Nebogipfel joined me in the cabin, and he stood at my shoulder; the strong, sweet smell of Morlock was almost overpowering in that enclosed space. Through the slit window I could see Gödel and Moses, filling up the flasks.
Gödel called, “You understand the principle of the CDV? This is all Wallis’s design, of course — I’ve had nothing much to do with the construction of it—”
I brought my face up against the slit window. “I am at the controls,” I said. “But they’re not labeled. And I can see nothing resembling a chronometric gauge.”
Gödel did not look up from his careful pouring. “I’ve a suspicion such niceties as chronometric dials aren’t yet fitted. This is an incomplete test vehicle, after all. Does that trouble you?”
“I have to admit the prospect of losing my bearings in time does not appeal to me very much,” I said, “but — no — it is scarcely important… One can always ask the natives!”
“The principle of the CDV is simple enough,” Gödel said. “The Plattnerite suffuses the sub-frames of the vehicle through a network of capillaries. It forms a kind of circuit… When you close the circuit, you will travel in time. Do you see? Most of the controls you have are to do with the petrol engine, transmission, and so forth; for the vehicle is also a functioning motor-car. But to close the time-circuit there is a blue toggle, on your dashboard. Can you recognize it?”
“I have it.”
Now Moses had fixed the last of the flask caps back into place, and he walked around the car to the door at its rear. He clambered in and placed his wrench on the floor, and he pounded his fists against the cabin’s inner walls. “A good, sturdy construction,” he said.
I said, “I think we are ready to depart.”
“But where — when — are we going to?”
“Does it matter? Away from here — that’s the only significant thing. Into the past — to try to rectify things…
“Moses, we are done with the Twentieth Century. Now we must take another leap into the dark. Our adventure is not over yet!”
His look of confusion dissolved, and I saw a reckless determination take its place; the muscles of his jaw set. “Then let’s do it, or be damned!”
Nebogipfel said: “I think we quite possibly will be.”
I called: “Professor Gödel — come aboard the car.”
“Oh, no,” he said, and he held his hands up before him. “My place is here.”
Moses pushed into the cabin behind me. “But London’s walls are collapsing around us — the German guns are only a few miles away — it’s hardly a safe place to be, Professor!”
“I do envy you, of course,” Gödel said. “To leave this wretched world with its wretched War…”
“Then come with us,” I said. “Seek that Final World of which you spoke—”
“I have a wife,” he said. His face was a pale streak in the candle-light.
“Where is she?”
“I lost her. We did not succeed in getting out together. I suppose she is in Vienna… I cannot imagine they would harm her, as punishment for my defection.”
There was a question in his voice, and I realized that this supremely logical man was looking to me, in that extreme moment, for the most illogical reassurance! “No,” I said, “I am sure she—”
But I never completed my sentence, for — without even the warning of a whistle in the air — a new shell fell, and this was the closest of all!
The last flicker of our candle showed me, in a flash-bulb slice of frozen time, how the westerly wall of the workshop burst inwards — simply that; it turned from a smooth, steady panel into a billowing cloud of figments and dust, in less than a heartbeat.
Then we were plunged into darkness.
The car rocked, and — “Down!” Moses called — I ducked — and a hail of masonry shards, quite lethal, rattled against the shell of the Time-Car.
Nebogipfel climbed forward; I could smell his sweet stink. His soft hand grasped my shoulder. “Close the switch,” he said.
I peered through the slit-window — and into utter darkness, of course. “What of Gödel?” I cried. “Professor!”
There was no reply. I heard a creak, quite ominous and heavy, from above the car, and there was a further clatter of falling masonry fragments.
“Close the switch,” Nebogipfel said urgently. “Can you not hear? The roof is collapsing — I — we will be crushed!”
“I’ll get him,” Moses said. In pitch darkness, I heard his boots clump over the car’s panels as he made his way to the rear of the cabin. “It will be fine — I’ve more candles…” His voice faded as he reached the rear of the cabin, and I heard his feet crunch on the rubble strewn floor -
— and then there was an immense groan, like a grotesque gasp, and a rushing from above. I heard Moses cry out.
