The Time Ships

[1] A New Vision of Richmond

My latest trip through time was bumpy and even more disorienting than usual, I judged because of the uneven distribution of those scraps of Plattnerite about the ’Naut. But the journey was brief, and the sense of plummeting faded.

Filby had been sitting there with arms folded and jowls tucked against his chest, the perfect picture of misery. Now he glanced up at what I had taken to be a clock on the wall, and he slapped his hand against his bony knee. “Ha! — here we are; once more, it is the Sixteenth of June, A.D. 1938.” He began to unravel his constraints.

I got out of my chair and took a closer look at that “clock.” I found that although the hands made up a conventional clock face — the device also featured several little chronometric dials. I snorted and tapped the glass face of the thing with my finger. I said to Moses, “Look at this! It is a chronometric clock, but it shows years and months — over-engineering, Moses; a characteristic of Government projects. I’m surprised it doesn’t feature little dolls with rain-coats and sun-hats, to show the passing of the seasons!”

After a few minutes we were joined by Captain Hilary Bond, and the young trooper who had collected us from Richmond Hill (whose name, Bond told us, was Harry Oldfield). The little cabin became rather crowded. Captain Bond said, “I’ve received instructions about you. My mission is to escort you to Imperial College, where research into Chronic Displacement Warfare is being conducted.”

I had not heard of this college, but I did not inquire further.

Oldfield was carrying a box of gas-masks and metallic epaulets. “Here,” he said to us, “you’d better put these on.”

Moses held up a gas-mask with distaste. “You cannot expect me to insert my head into such a contraption.”

“Oh, you must,” Filby said anxiously, and I saw he was already buttoning his own mask about his jowly face. “We’ve a little way to go in the open out there, you know. And it’s not safe. Not safe!”

“Come on,” I said to Moses, as I grimly took a set of mask and epaulets for myself. “we’re not at home anymore, I’m afraid, old man.”

The epaulets were heavy, but clipped easily to my jacket; but the mask Oldfield gave me, though roomy and well-fitting, was most uncomfortable. I found the twin eye-goggles fogging up almost immediately, the rubber and leather ridges of its construction soon pooling with sweat. “I shall never get used to this.”

“I hope we’re not here long enough to have to,” Moses hissed with feeling, his voice muffled by his own mask.

I turned to Nebogipfel. The poor Morlock — already trussed up in his schoolboy’s uniform — was now topped by a ridiculous mask several sizes too big for him: when he moved his head, the insectile filter on the front of the thing actually wobbled.

I patted his head. “At least you’ll blend with the crowds now, Nebogipfel!”

He forbore to reply.

We emerged from the metallic womb of the Raglan into a bright summer’s day. It was around two in the afternoon, and the sunlight splashed from the drab hull of the ’Naut. My mask immediately filled with perspiration and fog, and I longed to take the heavy, tight thing off my head.

The sky overhead was immense, a deep blue and free of cloud although here and there I could see thin white lines and swirls, tracings of vapor or ice crystals etched across the sky. I saw a glint at one end of such a trail — perhaps it was sunlight shimmering from some metal Flying Machine.

The Juggernaut was perched on a version of the Petersham Road which was much changed from 1873, or even 1891. I recognized most of the houses from my day: even my own still stood behind an area-rail that was corroded and covered in verdigris. But the gardens and verges seemed uniformly to have been dug over, and given up to a crop of a vegetable I did not know. And I saw that many of the houses had suffered great damage. Some had been reduced to little more than fascia, with their roofs and interior partitioning blasted in: here and there, buildings had been blackened and hollowed out by fire; and others were reduced quite to rubble. Even my own house was broken up, and the laboratory was quite demolished. And the damage was not recent: resurgent life, green and vital, had reclaimed the interior of many of the houses; moss and young plants carpeted the remnants of living-rooms and hall-ways, and ivy hung like bizarre curtains over the gaping windows.

I was able to see that the trees still fell away down the same sylvan slope to the Thames, but even the trees showed signs of damage: I saw the stumps of snapped-off branches, scorched boles, and the like. It was as if a great wind, or fire, had passed by here. The Pier was undamaged, but of Richmond Bridge only the haunches remained now, blackened and truncated, with the span quite demolished. Much of the river-side meadows towards Petersham had been given over to the same peculiar crop which had inhabited the gardens, I saw, and there was a brown scum floating down the river itself.

There was nobody about. No traffic moved; the weeds pushed through the broken-up road surfaces. I heard no people — no laughing or shouting, no children playing — no animals, no horses, no birds singing.

Of the gaiety which had once characterized a June afternoon from this prospect — the flashing of oars, the laughter of pleasure-seekers floating up off the river — none of that remained.

All of that was gone now, in this grim Year; and perhaps forever. This was a deserted Richmond, a dead place. I was reminded of the splendid ruins in the garden — like world of A.D. 802,701. I had thought all of that remote from me; I had never imagined to see my own familiar England in such a state!

“Great God,” Moses said. “What a catastrophe — what destruction! Is England abandoned?”

“Oh, no,” Trooper Oldfield put in brightly. “But places like this just aren’t safe any more. There’s the gas, and the aerial torpedoes — most people have gone in, to the Domes, do you see?”

“But it’s all so broken-down, Filby,” I protested. “What’s become of the spirit of our people? Where’s the will to set to and repair all this? It could be done, you know—”

Filby rested a gloved hand on my arm. “One day — when this wretched business is done — then we’ll revive it all. Eh? And it shall be just as it was. But for now…” His voice broke off, and I wished I could see his expression. “Come on,” he said. “We’d better get out of the open.”

We left the Raglan behind and hurried along the road towards the town center: Moses, Nebogipfel and I, with Filby and the two soldiers. Our companions from 1938 walked in a kind of crouch, with endless, nervous glances at the sky. I noted again how Bond walked with a pronounced limp favoring her left leg.

I glanced back with longing at the Juggernaut, for within, I knew, was my Time Machine — my only possible way home, out of this unfolding nightmare of Multiple Histories — but I knew there was no prospect of reaching the machine now; all I could do was to wait on events.

We walked along Hill Street, and then turned into George Street. There was none of the bustle and elegance which had characterized this shopping street in my Year. The department stores, like Gosling’s and Wright’s, were boarded up, and even the planks which sealed up their windows had faded with years of sunlight. I saw how one corner of Gosling’s window had been pried open, evidently by looters; the hole that had been made looked as if it had been gnawed by a rat the size of a human. We passed a squat shelter with a beetling cover, and a pillar beside it with checkered markings and a glass face, now cracked. This too looked abandoned, and the bright yellow-and-black paintwork of the pillar was chipped and peeling.

“It is a shelter against air-raids,” Filby told me in answer to my query. “One of the early designs. Quite inadequate — if ever a direct impact had come… Well! And the pillar marks a first-aid point, equipped with respirators and masks. Hardly used, before the great retreat into the Domes began.”

“Air-raids… This is not a happy world, Filby, to have coined such terms.”

He sighed. “They have aerial torpedoes, you see. The Germans, I mean. Flying machines, which can go to a spot two hundred miles away, drop a Bomb and return! — all mechanical, without the intervention of a man. It’s a world of marvels, for War is a terrific motivation for the inventive mind, you know. You’ll love it here!”

“The Germans…” Moses said. “We’ve had nothing but trouble with the Germans since the emergence of Bismarck. Is that old scoundrel still alive?”

“No, but he has able successors,” Filby said grimly.

I had no comment to make. From my perspective, so detached now from Moses’s, even such a brute as Bismarck scarcely seemed to warrant the loss of a single human life.

Filby was telling me, in breathless fragments, of more of the marvelous Warfaring gargantua of this benighted age: of raider submarines, designed to prosecute the gas battles, with practically unlimited cruising range, and containing half a dozen missiles each, all packed with a formidable supply of gas bombs; of a torrent of ironmongery which I imagined tearing its way across the battered plains of Europe; of more “Juggernauts” which could go underwater, or float, or burrow; and all of it was opposed by an equally formidable array of mines and guns of all sorts.

I avoided Nebogipfel’s eyes; I could not face his judgment! For this was no patch on a Sphere in the sky, populated by abhuman descendants remote from me: this was my world, my race, gone mad with War! For my part, I retained something of that greater perspective I had acquired in the Interior of that great construct. I could scarcely bear to see my own nation given over to such folly, and it pained me to hear Moses’s contributions, bound up as they were by the petty preconceptions of his day. I could hardly blame him! — but it distressed me to think that my own imagination had ever been so limited, so malleable.

[2] A Train Journey

We reached a crude rail station. But this was not the station I had used in 1891 to ride from Richmond into Waterloo, through Barnes; this new construction was away from the center of the town, being located just off the Kew Road. And it was an odd sort of station: there was nothing in the way of ticket collection points or destination boards, and the platform was a bare strip of concrete. A new line was crudely laid out. A train waited for us: the locomotive was a drab, dark affair which puffed steam mournfully about its soot-smeared boiler, and there was a single carriage. There were no lights on the locomotive, nor any insignia of the governing Railway Company.

Trooper Oldfield pulled open the carriage door; it was heavy, with a rubber seal around the edge. Oldfield’s eyes, visible behind their goggles, flicked about. Richmond, on a sunny afternoon in 1938, was not a safe place to be!

The carriage was plain: there were rows of hard wooden benches — that was all — nothing in the way of padding, or any decoration. The paint-work was a uniform dull brown, without character. The windows were sealed shut, and there were blinds which could be pulled down over them.

We settled into our places, facing each other rather stiffly. The heat inside the carriage on that sunny day was stifling.

Once Oldfield had closed the door, the train started into motion immediately, with something of a lurch.

“Evidently we’re the only passengers,” Moses murmured.

“Well, it’s a rum sort of train,” I said. “Rather bare amenities, Filby — eh?”

“It isn’t much of an age for comforts, old man.”

We passed through some miles of the desolate sort of countryside we had seen around Richmond. The land had been given over almost entirely to agriculture, it seemed to me, and was mostly deserted of people, although here and there I saw a figure or two scraping at some field. It might have been a scene from the fifteenth century, not the twentieth — save for the ruined and bombed-out houses which littered the countryside, with, here and there, the imposing brow of bomb shelters: these were great carapaces of concrete, half-submerged in the ground. Soldiers with guns patrolled the perimeters of these shelters, glaring at the world through their bug-faced gas-masks, as if daring any refugee to approach.

Near Mortlake I saw four men hanging from telegraph poles by a road-side. Their bodies were limp and blackened, and evidently the birds had been at them. I remarked on this horrifying sight to Filby — he and the soldiers had not even noticed the presence of the corpses — and he turned his watery gaze in that direction, and muttered something about how “no doubt they were caught stealing swedes, or some such.”

I was given to understand such sights were common, in this England of 1938.

Just then — quite without warning — the train plunged down a slope and into a tunnel. Two weak electric bulbs set in the ceiling cut into operation, and we sat there in their yellow glow, lowering at each other.

I asked Filby, “Is this an Underground train? We are on some extension of the Metropolitan Line, I imagine.”

Filby seemed confused. “Oh, I imagine the line has some Number or other…”

Moses began to fumble with his mask. “At least we can be shot of these terrible things.”

Bond laid a hand on his arm. “No,” she said. “It isn’t safe.”

Filby nodded his agreement. “The gas gets everywhere.” I thought he shuddered, but in that drab, loose outfit of his it was difficult to be sure. “Until you’ve been through it—”

Then, in brief, vivid words, he painted a picture of a gas raid he had witnessed in the early stages of the War, in Knightsbridge, when bombs had still been tipped by hand from floating balloons, and the population was not yet accustomed to it all.

And such ghastly scenes had become commonplace, Filby implied, in this world of endless War!

“It’s a wonder to me that morale hasn’t cracked altogether, Filby.”

“People aren’t like that, it seems. People endure. Of course there have been low moments,” he went on. “I remember August of 1918, for instance… It was a moment when it seemed the Western Allies might get on top of the damn Germans, after so long, and get the War completed. But then came the Kaiser’s Battle: the Kaiserschlacht, Ludendorff’s great victory, in which he smashed his way between the British and French lines… After four years of Trench War, it was a great breakthrough for them. Of course the bombing in Paris, which killed so many of the French general staff, didn’t help us…”

Captain Bond nodded. “The rapid victory in the West enabled the Germans to turn their attentions to the Russians in the East. Then, by 1925—”

“By 1925,” said Filby, “the blessed Germans had established their dreamed — of Mitteleuropa.”

He and Bond sketched the situation for me. Mitteleuropa: Axis Europe, a single market stretching from the Atlantic coast to beyond the Urals. By 1925 the Kaiser’s control extended from the Atlantic to the Baltic, through Russian Poland as far as the Crimea. France had become a weakened rump, shorn of much of its resources. Luxemburg was turned, by force, into a German federal state. Belgium and Holland were compelled to put their ports at German disposal. The mines of France, Belgium and Rumania were exploited to fuel further expansion of the Reich, to the East, and the Slavs were pushed back, and millions of non-Russians were “freed” from Moscow’s dominance…

And so on, in all its meaningless detail.

“Then, in 1926,” said Bond, “the Allies — Britain with her Empire, and America — opened up the Front in the West again. It has been the Invasion of Europe: the greatest transportation of troops and material across water, and through the air, ever seen.

“At first it went well. The populations of France and Belgium rose up, and the Germans were thrown back—”

“But not far,” Filby said. “Soon it was 1915 all over again, with two immense armies bogged down in the mud of France and Belgium.”

So the Siege had begun. But now, the resources available to make War were so much greater: the life-blood of the British Empire and the American continent on the one hand, and of Mitteleuropa on the other, was all poured into that awful sink of War.

And then came the War on Civilians, waged in earnest: the aerial torpedoes, the gassing…

“’The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings,’” Moses quoted grimly.

“But the people, Filby — what of the people!”

His voice, obscured by the mask, was at once familiar, yet removed from me. “There have been popular protests — especially in the late Twenties, I remember. But then they passed Order 1305, which made strikes and lockouts and the rest of it illegal. And that was the end of that! Since then — well, we’ve all simply got on with things, I suppose.”

I became aware that the walls of the tunnel had receded from the window, as if the tunnel were opening out. We seemed to be entering a large, underground chamber.

Bond and Oldfield unbuttoned their masks, with every expression of relief; Filby, too, released his straps, and when his poor old head came free of its moist prison, I could see white marks in his chin where the seal of the mask had dug into him. “That’s better,” he said.

“We’re safe now?”

“Should be,” he said. “Safe as anywhere!”

I unbuttoned my mask and pulled it free; Moses shed his quickly, then helped the Morlock. When Nebogipfel’s little face was exposed, Oldfield, Bond and Filby all stared quite openly — I could not blame them! — until Moses helped him restore his cap and goggles to their appointed sites.

“Where are we?” I asked Filby.

“Don’t you recognize it?” Filby waved his hand at the darkness beyond the window.

“It’s Hammersmith, old man. We’ve just crossed the river.” Hilary Bond explained to me, “It is the Hammersmith Gate. We have reached the Dome of London.”

[3] London at War

The London Dome!

Nothing in my own time had prepared me for this stupendous feat of construction. Picture it: a great pie-dish of concrete and steel almost two miles across, stretching across the city from Hammersmith to Stepney, and from Islington to Clapham… The streets were broken everywhere by pillars, struts and buttresses which thrust down into the London clay, dominating and confining the populace like the legs of a crowd of giants.

The train moved on, beyond Hammersmith and Fulham, and deeper into the Dome. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I began to see how the street-lights traced out an image of a London I could still recognize: “Here is Kensington High Street, beyond this fence! And is that Holland Park?” — and so forth. But for all the familiar landmarks and street names, this was a new London: a London of permanent night, a city which could never enjoy the glow of the June sky outside — but a London which had accepted all this as the price for survival, Filby told me; for bombs and torpedoes would roll off that massive Roof, or burst in the air harmlessly, leaving Cobbett’s “Great Wen” unmarked beneath.

Everywhere, Filby said, the cities of men — which had once blazed with light, turning the night-side of our turning world into a glowing jewel — had been covered by such brooding, obscuring Shells; now, men hardly moved between the great Dome-cities, preferring to cower in their man-made Darkness.

Our new train line appeared to have been slashed through the old pattern of streets. The roads we passed over were quite crowded, but with people on foot or on bicycles; I saw no carriages, drawn either by horse or by motor, as I had expected. There were even rickshaws! — light carriages, pulled by sweating, scrawny Cockneys, squirming around the obstacles posed by the Dome’s pillars.

Watching the crowds from the window of my slowing train, I caught a sense, despite the general bustle and busy-ness, of despondency, downheartedness, disillusion. I saw down-turned heads, slumped shoulders, lined, weary faces; there was a certain doggedness, it seemed to me, as people went about their lives; but there seemed to me — and it was not surprising — little joy.

It was striking that there were no children, anywhere to be seen. Bond told me that the schools were mostly underground now, for greater protection against the possibility of bombs, while the parents worked in the munitions factories, or in the huge aerodromes which had sprung up around London, at Balham, Hackney and Wembley. Well, perhaps that was a safer arrangement — but what a bleak place the city was without the laughter of running children! — as even I, a contented bachelor, was prepared to concede. And what kind of preparation for life were those poor subterranean mites receiving?

