The Time Ships. Stephen Baxter
see the sparkle of its water. I scarce felt these latest changes had done much to improve the place: at least the world of Morlocks and Eloi had seen the retention of the essential character of the English countryside, with its abundant greenery and water; the effect, looking back on it, had been rather like towing the whole of the British Isles to somewhere in the Tropics.
I pictured the poor planet, one face held in the sunlight forever, the other turned away. On the equator at the centre of the day-side, it must be warm enough to boil the flesh off a man’s bones. And air must be fleeing the overheated sunward side to rush, in immense winds, towards the cooler hemisphere, there to freeze out as a snow of oxygen and nitrogen over the ice-bound oceans. If I were to stop the machine now, perhaps I should be knocked off at once by those great winds, the last exhalations of a planet’s lungs! The process could stop only when the day-side was parched, airless, quite without life; and the dark side was buried under a thin shell of frozen air.
I realized with mounting horror that I could not return home! – for to turn back I must stop the machine, and if I did so I would be tipped precipitately into a land of vacuum and searing heat, as bleak as the surface of the moon. But dare I carry on, into an unknowable future, and hope that somewhere in the depths of time I would find a world I could inhabit?
Now I was sure that something was badly wrong with my perceptions, or memories, of my time travelling. For it was barely conceivable to me that during my first voyage to the future I might have missed the banishing of the seasons – though I found it hard to believe – but I could not countenance that I had failed to notice the slowing of the earth’s spin.
There could be no doubt about it: I was travelling through events which differed, massively, from those I had witnessed during my first sojourn.
I am by nature a speculative man, and am in general not short of an inventive hypothesis or two; but at that moment my shock was such that I was bereft of calculation. It was as if my body still plummeted onwards through time, but my brain had been left behind, somewhere in the glutinous past. I think I had had a veneer of courage earlier, a facade that had come from the complacent consideration that, although I was heading into danger, it was at least a danger I had confronted before. Now, I had no idea what awaited me in these corridors of time!
While I was occupied by these morbid thoughts, I became aware of continuing changes in the heavens – as if the dismantling of the natural order of things had not yet gone far enough! The sun was growing still brighter. And – it was hard to be sure, the glare of it was so strong – it seemed to me that the shape of the star was now changing. It was smearing itself across the sky, becoming an elliptical patch of light. I wondered if the sun was somehow being spun more rapidly, so that it had become flattened by rotation …
And then – it was quite sudden – the sun exploded.
Plumes of light erupted from the star’s poles, like immense flares. Within a handful of heartbeats the sun had surrounded itself with a glowing mantle of light. Heat and light blazed down anew on the battered earth.
I screamed and buried my face in my hands; but I could still see the light of the enhanced sun, leaking even through the flesh of my fingers, and blazing from the nickel and brass of the Time Machine.
Then, as soon as it had begun, the light storm ceased – and a sort of shell closed up around the sun, as if an immense Mouth was swallowing the star – and I was plunged into darkness!
I dropped my hands, and found myself in pitch blackness, quite unable to see, although dazzle-spots still danced in my eyes. I could feel the hard saddle of the Time Machine beneath me, and when I reached out I found the faces of the little dials; and the machine still swayed as it continued to forge through time. I began to wonder – to fear! – if I had lost my sight.
Despair welled up within me, blacker than the external darkness. Was my second great adventure into time to end so soon, so ignobly? I reached out, groping, for the control levers, and my feverish brain began to concoct schemes wherein I broke off the glass of the chronometric dials, and by touch, perhaps, worked my way home.
… And then I found I was not blind: I did see something.
In some ways this was the queerest aspect of the whole journey so far – so queer, that at first I was quite beyond fear.
First of all, I made out a lightening in the darkness. It was a vague, suffused brightening, something like a sun-rise, and so faint that I was unsure if my bruised eyes were not playing some trick on me. I thought I could see stars, all about me; but they were faint, their light tempered as if seen through a murky stained-glass window.
And now, by the dim glow, I began to see that I was not alone.
The creature stood a few yards before the Time Machine – or rather, it floated in the air, unsupported. It was a ball of flesh: something like a hovering head, all of four feet across, with two bunches of tentacles which dangled like grotesque fingers towards the ground. Its mouth was a fleshy beak, and it had no nostrils that I could make out. I noticed now that the creature’s eyes – two of them, large and dark – were human. It seemed to be making a noise – a low, murmuring babble, like a river – and I realized, with a stab of fear, that this was exactly the noise I had heard earlier in the expedition, and even during my first venture into time.
Had this creature – this Watcher, I labelled it – accompanied me, unseen, on both my expeditions through time?
Of a sudden, it rushed towards me. It loomed up, no more than a yard from my face!
I was unhinged at last. I screamed and, regardless of the consequences, hauled at my lever.
The Time Machine tipped over – the Watcher vanished – and I was flung into the air!
I was left insensible: for how long, I cannot say. I revived slowly, finding my face pressed down against a hard, sandy surface. I fancied I felt a hot breath at my neck – a whisper, a brush of soft hair against my cheek – but when I moaned and made to get up, these sensations vanished.
I was immersed in inky darkness. It felt neither warm nor cold. I was sitting on some hard, sandy surface. There was a scent of staleness in the still air. My head ached from the bump it had received, and I had lost my hat.
I reached out my arms and cast about all around me. To my great relief, I was rewarded almost immediately by a soft collision with a tangle of ivory and brass: it was the Time Machine, pitched like me into this darkened desert. I reached out with both hands and fingered the rails and studs of the machine. It was tipped over, and in the dark I could not tell if it was damaged.
I needed light, of course. I reached for some matches from my pocket – only to find none there; like a blessed fool I had packed my entire supply into the knapsack! A moment of panic assailed me; but I managed to suppress it, and I stood, shaking, and walked to the Time Machine. I investigated it by touch, searching between the bent rails until I found the knapsack, still stowed secure under the saddle. Impatient, I pulled the pack open and rummaged through it. I found two boxes of matches and tucked them into my jacket pockets; then I took out a match and struck it against its box.
… There was a face, immediately before me, not two feet away, glowing in the match’s circle of light: I saw dull white skin, flaxen hair draping down from the skull, and wide, grey-red eyes.
The creature let out a queer, gurgling scream, and disappeared into the darkness beyond the glow of my light.
It was a Morlock!
The match burned down against my fingers and I dropped it; I scrabbled for another, in my panic almost dropping my precious box.