The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  “I suppose so. It’s just the drill, you know.” He put down his boots and sipped his tea. “Of course we’re a jumble of Services here — I expect you noticed.”

  “No,” I said frankly.

  “Well, most of the chaps are Army, of course.” He pointed to a slim young trooper who wore a khaki tag at the shoulders of his Tropical shirt. “But a few of us, like him and myself, are RAF.

  “RAF?”

  “Royal Air Force. The men in gray suits have finally worked out that we’re the best chaps to drive these great iron brutes, you see.” A trooper of the Army passed by, goggling at Nebogipfel, and Gibson favored him with an easy grin. “Of course we don’t mind giving these foot-sloggers a lift. Better than leaving you to do it yourselves, eh, Stubbins?”

  The man Stubbins — slim, red-haired, with an open, friendly face — grinned back, almost shyly, but evidently pleased at Gibson’s attention: all this despite the fact that he must have been a good foot taller than the diminutive Gibson, and some years older. I recognized in Gibson’s relaxed manner something of the poise of the natural leader.

  “We’ve been here a week already,” Gibson said to me. “Surprising we didn’t stumble on you earlier, I suppose.”

  “We weren’t expecting visitors,” I said drily. “If we had been, I suppose I would have lit fires, or found some other way of signaling our presence.”

  He favored me with a wink. “We have been occupied ourselves. We had the devil’s own work to do in the first day or two here. We have good kit, of course — the boffins made it pretty clear to us be fore we left that the climate of dear old England is pretty variable, if you take a long enough view of it — and so we’ve come prepared with an issue of everything from greatcoats to Bombay bloomers. But we weren’t expecting quite these Tropical conditions: not here, in the middle of London! Our clothes seem to be falling apart literally rotting off our backs — and the metal fittings are rusting, and our boots won’t grip in this slime: even my bally socks have shrunk! And the whole lot is being gnawed away by rats.” He frowned. “At least I think they are rats.”

  “Probably not, in fact,” I remarked. “And the Juggernauts? Kitchener class, are they?”

  Gibson cocked an eyebrow at me, evidently surprised at my display of this fragment of knowledge. “Actually we can barely move the ’Nauts: those wretched elephants’ feet sink into this endless mud…”

  And now a clear, familiar voice called out from behind me: “I’m afraid you’re a little out of date, sir. The Kitchener class — including the dear old Raglan — has been obsolete for a number of years now…”

  I turned in my chair. Approaching me was a figure dressed in a crisp Juggernaut crew beret and coverall; this soldier walked with a pronounced limp, and a hand was proffered for shaking. I took the hand; it was small but strong.

  “Captain Hilary Bond,” I said, and smiled.

  She looked me up and down, taking in my beard and animal-skin clothes. “You’re a little more ragged, sir, but quite unmistakable. Surprised to see me?”

  “After a few doses of this time traveling, nothing much surprises me any more, Hilary!”

  [9]

  The Chronic Expeditionary Force

  Gibson and Bond explained the purpose of the Chronic Expeditionary Force to me.

  Thanks to the development of Carolinum fission piles, Britain and America had managed to achieve the production of Plattnerite in reasonable quantities soon after my escape into time. No longer did the engineers of the day have to rely on the scraps and leavings of my old workshop!

  There was still a great fear that German chronic warriors were planning some sneak offensive against Britain’s past — and besides, it was known from the wreckage we had left behind in Imperial College, and other clues, that Nebogipfel and I must have traveled some tens of millions of years into the past. So a fleet of time-traveling Juggernauts was rapidly assembled, and equipped with subtle instruments which could detect the presence of Plattnerite traces (based on the radio-active origins of that substance, I was given to understand). And now this Expeditionary Force was proceeding into the past, in great leaps of five million years or more.

  Its mission was nothing less than to secure the History of Britain from anachronistic attack!

