The Space Machine

by Christopher Priest

  It was getting late, and soon we discontinued our conversation, for we were all exhausted. The silence beyond the house was still absolute, but we felt we could not sleep easy in uncertainty. With this in mind, we crept out of the house before preparing for bed, and walked softly across the lawn to the edge of the ridge.

  We looked down across the Thames Valley and saw the burning desolation below. In every direction, and as far as we could see, the night land was sparked with the glow of burning buildings. The sky above us was clear, and the stars shone brightly.

  Amelia took my hand and said: “It is like Mars, Edward. They are turning our world into theirs.”

  “We cannot let them go on with this,” I said. “We must find a way to fight them.”

  Just then, Mr Wells pointed towards the west, and we all saw a brilliant green point of light. It grew brighter as we watched it, and within a few seconds we had all recognized it as a fourth projectile. It became blindingly bright, and for a terrible moment we were convinced it was coming directly towards us, but then at last it abruptly lost height. It fell with a dazzling explosion of green light some three miles to the south-west of us, and seconds later we heard the blast of its landing.

  Slowly, the green glare faded, until all was dark once more.

  Mr Wells said: “There are six more of those projectiles to come.”

  “There is no hope for us,” said Amelia.

  “We must never lose hope.”

  I said: “We are impotent against these monsters.”

  “We must build a second Time Machine,” said Mr Wells.

  “But that would be impossible,” Amelia said. “Only Sir William knows how to construct the device.”

  “He explained the principle to me in detail,” said Mr Wells.

  “To you, and to many others, but only in the most vague terms. Even I, who sometimes worked with him in the laboratory, have only a general understanding of its mechanism.”

  “Then we can succeed!” said Mr Wells. “You have helped to build the Machine, and I have helped design it.”

  We both looked at him curiously then. The flames from below lent an eerie cast to his features.

  “You helped design the Time Machine?” I said, incredulously.

  “In a sense, for he often showed me his blueprints and I made several suggestions which he incorporated. If the drawings are still available, it would not take me long to familiarize myself with them. I expect the drawings are still in his safe in the laboratory.”

  Amelia said: “That is where he always kept them.”

  “Then we could not get at them!” I cried. “Sir William is no longer here!”

  “We will blast the safe open, if we need to,” Mr Wells said, apparently determined to carry through his brave claim.

  “There is no need for that,” said Amelia. “I have some spare keys in my suite.”

  Suddenly, Mr Wells extended his hand to me, and I took it uncertainly, not sure what our compact was to be. He placed his other hand on my shoulder and gripped it warmly.

  “Turnbull,” he said, gravely. “You and I, and Miss Fitzgibbon too, will combine to defeat this enemy. We will become the unsuspected and invisible foe. We will fight this threat to all that is decent by descending on it and destroying it in a way it could never have anticipated. Tomorrow we shall set to and build a new Time Machine, and with it we will go out and stop this unstoppable menace!”

  And then, with the excitement of having formed a positive plan, we complimented ourselves, and laughed aloud, and shouted defiance across the blighted valley. The night was silent, and the air was tainted with smoke and death, but revenge is the most satisfactory of human impulses, and as we returned to the house we were most uncommonly expectant of an immediate victory.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  THE SPACE MACHINE

  i

  Mr Wells and I each took one of the guest-rooms that night, while Amelia slept in her private suite (it was the first time for weeks that I had slept alone, and I tossed restlessly for hours), and in the morning we came down to breakfast still exercised by the zeal of vengeance.

  Breakfast itself was a considerable luxury for Amelia and myself, for we were able to cook bacon and eggs on a ring in the kitchen (we judged it ill-advised to light the range).

  Afterwards, we went directly to the laboratory and opened Sir William’s safe. There, rolled untidily together, were the drawings he had made of his Time Machine.

  We found a clear space on one of the benches and spread them out. At once my spirits fell, because Sir William—for all his inventive genius—had not been the most methodical of men. There was hardly one sheet that made immediate sense, for there was a multitude of corrections, erasures and marginal sketches, and on most sheets original designs had been over-drawn with subsequent versions.

  Mr Wells maintained his optimistic tone of the night before, but I sensed that some of his previous confidence was lacking.

  Amelia said: “Of course, before we start work we must be sure that the necessary materials are to hand.”

  Looking around at the dirty chaos of the laboratory I saw that although it was well littered with many electrical components and rods and bars of metals—as well as pieces of the crystalline substance scattered almost everywhere—it would take a diligent search to establish if we had enough to construct an entire Machine.

  Mr Wells had carried some of the plans to the daylight, and was examining them minutely.

  “I shall need several hours,” he said. “Some of this is familiar, but I cannot say for certain…”

  I did not wish to infect him with my faintheartedness, so in the spirit of seeming to be of help—yet ensuring I was out of the way—I offered to search the grounds for more useful components. Amelia merely nodded, for she was already busily searching the drawer of one of the benches, and Mr Wells was absorbed with the plans, so I left the laboratory and went out of the house.

  I walked first to the ridge.