Again, I thought, my travels had landed me in a world of rayless obscurity — a world a Morlock would have enjoyed. But the people who had built this great edifice were no Morlocks: they were my own species, cowed by War into relinquishing the Light which was their birthright! A deep and abiding depression settled over me, a mood which was to linger for much of my stay in 1938.

Here and there, I saw rather more direct evidence of the horror of War. In Kensington High Street I saw one chap making his way along the road — he had to be helped, by a thin young woman at his side — his lips were thin and stretched, and his eyes were like beads in shrunken sockets. The skin of his face was a pattern of marks in purple and white on the underlying gray.

Filby sniffed when I pointed this out. “War Burns,” he said. “They always look the same… An aerial fighter, probably — a young gladiator, whose exploits we all adore when the Babble Machines shout about them! — and yet where is there for them to go afterwards?” He glanced at me, and laid a withered hand on my arm. “I don’t mean to sound unfeeling, my dear chap. I’m still the Filby you used to know. It’s just — God! — it’s just that one has to steel oneself.”

Most of the old buildings of London seemed to have survived, although, I saw, some of the taller constructions had been torn down to allow the concrete carapace to grow over — I wondered if Nelson’s Column still stood! — and the new buildings were small, beetling and drab. But there were some scars left by the early days of the War, before the Dome’s completion: great bombsites, like vacant eye-sockets, and mounds of rubble which no one had yet had the wit or energy to fill.

The Dome reached its greatest height of two hundred feet or so directly above Westminster at the heart of London; as we neared the center of town, I saw beams of brilliant lights flickering up from the central streets and splashing that universal Roof with illumination. And everywhere, protruding from the streets of London and from immense foundation-rafts on the river, there were those pillars: rough-hewn, crowding, with splayed and buttressed bases — ten thousand concrete Atlases to support that roof, pillars which had turned London into an immense Moorish temple.

I wondered if the basin of chalk and soft clay in which London rested could support this colossal weight! What if the whole arrangement were to sink into the mud, dragging its precious cargo of millions of lives with it? I thought with some wistfulness of that Age of Buildings which was to come, when the glimpses I had seen of the mastery of gravity would render a construction like this Dome into a trivial affair…

Yet, despite the crudity and evident haste of its construction, and the bleakness of its purpose, I found myself impressed by the Dome. Because it was all hewn out of simple stone and fixed to the London clay with little more than the expertise of my own century, that brooding edifice was more remarkable to me than all the wonders I had seen in the Year A.D. 657,208!

We traveled on, but we were evidently close to journey’s end, for the train moved at little more than walking pace. I saw there were shops open, but their windows were scarcely a blaze of light; I saw dummies wearing more of the drab clothes of the day, and shoppers peering through patched-up glass panes. There was little left of luxury, it seemed, in this long and bitter War.

The train drew to a halt. “Here we are,” said Bond. “This is Canning Gate: just a few minutes’ walk to Imperial College.” Trooper Oldfield pushed at the carriage door — it opened with a distinct pop, as if the pressure in this Dome were high — and a flood of noise burst in over us. I saw more soldiers, these dressed in the drab olive battle-dress of infantrymen, waiting for us on the platform.

So, grasping my borrowed gas-mask, I stepped out into the London Dome.

The noise was astonishing! — that was my first impression. It was like being in some immense crypt, shared with millions of others. A hubbub of voices, the squealing of train wheels and the hum of trams: all of it seemed to rattle around that vast, darkened Roof and shower down over me. It was immensely hot — hotter than the Raglan had been. There was a warm array of scents, not all of them pleasant: of cooking food, of ozone from some machinery, of steam and oil from the train — and, above all, of people, millions of them breathing and perspiring their way through that great, enclosed blanket of air.

There were lights placed here and there in the architecture of the Dome itself not enough to illuminate the streets below, but enough that one could make out its shape. I saw little forms up there, fluttering between the lights: they were the pigeons of London, Filby told me — still surviving, though now etiolated by their years of darkness — and the pigeons were interspersed with a few colonies of bats, who had made themselves unpopular in some districts.

In one corner of the Roof, to the north, a projected light-show was playing. I heard the echoing of some amplified voice from that direction, too. Filby called this the “Babble Machine” — it was a sort of public kinematograph, I gathered — but it was too remote to make out any details.

I saw that our new light rail track had been gouged, quite crudely, through the old road surface; and that this “station” was little more than a splash of concrete in the middle of Canning Place. Everything about the changes which had wrought this new world spoke of haste and panic.

The soldiers formed up into a little diamond around us, and we walked away from the station and along Canning Place towards Gloucester Road. Moses had his fists clenched. In his bright-colored masher’s costume he looked scared and vulnerable, and I felt a pang of guilt that I had brought him to this harsh world of metal epaulets and gas-masks.

I glanced along De Vere Gardens to the Kensington Park Hotel, where I had been accustomed to dine in happier times; the pillared porticoes of that place still stood, but the front of the building had become shabby, and many of the windows were boarded up, and the Hotel appeared to have become part of the new railway terminus.

We turned into Gloucester Road. There were many people passing here, on the pavement and in the road, and the tinkling of bicycle bells was a cheerful counterpoint to the general sense of despondency. Our tight little party — and Moses in his gaudy costume in particular were treated to many extended stares, but no body came too close, or spoke to us. There were plenty of soldiers hereabouts, in drab uniforms similar to those of the ’Naut crew, but most of the men wore suits which — if rather plain and ill-cut — would not have looked out of place in 1891. The women wore delicate skirts and blouses, quite plain and functional, and the only source of shock in this was that most of the skirts were cut quite high, to within three or four inches of the knee, so that there were more feminine calves and ankles on display in a few yards than, I think, I had ever seen in my life! (This latter was not of much interest to me, against the background of so much Change; but it was, apparently, of rather more fascination to Moses, and I found the way he stared rather ungentlemanly.)

But, uniformly, all the pedestrians wore those odd metal epaulets, and all lugged about, even in this summer heat, heavy webbing cases bearing their gas-masks.

I became aware that our soldiers had their holsters open, to a man; I realized that the weapons were not intended for us, for I could see the thin eyes of the soldiers as they surveyed the crush of people close to us.

We turned east along Queen’s Gate Terrace. This was a part of London I had been familiar with. It was a wide, elegant street lined by tall terraces; and I saw that the houses here were pretty much untouched by the intervening time. The fronts of the houses still sported the mock Greco-Roman ornamentation I remembered — pillars carved with floral designs, and the like — and the pavement was lined by the same black-painted area rails.

Bond stopped us at one of these houses, halfway along the street. She climbed the step to the front door and rapped on it with a gloved hand; a soldier — another private, in battle-dress — opened it from within. Bond said to us, “All the houses here were requisitioned by the Air Ministry, a while ago. You’ll have everything you need — just ask the privates — and Filby will stay with you.”

Moses and I exchanged glances. “But what are we to do now?” I asked.

“Just wait,” she said. “Freshen up — get some sleep. Heaven knows what hour your bodies think it is!… I’ve had instructions from the Air Ministry; they are very interested in meeting you,” she told me. “A scientist from the Ministry is taking charge of your case. He will be here to see you in the morning.

“Well. Good luck — perhaps we’ll meet again.” And with that, she shook my hand, and Moses’s, in a manly fashion, and she called Trooper Oldfield to her; and they set off down the Mews once more, two young warriors erect and brave — and every bit as fragile as that War-Burned wretch I had seen earlier in Kensington High Street.

[4] The House in Queen’s Gate Terrace

Filby showed us around the house. The rooms were large, clean and bright, though the curtains were drawn. The house was furnished comfortably but plainly, in a style that would not have seemed out of place in 1891; the chief difference was a proliferation of new electrical gadgets, especially a variety of lights and other appliances, such as a large cooker, refrigerating boxes, fans and heaters.

I went to the window of the dining-room and pulled back its heavy curtain. The window was a double layer of glass, sealed around its rim with rubber and leather — there were seals around the door-frames too — and beyond, on this English June evening, there was only the darkness of the Dome, broken by the distant flickering of light beams on the Roof. And under the window I found a box, disguised by an inlaid pattern, which contained a rack of gasmasks.

Still, with the curtains drawn and the lights bright, it was possible to forget, for a while, the bleakness of the world beyond these walls!

There was a smoking-room which was well stocked with books and newspapers; Nebogipfel studied these, evidently uncertain as to their function. There was also a large cabinet faced with multiple grilles: Moses opened this up, to find a bewildering landscape of valves, coils and cones of blackened paper. This device turned out to be called a phonograph. It was the size and shape of a Dutch clock, and down the front of it were electric barometric indicators, an electric clock and calendar, and various engagement reminders; and it was capable of receiving speech, and even music, broadcast by a sophisticated extension of the wireless-telegraphy of my day, with high faithfulness. Moses and I spent some time with this device, experimenting with its controls. It could be tuned to receive radio-waves of different frequencies by means of an adjustable capacitor — this ingenious device enabled the resonant frequency of the tuned circuits to be chosen by the listener — and there turned out to be a remarkable number of broadcasting stations: three or four at least!

Filby had fixed himself a whisky-and-water, and he watched us experiment, indulgent. “The phonograph is a marvelous thing,” he said. “Turns us all into one people — don’t you think? — although all the stations are MoI, of course.”

“MoI?”

“Ministry of Information.” Filby then tried to engage our interest by telling us of the development of a new type of phonograph which could carry pictures. “It was a fad before the War, but it never caught on because of the distortion of the Domes. And if you want pictures, there’s always the Babble Machine — eh? All MoI stuff again, of course — but if you like stirring speeches by politicians and soldiers, and encouraging homilies from the Great and Good, then it’s your thing!” He swigged his whisky and grimaced. “But what can you expect? — it’s a War, after all.”

Moses and I soon tired of the phonograph’s stream of bland news, and of the sounds of rather feeble orchestras drifting in the air, and we turned the device off.

We were given a bedroom each. There were changes of underclothes for us all — even the Morlock — though the garments were clearly hastily assembled and ill-fitting. One private, a narrow-faced boy called Puttick, was to stay with us in the house; although he wore his battle-dress whenever I saw him, this Puttick served pretty well as a manservant and cook. There were always other soldiers outside the house, though, and in the Terrace beyond. It was pretty clear we were under guard — or prisoners!

Puttick called us into the dining-room for dinner at around seven. Nebogipfel did not join us. He asked only for water and a plate of uncooked vegetables; and he stayed in the smoking-room, his goggles still clamped to his hairy face, and he listened to the phonograph and studied magazines.

Our meal proved to be plain though palatable, with as centerpiece a plate of what looked like roast beef, with potatoes, cabbage and carrots. I picked at the meat-stuff; it fell apart rather easily, and its fibers were short and soft. “What’s this?” I asked Filby.

“Soya.”

“What?”

“Soya-beans. They are grown all over the country, out of the Domes — even the Oval cricket ground has been given over to their production! — for meat isn’t so easy to come by, these days. It’s hard to persuade the sheep and cattle to keep their gas-masks on, you know!” He cut off a slice of this processed vegetable and popped it into his mouth. “Try it! — it’s palatable enough; these modern food mechanics are quite ingenious.”

The stuff had a dry, crumbling texture on my tongue, and its flavor made me think of damp cardboard.

“It’s not so bad,” Filby said bravely. “You’ll get used to it.”

I could not find a reply. I washed the stuff down with the wine — it tasted like a decent Bordeaux, though I forbore to ask its provenance — and the rest of the meal passed in silence.

I took a brief bath — there was hot water from the taps, a liberal supply of it — and then, after a quick round of brandy and cigars, we retired. Only Nebogipfel stayed up, for Morlocks do not sleep as we do, and he asked for a pad of paper and some pencils (he had to be shown how to use the sharpener and eraser).

I lay there, hot in that narrow bed, with the windows of my room sealed shut, and the air becoming steadily more stuffy. Beyond the walls the noise of this War-spoiled London rattled around the confines of its Dome, and through gaps in my curtains I saw the flickering of the Ministry news lamps, deep into the night.

I heard Nebogipfel moving about the smoking-room; strange as it tray seem, I found something comforting in the sounds of narrow Morlock feet as they padded about, and the clumsy scratching of his pencils across paper.

At last I slept.

There was a small clock on a table beside my bed, which told me that I woke at seven in the morning; though, of course, it was still as black as the deepest night outside.

I hauled myself out of bed. I put on that battered light suit which had already seen so many adventures, and I dug out a fresh set of underclothes, shirt and tie. The air was clammy, despite the earliness of the hour; I felt cotton-headed and heavy of limb.

I opened the curtain. I saw Filby’s Babble Machine still flickering against the roof; I thought I heard snatches of some stirring music, like a march, no doubt intended to hasten reluctant workers to another day’s toil on behalf of the War Effort.

I made my way downstairs to the dining-room. I found myself alone save for Puttick, the soldier-manservant, who served me with a breakfast of toast, sausages (stuffed with some unidentifiable substitute for meat) and — this was a rare treat, Puttick gave me to believe — an egg, softly fried.

When I was done, I set off, clutching a last piece of toast, for the smoking-room. There I found Moses and Nebogipfel, hunched over books and piles of paper on the big desk; cold cups of tea littered the desk’s surface.

“No sign of Filby?” I asked.

“Not yet,” Moses told me. My younger self wore a dressing gown; he was unshaven, and his hair was mussed.

I sat down at the desk. “Confound it, Moses, you look as if you haven’t slept.”

He grinned and drew a hand through the peak of hair over his broad forehead. “Well, so I haven’t. I just couldn’t settle — I think I’ve been through rather too much, you know, and my head’s been in something of a spin… I knew Nebogipfel was still up, so I came down here.” He looked at me out of eyes that were red and black-lined. “We’ve had a fascinating night — fascinating! Nebogipfel’s been introducing me to the mysteries of Quantum Mechanics.”

“Of what?”

“Indeed,” Nebogipfel said. “And Moses, in his turn, has been teaching me to read English.”

“He’s a damned fast learner, too,” said Moses. “He needed little more than the alphabet and a quick tour of the principles of phonetics, and he was off.”

I leafed through the detritus on the desk. There were several sheets of notepaper covered in odd, cryptic symbols: Nebogipfel’s writing, I surmised. When I held up a sheet I saw how clumsily he had used the pencils; in several places the paper was torn clean through. Well, the poor chap had never before had to make do with any implement so crude as a pen or pencil; I wondered how I should have got on with wielding the flint tools of my own ancestors, who were less remote in time from me than was Nebogipfel from 1938!

“I’m surprised you’ve not been listening to the phonograph,” I said to Moses. “Are you not interested in the details of this world we find ourselves in?”

Moses replied, “But much of its output is either music or fiction — and that of the Moralizing, Uplifting sort which I have never found palatable — as you know! — and I have become quite overwhelmed with the stream of trivia which masquerades as news. One wants to deal with the great Issues of the Day — Where are we? How did we get here? Where are we headed? — and instead one is inundated with a lot of nonsense about train delays and rationing shortfalls and the obscure details of remote military campaigns, whose general background one is expected to know already.”

I patted his arm. “What do you expect? Look here: we’re dipping into History, like temporal tourists. People are generally obsessed by the surface of things — and rightly so! How often in your own Year do you find the daily newspapers filled with deep analyses of the Causes of History? How much of your own conversation is occupied with explanations as to the general pattern of life in 1873?…”

“Your point is taken,” he said. He showed little interest in the conversation; he seemed unwilling to engage much concentration in the world around him. Instead: “Look,” he said, “I must tell you something of what your Morlock friend has related of this new theory.” His eyes were brighter, his voice clear, and I saw that this was an altogether more palatable subject for him — it was an escape, I supposed, from the complexities of our predicament into the clean mysteries of science.

I resolved to humor him; there would be time enough for him to confront his situation in the days to come. “I take it this has some bearing on our current plight—”

“Indeed it does,” said Nebogipfel. He ran his stubby fingers over his temples, in a gesture of evident, and very human, weariness. “Quantum Mechanics is the framework within which I must construct my understanding of the Multiplicity of Histories which we are experiencing.”

“It’s a remarkable theoretical development,” Moses enthused. “Quite unforeseen in my day — even unimaginable! — it’s astonishing that the order of things can be overturned with such speed.”

I put down Nebogipfel’s bit of paper. “Tell me,” I said.

[5] The Many Worlds Interpretation

Nebogipfel made to speak, but Moses held up his hand. “No — let me; I want to see if I’ve got it straightened out. Look here: You imagine the world is made up, pretty much, of atoms, don’t you? You don’t know the composition of these things, for they are far too fine to see, but that’s pretty much all there is to it: a lot of little hard Particles bouncing around like billiard balls.”

I frowned at this over-simplification. “I think you should remember who you’re talking to.”

“Oh — let me do this my own way, man! Follow me closely, now: for I have to tell you that this view of things is wrong, in every particular.”

I frowned. “How so?”

