The Time Ships

[1] The Chronic Argo

I wrapped my hand around that thin forearm and prized it from my neck. A hairy body lay sprawled across the nickel and brass beside me — a thin, goggled face was close to mine — the sweet, fetid smell of Morlock was powerful!

“Nebogipfel.”

His voice was small and shallow, and his chest seemed to be pumping. Was he afraid? “So you have escaped. And so easily—”

He looked like a doll of rags and horse-hair, clinging as he was to my machine. He was a reminder of that nightmarish world which I had escaped — I could have thrown him off in a moment, I am sure — and yet, I stayed my hand.

“Perhaps you Morlocks underestimated my capacity for action,” I snapped at him. “But you — you suspected, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Just in that last second… I have become adept, I think, at interpreting the unconscious language of your body. I realized you were planning to operate the machine — I had just time to reach you, before…

“Do you think we could straighten up?” he whispered. “I am in some discomfort, and I fear falling off the machine.”

He looked at me as I considered this proposition. I felt that there was a decision I had to make, of sorts; was I to accept him as a fellow passenger on the machine — or not?

But I would scarce throw him off; I knew myself well enough for that!

“Oh, very well.”

And so we two Chronic Argonauts executed an extraordinary ballet, there amid the tangle of my machine. I kept a grip of Nebogipfel’s arm — to save him from falling, and to ensure that he did not try to reach the controls of the machine — and twisted my way around until I was sitting upright on the saddle. I was not a nimble man even when young, and by the time I had achieved this goal I was panting and irritable. Nebogipfel, meanwhile, lodged himself in a convenient section of the machine’s construction.

“Why did you follow me, Nebogipfel?”

Nebogipfel stared out at the dark, attenuated landscape of time travel, and would not reply.

Still, I thought I understood. I remembered his curiosity and wonder at my account of futurity, while we shared the interplanetary capsule. It had been an impulse for the Morlock to climb after me — to discover if time travel was a reality — and an impulse driven by a curiosity descended, like mine, from a monkey’s! I felt obscurely moved by this, and I warmed to Nebogipfel a little. Humanity had changed much in the years that separated us, but here was evidence that curiosity, that relentless drive to find out — and the recklessness that came with it — had not died completely.

And then we erupted into light above my head I saw the dismantling of the Sphere-bare sunlight flooded the machine, and Nebogipfel howled.

I discarded my goggles. The uncovered sun, at first, hung stationary in the sky, but before long it had begun to drift from its fixed position; it arced across the heavens, more and more rapid, and the flapping of day and night returned to the earth. At last the sun shot across the sky too rapidly to follow, and it became a band of light, and the alternation of day and night was replaced by that uniform, rather cold, pearl-like glow.

So, I saw, the regulation of the earth’s axis and rotation was undone.

The Morlock huddled over himself, his face buried against his chest. He had his goggles on his face, but their protection did not seem to be enough; he seemed to be trying to burrow into the machine’s innards, and his back glowed white in the diluted sunlight.

I could not help but laugh. I remembered how he had failed to warn me when our earth-bound capsule had dropped out of the Sphere and into space: well, here was retribution! “Nebogipfel, it is only sunlight.”

Nebogipfel lifted his head. In the increased light, his goggles had blackened to impenetrability; the hair on his face was matted and appeared to be tear-stained. The flesh of his body, visible through the hair, glowed a pale white. “It is not just my eyes,” he said. “Even in this attenuated state the light is painful for me. When we emerge, into the full glare of the sun…”

“Sun-burn!” I exclaimed. After so many generations of darkness, this Morlock would be more vulnerable, even to the feeble sun of England, than would the palest redhead in the Tropics. I pulled off my jacket. “Here,” I said, “this should help protect you.”

Nebogipfel pulled the garment around him, huddling under its folds.

“And besides,” I said, “when I stop the machine, I will ensure we arrive when it is night, so we can find you shelter.” As I thought about this, I realized that to arrive in the hours of darkness would be a good idea in any event: a fine sight I should have made, appearing on Richmond Hill with this monster from the future, in the middle of a crowd of gaping promenaders!

The permanent greenery receded from the hill-side and we returned to a cycle of seasons. We began our passage back through the Age of Great Buildings which I have described before. Nebogipfel, with the jacket draped over his head, peered out with obvious fascination as bridges and pylons passed over the flickering landscape like mist. As for me, I felt an intense relief that we were approaching my own century.

Suddenly Nebogipfel hissed — it was a queer, cat-like sound — and pressed himself closer to the fabric of the machine. He stared ahead, his eyes huge and fixed.

I turned from him, and I realized that the extraordinary optical effects which I had observed during my voyage to the year A.D. 657,208 were again becoming apparent. I had the impression of star-fields, gaudy and crowded, trying to break through the diluted surface of things, all about me… And here, hovering a few yards before the machine, was the Watcher: my impossible companion. Its eyes were fixed on me, and I grabbed at a rail. I stared at that distorted parody of a human face, and those dangling tentacles — and again I was struck by the similarity with the flopping creature I had seen on that remote beach thirty million years hence.

It is an odd thing, but my goggles — which had been so useful in resolving the Morlock darkness — were of no help to me as I studied this creature; I saw it no more clearly than I could with my naked eyes.

I became aware of a low mumbling, like a whimper. It was Nebogipfel, clinging to his place in the machine with every evidence of distress.

“You’ve no need to be afraid,” I said, a little awkwardly. “I told you of my encounter with this creature on my way to your century. It is a strange sight, but it seems to be without harm.”

Through his shuddery whimpering, Nebogipfel said, “You do not understand. What we see is impossible. Your Watcher apparently has the ability to cross the corridors to traverse between potential versions of History… even to enter the attenuated environs of a traveling Time Machine. It is impossible!”