  It was a fine summer’s day, and the sun shone brightly over the ravaged countryside. Most of the fires had burnt themselves out during the night, but the inky depths of the black vapours which covered Twickenham, Hounslow and Richmond were still impenetrable. The dome-shapes had flattened considerably, and long tendrils of the black stuff were spreading through the streets which had at first escaped being smothered.

  Of the Martian invaders themselves there was no sign. Only to the south-west, in Bushy Park, did I see, clouds of green smoke rising, and I guessed that it was there the fourth projectile had landed.

  I turned away from the scene, and walked past the house to the other side, where the grounds opened out on to Richmond Park. Here the view was uninterrupted across to Wimbledon, and but for the total absence of any people, the Park was exactly as it had been on that first day I called at Reynolds House.

  When I returned to the house I immediately discovered a problem of pressing urgency, although it was not one which in any way threatened our safety. Beside the outhouse, where the gunners’ horses had been tethered, I came across the corpses of the four animals that had been killed when the Martian attacked. During the summer night the flesh had started to decompose, and the raw wounds were crawling with flies and an unhealthy stench filled the air.

  I could not possibly move the carcasses, and burning them was out of the question, so the only alternative was to bury them. Fortunately, the soldiers’ trenches had been dug very recently, and there was much fresh, upturned soil about.

  I found a shovel and wheelbarrow, and began the unpleasant and lengthy chore of covering the rotting bodies. In two hours I had completed the task, and the horses were safely buried. The work was not without its unexpected benefit, though, for during it I discovered that in their haste the soldiers had left behind them several pieces of equipment in the trenches. One of these was a rifle and many rounds of ammunition…but more promisingly, I discovered two wooden crates, inside each of which were twenty-five hand-grenades.


  With great care I carried these to the house, and stored them safely in the woodshed. I then returned to the laboratory to see how the other two were faring.

  ii

  The fifth projectile fell in Barnes that night, about three miles to the north-east of the house. On the night following, the sixth projectile fell on Wimbledon Common.

  Every day, at frequent intervals, we would walk out to the ridge and search for sign of the Martians. During the evening of the day we started work on the new Machine, we saw five of the glittering tripods marching together, heading towards London. Their heat-cannons were sheathed, and they strode with the confidence of the victor who has nothing to fear. These five must have been the occupants of the Bushy Park projectile, who were going up to join the others which even now, we assumed, were rampaging through London.

  There were marked changes taking place in the Thames Valley, and they were not ones we cared for. The clouds of black vapour were swept away by the Martians: for one whole day two battle-machines worked at clearing the muck, using an immense tube which sent forth a fierce jet of steam. This soon swept away the vapour, leaving a black, muddy liquid which flowed into the river. But the river itself was slowly changing.

  The Martians had brought with them seeds of the ubiquitous red weed, and were deliberately sowing them along the banks. One day we saw a dozen or so of the legged ground vehicles, scurrying along the riverside walks and throwing up clouds of tiny seeds. In no time at all the alien vegetables were growing and spreading. Compared with the Spartan conditions under which it survived on Mars, the weed must have found the rich soil and moist atmosphere of England like a well fertilized hothouse. Within a week of our return to Reynolds House, the whole length of the river visible to us was choked with the lurid weed, and soon it was spreading to the waterside meadows. On sunny mornings, the creaking of its prodigious growth was so loud that, high and set back from the river as the house was, we could hear the sinister noise when we were inside with the doors and windows closed. It was a constant background to our secret work, and while we could hear it we were always upset by it. The weed was even taking hold on the dry, wooded slopes below the house, and as it encroached the trees turned brown, although it was still the height of summer.

  How long would it be before the captive humans were set to cutting back the weed?

  iii

  On the day after the tenth projectile landed—this, like the three that had directly preceded it, had fallen somewhere in central London—Mr Wells summoned me to the laboratory and announced that he had at last made a substantial advance.

  Order had been restored in the laboratory. It had been thoroughly cleaned and tidied, and Amelia had draped huge velvet curtains over all the window-panes, so that work could continue after nightfall. Mr Wells had been in the laboratory from the moment he had left his bed, and the air was pleasantly smoked from his pipe.

  “It was the circuitry of the crystals that was baffling me,” he said, stretching back comfortably in one of the chairs he had brought from the smoking-room. “You see, there is something about their chemical constituency that provides a direct current of electricity. The problem has been not to produce this effect, but to harness it to produce the attenuation field. Let me show you what I mean.”

  He and Amelia had constructed a tiny apparatus on the bench. It consisted of a small wheel resting on a metal strip. Two tiny pieces of the crystalline substance had been attached to either side of the wheel. Mr Wells had connected various pieces of wire to the crystals, and the bare ends of these were resting on the surface of the bench.

  “If I now connect together those wires I have here, you will see what happens.” Mr Wells took more pieces of wire and laid them across the various bare ends. As the last contact was made we all saw clearly that the little wheel had started to rotate slowly. “You see, with this circuit the crystals provide a motive force.”

  “Just like the bicycles!” I said.

