The Time Ships (39 page)

I
do not know how long we lay there, huddled in the base of that Time-Car, grasping at our remaining flickers of body-warmth. I imagined that we were the only shards of life left on the planet – save, perhaps, for some hardy lichen clinging to an outcropping of frozen rock.

I pushed at Nebogipfel, and kept talking to him.

‘Let me sleep,’ he mumbled.

‘No,’ I replied, as briskly as I could. ‘Morlocks don’t sleep.’

‘I do. I have been around humans too long.’

‘If you sleep, you’ll die … Nebogipfel. I think we must stop the car.’

He was silent for a while. ‘Why?’

‘We must go back to the Palaeocene. The earth is dead – locked into the grip of this wretched winter – so we must return, to a more equable past.’

‘That is a fine idea –’ he coughed ‘– save for the detail that it is impossible. I did not have the means to design complex controls into this machine.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘That this Time-Car is essentially ballistic. I was able to aim it at future or past, and over a specified duration – we will be delivered to the 1891 of this History, or thereabouts – but then, after the aiming and launch, I have no control over its trajectory.

‘Do you understand? The car follows a path
through time, determined by the initial settings, and the strength of the German Plattnerite. We will come to rest in 1891 – a frozen 1891 – and not before …’

I could feel my shivering subsiding – but not through any great degree of increasing comfort, but because, I realized, my own strength was at last beginning to be exhausted.

But perhaps we were not finished even so, I speculated wildly: if the planet were not abandoned – if men were to rebuild the earth – perhaps we could yet find a climate we could inhabit.

‘And man? What of man?’ I pressed Nebogipfel.

He grunted, and his lidded eye rolled. ‘How could Humanity survive? Man has surely abandoned the planet – or else become extinct altogether …’

‘Abandoned the earth?’ I protested. ‘Why, even you Morlocks, with your Sphere around the sun, didn’t go quite so far as that!’

I pushed away from him, and propped myself up on my elbows so I could see out of the Time-Car towards the south. For it was from
there
– I was sure of it now – from the direction of the Orbital City, that any hope for us would come.

But what I saw next filled me with a deep dread.

That girdle around the earth remained in place, the links between the brilliant stations as bright as ever – but I saw now that the downward lines, which had anchored the City to the planet, had
vanished
. While I had been occupied with the Morlock, the orbital dwellers had dismantled their Elevators, thus abandoning their umbilical ties to Mother Earth.

As I watched further, a brilliant light flared from several of the stations. That glow shimmered from the earth’s fields of ice, as if from a daisy-chain of miniature suns. The metal ring slid away from its position, over the equator. At first this migration was
slow; but then the City appeared to turn on its axis – glowing with fire, like a Catherine Wheel – until it moved so fast that I could not make out the individual stations.

Then it was gone, sliding away from the earth and into invisibility.

The symbolism of this great abandonment was startling, and without the fire from the great engines, the ice fields of the deserted earth seemed more cold, more grey than before.

I settled back into the car. ‘It is true,’ I said to Nebogipfel.

‘What is?’

‘That the earth is abandoned – the Orbital City has cut loose and gone. The planet’s story is done, Nebogipfel – and so, I fear, is ours!’

Nebogipfel lapsed into unconsciousness, despite all my efforts to rouse him; and after a time, I lacked the strength to continue. I huddled against the Morlock, trying to protect his damp, cold body from the worst of the chill, I feared without much success. I knew that given our rate of passage through time, our journey should last no more than thirty hours in total – but what if the German Plattnerite, or Nebogipfel’s improvised design, were faulty? I might be trapped, slowly freezing, in this attenuated Dimension forever – or pitched, at any moment, out onto the eternal Ice.

I think I slept – or fainted.

I thought I saw the Watcher – that great broad head – hovering before my eyes, and beyond his limbless carcase I could see that elusive star-field, tinged with green. I tried to reach out to the stars, for they seemed so bright and warm; but I could not move – perhaps I dreamt it all – and then the Watcher was gone.

