The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  I spared a moment to glance up the Hill towards the Park, for I wondered for how long those ancient woodlands and herds of red and fallow deer had survived the winds of change. Now, the Park could be no more than a darkened desert, populated only by cacti and a few olives. I felt my heart harden. Perhaps these Morlocks were wise and patient perhaps their industrious pursuit of knowledge on the Sphere was to be applauded — but their neglect of the ancient earth was a shame!

  We reached the vicinity of the Park’s Richmond Gate, close to the site of the Star and Garter, perhaps half a mile from the site of my house. On a level patch of land, a rectangular platform of soft glass had been laid; this platform shimmered in the patchy star-light. It appeared to be manufactured of that marvelous, glassy material of which the Sphere Floor was composed; and from its surface had been evoked a variety of the podiums and partitions which I had come to recognize as the characteristic tools of the Morlocks. These were abandoned now; there was nobody about but Nebogipfel and I. And there — at the heart of the platform — I saw a squat and ugly tangle of brass and nickel, with ivory like bleached bone shining in the star-light, and a bicycle-saddle in the middle of it all: it was my Time Machine, evidently intact, and ready to take me home!

  [22]

  Rotations And Deceptions

  I felt my heart pump; I found it difficult to walk at a steady pace behind Nebogipfel — but walk I did. I dropped my hands into my jacket pockets and I grasped the two control levers there. I was already close enough to the machine to see the studs on which the levers must be fitted for the thing to work — and I meant to launch the machine as soon as I could, and to get away from this place!

  “As you can see,” Nebogipfel was saying, “the machine is undamaged — we have moved it, but not attempted to pry into its workings…”

  I sought to distract him from his close attention. “Tell me: now that you’ve studied my machine, and listened to my theories on the subject, what is your impression?”

  “Your machine is an extraordinary achievement — ahead of its age.”

  I have never been one with much patience for compliments. “But it is the Plattnerite which enabled me to construct it,” I said.

  “Yes. I would like to study this ’Plattnerite’ more closely.” He donned his goggles, and studied the machine’s shimmering quartz bars. “We have talked — a little — of multiple Histories: of the possible existence of several editions of the world. You have witnessed two yourself—”

  “The history of Eloi and Morlock, and the History of the Sphere.”

  “You must think of these versions of History as parallel corridors, stretching ahead of you. Your machine allows you to go back and forth along a corridor. The corridors exist independently of each other: looking ahead from any point, a man looking along one corridor will see a complete and self-consistent History — he can have no knowledge of another corridor, and nor can the corridors influence each other.

  “But in some corridors conditions may be very different. In some, even the laws of physics may differ…”

  “Go on.”

  “You said the operation of your machine depended on a twisting about of Space and Time,” he said. “Turning a Journey in Time into one through Space. Well, I agree: that is, indeed, how the Plattnerite exerts its effects. But how is this achieved?

  “Picture, now,” he said, “a universe — another History — in which this Space-Time twisting is greatly pronounced.”

  He went on to describe a variant of the universe almost beyond my imagining: in which rotation was embedded in the very fabric of the universe.

  “Rotation suffuses every point of Space and Time. A stone, thrown outward from any point, would be seen to follow a spiral path: its inertia would act like a compass, swinging around the launch point. It is even thought by some that our own universe might undergo such a rotation, but on an immensely slow scale: taking a hundred thousand million years to complete a single turn…

  “The rotating-universe idea was first described some decades after your time — by Kurt Gödel, in fact.”

  “Gödel?” It took me a moment to place the name. “The man who will demonstrate the imperfectibility of mathematics?”

  “The same.”

  We walked around the machine, and I kept my stiff fingers wrapped around the levers. I planned to maneuver myself into precisely the most propitious spot to reach the machine. “Tell me how this explains the operation of my machine.”

  “It is to do with axis-twisting. In a rotating universe, a journey through space, but reaching the past or future, is possible. Our universe rotates, but so slowly that such a path would be a hundred thousand million light years long, and would take the best part of a million million years to traverse!”

  “Of little practical use, then.”

  “But imagine a universe of greater density than ours: a universe as dense, everywhere, as the heart of an atom of matter. There, a rotation would be complete in mere fractions of a second.”

  “But we are not in such a universe.” I waved my hand through empty space. “That is evident.”

  “But perhaps you are! — for fractions of a second, and thanks to your machine — or at least to its Plattnerite component.

  “My hypothesis is that, because of some property of the Plattnerite, your Time Machine is flickering back and forth to this ultra-dense universe, and on each traverse is exploiting that reality’s axis-twisting to travel along a succession of loops into the past or future! So you spiral through time…”

  I considered these ideas. They were extraordinary — of course! — but, it seemed to me, no more than a somewhat fantastic extension of my preliminary thoughts of the intertwining of Space and Time, and the fluidity of their relevant axes. And besides, my subjective impression of time travel was bound up with feelings of twisting — of rotation.

  “These ideas are startling — but I believe they would bear further examination,” I told Nebogipfel.

