The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  We were in the midst of a stream of Morlocks, all fleeing the blaze with as much vigor as myself. Their hairy backs shone red in the flames, and their eyes were discs of palpable pain. They stumbled about the forest, clattering into trees and striking at each other with little fists; or else they crawled across the floor, moaning, seeking some illusory relief from the heat and light. When they collided with me, I punched and kicked at them to keep them off; but it was clear enough that, blinded as they were, they could offer me no threat, and after a time I found it was sufficient simply to push them away.

  Now that I had grown used to the quiet dignity of Nebogipfel, the bestial nature of these primal Morlocks, with their slack jaws, filthy and tangled hair, and hunched posture — some of them ran with their hands trailing on the ground — was distressing in the extreme.

  We came on the edge of the forest abruptly. I stumbled out of the last line of trees, and found myself staggering across a meadow.

  I hauled in great breaths of air, and turned to look back at the blazing wood. Smoke billowed up, forming a column which reached over the sky, obscuring the stars; and I saw, from the heart of the forest, huge flames — hundreds of feet tall — which stretched up like buildings. Morlocks continued to flee from the blaze, but in decreasing numbers; and those which emerged from the wood were disheveled and wounded.

  I turned, and walked on through long, wiry grass. At first the heat was strong on my back; but after perhaps a mile it had diminished, and the fire’s crimson glare faded to a mere glow. We saw no more Morlocks after that.

  I crossed over a hill, and in the valley beyond I came to a place I had visited before. There were acacias here, and a number of sleeping-houses, and a statue — incomplete and broken — which had reminded me of a Faun. I walked down the slope of this valley, and, cradled in its crook, I found a little river I remembered. Its surface, turbulent and broken, reflected the star-light. I settled beside the bank and laid Weena carefully on the ground. The water was cold and fast-running. I tore a strip off my shirt and dabbed it in the water; with this I bathed Weena’s poor face, and trickled a little of the water into her mouth.

  Thus, with Weena’s head cradled in my lap, I sat out the rest of that Dark Night.

  In the morning I saw him emerge from the burnt forest in a pitiable state. His face was ghastly pale, and he had half-healed cuts on his face, a coat that was dusty and dirty, and a limp worse than a footsore tramp’s with only scorched grass bound up around his bloody feet. I felt a twinge of compassion — or perhaps of embarrassment — to see his wretchedness: had this really been me, I wondered? — had I presented such a spectacle to my friends, on my return, after that first adventure?

  Again I had an impulse to offer help; but I knew that no assistance was necessary. My earlier self would sleep off his exhaustion through the brightness of the day, and then, as evening approached, he would return to the White Sphinx to retrieve his Time Machine.

  Finally — after one last struggle against the Morlocks — he would be gone, in a whirl of attenuation.

  So I stayed with Weena by the river, and nursed her while the sun climbed in the sky, and prayed that she might awaken.

  Epilogue

  My early days were the hardest, for I arrived here quite bereft of tools.

  At first I was forced to live with the Eloi. I partook of the fruit brought to them by the Morlocks, and I shared the elaborate ruins they used as sleeping-halls.

  When the moon waned, and the next sequence of Dark Nights came, I was struck by the boldness with which the Morlocks emerged from their caverns and assailed their human cattle! I set myself at the gate of a sleeping-house, with bits of iron and stone to serve as weapons, and in this way I was able to resist; but I could not keep them all out — the Morlocks swarm like vermin, rather than fight in the organized fashion of humans — and besides, I could defend only one sleeping-hall among hundreds dotted about the Thames Valley.

  Those black hours, of fear and unparalleled misery for the defenseless Eloi, are as bleak as anything in my experience. And yet, with the coming of the day, that darkness was already banished from the little minds of the Eloi, and they were prepared to play and laugh as readily as if the Morlocks did not exist.

  I was determined to make a change to this arrangement: for that with the rescue of Weena — had, after all, been my intention in returning here.

