The Time Ships (50 page)

T
he hands of my chronometric dials whirled around. The sun became a streak of fire, then merged into a brilliant arch, with the moon a whirling, fluctuating band. Trees shivered through their seasons, almost too fast for me to follow. The sky assumed a wonderful deepness of blue, like a midsummer twilight, with the clouds rendered happily invisible.

The looming, translucent shape of my house soon fell away from me. The landscape grew vague, and once more the splendid architecture of the Age of Buildings washed over Richmond Hill like a tide. I saw nothing of the peculiarities which had characterized the construction of Nebogipfel’s History: the stilling of the earth’s rotation, the building of the Sphere about the sun, and so forth. Presently I watched that tide of deeper green flow up the hillside and remain there without the interruption of winter; and I knew I had reached that happier future age in which warmer climes have returned to Britain – it was once more like the Palaeocene, I thought with a stab of nostalgia.

I kept my eyes wide for any hint of the Watchers, but I could see nothing of them. The Watchers – those immense, unimaginable minds, outcroppings of the great reefs of intellect which inhabit the Optimal History – had done with me now, and my
destiny was in my own hands. I felt a grim satisfaction at that, and – with the day-count on my dials passing Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand – I hauled carefully at the stopping-lever.

I caught a last glimpse of the moon as it spun through its phases, waning to darkness. I remembered that I had set off, with Weena, on that last jaunt to the Palace of Green Porcelain just before the time the little Eloi called the Dark Nights: that rayless obscurity during the dark of the moon, when the Morlocks emerged, and worked their will on the Eloi. How foolish I had been! I thought now; how impetuous, unthinking – how careless I had been of poor Weena – to have set off on such an expedition, at such a time of danger.

Well, I thought with a certain grimness, now I had returned; and I was determined to put right the mistakes of my past, or die in the attempt.

With a lurch, the machine dropped out of the grey tumult, and sunlight broke over me, heavy and warm and immediate. The chronometric dials rattled to a stop: it was Day 292,495,940 – the precise day, in the Year A.D. 802,701, on which I had lost Weena.

I sat on the familiar hill-side. The light of the sun was brilliant, and I had to shade my eyes. Because I had launched the machine from the garden at the rear of the house rather than the laboratory, I was perhaps twenty yards further down that little rhododendron lawn than when I had first arrived here. Behind me, a little higher up the Hill, I saw the familiar profile of the White Sphinx, with its inscrutable half-smile fixed forever. The bronze base remained thick with verdigris, although here and there I could see where the moulded inlays had been flattened by my futile attempts to break into the chamber within, and to retrieve the stolen Time Machine; and the grass was scarred and cut, showing
where the Morlocks had dragged my machine off into the pedestal.

The stolen machine was in there now, I realized with a jolt. It was odd to think of that other machine sitting mere yards from me in the obscurity of that chamber, while I sat on this copy, perfect in every way, which glittered on the grass!

I detached and pocketed my control levers, and stepped onto the ground. From the angle of the sun, I judged it to be perhaps three in the afternoon, and the air was warm and moist.

To get a better view of things, I walked perhaps a half-mile to the south-east, to the brow of what had been Richmond Hill. In my day the Terrace had stood here, with its expensive frontage and wide views of the river and the country beyond to the west; now, a loose stand of trees had climbed over the Hill’s crest – there was no sign of the Terrace, and I imagined that even the founds of the houses must have been obliterated by the action of tree-roots – but still, just as it had in 1891, the countryside fell away to the south and west, most attractively.

There was a bench set here, of that yellow metal I had seen before; it was corroded with a red rust, and its arm-rests were filed into the semblance of the creatures of some forgotten myth. A nettle, with large leaves tinted beautifully brown, had climbed over the chair, but I pulled this away – it was without stings – and I sat down, for I was already warm and perspiring.

The sun lay quite low in the sky, to the west, and its light glimmered from the scattered architecture and the bodies of water which punctuated the verdant landscape. The haze of heat lay everywhere on the land. Time, and the patient evolutions of geology, had metamorphosed this landscape from my day; but I could recognize several features, reshaped though
they were, and there was still a dreamy beauty about the poet’s ‘matchless vale of Thames’. The silver ribbon of the river was some distance removed from me; as I have noted elsewhere, the Thames had cut through a bow in its course and now progressed direct from Hampton to Kew. And it had deepened its valley; thus Richmond was now set high on the side of a broad valley, perhaps a mile from the water. I thought I recognized what had been Glover’s Island as a sort of wooded knoll in the centre of the old bed. Petersham Meadows retained much of its modern profile; but it was raised far above the level of the river now, and I imagined the area to be much less marshy than in my day.