And then — as easily as it had arisen — the star-glow faded, and my Watcher receded into invisibility, and the machine surged on its way into the past.

At length I said to the Morlock harshly, “You must understand this, Nebogipfel: I have no intention of returning to the future, after this last trip.”

He wrapped his long fingers around the machine’s struts. “I know I cannot return,” he said. “I knew that even as I hurled myself onto the machine. Even if your intention was to return to the future—”

“Yes?”

“By its return through time once more, this machine of yours is bound to force another adjustment of History, in an unpredictable way.” He turned to me, his eyes huge behind the goggles. “Do you understand? My History, my home, is lost — perhaps destroyed. I have already become a refugee in time… Just as you are.”

His words chilled me. Could he be right? Could I be inflicting more damage on the carcass of History with this new expedition, even as I sat here?

My resolve to put all of this right — to put a stop to the Time Machine’s destructiveness — hardened in me!

“But if you knew all this was so, your recklessness in following me was folly of the first order—”

“Perhaps.” His voice was muffled, for he sheltered his head beneath his arms. “But to see such sights as I have already witnessed — to travel in time — to gather such information… none of my species has ever had such an opportunity!”

He fell silent, and my sympathy for him grew. I wondered how I might have reacted, had I been presented with a single second of opportunity — as the Morlock had.

The chronometric dials continued to wind back, and I saw that we were approaching my own century. The world assembled itself into a more familiar configuration, with the Thames firmly set in its old bank, and bridges I thought I recognized flickering into existence over it.

I pulled the levers over. The sun became visible as a discrete object, flying over our heads like a glowing bullet; and the passage of night was a perceptible flickering. Two of the chronometric dials were already stationary; only thousands of days — a mere few years — remained to be traversed.

I became aware that Richmond Hill had congealed around me, in more or less the form I recognized from my own day. With the obstructing trees reduced to transient transparency by my travel, I took in a good view of the meadows of Petersham and Twickenham, and all dotted about with stands of ancient trees. It was all reassuring and familiar — despite the fact that my velocity through time was still so high that it was impossible to make out people, or deer, or cows, or other denizens of the Hill, meadows or river; and the flickering of night and day bathed the whole scene in an unnatural glow — despite all this, I was nearly home!

I watched my dials as the thousands hand approached its zero — for at zero I was home, and it took all my determination not to halt the machine there and then, for my longing to return to my own Year was strong in the extreme — but I kept the levers pressed over, and watched the dials run on into their negative region.

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.

“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?”

“You know who I am. Don’t you?”

The moment stretched on, still and silent. The Morlock was a wraith-like presence, hardly noticed by either of us.

At length, Moses said: “Yes. Yes, I think I do.”

I wanted to give him room to take in all of this. The reality of time travel — for any object more substantial than a light ray — was still in the realms of half-fantasy for Moses! To be confronted, so abruptly, with its physical proof — and worse, to be faced by one’s own self from the future — must be an immense shock.

“Perhaps you should regard my presence here as an inevitable consequence of your own researches,” I suggested. “Is not a meeting like this bound to happen, if you carry on down the experimental path you’ve set yourself?”

“Perhaps…”

But now I became aware that his reaction — far from remaining awe-struck, as I might have expected — seemed rather less respectful. He seemed to be inspecting me anew; his gaze traveled, appraising, over my face, my hair, my clothes.

I tried to see myself through the eyes of this brash twenty-six-year-old. Absurdly, I felt self-conscious; I brushed back my hair — which had not been combed since the Year A.D. 657,208 — and sucked in my stomach, which was rather less well-defined than once it had been. But that disapproval lingered in his face.

“Have a good look,” I said with feeling. “This is how it turns out for you!”

He stroked his chin. “Don’t take a lot of exercise, do you?” He jerked his thumb. “And him — Nebogipfel. Is he—”

“Yes,” I said. “He is a Man from the Future — from the Year A.D. 657,208, and much evolved from our present state — who I have brought back on my Time Machine: on the machine whose first, dim blueprint you are already conceiving.”

“I am tempted to ask you how it all turns out for me — am I a success? will I marry? — and so forth. But I suspect I’m better off without such knowledge.” He eyed Nebogipfel. “The future of the species, though, is another matter.”

“You do believe me — don’t you?”

He picked up his brandy-glass, found it empty, and set it down again. “I don’t know. I mean, it is all very easy for a fellow to walk into a house and say that he is one’s Future Self—”

“But you have already conceived of the possibility of time travel yourself. And — look at my face!”

“I admit there’s a certain superficial resemblance; but it’s also quite possible that this is all some sort of a prank, set up — maybe with malicious intent — to expose me as a quack.” He looked at me sternly. “If you are who you say you are — if you are me — then you have surely traveled here with a purpose.”

“Yes.” I tried to put aside my anger; I tried to remember that my communication with this difficult and rather arrogant young man was of vital importance. “Yes. I have a mission.”

He pulled at his chin. “Dramatic words. But how can I be so vital? I am a scientist — not even that, probably; I am a tinkerer, a dilettante. I am not a politician or a prophet.”

“No. But you are — or will be — the inventor of the most potent weapon that could be devised: I mean the Time Machine.”

“What is it you’ve come to tell me?”

“That you must destroy the Plattnerite; find some other line of research. You must not develop the Time Machine — that is essential!”

He steepled his fingers and regarded me. “Well. Evidently you have a story to tell. Is it to be a long narrative? Do you want some more brandy — or some tea, perhaps?”

“No. No, thank you. I will be as brief as I can manage.”

And so I began my account, with a short summary of the discoveries that had led me to the final construction of the machine — and how I had boarded it for the first time, and launched myself into the History of Eloi and Morlock — and what I discovered when I returned, and tried to go forward in time once more.

