The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  Furthermore — as I have said — I could not live with the knowledge that my Time Machine still existed, an engine so capable of damaging History!

  I began to formulate a plan to resolve all this, and I summoned Nebogipfel.

  “When the Sphere was constructed,” Nebogipfel said, “there was a schism. Those who wished to live much as men had always lived came into the Interior. And those who wished to put aside the ancient domination of the gene—”

  “ — became Morlocks. And so the wars — meaningless and eternal — wash like waves across this unbounded Interior surface.”

  “Yes.”

  “Nebogipfel, is the purpose of the Sphere to sustain these quasi-humans — these new Eloi — to give them room to wage their wars, without destroying Humanity?”

  “No.” He held up his parasol, in a dignified pose I no longer found comical. “Of course not. The purpose of the Sphere is for the Morlocks, as you call us: to make the energies of a star available for the acquisition of knowledge.” He blinked his huge eyes. “For what goal is there for intelligent creatures, but to gather and store all available information?”

  The mechanical Memory of the Sphere, he said, was like an immense Library, which stored the wisdom of the race, accumulated across half a million years; and much of the patient toil of the Morlocks I had seen was devoted to the further gathering of information, or to the classification and reinterpretation of the data already collected.

  These New Morlocks were a race of scholars! — and the whole energy of the sun was given over to the patient, coral-like growth of that great Library.

  I rubbed my beard. “I understand that — the motive at least. I suppose it is not so far from the impulses which have dominated my own life. But don’t you fear that one day you will finish this quest? What will you do when mathematics is perfected, for instance, and the final Theory of the physical universe is demonstrated?”

  He shook his head, in another gesture he had acquired from me. “That is not possible. A man of your own time — Kurt Gödel — was the first to demonstrate that.”

  “Who?”

  “Kurt Gödel: a mathematician who was born some ten years after your departure in time…”

  This Gödel — I was astonished to learn, as Nebogipfel again displayed his deep study of my age — would, in the 1930s, demonstrate that mathematics can never be finished off; instead its logical systems must forever be enriched by incorporating the truth or falsehood of new axioms.

  “It makes my head ache to think about it! — I can imagine the reception this poor Gödel got when he brought this news to the world. Why, my old algebra teacher would have thrown him out of the room.”

  Nebogipfel said, “Gödel showed that our quest, to acquire knowledge and understanding, can never be completed.”

  I understood. “He has given you an infinite purpose.” The Morlocks were like a world of patient monks, I saw now, working tirelessly to comprehend the workings of our great universe.

  At last — at the End of Time — that great Sphere, with its machine Mind and its patient Morlock servants, would become a kind of God, embracing the sun and an infinitude of knowledge.

  I agreed with Nebogipfel that there could be no higher goal for an intelligent species!

  I had rehearsed my next words, and spoke them carefully. “Nebogipfel, I wish to return to the earth. I will work with you on my Time Machine.”

  His head dipped. “I am pleased. The value to our understanding will be immense.”

  We debated the proposition further, but it took no more persuasion than that! — for Nebogipfel did not seem suspicious, and did not question me.

  And so I made my brief preparations to leave that meaningless prairie. As I worked, I kept my thoughts to myself.

  I had known that Nebogipfel — eager as he was to acquire the technology of time travel — would accept my proposal. And it gave me some pain, in the light of my new understanding of the essential dignity of the New Morlocks, that I was now forced to lie to him!

  I would indeed return to the earth with Nebogipfel — but I had no intention of remaining there; for as soon as I got my hands on my machine again, I meant to escape with it, into the past.

  [19]

  How I Crossed Inter-Planetary Space

  I was forced to wait three days until Nebogipfel pronounced himself ready to depart; it was, he said, a matter of waiting until the earth and our part of the Sphere entered the proper configuration with each other.

  My thoughts turned to the journey ahead with some anticipation — I would not say fear, for I had, after all, already survived one such crossing of inter-planetary space, although insensible at the time — but rather with quickening interest. I speculated on the means by which Nebogipfel’s space yacht might be propelled. I thought of Verne, who had his argumentative Baltimore gun clubbers firing that ludicrous cannon, with its man-bearing shell, across the gap between the earth and moon. But it only took a little mental calculation to show that an acceleration sufficient to launch a projectile beyond the earth’s gravity would also have been so strong as to smear my poor flesh, and Nebogipfel’s, across the interior of the shell like strawberry jam.

  What, then?

  It is a commonplace that inter-planetary space is without air; and so we could not fly like birds to the earth, for the birds rely on the ability of their wings to push against the air. No air — no push! Perhaps, I speculated, my space yacht would be driven by some advanced form of firework rocket — for a rocket, which flies by pushing out behind it masses of its own spent propellant, would be able to function in the airlessness of space, if oxygen were carried to sustain its combustion…

  But these were mundane speculations, grounded in my nineteenth-century understanding. How could I tell what might be possible by the year A.D. 657,208? I imagined yachts tacking against the sun’s gravity as if against an invisible wind; or, I thought, there might be some manipulation of magnetic or other fields.

  Thus my speculations raged, until Nebogipfel came to summon me, for the last time, from the Interior.