  When stops were made, a valiant effort was made to study the period; and to this end a number of the soldiers had been trained, albeit hastily, to act as amateur scientists: climatologists, ornithologists and the like. These fellows made rapid but effective surveys of the flora, fauna, climate and geology of the Age, and a good deal of Gibson’s daily log was given over to summarizing such observations. I saw that the soldiers, common men and women all, accepted this task with good humor and joking, as such people will, and — it seemed to me — they showed a healthy interest in the nature of the strange, Palaeocene Thames valley around them.

  But at night sentries patrolled the perimeter of the encampment, and troopers with field-glasses spent a great deal of their time peering at the air, or the Sea. When engaged in these duties, the soldiers showed none of the gentle humor and curiosity which characterized their scientific or other endeavors; rather, their fear and intent was apparent in the set of their faces, and the thinness of their eyes.

  This Force was here, after all, not to study flowers, but to seek Germans: time-traveling human enemies, here amid the wonders of the past.

  Proud as I was of my achievements in surviving in this alien Age, it was with considerable relief that I abandoned my suit of rags and animal pelts and donned the light, comfortable Tropical kit of these time-traversing troopers. I shaved off my beard, washed — in warm, clean water, with soap! — and tucked with relish into meals of tinned soya-meat. And at night, it was with a feeling of peace and security that I lay down under a covering of canvas and mosquito netting, and with the powerful shoulders of the ’Nauts all about me.

  Nebogipfel did not settle in the camp. Although our discovery by Gibson was the cause of some celebration and marveling — for our retrieval had been the primary objective of the Expedition — the Morlock soon became the object of blatant fascination among the troopers, and, I suspected, a little sly goading. So the Morlock returned to our original encampment, by the edge of the Palaeocene Sea. I did not oppose this, for I knew how eager he was to continue the construction of his time-frame — he even borrowed tools from the Expeditionary Force to facilitate this. Recalling his close shave with the Pristichampus, however, I insisted that he not stay there alone, but be accompanied either by me or an armed soldier.

  As for me, after a day or two I tired of being at leisure in this busy encampment — I am not by nature an idle man — and I asked to participate in the soldiers’ chores. I soon proved my worth in sharing my painfully acquired knowledge of the local flora, fauna and surrounding geography. There was a good deal of sickness in the camp — for the soldiers had been no more prepared than I had been for the various infections of the Age — and I lent a hand assisting the camp’s solitary doctor, a rather young and perpetually exhausted naik attached to the 9th Gurkha Rifles.

  After the first day I saw little of Gibson, who was consumed by the minutiae of the daily operation of his Expeditionary Force, and — to his own irritation — by a hefty load of bureaucracy, forms and reports and logs, which he was required to maintain daily: and all for the benefit of a Whitehall which would not exist for another fifty million years! I formed the impression that Gibson was restless and impatient with this timetraveling; he would, I think, have been more content if he could have resumed the bombing raids over Germany which he had led, and which he described to me with startling clarity. Hilary Bond had a deal of free time — her duties were most demanding during those periods when the great time-traveling ironclads pushed through the centuries — and she served as my, and Nebogipfel’s, host.

  One day the two of us walked along the rim of the forest, close to the shore. Bond pushed her way through the thick patches of undergrowth. She limped, but h
er gait was blunt and forceful. She described to me the progress of the War since 1938.

  “I would have thought the smashing-up of the Domes would have made an end of it,” I said. “Can’t people see — I mean, what is there to fight for after that?”

  “It should have been an end of the War, you mean? Oh, no. It’s been an end to city life for a time, I imagine. Our populations have taken a fair old battering. But there are the Bunkers, of course — that’s where the War is being run from now, and where the munitions factories and so forth are mostly located. It isn’t much of a century for cities, I don’t think.”

  I thought back to what I had seen of the barbarism of the countryside beyond the London Dome, and I tried to imagine permanent life in an underground Bomb Shelter: I conjured up images of hollow-eyed children scurrying through darkened tunnels, and a population reduced by fear to servility and near-savagery.

