I faced a long and comfortable life, then — but it was the life of a zoo animal, caged up in these few rooms, with nothing meaningful to achieve. It was a future that had become a tunnel, closed and unending…
But, on the other hand, I knew that concurring with the Constructors’ plan was a course of action quite capable of destroying my intellect.
I confided these doubts to Nebogipfel.
“I understand your fears, and I applaud your honesty in confronting your own weakness. You have grown in understanding of yourself, since our first meeting—”
“Spare me this kindness, Nebogipfel!”
“There is no need for a decision now.”
“What do you mean?”
Nebogipfel went on to describe the immense technical scope of the Constructors’ project. To fuel the Ships, vast amounts of Plattnerite would have to be prepared.
“The Constructors work on long time-scales,” the Morlock said. “But, even so, this project is ambitious. The Constructors’ own estimates of completion (and this is vague, because the Constructors do not plan in the sense that human builders do; rather they simply build, cooperative and incremental and utterly dedicated, in the manner of termites) are that another million years will pass before the Ships are made ready.”
“A million years?… The Constructors must be patient indeed, to devise schemes on such scales!”
My imagination was caught by the scale of all this, so startled was I by that number! To consider a project spanning geological ages, and designed to send ships to the Dawn of Time: I felt a certain awe settling over me, I told Nebogipfel: a sense, perhaps, of the numinous.
Nebogipfel favored me with a sort of skeptical glare. “That is all very well,” he said. “But we must strive to be practical.”
He said that he had negotiated to have the remains of our improvised Time-Car brought to us; as well as tools, raw materials, and a supply of fresh Plattnerite…
I understood his thinking immediately. “You’re suggesting we just hop on the Time-Car, and skip forward through a million-year interval, while our patient Constructors complete the Ships’ development?”
“Why not? We have no other way to reach the launch of the Ships. The Constructors may be functionally immortal, but we are not.”
“Well — I don’t know! — it just seems… I mean, can the Constructors be so sure of completing their building program on time, and as they have envisaged it over such immense intervals? Why, in my day, the human species itself was only a tenth that age.”
“You must remember,” Nebogipfel said, “the Constructors are not human. They are, truly, an immortal species. Individual foci of awareness may form and dissolve back into the general Sea, but the continuity of Information-gathering, and their consistency of purpose, is unwavering…
“In any event;” he said, regarding me, “what have you to lose? If we travel up through time and find that, after all, the Constructors gave up before completing their Ships — what of it?”
“Well, we could die, for one thing. What if no Constructor is available to greet us, and tend to our needs, at the distant end of your million years?”
“What of it?” the Morlock repeated. “Can you look into your heart, now, and say that you are happy” — he waved a hand at our little apartment — “to live like this for the rest of your life?”
I did not answer; but I think he read my response in my face.
“And besides — ,” he went on.
“Yes?”
“Once it is built, it is possible we may choose to use the Time-Car to travel in a different direction.”
“What do you mean?”
“We will be given plenty of Plattnerite — we could even reach the Palaeocene again, if you would like.”
I glanced about furtively, feeling like some plotting criminal! “Nebogipfel, what if the Constructors hear you saying such things?”
“What if they do? We are not prisoners here. The Constructors find us interesting — and they feel that you should accompany the Ships on their final quest, because of your historical and causal significance. But they would not force us, or keep us here if our distress was so deep that we could not survive.”
“And you?” I asked him carefully. “What do you want to do?”
“I have made no decision,” he retorted. “My main concern now is to open as many options to the future as I can.”
This was eminently sensible advice, and so — having done with introspection! — I concurred with Nebogipfel that we should make a start at rebuilding the Time-Car. We fell into a detailed discussion as to the requirements we would have for materials and tools.
[10]
Preparations
The Time-Car was brought in from the ice by the Constructor. To achieve this, the Constructor split himself into four small sub-pyramids, and positioned these child-machines beneath each corner of the car’s battered frame. The child-machines moved with a kind of oily, flowing motion — think of the way a sand-dune advances, grain by grain, under the influence of a wind — and I saw how migrating threads of metal cilia connected the child-machines to each other as the strange procession continued.
When the remains of our car had been deposited in the middle of one room, the child-machines coalesced into their parent Constructor once more; they flowed upwards and into each other, as if melting. I found it a fascinating sight, if repulsive; but soon Nebogipfel was happily plugged into his eye-scope once more without a qualm.
The essential sub-structure of the Time-Car came from the skeleton of our 1938 Chronic Displacement Vehicle, but its super-structure — such as it was, merely a few panels for walls and floor — had been improvised, by Nebogipfel, from the wreckage of the Expeditionary Force’s bombed-out Juggernauts and the Messerchmitt Zeitmaschine. The simple controls had been a similarly crude affair. Much of this, now, was depleted and wrecked. So, in addition to the replacement of the Plattnerite, it was pretty clear that we needed to perform some pretty extensive renovation work on the car.