  He looked up at me. “Your flexibility of mind is impressive, for a man of your evolutionary era.”

  I barely heard his dismissive remark. I was close enough now. Nebogipfel touched a rail of the machine, with one cautious finger. The device shimmered, belying its bulk, and a breeze ruffled the fine hairs on Nebogipfel’s arm. He snatched his hand back. I stared at the studs, rehearsing in my mind the simple action of lifting the levers out of my pockets and fitting them to the studs. It would take less than a second! Could I complete the action before Nebogipfel could render me unconscious, with his green rays?

  The darkness closed in around me, and the stink of Morlock was strong. In a moment, I thought with a surge of irrepressible eagerness, I might be gone from all this.

  “Is something wrong?” Nebogipfel was watching my face with those great, dark eyes of his, and his stance was upright and tense. Already he was suspicious! — had I betrayed myself? And already, in the darkness beyond, I knew, the muzzles of countless guns must be raised towards me — I had bare seconds before I was lost!

  Blood roared in my ears — I hauled the levers from my pockets — and, with a cry, I fell forward over the machine. I jammed the little bars down on their studs and with a single motion I wrenched the levers back. The machine shuddered — in that last moment there was a flash of green, and I thought it was all up for me! — and then the stars disappeared, and silence fell on me. I felt an extraordinary twisting sensation, and then that dreadful feeling of plummeting — but I welcomed the discomfort, for this was the familiar experience of time travel!

  I yelled out loud. I had succeeded — I was journeying back through time — I was free!

  …And then I became aware of a coolness around my throat — a softness, as if some insect had settled there, a rustling.

  I lifted my hand to my neck — and touched Morlock hair!

  [BOOK TWO]

  Paradox

  [1]

  The Chronic Argo

  I wrapped my hand around that thin forearm and
prized it from my neck. A hairy body lay sprawled across the nickel and brass beside me — a thin, goggled face was close to mine — the sweet, fetid smell of Morlock was powerful!

  “Nebogipfel.”

  His voice was small and shallow, and his chest seemed to be pumping. Was he afraid? “So you have escaped. And so easily—”

  He looked like a doll of rags and horse-hair, clinging as he was to my machine. He was a reminder of that nightmarish world which I had escaped — I could have thrown him off in a moment, I am sure — and yet, I stayed my hand.

  “Perhaps you Morlocks underestimated my capacity for action,” I snapped at him. “But you — you suspected, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. Just in that last second… I have become adept, I think, at interpreting the unconscious language of your body. I realized you were planning to operate the machine — I had just time to reach you, before…

  “Do you think we could straighten up?” he whispered. “I am in some discomfort, and I fear falling off the machine.”

  He looked at me as I considered this proposition. I felt that there was a decision I had to make, of sorts; was I to accept him as a fellow passenger on the machine — or not?

  But I would scarce throw him off; I knew myself well enough for that!

  “Oh, very well.”

  And so we two Chronic Argonauts executed an extraordinary ballet, there amid the tangle of my machine. I kept a grip of Nebogipfel’s arm — to save him from falling, and to ensure that he did not try to reach the controls of the machine — and twisted my way around until I was sitting upright on the saddle. I was not a nimble man even when young, and by the time I had achieved this goal I was panting and irritable. Nebogipfel, meanwhile, lodged himself in a convenient section of the machine’s construction.

  “Why did you follow me, Nebogipfel?”

  Nebogipfel stared out at the dark, attenuated landscape of time travel, and would not reply.

  Still, I thought I understood. I remembered his curiosity and wonder at my account of futurity, while we shared the interplanetary capsule. It had been an impulse for the Morlock to climb after me — to discover if time travel was a reality — and an impulse driven by a curiosity descended, like mine, from a monkey’s! I felt obscurely moved by this, and I warmed to Nebogipfel a little. Humanity had changed much in the years that separated us, but here was evidence that curiosity, that relentless drive to find out — and the recklessness that came with it — had not died completely.

  And then we erupted into light above my head I saw the dismantling of the Sphere-bare sunlight flooded the machine, and Nebogipfel howled.

  I discarded my goggles. The uncovered sun, at first, hung stationary in the sky, but before long it had begun to drift from its fixed position; it arced across the heavens, more and more rapid, and the flapping of day and night returned to the earth. At last the sun shot across the sky too rapidly to follow, and it became a band of light, and the alternation of day and night was replaced by that uniform, rather cold, pearl-like glow.

  So, I saw, the regulation of the earth’s axis and rotation was undone.

  The Morlock huddled over himself, his face buried against his chest. He had his goggles on his face, but their protection did not seem to be enough; he seemed to be trying to burrow into the machine’s innards, and his back glowed white in the diluted sunlight.

  I could not help but laugh. I remembered how he had failed to warn me when our earth-bound capsule had dropped out of the Sphere and into space: well, here was retribution! “Nebogipfel, it is only sunlight.”

