The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  After perhaps half a mile of this, the trees thinned; I walked through a fringe of palm trees and into the glare of sunlight, and rough, young sand scraped against my boots. I found myself at the head of a beach. Beyond a strip of white sand a body of water glittered, so wide I could not see its far side. The sun was low in the sky behind me, but quite intense; I could feel its warmth pressing on the flesh of my neck and scalp.

  In the distance — some way from me, along the long, straight beach — I saw a family of Diatryma birds. The two adults preened, wrapping their necks around each other, while three fledglings waded about on their ungainly legs, splashing and hooting, or sat in the water and shivered moisture into their oily feathers. The whole ensemble, with their black plumage, clumsy frames and minuscule wings, looked comical, but I kept a careful eye on their movements while I was there, for even the smallest of the youngsters was three or four feet tall, and quite muscular.

  I walked to the edge of the water; I moistened my fingers and licked them. The water was salty: sea water.

  I thought the sun had dipped lower, behind the forest, and it must be descending into the west. Therefore I had walked perhaps half a mile to the east of the Time-Car’s position, so here I was — I pictured it — somewhere near the intersection of Knightsbridge and Sloane Street. And, in this Palaeocene Age, it was the fringe of a Sea! I was looking across this ocean, which appeared to cover all of London to the east of Hyde Park Corner. Perhaps, I mused, this Sea was some extension of the North Sea or Channel, which had intruded into London. If I was right, we had been quite lucky; if the level of the seas had raised itself just a little further, Nebogipfel and I should have emerged into the depths of the ocean, and not at its shore.

  I took off my boots and socks, tied them to my belt by their laces, and waded a short way into the water. The liquid was cool as it worked around my toes; I was tempted to dip my face into it, but I refrained, for fear of the interaction of the salt with my wounds. I found a depression in the sand, which looked as if it would form a pool at low tide. I dug my hands into the sand here, and came up immediately with a collection of creatures: burrowing bivalves, gastropods, and what looked like oysters. There seemed to be a small variety of species, but there was evidently a high abundance of specimens in this fertile Sea.

  There at the fringe of that ocean, with the gurgling water lapping about my toes and fingers, and with the sun warm on my neck, a great feeling of peace descended on me. As a child I had been taken for day-trips by my parents to Lympne and Dungeness, and I would walk to the edge of the Sea — just as I had today — and imagine I was alone in the world. But now, it was nearly true! It was remarkable to think that no ships sailed this new ocean, anywhere in the world; that there were no cities of men on the other side of the jungle behind me — indeed, the only flickers of intelligence on the planet were myself, and the poor, wounded Morlock. But it was not a forbidding prospect — not a bit of it — not after the awful darkness and chaos of 1938, which I had so recently escaped.

  I straightened up. The Sea was charming, but we could not drink salt water! I took careful note of the point at which I had emerged from the jungle — I had no wish to lose Nebogipfel in that arboreal gloom — and I struck barefoot out along the water’s edge, away from the family of Diatryma.

  After perhaps a mile, I came to a brook which bubbled out of the forest, and came trickling down the beach to the Sea. When I tested this, I found it to be fresh water, and it seemed quite clear. I felt a great access of relief: at least we should not die today! I dropped to my knees and plunged my head and neck in the cool, bubbling stuff. I drank down great gulps, and then took off my jacket and shirt and bathed my head and neck. Crusted blood, stained brown by exposure to the air, swirled away towards the Sea; and when I straightened up I felt much refreshed.

  Now I faced the challenge of how to transport this bounty to Nebogipfel. I needed a cup, or some other container.

  I spent some minutes sitting by the side of that stream, peering about in a baffled fashion. All my ingenuity seemed to have been exhausted by my latest tumble through time, and this final puzzle was one step too far for my tired brain.

  In the end, I took my boots from my belt, rinsed them out as well as I could, and filled them up with stream water; then I transported them back along the beach and through the forest, to the waiting Morlock. As I bathed Nebogipfel’s battered face, and tried to rouse him to drink, I promised myself that the next day I should find something rather more suitable than an old boot to use as a dinner service.