I contributed much of the skilled manual work, under the direction of Nebogipfel. At first I resented this arrangement, but it was Nebogipfel who had the access to the Information Sea, and thereby the accumulated wisdom of the Constructors; and it was he who was able to specify to the Constructor the materials we needed: pipe of such-and-such a diameter, with a thread of this-or-that pitch; and so forth.
The Constructor produced the raw materials we needed in his usual novel fashion; he simply extruded the stuff from his hide. It cost him nothing, it seemed, save a material depletion; but that was soon made up by an increased flow into the apartment of the migrating cilia which sustained him.
I found it difficult to trust the results of this process. I had visited steelworks and the like during the manufacture of components of my own Time Machine, and earlier devices: I had watched molten iron run from the blast-furnaces into Bessemer converters, there to be oxidized and mixed with spiegel and carbon… And so on. By comparison, I found it hard to put my faith in something which had been disgorged by a shapeless, glistening heap!
The Morlock pointed out my folly in this prejudice, of course.
“The sub-atomic transmutation of which the Constructor is capable is a far more refined process than that mess of melting, mixing and hammering you describe — a process which sounds as if it had barely evolved since your departure from the caves.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “but even so… It’s the invisibility of all this!” I picked up a wrench; like all the tools we had specified, this had been disgorged by the Constructor within moments of Nebogipfel’s request for it, and it was a smooth, seamless thing, without joints, screws or mold marks. “When I pick up this thing, I half-expect it to feel warm, or to be dripping with stomach-acid, or to be covered with those dreadful iron cilia…”
Nebogipfel shook his head, his gesture a conscious mockery. “You are so intolerant of ways of doing things other than your own!”
Despite
my reservations, I was forced to allow to the Constructor providing us with more equipment and supplies. I reasoned that the journey should take thirty hours, if we retreated all the way to the Palaeocene — but no more than thirty minutes if we performed the limited hop to the future of the Time Ships. So, determined not to be unprepared this time, I stocked up our new car with enough food and water, to our varying requirements, to last us for some days; and I asked for thick, warm clothing to be provided for us both. Still, I was uneasy as I lifted the heavy coat the Constructor had made for me over the battered remains of my jungle-twill shirt; the coat was an affair of silvery, unidentifiable cloth, quite heavily quilted.
“It just doesn’t seem natural,” I protested to Nebogipfel, “to wear something which has been vomited up in such a fashion!”
“Your reservations are becoming tedious,” the Morlock replied. “It is clear enough to me that you have a morbid fear of the body and its functions. This is evidenced not only by that irrational response to the Constructor’s manufacturing capabilities, but also by your earlier reaction to Morlocks—”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I retorted, startled.
“You have repeatedly described to me your encounters with those — cousins — of mine, using terms associated with the body: fecal analogies, fingers like worms, and so on.”
“So you’re saying — wait a minute — you’re saying that, in fearing the Morlock, and the products of the Constructors, I fear my own biology?”
Without warning, he flashed his fingers in my face; the pallor of the naked flesh of his palm, the worm-like quality of his fingers — all of it was horrifying to me, of course, as it always was! — and I could not help but flinch away.
The Morlock evidently felt he had made his point; and I remembered, too, my earlier connection between my dread of the Morlocks’ dark subterranean bases and my childhood fear of the ventilation shafts set in the grounds of my parents’ home.
Needless to say I felt distinctly uncomfortable at this brusque diagnosis of Nebogipfel’s: at the thought that my reactions to things were governed, not by the force of my intellect as I might have supposed, but by such odd, hidden facets of my nature! “I think,” I concluded with all the dignity I could muster, “that some things are best left unsaid!” — and I stopped the conversation.
The finished Time-Car was quite a crude design: just a box of metal, open at the top, unpainted and roughly finished. But the controls were by some distance advanced over the limited mechanisms Nebogipfel had been able to manufacture with the materials available in the Palaeocene — they even included simple chronometric dials, albeit hand-lettered — and we would have about as much freedom of movement in time as I had been afforded by my own first machine.
As I worked, and the day approached on which we had set ourselves to depart, my fear and uncertainty mounted. I knew that I could never return home — but if I went on from here, on with Nebogipfel into future and past, I might enter such strangeness that I might not survive, either in mind or body. I might, I knew, be approaching the end of my life; and a soft, human terror settled over me.
Finally it was done. Nebogipfel set himself on his saddle. He was done up in a heavy, quilted overall of the Constructor’s silvery cloth; and new goggles were fixed over his small face. He looked a little like a small child bundled up against the winter at least until one made out the hair cascading from his face, and the luminous quality of the eye behind the blue glasses he wore.
I sat down beside him, and made a last check over the contents of our car.
Now — as we sat there, in a startling second — the walls of our apartment melted, silently, to glass! All around us, visible now through the translucent walls of our room, the bleak plains of White Earth stretched off to the distance, gilded red by an advanced sunset. The Constructor’s cilia — again to Nebogipfel’s specification — had reworked the material of the walls of the chamber within which the Time-Car sat. We should continue to need some protection from the savage climate of White Earth; but we wished to have a view of the world as we progressed.
