The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  “Aside from that last, it doesn’t sound so bad,” I mused.

  “Maybe — but this Planning isn’t to stop with the physical resources of the planet. It includes the human resources as well.

  “And that’s where the problems start. First of all there is behavior.” He looked at me. “These youngsters don’t look back with much favor on our times,” he said. “We suffer from a ’profound laxity of private conduct’ — so I was informed! These new types have gone back the other way: towards a severe austerity — particularly regarding sexual excitement. Decent busy-ness! — that is the order of the day.”

  I felt a twinge of nostalgia. “I suppose this bodes ill for the future of the Empire, Leicester Square.”

  “Closed already! Demolished? — to make way for a Railway Planning Office.

  “And it goes on. In the next phase, things will get a little more active. We will see the painless destruction of the more ’pitiful sorts of defectives’ — these are not my words! — and also the sterilization of some types who would otherwise have transmitted tendencies that are, I quote, ’plainly undesirable.’ “

  “In some parts of Britain, it seems, this cleansing process has already begun. They have a type of gas called Pabst’s Kinetogens…

  “Well. You can see that they are making a start here at directing Humanity’s racial heredity.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “I find myself with a deep distrust of such normalizing, Is it really so desirable that the future of the human species should be filtered through the ’tolerance’ of the Englishman of 1938? Should his long shadow stretch down, through all the millions of years to come?”

  “It’s all Planning, you see,” Moses said. “And, they say, the only alternative is a relapse through chaotic barbarism — to final extinction.”

  “Are men — modern men — capable of such epochal deeds?”

  Moses said, “There will surely be bloodshed and conflict on a scale not yet envisaged — even by the standards of this dull, ghastly War as the majority of the world resists the imposition of a flawed Plan by these Allied technocrats.”

  I met Moses’s eyes, and I recognized there a certain righteous anger, an infuriation at the foolishness of mankind, which had informed my own, younger soul. I had always had a distrust of the advancement, willy-nilly, of civilization, for it seemed to me an unstable edifice which must one day collapse about the foolish heads of its makers; and this Modern State business seemed about the most extreme folly, short of actual War, I had heard in awhile! It was as if I could see Moses’s thoughts in his gray eye — she had thrown off his funk, and become a younger, more determined version of me — and I had not felt closer to him since we met.

  “Well, then,” I said, “the matter is decided. I don’t think any of us can tolerate such a future.” Moses shook his head — Nebogipfel appeared to acquiesce — and, for my part, I renewed my resolve to put an end to this time-traveling business once and for all. “We must escape. But how—”

  And then, even before I could finish framing the question, the house shook.

  I was hurled down, nearly catching my head on the desk. There was a rumble — a deep boom, like the slamming of a door, deep inside the earth. The lamps flickered, but did not die. All around me there were cries — poor Filby whimpered — and I heard the tinkle of glass, the clatter of falling furniture.

  The building seemed to settle. Coughing, for an inordinate quantity of dust had been raised, I struggled to my feet. “Is everyone all right? Moses? Morlock?”

  Moses had already turned to help Nebogipfel. The Morlock seemed unhurt, but he’d got himself caught under a fallen bookcase.

  I let them be and looked for Filby. The old chap had been lucky; he’d not even been thrown out of his chair. But now he stood up and made his way to the window, which was cracked clean across.

  I reached him and put my arms around his bowed shoulders. “Filby, my dear chap — come away.”

  But he ignored me. His rheumy eyes streaming with water, and his face caked with dust, he raised a crooked finger to the window. “Look.”

  I leaned closer to the glass, cupping my hand against the reflection of the electric lamps. The Babble Machine Aldis lamps had died, as had many of the street-lamps. I saw people running, distraught an abandoned bicycle — a soldier with his mask over his face, firing shots into the air… and there, a little further in the distance, was a shaft of brilliant light, a vertical slice of scudding dust-motes; it picked out a cross-section of streets, houses, a corner of Hyde Park. People stood in its glare, blinking like owls, their hands before their faces.