The great buildings of this Age were dotted about, with their intricate parapets and tall columns, elegant and abandoned: they were spikes of architectural bone protruding from the hill-side’s green-clad flank. Perhaps a mile from me I saw that large building, a mass of granite and aluminium, to which I had climbed on my first evening. Here and there huge figures, as beautiful and enigmatic as my Sphinx, lifted their heads from the general greenery, and everywhere I saw the cupolas and chimneys that were the signatures of the Morlocks. The huge flowers of this latter day were everywhere, with their gleaming white petals and shining leaves. Not for the first time, this landscape, with its extraordinary and beautiful blooms, its pagodas and cupolas nestling among the green, reminded me of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in my day; but it was a Kew that had covered England, and had grown wild and neglected.

On the horizon there was a large building I had not noticed before. It was almost lost in the mists of the north-west, in the direction of modern Windsor; but it was too remote and faint for me to make out details. I promised myself that some day I should
make the trek out to Windsor, for surely, if anything of my day had survived the evolution and neglect of the intervening millennia, it would be a relic of the massive Norman keep there.

I turned now and saw how the countryside fell away in the direction of modern Banstead, and I made out that pattern of copses and hills, with here and there the glint of water, which had become familiar to me during my earlier explorations. And it was in that direction – perhaps eighteen or twenty miles distant – that the Palace of Green Porcelain lay. Peering that way now I thought I could make out a hint of that structure’s pinnacles; but my eyes were not what they were, and I was not sure.

I had hiked to that Palace, with Weena, in search of weapons and other provisions with which to take the fight to the Morlocks. Indeed, if I remembered correctly, I – my earlier self – must be rooting about within those polished green walls even now!

Perhaps ten miles away, a barrier interposed between myself and the Palace: a knot of dark forest. Even in the daylight it made a dark, sinister splash, at least a mile thick. Carrying Weena, I had made through that wood safely enough the first time, for we had waited for daylight to make the crossing; but the second time, on our return from the Palace (tonight!) I would let my impatience and fatigue get the better of me. Determined to return to the Sphinx as soon as possible, and to set to work retrieving my machine, I would push into that wood in the darkness – and fall asleep – and the Morlocks would descend on us, and take Weena.

I had been lucky to escape that folly with my life, I knew; and as for poor Weena …

But I put aside these feelings of shame, now, for I was here, I reminded myself, to make amends for all that.

It was early enough for me to reach that wood before the daylight faded. I was without weapons, of course, but my purpose here was not to fight the Morlocks – I had done with that – but simply to rescue Weena. And for that, I calculated, I should need no more powerful weapons than my intellect and my fists.

T
he Time Machine itself looked very exposed, there on the hill-side with its brass and nickel glittering, and – although I had no intention to use it again – I decided to conceal it. There was a copse nearby, and I dragged the squat machine there and covered it with branches and leaves. This took me some effort – the machine was a bulky affair – and I was left perspiring, and the rails cut deep grooves in the turf where I had hauled it.

I rested for a few minutes, and then, with a will, I set off down the hill-side in the direction of Banstead.

I had travelled barely a hundred yards when I heard voices. For a moment I was startled, thinking – despite the daylight – that it might be Morlocks. But the voices were quite human, and speaking that peculiar, simple sing-song which is characteristic of the Eloi; and now a party, five or six, of those little people emerged from a copse onto a pathway leading up to my Sphinx. I was struck afresh at how slight and small they were – no larger than the children of my time, male and female alike – and clad in those simple purple tunics and sandals.

The similarities with my first arrival in this Age struck me immediately; for I had been chanced upon by a party of Eloi in just such a fashion. I remembered how they had approached me without fear – more with curiosity – and had laughed and spoken to me.

Now, though, they came up with circumspection: in fact, I thought they shied away. I opened my hands and smiled, intending to show that I meant no harm; but I knew well enough the cause of this changed perception: it was what they had seen already of the dangerous and erratic behaviour of my earlier self, especially during my unhinging after the theft of the Time Machine. These Eloi were entitled to their caution!

I did not press the case, and the Eloi went on around me, up the hill-side towards the rhododendron lawn; as soon as I was out of their sight their speech resumed in its bubbling rhythms.

