The Time Ships (9 page)

Y
ou must imagine that place: a single immense
room
, with a carpet of stars and a complex, engineered ceiling, and all of it going on forever, without walls. It was a place of black and silver, without any other colour. The Floor was marked out by partitions that came up to chest-height, though there were no dividing walls: there were no enclosed areas, nothing resembling our offices or homes, anywhere.

And there were
Morlocks
, a pale scattering of them, all across that transparent Floor; their faces were like grey flakes of snow sprinkled over the starry carpet. The place was filled with their voices: their constant, liquid babbling washed over me, oceanic in itself, and remote from the sounds of the human palate – and removed, too, from the dry voice Nebogipfel had become accustomed to using in my company.

There was a line at infinity, utterly straight and a little blurred by dust and mist, where the Roof met the Floor. And that line showed none of the bowing effect that one sometimes sees as one studies an ocean. It is hard to describe – it may seem that such things are beyond one’s intuition until they are experienced – but at that moment, standing there,
I knew I was not on the surface of any planet
. There was no far horizon beyond which rows of Morlocks were hidden, like receding sea-going ships; instead I knew that the earth’s tight, compact contours were
far away. My heart sank, and I was quite daunted.

Nebogipfel stepped forward to me. He had doffed his goggles, and I had an impression it was with relief. ‘Come,’ he said gently. ‘Are you afraid? This is what you wanted to see. We will walk. And we will talk further.’

With great hesitation – it took me a genuine effort to step forward, away from the wall of my immense prison cell – I came after him.

I caused quite a stir in the population. Their little faces were all around me, huge-eyed and chinless. I shrank away from them as I walked, my dread of their cold flesh renewed. Some of them reached towards me, with their long, hair-covered arms. I could smell something of their bodies, a sweet, musty smell that was all too familiar. Most walked as upright as a man, although some preferred to lope along like an orang-utan, with knuckles grazing the Floor. Many of them had their hair, on scalp and back, coiffed in some style or other, some in a plain and severe fashion, like Nebogipfel, and some in a more flowing, decorative style. But there were one or two whose hair ran as wild and ragged as any Morlock’s I had encountered in Weena’s world, and at first I suspected that these individuals still ran savage, even here in this city-room; but they behaved as easily as the rest, and I hypothesized that these unkempt manes were simply another form of affectation – much as a man will sometimes allow his beard to grow to great profusion.

I became aware that I was passing by these Morlocks with remarkable speed – much quicker than my pace allowed. I almost stumbled at this realization. I glanced down, but I could see nothing to differentiate the stretch of transparent Floor on which I walked from any other; but I knew I must be on some form of moving pavement.

The crowding, pallid Morlock faces, the absence of colour, the flatness of the horizon, my unnatural speed through this bizarre landscape – and above all, the illusion that I was floating above a bottomless well of stars – combined into the semblance of a dream! – But then some curious Morlock would come too close, and I would get a whiff of his sickly scent, and reality pressed in again.

This was no dream: I was lost, I realized, marooned in this sea of Morlocks, and again I had to struggle to keep walking steadily, to avoid bunching my fists and driving them into the curious faces pressing around me.

I saw how the Morlocks were going about their mysterious business. Some were walking, some conversing, some eating food of the bland, uninteresting type which had been served to me, all as uninhibited as kittens. This observation, combined with the utter lack of any enclosed spaces, led me to understand that the Morlocks of the Sphere had no need of privacy, in the sense we understand it.

Most of the Morlocks seemed to me to be working, though at what I could not fathom. The surfaces of some of their partitions were inlaid with panes of a blue, glowing glass, and the Morlocks touched these panes with their thin, wormlike fingers, or talked earnestly into them. In response, graphs, pictures and text scrolled across the glass slabs. In some places this remarkable machinery was carried a stage further, and I saw elaborate models – representing what I could not say – springing into existence in mid-air. At a Morlock’s command, a model would rotate, or split open, displaying its interior – or fly apart, in dwindling arrays of floating cubes of coloured light.

And all of this activity, you must imagine, was immersed in a constant flow of the Morlocks’ liquid, guttural tongue.

Now we passed a place where a fresh partition was emerging from the Floor below. It rose up complete and finished like something emerging from a vat of mercury; when its growth was done it had become a thin slab about four feet high featuring three of the omnipresent blue windows. When I crouched down to peer through the transparent Floor, I could see nothing beneath the surface: no box, or uplifting machinery. It was as if the partition had appeared out of nothing. ‘Where does it come from?’ I asked Nebogipfel.