  The shaft of brilliancy was daylight. The Dome was breached.

  [12]

  The German Assault on London

  Our street door was hanging from its hinges, evidently shaken open by the concussion. There was no sign of the soldiers who had been guarding us — not even of the faithful Puttick. Outside in the Terrace, we heard the clatter of running footsteps, screams and angry shouts, the shrill of whistles, and we could smell dust, smoke and cordite. That fragment of June daylight, bright and sharp, hung over everything; the people of carapaced London blinked like disturbed owls, baffled and terrified.

  Moses clapped me on the shoulder. “This chaos won’t last long; now’s our chance.”

  “Very well. I’ll fetch Nebogipfel and Filby; you collect some supplies from the house—”

  “Supplies? What supplies?”

  I was irritated: what fool would proceed into time equipped with nothing more than a house-coat and slippers? “Oh — candles. And matches! As many as you can find. Any fashion of a weapon — a kitchen knife will do if there’s nothing better.” What else — what else? “Camphor, if we have it. Underwear! — fill your pockets with the stuff…”

  He nodded. “I understand. I’ll pack a satchel.” He turned from the door and made for the kitchen.

  I hurried back to the smoking-room. Nebogipfel had donned his schoolboy’s cap; he had gathered up his notes and was slipping them into a cardboard file. Filby — poor old devil! — was down on his knees beneath the window-frame; he had his bony knees tucked up against his concave chest, and his hands were up before his face, like a boxer’s guard.

  I knelt before him. “Filby. Filby, old chap—” I reached out to him but he flinched from me. “You must come with us. It’s not safe here.”

  “Safe? And will it be safer with you? Eh? You… conjurer. You quack.” His eyes, flooded with tears from the dust, were bright, like windows, and he hurled those words at me as if they were the vilest insults imaginable. “I remember you — when you scared the life out of all of us with that damned ghost trick of yours, that Christmas-time. Well, I’ll not be fooled again!”

  I restrained myself from shaking him. “Oh, have some sense, man! Time travel is no trick — and certainly this desperate War of yours isn’t!”

  There was a touch on my shoulder. It was Nebogipfel; his pale fingers seemed to glow in the fragments of daylight from the window. “We cannot help him,” he said gently.

  Filby had dropped his head into his trembling, liver-spotted hands now, and I was convinced he could no longer hear me.

  “But we can’t leave him like this!”

  “What will you do — restore him to 1891? The 1891 you remember doesn’t even exist any more — except across some unreachable Dimension.”

  Now Moses burst into the smoking-room, a small, crammed knapsack in his hand; he had donned his epaulets and his gasmask was at his waist. “I’m ready,” he gasped. Nebogipfel and I did not respond immediately, and Moses glanced from one to the other of us. “What is it? What are you waiting for?”

  I reached out and squeezed Filby’s shoulder. At least he did not resist, and I took this as a last shred of friendly contact between us.

  That was the last I saw of him.

  We looked out into the street. This had been a comparatively quiet part of London, to my memory; but today people poured through the Queen’s Ga
te Terrace, running, stumbling, bumping up against each other. Men and women had simply decanted from their homes and work-places. Most of them had their heads hidden by gas-masks, but where I could see faces, I read pain, misery and fear.

  There seemed to be children everywhere, mostly in drab school uniforms, with their small, shaped gas-masks; for the schools had evidently been closed up. The children wandered about the street, crying for their parents; I considered the agony of a mother searching for a child in the huge, teeming ant-hill which London had become, and my imagination recoiled.

  Some people carried the paraphernalia of the working day — briefcases and handbags, familiar and useless — and others had already gathered up bundles of household belongings, and bore them in bulging suitcases or wrapped up in curtains and sheets. We saw one thin, intense man stumbling along with an immense dresser, packed no doubt with valuables, balanced on the handlebars and saddle of a bicycle. The wheel of his cycle bumped against backs and legs. “Go on! Go on!” he cried, to those ahead of him.

