you to do it yourselves, eh, Stubbins?’

The man Stubbins – slim, red-haired, with an open, friendly face – grinned back, almost shyly, but evidently pleased at Gibson’s attention: all this despite the fact that he must have been a good foot taller than the diminutive Gibson, and some years older. I recognized in Gibson’s relaxed manner something of the poise of the natural leader.

‘We’ve been here a week already,’ Gibson said to me. ‘Surprising we didn’t stumble on you earlier, I suppose.’

‘We weren’t expecting visitors,’ I said drily. ‘If we had been, I suppose I would have lit fires, or found some other way of signalling our presence.’

He favoured me with a wink. ‘We have been occupied ourselves. We had the devil’s own work to do in the first day or two here. We have good kit, of course – the boffins made it pretty clear to us before we left that the climate of dear old England is pretty variable, if you take a long enough view of it – and so we’ve come prepared with an issue of everything from greatcoats to Bombay bloomers. But we weren’t expecting quite these Tropical conditions: not here, in the middle of London! Our clothes seem to be falling apart – literally rotting off our backs – and the metal fittings are rusting, and our boots won’t grip in this slime: even my bally socks have shrunk! And the whole lot is being gnawed away by rats.’ He frowned. ‘At least I think they are rats.’

‘Probably not, in fact,’ I remarked. ‘And the Juggernauts? Kitchener class, are they?’

Gibson cocked an eyebrow at me, evidently surprised at my display of this fragment of knowledge. ‘Actually we can barely move the ’Nauts: those wretched elephants’ feet sink into this endless mud …’

And now a clear, familiar voice called out from behind me: ‘I’m afraid you’re a little out of date, sir. The Kitchener class – including the dear old
Raglan
– has been discarded for a number of years now …’

I turned in my chair. Approaching me was a figure dressed in a crisp Juggernaut crew beret and coverall; this soldier walked with a pronounced limp, and a hand was proffered for shaking. I took the hand; it was small but strong.

‘Captain Hilary Bond,’ I said, and smiled.

She looked me up and down, taking in my beard and animal-skin clothes. ‘You’re a little more ragged, sir, but quite unmistakeable. Surprised to see me?’

‘After a few doses of this time travelling, nothing much surprises me any more, Hilary!’

G
ibson and Bond explained the purpose of the Chronic Expeditionary Force to me.

Thanks to the development of Carolinum fission piles, Britain and America had managed to achieve the production of Plattnerite in reasonable quantities soon after my escape into time. No longer did the engineers of the day have to rely on the scraps and leavings of my old workshop!

There was still a great fear that German chronic warriors were planning some sneak offensive against Britain’s past – and besides, it was known from the wreckage we had left behind in Imperial College, and other clues, that Nebogipfel and I must have travelled some tens of millions of years into the past. So a fleet of time-travelling Juggernauts was rapidly assembled, and equipped with subtle instruments which could detect the presence of Plattnerite traces (based on the radio-active origins of that substance, I was given to understand). And now this Expeditionary Force was proceeding into the past, in great leaps of five million years or more.

Its mission was nothing less than to secure the History of Britain from enemy anachronistic attack!

When stops were made, a valiant effort was made to study the period; and to this end a number of the soldiers had been trained, albeit hastily, to act as amateur scientists: climatologists, ornithologists and
the like. These fellows made rapid but effective surveys of the flora, fauna, climate and geology of the Age, and a good deal of Gibson’s daily log was given over to summarizing such observations. I saw that the soldiers, common men and women all, accepted this task with good humour and joking, as such people will, and – it seemed to me – they showed a healthy interest in the nature of the strange, Palaeocene Thames valley around them.

But at night sentries patrolled the perimeter of the encampment, and troopers with field-glasses spent a great deal of their time peering at the air, or the Sea. When engaged in these duties, the soldiers showed none of the gentle humour and curiosity which characterized their scientific or other endeavours; rather, their fear and intent was apparent in the set of their faces, and the thinness of their eyes.

This Force was here, after all, not to study flowers, but to seek
Germans
: time-travelling human enemies, here amid the wonders of the past.

Proud as I was of my achievements in surviving in this alien Age, it was with considerable relief that I abandoned my suit of rags and animal pelts and donned the light, comfortable Tropical kit of these time-traversing troopers. I shaved off my beard, washed – in warm, clean water, with soap! – and tucked with relish into meals of tinned soya-meat. And at night, it was with a feeling of peace and security that I lay down under a covering of canvas and mosquito netting, and with the powerful shoulders of the ’Nauts all about me.