Although the temperature of the air was unchanged, I immediately felt much colder; I shivered, and pulled my coat closer around me.
“I think we are set,” Nebogipfel said.
“Set,” I agreed “save for one thing — our decision! Do we travel to the future of the completed Ships, or—?”
“I think the decision is yours,” he said. But he had — I like to think — some sympathy in his alien expression.
Still that soft fear quivered inside me, for, save for those first few desperate hours after I lost Moses, I have never been a man to welcome the prospect of death! — and yet I knew that my choice now might end my life. But still -
“I really don’t think I have much choice,” I told Nebogipfel. “We cannot stay here.”
“No,” he said. “We are exiles, you and I,” he said. “I think there is nothing for us to do but continue — on to the End.”
“Yes,” I said. “To the End of Time itself, it seems… Well! So be it, Nebogipfel. So be it.”
Nebogipfel pressed forward the levers of the Time-Car — I felt my breathing accelerate, and blood pounded in my temples — and we fell into the gray clamor of time travel.
[11]
Forward in Time
Once more the sun rocketed across the sky, and the moon, still green, rolled through its phases, the months going by more quickly than heartbeats; soon, the velocities of both orbs had increased to the point where they had merged into those seamless, precessing bands of light I have described before, and the sky had taken on that steely grayness which was a compound of day and night. All around us, clearly visible from our elevated viewpoint, the ice-fields of White Earth swept away and over the horizon, all but unchanging as the meaningless years flapped past, displaying only a surface sheen smoothed over by the rapidity of our transition.
I should have liked to have seen those magnificent interstellar sail-craft soar off into space; but the rotation of the earth rendered those fragile ships impossible for me to make out, and as soon as we entered time travel the sail-ships became invisible to us.
Within seconds of our departure — as seen from our diluted point of view — our apartment was demolished. It vanished around us like dew, to leave our transparent blister sitting isolated on the flat roof of our tower. I thought of our bizarre, yet comfortable, set of chambers — with my steam-bath, that ludicrous flock wallpaper, the peculiar billiards table, and all the rest — all of it had been melted back, now, into general formlessness, and our apartment, no longer required, had been reduced to a dream: a Platonic memory, in the metal imagination of the Universal Constructors!
But we were not abandoned by our own, patient Constructor, however. From my accelerated point of view I saw how he seemed to rest here, a few yards from us — a squat pyramid, the writhing of his cilia smoothed over by our time passage — and then he would jump, abruptly, to there, to linger for a few seconds — and so on. Since a mere second for us lasted centuries in the world beyond the Time-Car, I could calculate that the Constructor was remaining close to our site, all but immobile, for as much as a thousand years at a time.
I remarked on this to Nebogipfel. “Imagine that, if you can! To be Immortal is one thing, but to be so devoted to a single task… He is like a solitary Knight guarding his Grail, while historical ages, and the mayfly concerns of ordinary men, flutter away.”
As I have described, the buildings which neighbored ours were towers, standing two to three miles apart, all across the Thames valley. In the several weeks we had spent in our apartment I had seen no evidence of change about these towers — not even the opening of a door. Now, though, with the benefit of my accelerated perceptions, I saw how slow evolutions crept over the buildings’ surfaces. One cylindrical affair in Hammersmith had its mirror-smooth face swell up, as if raddled by some metallic disease, before settling into a new pattern of angular bumps and channels. Another
tower, in the vicinity of Fulham, disappeared altogether! — One moment it was there, the next not, without even the shadow of foundations on the ground to show where it had been, for the ice closed over the exposed earth more rapidly than I could follow.
This sort of flowing evolution went on all the time. The pace of change in this new London must be measured in centuries, I realized — rather than the years within which sections of my own London had been transformed — but change there was, nevertheless.
I pointed this out to Nebogipfel.
“We can only speculate as to the purpose of this rebuilding,” he said. “Perhaps the change in outer appearance signifies a change in inner utilization. But the slow processes of decay are working even here. And perhaps there are, occasionally, more spectacular incidents, such as the fall of a meteorite.”
“Surely intelligences so vast as these Constructors could plan for such accidents as the fall of a meteor! — by tracking the falling rocks with their telescopes, perhaps using their Ships with rockets and sails to knock the things away.”
“To some extent. But the solar system is a random and chaotic place,” Nebogipfel said. “One could never be sure of eliminating all calamities, no matter what resources were available, and no matter what planning and watching was performed… And so, even the Constructors must sometimes rebuild — even the tower we inhabit.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think it out,” Nebogipfel said. “Are you warm? Do you feel comfortable?”
As I have noted, my apparent exposure to the wastes of White Earth, sheltered only by this invisible dome of the Constructors, had left me feeling chilled; but I knew this could only be an internal reaction. “I’m quite satisfactory.”
The Time Ships Page 43