I suppose I spoke wearily — I could not remember how many hours had elapsed since I had last slept but as my account developed I grew more animated, and I fixed on Moses’s sincere, round face in the bright circle of the candlelight. At first I was aware of Nebogipfel’s presence, for he sat silently by through out my account, and at times — during my first description of the Morlocks, for example — Moses turned to Nebogipfel as if for confirmation of some detail.

But after a while he ceased to do even that; and he looked only at my face.

[6] Persuasion and Scepticism

The early dawn of summer was well advanced by the time I was done.

Moses sat in his chair, his eyes still set on me, his chin cupped in his hand. Then, at length: “Well,” he said, as if to break a spell — “Well.” He stood up, stretched his back, and crossed the room to the windows; he pulled them back to reveal a cloudy but lightening sky.

“It’s a remarkable account.”

“It’s more than that,” I said, my voice hoarse. “Don’t you see? On my second journey into the future, I traveled into a different History. The Time Machine is a Wrecker of History — a Destroyer of Worlds and Species. Don’t you see why it must not be built?”

Moses turned to Nebogipfel, “If you are a Man from the Future — what do you have to say to all this?”

Nebogipfel’s chair was still in shadow, but he cowered from the encroaching daylight. “I am not a Man,” he said in his cold, quiet voice. “But I am from a Future — one of an infinite number, perhaps, of possible variants. And it seems true — it is certainly logically possible — that a Time Machine can change History’s course, thus generating new variants of events. In fact the very principle of the Machine’s operation appears to rely on its extension, through the properties of Plattnerite, into another, parallel History.”

Moses went to the window, and the rising sun caught his profile. “But to abandon my research, just on your uncorroborated say-so.

“Say-so? I think I deserve a little more respect than that,” I said, in rising anger. “After all, I am you! Oh, you are so stubborn. I’ve brought a Man from the Future — what more persuasion do you want?”

He shook his head. “Look,” he said, “I’m tired — I’ve been up all night, and all that brandy hasn’t helped much. And you two look as if you could do with some rest as well. I have spare rooms; I’ll escort you—”

“I know the way,” I said with some frost.

He conceded the point with some humor. “I’ll have Mrs. Penforth bring you breakfast… or,” he went on, looking at Nebogipfel again, “perhaps I’ll have it served in here.

“Come,” he said. “The Destiny of the Race can wait for a few hours.”

I slept deeply — remarkably so. I was wakened by Moses, who brought me a pitcher of hot water.

I’d folded up my clothes on a chair; after my adventures in time, they were rather the worse for wear. “I don’t suppose you could lend me a suit of clothes, could you?”

“You can have a house-coat, if you like. I’m sorry, old man — I hardly think anything of mine would fit you!”

I was angered by this casual arrogance. “One day, you too will grow a little older. And then I hope you remember — Oh — never mind!” I said.

“Look — I’ll have my man brush out these clothes for you, and patch the worst damage. Come down when you’re ready.”

In the dining-room, breakfast had been set out as a sort of buffet. Moses and Nebogipfel were already there. Moses wore the same costume as yesterday — or at least, an identical copy of it. The bright morning sun turned the parakeet colors of his coat into a clamor even more ghastly than before. And as for Nebogipfel, the Morlock was now dressed — ludicrously! — in short trousers and battered blazer. He had a cap tucked over his goggled, hairy face, and he stood patiently by the buffet.

“I told Mrs. Penforth to keep out of here,” Moses said. “As for Nebogipfel, that battered jacket of yours — it’s over the back of that chair, by the way — seemed hardly sufficient for him. So I dug out an old school uniform — the only thing I could find that might fit him: he reeks of moth-balls, but he seems a little happier.

“Now then.” He walked up to Nebogipfel. “Let me help you, sir. What would you like? You can see we have bacon, eggs, toast, sausages—”

In his quiet, fluid tones, Nebogipfel asked Moses to explain the provenance of these various items. Moses did so, in graphic terms: he picked up a slice of bacon on his fork, for example, and described the Nature of the Pig.

When Moses was done, Nebogipfel picked up a single piece of fruit — an apple — and walked with that, and a glass of water, to the room’s darkest corner.

As for me, after subsisting for so long on a diet of the Morlocks’ bland stuff, I could not have relished my breakfast more if I had known — which I did not — that it was the last nineteenth-century meal I should ever enjoy!

With breakfast done, Moses escorted us to his smoking-room. Nebogipfel installed himself in the darkest corner, while Moses and I sat on opposed armchairs. Moses dug out his pipe, filled it from a small pouch in his pocket, and lit it.

I watched him, seething. He was so maddeningly calm! “Do you have nothing to say? I have brought you a dire warning from the future — from several futures — which—”

“Yes,” he said, “it is dramatic stuff. But,” he went on, tamping down his pipe, “I’m still not sure if—”

“Not sure?” I cried, jumping to my feet. “What more proof — what persuasion — do you want?”

“It seems to me that your logic has a few holes. Oh, do sit down.”

I sat, feeling weak. “Holes?”

“Look at it this way. You claim that I’m you — and you’re me. Yes?”

“Exactly. We are two slices of a single Four-Dimensioned entity, taken at different points, and juxtaposed by the Time Machine.”

“Very well. But let us consider this: if you were once me, then you should share my memories.”

“I—” I fell silent.

“Then,” Moses said with a note of triumph, “what memories do you have of a rather burly stranger, and an odd companion of this sort, turning up on the door-step one night? Eh?”

The answer, of course — horrifying! impossible! — was that I had no such memories. I turned to Nebogipfel, stricken. “How can this not have occurred to me? Of course, my mission is impossible. It always was. I could never persuade young Moses, because I have no memories of how I, when I was Moses, was persuaded in my turn!”

