The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  “CDV? Ah! — I remember. Chronic Displacement Vehicle.”

  In this hangar, these cheerful workmen were laboring to construct Time Machines — and on an industrial scale, it seemed!

  Wallis led me to one of the vehicles, which looked pretty much complete. This Time-Car, as I thought of it, stood about five feet tall, and was an angular box shape; the cabin looked big enough to carry four or five people, and it sat on three pairs of wheels, about which tracks looped. There were lamps, brackets and other pieces of equipment dotted about. In each corner of the hull was bolted a flask a couple of inches wide; these flasks were evidently hollow, for they had screw caps. The whole was unpainted, and its gun-metal finish reflected the light.

  “It looks a little different from your prototype design, doesn’t it?” Wallis said. “It’s actually based on a standard military vehicle — the Carrier, Universal — and it functions as a motor-car as well, of course. Look here: there’s a Ford V8 engine driving the tracks by these sprockets — see? And you can steer by displacement of this front bogie unit” — he mimed it — “like this; or, if you must make a more savage turn, you can try track braking. The whole thing’s pretty much armored…”

  I pulled at my chin. I wondered how much I would have seen of the worlds I had visited if I had peered at them anxiously from within such an armored Time-Car as this!

  “Plattnerite is essential, of course,” Wallis went on, “but we don’t think there’s any need to go doping components of the machine with the stuff, as you did. Instead, it should be sufficient to fill up these flasks with the raw stuff:” He unscrewed a cap from one of the corner units to show me. “See? And then the thing can be steered through time, if steer is the right verb, from within the cabin.”

  “And have you tried it out?”

  He ran his fingers through his hair, making a lot of it stand on end. “Of course not! — for we have no Plattnerite.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Which is where you come in.”

  Wallis took me to another part of the complex. After more security checks we entered a long, narrow chamber, like a corridor. This chamber had one wall made entirely of glass, and beyond the glass I could see into a larger room, about the size of a tennis court. That larger room was empty. In our narrower companion chamber there were six or seven researchers sitting at desks; each wore the characteristic dirty white coat into which every experimentalist seems born, and they hunched over dials and switches. The researchers looked around at me as we entered — three of them were women — and I was struck by their drawn faces; there was a sort of nervous fatigue about them, despite their apparent youth. One class of instrument kept up a soft clicking, the whole time we were there; this was the sound of “radiation counters,” Wallis told me.

  The larger chamber beyond the glass was a simple box of concrete, with unpainted walls. Though quite empty, a monolith of bricks perhaps ten feet tall and six wide stood, square and silent, at the chamber’s center. The bricks were of two sorts, light and dark gray, alternating in a neat pattern. This monolith was held up from the floor on a layer of thicker slabs, and wires trailed from it to sealed orifices in the walls of the room.

  Wallis stared through the glass. “Remarkable — isn’t it? — that something so ugly, so simple, should have such profound implications. We should be safe here — the glass is leaded — and besides, the reaction is subdued at present.”

  I recognized the heap from the Babble Machine show. “This is your fission machine?”

  “It is the world’s second Graphite Reactor,” Wallis said. “It’s pretty much a copy of the first, which Fermi built at the University of Chicago.” He smiled. “He put it up in a squash court, I understand. It’s a remarkable story.”

  “Yes,” I said, becoming irritated, “but what is Reacting with what?”

  “Ah,” he said, and he took off his spectacles and polished the lenses on the end of his tie. “I’ll try to explain…”

  Needless to say, he took some time about this, but I managed to distill the essence of it for my understanding.

  I had already learned from Nebogipfel that there is a substructure within the atom — and that Thomson would take one of the first steps to this understanding. Now I learned that this substructure can be changed. This may happen through a coalescing of one atomic core with another, or perhaps spontaneously, through the breaking-up of a massive atom; and this disintegration is called atomic fission.

  And, since the sub-structure determines the identity of the atom, the result of such changes is nothing less, of course, than the transmutation of one element into another — the ancient dream of the Alchemists!