  I have further explored the countryside hereabouts. I must have made a fine sight as I tramped the hills, with my wild and spectacular beard, my sunburnt scalp, and with my bulky frame draped in gaudy Eloi cloth! There is no transport, of course, and no beasts of burden to carry me, and only the remnants of my 1944 boots to protect my feet. But I have reached as far as Hounslow and Staines to the west, Barnet in the north, Epsom and Leatherhead to the south; and to the east, I have followed the Thames’s new course as far as Woolwich.

  Everywhere I have found a uniform picture: the verdant landscape with its scattering of ruins, the halls and houses of the Eloi — and, everywhere, the grisly punctuation of the Morlock shafts. It may be that in France or Scotland the picture is very different! — but I do not believe it. The whole of this country, and beyond, is infested by the Morlocks and their subterranean warrens.

  So I have been forced to abandon my first, tentative plan, which was to take a party of the Eloi out of the reach of the Morlocks: for now I know that the Eloi cannot escape the Morlock — and nor vice versa, for the dependency of Morlock on Eloi, while less repellent to my mind, is just as degrading to the spirit of those nocturnal sub-men.

  I have begun, quietly, to seek other ways to live.

  I determined to take up a permanent residence in the Palace of Green Porcelain. This had been one of my plans in my previous visit here, for, although I had seen evidence of Morlock activity there, that ancient museum with its large halls and robust construction had commended itself to me as defensible a fastness as I had found against the cunning and climbing dexterity of the Morlocks, and I retained hopes that many of the artifacts and relics stored here might yet serve my purposes in the future. And besides, something about that derelict monument to the intellect, with its abandoned fossils and crumbled libraries, had caught at my imagination! It was like a great ship from the past, its keel broken on the reef of time; and I was a castaway of like origin, a Crusoe from out of antiquity.

  I repeated and extended my exploration of the cavernous halls and chambers of the Palace. I settled, for my base, on that Hall of Mineralogy which I found on my first visit, with its well-preserved but useless samples of a wider array of minerals than I could name. This chamber is rather smaller than some of the others, and so more easily secured; and, when I had swept it of dust and built a fire, it came to seem almost homelike to me. Since then, by shoring up the broken valves of doors and fixing breaches in the ancient walls, I have extended my fastness into some adjoining halls. While investigating the Gallery of Palaeontology, with its huge and useless brontosaurus bones, I came across a collection of bones tumbled about and scattered on the floor, evidently by the playful Eloi, of which at first I could make no sense; but when I roughly assembled the skeletons, I thought that they were of a horse, a dog, an ox, and, I think, of a fox — in short, they were the last relics of the ordinary animals of my own, vanished England. But the bones were too scattered and broken, and my anatomical understanding too imprecise, for me to be sure of my identification.

  I have also returned to that ill-lit and sloping gallery which contains the hulking corpses of great machines, for this has served me as a mine for improvised tools of all descriptions — and not just weapons, as was my first use of it. I spent some time on one machine which had the appearance of an electrical dynamo, for its condition was not too ruinous to look at, and I entertained fantasies of starting it up, and lighting such of the broken globes which hang from that chamber’s ceiling as would take a current. I calculated that that blaze of electric light, and the noise of the dynamo, would send the Morlocks
fleeing as nothing else! — but I have nothing in the way of fuel or lubricants, and besides the small parts of the hulk are seized up and corroded, and I have perforce abandoned that project.