The Morlock retorted, “Cause and Effect, when Time Machines are about, are rather awkward concepts.”

Moses said, with more of that insufferable cockiness, “Here’s another puzzle for you. Suppose I agree with you. Suppose I accept your story about your trips into time and your visions of Histories and so forth. Suppose I agree to destroy the Time Machine.”

I could anticipate his argument. “Then, if the Time Machine were never built—”

“You would not be able to return through time, to put a stop to its building”

“ — and so the machine would be built after all…”

“ — and you would return through time to stop the building once more — and on it would go, like an endless merry-go-round!” he cried with a flourish.

“Yes. It is a pathological causal loop,” Nebogipfel said. “The Time Machine must be built, in order to put a stop to its own building…”

I buried my face in my hands. Apart from my despair at the destruction of my case, I had the uncomfortable feeling that young Moses was more intelligent than I. I should have spotted these logical difficulties! — perhaps it was true, horribly, that intelligence, like more gross physical faculties, declines as age comes on.

“But — despite all this logic-chopping — it is nevertheless the truth,” I whispered. “And the machine must never be built.”

“Then you explain it,” Moses said with less sympathy. “ ’To Be, or Not to Be’ — that, it seems, is not the question. If you are me, you will remember being forced to play the part of Hamlet’s Father in that dire production at school.”

“I remember it well.”

“The question is more, it seems to me: How can things Be and — simultaneously — Not Be?”

“But it is true,” Nebogipfel said. The Morlock stepped forward a little way, into the light, and looked from one to the other of us. “But we must construct, it seems to me, a higher logic — a logic which can take account of the interaction of a Time Machine with History — a logic capable of dealing with a Multiplicity of Histories…”

And then just at that moment, when my own uncertainty was greatest — I heard a roar, as of some immense motor, which echoed up the Hill, outside the house. The ground seemed to shudder — it was as if some monster were walking there — and I heard shouting, and — though it was quite impossible that such a thing should happen here, in sleepy, early-morning Richmond! — the rattle of a gun.

Moses and I looked wildly at each other. “Great Scott,” Moses said. “What is that?”

I thought I heard the gun clatter again, and now a shout turned to a scream, suddenly cut off.

Together, we ran out of the smoking-room and into the hall. Moses pulled open the door — it was already unlatched — and we spilled into the street. There was Mrs. Penforth, thin and severe, and Poole, Moses’s manservant of the time. Mrs. Penforth carried a duster, bright yellow, and she clutched at Poole’s arm. They glanced perfunctorily at us, but then looked away — ignoring a Morlock as if he were no more odd than a Frenchman, or Scotsman!

There were a number of people in the Petersham Road, standing there staring. Moses touched my sleeve, and he pointed down the road in the direction of the town. “There,” he said. “There’s your anomaly.”

It was as if an ironclad had been lifted out of the sea and deposited by some great wave, high on Richmond Hill: It was perhaps two hundred yards from the house: it was a great box of metal which lay along the length of the Petersham Road like some immense, iron insect, at least eighty feet long.

But this was no stranded monster: it was, I saw now, crawling towards us, slow but quite deliberate, and where it passed I saw that it had scored the road surface with a series of linked indentations, like the trail of a bird. The ironclad’s upper surface was a complex speckle of ports — I took them to be gun ports, or telescope holes.

The morning traffic had been forced to make way for the thing; two dog-carts lay overturned in the road ahead of it, as did a brewer’s dray, with a distressed horse still caught between the shafts, and beer spilling from broken barrels.

One youth in a cap, foolhardy, hurled a lump of churned-up cobble at the thing’s metal hide. The stone bounced off the hull without leaving so much as a scratch, but there was a response: I saw a rifle poke its snout out of one of those upper ports, and fire off with a crack at the youth.

He fell where he had stood, and lay still.

At that, the crowd dispersed quickly, and there were more screams. Mrs. Penforth seemed to be weeping into her duster; Poole escorted her into the house.

A hatch in the front of the land ironclad opened with a clang — I caught a brief impression of a dim interior — and I saw a face (I thought masked) peer out towards us.

“It is Out of Time,” Nebogipfel said. “And it has come for us.

“Indeed.” I turned to Moses. “Well,” I said to him. “Now do you believe me?”

[7] The Juggernaut Lord Raglan

Moses’s grin was tight and nervous, his face paler than usual and his broad brow slick with sweat. “Evidently you are not the only Time Traveler!”

The mobile fort — if that was what it was — toiled its way up the road towards my house. It was a long, flat box, with something of the aspect of a dish-cover. It was painted in patches of green and mud-brown, as if its natural habitat were some broken-up field. There was a skirt of metal around its base, perhaps to shield its more vulnerable parts from the rifle-shots and shrapnel of opponents. I should say the fort was moving at around six miles per hour, and — thanks to some novel method of locomotion whose details I could not make out, because of that skirt — it managed to keep itself pretty level, in spite of the Hill’s incline.

Save for the three of us — and that wretched brewer’s horse — there was not a living soul left in the road now, and there was a silence broken only by the deep grumbling of the fort’s engines, and the distressed whinnying of the trapped horse.

“I don’t remember this,” I told Nebogipfel. “Any of it this didn’t happen, in my 1873.”

The Morlock studied the approaching fort through his goggles. “Once again,” he said evenly, “we have to consider the possibility of a Multiplicity of Histories. You have seen more than one version of A.D. 657,208: now, it seems, you must endure new variants on your own century.”

The fort came to a halt, its engine growling like some immense stomach; I could see masked faces peering out from the various ports at us, and a pennant fluttered languid above its hull.

