The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  “Look,” I said, “I’m prepared to tell you everything you want to know, just as I promised. But first—”

  “Yes?”

  “I would be honored to view your laboratory. And I’m sure Nebogipfel would be curious. Tell us something of you,” I said. “And in the course of that, you will learn about me.”

  He sat for a while, clutching his drink. Then, with a brisk motion, he recharged our glasses, stood up, and took his candle from the mantel.

  “Come with me.”

  [4]

  The Experiment

  Bearing his candle aloft, he led us down the cold passage-way to the laboratory. Those few seconds are vivid in my memory: the light of the candle casting huge shadows from Moses’s wide skull, and his jacket and boots glimmering in the uncertain light; behind me the Morlock’s feet padded softly, and in the enclosed space his rotten-sweet stench was strong.

  At the laboratory Moses made his way around the walls and benches, lighting candles and incandescent lamps. Soon the place was brightly lit. The walls were whitewashed and free of ornamentation — save for some of Moses’s notes, crudely pinned there — and the single book-case was crammed with journals, standard texts and volumes of mathematical tables and physical measurements. The place was cold; in my shirtsleeves, I found myself shivering, and wrapped my arms about my body.

  Nebogipfel padded across the workshop floor towards the book-case. He crouched down and studied the battered spines of the volumes there. I wondered if he could read English; for I had seen no evidence of books or papers in the Sphere, and the lettering on those ubiquitous panels of blue glass had been unfamiliar.

  “I’m not very interested in giving you a biographical summary,” Moses said. “And nor” — more sharply — “do I understand yet why you are so interested in me. But I’m willing to play your game. Look here: suppose I run you through my most recent experimental findings. How does that sound?”

  I smiled. How in keeping with my — his — character, with little at the surface of the mind but the current puzzle!

  He went to a bench, on which stood a haphazard arrangement of retort stands, lamps, gratings and lenses. “I’d be grateful if you wouldn’t touch anything here. It may look a little random, but I assure you there’s a system! I have the devil of a time keeping Mrs. Penforth and her dusters and brooms out of here, I can tell you.”

  Mrs. Penforth? I had an impulse to ask after Mrs. Watchets — but then I remembered that Mrs. Penforth had been Mrs. Watchets’s predecessor. I had released her some fifteen years before my departure into time, after I had caught her pilfering from my small stock of industrial diamonds. I thought of warning Moses of this little occurrence, but no real harm had been done; and — I thought with an oddly paternal mood towards my younger self — it would probably do Moses good to take a closer interest in the affairs of his household for once in a while, and not leave it all to chance!

  Moses went on, “My general field is physical optics — that is to say, the physical properties of light, which—”

  “We know,” I said gently.

  He frowned. “All right. Well, recently, I’ve been somewhat diverted by an odd conundrum — it’s the study of a new mineral, a sample of which I came upon by chance two years ago.” He showed me a common eight-ounce graduated medicine bottle, plugged with rubber; the bottle was half-full of a fine, greenish powder, oddly shining. “Look here: can you see how there is a faint translucence about it, as if it were glowing from within?” And indeed the material shone as if it were composed of fine glass beads. “But where,” Moses went on, “is the energy source for such illumination?

  “So I began my researches — at first in odd moments, for I have my work to do! — I depend on grants and commissions, which depend in turn on my building up a respectable flow of research results. I have no time for chasing wild geese… But later,” he admitted, “this Plattnerite came to absorb a great deal of my times — for such I had decided to call the stuff, after the rather mysterious chap — Gottfried Plattner, he called himself — who donated it to me.

  “I’m no chemist — even within the limits of the Three Gases my practical chemistry has always been a little tentative — but still, I set to with a will. I bought test tubes, a gas supply and burners, litmus paper, and all the rest of that smelly paraphernalia. I poured my green dust into test tubes and tried it with water, and with acids — sulphuric, nitric and hydrochloric — learning nothing. Then I emptied out a heap onto a slate and held it over my gas burner.” He rubbed his nose. “The resulting bang blew out a skylight and made a fearful mess of one wall,” he said.

