The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  I had hiked to that Palace, with Weena, in search of weapons and other provisions with which to take the fight to the Morlocks. Indeed, if I remembered correctly, I — my earlier self — must be rooting about within those polished green walls even now!

  Perhaps ten miles away, a barrier interposed between myself and the Palace: a knot of dark forest. Even in the daylight it made a dark, sinister splash, at least a mile thick. Carrying Weena, I had made through that wood safely enough the first time, for we had waited for daylight to make the crossing; but the second time, on our return from the Palace (tonight!) I would let my impatience and fatigue get the better of me. Determined to return to the Sphinx as soon as possible, and to set to work retrieving my machine, I would push into that wood in the darkness — and fall asleep — and the Morlocks would descend on us, and take Weena.

  I had been lucky to escape that folly with my life, I knew; and as for poor Weena…

  But I put aside these feelings of shame, now, for I was here, I reminded myself, to make amends for all that.

  It was early enough for me to reach that wood before the daylight faded. I was without weapons, of course, but my purpose here was not to fight the Morlocks — I had done with that — but simply to rescue Weena. And for that, I calculated, I should need no more powerful weapons than my intellect and my fists.

  [2]

  A Walk

  The Time Machine itself looked very exposed, there on the hill-side with its brass and nickel glittering, and — although I had no intention to use it again — I decided to conceal it. There was a copse nearby, and I dragged the squat machine there and covered it with branches and leaves. This took me some effort — the machine was a bulky affair — and I was left perspiring, and the rails cut deep grooves in the turf where I had hauled it.

  I rested for a few minutes, and then, with a will, I set off down the hill-side in the direction of Banstead.

  I had traveled barely a hundred yards when I heard voices. For a moment I was startled, thinking — despite the daylight — that it might be Morlocks. But the voices were quite human, and speaking that peculiar, simple sing-song which is characteristic of the Eloi; and now a party, five or six, of those little people emerged from a copse onto a pathway leading up to my Sphinx. I was struck afresh at how slight and small they were — no larger than the children of my time, male and female alike — and clad in those simple purple tunics and sandals.

  The similarities with my first arrival in this Age struck me immediately; for I had been chanced upon by a party of Eloi in just such a fashion. I remembered how they had approached me without fear — more with curiosity — and had laughed and spoken to me.

  Now, though, they came up with circumspection: in fact, I thought they shied away. I opened my hands and smiled, in tending to show that I meant no harm; but I knew well enough the cause of this changed perception: it was what they had seen already of the dangerous and erratic behavior of my earlier self, especially during my unhinging after the theft of the Time Machine. These Eloi were entitled to their caution!

  I did not press the case, and the Eloi went on around me, up the hill-side towards the rhododendron lawn; as soon as I was out of their sight their speech resumed in its bubbling rhythms.

  I struck across the countryside towards the wood. Everywhere I saw those wells which led, I knew, to the subterranean world of the Morlocks — and from which emitted, if I drew close enough to hear, the implacable thud-thud-thud of their great machines. Sweat broke across my brow and chest — for the day remained hot, despite the dipping of the afternoon sun — and I felt my breath scratch in and out of my lungs.

  With my immersion in this world, my emotions seemed to waken also. Weena, limited creature though she was, had shown me affection, the only creature in all this world of 802,701 to do so; and her loss had caused me the most intense wretchedness. But, when I had come to recount the tale to my companions by the familiar glow of my own fireside in 1891, that grief had been etiolated into a pale sketch of itself; Weena had become like the memory of a dream, quite unreal.

  Well, now I was here once more, tramping across this familiar country, and all that primal grief came back to me — it was as if I had never left here — and it fueled my every footstep.

  As I walked on a great hunger fell on me. I realized that I could not remember the last time I had eaten — it must have been before Nebogipfel and I departed firm the Age of White Earth — although, I speculated, it might be true to say that this body had never partaken of food, if it had been reconstructed by the Watchers as Nebogipfel had hinted! Well, whatever the philosophical niceties, my hunger was soon gnawing at my belly, and I began to feel a weariness from the heat. I came past an eating hall — a great, gray edifice of fretted stone — and I made a detour from my route.

  I entered through a carved archway, with its decorations badly weatherworn and broken up. Within I found a single great chamber hung with brown, and the floor was set with blocks of that hard white metal I had observed before, worn into tracks by the soft feet of innumerable generations of Eloi. Slabs of polished stone formed tables, on which were heaped piles of fruit; and around the tables were gathered little clusters of Eloi, in their pretty tunics, eating and jabbering to each other like so many cage-birds.

  I stood there in my dingy jungle twill — that relic of the Palaeocene was quite out of place in all that sunlit prettiness, and I mused that the Watchers might have outfitted me more elegantly! — and a group of the Eloi came to me and clustered around. I felt little hands on me, like soft tentacles, pulling at my shirt. Their faces had the small mouths, pointed chins and tiny ears characteristic of their race, but these seemed to be a different set of Eloi from those I had encountered near the Sphinx; and these little folk had no great memory, and therefore no fear, of me.

  I had come here to rescue one of their kind, not to commit more of that graceless barbarism which had disfigured my previous visit; so I submitted to their inspection with good grace and open hands.