  As we dropped into Morlock darkness I stood with my head tipped back, peering up at the receding sunlight; and just before I donned my goggles — I promised myself that the next time my face felt the warmth of man’s star, it would be in my own century!

  I think I had been expecting to be transported to some Morlock equivalent of a port, with great ebony space yachts nuzzling against the Sphere like liners against a dock.

  Well, there was none of that; instead Nebogipfel escorted me — across a distance of no more than a few miles, via strips of moving Floor — to an area which was kept clear of artifacts and partitions, and Morlocks in general, but was otherwise unremarkable. And in the middle of this area was a small chamber, a clear-walled box a little taller than I was — like a lift compartment which sat there, squat, on the star-spattered Floor.

  At Nebogipfel’s gesture, I stepped into the compartment. Nebogipfel followed, and behind us the compartment sealed itself shut with a hiss of its diaphragm door. The compartment was roughly rectangular, its rounded corners and edges giving it something of the look of a lozenge. There was no furniture; there were, however, upright poles fixed at intervals about the cabin.

  Nebogipfel wrapped his pale fingers around one of these poles. “You should prepare yourself. At our launch, the change in effective gravity is sudden.”

  I found these calm words disturbing! Nebogipfel’s eyes, blackened by the goggles, were on me with their usual disconcerting mixture of curiosity and analysis; and I saw his fingers tighten their grip on the pillar.

  And then — it happened faster than I can relate it — the Floor opened. The compartment fell out of the Sphere, and I and Nebogipfel with it!

  I cried out, and I grabbed at a pole like an infant clinging to its mother’s leg:

  I looked upwards, and there was the surface of the Sphere, now turned into an immense, black Roof which occluded half the universe from my gaz
e. At the center of this ceiling I could see a rectangle of paler darkness which was the door through which we had emerged; even as I watched, that door diminished with our distance, and in any event it was already folding closed against us. The door tracked across my view with magisterial slowness, showing how our compartment-capsule was starting to tumble in space. It was clear to me what had happened: any schoolboy can achieve the same effect by whirling a conker around his head, and then releasing the string. Well, the “string” which had held us inside the rotating Sphere — the solidity of its Floor — had now vanished; and we had been thrown out into space, without ceremony.

  And below me — I could hardly bear to glance down — there was a pit of stars, a floorless cavern into which I, and Nebogipfel, were falling forever!

  “Nebogipfel — for the love of God — what has happened to us? Has some disaster occurred?”

  He regarded me. Disconcertingly, his feet were hovering a few inches above the floor of the capsule — for, while the capsule fell through space, so we, within it, fell too, like peas in a matchbox!

  “We have been released from the Sphere. The effects of its spin are—”

  “I understand all that,” I said, “but why? Are we intending to fall all the way to the earth?”

  His answer I found quite terrifying.

  “Essentially,” he said, “yes.”

  And then I had no further energy for questions, for I became aware that I too was starting to float about that little cabin like a balloon; and with that realization came a fight with nausea which lasted many minutes.

  At length I regained some control over my body.

  I had Nebogipfel explain the principles of this flight to the earth. And when he had done so, I realized how elegant and economical was the Morlocks’ solution to travel between the Sphere and its cordon of surviving planets — so much so that I should have anticipated it, and dismissed all my nonsensical speculations of rockets — and yet, here was another example of the inhuman bias of the Morlock soul! Instead of the grandiose space yacht I had imagined, I would travel from Venus’s orbit to the earth in nothing more grand than this lozenge-shaped coffin.

  Few men of my century realized quite how much of the universe is vacancy, with but a few sparse pockets of warmth and life swimming through it, and what immense speeds are therefore required to traverse inter-planetary distances in a practicable time. But the Morlocks’ Sphere was, at its equator, already moving at enormous velocities. So the Morlocks had no need of rockets, or guns, to reach inter-planetary speeds. They simply dropped their capsules out of the Sphere, and let the rotation do the rest.

  And so they had done with us. At such speeds, the Morlock told me, we should reach the vicinity of the earth in just forty-seven hours.

  I looked around the capsule, but I could see no signs of rockets, or any other motive force. I floated in that little cabin, feeling huge and clumsy; my beard drifted before my face in a gray cloud, and my jacket persisted in rucking itself up around my shoulder-blades. “I understand the principles of the launch,” I said to Nebogipfel. “But how is this capsule steered?”

  He hesitated for some seconds. “It is not. Have you misunderstood what I have told you? The capsule needs no motive force, for the velocity imparted to it by the Sphere—”

  “Yes,” I said anxiously, “I followed all of that. But what if, now, we were to detect that we were off track, by some mistake of our launch — that we were going to miss the earth?” For I realized that the most minute error at the Sphere, of even a fraction of a degree of arc, could — thanks to the immensity of inter-planetary distances — cause us to miss the earth by millions of miles — and then, presumably, we would go sailing off forever into the void between the stars, allocating blame until our air expired!

  He seemed confused. “There has been no mistake.”

  “But still,” I stressed, “if there were, perhaps through some mechanical flaw — then how should we, in this capsule, correct our trajectory?”