  Mr Wells did not know what I was talking about, but Amelia nodded vigorously.

  “That’s right,” she said. “But there are more crystals used on the bicycles, for there is a greater weight to pull.”

  Mr Wells disconnected the apparatus, because as the wheel turned it was tangling the wires which were connected to it.

  “Now, however,” he said, “if I complete the circuit in a different way…” He bent closely over his work, peering first at the plans; then at the apparatus. “Watch this carefully, for I suspect we will see something dramatic.”

  We both stood by his shoulder, and watched as he connected first one wire then another! Soon only one remained bare.

  “Now!”

  Mr Wells touched the last wires together, and in that instant the whole apparatus—wheel, crystals and wires—vanished from our sight.

  “It works!” I cried in delight, and Mr Wells beamed up at me.

  “That is how we enter the attenuated dimension,” he said. “As you know, as soon as the crystals are connected, the entire piece becomes attenuated. By connecting the device that way, I tapped the power that resides in the dimension, and my little experiment is now lost to us forever.”

  “Where is it, though?” I said.

  “I cannot say for certain, as it was a test-piece only. It is certainly moving in Space, at a very slow speed, and will continue to do so for ever. It is of no importance to us, for the secret of travel through the attenuated dimension is how we may control it. That is my next task.”

  “Then how long will it be before we can build a new Machine?” I said.

  “It will be several days more, I think.”

  “We must be quick,” I said. “With every day that passes the monsters tighten their hold on our world.”

  “I am working as fast as I am able,” Mr Wells said without rancour, and then I noticed how his eyes showed dark circles around them. He had often been working in the laboratory long after Amelia and I had taken to our beds. “We shall need a frame in which the mechanism can be carried, and one large enough to carry passengers. I believe Miss Fitzgibbon has already had an idea about this, and if you and she were to concentrate on this now, our work will end soon enough.”

  “But a new Machine will be possible?” I said.

  “I see no reason why it should not,” said Mr Wells. “Now we have no desire to travel to futurity, our Machine need not be nearly so complicated as Sir William’s”

  iv

  Eight more days passed with agonizing slowness, but at last we saw the Space Machine taking shape.

  Amelia’s plan had been to use the frame of a bed as a base for the Machine, as this would provide the necessary sturdiness and space for the passengers. Accordingly, we searched the damaged servants’ wing, and found an iron bedstead some five feet wide. Although it was coated with grime after the fire, it took less than an hour to clean it up. We carried it to the laboratory, and under Mr Wells’s guidance began to connect to it the various pieces he produced. Much of this comprised the crystalline substance, in such quantities that it was soon clear that we would need every piece we could lay our hands on. When Mr Wells saw how quickly our reserves of the mysterious substance were being used up he expressed his doubts, but we pressed on nonetheless.

  Knowing that we intended to travel in this Machine ourselves, we left enough room for somewhere to sit, and with this in mind I fitted out one end of the bedstead with cushions.

  While our secret work continued in the laboratory, the Martians themselves were not idle.

  Our hopes that military reinforcements would be able to deal with the incursion had been without foundation, for whenever we saw one of the battle-machines or legged vehicles in the valley below, it strode unchallenged and arrogant. The Martians were apparently consolidating their gains, for we saw much equipment being transferred from the various landing-pits in Surrey to London, and on many occasions we saw groups of captive people either being herded by or driven in one of the legged ground vehicles. The slavery had beg
un, and all that we had ever feared for Earth was coming to pass.

  Meanwhile, the scarlet weed continued to flourish: the Thames Valley was an expanse of garish red, and scarcely a tree was left alive on the side of Richmond Hill. Already, shoots of the weeds were starting to encroach on the lawn of the house, and I made it my daily duty to cut it back. Where the lawn met the weeds was a muddy and slippery morass.

  v

  “I have done all I can,” said Mr Wells, as we stood before the outlandish contraption that once had been a bed. “We need many more crystals, but I have used all we could find.”

  Nowhere in any of Sir William’s drawings had there been so much as a single clue as to the constituency of the crystals. Therefore, unable to manufacture any more, Mr Wells had had to use those that Sir William had left behind. We had emptied the laboratory, and dismantled the four adapted bicycles which still stood in the outhouse, but even so Mr Wells declared that we needed at least twice as much crystalline substance as we had. He explained that the velocity of the Machine depended on the power the crystals produced.

  “We have reached the most critical moment,” Mr Wells went on. “The Machine, as it stands, is simply a collection of circuitry and metal. As you know, once it is activated it must stay permanently attenuated, and so I have had to incorporate an equivalent of Sir William’s temporal fly-wheel. Once the Machine is in operation, that wheel must always turn so that it is not lost to us.”

  He was indicating our makeshift installation, which was the wheel of the artillery piece blown off in the explosion. We had mounted this transversely on the front of the bedstead.

  Mr Wells took a small, leather-bound notebook from his breast pocket, and glanced at a list of handwritten instructions he had compiled himself. He passed this to Amelia, and as she called them out one by one, he inspected various critical parts of the Space Machine’s engine. At last he declared himself satisfied.