At last, with a groaning lurch, the power of the Plattnerite expired, and the car fell into History once more.

The pearly glow of the sky was dispersed, and the sun’s pale light vanished, as if a switch had been thrown: and I was plunged into darkness.

The last of our Palaeocene warmth fell away into the great sink of the sky. Ice clawed at my flesh – it felt like burning – and I could not breathe, though whether from the cold or from poisons in the air I did not know, and I had a great pressure in my chest, as if I was drowning.

I knew that I should not retain consciousness for many more seconds. I determined that I should at least see this 1891, so wildly changed from my own world, before I died. I got my arms underneath me – already I could not feel my hands – and pushed myself up until I was half-sitting.

The earth lay in a silver light, like moon-light (or so I thought at first). The Time-Car sat, like a crumpled toy, in the centre of a plain of ancient ice. It was night, and
there were no stars –
at first I thought there must be clouds – but then I saw, low in the sky, a sliver of crescent moon, and I could not understand the absence of the stars; I wondered if my eyes were somehow damaged by the cold. That sister world was still green, I saw, and I felt pleased; perhaps people still lived there. How brilliant the frozen earth must be, in the sky of that young world! Close to the moon’s limb, a bright light shone: not a star, for it was too close – it was the reflection of the sun from some lunar lake, perhaps.

A corner of my failing brain prompted me to wonder about the source of the silvery ‘moonlight’, for this now glinted from frost which was gathering already over the frame of the Time-Car. If the moon
was verdant still, she could not be the source of this elfish glow. What, then?

With the last of my strength I twisted my head. And there, in the starless sky far above me, was a glowing disc: a shimmering, gossamer thing, as if spun from spider-web, a dozen times the size of the full moon.

And, behind the Time-Car, standing patiently on the plain of ice –

I could not make it out; I wondered if my eyes were indeed failing. It was a pyramidal form, about the height of a man, but its lines were blurred, as if with endless, insectile motion.

‘Are you alive?’ – I wanted to ask this ugly vision. But my throat was closed up, my voice frozen out of me, and I could ask no more questions.

The blackness closed around me, and the cold receded at last.

I
opened my eyes – or rather, I had the sensation that my eyelids were
lifted
back, or perhaps cut away. My vision was cloudy, my view of the world refracted; I wondered if my eyeballs were iced over – perhaps even frozen through. I stared up into a random point in the dark, starless sky; at the periphery of my vision I saw a trace of green – perhaps the moon? – but I could not turn to see.

I was not breathing
. That is easy to record, but it is hard to convey the ferocity of that realization! I felt as if I had been lifted out of my body; there was none of that mechanical business – the clatter of breath and heart, the million tiny aches of muscles and membranes – which makes up, all but unnoticed, the surface of our human lives. It was as if my whole being, all of my identity, had become compressed into that open, staring, fixed gaze.

I should have been frightened, I thought; I should have been struggling for another breath, as if drowning. But no such urgency struck me: I felt sleepy, dream-like, as if I had been etherized.

It was that lack of terror, I think, which convinced me I was dead.

Now a shape moved over me, interposing itself between my line of sight and the empty sky. It was roughly pyramidal, its edges indistinct; it was like a mountain, all in shadow, looming over me.

I recognized this apparition, of course: it was the thing which had stood before me, as we lay exposed on the Ice. Now this machine – for such I thought it must be – swept towards me. It moved with an odd, flowing motion; if you think of how the sand in a glass timer might shift in a composite movement of grains if you tilt the device, you will have something of the effect. I saw, at the corner of my vision, how the blurred edge of the machine’s skirt swept over my chest and stomach. Then I felt a series of prickles – tiny jabs – across my chest and belly.

Thus, sensation had returned! – and with the suddenness of a rifle shot. There was a soft scraping against the skin of my chest, as if cloth were being cut away and pulled back. And now the prickles grew deeper; it was as if tiny, insectile palps were reaching below my flesh, infesting me. I felt
pain
– a million tiny needle-jabs, burrowing into my gut.