“Do you think we can run for it?” Moses hissed.

“I doubt it. See the rifle-barrels protruding from those portholes? I don’t know what the game is here — but these people clearly have the means, and the will, to detain us.

“Let’s show a little dignity. We will go forward,” I said. “Let us demonstrate we are not afraid.”

And so we stepped out, across the mundane cobbles of the Petersham Road, towards the fort.

The various rifles and heavier guns tracked us as we walked, and masked faces — some using field-glasses — marked our progress.

As we neared the fort, I got a better view of its general layout. As I have said it was more than eighty feet long, and perhaps ten feet tall; the flanks looked like sheets of thick gun-metal, although the arrangement of ports and scopes at the fort’s upper rim gave it a mottled impression there. Jets of steam squirted into the air from the rear of the machine. I have mentioned the footfall skirt which surrounded the base; now I was able to see that the skirt was lifted away from the ground, and that the machine stood — not on wheels, as I had assumed — but on feet! These were flat, broad things, about the shape of elephant’s feet, but much larger; from the indentations they left in the road behind, I could infer that the lower surfaces of these feet must be grooved for traction. This arrangement of feet was, I realized now, how the fort was keeping itself more-or-less level on the slope of the road.

There was a device like a flail fixed to the front of the fort: it consisted of lengths of heavy chain attached to a drum, which was held out on two metal frames before the fort’s prow. The drum was held up, so that the chains dangled in the air, like carters’ whips, and they made an odd clanking noise as the fort traveled along; but the drum was clearly capable of being lowered, to allow the chains to beat against the ground as the fort advanced. I could not fathom the purpose of this arrangement.

We stopped perhaps ten yards from the blunt prow of the machine. Those rifle-men kept their muzzles trained on us. Steam wafted towards us, on a stray breeze.

I was suffering a deep horror at this latest unremembered turn of events. Now, it seemed, even my past was no longer a place of reliability and stability: even that was subject to change, at the whims of Time Travelers! I had no escape from the influence of the Time Machine: it was as if, once invented, its ramifications were spreading into past and future, like ripples from a stone thrown into the placid River of Time.

“I think it’s British,” Moses said, breaking into my introspection.

“What? Why do you say that?”

“Do you think that’s a regimental badge, there above the skirt?”

I peered more closely; evidently Moses’s eyes were sharper than mine. I’ve never been much interested in military paraphernalia, but it looked as if Moses might be right.

Now he was reading off other bits of text, stenciled in black on that formidable hull. “ ’Live Munitions,’ “ he read. “ ’Fuel Access.’ It’s either British colonial or American — and from a future close enough that the language hasn’t changed much.”

There was a scrape of metal on metal. I saw that a wheel, set in one flank of the fort, was turning. When the wheel was fully turned, a hatch-door was pushed open — its polished metal rim gleamed against the dun hull — and I caught a glimpse of a dark interior, like a cave of steel.

A rope-ladder was dropped down from the frame. A trooper clambered out and came walking up the road towards us. He wore a heavy canvas suit; sewn up into one piece; it was open at the neck, and I could see a lining of khaki cloth. There were spectacularly huge metal epaulets across his shoulders. He wore a black beret, with a regimental badge affixed to the front. He carried a pistol in a web holster which dangled before him; there was a small pouch above this, evidently for ammunition. I saw how the holster flap was open, and his gloved hands never strayed far from his weapon.

And — most striking of all — the trooper’s face was hidden by the most extraordinary mask: with wide, blackened goggles and a muzzle like the proboscis of a fly over the mouth, the mask enclosed the head beneath the beret.

“Great Scott,” Moses whispered to me. “What a vision.”

“Indeed,” I said grimly, for I had seen the significance of this apparition immediately. “He has protection against gas — see that? There is not a square inch of the fellow’s bare flesh showing. And those epaulets must be to protect him against darts, perhaps also bearing poison — I wonder what other layers of protection he is wearing under that bulky canvas.

“What kind of Age believes it necessary to send such a brute as this, back through time to the innocence of 1873? Moses, this fort comes to us from a very dark future — a Future of War!”

The trooper stepped a little closer to us. In clipped tones — which were muffled by the mask, but were otherwise absolutely characteristic of the Officers’ class — he called out a challenge to us, in a language which, at first, I failed to recognize.

Moses leaned towards me. “That was German! And a damn poor accent too. What on earth is this all about — eh?”

I stepped forward, my hands raised in the air. “We are English. Do you understand?”

I could not see this trooper’s face, but I thought I saw, in the set of his shoulders, evidence of some relief. His voice sounded youthful. This was but a young man, I realized, trapped in a warlike carapace. He said briskly: “Very well. Please come with me.”

We had little choice, it seemed.

The young trooper stood by his fort, his hands resting on the hilt of his pistol, as we climbed the few steps into the interior.

“Tell me one thing,” Moses demanded of the trooper. “What is the purpose of that contraption of chains and drum at the front of the vehicle?”

“That’s the anti-mine flail,” the masked fellow said.

“Anti-mine?”

“The chains whip at the ground, as the Raglan advances.” He mimed with his gloved hands, although he kept a careful eye on Moses. He was quite evidently British; he had thought we might be Germans! “See? It’s all about blowing up the mines buried there before we get to them.”

Moses thought it over, then climbed after me into the fort. “A charming use of British ingenuity,” he said to me. “And — look at the thickness of this hull! Bullets would splash off this hide like rain-drops — surely only a field-gun could slow such a creature.”

The heavy hatch door was swung to behind us; it settled into its socket with a heavy thud, and rubber seals settled against the hull.

Thus, the daylight was excluded.

