The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  Hilary lay in a shallow unconsciousness, with her limbs convulsing and mumbled cries escaping her lips, as echoes of pain worked their way through her nervous system.

  When we reached the shore we set Hilary down in the shade of the forest’s rim, and Stubbins lifted her head, cupping her skull in one hand, as he fed her sips of water. Stubbins was a clumsy man, but he worked with an unconscious delicacy and sensitivity that overcame the natural limitations of his frame; it seemed to me that he was pouring his whole being into those simple acts of kindness for Hilary. Stubbins struck me as fundamentally a good, kind man; and I accepted that his detailed care of Hilary was motivated largely by nothing more nor less than simple compassion. But I saw, too, that it would have been unbearable for poor Stubbins to have survived — thanks only to the lucky chance of following an assignment away from the camp during the disaster — when all of his fellows had perished; and I foresaw that he would spend a good deal of his remaining days on such acts of contrition as this.

  When we had done our best we picked up the stretcher and progressed along the beach. Stubbins and I, all but naked, our bodies coated with the soot and ash of the burned forest, and with the broken body of Hilary Bond suspended between us, walked along the firmer, damp sand at the Sea’s fringe, with cool, wet sand between our toes and brine wavelets lapping against our shins.

  When we reached our small encampment, Nebogipfel took command. Stubbins fussed about, but he impeded Nebogipfel’s movements, and the Morlock served me with a series of hostile glares until I took Stubbins’s arm and pulled him away.

  “Look here, old chap,” I said, “the Morlock might look a little strange, but he knows a sight more medicine than I do — or you, I should hazard. I think it’s best if we keep out of his way for a bit, and let him treat the Captain.”

  Stubbins’s great hands flexed.

  At length I had an idea. “We still need to seek out any others,” I said. “Why not build a fire? If you use green wood, and produce enough smoke, you should raise a signal which will be visible for miles.”

  Stubbins fell in with this suggestion with alacrity, and he plunged without delay into the forest. He was like some clumsy animal as he hauled out branches from the wood, but I felt relief that I had found a useful purpose for the helpless energy surging within him.

  Nebogipfel had prepared a series of opened palm-nut shells, set in little cups in the sand, each filled with a milky lotion he had devised. He asked for Stubbins’s clasp-knife; with this, he began to cut away Hilary’s clothing. Nebogipfel scooped up handfuls of his lotion and, with his soft Morlock fingers, he began to work it into her worst-damaged flesh.

  At first Hilary, still all but unconscious, cried out at these ministrations; but before long her discomfort passed, and she appeared to be passing into a deeper, more peaceful sleep.

  “What is the lotion?”

  “A salve,” he said as he worked, “based on palm-nut milk, bivalve oil and plants from the forest.” He pushed his slit-mask more comfortably over his face, and left on it streaks of the sticky lotion. “It will ease the pain of the bums.”

  “I’m impressed by your foresight in preparing the salve,” I said.

  “It did not take much foresight,” he said coolly, “to anticipate such victims, after your self-inflicted catastrophe of yesterday.”

  I felt a stab of irritation at this. Self-inflicted? None of us had asked the confounded German to come through time with his Carolinum Bomb. “Blast you, I was trying to congratulate you on your efforts for this girl!”

  “But I would much rather not have you bring me such sad victims of folly, as exercises for my compassion and ingenuity.”

  “Oh — confound it!” The Morlock really was impossible at times, I thought — quite un-human!

  Stubbins and I maintained our bonfire, feeding it with wood so green it spat and fractured and sent up billows of cloudy-white smoke. Stubbins set off for brief, ineffectual searches of the forest; I was forced to promise him that if the fire met with no success in a few days, we should resume our expedition around the explosion epicenter.

  It was on the fourth day after the Bombing that more survivors began to arrive at our beacon. They came alone, or in pairs, and they were burned and beaten up, clothed in the ragged remnants of jungle kit. Soon Nebogipfel was running a respectable field hospital — a row of palm-frond pallets, there in the shade of the dipterocarps — while the able-bodied among us were set to work with rudimentary nursing duties and the collection of more supplies.