He said, after some thought – evidently he had to choose his words: ‘The Sphere has a
Memory
. It has machines which enable it to store that Memory. And the form of the data blocks –’ he meant the partitions ‘– is held in the Sphere’s Memory, to be retrieved in this material form as desired.’

For my entertainment, Nebogipfel caused more extrusions: on one pillar I saw a tray of foodstuffs and water rising out of the floor, as if prepared by some invisible butler!

I was struck by this idea of extrusions from the uniform and featureless Floor. It reminded me of the Platonist theory of thought expounded by some philosophers: that to every object there exists, in some realm, an ideal Form – an essence of Chair, the summation of Table-ness, and so on – and when an object is manufactured in our world, templates stored in the Platonic over-world are consulted.

Well, here I was in a Platonic universe made real: the whole of this mighty, sun-girdling Sphere was suffused by an artificial, god-like Memory – a Memory within whose rooms I walked even as we spoke. And within the Memory was stored the Ideal of every object the heart could desire – or at least, as desired by a Morlock heart.

How very convenient it would be to be able to
manufacture and dissolve equipment and apparatus as one required! My great, draughty house in Richmond could be reduced to a single Room, I realized. In the morning, the bedroom furniture could be commanded to fade back into the carpet, to be replaced by the bathroom suite, and next the kitchen table. Like magic, the various apparatuses of my laboratory could be made to flow from the walls and ceiling, until I was ready to work. And at last, of an evening, I could summon up my dinner table, with its comfortable surrounds of fireplace and wallpaper; and perhaps the table could be manufactured already replete with food!

All our professions of builders, plumbers, carpenters and the like would disappear in a trice, I realized. The householder – the owner of such an Intelligent Room – would need to engage no more than a peripatetic cleaner (though perhaps the Room could take care of that too!), and perhaps there would be occasional boosts to the Room’s mechanical memory, to keep pace with the latest vogues …

So my fecund imagination ran on, quite out of my control.

I soon began to feel fatigued. Nebogipfel took me to a clear space – though there were Morlocks in the distance, all about me – and he tapped his foot on the Floor. A sort of shelter was extruded; it was perhaps four feet high, and little more than a roof set on four fat pillars: something like a substantial table, perhaps. Within the table there arose a bundle of blankets and a food-stand. I climbed into the hut gratefully – it was the first enclosure I had enjoyed since my arrival on the Sphere – and I acknowledged Nebogipfel’s consideration at providing it. I made a meal of water and some of the greenish cheese stuff, and I took off my goggles – I was immersed in the
endless darkness of that Morlock world – and was able to sleep, with my head settled on a rolled-up blanket.

This odd little shelter was my home for the next few days, as I continued my tour of the Morlock’s city-chamber with Nebogipfel. Each time I arose, Nebogipfel had the Floor absorb the shelter once again, and he evoked it afresh in whatever place we stopped – so we had no luggage to carry! I have noted that the Morlocks did not sleep, and I think my antics in my hut were the source of considerable fascination to the natives of the Sphere – just as those of an orang-utan catch the eye of the civilized man, I suppose – and they would have crowded around me as I tried to sleep, pressing their little round faces in on me, and rest would have been impossible, had not Nebogipfel stayed by me, and deterred such sightseeing.

I
n all the days Nebogipfel led me through that Morlock world, we never encountered a wall, door or other significant barrier. As near as I could make it out, we were restricted – the whole time – to a single chamber: but it was a chamber of a stupendous size. And it was, in its general details, homogenous, for everywhere I found this same carpet of Morlocks pursuing their obscure tasks. The simplest practicalities of such arrangements were startling enough; I considered, for example, the prosaic problems of maintaining a consistent and stable atmosphere, at an even temperature, pressure and humidity, over such scales of length. And yet, Nebogipfel gave me to understand, this was but one chamber in a sort of mosaic of them, that tiled the Sphere from Pole to Pole.

I soon came to understand that there were no
cities
on this Sphere, in the modern sense. The Morlock population was spread over these immense chambers, and there were no fixed sites for any given activity. If the Morlocks wished to assemble a work area – or clear it for some other purpose – the relevant apparatuses could be extruded directly from the Floor, or else absorbed back. Thus, rather than cities, there were to be found nodes of population of higher density – nodes which shifted and migrated, according to purpose.

After one sleep I had clambered out of the shelter and was sitting cross-legged on the Floor, sipping water. Nebogipfel remained standing, seemingly without fatigue. Then I saw approaching us a brace of Morlocks, the sight of which made me swallow a mouthful of water too hastily; I sputtered, and droplets of water sprayed across my jacket and trousers.