I twisted, intending to dive out of the cabin after Moses — and I felt a nip of small teeth in the soft part of my hand — Morlock teeth!
At that instant, with Death closing in around me, and plunged into primal darkness once more, the presence of the Morlock, his teeth in my flesh, the brush of his hair against my skin: it was all unbearable! I roared and drove my fist into the soft flesh of the Morlock’s face.
…But he did not cry out; even as I struck him, I felt him reach past me to the dash-board.
The darkness fell from my eyes — the roar of collapsing concrete diminished into silence — and I found myself falling once more into the gray light of time travel.
[16]
Falling Into Time
The Time-Car rocked. I grasped for the bucket seat, but I was thrown to the floor, clattering my head and shoulders against a wooden bench. My hand ached, irrelevantly, from the Morlock’s nip.
White light flooded the cabin, bursting upon us with a soundless explosion. I heard the Morlock cry out. My vision was blurred, impeded by the mats of blood which clung to my cheeks and eyebrows. Through the rear door and the various slit-windows, a uniform, pale glow seeped into the shuddering cabin; at first it flickered, but it soon settled to a washed-out gray glow. I wondered if there had been some fresh catastrophe: perhaps this workshop was being consumed by flames…
But then I recognized that the quality of light was too steady, too neutral for that. I understood that we had already gone far beyond that War-time laboratory.
The glow was, of course, daylight, rendered featureless and bland by the overlaying of day and night, too fast for the eye to follow. We had indeed fallen into time; this car — though crude and ill-balanced — was functioning correctly. I could not tell if we were falling into future or past, but the car had already taken us to a period beyond the existence of the London Dome.
I got my hands under me and tried to rise, but there was blood — mine or the Morlock’s — on my palms, and they slid out from under me. I tumbled back to the hard floor, thumping my head on the bench once more.
I fell into a huge, bone-numbing fatigue. The pain of my rattling about during the shellings, deferred by the scramble I had been through, now fell on me with a vengeance. I let my head rest against the floor’s metal ribs and closed my eyes. “What’s it all for, anyhow?” I asked, of no one in particular. Moses was dead… lost, with Professor Gödel, under tons of masonry in that destroyed lab. I had no idea whether the Morlock was alive or dead; nor did I care. Let the Time-Car carry me to future or past as it would; let it go on forever, until it smashed itself to pieces against the walls of infinity and Eternity! Let there be an end to it — I could do no more. “It’s not worth the candle,” I muttered. “Not worth the candle…”
I thought I felt soft hands on mine, the brush of hair against my face; but I protested, and — with the last of my strength — pushed the hands away.
I fell into a deep, dreamless, comfortless darkness.
I was woken by a severe buffeting.
I was rattled against the floor of the cabin. Something soft lay under my head, but that slipped away, and my skull banged against the hard
corner of a bench. This renewed hail of pain brought me to my senses, and, with some reluctance, I sat up.
My head ached pretty comprehensively and my body felt as if it had been through a grueling boxing-bout. But, paradoxically, my mood seemed a little improved. The death of Moses — was still there in my mind — a huge event, which I knew I must confront, in time — but after those moments of blessed unconsciousness I was able to look away from it, as one might turn away from the blinding light of the sun, and consider other things.
That dim, pearly mixture of day and night still suffused the interior of the car. It was quite remarkably cold; I felt myself shiver, and my breath fogged before my face. Nebogipfel sat in the pilot’s bucket seat, his back turned to me. His white fingers probed at the instruments in the rudimentary dash-board, and he traced the wires which dangled from the steering column.
I got to my feet. The car’s swaying, together with the battering I had endured in 1938, left me uncertain on my feet; to steady myself I had to cling to the cabin’s ribbed framework, and found the metal ice-cold under my bare hands. The soft item which had been cushioning my head, I found, was the Morlock’s blazer. I folded it up and placed it on a bench. I also saw, dropped on the floor, the heavy wrench which Moses had used to open the Plattnerite flasks. I picked it up with my fingertips; it was splashed with blood.