  “Now,” said Wallis, “you won’t be surprised to learn that on each atomic disintegration, some energy is released — for the atoms are always seeking a more stable, lower energy state. Do you follow?”

  “Of course.”

  “So, in this pile, we have six tons of Carolinum, fifty tons of uranium oxide, and four hundred tons of graphite blocks… and it is producing a flood of invisible energy, even as we look at it.”

  “Carolinum? I have not heard of that.”

  “It is a new, artificial element, produced by bombardment. Its half period is seventeen days — that is, it loses half its store of energy in that period.”

  I looked again at that nondescript heap of bricks: it looked so plain, so unprepossessing! — and yet, I thought, if what Wallis said about the energy of the atomic core was true…

  “What are the applications of this energy?”

  He popped his glasses back onto his nose. “We see three broad areas. First, the provision of energy from a compact source: with such a pile aboard, we can envisage submarine Juggernauts which could spend months below the ocean, without the need to refuel; or we could build high-altitude Bombers which could circle the earth dozens of times before having to land — and so forth.

  “Second, we’re using the pile to irradiate materials. We can use the byproducts of uranium fission to transmute other materials — in fact, a number of samples are being run in there for Professor Gödel just now, to support some obscure experiment of his. You can’t see them, of course — the sample bottles are within the pile itself…”

  “And the third application?”

  “Ah,” he said, and once more his eyes took on that remote, calculating look.

  “I see it already,” I said grimly. “This atomic energy would make a fine Bomb.”

  “Of course there are severe practical problems to solve,” he said. “The production of the right isotopes in sufficient quantities… the timing of preliminary explosions… but, yes; it looks as if one could make a Bomb powerful enough to flatten a city — Dome and all — a Bomb small enough to fit into a suitcase.”

  [10]

  Professor Gödel

  We set off through more of the narrow concrete corridors, emerging at last in the College’s main office block. We came to a corridor carpeted in plush pile, with portraits of eminent men of the past on the walls — you know the sort of place: a Mausoleum for Dead Scientists! There were soldiers about, but they were discreet in their presence.

  It was here that Kurt Gödel had been awarded an office.

  With quick, efficient strokes, Wallis sketched out Gödel’s life for me. He was born in Austria, and took his degree, in mathematics, in Vienna. Influenced by the gaggle of Logical Positivist Thinkers he found there (I have never had much time for Philosophizing myself), Gödel’s interests drifted towards logic and the foundations of mathematics.

  By 1931 — he was just twenty-five — Gödel had published his startling thesis on the eternal Incompleteness of Mathematics.

  Later, he showed interest in the physicists’ newly emerging studies of Space and Time, and he produced speculative papers on the possibility of time travel. (These must have been the published studies to which Nebogipfel had referred, I thought.) Soon, under pressure from the Reich, he was moved to Berlin, where he began work on the military applications
of time traveling.

  We reached a door on which a brass plate bearing Gödel’s name had been fixed — so recently, in fact, that I spotted spindles of wood from the drilling on the carpet below.

  Wallis warned me that I could have only a few minutes on this visit. He knocked on the door.

  A thin, high, voice within called: “Come!”

  We entered a roomy office with a high ceiling, fine carpet and rich wallpaper, and a desk inlaid with green leather. Once this room must have been sunny, I realized, for the wide windows — now curtained — faced westwards: in fact, in the direction of the Terrace where I was lodged.

  The man at the desk continued to write as we entered; he kept his arm tucked around the page, evidently lest we see. He was a short, thin, sickly-looking man, with a high, fragile forehead; his suit was of wool and quite crumpled. He was in his thirties, I judged.

  Wallis cocked an eyebrow at me. “He’s a rum cove,” he whispered, “but a remarkable mind.”

  There were book-shelves all around the room, though currently bare; the carpet was piled high with crates, and books and journals — mostly in German — had spilled out in uneven piles. In one crate I caught a glimpse of scientific equipment, and various sample bottles — and in one such, I saw something which made my heart pound with excitement!