I supposed the pair were indeed Morlocks – but they were like no Morlocks I had seen before: whereas Nebogipfel was a little under five feet tall, these were like cartoon caricatures, extended to a height of perhaps twelve feet! One of the long creatures noticed me, and he came loping over, metal splints on his legs clattering as he walked; he stepped
over
the intervening partitions like some huge gazelle.

He bent down and peered at me. His red-grey eyes were the size of dinner-plates, and I quailed away from him. His odour was sharp, like burnt almonds. His limbs were long and fragile-looking, and his skin seemed stretched over that extended skeleton: I was able to see, embedded in one shin and quite visible through drum-tight skin, the profile of a tibia no less than four feet long. Splints of some soft metal were attached to those long leg-bones, evidently to help strengthen them against snapping. This attenuated beast seemed to have no greater number of follicles than your average Morlock, so that his hair was scattered over that stretched-out frame, in a very ugly fashion.

He exchanged a few liquid syllables with Nebogipfel, then rejoined his companion and – with many a backward glance at me – went on his way.

I turned to Nebogipfel, stunned; even
he
seemed an oasis of normality after that vision.

Nebogipfel said, ‘They are –’ a liquid word I could
not repeat ‘– from the higher latitudes.’ He glanced after our two visitors. ‘You can see that they are unsuited to this equatorial region. Splints are required to help them walk, and –’

‘I don’t see it at all,’ I broke in. ‘What’s so different about the higher latitudes?’

‘Gravity,’ he said.

Dimly, I began to understand.

The Morlocks’ Sphere was, as I have recorded, a titanic construction which filled up the orbit once occupied by Venus. And – Nebogipfel told me now – the whole thing rotated, about an axis. Once, Venus’s year had been two hundred and twenty-five days. Now – said Nebogipfel – the great Sphere turned in just seven days and thirteen hours!

‘And so the rotation –’ Nebogipfel began.

‘– induces centrifugal effects, simulating the earth’s gravity at the equator. Yes,’ I said. ‘I see it.’

The spin of the Sphere kept us all plastered to this Floor. But away from the equator, the turning circle of a point on the Sphere about the rotation axis was less, and so the effective gravity was reduced: gravity dwindled to zero, in fact, at the Sphere’s rotation poles. And in those extraordinary, broad continents of lower gravity, such remarkable animals as those two loping Morlocks lived, and had adapted to their conditions.

I thumped my forehead with the back of my hand.

‘Sometimes I think I am the greatest fool who ever lived!’ I exclaimed to the bemused Nebogipfel. For I had never thought to inquire about the source of my ‘weight’, here on the Sphere. What sort of scientist was it who failed to question – even to observe properly – the ‘gravity’ which, in the absence of anything so convenient as a
planet
, glued him to the surface of this Sphere? I wondered how many other marvels I was passing by, simply from the fact that it did not
occur to me to
ask
about them – and yet to Nebogipfel such features were merely a part of the world, of no more novelty than a sunset, or a butterfly’s wing.

I teased out of Nebogipfel details of how the Morlocks lived. It was difficult, for I scarcely knew how to begin even to phrase my questions. That may seem odd to state – but how was I to ask, for instance, about the machinery which underpinned this transforming Floor? It was doubtful if my language contained the concepts required even to frame the query, just as a Neandertaler would lack the linguistic tools to inquire about the workings of a clock. And as to the social and other arrangements which, invisibly, governed the lives of the millions of Morlocks in this immense chamber, I remained as ignorant as might a tribesman arrived in London fresh from Central Africa would have been of social movements, of telephone and telegraph wires, of the Parcels Delivery Company, and the like. Even their arrangements for sewage remained a mystery to me!

I asked Nebogipfel how the Morlocks governed themselves.

He explained to me – in a somewhat patronizing manner, I thought – that the Sphere was a large enough place for several ‘nations’ of Morlocks. These ‘nations’ were distinguished mainly by the mode of government they chose. Almost all had some form of democratic process in place. In some areas a representative parliament was selected by a Universal Suffrage, much along the lines of our own Westminster Parliament. Elsewhere, suffrage was restricted to an elite sub-group, composed of those considered especially capable, by temperament and training, of governance: I think the nearest models in our philosophy are the classical republics, or
perhaps the ideal form of Republic imagined by Plato; and I admit that this approach appealed to my own instincts.