  “And what of the War itself?” I asked. “The fronts — your great Siege of Europe—”

  Bond shrugged. “Well, you hear a lot on the Babbles about great advances here and there: One Last Push — that sort of thing.” She lowered her voice. “But — and I don’t suppose it matters much if we discuss this here — the fliers see a bit of Europe, you know, even if it is by night and lit up by shell-fire, and word gets around. And I don’t think those trench lines have moved across an inch of mud since 1935. We’re stuck, is what we are.”

  “I can no longer imagine what you’re all fighting for. The countries are all pretty much bashed up, industrially and economically. None of them can pose much of a threat to the rest, surely; and none of them can have assets left that are worth acquiring.”

  “Perhaps that’s true,” she said. “I don’t think Britain has strength left to do much but rebuild her own smashed-up countryside, once the War is done. We’ll not be going conquering for a long time! And, the situation being as even as it is, the view of things from Berlin must be pretty similar.”

  “Then why go on?”

  “Because we can’t afford to stop.” Beneath the tan she had acquired in this deep Palaeocene, I could see traces of Bond’s former weary pallor. “There are all sorts of reports — some rumors, but some better substantiated, from what I hear — of German technical developments…”

  “Technical developments? You mean weapons.”

  We walked away from the forest, now, and down to the edge of the Sea. The air burned hot against my face, and we let the water lap around the soles of our boots.

  I pictured the Europe of 1944: the smashed cities, and, from Denmark to the Alps, millions of men and women trying to inflict irreparable damage to each other… In this Tropical peace, it all seemed absurd — a fevered dream!

  “But what can you possibly hope to invent,” I protested, “that can do significantly more damage than has already been achieved?”

  “There is talk of Bombs. A new sort — more powerful than anything we’ve yet seen… Bombs containing Carolinum, they say.” I remembered Wallis’s speculations on those lines in 1938. “And, of course,” Bond said, “there is Chronic-Displacement warfare.

  “You see, we can’t stop fighting if it means letting the Germans have a monopoly on such weapons.” Her voice had a sort of quiet desperation. “You can see that, can’t you? That’s why there’s been such a rush to build atomic piles, to acquire Carolinum, to produce more Plattnerite… that’s why so much expense and resource has been invested in these time-traveling Juggernauts.”

  “And all to leap back in time before the Germans? To do unto them before they get the chance to do unto you?”

  She lifted her chin and looked defiant. “Or to fix the damage they do. That’s another way of looking at it, isn’t it?”

  I did not debate, as Nebogipfel might have done, the ultimate futility of this quest; for it was clear that the philosophers of 1944 had not yet come to such an understanding of the Multiplicity of Histories as I had, under the Morlock’s tuition.

  “But,” I protested, “the past is a pretty huge place. You came looking for us, but how could you know we would end up here — how could you settle near us, even to within a million years or so.”

  “We had clues,” she said.

  “What sort of clues? You mean the wreckage left behind in Imperial?”

  “Partly. But also archaeological.”

  “Archaeological?”

  She looked at me quizzically. “Look here, I’m not sure you’d want to hear this—”

  That, of course, made my curiosity burn! I insisted — she told me.

  “Very well. They — the boffins — knew the general area where you had left for the past — in the grounds of Imperial College, of course — and so they began an intensive archaeological survey of the area. Pits were dug.”

  “Good heavens,” I said. “You were looking for my fossilized bones!”

  “And Nebogipfel’s. It was reasoned that if any anomalies were found — bones, or tools — we should be able to place you tolerably well by your position in the strata…”

  “And were they? Hilary—” She held back again, and I had to insist she answer.

  “They found a skull.”

  “Human?”

  “Sort of.” She hesitated. “Small, and rather misshapen — placed in a stratum fifty million years older than any human remains had a right to be — and bitten clean in two.”