  In the course of my exploration of the Palace I came across a new exhibit which caught my fancy. This was close to the gallery with the model tin mine I had observed before, and it appeared to be a model of a city. This exhibit was finely detailed and so large it filled most of a chamber by itself, and the whole thing was protected by a sort of pyramid of glass, from which I had to wipe away centuries of dust to see. This city was evidently constructed far in my own future, but even the model was so ancient here in this sunset Age that its bright colors had faded at the dust-filtered touch of sunlight. I imagined this town might be a descendant of London, for I thought I saw the characteristic morphology of the Thames represented by a ribbon of glass which snaked through the exhibit’s heart. But it was a London greatly transformed from the city of my day. It was dominated by seven or eight huge glass palaces — if you think of the Crystal Palace, vastly extended and several times twinned, you will have something of the effect and these palaces had been joined over by a sort of skin of glass which carapaced the whole of the city. There was nothing of the somberness of the London Dome of 1938, for this immense roof served to catch and amplify the sunlight, it seemed to me, and there were ribbons of electric lamps set about the city — though none of their pin-point bulbs still functioned in my model. There was a forest of immense wind-mills set up over this roof — though the vanes no longer turned — and great platforms were set here and there about the roof, over which hovered toy versions of flying machines. These machines had something of the look of great dragonflies, with huge tiers of sails hovering over them, and gondolas with rows of toy people sitting in them beneath.

  Yes — people! — women and men, not unlike myself. For this city evidently came from a time not so impossibly removed from my own, that the blunt hand of evolution had not yet remade mankind.

  Great roads looped off over the countryside, joining this future London to other cities about the country — or so I surmised. These roads were populated by vast mechanisms: unicycles which each bore a score of men, huge produce carts which seemed to have no driver and must therefore be directed mechanically; and so forth. There were no details to represent the countryside between the roads, however, just a bland, gray surface.

  The whole design was so huge — it was like one enormous building — that I imagine it could have housed twenty or thirty millions, as opposed to the meager four millions of the London of my day. Much of the model had its walls and floors cut away, and I was able to see little toy figures representing the populace, set about the many dozens of levels of the city. In the upper levels these inhabitants were dressed in variegated and gaudy designs, with capes of scarlet, hats as spectacular and impractical as a cock’s comb, and so forth. Those upper layers seemed to me a place of great comfort and leisure, being a sort of multiply-leveled mosaic of shops, parks, libraries, sumptuous homes, and the like.

  But at the base of the city — in its ground floor and basement, so to speak — things were rather different. There, great machines slouched, and ducts, pipes and cables ten or twenty feet across (in the full scale) snaked across the ceilings. Dolls were set here, but they were dressed uniformly in a sort of pale blue canvas, and their personal arrangements were restricted to great communal eating and sleeping halls; and it seemed to me that these lower workers must scarcely get a glimpse, in the general order of things, of the light which bathed the lives of the upper folk.

  This model was aged and far from perfect — in one corner the pyramid-case had collapsed, and the model there had been smashed up out of recognition, and elsewhere the little dolls and machines had been tumbled over or broken by small disturbances down the ages; and in one place the blue-suited dolls had been set up in little circles and patterns, as if by the playful fingers of the Eloi — but still, the toy city has been a source of continuing fascination to me, for its people and gadgets are close enough to my sort to be intriguing, and I have spent long hours picking out new details about its construction.

  It seems to me that this vision of the future might represent a sort of intermediate step in the development of the grisly order of things in which I have found myself. Here was a point in time at which the separation of mankind into Upper and Lower remained largely a social artifact, and had not yet begun to influence the evolution of the species itself: The city was a beautiful and magnificent structure, but if it led to this world of Morlock and Eloi — it was a monument to the most colossal folly on the part of Humanity!

  The Palace of Green Porcelain is set on a high, turfy down, but there are meadows nearby which are well-watered. I dismantled my Time Machine, and scoured the Palace for materials, and from these I devised simple hoes and rakes. I broke the soil in the meadows about my Palace, and planted seeds from the Morlock fruit.

  I persuaded some of the Eloi to join me in this enterprise. At first they were willing enough — they thought it was some new game — but they lost enthusiasm when I had them keep at their repetitive tasks for long hours; and I had some qualms when I saw their delicate robes stained with soil, and those pretty oval faces running with tears of frustration. But I kept at it, and, when things got too monotonous, I jollied them along with games and dances, and clumsy renditions of “The Land of the Leal,” and what I could remember of the “swing” music of 1944 — that is particularly popular with them — and gradually they have come about.