  I made for the tables, followed everywhere by a little gaggle of the Eloi. I found a cluster of hypertrophied strawberries, and I crammed these into my mouth; and it was not long before I found several samples of that floury fruit in its three-sided husk which had proved my particular favorite before. I collected a haul I judged sufficient, found a darker, shaded corner, and settled down to eat, surrounded by a little wall of the curious Eloi.

  I smiled at the Eloi, welcoming them, and tried to remember those scraps of their simple speech which I had learned before. As I spoke their little faces pressed around me, their eyes wide in the dark, their red lips parted like children’s. I relaxed. I think it was the plainness of this encounter, the easy humanity of it, which entranced me then; I had suffered too much inhuman strangeness recently! The Eloi were not human, I knew — in their way they were as alien to me as the Morlocks — but they were a good facsimile.

  I seemed just to close my eyes.

  I came to myself with a start. It had grown quite dark! There were fewer of the Eloi close to me, and their mild, unquestioning eyes seemed to shine at me in the gloom.

  I got to my feet in a panic. Fruit husks and flowers fell from my person, where they had been arranged by the playful Eloi. I blundered across the main chamber. It was quite full of Eloi, now, and they slept in little clusters across the metal floor. I emerged at last through the doorway and into the daylight…

  Or rather, what little there was left of the day! Peering about wildly, I saw how a last sliver of sun was barely visible — a mere fingernail of light, resting on the western horizon — and to the east, I saw a single bright planet — perhaps it was Venus.

  I cried out and lifted my arms to the sky. After all my inner resolve that I should make amends for the impetuous foolishness of the past, here I had dozed through the afternoon, as indolent as you like!

  I plunged back to the path I had followed and struck out for the wood. So much for my plans for arriving in the wood during dayli
ght! As the twilight drew in around me, I caught glimpses of gray-white ghosts, barely visible at the edge of my vision. I whirled about at each such apparition, but they fled, staying beyond my reach.

  The shapes were Morlocks, of course — the cunning, brutal Morlocks of this History — and they were tracking me with all the silent hunting skills they could command. My earlier resolve that I should not need a weapon for this expedition now began to seem a little foolish, and I told myself that as soon as I reached the wood I should find a fallen branch or some such, to serve me in the office of a club.

  [3]

  In the Darkness

  I tripped on the unevenness of the ground several times, and would have twisted my ankles, I think, if it were not for the stiffness of my soldier’s boots.

  By the time I came upon the wood, it was full night.

  I surveyed that expanse of dank, black forest. The futility of my quest came to me. I remembered how it had seemed to me that a great host of Morlocks had been gathered about me: how was I to find that malevolent handful which would bear away Weena?

  I considered plunging into the forest — I remembered, roughly, the way I had gone the first time — and I might come upon my earlier self, with Weena. But the folly of that procedure struck me immediately. For one thing, I had got turned about in my struggles with the Morlocks, and had finished up stumbling about the forest more or less at random. And besides, I had no protection: in the dark enclosure of the forest I should be quite vulnerable. No doubt I should make a satisfying mess of some of them, before they brought me down — but bring me down they surely would; and in any event such a battle was not my intention.

  So I retreat, through a quarter-mile or so, until I came upon a hillock which overlooked the wood.

  The full darkness gathered about me, and the stars emerged in their glory. As I had done once before, I distracted myself by seeking out signs of the old constellations, but the gradual proper motion of the stars had quite distorted the familiar picture. Still, though, that planet I had noticed earlier shone down on me, as steady as a true companion.

  The last time I had studied this altered sky, I remembered, I had had Weena at my side, wrapped up in my jacket for warmth, as we had rested the night while making for the Palace of Green Porcelain. I recalled my feelings then: I had reflected on the littleness of earthly life, compared to the millennial migrations of the stars, and I had been taken, briefly, by an elegiac remoteness — by a view of the grandeur of time, above the level of my earthly troubles.

  But now, it seemed to me, I was done with all that. I had had enough of perspective, of Infinities and Eternities; I felt impatient and taut. I was, and always had been, no more than a man, and now I was fully immersed once more in the gritty concerns of Humanity, and only my own projects filled my consciousness.

  I dropped my eyes from the remote, unfathomable stars, and down to the woods before me. And now, even as I watched, a gentle, roseate glow began to spread across the south-western horizon. I got to my feet, and did a sort of dance step, such was my sudden elation. Here was confirmation that, after all my adventures, I had finished up on the right day, of all the possible days, here in this remote century! For that glow was a fire in the forest — a fire started, with careless abandon, by myself.

  I struggled to remember what had come next on that fateful night — the precise sequence…

  The fire I had started had been a quite new and wonderful thing to Weena, and she had wanted to play with its red sheets and flickers; I had been forced to restrain her from throwing her self into that liquid light. Then I picked her up — she had struggled — and I had plunged on into that wood, with the light of my fire illuminating my path.