We were escorted to the center of a narrow gallery which ran the length of the fort. In that enclosed space the noise of engines was loud and resonant. There was a smell of engine-oil and petrol, and the thin stink of cordite; it was exceeding hot, and I felt the perspiration start about my collar immediately. The only illumination came from two electric lamps — quite inadequate to illuminate that long, compact space.

The fort’s interior sketched itself into my mind, in fleeting impressions of half-light and shadows. I could see the outlines of eight great wheels — each ten feet in diameter — lining the fort’s flanks, and shielded within the hull. At the front of the fort, within the prow, was a single trooper in a high canvas chair; he was surrounded by levers, dials and what looked like the lenses of periscopes; I took this to be the driver. The fort’s rear compartment was an engine and transmission center. There I could see the hulking forms of machinery; in that darkness, the engines were more like the brooding forms of great beasts than anything contrived by the hand of man. Troopers moved around the machines, masked and heavy-gloved, for all the world like attendants serving some idols of metal.

Little cabins, cramped and uncomfortable-looking, were slung from the long ceiling; and in each of these I could see the shadowy profile of a single trooper. Each soldier had a variety of guns and optical instruments, most of them of unfamiliar design to me, which protruded through the hull of the ship. There must have been two dozen of these rifle-men and engineers — they were all masked, and wore the characteristic canvas suits and berets — and, to a man, they stared openly down at us. You may imagine how the Morlock attracted their gaze!

This was a bleak, intimidating place: a mobile temple, dedicated to Brute Force. I could not help but contrast this with the subtle engineering of Nebogipfel’s Morlocks.

Our young trooper came up to us; now that the fort was sealed up again, he had discarded his mask — it dangled at his neck, like a flayed face — and I saw that indeed he was quite young, his cheeks rimmed by sweat. “Please come forward,” he said. “The Captain would like to welcome you aboard.”

At his guidance, we formed into a line, and began to make our cautious way — under the unrelenting and silent gaze of the troopers towards the prow of the fort. The floor was open, and we were forced to clamber along narrow metal cat-walks; Nebogipfel’s bare feet pattered over the ribbed metal, almost noiseless.

Near the prow of this land boat, and a little behind the driver, there was a cupola of brass and iron which extended up through the roof. Below the cupola stood an individual — masked, hands clasped to rear — with the demeanor of the controller of this fort. The Captain wore a beret and coverall of much the same type as the trooper who had greeted us, with those metal epaulets and a hand-weapon at the waist; but this superior officer also wore a criss-cross of leather belt, cross strap and sword frog, and also other rank insignia, including cloth formation signs and shoulder flashes. Campaign-ribbons, thick inches of them, decorated the uniform’s chest.

Moses was staring around with avid curiosity. He pointed to a ladder-arrangement set above the Captain. “Look there,” he said. “I’ll wager that he can summon down that ladder, by means of those levers in the rail beside him — see? — and then ascend up to that cupola above. Thus he would be able to see all around this fortress, the better to guide the engineers and gunners.” He sounded impressed by the ingenuity that had gone into this monster of War.

The Captain stepped forward, but with a noticeable limp. Now the mask was pulled back and the Captain’s face was revealed. I could see that this person was still quite young, evidently healthy enough — although extraordinarily pallid — and of a type that one associates with the Navy: alert, calm, intelligent — profoundly competent. A glove was pulled off and a hand extended to me. I took the proffered hand — it was small, and my own palm enveloped it like a child’s — and I stared, with an astonishment I could not disguise, into that clear face.

The Captain said: “I wasn’t expecting quite such a crowd of passengers — I don’t suppose we knew what we were expecting — but you’re all welcome here, and I’ll ensure you’re treated well.” The voice was light, but raised to a bray above the rumble of the engines. Pale blue eyes swept over Moses and Nebogipfel, with a hint of humor. “Welcome to the Lord Raglan. My name is Hilary Bond; I’m a Captain in the Ninth Battalion of the Royal Juggernaut Regiment.”

It was true! This Captain — experienced and wounded soldier, and commander of a deadlier fighting machine than I could ever have envisaged — was a woman.

[8] Old Acquaintance Renewed

She smiled, revealing a scar about her chin, and I saw that she could be no more than twenty-five years of age.

“Look here, Captain,” I said, “I demand to know by what right you’re holding us.”

She was unruffled. “My mission is a priority for the National Defense. I’m sorry if—”

But now Moses stepped forward; in his gaudy masher’s outfit he looked strikingly out of place in that drab, military interior. “Madam Captain, there is no need for National Defense in the Year 1873!”

“But there is in the Year 1938.” This Captain was quite immovable, I saw; she radiated an air of unshakable command. “My mission has been to safeguard the scientific research which is proceeding in that house on Petersham Road — in particular, to discourage anachronistic interference with its due process.”

Moses grimaced. “ ’Anachronistic interference’ — I take it you are talking of Time Travelers.”

I smiled. “A lovely word, that discourage! Have you brought back enough guns, do you think, effectively to discourage?”

Now Nebogipfel stepped forward. “Captain Bond,” the Morlock said slowly, “surely you can see that your mission is a logical absurdity. Do you know who these men are? How can you safeguard the research when its prime progenitor” — he pointed to Moses with one hairy hand — “is being abducted from his rightful time?”

At that Bond stared at the Morlock for long seconds; and then she turned her attention to Moses — and to me — and I thought she saw, as if for the first time, our resemblance! She snapped out questions to us all, aimed at confirming the truth of the Morlock’s remark, and Moses’s identity. I did not deny it — I could see little advantage to us either way — perhaps, I calculated, we should be treated with more consideration if we were thought to be historically significant; but I made as little as I could of my shared identity with Moses.

At last, Hilary Bond whispered brief instructions to the trooper, and he went off to another part of the craft.