  I turned resolutely from the crate, and tried to conceal my agitation.

  At last, with a gasp of exasperation, the man at the desk hurled his pen from him — it clattered against a wall — and he crumpled the written pages within his fists, before discarding the whole lot — everything he had written — in a wastebin!

  Now he glanced up, as if noticing we were there for the first time. “Ah,” he said. “Wallis.” He tucked his hands behind his desk and seemed to shrink inside himself.

  “Professor Gödel, it’s good of you to let us visit you. This is—” He introduced me.

  “Ah,” Gödel said again, and he grinned, showing uneven teeth. “Of course.” Now he stood, in angular jerks, and stepped around the desk and proffered his hand. I took it; it was thin, bony and cold. He said, “The pleasure is mine. I anticipate we will have many engrossing discussions.” His English was good, lightly accented.

  Wallis took the initiative and waved us to a set of arm-chairs close to the window.

  “I hope you find a place for yourself in this New Age,” Gödel said to me sincerely. “It may be a little more savage than the world you remember. But perhaps, like me, you will be tolerated as a useful Eccentric. Yes?”

  Wallis blustered, “Oh, come now, Professor—”

  “Eccentric,” he snapped. “Ekkentros — out of the center.” His eyes swiveled to me. “That’s what we both are, I suspect — a little out of the center of things. Come, Wallis, I know you steady British think I’m a little odd.”

  “Well—”

  “Poor Wallis can’t get used to my habit of my drafting and redrafting my correspondence,” Gödel said to me. “Sometimes I will go through a dozen drafts or more — and still finish by abandoning the piece altogether — as you saw! Is that strange? Well. So be it!”

  I said, “You must have some regrets at leaving your home, Professor.”

  “None. None. I had to get away from Europe,” he said to me, and his voice was low, like a conspirator’s.

  “Why?”

  “Because of the Kaiser, of course.”

  Barnes Wallis shot me warning glares.

  “I have evidence, you know,” Gödel said intently. “Take two photographs — one from 1915, say, and one from this year, of the man purporting to be Kaiser Wilhelm. If you measure the length of the nose, and take its ratio with the distance from the tip of the nose to the point of the chin — you’ll find it different!”

  “I — ah — Great Scott!”

  “Indeed. And with such a simulacrum at the helm — who knows where Germany is heading? Eh?”

  “Quite,” said Wallis hastily. “Anyway, whatever your motives, we’re glad you accepted our offer of a Professorship here — that you chose Britain to make your home.”

  “Yes,” I said, “couldn’t you have found a place in America? Perhaps at Princeton, or—”

  He looked shocked. “I’m sure I could. But it would be quite impossible. Quite impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the Constitution, of course!” And now this extraordinary chap went into a long and rambling discourse on how he had discovered a logical loop-hole in the American Constitution, which would allow the legal creation of a dictatorship!

  Wallis and I sat and endured this.

  “Well,” Gödel said when he had run down, “what do you think of that?”

  I got more stern looks from Wallis, but I decided to be honest. “I can’t fault your logic,” I said, “but its application strikes me as outlandish in the extreme.”

  He snorted. “Well — perhaps! — but logic is everything. Don’t you think? The axiomatic method is very powerful.” He smiled. “I also have an ontological proof for the existence of God — quite faultless, as far as I can see — and with honorable antecedents, going back eight hundred years to Archbishop Anselm. You see—”

  “Perhaps another time, Professor,” Wallis said.

  “Ah — yes. Very well.” He looked from one to other of us — his gaze was piercing, quite unnerving. “So. Time travel. I’m really quite envious of you, you know.”

  “For my traveling?”

  “Yes. But not for all this tedious hopping about through History.” His eyes were watery; they gleamed in the strong electric light.

  “What, then?”

  “Why, for the glimpses of other Worlds than this — other Possibilities — do you see?”