“To begin with, you can put aside your Particle — for there is no such animal. It turns out that — despite the confidence of Newton — one can never tell, precisely, where a Particle is, or where it is heading.”

“But if one had microscopes fine enough, surely, to inspect a Particle, any degree of accuracy one desired—”

“Put it aside!” he commanded. “There is a fundamental limitation on measurement — called the Uncertainty Principle, I gather — which places a sort of bottom level to such exercises.

“We have to forget about any definiteness about the world, you see. We must think in terns of Probability — the chance of finding a physical object at such-and-such a place, with a speed of so-and-so — et cetera. There’s a sort of fuzziness about things, which—”

I said bluntly, “But look here — let’s suppose I perform some simple experiment. I will measure, at some instant, the position of a Particle — with a microscope, of an accuracy I can name. You’ll not deny the plausibility of such an experiment, I hope. Well, then: I have my measurement! Where’s the uncertainty in that?”

“But the point is,” Nebogipfel put in, “there is a finite chance that if you were able to go back and repeat the experiment, you would find the Particle in some other place — perhaps far removed from the first location…”

The two of them kept up the argument in this vein for some time.

“Enough,” I said. “I concede the point, for the sake of the discussion. But what is the relevance for us?”

“There is — will be — a new philosophy called the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, “Nebogipfel said, and the sound of his queer, liquid voice, delivering such a striking phrase, sent shivers along my spine. “There is another ten or twenty years to elapse before the crucial papers are published — I remember the name of Everett…”

“It’s like this,” Moses said. “Suppose you have a Particle which can be in just two places — here or there, we will say — with some chance associated with each place. All right? Now you take a look with your microscope, and find it here…”

“According to the Many Worlds idea,” Nebogipfel said, “History splits into two when you perform such an experiment. In the other History, there is another you — who has just found the object there, rather than here.”

“Another History?”

Moses said, “With all the reality and consistency of this one.”

He grinned. “There is another you there is an infinite number of ’you’s’ — propagating like rabbits at every moment!”

“What an appalling thought,” I said. “I thought two were more than enough. But look, Nebogipfel, couldn’t we tell if we were being split up in this way?”

“No,” he said, “because any such measurement, in either History, would have to come after the split. It would be impossible to measure the consequences of the split itself.”

“Would it be possible to detect if these other Histories were there? — or for me to travel there, to meet another of this sheaf of twin selves you say I have?”

“No,” Nebogipfel said. “Quite impossible. Unless—”

“Yes?”

“Unless some of the tenets of Quantum Mechanics prove to be false.”

Moses said, “You can see why these ideas could help us make sense of the paradoxes we have uncovered. If more than one History can indeed exist—”

“Then causality violations are easily dealt with,” Nebogipfel said. “Look: suppose you had returned through time with a gun, and shot Moses summarily.” Moses paled a little at this. Nebogipfel went on: “So there we have a classic Causality Paradox in its simplest terms. If Moses is dead, he will not go on to build the Time Machine, and become you — and so he cannot travel back in time to do the murder. But if the murder does not take place, Moses lives on to build the machine, travels back — and kills his younger self. And then he cannot build the machine, and the murder cannot be committed, and—”

“Enough,” I said. “I think we understand.”

“It is a pathological failure of causality,” Nebogipfel said, “a loop without termination.

“But if the Many Worlds idea is right, there is no paradox. History splits in two: in one edition, Moses lives; in the second, he dies. You, as a Time Traveler, have simply crossed from one History into the other.”

“I see it,” I said in wonder. “And surely this Many Worlds phenomenon is precisely what we have witnessed, Nebogipfel and I — we have already watched the unfolding of more than one edition of History…” I felt enormously reassured by all this — for the first time, I saw that there might be a glimmer of logic about the blizzard of conflicting Histories which had hailed about my head since my second launch into time! Finding some sort of theoretical structure to explain things was as important to me as finding solid ground beneath his feet might be to a drowning man; though what practical application we might make of all this I could not yet imagine.

And — it occurred to me — if Nebogipfel was right, perhaps I was not responsible for the wholesale destruction of Weena’s History after all. Perhaps, in some sense, that History still existed! I felt a little of my guilt and grief lift at the thought.

Now the smoking-room door clattered open, and in bustled Filby. It was not yet nine in the morning; Filby was unwashed and unshaven, and a battered dressing gown clung to his frame. He said to me: “There’s a visitor for you. That scientist chap from the Air Ministry Bond mentioned…”

I pushed back my chair and stood. Nebogipfel returned to his studies, and Moses looked up at me, his hair still tousled. I regarded him with some concern; I was beginning to realize that he was taking all this dislocation in time quite hard. “Look,” I said to him, “it seems I have to go to work. Why don’t you come with me? I’d appreciate your insights.”

He smiled without humor. “My insights are your insights,” he said. “You don’t need me.”

“But I’d like your company… After all, this may be your future. Don’t you think you’ll be better off if you stir yourself a bit?

His eyes were deep, and I thought I recognized that longing for home which was so strong in me. “Not today. There will be time… perhaps tomorrow.” He nodded to me. “Be careful.”

I could think of no more to say — not then.

I let Filby lead me to the hall. The man waiting for me at the open front door was tall and ungainly, with a shock of rough, graying hair. A trooper stood in the street behind him.

When the tall chap saw me, he stepped forward with a boyish clumsiness incongruous in such a big man. He addressed me by name, and pumped my hand; he had strong, rather battered hands, and I realized that this was a practical experimenter — perhaps a man after my own heart! “I’m glad to meet you so glad,” he said. “I work on assignment to the DChronW that’s the Directorate of Chronic-Displacement Warfare, of the Air Ministry.” His nose was straight, his features thin, and his gaze, behind wire-rimmed spectacles, was frank. He was clearly a civilian, for, beneath the universal epaulets and gas-mask cache, he wore a plain, rather dowdy suit, with a striped tie and yellowing shirt beneath. He had a numbered badge on his lapel. He was perhaps fifty years old.

“I’m pleased,” I said. “Although I fear your face isn’t familiar…”

“Why on earth should it be? I was just eight years old when your prototype CDV departed for the future… I apologize! — that’s ’Chronic Displacement Vehicle.’ You may get the hang of all these acronyms of ours — or perhaps not! I never have; and they say Lord Beaverbrook himself struggles to remember all the Directorates under his Ministry.

“I’m not well-known — not nearly so famous as you! Until a while ago, I worked as nothing more grand than Assistant Chief Designer for the Vickers-Armstrong Company, in the Weybridge Bunker. When my proposals on Time Warfare began to get some notice, I was seconded to the headquarters of the DChronW, here at Imperial. Look,” he said seriously, “I really am so glad you’re here — it’s a remarkable chance that brought you. I believe that we — you and I — could forge a partnership that might change History — that might resolve this damned War forever!”

I could not help but shudder, for I had had my fill of changing History already. And this talk of Time Warfare — the thought of my machine, which had already done so much damage, deployed deliberately for destruction! The idea filled me with a deep dread, and I was unsure how to proceed.

“Now — where shall we talk?” he asked. “Would you like to retire to my room at Imperial? I have some papers which—”

“Later,” I said. “Look — this may seem odd to you — but I’m still newly arrived here, and I’d appreciate seeing a little more of your world. Is that possible?”

He brightened. “Of course! We can have our talk on the way.” He glanced over his shoulder at the soldier, who nodded his permission.

“Thank you,” I said, “Mr.—”

“Actually, it’s Dr. Wallis,” he said. “Barnes Wallis.”

[6] Hyde Park

Imperial College, it turned out, was situated in South Kensington — it was a few minutes’ walk from Queen’s Gate Terrace. The College had been founded a little after my time, in 1907, from three principal constituent colleges, with which I was familiar: they were the Royal College of Chemistry, the Royal School of Mines and the City and Guilds College. As it happened, in my younger days I had done a little teaching at the Normal School of Science, which had also been absorbed into Imperial; and, emerging now into South Kensington, I was reminded of how I had made the most of my time in London, with many visits to the delights of such establishments as the Empire, Leicester Square. At any rate, I had got to know the area well — but what a transformation I found now!

We walked out through Queen’s Gate Terrace towards the College, and then turned up Queen’s Gate to Kensington Gore, at the southern edge of Hyde Park. We were escorted by a half-dozen soldiers — quite discreet, for they moved about us in a rough circle — but I wondered at the size of the force that might be brought down on us if anything went awry. It did not take long before the sticky heat started to sap my strength — it was like being in a large, hot building — and I took off my jacket and loosened my tie. On Wallis’s advice, I clipped my heavy epaulets to my shirt, and reattached my gas-mask bag to my trouser-belt.

The streets were much transformed, and it struck me that not all the changes between my day and this had been for ill. The banishment of the insanitary horse, the smoke of domestic fires and the fumes of the motorcar — all for reasons of the quality of the air under the Dome — had resulted in a certain freshness about the place. In the major avenues, the roadway was surfaced over by a new, more resilient, glassy material, kept clean by a chain of workmen who pushed about trolley-carts fixed with brushes and sprinklers. The roads were crowded with bicycles, rickshaws and electrical trams, guided by wires which hissed and sparked blue flashes in the gloom; but there were new ways for pedestrians, called the Rows, which ran along the front of the houses at the height of the first storey — and on the second or even third storeys in some places. Bridges, light and airy, ran across the roads to join up these Rows at frequent intervals, giving London — even in this Stygian darkness — something of an Italian look.

Moses later saw a little more of the life of the city than I did, and he reported bustling shops in the West End — despite the privations of the War — and new theaters around Leicester Square, with frontages of reinforced porcelain, and the whole glowing with reflections and illuminated advertisements. But the plays performed were of a dull, educational or improving variety, Moses complained, with two theaters given over to nothing but a perpetual cycle of Shakespeare’s plays.

Wallis and I came past the Royal Albert Hall, which I have always regarded as a monstrosity — a pink hatbox! In the obscurity of the Dome, this pile was picked out by a row of brilliant light beams (projected by Aldis lamps, Wallis said), which made that memorable heap seem still more grotesque, as it sat and shone complacently. Then we cut into the Park at the Alexandra Gate, walked back to the Albert Memorial, and set off along the Lancaster Walk to the north. Ahead of us I could see the flickering of the Babble Machine beams against the Roof, and hear the distant boom of amplified voices.

Wallis kept up a descriptive chatter as we walked. He was good enough company, and I began to realize that he was indeed the sort of man who — in a different History — I might have called a friend.

I remembered Hyde Park as a civilized place: attractive and calm, with its wide walkways and its scattering of trees. Some of the features I had known were still there — I recognized the copper-green cupola of the Bandstand, where I could hear a choir of Welsh miners singing hymns in gusty unison — but this version of the Park was a place of shadows, broken by islands of illumination around lamp-standards. The grass was gone — dead, no doubt, as soon as the sun was occluded — and much of the bare earth had been covered with sheets of timber. I asked Wallis why the Park had not simply been given over to concrete; he gave me to understand that Londoners liked to believe that one day the ugly Dome over their city could safely be demolished, and their home restored to the beauty it had once known — Parks and all.

One part of the Park, near the Bandstand, had been given over to a sort of shanty-town. There were tents, hundreds of them, clustered around crude concrete buildings which turned out to be communal kitchens and bath-houses. Adults, children and dogs picked across the dry, hard-trodden ground between the tents, making their way through the endless, dull processes of living.

“Poor old London has soaked up a lot of refugees in recent years,” Wallis explained. “The population density is so much higher than it was… and yet there’s useful work for them all. They do suffer in those tents, though — and yet there’s nowhere else to keep them.”

Now we cut off Lancaster Walk and approached the Round Pond at the heart of the Park. This had once been an attractive, uncluttered feature, offering a fine view of Kensington Palace. The Pond was still there, but fenced off; Wallis told me it served as a reservoir to serve the needs of the increased populace. And of the Palace there was only a shell, evidently bombed-out and abandoned.

We stopped at a stand, and were served rather warm lemonade. The crowds milled about, some on bicycles. There was a game of football going on in one corner, with gas-masks piled up to serve as posts; I even heard speckles of laughter. Wallis told me that people would still turn out to the Speakers’ Corner, to hear the Salvation Army, the National Secular Society, the Catholic Evidence Guild, the Anti-Fifth Column League (who waged a campaign against spies, traitors and anyone who might give comfort to the enemy), and so forth.

This was the happiest I had seen people in this benighted time; save for the universal epaulets and masks — and the deadness of the ground beneath, and that awful, looming Roof over all our heads — this might have been a Bank Holiday crowd from any age, and I was struck again by the resilience of the human spirit.

[7] The Babble Machine

To the north of the Round Pond rows of dingy canvas deck-chairs had been set out, for the use of those wishing to view the news projected on the roof above us. The chairs were mostly occupied; Wallis paid an attendant — the coins were metal tokens, much smaller than the currency of my day — and we settled in two seats with our heads tipped back.

Our silent soldier-attendants moved into place around us, watching us and the crowd.

Dusty fingers of light reached up from Aldis lamps situated (Wallis said) in Portland Place, and splashed gray and white tones across the roof. Amplified voices and music washed down over the passive crowd. The Roof had been white-washed hereabouts and so the kinematographic images were quite sharp. The first sequence showed a thin, rather wild-looking man shaking hands with another, and then posing beside what looked like a pile of bricks; the voices were not quite lined up with the movements of the mouths, but the music was stirring, and the general effect was easy to follow.

Wallis leaned over to me. “We’re in luck! — it is a feature on Imperial College. That’s Kurt Gödel — a young scientist from Austria. You may meet him. We managed to retrieve Gödel recently from the Reich; apparently he wished to defect because he has some crazy notion that the Kaiser is dead, and has been replaced by an impostor… Rather an odd chap, between you and me, but a great mind.”

“Gödel?” I felt a flicker of interest. “The chap behind the Incompleteness of Mathematics, and all of that?”

“Why, yes.” He looked at me curiously. “How do you know about that? — It’s after your time. Well,” he said, “it’s not his achievements in mathematical philosophy we want him for. We’ve put him in touch with Einstein in Princeton” — I forbore to ask who this Einstein was — “and he’s going to start up on a line of research he was pursuing in the Reich. It’ll be another way into time travel for us, we hope. It was quite a coup — I imagine the Kaiser’s boys are furious with each other…”

“And the brick construction beside him? What’s that?”

“Oh, an experiment.” He glanced around with caution. “I shouldn’t say too much — it’s only on the Babble for a bit of show. It’s all to do with atomic fission… I can explain later, if you’re interested. Gödel is particularly keen, apparently, to run experiments with it; in fact I believe we’ve started some tests for him already.”

We were presented, now, with a picture of a troop of rather elderly-looking men in ill-fitting battle-dress, grinning towards the camera. One of them was picked out, a thin, intense-looking chap. Wallis said, “The Home Guard… men and women out of serviceable age, who nevertheless do a bit of soldiering, in case the Invasion of England ever comes. That’s Orwell — George Orwell. A bit of a writer — don’t suppose you know him.”

The news seemed to be finished for now, and a new entertainment blossomed over our heads. This turned out to be a cartoon — a kind of animated drawing, with a lively musical backing. It featured a character called Desperate Dan, I gathered, who lived in a crudely-drawn Texas. After eating a huge cow pie, this Dan tried to knit himself a jumper of wires, using telegraph poles as needles. Inadvertently he created a chain; and when he threw it away in the sea, it sank. Dan fished the chain out and found that he had snagged no less than three German undersea Juggernauts. A naval gentleman, observing this, gave Dan a reward of fifty pounds… and so forth.

I had supposed this entertainment to be fit only for children, but I saw that adults laughed at it readily enough. I found it all rather crude and coarsely imagined propaganda, and I decided that the common slang epithet of “Babble Machine” suited this kinematographic show rather well.

After this entertainment we were treated to some more snippets of news. I saw a burning city — it might have been Glasgow, or Liverpool — where a glow filled the night sky, and the flames were gigantic. Then there were pictures of children being evacuated from a collapsed Dome in the Midlands. They looked like typical town children to me, grinning into the camera, with their outsize boots and dirty skin-waifs, quite helpless in the tide of this War.

Now we entered a section of the show entitled, according to a caption, “Postscript.” First there was a portrait of the King; he was, disconcertingly for me, a skinny chap called Egbert, who turned out to be a remote relation of the old Queen I remembered. This Egbert was one of the few members of the family to have survived audacious German raids in the early days of the War. Meanwhile a plum-voiced actor read us a poem:

“…All shall be well and/ All manner of thing shall be well/ When the tongues of flame are in folded/ Into the crowned knot office/ And the fire and the rose are one…”

And so on! As far as I could make out the piece was representing the effects of this War as a kind of Purgatory, which in the end would cleanse the souls of Humanity. Once I might have agreed with this argument, I reflected; but after my time in the Sphere’s Interior, I think I had come to regard War as no more or less than a dark excrescence, a flaw of the human soul; and any justification for it was just that justification, after the fact of it.

I gathered Wallis didn’t make much of this sort of stuff. He shrugged his shoulders. “Eliot,” he said, as if that explained it all.