  Nebogipfel’s right leg had been mangled by the assault of the Diatryma; the knee seemed crushed, and the foot was resting at an unnatural angle. Using a sharp fragment of Time-Car hull — I had no knife — I made a rudimentary effort to shave his flaxen hair from the damaged areas. I washed off the exposed flesh as best I could: at least the surface wounds seemed to have closed, and there was no sign of infection.

  During my clumsy manipulations — I am no medical man — the Morlock, still unconscious, grunted and mewled with pain, like a cat.

  Having cleaned the wounds, I ran my hands along the leg, but could detect no obvious break in the shin or calf bones. As I had noted before, the main damage seemed to be in the knee and ankle areas, and I registered this with dismay, for, while I might have been able to set a broken tibia by touch, I could see no way I could treat such damage as Nebogipfel had sustained. Still, I rummaged through the wreckage of our car until I had found two straight sections of framework. I took my improvised knife to my jacket — I did not anticipate the garment being terribly useful in such a climate as this — and produced a set of bandages, which I washed off.

  Then, taking my courage in my hands, I straightened out the Morlock’s leg and foot. I bound his leg tight to the splints, strapping it for support against the other, uninjured leg.

  The Morlock’s screams, echoing from the trees, were terrible to hear.

  Exhausted, I dined that night on oysters — raw, for I had no strength to construct a fire — and I propped myself up, close to the Morlock, with my back against a tree trunk and Moses’s wrench in my hand.

  [3]

  How We Lived

  I established a camp on the shore of my Palaeocene Sea, close to that fresh-water brook I had found. I decided we should be healthier, and safer from attack, there rather than in the gloom of the forest. I set up a sunshade for Nebogipfel, using bits of the Time-Car with items of clothing stretched over them.

  I carried Nebogipfel to this site in my arms. He was as light as a child, and still only half conscious; he looked up at me, helpless, through the ruins of his goggles, and it was hard for me to remember that he was a representative of a species which had crossed space, and tamed the sun!

  My next priority was fire. The available wood — fallen branches and so forth — was moist and moldy, and I took to carrying it out to the edge of the beach, to allow it to dry. With some fallen leaves to act as kindling, and a spark from a stone beaten against Time-Car metal, I was able to ignite a flame readily enough. At first I went through the ritual of restarting the fire daily, but soon discovered the doubtless ancient trick of keeping coals glowing in the fire’s pit during the day, with which it was a simple matter to re-ignite the blaze as required.

  Nebogipfel’s convalescence progressed slowly. Enforced unconsciousness, to a member of a species who do not know sleep, is a grave and disturbing thing, and on his revival he sat in the shade for some days, passive and unwilling to talk. But he proved able to eat the oysters and bivalves I fetched up from the Sea, albeit with a deep reluctance. In time I was able to vary our diet with the cooked flesh of turtle — for that creature was quite abundant, all along the shore. After some practice, I succeeded in bringing down clusters of the fruits of the shoreline palm trees by hurling lumps of metal and rocks high into the branches. The nuts proved very useful: their milk and flesh varied our diet; their empty shells served as containers for a variety of purposes; and even the
brown fibers which clung to the shells were capable of being woven into a crude cloth. However, I have no great facility for such fine work, and I never got much further than making myself a cap — a broad-brimmed affair, like a coolie’s.

  Still, despite the munificence of the Sea and the palms, our diet was monotonous. I looked with envy at the succulent little creatures which clambered, out of my reach, through the branches of the trees above me.

  I explored the shore of the Sea. Many types of creature inhabited that oceanic world. I observed wide, diamond-shaped shadows skimming the surface, which I believe were rays; and twice I saw upright fins — beating with purpose through the water, at least a foot high — which could only be the signs of huge sharks.

