The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  Around me the Hill flickered through night and day, with here and there a splash of color as some picnic party stayed on the grass long enough for them to register on my vision. At last, with the dials reading six thousand, five hundred and sixty days before my departure, I pressed the levers again.

  I brought the Time Machine to rest, in the depths of a cloudy, moonless night. If I had got my calculations right, I had landed in July of 1873. With my Morlock goggles, I saw the slope of the Hill, and the river’s flank, and dew glittering on the grass; and I could see that — although the Morlocks had deposited my machine on an open stretch of hill-side, a half-mile from my house — there was nobody about to witness my arrival. The sounds and scents of my century flooded over me: the sharp tang of wood burning in some grate somewhere, the distant murmur of the Thames, the brush of a breeze through the trees, the naphtha flares of hawkers’ barrows. It was all delicious, and familiar, and welcome!

  Nebogipfel stood up cautiously. He had slipped his arms into my jacket sleeves, and now that heavy garment hung from him as if he were a child. “Is this 1891?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I have brought us back further in time.” I glanced along the Hill, in the direction of my house. “Nebogipfel, in a laboratory up there, a brash young man is embarking on a series of experiments which will lead, ultimately, to the creation of a Time Machine…”

  “You are saying—”

  “That this is the year 1873 — and I anticipate, soon, meeting myself as a young man!”

  His goggled, chinless face swiveled towards me in what appeared to be astonishment.

  “Now come, Nebogipfel, and assist me in finding a place of concealment for this contraption.”

  [2]

  Home

  I cannot describe how odd it seemed to me to walk through the night air along the Petersham Road, coming at last to my own house — with a Morlock at my side!

  The house was an end terrace, with big bay windows, rather unambitious carvings about the door frame, and a porch with mock-Grecian pillars. At the front there was an area with steps which went down to the basement, railed off by a bit of delicate, black-painted metal-work. The whole effect was really a sort of imitation of the genuinely grand houses on the Green, or in the Terrace at the top of the Hill; but it was a big, roomy, comfortable place which I had bought as a bargain as a younger man, and from which I had since had no thoughts of moving away.

  I walked past the front door and around towards the rear of the house. At the rear there were balconies, with delicate iron pilasters painted white, giving a view to the west. I could make out the windows of the smoking-room and dining-room, darkened now (it occurred to me that I was not sure what time of the night it was), but I was aware of an odd absence to the rear of the smoking-room. It took me some moments to remember what this represented — an unexpected absence of something is so much harder to identify than an incongruous presence — it was, in fact, the site of the bathroom which I would later have built there. Here, in 1873, I was still forced to wash in a hip-bath brought into my bedroom by a servant!

  And, in that ill-proportioned conservatory protruding from the rear of the house, there was my laboratory, where — I saw with a thrill of anticipation — a light still burned. Any dinner guests had gone, and the servants had long retired; but still he — I — was working on.

  I suffered a mixture of emotions I imagine no man has shared before; here was my home, and yet I could lay no claim to it!

  I returned to the front door. Nebogipfel was standing a little way into the deserted road; he seemed cautious of approaching the area steps, for the pit into which they descended was quite black, even with the goggles.

  “You don’t need to be fearful,” I said. “It’s quite common to have kitchens and the like underground in houses like this… The steps and railings are sturdy enough.”

  Nebogipfel, anonymous behind his goggles, inspected the steps suspiciously. I supposed his caution came from an ignorance of the robustness of nineteenth-century technology — I had forgotten how strange my crude era must seem to him — but, nevertheless, something about his attitude disturbed me.

  I was reminded, and it disconcerted me, of an odd fragment of my own childhood. The house where I grew up was large and rambling — impractical, actually — and it had underground passages which ran from the house to the stable block, larder and the like: such passages are a common feature of houses of that age. There were gratings set in the ground at intervals: black-painted, round things, covering shafts which led down to the passages, for ventilation. I recalled, now, my own fear, as a child, of those enclosed pits in the ground. Perhaps they had been simple air-shafts; but what, my childish imagination had prompted me, if some bony Hand came squirming through those wide bars and grabbed my ankle?