  There was no evidence of authority or control. If there were policemen, or soldiers, they must have been overwhelmed — or had torn off their insignia and joined the rush. I saw a man in the uniform of the Salvation Army; he stood on a step and bawled: “Eternity! Eternity!”

  Moses pointed. “Look — the Dome is breached to the east, towards Stepney. So much for the impregnability of this marvelous Roof!”

  I saw that he was right. It looked as if a great Bomb had punched an immense hole in the concrete shell, close to the eastern horizon. Above that main wound, the Dome had cracked like an eggshell, and a great irregular ribbon of blue sky was visible, almost all the way up to the Dome’s zenith above me. I could see that the damage hadn’t settled yet, for bits of masonry — some the size of houses — were raining down, all over that part of the city, and I knew that the damage and loss of life on the ground must be vast.

  In the distance — to the north, I thought — I heard a sequence of dull booms, like the footsteps of a giant. All around us the air was rent by the wail of sirens — “ulla, ulla, ulla” — and by the immense groans of the broken Dome above us.

  I imagined looking down from the Dome, on a London transformed in moments from a fearful but functioning city to a bowl of chaos and terror. Every road leading west, south or north, away from the Dome breach, would be stippled black with streaming refugees, with each dot in that stippling representing a human being, a mote of physical suffering and misery: each one a lost child, a bereft spouse or parent.

  Moses had to shout over the cacophony of the street. “That confounded Dome is going to come down on us all, any minute!”

  “I know. We must get to Imperial College. Come on — use your shoulders! Nebogipfel, help us if you can.”

  We stepped to the middle of the crowded street. We had to go eastwards, against the flow of the crowd. Nebogipfel, evidently dazzled by the daylight, was almost knocked down by a running, moon-faced man in a business suit and epaulets who shook his fist at the Morlock. After that, Moses and I kept the Morlock between us, each with a skinny arm clamped in one fist. I collided with a cyclist, almost knocking him off his vehicle; he screamed at me, incoherent, and swung a bony punch, which I ducked; then he wobbled on into the press of people behind me, his tie draped over his shoulder. Now there, came a fat woman who stumbled backwards up the street, lugging a rolled-up carpet behind her; her skirt had ridden up over her knees, and her calves were streaked with dust. Every few feet, some other refugee would stand on her carpet, or a cyclist’s wheel would run over it, and the woman would stumble; she wore her mask, and I could see tears pooling behind those goggles as she struggled with the unreasonable, unmanageable mass that was so important to her.

  Where I could see a human face it didn’t seem so bad, for I could feel a shard of fellow feeling for this red-eyed clerk, or that tired shopgirl; but, with the gas-masks, and in that patchy, shadowed illumination, the crowd was rendered anonymous and insectile; it was as if I had once more been transported away from the earth to some remote planet of nightmares.

  Now there came a new sound — a thin, shrill monotone, which pierced the air. It seemed to me it came from that breach to the east. The crowds around us seemed to pause in their scrambling past each other, as if listening. Moses and I looked at each other, baffled as to the meaning of this new, menacing development.

  Then the whistling stopped.

  In the silence that followed, a single voice set up a call: “Shell! That’s a bloomin’ shell—”

  Now I knew what those distant giant’s footsteps to the north had signified: it was the landing of an artillery barrage.

  The pause broke. The panic erupted around us, more frantic than ever. I reached over Nebogipfel and grabbed at Moses’s shoulders; without ceremony I wrestled him, and the Morlock, to the ground, and a layer of people stumbled around us, covering us with warm, squirming flesh. In that last moment, as limbs battered against my face, I could hear the thin voice of that Salvation Army man, still shrieking out his call: “E-ternity! E-ternity!”

  And then there was a flash, bright even under that heap of flesh, and a surge of motion through the earth. I was lifted up — my head cracked against another man’s — and then I was cast to the ground, for the moment insensible.