  It had been the south-western wall which had sustained damage, and now — I could not help myself — I glanced that way, but there was nothing to distinguish it, for the repair work had been thorough. Moses noted my glance, curiously, for he had not indicated which wall it had been.

  “After this failure,” he went on, “I was still no closer to unraveling the mysteries of Plattnerite. Then, however” — his tone grew more animated — “I began to apply a little more reason to the case. The translucence is an optical phenomenon, after all. So — I reasoned — perhaps the key to the secrets of Plattnerite lay not in its chemistry, but in its optical properties.”

  I felt a peculiar satisfaction — a kind of remote self-regard — at hearing this summary of my own clear thinking processes! And I could tell that Moses was enjoying the momentum of his own narrative: I have always enjoyed recounting a good tale, to whatever audience — I think there is something of the showman in me.

  “So I swept aside my clutter of Schoolboy Chemistry,” Moses went on, “and began a new series of tests. And very quickly I came upon striking anomalies: bizarre results concerning Plattnerite’s refractive index — which, you may know, depends on the velocity of light within the substance. And it turned out that the behavior of light rays passing through Plattnerite is highly peculiar.” He turned to the experiment on the bench-top. “Now, look here; this is the clearest demonstration of Plattnerite’s optical oddities which I have been able to devise.”

  Moses had set up his test in three parts, in a line. There was a small electric lamp with a curved mirror behind it, and, perhaps a yard away, a white screen, held upright by a retort stand; between these two, clamped in the claws of another retort, was a cardboard panel which bore the evidence of fine scoring. Beside the lamp, wires trailed to an electromotive cell beneath the bench.

  The set-up was lucidly simple: I have always sought as straightforward as possible a demonstration of any new phenomenon, the better to focus the mind on the phenomenon itself, and not on deficiencies in the experimental arrangement, or — it is always possible — some trickery on behalf of the experimenter.

  Now Moses closed a switch, and the lamp lit; it was a small yellow star in the candle-lit room. The cardboard panel shielded the screen from the light, save for a dim central glow, cast by rays admitted by the scoring in the panel. “Sodium light,” Moses said. “It is nearly a pure color — as opposed, say, to white sunlight, which is a mixture of all the colors. This mirror behind the lamp is parabolic, so it casts all the lamp’s light towards the interposed card.”

  He traced the paths of the light rays towards the card. “On the card I have scored two slits. The slits are a mere fraction of an inch apart — but the structure of light is so fine that the slits are, nevertheless, some three hundred wavelengths apart. Rays emerge from the two slits” — his finger continued on “and travel onwards to the screen, here. Now, the rays from the two slits interfere — their crests and troughs reinforce and cancel each other out, at successive places.” He looked at me uncertainly. “Are you familiar with the idea? You would get much the same effect if you were to drop two stones into a still pond, and watch how the spreading ripples coalesced…”

  “I understand.”

  “Well, in just the same way, these waves of light — ripples in the ether — interfere with each other, and set up a pattern which
one may observe, here on this screen beyond.” He pointed to the patch of yellow illumination which had reached the screen beyond the slits. “Can you see? — one really needs a glass — right at the heart of it, there, you’ll see bands of illumination and darkness, alternating, a few tenths of an inch apart. Well, those are the spots where the rays from the two slits are combining.”

  Moses straightened up. “This interference is a well-known effect. Such an experiment is commonly used to determine the wavelength of the sodium light — it works out at a fifty-thousandth part of an inch, if you’re interested.”

  “And the Plattnerite?” Nebogipfel asked.