“I’ll inform the Air Ministry of this when we get back. I’m sure they will be more than interested in you — and you’ll have plenty of opportunity to debate the issue with the authorities on our return.”

“Return?” I snapped. “Return — do you mean, to your 1938?”

She looked strained. “The paradoxes of time travel are a bit beyond me, I’m afraid; no doubt the clever chaps at the Ministry will untangle it all.”

I was aware of Moses laughing beside me — loudly, and with a touch of hysteria. “Oh, this is rich!” he said. “Oh, it’s rich — now I needn’t bother building the wretched Time Machine at all!”

Nebogipfel regarded me somberly. “I’m afraid these multiple blows to causality are moving us further and further from the primal version of History — that which existed before the first operation of the Time Machine…”

Now Captain Bond cut us short. “I can understand your consternation. But I can assure you you’ll not be harmed in any way — on the contrary, my mission is to protect you. Also,” she said with an easy grace, “I’ve gone to the trouble of bringing along someone to help you settle in with us. A native of the period, you might say.”

Another figure made its slow way towards us from the darkened rear of the passage. It came to us wearing the ubiquitous epaulets, hand-weapon and mask dangling at the waist; but the uniform — a drab, black affair — bore no military insignia. This new person moved slowly, quite painfully, along the awkward cat-walks, with every sign of age; I saw how uniform fabric was stretched over a sagging belly.

His voice was feeble barely audible above the din of the engines. “Good God, it’s you,” he called to me. “I’m armed to the teeth for Germans — but do you know, I scarcely expected you to turn up again, after that last Thursday dinner-party — and not in circumstances like these!”

As he came into the light, it was my turn for another shock. For, though the eyes were dulled, the demeanor stooped, and barely a trace of red left in that shock of gray hair — and though the man’s forehead was disfigured by an ugly scar, as if he had been burned this was, unmistakably, Filby.

I told him I was damned.

Filby snickered as he came up to me. I grasped his hand — it was fragile and liver-spotted — and I judged him to be aged no less than seventy-five. “Damned you may be. Damned we all are, perhaps! — but it’s good to see you, nevertheless.” He gave Moses some odd looks: not surprising, I thought!

“Filby — Great Scott, man — I’m teeming with questions.”

“I’ll bet you are. That’s why they dug me out of my old people’s shelter in the Bournemouth Dome. I’m in charge of Acclimatization, they call it — to help you natives of the period adjust — do you see?”

“But Filby — it seems only yesterday — how did you come to—”

“This?” He indicated his withered frame with a dismissive, cynical gesture. “How did I come to this? Time, my friend. That wonderful River on whose breast, you would have us believe, you could skate around like a water-boatman. Well, time is no friend of the common man; I’ve been traveling through time the hard way, and here is what the journey has done to me. For me, it’s been forty-seven years since that last session in Richmond, and your bits of magic quackery with the model Time Machine — do you remember? — and your subsequent disappearance into the Day After Tomorrow.”

“Still the same old Filby,” I said with affection, and I grasped his arm. “Even you have to admit — at last — that I was right about time travel!”

“Much good it’s done any of us,” he growled.

“And now,” the Captain said, “if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I’ve a ’Naut to command. We’ll be ready to depart in a few minutes.” And, with a nod to Filby, she turned to her crew.

Filby sighed. “Come on,” he said. “There’s a place at the back where we can sit; it’s a little less noisy, and dirty, than this.”

We made our way towards the rear of the fort.

As we walked through the central passage I was able to get a closer look at the fort’s means of locomotion. Below the central cat-walks I could see an arrangement of long axles, each free to swivel about a common axis, with a metal floor beneath; and the axles were hitched up to those immense wheels. Those elephantine feet we had spotted earlier dangled from the wheels on stumps of legs. The wheels dripped mud and bits of churned-up road surface into the engineered interior. By means of the axles, I saw, the wheels could be raised or lowered relative to the main body of the fort, and it seemed that the feet and legs could also be raised, on pneumatic pistons. It was through this arrangement that the fort’s variable pitch was achieved, enabling it to travel across the most uneven ground, or hold itself level on steep hills.

Moses pointed out the sturdy, box-shaped steel framework which underpinned the construction of the fort. “And look,” he said quietly to me, “can you see something odd about that section? — and that, over there? — the rods which look rather like quartz. It’s hard to see what structural purpose they serve.”

I looked more closely; it was difficult to be certain in the light of the remote electric lamps, but I thought I could see an odd green translucence about the sections of quartz and nickel — a translucence which looked more than familiar!

“It is Plattnerite,” I hissed at Moses. “The rods have been doped… Moses, I am convinced — I cannot be mistaken, despite the uncertain light — those are components taken from my own laboratory: spares, prototypes and discards I produced during the construction of my Time Machine.”

Moses nodded. “So at least we know these people haven’t learned the technique of manufacturing Plattnerite for themselves, yet.”

The Morlock came up to me and pointed at something stored in a darkened recess in the engine compartment. It took some squinting, but I could make out that that bulky shape was my own Time Machine! — whole and unbroken, evidently extracted from Richmond Hill and brought into this fort, its rails still stained by grass. The machine was wrapped about by ropes as if confined in a spider-web.

I felt a powerful urge, at the sight of that potent symbol of safety, to break free of these soldiers — if I could — and make for my machine. Perhaps I could reach my home, even now…

But I knew it would be a futile attempt, and I stilled myself. Even if I could reach the machine — and I could not, for these troopers would gun me down in a moment — I could not find my home again. After this latest incident, no version of 1891 which I could reach could bear any resemblance to the safe and prosperous Year I had abandoned so foolishly. I was stranded in time!