  Soon we had left the glow of those flames, and were proceeding in blackness, broken only by patches of deep blue sky beyond the trees’ stems. It had not been long, in all that oily darkness, before I had heard the pattering of narrow feet, the soft cooing of voices, all around me; I remembered a tug of my coat, and then at my sleeve. I had put Weena down so that I could find my matches, and there was a struggle about my knees, as those Morlocks, like persistent insects, had fallen on her poor body. I got a match lit when its head flared I had seen a row of white Morlock faces, illuminated as if by a flash lamp, all turned up towards me with their red gray eyes — and then, in a second, they had fled.

  I had determined to build a new fire and wait for the morning. I had lit camphor and cast it on the ground. I had dragged down dry branches from the trees above, and built a choking fire of green wood…

  I raised myself, now, onto the tips of my toes, and cast about over the forest. You must imagine me in all that inky darkness, under a sky without a moon, and the only illumination corning from that spreading fire on the far side of the forest.

  There — I had it! — a thread of smoke that curled up into the air, forming a sort of narrow silhouette against the greater blaze behind it. That must be the site at which I had decided to make my stand. It was some distance from me — perhaps two miles to the east, and in the depths of the wood — and, without allowing myself further contemplation, I plunged into the forest.

  For some distance I heard nothing but the cracking of twigs under my feet, and a remote, slumberous roar that must have been the voice of the greater fire. The darkness was broken only by the remote glow of the fire, and by patches of deep blue sky overhead; and I could see the boles and roots about me only by silhouette, and I stumbled several times. Then I heard a pattering around me, as soft as rainfall, and I caught that queer, gurgling sound that is the voice of the Morlock. I felt a tug at my shirt-sleeve, a soft pull at my belt, fingers at my neck.

  I swung my arms about. I connected with flesh and bone, and my assailants fell back; but I knew my reprieve should not be for long. And, sure enough, within a few seconds that pattering closed up around me again, and I was forced to push on through a sort of hail of touches, of cold pawing and bold, sharp nips, of huge red eyes all around me.

  It was a return to my deepest nightmare, to that horrible dark I have dreaded all my life! — But I persisted, and they did not attack me — not outright, at any rate. Already I detected a certain agitation about them — the Morlocks ran about with increasing rapidity — as the glow of that remote blaze grew brighter.

  And then, of a sudden, there was a new scent on the air: it was faint, nearly overpowered by the smoke…

  It was camphor vapor.

  I could be only yards from the place the Morlocks had fallen on me and Weena as we slept — the place where I had fought, and Weena had been lost!

  I came upon a great host of Morlocks — a density of them, just visible through the next line of trees. They swarmed over each other like maggots; eager to join the fray or the feast, in a mass such as I did not remember seeing before. I saw a man struggling to rise in their midst. He was obscured by a great weight of Morlocks, and they caught at his neck, hair and arms, and down he went. But then I saw an arm emerge from the melee holding an iron bar — it had been torn from a machine in the Palace of Green Porcelain, I remembered — and he laid about the Morlocks with a vigor. They fell away from him, briefly, and soon he had backed himself up against a tree. His hair stuck out from all around his broad scalp, and he wore, on his feet, only torn and blood-stained socks. The Morlocks, frenetic, came at him again, and he swung his iron bar, and I heard the soft, pulpy crushing of Morlock faces.

  For a moment I thought of falling in with him; but I knew it was unnecessary: He would survive, to stumble out of this forest — alone, grieving for Weena and recover his Time Machine from the plotting of the wily Morlocks. I remained in the shadows of the trees, and I am convinced he did not see me…

  But Weena was already gone from here, I realized: by this point in the conflict, I had already lost her to the Morlocks!

  I whirled about in desperation. Again I had allowed my concentration to lapse. Had I already failed? — had I lost her again?

  By this time the panic among
the Morlocks at the fire had taken a strong hold, and they fled in a stream away from the blaze, their hunched, hairy backs stained red. Then I saw a leash of Morlocks, four of them, stumbling through the trees, away from the direction of the fire. They were carrying something, I saw now: something still, pale, limp, with a hint of white and gold…

  I roared, and I crashed forward through the undergrowth. The Morlocks’ four heads snapped about until their huge, red-gray eyes were fixed on me; and then, my fists raised, I fell on them.

  It was not much of a fight. The Morlocks dropped their precious bundle; they faced me, but they were distracted all the time by the growing glow behind them. One little brute got his teeth locked into my wrist, but I pounded at his face, feeling the grinding of bone, and in a few seconds he released me; and the four of them fled.

  I bent and scooped up Weena from the ground — the poor mite was as light as a doll — and my heart could have broken at her condition. Her dress was torn and stained, her face and golden hair were smudged with soot and smoke, and I thought she had suffered a burn down one side of her cheek. I noticed, too, the small, pinprick imprints of Morlock teeth in the soft flesh of her neck and upper arms.

  She was quite insensible, and I could not tell if she was breathing; I thought she might already be dead.

  With Weena cradled in my arms, I ran through the forest.

  In the smoky darkness, my vision was obscured; there was the fire which provided a yellow and red glow, but it turned the forest into a place of shadows, shifting and deceiving of the eye. Several times I blundered into trees, or tripped over some hummock; and I am afraid poor Weena got quite thrown about in the course of it.