  It occurred to me now — I think something in Nebogipfel’s cautious stance was triggering all this — that there was something of a similarity between those shafts in the grounds of my childhood, and the sinister wells of the Morlocks… Was that why, in the end, I had lashed out so at that Morlock child, in A.D. 657,208?

  I am not a man who enjoys such insights into his own character! Quite unfairly, I snapped at Nebogipfel, “Besides, I thought you Morlocks liked the dark!” And I turned from him and walked up to the front door.

  It was all so familiar — and yet disconcertingly different. Even at a glance I could see a thousand small changes from my day, eighteen years into the future. There was the sagging lintel I would later have replaced, for instance, and there the vacant site which would hold the arched lamp-holder I would one day install, at the prompting of Mrs. Watchets.

  I came to realize, anew, what a remarkable business this time traveling was! One might expect the most dramatic changes in a flight across thousands of centuries — and such I had found — but even this little hop, of mere decades, had rendered me an anachronism.

  “What shall I do? Should I wait for you?”

  I considered Nebogipfel’s silent presence beside me. Wearing his goggles and with my jacket still drooped about him, he looked comical and alarming in equal measure! “I think there is more danger in the situation if you stay outside. What if a policeman were to spot you? — he might think you were some odd burglar.” Without his web of Morlock machinery, Nebogipfel was quite defenseless; he had launched himself into History quite as unprepared as I had been on my first jaunt. “And what of dogs? Or cats? I wonder what the average Tom of the eighteen-seventies would make of a Morlock. A fine meal, I should think… No, Nebogipfel. All in all, I think it would be safer if you stayed with me.”

  “And the young man you are visiting? What of his reaction?”

  I sighed. “Well, I have always been blessed by an open and flexible mind. Or so I like to think!… Perhaps I am soon to find out. Besides, your presence might convince me — him — of the veracity of my account.”

  And, without allowing myself any further hesitation, I tugged at the bell-pull.

  From within the house, I heard doors slamming, an irritable shout: “It’s all right, I’ll go!” — and then footsteps which clattered along the short corridor linking the rest of the house to my laboratory.

  “It’s me,” I hissed at Nebogipfel. “Him. It must be late — the servants are abed.”

  A key rattled in the lock of the door.

  Nebogipfel hissed: “Your goggles.”

  I snatched the offending anachronisms from my face, and jammed them into my trouser pocket just as the door swung open.

  A young man stood there, his face glowing like a moon in the light of the single candle he carried. His glance over me, in my shirt-sleeves, was cursory; and the inspection he gave Nebogipfel was even more superficial. (So much for the powers of observation I prized!) “What the Devil do you want? It’s after one in the morning, you know.”

  I opened my mouth to speak but my little rehearsed preamble disappeared from my mind
.

  Thus I confronted myself at the age of twenty-six!

  [3]

  Moses

  I have become convinced that we all, without exception, use the mirror to deceive ourselves. The reflection we see there is so much under our control: we favor our best features, if unconsciously, and adjust our mannerisms into a pattern which our closest friend would not recognize. And, of course, we are under no compulsion to consider ourselves from less favorable angles: such as from the back of the head, or with our prominent nose in full, glorious profile.

  Well, here was one reflection which was not under my control — and a troubling experience it was.

  He was my height, of course: if anything, I was startled to find, I had shrunk a little in the intervening eighteen years. His forehead was odd: peculiarly broad, just as many people have pointed out to me, unkindly, through my life, and dusted with thin, mouse-brown hair, yet to recede or show any streaks of gray. The eyes were a clear gray, the nose straight, the jaw firm; but I had hardly been a handsome devil: he was naturally pale, and that pallor was enhanced by the long hours he had spent, since his formative years, in libraries, studies, teaching-rooms and laboratories.