I struck across the countryside towards the wood. Everywhere I saw those wells which led, I knew, to the subterranean world of the Morlocks – and from which emitted, if I drew close enough to hear, the implacable
thud-thud-thud
of their great machines. Sweat broke across my brow and chest – for the day remained hot, despite the dipping of the afternoon sun – and I felt my breath scratch in and out of my lungs.

With my immersion in this world, my emotions seemed to waken also. Weena, limited creature though she was, had shown me affection, the only creature in all this world of 802,701 to do so; and her loss had caused me the most intense wretchedness. But, when I had come to recount the tale to my companions by the familiar glow of my own fireside in 1891, that grief had been etiolated into a pale sketch of itself; Weena had become like the memory of a dream, quite unreal.

Well, now I was
here
once more, tramping across this familiar country, and all that primal grief came back to me – it was as if I had never left here – and it fuelled my every footstep.

As I walked on a great hunger fell on me. I real
ized that I could not remember the last time I had eaten – it must have been before Nebogipfel and I departed from the Age of White Earth – although, I speculated, it might be true to say that this body had
never
partaken of food, if it had been reconstructed by the Watchers as Nebogipfel had hinted! Well, whatever the philosophical niceties, my hunger was soon gnawing at my belly, and I began to feel a weariness from the heat. I came past an eating hall – a great, grey edifice of fretted stone – and I made a detour from my route.

I entered through a carved archway, with its decorations badly weather-worn and broken up. Within I found a single great chamber hung with brown, and the floor was set with blocks of that hard white metal I had observed before, worn into tracks by the soft feet of innumerable generations of Eloi. Slabs of polished stone formed tables, on which were heaped piles of fruit; and around the tables were gathered little clusters of Eloi, in their pretty tunics, eating and jabbering to each other like so many cage-birds.

I stood there in my dingy jungle twill – that relic of the Palaeocene was quite out of place in all that sunlit prettiness, and I mused that the Watchers might have outfitted me more elegantly! – and a group of the Eloi came to me and clustered around. I felt little hands on me, like soft tentacles, pulling at my shirt. Their faces had the small mouths, pointed chins and tiny ears characteristic of their race, but these seemed to be a different set of Eloi from those I had encountered near the Sphinx; and these little folk had no great memory, and therefore no fear, of me.

I had come here to rescue one of their kind, not to commit more of that graceless barbarism which had disfigured my previous visit; so I submitted to their inspection with good grace and open hands.

I made for the tables, followed everywhere by a
little gaggle of the Eloi. I found a cluster of hypertrophied strawberries, and I crammed these into my mouth; and it was not long before I found several samples of that floury fruit in its three-sided husk which had proved my particular favourite before. I collected a haul I judged sufficient, found a darker, shaded corner, and settled down to eat, surrounded by a little wall of the curious Eloi.

I smiled at the Eloi, welcoming them, and tried to remember those scraps of their simple speech which I had learned before. As I spoke their little faces pressed around me, their eyes wide in the dark, their red lips parted like childrens’. I relaxed. I think it was the plainness of this encounter, the easy humanity of it, which entranced me then; I had suffered too much inhuman strangeness recently! The Eloi were
not
human, I knew – in their way they were as alien to me as the Morlocks – but they were a good facsimile.

I seemed just to close my eyes.

I came to myself with a start. It had grown quite dark! There were fewer of the Eloi close to me, and their mild, unquestioning eyes seemed to shine at me in the gloom.

I got to my feet in a panic. Fruit husks and flowers fell from my person, where they had been arranged by the playful Eloi. I blundered across the main chamber. It was quite full of Eloi, now, and they slept in little clusters across the metal floor. I emerged at last through the doorway and into the daylight …

Or rather, what little there was left of the day! Peering about wildly, I saw how a last sliver of sun was barely visible – a mere fingernail of light, resting on the western horizon – and to the east, I saw a single bright planet – perhaps it was Venus.

I cried out and lifted my arms to the sky. After all my inner resolve that I should make amends for the impetuous foolishness of the past, here I had
dozed through the afternoon, as indolent as you like!

I plunged back to the path I had followed and struck out for the wood. So much for my plans for arriving in the wood during daylight! As the twilight drew in around me, I caught glimpses of grey-white ghosts, barely visible at the edge of my vision. I whirled about at each such apparition, but they fled, staying beyond my reach.

The shapes were Morlocks, of course – the cunning, brutal Morlocks of this History – and they were tracking me with all the silent hunting skills they could command. My earlier resolve that I should not need a weapon for this expedition now began to seem a little foolish, and I told myself that as soon as I reached the wood I should find a fallen branch or some such, to serve me in the office of a club.