  [13]

  The Shelling

  I awoke to find Moses with his hands under my arm-pits, dragging me from beneath fallen bodies. My foot caught on something — I think it was a bicycle-frame — and I cried out; Moses gave me a moment to twist my foot free of the obstruction, and then he hauled me free.

  “Are you all right?” He touched my forehead with his fingertips, and they came away bloody. He had lost his knapsack, I saw.

  I felt dizzy, and a huge pain seemed to be hovering around my head, waiting to descend; I knew that when I lost this momentary numbness, I should suffer indeed. But there was no time. “Where’s Nebogipfel?”

  “Here.”

  The Morlock stood in the street, unharmed; he had lost his cap, though, and his goggles were starred by some flying fragment. His notes were scattered about, their file having burst, and Nebogipfel watched the pages blow away.

  People had been scattered like skittles by the blast and concussion. All round us, they lay in awkward positions, with body on top of body, flung arm, twisted feet, open mouth, staring eyes, old men on top of young women, a child lying on a soldier’s back. There was much stirring and groaning, as people struggled to rise — I was reminded of nothing so much as a heap of insects, squirming over each other — and here and there I saw splashes of blood, dark against flesh and clothing.

  “My God,” Moses said with feeling. “We have to help these people. Can you see—?”

  “No,” I snapped at him. “We can’t — there are too many; there’s nothing we can do. We’re lucky to be alive — don’t you see that? And now that the guns have got their range — Come! We have to stick to our intention; we have to escape from here, and into time.”

  “I can’t bear it,” Moses said. “I’ve never seen such sights.”

  The Morlock came up to us now. “I fear there’s worse to see before we’re done with this century of yours,” he said grimly.

  So we went on. We stumbled over a road surface become slippery with blood and excrement. We passed a boy, moaning and helpless, evidently with a shattered leg; despite my earlier admonitions, Moses and I were quite unable to resist his plaintive weeping and cries for help, and we bent to lift him from where he lay, close to the body of a milkman, and we sat him up against a wall. A woman emerged from the crowd, saw the child’s plight and came to him; she began to wipe his face with a handkerchief.

  “Is she his mother?” Moses asked me.

  “I don’t know. I—”

  That odd, liquid voice sounded behind us, like a call from another world. “Come.”

  We went on, and at length we reached the corner of Queen’s Gate with the Terrace; and we saw how this had
been the epicenter of the blast.

  “No gas, at least,” I said.

  “No,” Moses said, his voice tight. “But — oh, God! — this is enough!”

  There was a crater, torn into the road surface, a few feet across. Doors were beaten in, and there was not a window left intact as far as I could see; curtains dangled, useless. There were subsidiary craters in the pavements and walls, left by bits of shrapnel from the exploded shell.

  And the people…

  Sometimes language is incapable of portraying the full horror of a scene; sometimes the communication of remembered events between humans, which is the basis of our shared society, breaks down. This was one such time. I could not communicate the horror of that London street to anyone who did not witness it.

  Heads were blown off. One lay on the pavement, quite neatly, beside a small suitcase. Arms and legs littered the scene, most still clothed; here I saw one outstretched limb with a watch at the wrist — I wondered if it was still working! — and here, on a small, detached hand which lay close to the crater, I saw fingers curled upwards like a flower’s petals. To describe it so sounds absurd — comical! Even at the time I had to force myself to understand that these detached components had comprised, a few minutes ago, conscious human beings, each with a life and hope of his own. But these bits of cooling flesh seemed no more human to me than the pieces of a smashed-up bicycle, which I saw scattered across the road.

  I had never seen such sights before; I felt detached from it all, as if I were moving through the landscape of a dream — but I knew that I should forever revisit this carnage in my soul. I thought of the Interior of the Morlocks’ Sphere, and imagined it as a bowl filled with a million points of horror and suffering, each as ghastly as this. And the thought that such madness could descend on London — my London — filled me with an anguish that caused a sensation of actual physical pain in my throat.