  I spotted an undulating form, cruising through the surface of the water perhaps a half mile from land. I made out a wide, hinged jaw, inset with small, cruel teeth, and white flesh behind. This beast was perhaps five feet long, swimming by means of undulations of its sinuous body. I reported this sighting to Nebogipfel, who — retrieving a little more of that encyclopedic body of data stored in his little skull — identified it as Champsosaurus: an ancient creature, related to the crocodile, and in fact a survivor of the Age of the Dinosaurs — an Age already long vanished by this Palaeocene period.

  Nebogipfel told me that in this period, the ocean-going mammals of my century whales, sea-cows and so forth — were in the midst of their evolutionary adaptation to the Sea, and lived still as large, slow-moving land animals. I kept a wary eye out for a basking land-whale, for surely I should be able to hunt down such a slow-moving animal — but I never saw one.

  When I removed Nebogipfel’s splints for the first time, the broken flesh showed itself to be healing. Nebogipfel probed at his joints, however, and pronounced that they had been set incorrectly. I was not surprised, but neither of us could think of a way to improve the situation. Still, after some time, Nebogipfel was able to walk, after a fashion, by using a crutch made of a shaped branch, and he took to hobbling about our little encampment like some desiccated wizard.

  His eye, however — which I had ruined with my assault in the Time-Car workshop — did not recover, and remained without sight, to my deep regret and shame.

  Being a Morlock, poor Nebogipfel was far from comfortable in the intensity of the daytime sun. So he took to sleeping through the day, within the shelter I constructed, and moving about during the hours of darkness. I stuck to the daylight, and so each of us spent most of his waking hours alone. We met and talked at twilight and dawn, although I have to admit that after a few weeks of open air, heat and hard physical labor, I was pretty much spent by the time the sun fell.

  The palms had broad fronds, and I determined to retrieve some of these, intent on using them to construct a better shelter. But all my efforts at hurling artifacts up into the trees were of no avail at fetching down the fronds, and I had no means of cutting down the palms themselves. So I was forced to resort to stripping down to my trousers and shinning up the trees like a monkey. Once at the crown of a tree, it was the work of moments to strip the fronds from the trunk and hurl them to the ground. I found those climbs exhausting. In the fresh sea air and sunshine, I was growing healthier and more robust; but I am not a young man, and I soon found a limit to my athletic ability.

  With the retrieved fronds I constructed us a more substantial shelter, of fallen branches roofed over by plaited fronds. I made a wide hat of fronds for Nebogipfel. When he sat in the shade with this affair tied under his chin, and otherwise naked, he looked absurd.

  As for me, I have always been pale of complexion, and after the first few days I suffered greatly from my exposure to the sun, and I learned caution. The skin peeled from my back, arms and nose. I grew a thick beard to protect my face, but my lips blistered in a most unsightly fashion — and the worst of it was the intense burning of the bald patch at my crown. I took to bathing my burns, and to wearing my hat and what remained of my shirt at all times.

  One day, after perhaps a month of this, while I was shaving (using bits of Time-Car as blade and mirror), I realized, suddenly, how much I had changed. My teeth and eyes shone, brilliant white, from a mahogany-brown face, my stomach was as flat as it had been during my College days, and I walked about in a palm frond hat, cut-off trousers, and barefoot, as naturally as if I had been born to it.

  I turned to Nebogipfel. “Look at me! My friends would barely recognize me — I’m becoming an aboriginal.”

  His chinless face showed no expression. “You are an aboriginal. This is England, remember?”

  Nebogipfel insisted that we retrieve the components of our smashed Time-Car from the forest. I could see the logic of this, for I knew that in the days to come we should need every scrap of raw materials, particularly metals. So we salvaged the car, and assembled the remnants in a pit in the sand. When the more urgent of our survival needs were satisfied, Nebogipfel took to spending a great deal of time with this wreckage. I did not inquire too closely at first, supposing that he was constructing some addition to our shelter, or perhaps a hunting weapon.

  One morning, however, after he had fallen asleep, I studied his project. He had reconstructed the frame of the Time-Car; he had laid out the shattered floor section, and built up a cage of rods around it, tied together with bits of wire salvaged from the steering column. He had even found that blue toggle switch which had closed the Plattnerite circuit.