  Nebogipfel lifted his head. In the increased light, his goggles had blackened to impenetrability; the hair on his face was matted and appeared to be tear-stained. The flesh of his body, visible through the hair, glowed a pale white. “It is not just my eyes,” he said. “Even in this attenuated state the light is painful for me. When we emerge, into the full glare of the sun…”

  “Sun-burn!” I exclaimed. After so many generations of darkness, this Morlock would be more vulnerable, even to the feeble sun of England, than would the palest redhead in the Tropics. I pulled off my jacket. “Here,” I said, “this should help protect you.”

  Nebogipfel pulled the garment around him, huddling under its folds.

  “And besides,” I said, “when I stop the machine, I will ensure we arrive when it is night, so we can find you shelter.” As I thought about this, I realized that to arrive in the hours of darkness would be a good idea in any event: a fine sight I should have made, appearing on Richmond Hill with this monster from the future, in the middle of a crowd of gaping promenaders!

  The permanent greenery receded from the hill-side and we returned to a cycle of seasons. We began our passage back through the Age of Great Buildings which I have described before. Nebogipfel, with the jacket draped over his head, peered out with obvious fascination as bridges and pylons passed over the flickering landscape like mist. As for me, I felt an intense relief that we were approaching my own century.

  Suddenly Nebogipfel hissed — it was a queer, cat-like sound — and pressed himself closer to the fabric of the machine. He stared ahead, his eyes huge and fixed.

  I turned from him, and I realized that the extraordinary optical effects which I had observed during my voyage to the year A.D. 657,208 were again becoming apparent. I had the impression of star-fields, gaudy and crowded, trying to break through the diluted surface of things, all about me… And here, hovering a few yards before the machine, was the Watcher: my impossible companion. Its eyes were fixed on me, and I grabbed at a rail. I stared at that distorted parody of a human face, and those dangling tentacles — and again I was struck by the similarity with the flopping creature I had seen on that remote beach thirty million years hence.

  It is an odd thing, but my goggles — which had been so useful in resolving the Morlock darkness — were of no help to me as I studied this creature; I saw it no more clearly than I could with my naked eyes.

  I became aware of a low mumbling, like a whimper. It was Nebogipfel, clinging to his place in the machine with every evidence of distress.

  “You’ve no need to be afraid,” I said, a little awkwardly. “I told you of my encounter with this creature on my way to your century. It is a strange sight, but it seems to be without harm.”

  Through his shuddery whimpering, Nebogipfel said, “You do not understand. What we see is impossible. Your Watcher apparently has the ability to cross the corridors to traverse between potential versions of History… even to enter the attenuated environs of a traveling Time Machine. It is impossible!”

  And then — as easily as it had arisen — the star-glow faded, and my Watcher receded into invisibility, and the machine surged on its way into the past.

  At length I said to the Morlock harshly, “You must understand this, Nebogipfel: I have no intention of returning to the future, after this last trip.”

  He wrapped his long fingers around the machine’s struts. “I know I cannot return,” he said. “I knew that even as I hurled myself onto the machine. Even if your intention was to return to the future—”

  “Yes?”

  “By its return through time once more, this machine of yours is bound to force another adjustment of History, in an unpredictable way.” He turned to me, his eyes huge behind the goggles. “Do you understand? My History, my home, is lost — perhaps destroyed. I have already become a refugee in time… Just as you are.”

  His words chilled me. Could he be right? Could I be inflicting more damage on the carcass of History with this new expedition, even as I sat here?

  My resolve to put all of this right — to put a stop to the Time Machine’s destructiveness — hardened in me!

  “But if you knew all this was so, your recklessness in following me was folly of the first order—”

  “Perhaps.” His voice was muffled, for he sheltered his head beneath his arms. “But to see such sights as I have already witnessed — to travel in time — to gather such information
… none of my species has ever had such an opportunity!”

  He fell silent, and my sympathy for him grew. I wondered how I might have reacted, had I been presented with a single second of opportunity — as the Morlock had.

  The chronometric dials continued to wind back, and I saw that we were approaching my own century. The world assembled itself into a more familiar configuration, with the Thames firmly set in its old bank, and bridges I thought I recognized flickering into existence over it.

  I pulled the levers over. The sun became visible as a discrete object, flying over our heads like a glowing bullet; and the passage of night was a perceptible flickering. Two of the chronometric dials were already stationary; only thousands of days — a mere few years — remained to be traversed.

  I became aware that Richmond Hill had congealed around me, in more or less the form I recognized from my own day. With the obstructing trees reduced to transient transparency by my travel, I took in a good view of the meadows of Petersham and Twickenham, and all dotted about with stands of ancient trees. It was all reassuring and familiar — despite the fact that my velocity through time was still so high that it was impossible to make out people, or deer, or cows, or other denizens of the Hill, meadows or river; and the flickering of night and day bathed the whole scene in an unnatural glow — despite all this, I was nearly home!

  I watched my dials as the thousands hand approached its zero — for at zero I was home, and it took all my determination not to halt the machine there and then, for my longing to return to my own Year was strong in the extreme — but I kept the levers pressed over, and watched the dials run on into their negative region.