  Moses started at hearing the Morlock’s liquid tones, but he carried on gamely. From another part of the bench he produced a glass slide, perhaps six inches square, held upright in a stand. The glass appeared to be stained green. “Here I have some Plattnerite — actually, this slide is a sandwich of two glass sheets, with the Plattnerite sprinkled and scattered between — do you see? Now, watch what happens when I interpose the Plattnerite between card and screen…”

  It took him some adjusting, but he arranged affairs so that one of the slits in the cards remained clear, and the other was covered by the Plattnerite slide. Thus, one of the two interfering sets of rays would have to pass through Plattnerite before reaching the screen.

  The image of interference bands on the screen was made fainter — it was tinged with green — and the pattern was shifted and distorted.

  Moses said, “The rays are rendered less pure, of course some of the sodium light is scattered from the Plattnerite itself, and so emerges with wavelengths appropriate to the greener part of the spectrum but still, enough of the original sodium light passes through the Plattnerite without scattering to allow the interference phenomenon to persist. But — can you see the changes this has made?”

  Nebogipfel bent closer; the sodium light shone from his goggles.

  “The shifting of a few smears of light on a card may not seem so important to the layman,” Moses went on, “but the effect is of great significance, if analyzed closely. For and I can show you the mathematics to prove it,” he said, waving unconvincingly at a heap of notes on the floor, “the light rays, passing through the Plattnerite, undergo a temporal distortion. It is a tiny effect, but measurable — it shows up in a distortion of the interference pattern, you see.”

  “A ’temporal distortion’?” Nebogipfel said, looking up. “You mean…”

  “Yes.” Moses’s skin was coldly illuminated in the sodium light. “I believe that the light rays — in passing through the Plattnerite — are transferred through time.”

  I gazed with a sort of rapture at this crude demonstration, of bulb and cards and clamps. For this was the start — it was from this naive beginning that the long, difficult experimental and theoretical trail would lead, at last, to the construction of the Time Machine itself!

  [5]

  Honesty and Doubt

  I could not betray how much I knew, of course, and I did my best to simulate surprise and shock at his pronouncement. “Well,” I said vaguely, “well — Great Scott…”

  He looked at me, dissatisfied. He was evidently forming the opinion that I was something of an unimaginative fool. He turned away and began to tinker with his apparatus.

  I took the opportunity to draw the Morlock to one side. “What did you make of that? An ingenious demonstration.”

  “Yes,” he said, “but I am surprised he has not noticed the radioactivity of your mysterious substance, Plattnerite. The goggles show clearly—”

  “Radio-activity?”

  He looked at me. “The term is unfamiliar?” He gave me a quick survey of this phenomenon, which involves, it seems, elements which break up and fly into pieces. All elements do this — according to Nebogipfel — at more or less perceptible rates; some, like radium, do it in a manner spectacular enough to be measurable — if one knows what to look for!

  All this stirred up some memories. “I remember a toy called a spinthariscope,” I told Nebogipfel. “Where radium is held in close proximity to a screen, coated with sulphide of zinc—”

  “And the screen fluoresces. Yes. It is the disintegration of the cores of radium atoms which causes this,” he said.

  “But the atom is indivisible — or so it is thought—”

  “The phenomenon of subatomic structure will be demonstrated by Thomson at Cambridge, no more than a few years — if I recall my studies — after your departure into time.”

  “Subatomic structure — by Thomson! Why, I’ve met Joseph Thomson myself, several times — a rather pompous buffer, I always thought — and only a handful of years younger than me…”

  Not for the first time I felt a deep regret at my precipitate plummeting into time! If only I had stayed to take part in such intellectual excitement — I could have been at the thick of it, even without my experiments in time travel — surely that would have been adventure enough, for any one lifetime.

  Now Moses seemed to be done, and he reached out to turn off the sodium lamp — but he snatched his hand back with a cry.

  Nebogipfel had touched Moses’s fingers with his own, hairless palm. “I am sorry.”

  Moses rubbed his hand, as if trying to wipe it clean. “Your touch,” he said. “It’s so — cold.” He stared at Nebogipfel as if seeing him, in all his strangeness, for the first time.