  For a while we hoped that there might be, elsewhere, some other encampment better equipped than ours. Perhaps Guy Gibson had survived, I speculated, and had taken things in hand, in his practical, level-headed way.

  We had a brief burst of optimism along these lines when a light motor vehicle came bounding along the beach. The car bore two soldiers, both young women. But we were to be disappointed. These two girls were merely the furthest-flung of the exploratory expeditions the Force had sent out from its base: they had been following the shore to the west, looking for a way to strike inland.

  For some weeks after the attack we maintained patrols along the beach and into the forest. These occasionally turned up the remains of some poor victim of the Bombing. Some of these appeared to have survived for a time after the first blast, but, enfeebled by injuries, had proved unable to save themselves or call for help. Sometimes a bit of kit would be brought back. (Nebogipfel was keen that any scraps of metal should be retrieved, for he argued that it would be some considerable time before our little residual colony would be able to smelt ore.) But of further survivors, we found none; the two women in their car were the last to join us.

  We kept the signal fire burning, though, day and night, long after any reasonable hope of more survivors had vanished.

  All told, of the hundred or more Expedition members, twenty-one individuals — eleven women, nine men, and Nebogipfel — survived the Bombing and fire-storm. No trace of Guy Gibson was found; and the Gurkha doctor was lost.

  So we busied ourselves with caring for the injured, with collecting the supplies necessary to keep us alive from day to day, and with assembling our thoughts for how we should build a colony for the future… for, with the destruction of the Juggernauts, it was soon evident to us all that we should not be returning to our home centuries: that this Palaeocene earth would, after all, receive our bones.

  [15]

  A New Settlement

  Four of our number died, of burns and other injuries, soon after being brought to the camp. At least their suffering appeared to be slight, and I wondered if Nebogipfel had tempered his improvised drugs in such a way as to shorten the distress of these afflicted.

  I kept such speculations to myself, however.

  Each loss cast a deep pall over our little colony. For myself I felt numb, as if my soul was replete with horror, and beyond further reaction. I watched the battered young soldiers, in their ragged, bloodied remnants of military kit, go about their dismal chores; and I knew that these new deaths, in the midst of the brutal, primitive squalor within which we now strove to survive, forced each one of them to confront his or her own mortality anew.

  To make things worse, after a few weeks a new sickness began to haunt our thinned ranks. It afflicted some of those already wounded, and, disturbingly, others who had seemed, on the surface, to have been left healthy after the Bombing. The symptoms were gross: vomiting, bleeding from the body’s orifices, and a loosening of the hair, fingernails and even the teeth.

  Nebogipfel took me aside. “It is as I feared,” he whispered. “It is a sickness brought on by exposure to Carolinum radiation.”

  “Are any of us safe — or will we all succumb?”

  “We have no way to treat it, save for the alleviation of some of the worst symptoms. And as for safety—”

  “Yes?”

  He pushed his hands under his slit-mask to rub his eyes. “There is no such thing as a safe level of radio-activity,”
he said. “There are only degrees of risk — of chance. We may all survive — or we may all succumb.”

  I found all this most distressing. To see those young bodies, already scarred by years of War, now lying broken on the sand, left this way at the hands of a fellow human, and with only the inexpert ministrations of a Morlock — a stranded alien — to treat their wounds… It made me ashamed of my race, and of myself.

  “Once, you know,” I told Nebogipfel, “I think a part of me might have argued that War could ultimately be a force for good — because it might break open the ossified ways of the Old Order of things, and open up the world for Change. And once I believed in an innate wisdom in Humanity: that, after witnessing so much destruction in a War like this, a certain bluff common sense would prevail, to put a stop to it all.”

  Nebogipfel rubbed his hairy face. “ ’Bluff common sense’?” he repeated.