Nebogipfel did not settle in the camp. Although our discovery by Gibson was the cause of some celebration and marvelling – for our retrieval had been the primary objective of the Expedition – the Morlock soon became the object of blatant fascina
tion among the troopers, and, I suspected, a little sly goading. So the Morlock returned to our original encampment, by the edge of the Palaeocene Sea. I did not oppose this, for I knew how eager he was to continue the construction of his time-frame – he even borrowed tools from the Expeditionary Force to facilitate this. Recalling his close shave with the
Pristichampus
, however, I insisted that he not stay there alone, but be accompanied either by me or an armed soldier.

As for me, after a day or two I tired of being at leisure in this busy encampment – I am not by nature an idle man – and I asked to participate in the soldiers’ chores. I soon proved my worth in sharing my painfully acquired knowledge of the local flora, fauna and surrounding geography. There was a good deal of sickness in the camp – for the soldiers had been no more prepared than I had been for the various infections of the Age – and I lent a hand assisting the camp’s solitary doctor, a rather young and perpetually exhausted
naik
attached to the 9th Gurkha Rifles.

After the first day I saw little of Gibson, who was consumed by the minutiae of the daily operation of his Expeditionary Force, and – to his own irritation – by a hefty load of bureaucracy, forms and reports and logs, which he was required to maintain daily: and all for the benefit of a Whitehall which would not exist for another fifty million years! I formed the impression that Gibson was restless and impatient with this time-travelling; he would, I think, have been more content if he could have resumed the bombing raids over Germany which he had led, and which he described to me with startling clarity. Hilary Bond had a deal of free time – her duties were most demanding during those periods when the great time-travelling ironclads pushed through the
centuries – and she served as my, and Nebogipfel’s, host.

One day the two of us walked along the rim of the forest, close to the shore. Bond pushed her way through the thick patches of undergrowth. She limped, but her gait was blunt and forceful. She described to me the progress of the War since 1938.

‘I would have thought the smashing-up of the Domes would have made an end of it,’ I said. ‘Can’t people see – I mean, what is there to fight for after that?’

‘It should have been an end of the War, you mean? Oh, no. It’s been an end to city life for a time, I imagine. Our populations have taken a fair old battering. But there are the Bunkers, of course – that’s where the War is being run from now, and where the munitions factories and so forth are mostly located. It isn’t much of a century for cities, I don’t think.’

I thought back to what I had seen of the barbarism of the countryside beyond the London Dome, and I tried to imagine permanent life in an underground Bomb Shelter: I conjured up images of hollow-eyed children scurrying through darkened tunnels, and a population reduced by fear to servility and nearsavagery.

‘And what of the War itself?’ I asked. ‘The fronts – your great Siege of Europe –’

Bond shrugged. ‘Well, you hear a lot on the Babbles about great advances here and there:
One Last Push
– that sort of thing.’ She lowered her voice. ‘But – and I don’t suppose it matters much if we discuss this here – the flyers see a bit of Europe, you know, even if it is by night and lit up by shell-fire, and word gets around. And
I
don’t think those trench lines have moved across an inch of mud since 1935. We’re stuck, is what we are.’

‘I can no longer imagine what you’re all fighting
for
. The countries are all pretty much bashed up, industrially and economically. None of them can pose much of a threat to the rest, surely; and none of them can have assets left that are worth acquiring.’

‘Perhaps that’s true,’ she said. ‘I don’t think Britain has strength left to do much but rebuild her own smashed-up countryside, once the War is done. We’ll not be going conquering for a long time! And, the situation being as even as it is, the view of things from Berlin must be pretty similar.’

‘Then why go on?’

‘
Because we can’t afford to stop
.’ Beneath the tan she had acquired in this deep Palaeocene, I could see traces of Bond’s former weary pallor. ‘There are all sorts of reports – some rumours, but some better substantiated, from what I hear – of German technical developments …’

‘Technical developments? You mean
weapons
.’

We walked away from the forest, now, and down to the edge of the Sea. The air burned hot against my face, and we let the water lap around the soles of our boots.

I pictured the Europe of 1944: the smashed cities, and, from Holland to the Alps, millions of men and women trying to inflict irreparable damage on each other … In this Tropical peace, it all seemed absurd – a fevered dream!