  Growing cycles are not predictable, here in this Age which lacks seasons, and I had to wait no more than a few months before the first canes and plants bore fruit. When I presented these to the Eloi, my delight evoked only puzzlement in their little faces, for my poor first efforts could not compete for flavor and richness with the provisions of the Morlocks — but I could see the significance of these foodstuffs beyond their size and flavor: for with these first crops, I had begun the slow disentanglement of Eloi from Morlock.

  I have found enough of the Eloi with an aptitude for the work to establish a number of little farms, up and down the valley of the Thames. So now, for the first time in uncounted millennia, there are groups of Eloi who can subsist quite independent of the Morlocks.

  Sometimes I am wearied, and I feel what I am doing is less teaching than modifying the instinct of intelligent animals; but at least it is a start. And I am working with the more receptive of the Eloi to extend their vocabulary, to enrich their curiosity — you see, I mean to reawaken Minds!

  But I know that to provoke and excite the Eloi in this way is not sufficient; for the Eloi are not alone, in this latter earth. And if my reforms among the Eloi continue, the equilibrium, however unhealthy, between Eloi and Morlock will be lost. And the Morlocks must inevitably react.

  A new war between these post-human species would be disastrous, it seems to me, for I could not imagine that my precarious agricultural initiatives would survive much diligent assault by the Morlocks. And I must push out of my mind any antiquated notions of loyalty, to one side or the other! As a man of my time, my sympathies lie naturally with the Eloi, for they appear the more human, and my work with them has been pleasurable and productive. In fact it is an effort for me to remember these little folk are not human — I think if I saw a man of my own century now, I should be astonished by his height, bulk and clumsiness!

  But neither Eloi nor Morlock are human — they are both post-human — regardless of my antique prejudices. And I cannot solve the equation of this degenerate History without addressing both its sides:

  That is, I must face the Darkness.

  I have determined to descend once more into the Morlocks’ subterranean complex. I must find ways to negotiate with that subterranean race — to work with them, as I have the Eloi. I have no reason to believe this is impossible. I know that the Morlocks have a certain intelligence: I have seen their great underground machines, and I recall that, when it was in th
eir captivity, they disassembled, cleaned and even oiled the Time Machine! It may be that beneath their surface ugliness the Morlocks have an instinct which is closer to the engineering enterprise of my own day than that of the passive, cattle-like Eloi.

  I know well — Nebogipfel taught me! — that much of my dread of the Morlocks is instinctive, and proceeds from a complex of experiences, nightmares and fears within my own soul, irrelevant to this place. I have had that dread of darkness and subterranean places since I was a boy; there is that fear of the body and its corruption which Nebogipfel diagnosed — a dread which I may share, I think, with many of my time — and, besides, I am honest enough to recognize that I am a man of my class, and as such have had little to do with the laboring folk of my own time, and in my ignorance I have developed, I fear, a certain disregard and fear. And all of these fragments of nightmare are amplified, a hundredfold, in my reactions to the Morlocks! But such coarseness of soul is not worthy of me, or my people, or the memory of Nebogipfel. I am determined that I should put aside such inner dark, and think of these Morlocks not as monsters, but as potential Nebogipfels.

  This is a rich world, and there is no need for the remnants of humanity to feed off each other in the ghastly fashion they have evolved. The light of intellect has dimmed, in this History: but it is not extinguished. The Eloi retain their fragments of human language, and the Morlocks their evident mechanical understanding.

  I dream that, before I die, I might build a new fire of rationality out of these coals.

  Yes! — it is a noble dream — and a fine legacy for me.

  I found these scraps of paper when exploring a vault, deep under the Palace of Green Porcelain. The pages had been preserved by their storage in a tight package, from which the air had been excluded. It has not been difficult for me to improvise a nib of bits of metal, and an ink of vegetable dyes; and to do my writing, I have returned to my favored seat of yellow metal set at the brow of Richmond Hill, not a half-mile from the site of my old home; and, as I write, I have the vale of Thames for company: that lovely land whose evolution I have watched across geological ages.