Now there came an image of a man: a rather careworn, jowly old fellow with an unruly moustache, tired eyes, ugly ears and a fierce, frustrated sort of manner. He sat with his pipe in his hand, by a fire-place — the pipe was rather obviously unlit — and he began to proclaim in a frail voice a kind of commentary on the day’s events. I thought the chap looked familiar, but at first I couldn’t place him. He wasn’t much impressed by the efforts of the Reich, it seemed — “That vast machine of theirs can’t create a glimmer of that poetry of action which distinguishes War from Mass Murder. It’s a machine — and therefore has no soul.”

He evoked us all to still sterner efforts. He worked the myths of the English countryside — “the round green hills dissolving into the hazy blue of the sky” — and asked us to imagine that English scene torn apart — “to reveal the old Flanders Front, trenches and bomb craters, ruined towns, a scarred countryside, a sky belching death, and the faces of murdered children” — all this last pronounced with something of an apocalyptic glee, I thought.

In a burst of realization, I remembered him. It was my old friend the Writer, withered into an old man! “Why, isn’t that Mr.—?” I said, naming him.

“Yes,” he said. “Did you know him? I suppose you could have… Of course you did! For he wrote up that popular account of your travels in time. It was serialized in The New Review, as I recall; and then put out as a book. That was quite a turning point for me, you know, to come across that… Poor chap’s getting on now, of course — I don’t think he was ever all that healthy — and his fiction isn’t what it was, in my view.”

“No?”

“Too much lecturing and not enough action — you know the type! Still, his works of popular science and history have been well received. He’s a good friend of Churchill — I mean the First Lord of the Admiralty — and I suspect your pal has had a great deal of influence on official thinking on the shape of things to come, after the War is done. You know — when we reach the ’Uplands of the Future.’ “ Wallis said, quoting some other speech of my former friend’s. “He’s working on a Declaration of Human Rights, or some such, to which we all must adhere after the War — you know the sort of dreamy affair. But he’s not so effective a speaker. Priestley’s my favorite of that type.”

We listened to the Writer’s perorations for several minutes. For my part, I was gladdened that my old friend had survived the vicissitudes of this grisly history, and had even found a meaningful role for himself — but I was helplessly saddened to see what time had done to the eager young man I had known! As when I had met Filby, I felt a stab of pity for the anonymous multitudes around me, embedded in slow-oozing time and doomed to inexorable decay. And it was a ghastly irony, I thought, that a man with such strong faith in the perfectibility of man should find the greater part of his lifetime dominated by the greatest War in history.

“Come on,” Wallis said briskly. “Let’s walk some more. The shows here repeat themselves pretty quickly anyway…”

Wallis told me more of his background. In the Weybridge Bunker, working for the Vickers-Armstrong Company, he had become a designer of aeronautical devices of some reputation — he was known as a “wizard boffin,” in his words.

As the War had dragged on, Wallis’s evidently fertile brain had turned to schemes of how its end might be accelerated. He had considered, for instance, how one might go about destroying the enemy’s sources of energy-reservoirs, dams, mines and such-like — by means of massive explosives to be dropped from the stratosphere by “Monster Bomber” flying machines. To this end he had gone into studies of the Variation of Wind Speed with Height, the Visibility of Objects from Great Heights, and the Effect of Earth Waves on Coal-mine Shafts, and so forth. “You can see the possibilities of such things, can’t you? One just needs the right sort of imagination. With ten tons of explosives one could divert the course of the Rhine!”

“And what was the reaction to these proposals?”

He sighed. “Resources are always scarce during wars — even for priority schemes — and for unproven ventures like this… ’Moonshine,’ they called it. ’Tripe of the wildest description…’ and there was a lot of talk from the military types about ’inventors’ like me ’throwing away’ the lives of ’their boys.’ “ I could see he was hurt by this memory. “You know that men such as you and I must expect skepticism… but still!”

But Wallis had persevered with his studies, and at last he had been given the go-ahead to build his “Monster Bomber.” “It is called the Victory,” he said. “With a bomb-load of twenty thousand pounds, and operating at forty thousand feet, it can travel at over three hundred miles per hour and has a range of four thousand miles. It is a magnificent sight at take-off — with its six Hercules engines blazing away, it takes no less than two-thirds of a mile to lumber into the air… and the Earthquake Bombs it can deliver have already begun to wreak havoc, deep in the heart of the Reich!” His deep, handsome eyes gleamed behind his dusty glasses.

Wallis had thrown himself into the development of the Victory air machine for some years. But then his track had turned, for he came across that popular account of my time travels, and he had immediately seen the possibilities of adapting my machine for War.

This time his ideas had received a decent hearing — his stock was high, and it didn’t take much imagination to see the limitless military potential of a Time Machine — and the Directorate of Chronic-Displacement Warfare was set up with Wallis as the civilian head of research. The first action of the DChronW was to sequester my old house, which had stood abandoned in Richmond since my departure into time, and the relics of my research were dug out.

“But what do you want of me? You have a Time Machine already — the Juggernaut that brought me here.”

He clasped his hands behind his back, his face long and serious. “The Raglan. Of course — but you’ve seen that beast for yourself. As far as its time-traveling abilities go, it was constructed solely with the scrap that was found in the ruins of your laboratory. Bits of quartz and brass, doped with Plattnerite — impossible to balance or calibrate — the Raglan is a lumbering beast which can reach barely a half-century away from the present. We dared risk the ’Naut for no more than to try to ensure that there was no anachronistic interference by our enemies with the development of your original machine. But now — by chance! — it has brought us you.

“Already we can do more, of course: we have stripped the Plattnerite from your old machine, and have lodged the hull in the Imperial War Museum. Would you like to see it? It will be an honored exhibit.”

I was pained at the thought of such an end for my faithful chariot — and disturbed at the destruction of my only route away from 1938! I shook my head stiffly.

Wallis went on, “We need you to generate more of the substance you called Plattnerite — tons of it — show us how!” So Wallis thought I had manufactured the Plattnerite?… I kept the thought to myself. He went on, “We want to take your Time Machine technology, and extend it — put it to uses beyond, perhaps, your most extraordinary dreams…

“With a CDV one might bomb History and change its course — it is just like my scheme to divert the Rhine! Why not? — if it can be conceived, it should be done. It’s the most exciting technical challenge you can imagine — and it’s all for the benefit of the War Effort.”

“Bomb History?”

“Think of it — one might go back and intervene in the early stages of the War. Or assassinate Bismarck — why not? — what a prank that would be — and put a stop to the formation of Germany in the first place.

“Can you see it, sir? A Time Machine is a weapon against which there can be no defense. Whoever first develops a reliable Chronic-Displacement technology will be the Master of the World — and that Master must be Britain!”

His eyes shone, and I began to find his high-altitude enthusiasm for all of this destruction and power rather disturbing.

[8] The uplands of the Future

We reached the Lancaster Walk and began our stroll back to the southern boundary of the park. We were still flanked by our discreet soldiers.

I said, “Tell me more of what will be done when Britain and her Allies win this Time War — tell me about your ’Uplands of the Future.’ “

He rubbed his nose and looked uncertain. “I’m no politician, sir. I can’t.”

“No, no. Give me your own words.”

“Very well.” He looked up at the Dome. “To begin with — this War has stripped away a lot of our fond illusions, you know.”

“It has?” I thought that an ominous preamble — and my fears were soon justified!

“The Fallacy of Democracy, for one thing. You see, it is now clear that is no good asking people what they want. You have first to think out what they ought to want if society is to be saved. Then you have to tell them what they want and see that they get it.

“I know this may seem odd for a man of your century,” he said, “but it’s the modern thinking — and I’ve heard your famous friend espouse much the same views on the phonograph before! — and he’s of your time, isn’t he?

“I know little of History, but it seems to me that the Modern State which we’re developing in Britain and America the form of things we intend to share with the rest of the world — is more like the Republics of antiquity — Carthage, Athens, Rome — which were essentially aristocratic, you see. We have Members of Parliament still, but they are no longer nominated by anything so crude as popular suffrage.

“And all that old business of Opposition — well! We’ve given all of that up. Look, men like you and me know that about most affairs there can be no two respectable and opposed opinions. There is one sole right way and endless wrong ways of doing things. A government is trying to go the right way, or it is criminal. That is all there is to it. The Opposition of the past was mostly just a spoiling job done for advancement. And the sabotage must cease.

“And some of the younger folk are going much further, in their thinking on the future. The family, for instance, is dissolving — so they say. It was the common social cell, if you like, through all our agricultural past. But now, in our modern world, the family is losing its distinctness, and has been dissolving into larger systems of relationships. The domestication of all our young people, including the women, is diminishing greatly.”

I thought, at that, of Captain Hilary Bond. “But what’s to replace the family?”

“Well, the outlines aren’t clear, but the youngsters are talking of a re-nucleation of society around different seeds: teachers, writers, talkers, who will lead us into a new way of thinking — and get us away from this old tribalism and into a better way.”

“ ’Uplands,’ indeed.” I doubted that much — or any! — of this philosophizing originated with Wallis himself; he was acting simply as a mirror of his times, as molded by the chattering opinion-makers in Government and beyond. “And how do you feel about all this?”

“Me?” He laughed, self-deprecating. “Oh, I’m too old to change — and,” his voice was uneven, “I’d hate to lose my daughters… But, likewise, I don’t want to see them growing up in a world like” — he waved a hand at the Dome, the dead Park, the soldiers — “like this! And if that means changing the heart of man, then so be it.

“Now,” he said, “can you see why we need your cooperation? With such a weapon as a CDV — a Time Machine — the establishment of this Modern State becomes, not trivial, but more achievable. And if we fail—”

“Yes?”

He stopped; we were approaching the south wall of the Park now, and there were few people around. He said in a low voice, “We have rumors that the Germans are building a Time Machine of their own. And if they succeed first — if the Reich gets functioning Chronic-Displacement Warfare capabilities…”

“Yes—”

And he painted, for my benefit, a brief but chilling portrait, evidently informed by years of propaganda, of the Time War to come. The old Kaiser’s cold-eyed staff officers would be planning how to project into our noble History their half-doped, crazy lads — their Time Warriors. Wallis portrayed these soldiers as if they were bombs with legs; they would swarm forward into a hundred of our ancient battles like death-dealing dolls…

“They would destroy England — strangle it in its cot. And that’s what we have to stop,” he said to me. “You see that, don’t you? You see it?”

I gazed into his deep, earnest face, quite unable to respond.

Wallis returned me to the house in Queen’s Gate Terrace. “I don’t want to press you for a decision on working with me, old man — I know how difficult all this must be for you; after all, it isn’t your War — but time is short. And yet, what does ’time’ mean, in such a circumstance? Eh?”

I rejoined my companions in the smoking-room. I accepted a whisky-and-water from Filby and threw myself into a chair. “It’s so close out there,” I said. “More like Burma! — that damned Dome. And doesn’t it feel odd? Pitch dark outside, and yet it’s only lunch-time.”

Moses glanced up from the volume he was reading. “ ’Experience is as to intensity and not as to duration,’ “ he quoted. He grinned at me. “Wouldn’t that be a perfect epitaph for a Time Traveler? Intensity — that’s what counts.”

“Who’s the author?”

“Thomas Hardy. Close to a contemporary of yours, wasn’t he?”

“I’ve not read him.”

Moses checked the preface. “Well, he’s gone now… 1928.” He closed the book. “What did you learn from Wallis?”

I summarized my conversations for them. I concluded, “I was glad to get away from him. What a farrago of propaganda and half-baked politics… not to mention the most perfect muddle about causality, and so forth.”

Wallis’s words had deepened the sense of depression I had endured since my arrival here in 1938. It seems to me that there is a fundamental conflict in the heart of man. He is swept along by the forces of his own nature — more than anyone, I have witnessed the remorseless action of the evolutionary currents which pulse through Humanity, deriving even from the primal seas — and yet here were these bright young Britons and Americans, hardened by War, determined to Plan, to Control, to fight against Nature and set themselves and their fellows in a sort of stasis, a frozen Utopia!

If I were a citizen of this new Modern State they intended, I knew, I should soon have become one of the protesting spirits who squirmed in its pitilessly benevolent grip.

But, even as I reflected thus, I wondered, deep in my heart, to what extent I would have fallen into Wallis’s way of thinking — of this Modern State, with its Controls and Plans — before my time-traveling had opened up my eyes to the limitations of Humanity.

“By the way, Nebogipfel,” I said, “I came across an old friend of ours — Kurt Gödel—”

And the Morlock uttered a queer, gurgling word in his own language; he spun in his chair and stood up in a rapid, liquid movement that made him seem more animal than human. Filby blanched, and I saw Moses’s fingers tighten around the book he held.

“Gödel — is he here?”

“He’s in the Dome, yes. In fact, he’s not a quarter-mile from this spot in Imperial College.” I described the Babble Machine show I had seen.

“A fission pile. That is it,” hissed Nebogipfel. “I understand now. He is the key — Gödel is the key to everything. It must have been him, with his insights into rotating universes—”

“I don’t see what you’re talking about.”

“Look: do you want to escape from this dreadful History?”

I did — of course I did! — for a thousand reasons: to escape this dreadful conflict, to try to get home, to put a stop to time traveling before the inception of the insanity of Time War… “But for that we must find a Time Machine.”

“Yes. Therefore you must get us to Gödel. You must. Now I see the truth.”

“What truth?”

“Barnes Wallis was wrong about the Germans, Their Time Machine is more than a threat. It has already been built!”

Now we were all on our feet, and talking at once. “What?” “What are you saying?” “How—”

“Already,” the Morlock said, “we are in a strand of History which has been engineered by the Germans.”

“How do you know?” I demanded.

“Remember that I studied your era in my history,” he said. “And — in my history — there was no such European War as this, which has already spanned decades. In my History, there was a War in 1914 — but it finished in 1918, with a victory for the Allies over the Germans. A new War started up in 1939, but under a new form of government in Germany. And—”

I felt odd — dizzy — and I felt behind me for a chair and sat down.

Filby looked terrified. “Those confounded Germans — I told you! I told you they’d cause trouble!”

Moses said, “I wonder if that final battle which Filby described — the Kaiserschlacht — was somehow modified in the Germans’ favor. Perhaps the assassination of an Allied commander might have done it…”

“The bombing in Paris,” Filby said, confused and wondering. “Could that have been it?”

I remembered Wallis’s horrid descriptions, of robotic German soldiers dropping into British History. “What are we to do? We must stop this dreadful Time War!”

“Get us to Gödel,” the Morlock said.

“But why?”

“Because it can only be Gödel who has manufactured the Germans’ Plattnerite!”

[9] Imperial College

Wallis called for me again after lunch. Immediately he started pressing me for a decision as to whether I would throw in my lot with his Time War project.

I requested that I be taken into Imperial College, to visit this Kurt Gödel. At first Wallis demurred: “Gödel is a difficult man — I’m not sure what you’d gain out of the meeting — and the security arrangements are pretty elaborate…” But I set my jaw, and Wallis soon caved in. “Give me thirty minutes,” he said, “and I’ll make the arrangements.”

The fabric of Imperial College seemed largely untouched by the intervening years, or by its reestablishment from the constituent colleges I remembered. Here was Queen’s Tower, that central monument of white cut stone flanked by lions, and surrounded by the rather dowdy red brick buildings that comprised this functional place of learning. But I saw that some neighboring buildings had been appropriated for the College’s expanded War-time purposes: in particular the Science Museum had been given over to Wallis’s Directorate of Chronic-Displacement Warfare, and there were several newer structures on the campus — mostly squat, plain and evidently thrown up in haste and without much regard for the architectural niceties — and all of these buildings were joined together by a new warren of closed-over corridors, which ran across the campus like huge worm-casts.

Wallis glanced at his watch. “We’ve a short while yet before Gödel will be ready for us,” he said. “Come this way — I’ve got clearance to show you something else.” He grinned, looking boyish and enthusiastic. “Our pride and joy!”

So he led me into the warren of worm-cast corridors. Inside, these proved to be walled with untreated concrete and illuminated at sparse intervals by isolated light bulbs. I remember how the uneven light caught the lie of Wallis’s clumsy shoulders and his awkward gait as he preceded me deeper into that maze. We passed through several gates, at each of which Wallis had his lapel-badge checked, was required to produce various papers, provide thumb- and finger-prints, have his face compared to photographs, and so forth; I, too, had to be validated against pictures; and we were both searched, bodily, twice.

We took several twists and turns on the way; but I took careful note of my bearings, and built up a map of the College’s various annexes in my head.

“The College has been expanded quite a bit,” Wallis said. “I’m afraid we’ve lost the Royal College of Music, the College of Art, and even the Natural History Museum — this damned War, eh? And you can see they’ve had to clear a lot of ground for this new stuff.

“There are still a good few scientific facilities scattered around the country, including the Royal Ordnance factories at Chorley and Woolwich, the Vickers-Armstrong facilities at Newcastle, Barrow, Weybridge, Burhill and Crawford, the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, tire Armament and Aeronautical Experimental Establishment at Boscombe Down… and so forth. Most of these have been relocated into Bunkers and Domes. Nevertheless, Imperial — enhanced as it has been — has become Britain’s primary center for scientific research into Military Technology.”