  “Well, so I imagined,” I said. “But I had had no experience of War — not of the real thing. Once humans start bashing each other up, precious little will stop them until exhaustion and attrition overcome them! Now I can see there’s no sense in War — not even in the outcome of it…”

  But on the other hand, I told Nebogipfel, I was struck by the selfless devotion of this handful of survivors to the care and tending of each other. Now that our situation had been reduced to its essentials — to simple human suffering — the tensions of class, race, creed and rank, all of which I had observed in this Expeditionary Force before the Bombing, had dissolved away.

  Thus I observed, if I adopted the dispassionate viewpoint of a Morlock, that contradictory complex of strengths and weaknesses that lay at the soul of my species! Humans are at once more brutal, and yet, in some ways, more angelic, than the shallow experience of my first four decades of life had led me to believe.

  “It’s a little late,” I conceded, “to be learning such deep lessons about the species with whom I have shared the planet for forty-odd years. But nevertheless, there it is. It seems to me now that if man is ever to achieve peace and stability — at least before he evolves into something new, like a Morlock — then the unity of the species will have to start at the bottom: by building on the firmest foundation — the only foundation — the instinctive support of a man for his fellows.” I peered at Nebogipfel. “Do you see what I’m getting at? Do you think there’s any sense in what I say?”

  But the Morlock would neither support nor dismiss this latest rationalization. He simply returned my gaze: calm, observant, analytical.

  We lost three more souls to the radiative sickness.

  Others showed some symptoms — Hilary Bond, for instance, suffered extensive hair loss — but survived; and some, even one man who had been closer to the original blast than most, showed no ill-effects at all. But, Nebogipfel warned me further, we were not done with the Carolinum yet; for other illnesses — cancers and other disorders of the body — might develop in any of us in later life.

  Hilary Bond was the senior officer surviving; and, as soon as she was able to raise herself on her pallet, she began to take a calm and authoritative command. A natural military discipline began to assert itself over our group — though much simplified, given that only thirteen had survived of the Expeditionary Force — and I think the soldiers, particularly the younger ones, found much comfort in the restoration of this familiar framework to their world. This military order could not last, of course. If our colony flourished, grew, and survived beyond this generation, then a chain of command along the lines of an Army unit would be neither desirable nor practicable. But for now, I reflected, needs must.

  Most of these troopers had spouses, parents, friends — even children — “back home,” in the twentieth century. Now they must come to terms with the fact that none of us were going home — and, as their remaining equipment slowly fell apart in the humidity of the jungle, the troopers came to realize that all that would sustain them in the future was the fruit of their own labor and ingenuity, and their support for each other.

  Nebogipfel, still mindful of the dangers of radiative emissions, insisted that we should make a more permanent encampment further along the coast. We sent out scouting parties, making the best use of our motor-car while its fuel lasted. At length, we decided on the delta of the mouth of a broad river, some five miles south-west of the Expedition’s original encampment — it was in the vicinity of Surbiton, I suppose. The land bordering our river’s plain would be fertile and irrigated, if we chose to develop agriculture in the future.

  We made the migration in several stages, for many of the wounded required carrying for much of the journey. At first we used the car, but its supply of petrol soon expired. Nebogipfel insisted we bring the vehicle with us, though, to serve as a mine of rubber, glass, metal and other materials; and so for its final journey we shoved our car like a wheel-barrow along the sand, laden with wounded and with our supplies and equipment.

  Thus we limped along the beach, the fourteen of us who had survived, with our ragged clothes and crudely-treated wounds. It struck me that if a dispassionate observer had watched this little trek, he should scarcely have been able to deduce that this ragged band of survivors were the sole representatives, in this Age, of a species which could one day shatter worlds!

  Our new colony site was distant enough from the Expedition’s first encampment that the forest here showed no significant damage. We could not yet forget the Bombing, though; for at night, that bruised-purple glow to the east still lingered — Nebogipfel said it would remain visible for many years to come — and, exhausted by the work of the day, I often took to sitting at the edge of the camp, away from the lights and talk of the others, and I would watch the stars rise over that man-made volcano.