‘But what can you possibly hope to invent,’ I protested, ‘that can do significantly more damage than has already been achieved?’

‘There is talk of Bombs. A new sort – more powerful than anything we’ve yet seen … Bombs containing Carolinum, they say.’ I remembered Wallis’s speculations on those lines in 1938. ‘And, of course,’ Bond said, ‘there is Chronic-Displacement warfare.

‘You see, we can’t stop fighting if it means letting the Germans have a monopoly on such weapons.’
Her voice had a sort of quiet desperation. ‘You
can
see that, can’t you? That’s why there’s been such a rush to build atomic piles, to acquire Carolinum, to produce more Plattnerite … that’s why so much expense and resource has been invested in these time-travelling Juggernauts.’

‘And all to leap back in time before the Germans? To do unto them
before
they get the chance to do unto you?’

She lifted her chin and looked defiant. ‘Or to fix the damage they do. That’s another way of looking at it, isn’t it?’

I did not debate, as Nebogipfel might have done, the ultimate futility of this quest; for it was clear that the philosophers of 1944 had not yet come to such an understanding of the Multiplicity of Histories as I had, under the Morlock’s tuition.

‘But,’ I protested, ‘the past is a pretty huge place. You came looking for us, but how could you know we would end up here – how could you settle near us, even to within a million years or so?’

‘We had clues,’ she said.

‘What sort of clues? You mean the wreckage left behind in Imperial?’

‘Partly. But also archaeological.’

‘
Archaeological
?’

She looked at me quizzically. ‘Look here, I’m not sure you’d want to hear this –’

That, of course, made my curiosity burn! I insisted she told me.

‘Very well. They – the boffins – knew the general area where you had left for the past – in the grounds of Imperial College, of course – and so they began an intensive archaeological survey of the area. Pits were dug –’

‘Good heavens,’ I said. ‘You were looking for my fossilized bones!’

‘And Nebogipfel’s. It was reasoned that if any anomalies were found – bones, or tools – we should be able to place you tolerably well by your position in the strata …’

‘And were they? Hilary –’ She held back again, and I had to insist she answer.

‘They found a skull.’

‘Human?’

‘Sort of.’ She hesitated. ‘Small, and rather misshapen – placed in a stratum fifty million years older than any human remains had a right to be –
and bitten clean in two
.’

Small and misshapen
– it must, I realized, have been Nebogipfel’s! Could that have been the relic of his encounter with
Pristichampus
– but in some other History, in which Gibson did not intervene?

And did
my
bones lie, crushed and turned to stone, in some neighbouring, undiscovered pit?

I felt a chill, despite the heat of the sun on my back and head. Suddenly this brilliant Palaeocene world seemed faded – a transparency, through which shone the pitiless light of time.

‘So you detected your traces of Plattnerite, and you found us,’ I said. ‘But I imagine you were disappointed merely to find me – again! – and no horde of warmongering Prussians. But – look here – can’t you see there is a certain paradox?

‘You develop your time ironclads because you fear the Germans are doing the same. Very well. But the situation is symmetrical: from
their
point of view, the Germans must fear that
you
will exploit such time machinery first. Each side is behaving precisely in such a way as to provoke the worst reaction in its opponents. And so you both slide towards the worst situation for all.’

‘That’s as may be,’ Bond said. ‘But the possession
of time technology by the Germans would be catastrophic for the Allied Cause. The role of this Expedition is to hunt down German travellers, and to avert any damage the Germans inflict on History.’

I threw my hands in the air, and Palaeocene water rippled about my ankles. ‘But – confound it, Captain Bond – it is fifty million years until the birth of Christ! What meaning can that firefly struggle between England and Germany – in such a remote future – have
here
?’

‘We cannot relax,’ she said with a grim weariness. ‘Can’t you see that? We must hunt the Germans, right back to the dawn of Creation – if necessary.’

‘And where will this War stop? Will you consume all of Eternity before you are done? Don’t you see that
that
–’ I waved a hand, meaning to summarize all of that awful future of shattered cities and populations huddling in subterranean caves. ‘– all that – is impossible? Or will you go on until there are two men left – just two – and the last turns to his neighbour and bashes out his brain with a lump of shattered masonry? Eh?’

Bond turned away – the light of the Sea picked out the lines in her face – and she would not reply.

This period of calm, after our first encounter with Gibson, lasted five days.