After more security checks, we entered a kind of hangar, brightly lit, about which there was a healthy smell of engine grease, rubber and scorched metal. Motor vehicles sat about on the stained concrete floor in various states of disassembly; overall-clad men moved amongst them, some of them whistling. I felt my spirits lift a little from my habitual Dome-induced oppression. I have often observed that nothing much perturbs a man who has the opportunity to work with his hands.

“This,” Wallis announced, “is our CDV Development Division.”

“CDV? Ah! — I remember. Chronic Displacement Vehicle.”

In this hangar, these cheerful workmen were laboring to construct Time Machines — and on an industrial scale, it seemed!

Wallis led me to one of the vehicles, which looked pretty much complete. This Time-Car, as I thought of it, stood about five feet tall, and was an angular box shape; the cabin looked big enough to carry four or five people, and it sat on three pairs of wheels, about which tracks looped. There were lamps, brackets and other pieces of equipment dotted about. In each corner of the hull was bolted a flask a couple of inches wide; these flasks were evidently hollow, for they had screw caps. The whole was unpainted, and its gun-metal finish reflected the light.

“It looks a little different from your prototype design, doesn’t it?” Wallis said. “It’s actually based on a standard military vehicle — the Carrier, Universal — and it functions as a motor-car as well, of course. Look here: there’s a Ford V8 engine driving the tracks by these sprockets — see? And you can steer by displacement of this front bogie unit” — he mimed it — “like this; or, if you must make a more savage turn, you can try track braking. The whole thing’s pretty much armored…”

I pulled at my chin. I wondered how much I would have seen of the worlds I had visited if I had peered at them anxiously from within such an armored Time-Car as this!

“Plattnerite is essential, of course,” Wallis went on, “but we don’t think there’s any need to go doping components of the machine with the stuff, as you did. Instead, it should be sufficient to fill up these flasks with the raw stuff:” He unscrewed a cap from one of the corner units to show me. “See? And then the thing can be steered through time, if steer is the right verb, from within the cabin.”

“And have you tried it out?”

He ran his fingers through his hair, making a lot of it stand on end. “Of course not! — for we have no Plattnerite.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Which is where you come in.”

Wallis took me to another part of the complex. After more security checks we entered a long, narrow chamber, like a corridor. This chamber had one wall made entirely of glass, and beyond the glass I could see into a larger room, about the size of a tennis court. That larger room was empty. In our narrower companion chamber there were six or seven researchers sitting at desks; each wore the characteristic dirty white coat into which every experimentalist seems born, and they hunched over dials and switches. The researchers looked around at me as we entered — three of them were women — and I was struck by their drawn faces; there was a sort of nervous fatigue about them, despite their apparent youth. One class of instrument kept up a soft clicking, the whole time we were there; this was the sound of “radiation counters,” Wallis told me.

The larger chamber beyond the glass was a simple box of concrete, with unpainted walls. Though quite empty, a monolith of bricks perhaps ten feet tall and six wide stood, square and silent, at the chamber’s center. The bricks were of two sorts, light and dark gray, alternating in a neat pattern. This monolith was held up from the floor on a layer of thicker slabs, and wires trailed from it to sealed orifices in the walls of the room.

Wallis stared through the glass. “Remarkable — isn’t it? — that something so ugly, so simple, should have such profound implications. We should be safe here — the glass is leaded — and besides, the reaction is subdued at present.”

I recognized the heap from the Babble Machine show. “This is your fission machine?”

“It is the world’s second Graphite Reactor,” Wallis said. “It’s pretty much a copy of the first, which Fermi built at the University of Chicago.” He smiled. “He put it up in a squash court, I understand. It’s a remarkable story.”

“Yes,” I said, becoming irritated, “but what is Reacting with what?”

“Ah,” he said, and he took off his spectacles and polished the lenses on the end of his tie. “I’ll try to explain…”

Needless to say, he took some time about this, but I managed to distill the essence of it for my understanding.

I had already learned from Nebogipfel that there is a substructure within the atom — and that Thomson would take one of the first steps to this understanding. Now I learned that this substructure can be changed. This may happen through a coalescing of one atomic core with another, or perhaps spontaneously, through the breaking-up of a massive atom; and this disintegration is called atomic fission.

And, since the sub-structure determines the identity of the atom, the result of such changes is nothing less, of course, than the transmutation of one element into another — the ancient dream of the Alchemists!

“Now,” said Wallis, “you won’t be surprised to learn that on each atomic disintegration, some energy is released — for the atoms are always seeking a more stable, lower energy state. Do you follow?”

“Of course.”

“So, in this pile, we have six tons of Carolinum, fifty tons of uranium oxide, and four hundred tons of graphite blocks… and it is producing a flood of invisible energy, even as we look at it.”

“Carolinum? I have not heard of that.”

“It is a new, artificial element, produced by bombardment. Its half period is seventeen days — that is, it loses half its store of energy in that period.”

I looked again at that nondescript heap of bricks: it looked so plain, so unprepossessing! — and yet, I thought, if what Wallis said about the energy of the atomic core was true…

“What are the applications of this energy?”

He popped his glasses back onto his nose. “We see three broad areas. First, the provision of energy from a compact source: with such a pile aboard, we can envisage submarine Juggernauts which could spend months below the ocean, without the need to refuel; or we could build high-altitude Bombers which could circle the earth dozens of times before having to land — and so forth.

“Second, we’re using the pile to irradiate materials. We can use the byproducts of uranium fission to transmute other materials — in fact, a number of samples are being run in there for Professor Gödel just now, to support some obscure experiment of his. You can’t see them, of course — the sample bottles are within the pile itself…”

“And the third application?”

“Ah,” he said, and once more his eyes took on that remote, calculating look.

“I see it already,” I said grimly. “This atomic energy would make a fine Bomb.”

“Of course there are severe practical problems to solve,” he said. “The production of the right isotopes in sufficient quantities… the timing of preliminary explosions… but, yes; it looks as if one could make a Bomb powerful enough to flatten a city — Dome and all — a Bomb small enough to fit into a suitcase.”

[10] Professor Gödel

We set off through more of the narrow concrete corridors, emerging at last in the College’s main office block. We came to a corridor carpeted in plush pile, with portraits of eminent men of the past on the walls — you know the sort of place: a Mausoleum for Dead Scientists! There were soldiers about, but they were discreet in their presence.

It was here that Kurt Gödel had been awarded an office.

With quick, efficient strokes, Wallis sketched out Gödel’s life for me. He was born in Austria, and took his degree, in mathematics, in Vienna. Influenced by the gaggle of Logical Positivist Thinkers he found there (I have never had much time for Philosophizing myself), Gödel’s interests drifted towards logic and the foundations of mathematics.

By 1931 — he was just twenty-five — Gödel had published his startling thesis on the eternal Incompleteness of Mathematics.

Later, he showed interest in the physicists’ newly emerging studies of Space and Time, and he produced speculative papers on the possibility of time travel. (These must have been the published studies to which Nebogipfel had referred, I thought.) Soon, under pressure from the Reich, he was moved to Berlin, where he began work on the military applications of time traveling.

We reached a door on which a brass plate bearing Gödel’s name had been fixed — so recently, in fact, that I spotted spindles of wood from the drilling on the carpet below.

Wallis warned me that I could have only a few minutes on this visit. He knocked on the door.

A thin, high, voice within called: “Come!”

We entered a roomy office with a high ceiling, fine carpet and rich wallpaper, and a desk inlaid with green leather. Once this room must have been sunny, I realized, for the wide windows — now curtained — faced westwards: in fact, in the direction of the Terrace where I was lodged.

The man at the desk continued to write as we entered; he kept his arm tucked around the page, evidently lest we see. He was a short, thin, sickly-looking man, with a high, fragile forehead; his suit was of wool and quite crumpled. He was in his thirties, I judged.

Wallis cocked an eyebrow at me. “He’s a rum cove,” he whispered, “but a remarkable mind.”

There were book-shelves all around the room, though currently bare; the carpet was piled high with crates, and books and journals — mostly in German — had spilled out in uneven piles. In one crate I caught a glimpse of scientific equipment, and various sample bottles — and in one such, I saw something which made my heart pound with excitement!

I turned resolutely from the crate, and tried to conceal my agitation.

At last, with a gasp of exasperation, the man at the desk hurled his pen from him — it clattered against a wall — and he crumpled the written pages within his fists, before discarding the whole lot — everything he had written — in a wastebin!

Now he glanced up, as if noticing we were there for the first time. “Ah,” he said. “Wallis.” He tucked his hands behind his desk and seemed to shrink inside himself.

“Professor Gödel, it’s good of you to let us visit you. This is—” He introduced me.

“Ah,” Gödel said again, and he grinned, showing uneven teeth. “Of course.” Now he stood, in angular jerks, and stepped around the desk and proffered his hand. I took it; it was thin, bony and cold. He said, “The pleasure is mine. I anticipate we will have many engrossing discussions.” His English was good, lightly accented.

Wallis took the initiative and waved us to a set of arm-chairs close to the window.

“I hope you find a place for yourself in this New Age,” Gödel said to me sincerely. “It may be a little more savage than the world you remember. But perhaps, like me, you will be tolerated as a useful Eccentric. Yes?”

Wallis blustered, “Oh, come now, Professor—”

“Eccentric,” he snapped. “Ekkentros — out of the center.” His eyes swiveled to me. “That’s what we both are, I suspect — a little out of the center of things. Come, Wallis, I know you steady British think I’m a little odd.”

“Well—”

“Poor Wallis can’t get used to my habit of my drafting and redrafting my correspondence,” Gödel said to me. “Sometimes I will go through a dozen drafts or more — and still finish by abandoning the piece altogether — as you saw! Is that strange? Well. So be it!”

I said, “You must have some regrets at leaving your home, Professor.”

“None. None. I had to get away from Europe,” he said to me, and his voice was low, like a conspirator’s.

“Why?”

“Because of the Kaiser, of course.”

Barnes Wallis shot me warning glares.

“I have evidence, you know,” Gödel said intently. “Take two photographs — one from 1915, say, and one from this year, of the man purporting to be Kaiser Wilhelm. If you measure the length of the nose, and take its ratio with the distance from the tip of the nose to the point of the chin — you’ll find it different!”

“I — ah — Great Scott!”

“Indeed. And with such a simulacrum at the helm — who knows where Germany is heading? Eh?”

“Quite,” said Wallis hastily. “Anyway, whatever your motives, we’re glad you accepted our offer of a Professorship here — that you chose Britain to make your home.”

“Yes,” I said, “couldn’t you have found a place in America? Perhaps at Princeton, or—”

He looked shocked. “I’m sure I could. But it would be quite impossible. Quite impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because of the Constitution, of course!” And now this extraordinary chap went into a long and rambling discourse on how he had discovered a logical loop-hole in the American Constitution, which would allow the legal creation of a dictatorship!

Wallis and I sat and endured this.

“Well,” Gödel said when he had run down, “what do you think of that?”

I got more stern looks from Wallis, but I decided to be honest. “I can’t fault your logic,” I said, “but its application strikes me as outlandish in the extreme.”

He snorted. “Well — perhaps! — but logic is everything. Don’t you think? The axiomatic method is very powerful.” He smiled. “I also have an ontological proof for the existence of God — quite faultless, as far as I can see — and with honorable antecedents, going back eight hundred years to Archbishop Anselm. You see—”

“Perhaps another time, Professor,” Wallis said.

“Ah — yes. Very well.” He looked from one to other of us — his gaze was piercing, quite unnerving. “So. Time travel. I’m really quite envious of you, you know.”

“For my traveling?”

“Yes. But not for all this tedious hopping about through History.” His eyes were watery; they gleamed in the strong electric light.

“What, then?”

“Why, for the glimpses of other Worlds than this — other Possibilities — do you see?”

I felt chilled; his grasp seemed extraordinary — almost telepathic. “Tell me what you mean.”

“The reality of other Worlds, containing a meaning beyond that of our brief existence, seems evident to me. Anyone who has experienced the wonder of mathematical discovery must know that mathematical Truths have an independent existence from the minds in which they lodge — that the Truths are splinters of the thoughts of some higher Mind…

“Look: our lives, here on earth, have but a dubious meaning. And so their true significance must lie outside this world. Do you see? So much is mere logic. And the idea that everything in the world has an ultimate Meaning is an exact analogue of the principle that everything has a Cause — a principle on which rests all of science.

“It follows, immediately, that somewhere beyond our History is the Final World — the World where all Meaning is resolved.

“Time travel, by its very nature, results in the perturbation of History, and hence the generation, or discovery, of Worlds other than this. Therefore the task of the Time Traveler is to search — to search on, until that Final World is found — or built!”

By the time we left Gödel, my thoughts were racing. I resolved never to mock Mathematical Philosophers again, for this odd little man had journeyed further in Time, Space and Understanding, without leaving his office, than I ever had in my Time Machine! And I knew that I must indeed visit Gödel again soon… for I was convinced that I had seen a flask of raw Plattnerite, tucked inside his crate!

[11] The New World Order

I was returned to our lodging at about six. I came in calling halloos, and found the rest of my party in the smoking-room. The Morlock was still poring over his notes — he seemed to be trying to reconstruct the whole of this future science of Quantum Mechanics from his own imperfect memory — but he jumped up when I came in. “Did you find him? Gödel?”

“I did.” I smiled at him. “And — yes! — you were right.” I glanced at Filby, but the poor old chap was dozing over a magazine, and could not hear us. “I think Gödel has some Plattnerite.”

“Ah.” The Morlock’s face was as inexpressive as ever, but he thumped one fist into the other palm in a decidedly human gesture. “Then there is hope.”

Now Moses walked up to me; he handed me a glass of what proved to be whisky-and-water. I gulped at the drink gratefully, for the day had stayed as hot as in the morning.

Moses moved a little closer to me, and the three of us bent our heads together and spoke quietly. “I’ve come to a conclusion as well,” Moses said.

“Which is?”

“That we must indeed get out of here — by any means possible!”

Moses told me the story of his day. Growing bored with his confinement, he had struck up conversations with our young soldier-guards. Some of these were privates, but others were Officer-class; and all of those assigned to guard us and to other duties in this scientific campus area were generally intelligent and well-educated. They seemed to have taken a liking to Moses, and had invited him to a nearby hostelry — the Queen’s Arms in Queen’s Gate Mews — and later they had taken rickshaws into the West End. Over several drinks, these young people had evidently enjoyed arguing through their ideas — and the concepts of their new Modern State — with this stranger from the past.

For my part I was pleased that Moses seemed to be shaking off his timidity, and was showing interest in the world in which we found ourselves. I listened to what he had to say with fascination.

“These youngsters are all highly likable,” Moses said. “Competent — practical — clearly brave. But their views!”

The great concept of the future — Moses had learned — was to be Planning. When the Modern State was in place, as directed by a victorious Britain and her Allies, an Air and Sea Control would take effective possession of all the ports, coal mines, oil wells, power stations and mines. Similarly a Transport Control would take over the world’s shipyards and turn them away from warships to manufacturing steel cargo ships. The Allied Supply Control would organize the production of iron, steel, rubber, metals, cotton, wool and vegetable substances. And the Food Control…

“Well!” Moses said. “You get the picture. It’s an end of Ownership, you see; all these resources will be owned by the new Allied World State. The resources of the world will be made to work together, at last, for the repair of the War-ravaged lands — and later, for the betterment of Humanity. All Planned, you see, by an all-wise, all-knowing Fellowship — who, by the by, will elect themselves!”

“Aside from that last, it doesn’t sound so bad,” I mused.

“Maybe — but this Planning isn’t to stop with the physical resources of the planet. It includes the human resources as well.

“And that’s where the problems start. First of all there is behavior.” He looked at me. “These youngsters don’t look back with much favor on our times,” he said. “We suffer from a ’profound laxity of private conduct’ — so I was informed! These new types have gone back the other way: towards a severe austerity — particularly regarding sexual excitement. Decent busy-ness! — that is the order of the day.”

I felt a twinge of nostalgia. “I suppose this bodes ill for the future of the Empire, Leicester Square.”

“Closed already! Demolished? — to make way for a Railway Planning Office.

“And it goes on. In the next phase, things will get a little more active. We will see the painless destruction of the more ’pitiful sorts of defectives’ — these are not my words! — and also the sterilization of some types who would otherwise have transmitted tendencies that are, I quote, ’plainly undesirable.’ “

“In some parts of Britain, it seems, this cleansing process has already begun. They have a type of gas called Pabst’s Kinetogens…

“Well. You can see that they are making a start here at directing Humanity’s racial heredity.”

“Hmm,” I said. “I find myself with a deep distrust of such normalizing, Is it really so desirable that the future of the human species should be filtered through the ’tolerance’ of the Englishman of 1938? Should his long shadow stretch down, through all the millions of years to come?”

“It’s all Planning, you see,” Moses said. “And, they say, the only alternative is a relapse through chaotic barbarism — to final extinction.”

“Are men — modern men — capable of such epochal deeds?”