  At first our new encampment was crude: little more than a row of lean-tos lashed up out of windfall branches and palm fronds. But as we settled in, and as our supply of food and water became assured, a more vigorous program of construction was put underway. The first priority, it was agreed, was a communal Hall, large enough to house us all in the event of a storm or other disaster. The new colonists set to constructing this with a will. They followed the rough outlines I had intended for my own shelter: a wooden platform, set on stilt-like foundations; but its scale was rather more ambitious.

  A field beside our river was cleared, so that Nebogipfel could direct the patient cultivation of what might one day become useful crops, bred out of the aboriginal flora. A first boat — a crude dug-out canoe — was constructed, so that the Sea could be fished.

  We captured, after much effort, a small family of Diatryma, and contained them within a stockade. Although these bird-beasts broke out several times, causing havoc about the colony, we stuck at containing and taming the birds, for the meat and eggs available from a domesticated flock of Diatryma was a pleasant prospect, and there were even experiments in having the Diatryma draw ploughs.

  From day to day, the colonists treated me with a certain polite deference, as befitted my age — I conceded! — and my greater experience of the Palaeocene. For my part, I found myself in the position of leader of some of our projects in their early days, thanks to my greater experience. But the inventiveness of the younger people, coupled with the jungle survival training they had received, allowed them quickly to surpass my limited understanding; and soon I detected a certain tolerant amusement in their dealings with me. I remained an enthusiastic participant in the colony’s burgeoning activities, however.

  As for Nebogipfel, he remained, naturally enough, something of a recluse in that society of young humans.

  Once the immediate medical problems were resolved, and the demands on his time grew less, Nebogipfel took to spending time away from the colony. He visited our old hut, which still stood some miles to the north-east along the beach; and he went for great explorations into the forest. He did not take me into his confidence as to the purpose of these trips. I remembered the Time-Car he had tried to construct, before the arrival of the Expeditionary Force, a
nd I suspected he was returning to some such project; but I knew that the Plattnerite of the Force’s landcruisers had been destroyed in the Bombing, so I could see no purpose in his continuing with that scheme. Still, I did not press Nebogipfel on his activities, reasoning that, of all of us, he was the most isolated — the most removed from the company of his fellows — and so, perhaps, the most in need of tolerance.

  [16]

  The Establishment of First London

  Despite the grisly battering they had endured, the colonists were resilient young people, and they were capable of high spirits. Gradually — once we were finished with the Bombing radiation deaths, and — once it was clear that we should not immediately starve or get washed into the Sea — a certain good humor became more evident.

  One evening, with the shadows of the dipterocarps stretching towards the ocean, Stubbins found me sitting, as usual, at the verge of the camp, looking back towards the glow of the Bomb pit. With a painful shyness he — to my astonishment — asked me if I would care to join in a game of football! My protests that I had never played a game in my life counted for nothing, and so I found thyself walking back along the beach with him, to where a rough pitch had been marked out in the sand, and posts — scrap timber from the construction of the Hall — had been set up to serve as goals. The “ball” was a palm-nut shell, emptied of its milk, and eight of us prepared to play out the game, a mixture of men and women.

  I scarcely expect that dour battle to go down in the annals of sporting history. My own contribution was negligible, save only to expose that utter lack of physical coordination which had made my days at school such a trial. Stubbins was by far the most skilled of us. Only three of the players, including Stubbins, were fully fit and one of those was me, and I was completely done in within ten minutes of the start. The rest were a collection of strapped-up wounds and — comic, pathetic — missing or artificial limbs! But still, as the game wore on, and laughter and shouts of encouragement started to flourish, it seemed to me that my fellow players were really little more than children: battered and bewildered, and now stranded in this ancient Age — but children nevertheless.