  Small and misshapen — it must, I realized, have been Nebogipfel’s! Could that have been the relic of his encounter with Pristichampus — but in some other History, in which Gibson did not intervene?

  And did my bones lie, crushed and turned to stone, in some neighboring, undiscovered pit?

  I felt a chill, despite the heat of the sun on my back and head. Suddenly this brilliant Palaeocene world seemed faded — a transparency, through which shone the pitiless light of time.

  “So you detected your traces of Plattnerite, and you found us,” I said. “But I imagine you were disappointed merely to find me — again! — and no horde of warmongering Prussians. But — look here — can’t you see there is a certain paradox?

  “You develop your time ironclads because you fear the Germans are doing the same. Very well. But the situation is symmetrical: from their point of view, the Germans must fear that you will exploit such time machinery first. Each side is behaving precisely in such a way as to provoke the worst reaction in its opponents. And so you both slide towards the worst situation for all.”

  “That’s as may be,” Bond said. “But the possession of time technology by the Germans would be catastrophic for the Allied Cause. The role of this Expedition is to hunt down German travelers, and to avert any damage the Germans inflict on History.”

  I threw my hands in the air, and Palaeocene water rippled about my ankles. “But — confound it, Captain Bond — it is fifty million years until the birth of Christ! What meaning can that firefly struggle between England and Germany — in such a remote future — have here?”

  “We cannot relax,” she said with a grim weariness. “Can’t you see that? We must hunt the Germans, right back to the dawn of Creation — if necessary.”

  “And where will this War stop? Will you consume all of Eternity before you are done? Don’t you see that that—” I waved a hand, meaning to summarize all of that awful future of shattered cities and populations huddling in subterranean eaves “ — all that — is impossible? Or will you go on until there are two men left — just two — and the last turns to his neighbor and bashes out his brain with a lump of shattered masonry? Eh?”

  Bond turned away — the light of the Sea picked out the lines in her face — and she would not reply.

  This period of calm, after our first encounter with Gibson, lasted five days.

  [10]

  The Apparition

  It was noon of a cloudless, brilliant day, and I had spent the morning putting my clumsy nursing skills at the service of the gurkha doctor. It was with a sense of relief that I accepted Hilary Bond’s invitat
ion to join her for another of our walks to the beach.

  We cut through the forest easily enough — by now, the troopers had cleared respectable paths radiating from the central encampment — and, when we reached the beach, I hauled off my boots and socks and dumped them at the fringe of the forest, and I scampered down to the water’s edge. Hilary Bond discarded her own footwear, a little more decorously, and she piled it on the sand with the hand-weapon she carried. She rolled up the legs of her trousers — I was able to see how her left leg was misshapen, the skin shrunken by an ancient burn — and she waded into the foamy surf after me.

  I stripped off my shirt (we were pretty much informal in that camp in the ancient forest, men and women all) and I dunked my head and upper body in the transparent water, disregarding the soaking my trouser legs were receiving. I breathed deep, relishing it all: the heat of the sun prickling on my face, the sparkle of the water, the softness of the sand between my toes, the sharp scents of salt and ozone.

  “You’re glad to get here, I see,” Hilary said with a tolerant smile.

  “Indeed I am.” I told her how I had been assisting the doctor.

  “You know I’m willing enough — more than willing — to help. But by about ten o’clock today my head had got so full of the stench of chloroform, of ether, of various antiseptic fluid — as well as more earthy smells! — that—”

  She held her hands up. “I understand.”

  We emerged from the Sea, and I toweled myself dry with my shirt. Hilary picked up her gun, but we left our boots piled on the beach, and we strolled by the water’s edge. After a few dozen yards I spotted the shallow indentations which betrayed the presence of corbicula — those burrowing bivalves which inhabited that beach in such numbers. We squatted on the sand, and I showed her how to dig out the compact little creatures. Within a few minutes we had built up a respectable haul; a heap of bivalves sat drying in the sun beside us.