Moses said, “There will surely be bloodshed and conflict on a scale not yet envisaged — even by the standards of this dull, ghastly War as the majority of the world resists the imposition of a flawed Plan by these Allied technocrats.”

I met Moses’s eyes, and I recognized there a certain righteous anger, an infuriation at the foolishness of mankind, which had informed my own, younger soul. I had always had a distrust of the advancement, willy-nilly, of civilization, for it seemed to me an unstable edifice which must one day collapse about the foolish heads of its makers; and this Modern State business seemed about the most extreme folly, short of actual War, I had heard in awhile! It was as if I could see Moses’s thoughts in his gray eye — she had thrown off his funk, and become a younger, more determined version of me — and I had not felt closer to him since we met.

“Well, then,” I said, “the matter is decided. I don’t think any of us can tolerate such a future.” Moses shook his head — Nebogipfel appeared to acquiesce — and, for my part, I renewed my resolve to put an end to this time-traveling business once and for all. “We must escape. But how—”

And then, even before I could finish framing the question, the house shook.

I was hurled down, nearly catching my head on the desk. There was a rumble — a deep boom, like the slamming of a door, deep inside the earth. The lamps flickered, but did not die. All around me there were cries — poor Filby whimpered — and I heard the tinkle of glass, the clatter of falling furniture.

The building seemed to settle. Coughing, for an inordinate quantity of dust had been raised, I struggled to my feet. “Is everyone all right? Moses? Morlock?”

Moses had already turned to help Nebogipfel. The Morlock seemed unhurt, but he’d got himself caught under a fallen bookcase.

I let them be and looked for Filby. The old chap had been lucky; he’d not even been thrown out of his chair. But now he stood up and made his way to the window, which was cracked clean across.

I reached him and put my arms around his bowed shoulders. “Filby, my dear chap — come away.”

But he ignored me. His rheumy eyes streaming with water, and his face caked with dust, he raised a crooked finger to the window. “Look.”

I leaned closer to the glass, cupping my hand against the reflection of the electric lamps. The Babble Machine Aldis lamps had died, as had many of the street-lamps. I saw people running, distraught an abandoned bicycle — a soldier with his mask over his face, firing shots into the air… and there, a little further in the distance, was a shaft of brilliant light, a vertical slice of scudding dust-motes; it picked out a cross-section of streets, houses, a corner of Hyde Park. People stood in its glare, blinking like owls, their hands before their faces.

The shaft of brilliancy was daylight. The Dome was breached.

[12] The German Assault on London

Our street door was hanging from its hinges, evidently shaken open by the concussion. There was no sign of the soldiers who had been guarding us — not even of the faithful Puttick. Outside in the Terrace, we heard the clatter of running footsteps, screams and angry shouts, the shrill of whistles, and we could smell dust, smoke and cordite. That fragment of June daylight, bright and sharp, hung over everything; the people of carapaced London blinked like disturbed owls, baffled and terrified.

Moses clapped me on the shoulder. “This chaos won’t last long; now’s our chance.”

“Very well. I’ll fetch Nebogipfel and Filby; you collect some supplies from the house—”

“Supplies? What supplies?”

I was irritated: what fool would proceed into time equipped with nothing more than a house-coat and slippers? “Oh — candles. And matches! As many as you can find. Any fashion of a weapon — a kitchen knife will do if there’s nothing better.” What else — what else? “Camphor, if we have it. Underwear! — fill your pockets with the stuff…”

He nodded. “I understand. I’ll pack a satchel.” He turned from the door and made for the kitchen.

I hurried back to the smoking-room. Nebogipfel had donned his schoolboy’s cap; he had gathered up his notes and was slipping them into a cardboard file. Filby — poor old devil! — was down on his knees beneath the window-frame; he had his bony knees tucked up against his concave chest, and his hands were up before his face, like a boxer’s guard.

I knelt before him. “Filby. Filby, old chap—” I reached out to him but he flinched from me. “You must come with us. It’s not safe here.”

“Safe? And will it be safer with you? Eh? You… conjurer. You quack.” His eyes, flooded with tears from the dust, were bright, like windows, and he hurled those words at me as if they were the vilest insults imaginable. “I remember you — when you scared the life out of all of us with that damned ghost trick of yours, that Christmas-time. Well, I’ll not be fooled again!”

I restrained myself from shaking him. “Oh, have some sense, man! Time travel is no trick — and certainly this desperate War of yours isn’t!”

There was a touch on my shoulder. It was Nebogipfel; his pale fingers seemed to glow in the fragments of daylight from the window. “We cannot help him,” he said gently.

Filby had dropped his head into his trembling, liver-spotted hands now, and I was convinced he could no longer hear me.

“But we can’t leave him like this!”

“What will you do — restore him to 1891? The 1891 you remember doesn’t even exist any more — except across some unreachable Dimension.”

Now Moses burst into the smoking-room, a small, crammed knapsack in his hand; he had donned his epaulets and his gasmask was at his waist. “I’m ready,” he gasped. Nebogipfel and I did not respond immediately, and Moses glanced from one to the other of us. “What is it? What are you waiting for?”

I reached out and squeezed Filby’s shoulder. At least he did not resist, and I took this as a last shred of friendly contact between us.

That was the last I saw of him.

We looked out into the street. This had been a comparatively quiet part of London, to my memory; but today people poured through the Queen’s Gate Terrace, running, stumbling, bumping up against each other. Men and women had simply decanted from their homes and work-places. Most of them had their heads hidden by gas-masks, but where I could see faces, I read pain, misery and fear.

There seemed to be children everywhere, mostly in drab school uniforms, with their small, shaped gas-masks; for the schools had evidently been closed up. The children wandered about the street, crying for their parents; I considered the agony of a mother searching for a child in the huge, teeming ant-hill which London had become, and my imagination recoiled.

Some people carried the paraphernalia of the working day — briefcases and handbags, familiar and useless — and others had already gathered up bundles of household belongings, and bore them in bulging suitcases or wrapped up in curtains and sheets. We saw one thin, intense man stumbling along with an immense dresser, packed no doubt with valuables, balanced on the handlebars and saddle of a bicycle. The wheel of his cycle bumped against backs and legs. “Go on! Go on!” he cried, to those ahead of him.

There was no evidence of authority or control. If there were policemen, or soldiers, they must have been overwhelmed — or had torn off their insignia and joined the rush. I saw a man in the uniform of the Salvation Army; he stood on a step and bawled: “Eternity! Eternity!”

Moses pointed. “Look — the Dome is breached to the east, towards Stepney. So much for the impregnability of this marvelous Roof!”

I saw that he was right. It looked as if a great Bomb had punched an immense hole in the concrete shell, close to the eastern horizon. Above that main wound, the Dome had cracked like an eggshell, and a great irregular ribbon of blue sky was visible, almost all the way up to the Dome’s zenith above me. I could see that the damage hadn’t settled yet, for bits of masonry — some the size of houses — were raining down, all over that part of the city, and I knew that the damage and loss of life on the ground must be vast.

In the distance — to the north, I thought — I heard a sequence of dull booms, like the footsteps of a giant. All around us the air was rent by the wail of sirens — “ulla, ulla, ulla” — and by the immense groans of the broken Dome above us.

I imagined looking down from the Dome, on a London transformed in moments from a fearful but functioning city to a bowl of chaos and terror. Every road leading west, south or north, away from the Dome breach, would be stippled black with streaming refugees, with each dot in that stippling representing a human being, a mote of physical suffering and misery: each one a lost child, a bereft spouse or parent.

Moses had to shout over the cacophony of the street. “That confounded Dome is going to come down on us all, any minute!”

“I know. We must get to Imperial College. Come on — use your shoulders! Nebogipfel, help us if you can.”

We stepped to the middle of the crowded street. We had to go eastwards, against the flow of the crowd. Nebogipfel, evidently dazzled by the daylight, was almost knocked down by a running, moon-faced man in a business suit and epaulets who shook his fist at the Morlock. After that, Moses and I kept the Morlock between us, each with a skinny arm clamped in one fist. I collided with a cyclist, almost knocking him off his vehicle; he screamed at me, incoherent, and swung a bony punch, which I ducked; then he wobbled on into the press of people behind me, his tie draped over his shoulder. Now there, came a fat woman who stumbled backwards up the street, lugging a rolled-up carpet behind her; her skirt had ridden up over her knees, and her calves were streaked with dust. Every few feet, some other refugee would stand on her carpet, or a cyclist’s wheel would run over it, and the woman would stumble; she wore her mask, and I could see tears pooling behind those goggles as she struggled with the unreasonable, unmanageable mass that was so important to her.

Where I could see a human face it didn’t seem so bad, for I could feel a shard of fellow feeling for this red-eyed clerk, or that tired shopgirl; but, with the gas-masks, and in that patchy, shadowed illumination, the crowd was rendered anonymous and insectile; it was as if I had once more been transported away from the earth to some remote planet of nightmares.

Now there came a new sound — a thin, shrill monotone, which pierced the air. It seemed to me it came from that breach to the east. The crowds around us seemed to pause in their scrambling past each other, as if listening. Moses and I looked at each other, baffled as to the meaning of this new, menacing development.

Then the whistling stopped.

In the silence that followed, a single voice set up a call: “Shell! That’s a bloomin’ shell—”

Now I knew what those distant giant’s footsteps to the north had signified: it was the landing of an artillery barrage.

The pause broke. The panic erupted around us, more frantic than ever. I reached over Nebogipfel and grabbed at Moses’s shoulders; without ceremony I wrestled him, and the Morlock, to the ground, and a layer of people stumbled around us, covering us with warm, squirming flesh. In that last moment, as limbs battered against my face, I could hear the thin voice of that Salvation Army man, still shrieking out his call: “E-ternity! E-ternity!”

And then there was a flash, bright even under that heap of flesh, and a surge of motion through the earth. I was lifted up — my head cracked against another man’s — and then I was cast to the ground, for the moment insensible.

[13] The Shelling

I awoke to find Moses with his hands under my arm-pits, dragging me from beneath fallen bodies. My foot caught on something — I think it was a bicycle-frame — and I cried out; Moses gave me a moment to twist my foot free of the obstruction, and then he hauled me free.

“Are you all right?” He touched my forehead with his fingertips, and they came away bloody. He had lost his knapsack, I saw.

I felt dizzy, and a huge pain seemed to be hovering around my head, waiting to descend; I knew that when I lost this momentary numbness, I should suffer indeed. But there was no time. “Where’s Nebogipfel?”

“Here.”

The Morlock stood in the street, unharmed; he had lost his cap, though, and his goggles were starred by some flying fragment. His notes were scattered about, their file having burst, and Nebogipfel watched the pages blow away.

People had been scattered like skittles by the blast and concussion. All round us, they lay in awkward positions, with body on top of body, flung arm, twisted feet, open mouth, staring eyes, old men on top of young women, a child lying on a soldier’s back. There was much stirring and groaning, as people struggled to rise — I was reminded of nothing so much as a heap of insects, squirming over each other — and here and there I saw splashes of blood, dark against flesh and clothing.

“My God,” Moses said with feeling. “We have to help these people. Can you see—?”

“No,” I snapped at him. “We can’t — there are too many; there’s nothing we can do. We’re lucky to be alive — don’t you see that? And now that the guns have got their range — Come! We have to stick to our intention; we have to escape from here, and into time.”

“I can’t bear it,” Moses said. “I’ve never seen such sights.”

The Morlock came up to us now. “I fear there’s worse to see before we’re done with this century of yours,” he said grimly.

So we went on. We stumbled over a road surface become slippery with blood and excrement. We passed a boy, moaning and helpless, evidently with a shattered leg; despite my earlier admonitions, Moses and I were quite unable to resist his plaintive weeping and cries for help, and we bent to lift him from where he lay, close to the body of a milkman, and we sat him up against a wall. A woman emerged from the crowd, saw the child’s plight and came to him; she began to wipe his face with a handkerchief.

“Is she his mother?” Moses asked me.

“I don’t know. I—”

That odd, liquid voice sounded behind us, like a call from another world. “Come.”

We went on, and at length we reached the corner of Queen’s Gate with the Terrace; and we saw how this had been the epicenter of the blast.

“No gas, at least,” I said.

“No,” Moses said, his voice tight. “But — oh, God! — this is enough!”

There was a crater, torn into the road surface, a few feet across. Doors were beaten in, and there was not a window left intact as far as I could see; curtains dangled, useless. There were subsidiary craters in the pavements and walls, left by bits of shrapnel from the exploded shell.

And the people…

Sometimes language is incapable of portraying the full horror of a scene; sometimes the communication of remembered events between humans, which is the basis of our shared society, breaks down. This was one such time. I could not communicate the horror of that London street to anyone who did not witness it.

Heads were blown off. One lay on the pavement, quite neatly, beside a small suitcase. Arms and legs littered the scene, most still clothed; here I saw one outstretched limb with a watch at the wrist — I wondered if it was still working! — and here, on a small, detached hand which lay close to the crater, I saw fingers curled upwards like a flower’s petals. To describe it so sounds absurd — comical! Even at the time I had to force myself to understand that these detached components had comprised, a few minutes ago, conscious human beings, each with a life and hope of his own. But these bits of cooling flesh seemed no more human to me than the pieces of a smashed-up bicycle, which I saw scattered across the road.

I had never seen such sights before; I felt detached from it all, as if I were moving through the landscape of a dream — but I knew that I should forever revisit this carnage in my soul. I thought of the Interior of the Morlocks’ Sphere, and imagined it as a bowl filled with a million points of horror and suffering, each as ghastly as this. And the thought that such madness could descend on London — my London — filled me with an anguish that caused a sensation of actual physical pain in my throat.

Moses was pallid, and his skin was covered by a sheen of fine sweat and dust; his eyes were huge and flickered about, staring. I glanced at Nebogipfel. Behind his goggles, his large eyes were unblinking as he surveyed that awful carnage; and I wondered if he had begun to believe that I had transported him — not into the past — but to some lower Circle of Hell.

[14] The Rota-Mine

We struggled through the last few dozen yards to the walls of Imperial College; and there we found, to my dismay, our way blocked by a soldier, masked and with a rifle. This fellow — stout-hearted, but evidently quite without imagination — had stayed at his post, while the gutters of the street before him had turned red with blood. His eyes became huge, behind their protective discs of glass, at the sight of Nebogipfel.

He did not recognize me, and he adamantly would not let us pass without the proper authority.

There was another whistle in the air; we all cringed — even the soldier clutched his weapon to his chest like a totemic shield — but, this time, the shell fell some distance from us; there was a flash, a smash of glass, a shudder of the ground.

Moses stepped up to the soldier with his fists clenched. His distress at the bombing seemed to have metamorphosed into anger. “Did you hear that, you confounded uniformed flunky?” he bellowed. “It’s all chaos anyway! What are you guarding? What’s the point anymore? Can’t you see what’s happening?”

The guard pointed his rifle at Moses’s chest. “I’m warning you, chappy—”

“No, he doesn’t see.” I interposed myself between Moses and the soldier; I was dismayed by Moses’s evident lack of control, regardless of his distress.

Nebogipfel said, “We may find another way. If the College walls are breached—”

“No,” I said with determination. “This is the route I know.” I stepped up to the soldier. “Look, Private, I don’t have authority to pass you — but I have to assure you I’m important for the War Effort.”

Behind the soldier’s mask, his eyes narrowed.

“Make a call,” I insisted. “Send for Dr. Wallis. Or Professor Gödel. They’ll vouch for me — I’m sure of it! Please check, at least.”

At length — and with his gun pointed at us — the trooper backed into his doorway, and lifted a light telephone receiver from the wall.

It took him several minutes to complete the call. I waited with mounting anguish; I could not have borne to be kept away from an escape into time by such a pettifogging obstacle — not after having made it through so much! At last, grudgingly, he said: “You’re to go to Dr. Wallis’s office.” And with that our simple, brave soldier stood aside, and we stepped out of the chaos of that street and into the comparative calm of Imperial College.

“We’ll report to Wallis,” I told him. “Don’t worry. Thank you…!”

We entered that maze of enclosed corridors I have described earlier.

Moses let out a grunt of relief. “Just our luck,” he said, “to come up against the only soldier still at his post in all of confounded London! The hopeless little fool—”

“How can you be so contemptuous?” I snapped. “He is a common man, doing the job he’s been given as best he can, in the middle of all this — a madness not of his making! What more do you want from a man? Eh?”

“Huh! How about imagination? Flair, intelligence, initiative—”

We had come to a halt and stood nose to nose.

“Gentlemen,” Nebogipfel said. “Is this the time for such navel-gazing?”

Moses and I stared at the Morlock, and at each other. In Moses’s face, I saw a sort of vulnerable fear which he masked with this anger — looking into his eyes was like peering into a cage at a terrified animal — and I nodded at him, trying to transmit reassurance.

The moment passed, and we moved apart.

“Of course,” I said in an attempt to break the tension, “you never do any navel-gazing, do you, Nebogipfel?”

“No,” the Morlock said easily. “For one thing I do not have a navel.”