But in most areas, the machinery of the Sphere had made possible a form of
true
Universal Suffrage, in which the inhabitants were kept abreast of current debates by means of the blue windows in their partitions, and then instantly registered their preferences on each issue by similar means. Thus, governance proceeded on a piecemeal basis, with every major decision subject to the collective whim of the populace.

I felt distrustful of such a system. ‘But surely there are
some
in the population who cannot be empowered with such authority! What about the insane, or the feeble-minded?’

He considered me with a certain stiffness. ‘We have no such weaknesses.’

I felt like challenging this Utopian – even here, in the heart of his Utopia! ‘And how do you ensure that?’

He did not answer me immediately. Instead he went on, ‘Each member of our adult population is rational, and able to make decisions on behalf of others – and is trusted to do so. In such circumstances, the purest form of democracy is not only possible, it is advisable – for many minds combine to produce decisions superior to those of one.’

I snorted. ‘Then what of all these other Parliaments and Senates you have described?’

‘Not everyone agrees that the arrangements in this part of the Sphere are ideal,’ he said. ‘Is that not the essence of freedom? Not all of us are sufficiently interested in the mechanics of governance to wish to participate; and for some, the entrusting of power to another through representation – or even without any representation at all – is preferable. That is a valid choice.’

‘Fine. But what happens when such choices conflict?’

‘
We have room
,’ he said heavily. ‘You must not forget that fact; you are still dominated by planet-bound expectations. Any dissenter is free to depart, and to establish a rival system elsewhere …’

These ‘nations’ of the Morlocks were fluid things, with individuals joining and leaving as their preferences evolved. There was no fixed territory or possessions, nor even any fixed boundaries, as far as I could make out; the ‘nations’ were mere groupings of convenience, clusterings across the Sphere.

There was no war among the Morlocks.

It took me some time to believe this, but at last I was convinced. There were no
causes
for war. Thanks to the mechanisms of the Floor there was no shortage of provision, so no ‘nation’ could argue for goals of economic acquisition. The Sphere was so huge that the empty land available was almost unlimited, so that territorial conflicts were meaningless. And – most crucially – the Morlocks’ heads were free of the canker of
religion
, which has caused so much conflict through the centuries.

‘You have no God, then,’ I said to Nebogipfel, with something of a thrill: though I have some religious tendencies myself, I imagined shocking the clerics of my own day with an account of this conversation!

‘We have no
need
of a God,’ Nebogipfel retorted.

The Morlocks regarded a religious set of mind – as opposed to a
rational
state – as a hereditable
trait
, with no more intrinsic meaning than blue eyes or brown hair.

The more Nebogipfel outlined this notion, the more sense it made to me.

What notion of God has survived through all of Humanity’s mental evolution? Why, precisely the form it might suit man’s vanity to conjure up: a God
with immense powers, and yet still absorbed in the petty affairs of man. Who could worship a chilling God, even if omnipotent, if He took no interest whatsoever in the flea-bite struggles of humans?

One might imagine that, in any conflict between
rational
humans and
religious
humans, the rational ought to win. After all, it is rationality that invented gunpowder! And yet – at least up to our nineteenth century – the
religious
tendency has generally won out, and natural selection operated, leaving us with a population of religiously-inclined sheep – it has sometimes seemed to me – capable of being deluded by any smooth-tongued preacher.

The paradox is explained because religion provides a
goal
for men to fight for. The religious man will soak some bit of ‘sacred’ land with his blood, sacrificing far more than the land’s intrinsic economic or other value.

‘But we have moved beyond this paradox,’ Nebogipfel said to me. ‘We have mastered our inheritance: we are no longer governed by the dictates of the past, either as regards our bodies or our minds …’

But I did not follow up this intriguing notion – the obvious question to ask was, ‘In the absence of a God, then, what is the purpose of all of your lives?’ – for I was entranced by the idea of how Mr Darwin, with all his modern critics in the Churches, would have loved to have witnessed this ultimate triumph of his ideas over the Religionists!

In fact – as it turned out – my understanding of the true purpose of the Morlocks’ civilization would not come until much later.

I was impressed, though, with all I saw of this artificial world of the Morlocks – I am not sure if my respectful awe has been reflected in my account here. This brand of Morlock had indeed mastered their inherited weaknesses; they had put aside the legacy of
the brute – the legacy bequeathed by
us
– and had thereby achieved a stability and capability almost unimaginable to a man of 1891: to a man like me, who had grown up in a world torn apart daily by war, greed and incompetence.

And this mastery of their own nature was all the more striking for its contrast with those
other
Morlocks – Weena’s Morlocks – who had, quite obviously, fallen foul of the brute within, despite their mechanical and other aptitudes.