  When he next woke, I confronted him. “You’re trying to build a new Time Machine, aren’t you?”

  He dug his small teeth into palm-nut flesh. “No. I am rebuilding one.”

  “Your intention is obvious. You have remade the frame which bore the essential Plattnerite circuit.”

  “As you say, that is obvious.”

  “But it’s futile, man!” I looked down at my callused and bleeding hands, and found myself resenting this diversion of his effort, while I was struggling to keep us alive. “We don’t have any Plattnerite. The stuff we arrived with is exhausted, and scattered about in the jungle anyway; and we’ve no possible means of manufacturing any more.”

  “If we build a Time Machine,” he said, “we may not be able to escape from this Age. But if we do not build one, we certainly will not be able to escape.”

  I growled. “Nebogipfel, I think you should face facts. We are stranded, here in deep time. We will never find Plattnerite here, as it is not a naturally occurring substance. We can’t make it, and no one will bring a sample to us, for no one has the faintest inkling that we are within ten million years of this era!”

  For reply, he licked at the succulent meat of his palm-nut.

  “Pah!” Frustrated and angry, I stalked about the shelter. “You’d be better advised to spend your ingenuity and effort in making me a gun, so I can bag some of those monkeys.”

  “They are not monkeys,” he said. “The most common species are miacis and chriacus—”

  “Well — whatever they are — oh!”

  Infuriated, I stalked away.

  My arguments made no difference, of course, and Nebogipfel continued with his patient rebuilding. But he did assist me in many ways in my quest to keep us alive, and after a time I grew to accept the presence of the rudimentary machine, glittering and complicated and exquisitely useless, there on that Palaeocene beach.

  We all need hope, to give purpose and structure to our lives, I decided — and that machine, as flightless as great Diatryma, represented Nebogipfel’s last hope.

  [4]

  Illness and Recuperation

  I fell ill.

  I was unable to rise from the crude pallet of fronds and dried leaves I had made for myself. Nebogipfel was forced to nurse me, which duty he performed without much in the way of bedside manner, but with patience and persistence.

  Once, in the dark pit of night, I came to a state of half-consciousness with the Morlock’s soft fingers probing at my face and neck. I imagined I was once more entrapped in the pedestal of that White Sphinx, with the Morlocks
crowding around to destroy me. I cried out, and Nebogipfel scurried backwards; but not before I was able to lift my fist and strike him a blow in the chest. Enfeebled as I was, I retained sufficient strength to knock the Morlock off his feet.

  That done, my energy was spent, and I lapsed into unconsciousness.

  When I next cane to wakefulness, there was Nebogipfel at my side again, patiently trying to induce me to take a mouthful of shellfish chowder.

  At length my senses returned, and I found myself propped up on my pallet. I was alone in our little hut. The sun was low, but the heat of the day still lay on me. Nebogipfel had left a nutshell of water close to my pallet; I drank this.

  The sunlight seeped away, and the warm, Tropical darkness of evening settled over our lean-to. The sunset was tall and magnificent: this was because of a surplus of ash in the atmosphere, Nebogipfel had told me, deposited by volcanoes to the west of Scotland. This vulcanism would one day lead to the formation of the Atlantic Ocean; lava was flowing as far as the Arctic, Scotland and Ireland, and the warm climatic zone in which we found ourselves stretched as far north as Greenland.

  Britain was already an island, in this Palaeocene, but compared to its configuration in the nineteenth century, its north-west corner was tipped up to a greater altitude. The Irish Sea had yet to form, so that Britain and Ireland formed a single landmass; but the south-east of England was immersed beneath the Sea whose margins we inhabited. My Palaeocene Sea was an extension of the North Sea; if we could have made a boat, we could have traveled across the English Channel and sailed into the heart of France through the Aquitaine Basin, a tongue of water which connected in turn to the Tethys Sea — a great ocean swamping the Mediterranean countries.