We hurried on. We reached the central office block and set off in search of Wallis’s room. We moved through carpeted corridors, past rows of brass-plated doors. The lights were still burning — I imagined the College had its own, secured supply of electricity and the carpet deadened our footsteps. We saw no one about. Some of the office doors were open, and there were signs of hasty departure: a spilled cup of tea, a cigarette burning down in an ash tray, papers scattered across floors.

It was hard to believe that carnage reigned only a few dozen yards away!

We came to an opened door; a bluish flicker emanated from it. When we reached the doorway, the single occupant — it was Wallis — was perched on the corner of the desk. “Oh! it’s you. I’m not sure I expected to see you again.” He wore his wire spectacles, and a tweed jacket over a woolen tie; he had one epaulet attached and his gas-mask on the desk beside him; he was evidently in the midst of preparations to evacuate the building with the rest, but he had let himself be distracted. “This is a desperate business,” he said. “Desperate!” Then he looked at us more closely — it was as if he was seeing us for the first time. “Good God, you’re in a state!”

We moved into the room, and I could see that the blue flickering came from the screen of a small, glass-fronted box. The screen showed a view down a stretch of river, presumably the Thames, in rather grainy detail.

Moses leaned forward, with his hands on his knees, the better to see the little set. “The focus is pretty poor,” he said, “but it’s quite a novelty.”

Despite the urgency of the moment, I too was intrigued by the device. This was evidently the picture-carrying development of the phonograph which Filby had mentioned.

Wallis snapped a switch on his desk, and the picture changed; it was the same in its broad details — the river, winding through built-over landscape — but the lighting was a little brighter. “Look here,” he said, “I’ve been watching this film over and over since it happened. I really can’t quite believe my eyes… Well,” he said, “if we can dream up such things, I suppose they can too!”

“Who?” Moses asked.

“The Germans, of course. The blessed Germans! Look: this view is from a camera fixed up at the top of the Dome. We’re looking east, beyond Stepney you can see the curve of the river. Now: look here — in she comes—”

We saw a flying machine, a black, cross-shaped craft, sweeping low over the shining river. It came in from the east.

“You see, it’s not easy to Bomb a Dome,” Wallis said. “Well, that’s the point, of course. The whole thing’s pretty much solid masonry, and it’s all held together by gravity as much as by steel; any small breaches tend to heal themselves…”

Now the flying machine dropped a small package towards the water. The image was grainy, but the package looked cylindrical, and it was glinting in the sunlight, as if spinning as it fell.

Wallis went on, “The fragments from an air-burst will simply hail off the concrete, by and large. Even a Bomb placed, somehow, directly against the face of the Dome won’t harm it, in ordinary instances, because so much of the blast goes off into the air — do you see?

“But there is a way. I knew it! The Rota-Mine — or Surface Torpedo… I wrote up a proposal myself, but it never progressed, and I had no energy — not with this DChronW business as well… Where the Dome meets the river, you see, the carapace extends beneath the surface of the water. The purpose is to keep out attack by submersibles and so forth. Structurally the whole thing is like a dam.

“Now — if you can place your Bomb against the part of the Dome beneath the water…” Wallis spread his large, cultured hands to mime it. “Then the water will help you, you see; it contains the blast and directs the energy inward, into the structure of the Dome.”

On the screen, the package — the German Bomb — struck the water. And it bounced, in a mist of silvery spray, and leapt on, over the surface of the water, towards the Dome. The flying machine tipped to its right and swept away, quite graceful, leaving its Rota-Mine to stride on towards the Dome in successive parabolic arcs.

“But how to deliver a Bomb, accurately, to such an inaccessible place?” Wallis mused. “You can’t simply drop the thing. Sticks end up scattered all over the shop… If you drop a mine even from a modest height of, say, fifteen thousand feet, a crosswind of just ten miles an hour will create two hundred yards’ inaccuracy.

“But then it came to me,” he said. “Give it a bit of back-spin, and your Bomb could bounce over the water — one can work out the laws of ricochet with a bit of experiment and make it all quite accurate… Did I tell you about my experiments at home on this subject, with my daughter’s marbles?

“The Mine bounces its way to the foot of the Dome, and then slides down its face, under the water, until it reaches the required depth… And — there it is. A perfect placement!” He beamed, and with his shock of white hair and those uneven glasses, he looked quite avuncular.

Moses squinted at the imprecise images. “But this Bomb looks to me as if it’s going to fail… Its bounces will surely leave it short… ah.”

Now a plume of smoke, brilliant white even in the poor image, had burst from the back of the Rota-Mine: The Bomb leapt across the water, as if invigorated.

Wallis smiled. “Those Germans — you have to admire them. Even I never thought of that little wrinkle…”

The Rota-Mine, its rocket-engine still blazing, passed beneath the curve of the Dome and out of sight of the camera. And then the image shuddered, and the screen filled with a formless blue light.

Barnes Wallis sighed. “They’ve done for us, it looks like!”

“What about the German shelling?” Moses asked.

“The guns?” Wallis scarcely sounded interested. “Probably hundred-and-five-mil Light-Gun 42s, dropped in by paratroop units. All in advance of the Invasion by Sea and Air that’s to follow, I don’t doubt.” He took off his glasses and began to polish them on the end of his tie. “We’re not finished yet. But this is a desperate business. Very bad indeed…”

“Dr. Wallis,” I said, “what about Gödel?”

“Hum? Who?” He looked at me from large, fatigue-rimmed eyes. “Oh, Gödel. What about him?”

“Is he here?”

“Yes, I should think so. In his office.”

Moses and Nebogipfel made for the door; Moses indicated, urgently, that I should follow. I held up my hand.

“Dr. Wallis — won’t you come with us?”

“Whatever for?”

“We might be stopped before we reach Gödel. We must find him.”

He laughed and thrust his glasses back over his nose. “Oh, I don’t think security and any of that matters very much any more. Do you? Anyway — here.” He reached up to his lapel and tugged free the numbered button that was clipped there. “Take this — tell them I’m authorizing you — if you meet anyone mad enough to be at his post.”

“You might be surprised,” I said with feeling.

“Hum?” He turned back to his television set. Now it was showing a random assortment of scenes, evidently taken from a series of cameras about the Dome: I saw flying machines take to the air like black gnats, and lids in the ground which were drawn back to reveal a host of Juggernaut machines which toiled out of the ground, spitting steam, to draw up in a line which stretched, it seemed to me, from Leytonstone to Bromley; and all this great horde pressed forward, breaking up the earth, to meet the invading Germans. But then Wallis pressed a switch, and these fragments of Armageddon were banished, as he made his record of the Rota-Mine run through again.

“A desperate business,” he said. “We could have had it first! But what a marvelous development… even I wasn’t sure if it could be done.” His gaze was locked on the screen, his eyes hidden by the flickering, meaningless reflection of the images.

And that was how I left him; with an odd impulse towards pity, I closed his office door softly behind me.

[15] The Time-Car

Kurt Gödel stood at the uncurtained window of his office, his arms folded. “At least the gas hasn’t come yet,” he said without preamble. “I once witnessed the result of a gas attack, you know. Delivered by English bombers on Berlin, as it happens. I came down the Unter der Linden and along the Sieges Allee, and there I came upon it… So undignified! The body corrupts so quickly, you know.” He turned and smiled sadly at me. “Gas is very democratic, do you not think?”

I walked up to him. “Professor Gödel. Please… We know you have some Plattnerite. I saw it.”

For answer, he walked briskly to a cupboard. As he passed a mere three feet from Nebogipfel, Gödel did no more than glance at him.; of all the men I met in 1938, Gödel showed the coolest reaction to the Morlock. Gödel took a glass jar from the cupboard; it contained a substance that sparkled green, seeming to retain the light.

Moses, breathed, “Plattnerite.”

“Quite so. Remarkably easy to synthesize from Carolinum — if you know the recipe, and have access to a fission pile for irradiation.” He looked mischievous. “I wanted you to see it,” he said to me; “I hoped you would recognize it. I find it delightfully easy to tweak the nose of these pompous Englishmen, with their Directorates of This and That, who could not recognize the treasure under their own noses! And now it will be your passage out of this particular Vale of Tears — yes?”

“I hope so,” I said fervently. “Oh, I hope so.”

“Then come!” he shouted. “To the CDV workshop.” And he held the Plattnerite up in the air like a beacon, and led us out of the office.

Once more we entered that labyrinth of concrete corridors. Wallis had been right: the guards had universally left their posts, and, although we came across one or two white-coated scientists or technicians hurrying through the corridors, they made no attempt to impede us, nor even to inquire where we were going.

And then — whump! — a fresh shell hit.

The electric lights died, and the corridor rocked, throwing me to the ground. My face collided with the dusty floor, and I felt warm blood start from my nose — my face must have presented a fine sight by now — and I felt a light body, I think Nebogipfel’s, tumble against my leg.

The shuddering of the foundations ceased within a few seconds. The lights did not return.

I was taken by a fit of coughing, for concrete dust was thick on the air, and I suffered a remnant of my old terror of darkness. Then I heard the fizz of a match — I caught a brief glimpse of Moses’s broad face — and I saw him apply the flame to a candle wick. He held up the candle, cupping the flame in his hands, and its yellow light spread in a pool through the corridor. He smiled at me. “I lost the knapsack, but I took the precaution of loading some of those supplies you recommended in my pockets,” he said.

Gödel got to his feet, a little stiffly; he was (I saw with gratitude) cradling the Plattnerite against his chest, and the jar was unbroken. “I think that one must have been in the grounds of the College. We must be grateful to be alive; for these walls could easily have collapsed in on us.”

So we progressed through those gloomy corridors. We were impeded twice by fallen masonry, but with a little effort we were able to clamber through. By now I was disoriented and quite lost; but Gödel — I could see him ahead of me, with the Plattnerite jar glowing under one arm — made his way quite confidently.

Within a few more minutes we reached the annex Wallis had called the CDV Development Division. Moses lifted his candle up, and the light glimmered about the big workshop. Save for the lack of lights, and one long, elaborate crack which ran diagonally across the ceiling, the workshop remained much as I remembered it. Engine parts, spare wheels and tracks, cans of oil and fuel, rags and overalls — all the paraphernalia of a workshop — lay about the floor; chains dangled from pulleys fixed to brackets on the ceiling, casting long, complex shadows. In the center of the floor I saw a half-drunk mug of tea, apparently set down with some care, with a thin layer of concrete dust scumming the liquid’s surface.

The one almost-complete Time-Car sat in the center of the floor, its bare gunmetal finish shining in the light of Moses’s candle. Moses stepped up to the vehicle and ran a hand along the rim of its boxy passenger compartment. “And this is it?”

I grinned. “The pinnacle of 1930s technology. A ’Universal Carrier,’ I think Wallis called it.”

“Well,” Moses said, “it’s scarcely an elegant design.”

“I don’t think elegance is the point,” I said: “This is a weapon of war: not of leisure, exploration or science.”

Gödel moved to the Time-Car, set the Plattnerite jar on the floor, and made to open one of the steel flasks welded to the hull of the vehicle. He wrapped his hands around the screw-cap lid and grunted with exertion, but could not budge it. He stepped back, panting. “We must prime the frame with Plattnerite,” he said. “Or—”

Moses set his candle on a shelf and cast about in the piles of tools, and emerged with a large adjustable wrench. “Here,” he said. “Let me try with this.” He closed the clamps about the cap’s rim and, with a little effort, got the cap unstuck.

Gödel took the Plattnerite jar and tipped the stuff into the flask. Moses moved around the Time-Car, unfixing the caps of the remaining flasks.

I made my way to the rear of the vehicle, where I found a door, held in place by a metal pin. I removed the pin, folded the door downwards, and clambered into the cabin. There were two wooden benches, each wide enough to take two or three people, and a single bucket seat at the front, facing a slit window. I sat in the driver’s bucket seat.

Before me was a simple steering wheel — I rested my hands on it — and a small control panel, fitted with dials, switches, levers and knobs; there were more levers close to the floor, evidently to be operated by the feet. The controls had a raw, unfinished look; the dials and switches were not labeled, and wires and mechanical transmission levers protruded from the rear of the panel.

Nebogipfel joined me in the cabin, and he stood at my shoulder; the strong, sweet smell of Morlock was almost overpowering in that enclosed space. Through the slit window I could see Gödel and Moses, filling up the flasks.

Gödel called, “You understand the principle of the CDV? This is all Wallis’s design, of course — I’ve had nothing much to do with the construction of it—”

I brought my face up against the slit window. “I am at the controls,” I said. “But they’re not labeled. And I can see nothing resembling a chronometric gauge.”

Gödel did not look up from his careful pouring. “I’ve a suspicion such niceties as chronometric dials aren’t yet fitted. This is an incomplete test vehicle, after all. Does that trouble you?”

“I have to admit the prospect of losing my bearings in time does not appeal to me very much,” I said, “but — no — it is scarcely important… One can always ask the natives!”

“The principle of the CDV is simple enough,” Gödel said. “The Plattnerite suffuses the sub-frames of the vehicle through a network of capillaries. It forms a kind of circuit… When you close the circuit, you will travel in time. Do you see? Most of the controls you have are to do with the petrol engine, transmission, and so forth; for the vehicle is also a functioning motor-car. But to close the time-circuit there is a blue toggle, on your dashboard. Can you recognize it?”

“I have it.”

Now Moses had fixed the last of the flask caps back into place, and he walked around the car to the door at its rear. He clambered in and placed his wrench on the floor, and he pounded his fists against the cabin’s inner walls. “A good, sturdy construction,” he said.

I said, “I think we are ready to depart.”

“But where — when — are we going to?”

“Does it matter? Away from here — that’s the only significant thing. Into the past — to try to rectify things…

“Moses, we are done with the Twentieth Century. Now we must take another leap into the dark. Our adventure is not over yet!”

His look of confusion dissolved, and I saw a reckless determination take its place; the muscles of his jaw set. “Then let’s do it, or be damned!”

Nebogipfel said: “I think we quite possibly will be.”

I called: “Professor Gödel — come aboard the car.”

“Oh, no,” he said, and he held his hands up before him. “My place is here.”

Moses pushed into the cabin behind me. “But London’s walls are collapsing around us — the German guns are only a few miles away — it’s hardly a safe place to be, Professor!”

“I do envy you, of course,” Gödel said. “To leave this wretched world with its wretched War…”

“Then come with us,” I said. “Seek that Final World of which you spoke—”

“I have a wife,” he said. His face was a pale streak in the candle-light.

“Where is she?”

“I lost her. We did not succeed in getting out together. I suppose she is in Vienna… I cannot imagine they would harm her, as punishment for my defection.”

There was a question in his voice, and I realized that this supremely logical man was looking to me, in that extreme moment, for the most illogical reassurance! “No,” I said, “I am sure she—”

But I never completed my sentence, for — without even the warning of a whistle in the air — a new shell fell, and this was the closest of all!

The last flicker of our candle showed me, in a flash-bulb slice of frozen time, how the westerly wall of the workshop burst inwards — simply that; it turned from a smooth, steady panel into a billowing cloud of figments and dust, in less than a heartbeat.

Then we were plunged into darkness.

The car rocked, and — “Down!” Moses called — I ducked — and a hail of masonry shards, quite lethal, rattled against the shell of the Time-Car.

Nebogipfel climbed forward; I could smell his sweet stink. His soft hand grasped my shoulder. “Close the switch,” he said.

I peered through the slit-window — and into utter darkness, of course. “What of Gödel?” I cried. “Professor!”

There was no reply. I heard a creak, quite ominous and heavy, from above the car, and there was a further clatter of falling masonry fragments.

“Close the switch,” Nebogipfel said urgently. “Can you not hear? The roof is collapsing — I — we will be crushed!”

“I’ll get him,” Moses said. In pitch darkness, I heard his boots clump over the car’s panels as he made his way to the rear of the cabin. “It will be fine — I’ve more candles…” His voice faded as he reached the rear of the cabin, and I heard his feet crunch on the rubble strewn floor -

— and then there was an immense groan, like a grotesque gasp, and a rushing from above. I heard Moses cry out.

I twisted, intending to dive out of the cabin after Moses — and I felt a nip of small teeth in the soft part of my hand — Morlock teeth!

At that instant, with Death closing in around me, and plunged into primal darkness once more, the presence of the Morlock, his teeth in my flesh, the brush of his hair against my skin: it was all unbearable! I roared and drove my fist into the soft flesh of the Morlock’s face.

…But he did not cry out; even as I struck him, I felt him reach past me to the dash-board.

The darkness fell from my eyes — the roar of collapsing concrete diminished into silence — and I found myself falling once more into the gray light of time travel.

[16] Falling Into Time

The Time-Car rocked. I grasped for the bucket seat, but I was thrown to the floor, clattering my head and shoulders against a wooden bench. My hand ached, irrelevantly, from the Morlock’s nip.