  He thought for some time before answering. “Flaws do not occur,” he repeated. “And so this capsule has no need of corrective propulsion, as you suggest.”

  At first I could not quite believe this, and I had to have Nebogipfel repeat it several times before I accepted its truth. But true it was! — after launch, the craft flew between the planets with no more intelligence than a hurled stone: my capsule fell across space as helpless as Verne’s lunar cannon-shot.

  As I protested the foolishness of this arrangement, I got the impression that the Morlock was becoming shocked — as if I were pressing some debating point of moral dubiety on a vicar of ostensibly open mind — and I gave it up.

  The capsule twisted slowly, causing the remote stars and the immense wall that was the Sphere to wheel around us; I think that without that rotation I might have been able to imagine that I was safe and at rest, in some desert night, perhaps; but the tumbling made it impossible to forget that I was in a remote, fragile box, falling without support or attachment or means of direction. I spent the first few of my hours in that capsule in a paralysis of fear! I could not grow accustomed to the clarity of the walls around us, nor to the idea that, now that we were launched, we had no means of altering our trajectory. The journey had the elements of a nightmare — a fall through endless darkness, with no means of adjusting the situation to save myself. And there you have, in a nutshell, the essential difference between the minds of Morlock and human. For what man would trust his life to a ballistic journey, across inter-planetary distances, without any means of altering his course? But such was the New Morlock way: after a half-million years of steadily perfected technology, the Morlock would trust himself unthinkingly to his machines, for his machines never failed him.

  I, though, was no Morlock!

  Gradually, however, my mood softened. Apart from the slow tumble of the capsule, which continued throughout my journey to the earth, the hours passed in a stillness and silence broken only by the whisper-like breathing of my Morlock companion. The craft was tolerably warm, and so I was suspended in complete physical comfort. The walls were made of that extruding Floor-stuff, and, at a touch from Nebogipfel, I was provided with food, drink and other requirements, although the selection was more limited than in the Sphere, which had a larger Memory than our capsule.

  So we sailed through the grand cathedral of inter-planetary space with utter ease. I began to feel as if I were disembodied, and a mood of utter detachment and independence settled on me. It was not like a journey, nor even — after those first hours — a nightmare; instead, it took on the qualities of a dream.

  [20]

  My Account of the Far Future

  On the second day of our flight, Nebogipfel asked me once again about my first journey into futurity.

  “You managed to retrieve your machine from the Morlocks,” he prompted. “And you went on, further into the future of that History…”

  “For a long period I simply held onto the machine,” I remembered, “much as now I am clinging to these poles, uncaring where I went. At last I brought myself to look at my chronometric dials, and I found that the hands were sweeping, with immense rapidity, further into futurity.

  “You must recall,” I told him, “that in this other History the axis of the earth, and its rotation, had not been straightened out. Still day and night flickered like wings over the earth, and still the sun’s path dipped between its solstices as the seasons wore away. But gradually I became aware of a change: that, despite my continuing velocity through time, the flickering of night and day returned, and grew more pronounced.”

  “The earth’s rotation was slowing,” Nebogipfel said.

  “Yes. At last the days spread across centuries. The sun had become a dome — huge and angry — glowing with its diminished heat. Occasionally its illumination brightened — spasms which recalled its former brilliancy. But each time it reverted to its sullen crimson.

  “I began to slow my plummeting through time…”
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br />   When I stopped, it was on such a landscape as I had always imagined might prevail on Mars. The huge, motionless sun hung on the horizon; and in the other half of the sky, stars like bones still shone. The rocks strewn across the land were a virulent red, stained an intense green, as if by lichen, on every west-facing plane.

  My machine stood on a beach which sloped down to a sea, so still it might have been coated in glass. The air was cold, and quite thin; I felt as if I were suspended atop some remote mountain. Little remained of the familiar topography of the Thames valley; I imagined how the scraping of glaciation, and the slow breathing of the seas, must have obliterated all trace of the landscape I had known — and all trace of Humanity…

  Nebogipfel and I hovered there, suspended in space in our shining box, and I whispered my tale of far futurity to him; in that calm, I rediscovered details beyond those I recounted to my friends in Richmond.

  “I saw a thing like a kangaroo,” I recalled. “It was perhaps three feet tall… squat, with heavy limbs and rounded shoulders. It loped across the beach — it looked forlorn, I remember its coat of gray fir was tangled, and it pawed feebly at the rocks, evidently trying to prize free handfuls of lichen. There was a sense of great degeneration about it. Then, I was surprised to see that the thing had five feeble digits to both its fore- and hind-feet… And it had a prominent forehead and forward-looking eyes. Its hints of humanity were most disagreeable!

  “But then there was a touch at my ear — like a hair, stroking me — and I turned in my saddle.

  “There was a creature just behind the machine. It was like a centipede, I suppose, but three or four feet wide, perhaps thirty feet in length, its body segmented and the chitin of its plates — they were crimson — scraping as it moved. Cilia, each a foot long, waved in the air, moist; and it was one of these which had touched me. Now this beast lifted up its stump of a head, and its mouth gaped wide, with damp mandibles waving before it; it had a hexagonal arrangement of eyes which swiveled about, fixing on me.