  I felt vaguely repulsed; there was indeed a little of the Morlock in me! And had my ears ever been so prominent?

  But it was the clothes which caught my eye. The clothes!

  He wore what I remembered as the costume of a masher: a short, bright red coat over a yellow and black waistcoat fixed with heavy brass buttons, boots tall and yellow, and a nosegay adorning his lapel.

  Had I ever worn such garments? I must have done! — but anything further from my own sober style would have been difficult to imagine.

  “Confound it,” I couldn’t help but say, “you’re dressed like a circus clown!”

  He seemed uncertain — he saw something odd about my face, evidently — but he replied briskly enough: “Perhaps I should close this door in your face, sir. Have you climbed the Hill just to insult my clothing?”

  I noticed that his nosegay was rather wilted, and I thought I could smell brandy on his breath. “Tell me. Is this Thursday?”

  “That’s a very odd question. I ought to…”

  “Yes?”

  He held up the candle and peered into my face. So fascinated was he by me — by his own, dimly perceived self — that he ignored the Morlock: a man-thing from the distant future, standing not two yards away from him! I wondered if there was some clumsy Metaphor buried in this little scene: had I traveled into time, after all, only to seek out myself?

  But I have no time for irony, and I felt rather embarrassed at even having framed such a Literary thought!

  “It is Thursday, as it happens. Or was — we’re in Friday’s small hours now. What of it? And why don’t you know in the first place? Who are you, sir?”

  “I’ll tell you who I am,” I said. “And” — indicated the Morlock, and evoked widened eyes from our reluctant host — “and who this is. And why I’m not sure what hour it is, or even what day. But first — may we come inside? For I would relish a little of your brandy.”

  He stood there for perhaps half a minute, the candle wick sputtering in its pool of wax; and, in the distance, I heard the sigh of the Thames as it made its languid way through the bridges of Richmond. Then, at length, he said: “I should throw you into the street! — but…”

  “I know,” I said gently. I regarded my younger self with indulgence; I have never been shy of feverish speculation, and I could imagine what wild hypotheses were already fomenting in that fecund, undisciplined mind!

  He came to his decision. He stepped back from the door.

  I gestured Nebogipfel forward. The Morlock’s feet, bare save for a coat of hair, padded on the hall’s parquetry floor. My younger self stared anew — Nebogipfel returned his gaze with interest — and he said: “It’s — ah — it’s late. I don’t want to get the servants up. Come on through to the dining-room; it’s probably the warmest place.”

  The hall was dark, with a painted dado and a row of hat-pegs; our reluctant host’s broad skull was silhouetted by his single candle as he led the way past the door to the smoking-room. In the dining-room, there was still a glow of coals in the fireplace. Our host lit candles from the one he carried, and the room emerged into brightness, for there were a dozen or so candles in there: two in brass sticks on the mantel, with a tobacco jar plump and complacent between, and the rest in sconces.

  I gazed around at this warm and comfortable room — so familiar, and yet made so different by the most subtle of rearrangements and redecoration! There was the little table at the door, with its pile of newspapers — replete, no doubt, with gloomy analyses of Mr. Disraeli’s latest pronouncements, or perhaps some dreadfully dreary stuff about the Eastern Question — and there was my armchair close to the fire, low and comfortable. But of my set of small octagonal tables, and of my incandescent lamps with their lilies of silver, there was no sign.

  Our host came up to the Morlock. He leaned forward, resting his hands on his knees. “What is this? It looks like some form of ape — or a deformed child. Is this your jacket it’s wearing?”

  I bridled at this tone — and surprised myself for doing so. “ ’It.’ “ I said, “is actually a ’he.’ And he can speak for himself.”

  “Can it?” He swiveled his face back to Nebogipfel. “I mean, can you? Great Scott.”

  He kept on staring into poor Nebogipfel’s hairy face, and I stood there on the carpet of the dining-room, trying not to betray my impatience — not to say embarrassment — at this ill-courtesy.