White light flooded the cabin, bursting upon us with a soundless explosion. I heard the Morlock cry out. My vision was blurred, impeded by the mats of blood which clung to my cheeks and eyebrows. Through the rear door and the various slit-windows, a uniform, pale glow seeped into the shuddering cabin; at first it flickered, but it soon settled to a washed-out gray glow. I wondered if there had been some fresh catastrophe: perhaps this workshop was being consumed by flames…

But then I recognized that the quality of light was too steady, too neutral for that. I understood that we had already gone far beyond that War-time laboratory.

The glow was, of course, daylight, rendered featureless and bland by the overlaying of day and night, too fast for the eye to follow. We had indeed fallen into time; this car — though crude and ill-balanced — was functioning correctly. I could not tell if we were falling into future or past, but the car had already taken us to a period beyond the existence of the London Dome.

I got my hands under me and tried to rise, but there was blood — mine or the Morlock’s — on my palms, and they slid out from under me. I tumbled back to the hard floor, thumping my head on the bench once more.

I fell into a huge, bone-numbing fatigue. The pain of my rattling about during the shellings, deferred by the scramble I had been through, now fell on me with a vengeance. I let my head rest against the floor’s metal ribs and closed my eyes. “What’s it all for, anyhow?” I asked, of no one in particular. Moses was dead… lost, with Professor Gödel, under tons of masonry in that destroyed lab. I had no idea whether the Morlock was alive or dead; nor did I care. Let the Time-Car carry me to future or past as it would; let it go on forever, until it smashed itself to pieces against the walls of infinity and Eternity! Let there be an end to it — I could do no more. “It’s not worth the candle,” I muttered. “Not worth the candle…”

I thought I felt soft hands on mine, the brush of hair against my face; but I protested, and — with the last of my strength — pushed the hands away.

I fell into a deep, dreamless, comfortless darkness.

I was woken by a severe buffeting.

I was rattled against the floor of the cabin. Something soft lay under my head, but that slipped away, and my skull banged against the hard corner of a bench. This renewed hail of pain brought me to my senses, and, with some reluctance, I sat up.

My head ached pretty comprehensively and my body felt as if it had been through a grueling boxing-bout. But, paradoxically, my mood seemed a little improved. The death of Moses — was still there in my mind — a huge event, which I knew I must confront, in time — but after those moments of blessed unconsciousness I was able to look away from it, as one might turn away from the blinding light of the sun, and consider other things.

That dim, pearly mixture of day and night still suffused the interior of the car. It was quite remarkably cold; I felt myself shiver, and my breath fogged before my face. Nebogipfel sat in the pilot’s bucket seat, his back turned to me. His white fingers probed at the instruments in the rudimentary dash-board, and he traced the wires which dangled from the steering column.

I got to my feet. The car’s swaying, together with the battering I had endured in 1938, left me uncertain on my feet; to steady myself I had to cling to the cabin’s ribbed framework, and found the metal ice-cold under my bare hands. The soft item which had been cushioning my head, I found, was the Morlock’s blazer. I folded it up and placed it on a bench. I also saw, dropped on the floor, the heavy wrench which Moses had used to open the Plattnerite flasks. I picked it up with my fingertips; it was splashed with blood.

I still wore my heavy epaulets; disgusted by these bits of armor, I ripped them from my clothes and dropped them with a clatter.

At the noise, Nebogipfel glanced towards me, and I saw that his blue goggles were cracked in two, and that one huge eye was a mess of blood and broken flesh. “Prepare yourself,” he said thickly.

“What for? I—”

And the cabin was plunged into darkness.

I stumbled backwards, almost falling again. An intense cold sucked the remaining warmth out of the cabin air, and from my blood; and my head pounded anew. I wrapped my arms around my torso. “What has happened to the daylight?”

The voice of the Morlock seemed almost harsh in that swaying blackness. “It will last only a few seconds. We must endure…”

And, as quickly as it had come, the blackness receded, and the gray light seeped into the cabin once more. Some of the edge of that immense cold was blunted, but still I shivered violently. I knelt on the floor beside Nebogipfel’s seat. “What is happening? What was that?”

“Ice,” he said. “We are traveling through an Age of Periodic Glaciation; ice-sheets and glaciers are sweeping down from the north and covering the land — overwhelming us in the process — and then melting away. At times, I would hazard, there is as much as a hundred feet of ice above us.”

I peered through the slit-windows in the car’s front panel. I saw a Thames valley made over into a bleak tundra inhabited only by tough grass, defiant blazes of purple heather, and sparse trees; these latter shivered through their annual cycles too fast for me to follow, but they looked to me like the hardier varieties: oak, willow, poplar, elm, hawthorn. There was no sign of London: I could make out not even the ghosts of evanescent buildings, and there was no evidence of man in all that gray landscape, nor indeed of any animal life. Even the shape of the landscape, the hilts and valleys, seemed unfamiliar to me, as it was remade over and again by the glaciers.

And now — I saw it approach in a brief flood of white brilliance, before it overwhelmed us — the great Ice came again. In darkness, I cursed, and dug my hands into my arm-pits; my fingers and toes were numb, and I began to fear frostbite. When the glaciers receded once more, they left a landscape inhabited by much the same variety of hardy plants, as far as I could see, but with its contours adjusted: evidently the intervals of Ice were remaking the landscape, though I could not tell if we were proceeding into future or past. As I watched, boulders taller than men seemed to migrate across the landscape, taking slow slithers or rolls; this was clearly some odd effect of the erosion of the land.

“For how long was I unconscious?”

“Not long. Perhaps thirty minutes.”

“And is the Time-Car taking us into the future?”

“We are penetrating the past,” the Morlock said. He turned to face me, and I saw how his graceful movements had been reduced to stiff jerks by the fresh pummeling I had inflicted on him. “I am confident of it. I caught a few glimpses of the recession of London — its withering, back to its historical origins… From the intervals between Glaciations, I should say we are traveling at some tens of thousands of years every minute.”

“Perhaps we should work out how we might stop this car’s headlong drive into time. If we find an equable age—”

“I do not drink we have any way of terminating the flight of the car.”

“What?”

The Morlock spread his hands — I saw how the hair on the back of them was sprinkled with a light frost — and then we were plunged once more into a darkened sepulcher of Ice, and his voice floated out of the obscurity. “This is a crude, unfinished test vehicle, remember. Many of the controls and indicators are disconnected; those that do have connections largely appear nonfunctional. Even if we knew how to modify the workings with out wrecking the vehicle, I can see no way for us to get out of the cabin to reach the inner mechanism.”

We emerged from the Ice into that reshaped tundra once more. Nebogipfel watched the landscape with some fascination. “Think of it: the fjords of Scandinavia are not yet cut, and the lakes of Europe and North America — deposited by melting ice — are phantasms of the future.

“Already, we have passed beyond the dawn of human history. In Africa we might find races of Australopithecines some of them clumsy, some gracile, some carnivorous, but all with a bipedal gait and ape-like features: a small brain-case and large jaws and teeth…”

A great, cold loneliness descended on me. I had been lost in time before, but never, I thought, had I suffered quite this intensity of isolation! Was it true — could it be true — that Nebogipfel and I, in our damaged Time-Car, represented the only candle-flames of intelligence on the whole of the planet?

“So we are out of control,” I said. “We may not stop until we reach the beginning of time…”

“I doubt it will come to that,” Nebogipfel said. “The Plattnerite must have some finite capacity. It cannot propel us deeper into time, forever; it must exhaust itself: We must pray that it does so before we pass through the Ordovician and Cambrian time-layers — before we reach an Age in which there is no oxygen to sustain us.”

“That’s a cheerful prospect,” I said. “And things may become worse still, I suppose.”

“How?”

I got my stiff legs out from under me and sat on the cold, ribbed metal floor. “We have no provisions, of any kind. No water, no food. And we’re both injured. We don’t even have warm clothing! How long can we survive, in this freezing time-ark? A few days? Less?”

Nebogipfel did not reply.

I am not a man to submit easily to Fate, and I invested some energy in studying Nebogipfel’s controls and wires. I soon learned he was right — there was no way I could find to build this tangle of components into a dirigible vehicle — and my energy, sapped as it was, was soon spent: I reverted to a sort of dull apathy.

We passed through one more brief, brutal Glaciation; and then we entered a long, bleak winter. The seasons still brought snow and ice flickering across the land, but the Age of Permanent Ice lay in the future now. I saw little change in the nature of the landscape, millennium on millennium: perhaps there was a slow enrichment of the texture of the blur of greenery that coated the hills. An immense skull — it reminded me of an elephant’s — appeared on the ground not far from the Time-Car, bleached, bare and crumbled. It persisted long enough for me to make out its contours, a second or so, before it vanished as fast as it had appeared.

“Nebogipfel — about your face. I — you have to understand…”

He regarded me from his one good eye. I saw he had reverted to his Morlock mannerisms, losing the human coloration he had adopted. “What? What must I understand?”

“I didn’t mean to injure you.”

“You do not now,” he said with a surgeon’s precision. “But you did then. Apology is futile — absurd. You are what you are… we are different species, as divergent from each other as from the Australopithecines.”

I felt like a clumsy animal, my huge fists stained once more with the blood of a Morlock. “You shame me,” I said.

He shook his head a brief, curt gesture. “Shame? The concept is without meaning, in this context.”

I should no more feel shame — I saw he meant — than should some savage animal of the jungle. If attacked by such a creature, would I argue the morals of the case with it? No — without intelligence, it could not help its behavior. I should merely deal with its actions.

To Nebogipfel, I had proved myself — again! — to be little better than those clumsy brutes of the African plains, the precursors of men in this desolate period.

I retreated to the wooden benches. I lay there, cradling my aching head with my arm, and watched the flicker of Ages beyond the still-open door of the car.

[17] The Watcher

The bleak, wintry cold passed, and the sky took on a more complex, mottled texture. Occasionally the rocking sun-band would be blotted out by a shell of dark cloud, for as long as a second. New species of trees flourished in this milder climate: deciduous types, as best I could make out, maple, oak, poplar, cedars and others. Sometimes these antique forests lapped over the car, shutting us into a twilight of flickering green-brown, and then they receded, as if a curtain had been drawn aside.

We had entered a time of powerful earth movements, Nebogipfel said. The Alps and Himalayas were being forced out of the ground, and immense volcanoes were spewing ash and dust into the air, sometimes obscuring the sky for years on end. In the oceans — the Morlock said — great sharks cruised, with teeth like daggers. And in Africa, the ancestors of Humanity were shriveling back into primitive mindlessness, with shrinking brains, stooping gait and blunted, clumsy fingers.

We fell through that long, savage Age for perhaps twelve hours.

I tried to ignore the hunger and thirst that clawed at my belly, while centuries and forests flickered past the cabin. This was the longest journey through time I had taken since my first plunge into the remote future beyond Weena’s History, and the immense, futile emptiness of it all — for hour after unchanging hour — began to depress my soul. Already the brief flourishing of Humanity was a remote sliver of light, far away in time; even the distance between man and Morlock — of whatever variety — was but a fraction of the great distance I had traveled.

The hugeness of time, and the littleness of man and his achievements, quite crushed me; and my own, petty concerns seemed of absurd insignificance. The story of Humanity seemed trivial, a flash-lamp moment lost in the dark, mindless halls of Eternity.

The earth’s crust heaved like the chest of a choking man, and the Time-Car was lifted or dropped with the evolving landscape; it felt like the swell of an immense sea. The vegetation grew more lush and green, and new forests pressed up against the Time-Car — I thought they were deciduous trees by now, though flowers and leaves were reduced to a uniform green blur by our velocity — and the air grew warmer.

The ache of those eons of cold left my fingers at last, and I discarded my jacket and loosened the buttons of my shirt; I abandoned my boots and flexed the circulation back into my toes. Barnes Wallis’s numbered security badge fell out of my jacket pocket. I picked it up, this little symbol of man’s suspicious fencing-off of his fellow man, and I do not think I could have found, in that primeval greenness, a more perfect symbol of the narrowness and absurdity on which so much human energy is wasted! I threw the badge into a dark corner of the car.

The long hours, suspended in that cloaking greenery, passed more slowly than ever, and I slept for a while. When I woke, the quality of the greenness around me seemed to have changed — it was more translucent, with something of the shade of Plattnerite, and I thought I saw a hint of star-fields — it was like being immersed in emeralds, rather than leaves.

Then I saw it: it hovered in the moist, gloomy air of the cabin, immune to the rocking of the car, with its huge eyes, fleshy “V” of a mouth, and those articulated tentacles which trailed towards, but did not touch, the floor. This was no phantasm — I could not see through it, to details of the forest beyond — and it was as real as me, Nebogipfel, or the boots I had set on the bench.

The Watcher regarded me with a cool analysis.

I felt no fear. I reached out towards it, but it bobbled away through the air. I had no doubt that its gray eyes were fixed on my face. “Who are you?” I asked. “Can you help us?”

If it could hear, it did not respond. But the illumination was already changing; that light-suffused quality of the air was fading back to a vegetable greenness. I caught a sensation, then, of spinning — that great skull was like some improbable toy, turning on its axis — and then it was gone.

Nebogipfel walked up to me, his long feet picking over the floor’s ribs. He had discarded his nineteenth-century clothes, and he went naked, save for his battered goggles and the coat of white hair on his back, now tangled and grown out. “What is it? Are you ill?”

I told him of the Watcher, but he had seen nothing of it. I returned to my rest on the bench, uncertain if what I had witnessed was real — or a lingering dream.

The heat was oppressive, and the air in the cabin grew stifling.

I thought of Gödel, and of Moses.

That unprepossessing man, Gödel, had deduced the existence of Multiple Histories, purely from ontological principles — while I, poor fool that I am, had needed several trips through time before the possibility had even occurred to me! But now, that man who had dreamed his magnificent dreams of the Final World, a world in which all Meaning is resolved, lay crushed and broken under a heap of masonry killed by the narrowness and stupidity of his fellow men.

And as for Moses: for him, I simply grieved. It was something of the desolation one might feel if a child is killed, I think, or a younger brother. Moses was dead at twenty-six; and yet I — the same person — breathed on at four-and-forty! My past had been cut out from under me; it was as if the ground had evaporated, leaving me stranded in the air. But beyond this I had come to know Moses, if briefly, as a person in his own regard. He had been cheerful, erratic, impulsive, a little absurd — just like me! — and immensely likable.

It was another death on my hands!

All Nebogipfel’s double-talk of a Multiplicity of Worlds — all the possible arguments that the Moses I had known was never, in the end, destined to be me, but some other variant of me — none of that made any difference to the way it felt to have lost him.

My thoughts dissolved into half-coherent fragments — I struggled to keep my eyes open, fearing I should not wake again — but, once more, consumed by confusion and grief, I slept.

I was woken by my name, pronounced in the Morlock’s odd, liquid guttural. The air was as foul as before, and a new throb, caused by the heat and lack of oxygen, was jostling for room in my skull with the residue of my earlier injuries.

Nebogipfel’s battered eyes were huge in that arboreal gloom. “Look around,” he said.

The greenery pressed about us with as much persistence as before — and yet now the texture seemed different. I found that — with care — I was able to follow the evolution of single leaves on the crowding branches. Each leaf sprang from the dust, went through a sort of reverse withering, and crumpled into its bud in less than a second, but even so -

“We are slowing,” I breathed.

“Yes. The Plattnerite is losing its potency, I think.”

I uttered a prayer of thanks — for my strength had recovered sufficiently that I no longer wished to die on some airless, rocky plain at the dawn of the earth!

“Do you know where we are?”

“Somewhere in the Palaeocene Era. We’ve been traveling for twenty hours. We are perhaps fifty million years before the present…”

“Whose present? — mine, of 1891, or yours?”

He touched the blood still matted over his face. “On such time-scales it scarcely matters.”

The blossoming of leaves and flowers was now quite slow — almost stately. I became aware of a flickering, of impermanent intrusions of deeper darkness, superimposed on the general green gloom. “I can distinguish night and day,” I said. “We’re slowing.”

“Yes.” The Morlock sat on the bench opposite me and gripped its edge with his long fingers. I wondered if he was afraid — he had every right to be! I thought I saw a motion in the floor of the car, a gentle, upward bulging below Nebogipfel’s bench.

“What should we do?”

He shook his head. “We can only wait on events. We are hardly in a controlled situation…”

The flapping of night and day slowed further, until it became a steady pulse around us, like a heartbeat. The floor creaked, and I saw stress-marks appear in its steel plates…

Suddenly I understood!

I cried, “Look out!” I stood, reached over and grabbed Nebogipfel by the shoulders. He did not resist. I lifted him as if he were a skinny, hairy child, and stumbled backwards -

— and a tree accreted out of the air before me, ripping the car’s metal like paper. One immense branch probed towards the controls like the arm of some huge, purposeful man of wood, and smashed through the casing’s front panel.

We were evidently arriving in the space occupied by this tree, in this remote era!

I fell backwards against a bench, cradling Nebogipfel. The tree shrank a little, as we receded towards the moment of its birth. The flapping of night and day grew slower, still more ponderous. The trunk narrowed further — and then, with an immense crack, the cabin of the car broke in two, snapped open from within like an egg-shell.

I lost hold of Nebogipfel, and the Morlock and I tumbled to the soft, moist earth, amid a hail of metal and wood.