Filby joined me. “What do you think of the machinery — eh?” He punched me in the shoulder, and his touch had the withered feebleness of an old man. He said, “The whole thing was designed by Sir Albert Stern, who has been prominent in these things since the early days of the War. I’ve taken quite an interest in these beasts, as they’ve evolved over the years… You know I’ve always had a fascination for things mechanical.

“Look at that.” He pointed into the recesses of the engine compartment. “Rolls-Royce ’Meteor’ engines — a whole row of ’em! And a Merrit-Brown gear-box — see it, over there? We’ve got Horstmann suspension, with those three bogeys to either side…”

“Yes,” I cut in, “but — dear old Filby — what is it all for?”

“For? It’s for the prosecution of the War, of course.” Filby waved his hand about. “This is a Juggernaut: Kitchener-class; one of the latest models. The main purpose of the ’Nauts is to break up the Siege of Europe, you see; they can negotiate all but the widest trench-works with alacrity — although they are expensive, prone to malfunction, and vulnerable to shelling. Raglan is rather an appropriate name, don’t you think? — For Lord Fitzroy Raglan was the old devil who made such a hash of the siege of Sebastopol, in the Crimea. Perhaps poor old Raglan would have—”

“The Siege of Europe?”

He looked at me sadly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Perhaps they shouldn’t have sent me after all — I keep forgetting how little you must know! I’ve turned into the most awful old buffer, I’m afraid. Look here — I’ve got to tell you that we’ve been at War, since 1914.”

“War? With whom?”

“Well, with the Germans, of course. Who else? And it really is a terrible mess…”

These words, this casual glimpse of a future Europe darkened by twenty-four years of War, chilled me to the core!

[9] Into Time

We came to a chamber perhaps ten feet square; it was little more than a box of metal bolted to the inner hull of the ’Naut. A single electric bulb glowed in the ceiling, and padded leather coated the walls, alleviating the metal bleakness of the fort and suppressing the noise of the engines — although a deeper throb could be felt through the fabric of the vessel. There were six chairs here: simple upright affairs that were bolted to the floor, facing each other, and fitted with leather harnesses. There was also a low cabinet.

Filby waved us to the chairs and started fussing around the cabinet. “I should strap yourselves in,” he said. “This time-hurdling nonsense is quite vertiginous.”

Moses and I sat down to face each other. I fastened the restraints loosely around me; Nebogipfel had some trouble with his buckles, and the straps dangled about him until Moses helped him adjust their tightness.

Now Filby came pottering up to me with something in his hand; it was a cup of tea in a cracked china saucer, with a small biscuit to one side of the cup. I could not help but laugh. “Filby, the turns of fate never cease to amaze me. Here we are, about to journey through time in this menacing mobile fort — and you serve us with tea and biscuits!”

“Well, this business is quite difficult enough without life’s comforts. You must know that!”

I sipped the tea; it was lukewarm and rather stewed. Thus fortified, I became, incongruously, rather mischievous — I think on reflection my mental state was a little fragile, and I was unwilling to face my own future, or the dire prospect of this 1938 War. “Filby,” I teased him, “do you not observe anything — ah — odd about my companions?”

I introduced him to Moses — and poor Filby began a staring session which resulted in him dribbling tea down his chin.

“And there is the true shock of time travel,” I said to Filby with feeling. “Forget all this stuff about the Origin of the Species, or the Destiny of Humanity — it’s only when you come face to face with yourself as a young man that you realize what shock is all about!”

Filby questioned us on this issue of our identity for a little longer — good old Filby, skeptical to the last! “I thought I’d seen enough changes and wonders in my life, even without this time business. But now — well!” He sighed, and I suspected that he had actually seen a little too much in his long lifetime, poor fellow; he always had been prone to a certain brain-weariness, even as a young man.

I leaned forward, as far as my restraints allowed. “Filby, I can scarce believe that men have fallen so far — become so blind. Why, from my perspective, this damnable Future War of yours sounds pretty much like the end of civilization.”

“For men of our day,” he said solemnly, “perhaps it is. But this younger generation, who’ve grown up to know nothing but War, who have never felt the sun on their faces without fear of the air-torpedoes — well! I think they’re inured to it; it’s as if we’re turning into a subterranean species.”

I could not resist a glance at the Morlock.

“Filby, why this mission through time?”

“It isn’t so much you, as the Machine. They had to ensure the construction of the Time Machine, you see,” Filby began. “Time technology is so vital to the War Effort. Or so some of them feel.

“They knew pretty much how you went about your research, from the bits of notes you left behind — although you never published anything on the subject; there was only that odd account you left with us of your first trip into the remote future, on your brief return. And so the Raglan has been sent to guard your house against any intrusion by a Time Traveler — like you…”

Nebogipfel lifted his head. “More confusion about causality,” he said. “Evidently the scientists of 1938 have still not begun to grasp the concept of Multiplicity — that one cannot ensure anything about the past: one cannot change History; one can only generate new versions of—”

Filby stared at him — this chattering vision in a school uniform, with hair sprouting from every limb!

“Not now,” I said to Nebogipfel. “Filby, you keep saying they. Who are they?”

He seemed surprised by the question. “The Government, of course.”

“Which party?” snapped Moses.

“Party? Oh, all of that is pretty much a thing of the past.”

He gave us that chilling news — of the death of Democracy in Britain — with just those casual words!

He went on, “I think we have all been expecting to find die Zeitmaschine here, rolling around Richmond Park and hoping for a bit of assassination…” He looked mournful. “It’s the Germans, you know. The blessed Germans! They’re making the most frightful mess of everything… Just as they’ve always done!”

And with that, the single electric bulb dimmed, and I heard the engines roar; I felt the familiar, helpless plummeting which told me that this Raglan had launched me into time once more.