I still wore my heavy epaulets; disgusted by these bits of armor, I ripped them from my clothes and dropped them with a clatter.
At the noise, Nebogipfel glanced towards me, and I saw that his blue goggles were cracked in two, and that one huge eye was a mess of blood and broken flesh. “Prepare yourself,” he said thickly.
“What for? I—”
And the cabin was plunged into darkness.
I stumbled backwards, almost falling again. An intense cold sucked the remaining warmth out of the cabin air, and from my blood; and my head pounded anew. I wrapped my arms around my torso. “What has happened to the daylight?”
The voice of the Morlock seemed almost harsh in that swaying blackness. “It will last only a few seconds. We must endure…”
And, as quickly as it had come, the blackness receded, and the gray light seeped into the cabin once more. Some of the edge of that immense cold was blunted, but still I shivered violently. I knelt on the floor beside Nebogipfel’s seat. “What is happening? What was that?”
“Ice,” he said. “We are traveling through an Age of Periodic Glaciation; ice-sheets and glaciers are sweeping down from the north and covering the land — overwhelming us in the process — and then melting away. At times, I would hazard, there is as much as a hundred feet of ice above us.”
I peered through the slit-windows in the car’s front panel. I saw a Thames valley made over into a bleak tundra inhabited only by tough grass, defiant blazes of purple heather, and sparse trees; these latter shivered through their annual cycles too fast for me to follow, but they looked to me like the hardier varieties: oak, willow, poplar, elm, hawthorn. There was no sign of London: I could make out not even the ghosts of evanescent buildings, and there was no evidence of man in all that gray landscape, nor indeed of any animal life. Even the shape of the landscape, the hilts and valleys, seemed unfamiliar to me, as it was remade over and again by the glaciers.
And now — I saw it approach in a brief flood of white brilliance, before it overwhelmed us — the great Ice came again. In darkness, I cursed, and dug my hands into my arm-pits; my fingers and toes were numb, and I began to fear frostbite. When the glaciers receded once more, they left a landscape inhabited by much the same variety of hardy plants, as far as I could see, but with its contours adjusted: evidently the intervals of Ice were remaking the landscape, though I could not tell if we were proceeding into future or past. As I watched, boulders taller than men seemed to migrate across the landscape, taking slow slithers or rolls; this was clearly some odd effect of the erosion of the land.
“For how long was I unconscious?”
“Not long. Perhaps thirty minutes.”
“And is the Time-Car taking us into the future?”
“We are penetrating the past,” the Morlock said. He turned to face me, and I saw how his graceful movements had been reduced to stiff jerks by the fresh pummeling I had inflicted on him. “I am confident of it. I caught a few glimpses of the recession of London — its withering, back to its historical origins… From the intervals between Glaciations, I should say we are traveling at some tens of thousands of years every minute.”
“Perhaps we should work out how we might stop this car’s headlong drive into time. If we find an equable age—”
“I do not drink we have any way of terminating the flight of the car.”
“What?”
The Morlock spread his hands — I saw how the hair on the back of them was sprinkled with a light frost — and then we were plunged once more into a darkened sepulcher of Ice, and his voice floated out of the obscurity. “This is a crude, unfinished test vehicle, remember. Many of the controls and indicators are disconnected; those that do have connections largely appear nonfunctional. Even if we knew how to modify the workings with out wrecking the vehicle, I can see no way for us to get out of the cabin to reach the inner mechanism.”
We emerged from the Ice into that reshaped tundra once more. Nebogipfel watched the landscape with some fascination. “Think of it: the fjords of Scandinavia are not yet cut, and the lakes of Europe and North America — deposited by melting ice — are phantasms of the future.