So much for Death – so much for Discorporeality! And with the realization of my continued existence came the return of Fear – instantly, and in a great flood of spurting chemicals which swilled around inside me with great intensity.

Now the looming shadow of the mountain-creature, blurred and ominous, crept further along my body, in the direction of my head. Soon I should be smothered! I wanted to scream – but I could feel nothing of my mouth and lips and neck.

I had never, in all my travels, felt so helpless as in that moment. I felt splayed out, like a frog on a dissecting table.

In the last moment, I felt something move over my hand. I could feel an etiolated cold there, a brush of hair: it was Nebogipfel’s hand, holding mine. I wondered if he were lying beside me, even now, as this ghastly vivisection proceeded. I tried to enclose his fingers, but I could not move a muscle.

And now the pyramidal shadow reached my face, and my friendly patch of sky was obscured. I felt needles burrow into my neck, chin, cheeks and forehead. There was a prickle – an unbearable itch – across the surface of my exposed eyes. I longed to look away, to close my eyes; but I could not: it was the most exquisite torture I can imagine!

Then, with that deep fire penetrating even my eyeballs, my grasp on consciousness slipped mercifully away.

When next I woke, my emergence had none of the nightmarish quality of my first arousal. I surfaced towards the world through a layer of sunlit dreams: I swam through fragmentary visions of sand, forest and ocean; I tasted again tough, salty bivalves; and I lay with Hilary Bond in warmth and darkness.

Then, slowly, full awakening came.

I was lying on some hard surface. My back, which responded with a twinge when I tried to move, was real enough; as were my splayed-out legs, my arms, my tingling fingers, the engine-like whistle of air through my nostrils, and the thrum of blood in my veins. I lay in darkness – utter and complete – but that little fact, which once might have terrified me, now seemed incidental, for I was alive again, surrounded by the familiar mechanical rattle of my own body. I felt an access of relief, pure and intense, and I let out a whoop of joy!

I sat up. When I laid my hands on the floor I found coarse-grained particles there, as if a layer of sand sat over some harder surface. Though I wore only my shirt, trousers and boots, I felt quite warm. I remained in complete darkness; but the echoes of that foolish holler had returned swiftly to my ears, and I had the sensation that I was in some enclosed space.

I turned my head this way and that, seeking a window or door; but this was without avail. However I became aware of a heaviness about my head – something was pinching my nose – and when I lifted my hands to investigate, I found a pair of heavy spectacles sitting on my face, the glass integrated with the frame.

I probed at this clumsy device – and the room was flooded with a brilliant light.

At first I was dazzled, and I squeezed my eyes shut. I snatched off the spectacles – and found that the light disappeared, leaving me sunk in darkness. And when I donned the spectacles, the brightness returned.

It did not tax my ingenuity far to understand that the darkness was the reality; and that the light was being furnished for me by the spectacles themselves, which I had inadvertently activated. The spectacles were some equivalent of Nebogipfel’s goggles, which the poor Morlock had lost in the Palaeocene Storm.

My eyes adjusted to the illumination, and I stood up and inspected myself. I was whole, and, it seemed, hale; I could find no trace on my hands or arms of the action of that diffuse pyramid-creature on my skin. I noticed a series of white traces, though, in the fabric of my jungle-twill shirt and trousers; when I ran my finger along these, I found low, ridged seams, as if clumsy repairs had been effected in my clothes.

I was in a chamber perhaps twelve feet across and about as high – and it was the most peculiar room I had visited in all my travels through time so far. To picture it, you must begin with a hotel room of the late nineteenth century. But the room was not constructed on the rectangular pattern common in my day; rather, it was a rounded cone, something like the inside of a tent. There was no door, and no furniture of any sort. The floor was covered by an even
layer of sand, in which I could see the indentations where I had slept.

On the walls there was a rather garish paper – a purple, flock concoction – and what looked like window-frames, set about with heavy curtains. But the frames contained not glass, but only panels coated with more of the flock-paper.