  I felt chilled; his grasp seemed extraordinary — almost telepathic. “Tell me what you mean.”

  “The reality of other Worlds, containing a meaning beyond that of our brief existence, seems evident to me. Anyone who has experienced the wonder of mathematical discovery must know that mathematical Truths have an independent existence from the minds in which they lodge — that the Truths are splinters of the thoughts of some higher Mind…

  “Look: our lives, here on earth, have but a dubious meaning. And so their true significance must lie outside this world. Do you see? So much is mere logic. And the idea that everything in the world has an ultimate Meaning is an exact analogue of the principle that everything has a Cause — a principle on which rests all of science.

  “It follows, immediately, that somewhere beyond our History is the Final World — the World where all Meaning is resolved.

  “Time travel, by its very nature, results in the perturbation of History, and hence the generation, or discovery, of Worlds other than this. Therefore the task of the Time Traveler is to search — to search on, until that Final World is found — or built!”

  By the time we left Gödel, my thoughts were racing. I resolved never to mock Mathematical Philosophers again, for this odd little man had journeyed further in Time, Space and Understanding, without leaving his office, than I ever had in my Time Machine! And I knew that I must indeed visit Gödel again soon… for I was convinced that I had seen a flask of raw Plattnerite, tucked inside his crate!

  [11]

  The New World Order

  I was returned to our lodging at about six. I came in calling halloos, and found the rest of my party in the smoking-room. The Morlock was still poring over his notes — he seemed to be trying to reconstruct the whole of this future science of Quantum Mechanics from his own imperfect memory — but he jumped up when I came in. “Did you find him? Gödel?”

  “I did.” I smiled at him. “And — yes! — you were right.” I glanced at Filby, but the poor old chap was dozing over a magazine, and could not hear us. “I think Gödel has some Plattnerite.”

  “Ah.” The Morlock’s face was as inexpressive as ever, but he thumped one fist into the other palm in a decidedly human gesture. “Then there is hope.”

  Now Moses
walked up to me; he handed me a glass of what proved to be whisky-and-water. I gulped at the drink gratefully, for the day had stayed as hot as in the morning.

  Moses moved a little closer to me, and the three of us bent our heads together and spoke quietly. “I’ve come to a conclusion as well,” Moses said.

  “Which is?”

  “That we must indeed get out of here — by any means possible!”

  Moses told me the story of his day. Growing bored with his confinement, he had struck up conversations with our young soldier-guards. Some of these were privates, but others were Officer-class; and all of those assigned to guard us and to other duties in this scientific campus area were generally intelligent and well-educated. They seemed to have taken a liking to Moses, and had invited him to a nearby hostelry — the Queen’s Arms in Queen’s Gate Mews — and later they had taken rickshaws into the West End. Over several drinks, these young people had evidently enjoyed arguing through their ideas — and the concepts of their new Modern State — with this stranger from the past.

  For my part I was pleased that Moses seemed to be shaking off his timidity, and was showing interest in the world in which we found ourselves. I listened to what he had to say with fascination.

  “These youngsters are all highly likable,” Moses said. “Competent — practical — clearly brave. But their views!”

  The great concept of the future — Moses had learned — was to be Planning. When the Modern State was in place, as directed by a victorious Britain and her Allies, an Air and Sea Control would take effective possession of all the ports, coal mines, oil wells, power stations and mines. Similarly a Transport Control would take over the world’s shipyards and turn them away from warships to manufacturing steel cargo ships. The Allied Supply Control would organize the production of iron, steel, rubber, metals, cotton, wool and vegetable substances. And the Food Control…

  “Well!” Moses said. “You get the picture. It’s an end of Ownership, you see; all these resources will be owned by the new Allied World State. The resources of the world will be made to work together, at last, for the repair of the War-ravaged lands — and later, for the betterment of Humanity. All Planned, you see, by an all-wise, all-knowing Fellowship — who, by the by, will elect themselves!”