  Nebogipfel apologized again. “I did not mean to startle you. But—”

  “Yes?” I said.

  The Morlock reached out with one worm-like finger, and pointed at the slab of Plattnerite. “Look.”

  With Moses, I bent down and squinted into the illuminated slab.

  At first I could make out nothing but the speckled reflection of the sodium bulb, a sheen of fine dust on the surface of the glass slides… and then I became aware of a growing light, a glow from deep within the substance of the Plattnerite itself: a green illumination that shone as if the slide was a tiny window into another world.

  The glow intensified further, and evoked glittering reflections from the test tubes and slides and other paraphernalia of the laboratory.

  We retired to the dining-room. It was now long hours since the fire had died, and the room was growing chilly, but Moses did not show any awareness of my discomfort. He, supplied me with another brandy, and I accepted an offer of a cigar; Nebogipfel asked for some clear water. I lit up my cigar with a sigh, while Nebogipfel watched me with what I took to be blank astonishment, all his acquired human mannerisms forgotten!

  “Well, sir,” I said, “when do you intend to publish these remarkable findings?”

  Moses scratched his scalp and loosened his gaudy tie. “I’m not certain,” he said frankly. “What I have amounts to little more than a catalogue of observations of anomalies, you know, of a substance whose provenance is uncertain. Still, perhaps there are brighter fellows than me out there who might make something out of it learn how to manufacture more Plattnerite, perhaps…”

  “No,” Nebogipfel said obscurely. “The means to manufacture radio-active material will not exist for another several decades.”

  Moses looked at the Morlock curiously, but did not take up the point.

  I said bluntly, “But you’ve no intention of publishing.”

  He gave me a conspiratorial wink — another grating mannerism! — and said, “All in good time. You know, in some ways I’m not quite like a True Scientist — you know what I mean, the careful, miniature sort of chap who ends up known in the Press as a ’distinguished scientist.’ You see such a chap giving his little talk, on some obscure aspect of toxic alkaloids, perhaps, and floating out of the magic-lantern darkness you might hear the odd fragment the chap imagines himself to be reading audibly; and you might catch a glimpse of gold-rimmed spectacles and cloth boots cut open for corns…”

  I prompted, “But you—”

  “Oh, I’m not meaning to decry the patient plodders of the world! — I daresay I have my share of plodding
to do in the years to come — but I also have a certain impatience. I always want to know how things turn out, you see.” He sipped his drink. “I do have some publications behind me — including one in the Philosophical Transactions and a number of other studies which should yield papers. But the Plattnerite work…”

  “Yes?”

  “I have an odd notion about that. I want to see how far I can take it myself…”

  I leaned forward. I saw how the bubbles in his glass caught the candlelight, and his face was animated, alive. It was the quietest part of the night, and I seemed to see every detail, hear the tick of every clock in the house, with preternatural clarity. “Tell me what you mean.”

  He straightened his ridiculous masher’s jacket. “I’ve told you of my speculation that a ray of light, passing through Plattnerite, is temporally transferred. By that I mean that the ray moves between two points in space without any intervening interval in time. But it seems to me,” he said slowly, “that if light can move through these time intervals in such a fashion — then so, perhaps, can material objects. I have this notion that if one were to mix up the Plattnerite with some appropriate crystalline substance — quartz, perhaps, or some rock crystal — then…”

  “Yes?”

  He seemed to recover himself. He put his brandy-glass down on a table close to his chair, and leaned forward; his gray eyes seemed to shine in the candlelight, pale and earnest. “I’m not sure I want to say any more! Look here: I’ve been very open with you. And now, it’s time for you to be just as open with me. Will you do that?”

  For answer, I looked into his face — into eyes which, though surrounded by smoother skin, were undeniably my own, the eyes which stared out from my shaving-mirror every day!

  Evidently unable to look away, he hissed: “Who are you?”