There was no light source in the room. Instead, a steady and diffuse glow permeated the air, like the light of a cloudy day. I was by now convinced, however, that the illumination I saw was some artefact of my spectacles rather than anything physical. The ceiling above me was an ornate affair, decorated with the most remarkable paintings. Here and there in that baroque cascade I could make out fragments of the human form, but so jumbled about and distorted that the design was impossible to make out: it was not grotesque, but instead clumsy and confused – as if the artist had the technical ability of a Michelangelo, but the vision of a retarded child. And so you have it: the elements, I suppose, of a cheap hotel room of my day – but transmogrified into this peculiar geometry, like something out of a dream!

I walked about, and my boots crunched on the coarse sand. I found no seam in the walls, no hint of a door. In one part of the room there was a cubicle, about three feet on a side, made of white porcelain. When I stepped off the sand and onto the porcelain platform, steam hissed, quite unexpectedly, from vents in the walls. I stepped back, startled, and the jets desisted; the lingering steam lapped about my face.

I found a series of small bowls set on the sand. They were a hand’s-breadth across and had shallow rims, like saucers. Some of the bowls contained water, and others portions of food: simple stuff, fruit and nuts and berries and the like, but nothing I could
readily recognize. Finding myself thirsty, I drained a couple of the water-bowls. I found the bowls clumsy to use; their shallow profiles gave them a tendency to dump their contents over my chin, and they were less like cups, I thought, than the dishes one uses to water a dog or cat. I nibbled at a little of the food; the taste of the fruit pieces was bland but acceptable.

After this my hands and lips were left sticky, and I looked about for a sink or toilet facilities. There was none, of course; and I resorted to rinsing myself with the contents of another of the little water-bowls, and drying my face on a corner of my shirt.

I probed at the dummy windows, and leaped up, trying to poke at the clumsy ceiling designs, but to no avail; the surface of the walls and floor was as smooth as an eggshell’s but unbreachable. I dug out some of the sand on the floor and found that it penetrated to a depth of nine inches or a foot; under it lay a mosaic of brightly coloured fragments, rather after the Roman style – but, like the ceiling, the mosaic depicted no portrait or scene I could discern, but rather a fragmentary jumble of designs.

I was quite alone, and there was no sound from beyond the walls: no sound in my universe, in fact, save the rustle of my own breathing, the thump of my heart – the very noises which I had welcomed back with such vigour, so recently!

After a time, certain human needs asserted themselves. I resisted these pressures as long as I could, but at last was forced to resort to digging shallow pits in the sand, for the purpose of relieving myself.

As I covered over the first of these pits I felt the most extraordinary shame. I wondered what the Starmen of this remote 1891 were making of this performance!

When I tired, I settled myself in the sand, with my back to the wall of the room. At first I kept the light-
spectacles on, but I found the illumination too bright to allow me to rest; so I doffed the spectacles, and kept them wrapped around my hand while I slept.

So began my sojourn in that bizarre cage of a room. As my initial fear subsided, a restless boredom crept over me. It was an imprisonment reminiscent of my time in the Morlocks’ Cage of Light, and I had come away from
that
without any wish to repeat the experience. I came to feel that
anything
, even the intrusion of danger, would be preferable to remaining in this dull, seamless prison. My exile in the Palaeocene – fifty million years from the nearest newspaper – had cured me of my old impulse to read, I think; but still, at times I thought I should go mad for lack of someone to talk to.

The bowls of food and water were filled up each time I slept. I never determined the mechanism by which this was done. I saw no evidence of an extruding machinery like the Morlocks’; but neither did I ever witness the refilling of a bowl by any semblance of attendant. Once, as an experiment, I went to sleep with a bowl buried
beneath
my body. I awoke to find a soggy sensation under my ribs. When I lifted myself, I found the bowl had filled with water once more, as if by some miraculous process.

I came to the tentative conclusion that, somehow, a subtle machinery in the bowls themselves was
assembling
the contents – either from the substance of the bowls, or from the material of the air. I thought – though I had no desire to investigate! – that my buried waste was broken down by the same discreet mechanisms. It was a bizarre, and not very appetizing, prospect.