“Already, we have passed beyond the dawn of human history. In Africa we might find races of Australopithecines some of them clumsy, some gracile, some carnivorous, but all with a bipedal gait and ape-like features: a small brain-case and large jaws and teeth…”
A great, cold loneliness descended on me. I had been lost in time before, but never, I thought, had I suffered quite this intensity of isolation! Was it true — could it be true — that Nebogipfel and I, in our damaged Time-Car, represented the only candle-flames of intelligence on the whole of the planet?
“So we are out of control,” I said. “We may not stop until we reach the beginning of time…”
“I doubt it will come to that,” Nebogipfel said. “The Plattnerite must have some finite capacity. It cannot propel us deeper into time, forever; it must exhaust itself: We must pray that it does so before we pass through the Ordovician and Cambrian time-layers — before we reach an Age in which there is no oxygen to sustain us.”
“That’s a cheerful prospect,” I said. “And things may become worse still, I suppose.”
“How?”
I got my stiff legs out from under me and sat on the cold, ribbed metal floor. “We have no provisions, of any kind. No water, no food. And we’re both injured. We don’t even have warm clothing! How long can we survive, in this freezing time-ark? A few days? Less?”
Nebogipfel did not reply.
I am not a man to submit easily to Fate, and I invested some energy in studying Nebogipfel’s controls and wires. I soon learned he was right — there was no way I could find to build this tangle of components into a dirigible vehicle — and my energy, sapped as it was, was soon spent: I reverted to a sort of dull apathy.
We passed through one more brief, brutal Glaciation; and then we entered a long, bleak winter. The seasons still brought snow and ice flickering across the land, but the Age of Permanent Ice lay in the future now. I saw little change in the nature of the landscape, millennium on millennium: perhaps there was a slow enrichment of the texture of the blur of greenery that coated the hills. An immense skull — it reminded me of an elephant’s — appeared on the ground not far from the Time-Car, bleached, bare and crumbled. It persisted long enough for me to make out its contours, a second or so, before it vanished as fast as it had appeared.
“Nebogipfel — about your face. I — you have to understand…”
He regarded me from his one good eye. I saw he had reverted to his Morlock mannerisms, losing the human coloratio
n he had adopted. “What? What must I understand?”
“I didn’t mean to injure you.”
“You do not now,” he said with a surgeon’s precision. “But you did then. Apology is futile — absurd. You are what you are… we are different species, as divergent from each other as from the Australopithecines.”
I felt like a clumsy animal, my huge fists stained once more with the blood of a Morlock. “You shame me,” I said.
He shook his head a brief, curt gesture. “Shame? The concept is without meaning, in this context.”
I should no more feel shame — I saw he meant — than should some savage animal of the jungle. If attacked by such a creature, would I argue the morals of the case with it? No — without intelligence, it could not help its behavior. I should merely deal with its actions.
To Nebogipfel, I had proved myself — again! — to be little better than those clumsy brutes of the African plains, the precursors of men in this desolate period.
I retreated to the wooden benches. I lay there, cradling my aching head with my arm, and watched the flicker of Ages beyond the still-open door of the car.
[17]
The Watcher
The bleak, wintry cold passed, and the sky took on a more complex, mottled texture. Occasionally the rocking sun-band would be blotted out by a shell of dark cloud, for as long as a second. New species of trees flourished in this milder climate: deciduous types, as best I could make out, maple, oak, poplar, cedars and others. Sometimes these antique forests lapped over the car, shutting us into a twilight of flickering green-brown, and then they receded, as if a curtain had been drawn aside.
We had entered a time of powerful earth movements, Nebogipfel said. The Alps and Himalayas were being forced out of the ground, and immense volcanoes were spewing ash and dust into the air, sometimes obscuring the sky for years on end. In the oceans — the Morlock said — great sharks cruised, with teeth like daggers. And in Africa, the ancestors of Humanity were shriveling back into primitive mindlessness, with shrinking brains, stooping gait and blunted, clumsy fingers.
The Time Ships Page 26