  He remembered his hospitable duties. “Oh,” he said, “I’m sorry. Please — here. Sit down.”

  Nebogipfel, swamped by my jacket, stood in the middle of, the hearth-rug. He glanced down at the floor, and then around the room. He seemed to be waiting for something — and in a moment, I understood. So used was the Morlock to the technology of his time, he was waiting for furniture to be extruded from the carpet! Although, later in our acquaintance, the Morlock was to show himself rather knowledgeable about things and flexible of mind, just then he was as baffled as I might have been had I searched for a gas mantle on the wall of some Stone Age cave.

  “Nebogipfel,” I said, “these are simpler times. The forms are fixed.” I pointed to the dining-table and chairs, “You must select one of these.”

  My younger self listened to this exchange with evident curiosity.

  The Morlock, after a few more seconds’ hesitation, made for one of the bulkier chairs.

  I got there before him. “Actually, not this one, Nebogipfel,” I said gently. “I don’t think you’d find it comfortable — it might try to give you a massage, you see, but it’s not designed for your weight…”

  My host looked at me, startled.

  Nebogipfel, under my guidance — I felt like a clumsy parent as I fussed about him — pulled out a simple upright and climbed up into it; he sat there with his legs dangling like some hairy child.

  “How did you know about my Active Chairs?” my host demanded. “I’ve only demonstrated them to a few friends — the design isn’t even patented yet—”

  I did not answer: I simply held his gaze, for long seconds. I could see that the extraordinary answer to his own question was already forming in his mind.

  He broke the gaze. “Sit down,” he said to me. “Please. I’ll fetch the brandy.”

  I sat with Nebogipfel — at my own transmuted dining-table, with a Morlock for company! — and I glanced around. In one corner of the dining-room, on its tripod, sat the old Gregorian telescope which I had brought from my parents’ home — a simple thing capable of delivering only cloudy images, and yet a window for me as a child into worlds of wonder in the sky, and into the intriguing marvels of physical optics. And, beyond this room, there was the dark passage to the laboratory, with the doors left carelessly open; through the passage I caught tantalizing glimpses of my workshop itself: the clutter of apparatuses on the benches, sheets
of drawings laid across the floor, and various tools and appliances.

  Our host rejoined us; he carried, clumsily, three glasses for brandy, and a carafe. He poured out three generous measures, and the liquor sparkled in the light of the candles. “Here,” he said. “Are you cold? Would you like the fire?”

  “No,” I said, “thank you.” I raised the brandy, sniffed at it, then let it roll over my tongue.

  Nebogipfel did not pick up his glass. He dipped a pallid finger into the stuff, withdrew it, and licked a drop from his fingertip. He seemed to shudder. Then, delicately, he pushed the glass away from him, as if it were full to the brim with the most noxious ale imaginable!

  My host watched this curiously. Then, with an evident effort, he turned to me. “You have me at a disadvantage. I don’t know you. But you know me, it appears.”

  “Yes.” I smiled. “But I’m at something of a quandary as to what to call you.”

  He frowned, looking uneasy. “I don’t see why that’s any sort of a problem. My name is—”

  I held up my hand; I had an inspiration. “No. I will use — if you will permit — Moses.”

  He took a deep pull on his brandy, and gazed at me with genuine anger in his gray eyes. “How do you know about that?”

  Moses — my hated first name, for which I had been endlessly tormented at school — and which I had kept a secret since leaving home!

  “Never mind,” I said. “Your secret is safe with me.”

  “Look here, I’m growing tired of these games. You turn up here with your — companion — and make all sorts of disparagements about my clothes. And I still don’t even know your name!”

  “But,” I said, “perhaps you do.”

  His long fingers closed around his glass. He knew something strange, and wonderful, was going on — but what? I could see in his face, as clear as day, that mixture of excitement, impatience and a little fear which I had felt so often when confronting the unknown.