Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperVoyager

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London SE1 9GF

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First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 1995

Copyright © Stephen Baxter 1995

Illustrations © Les Edwards

Cover design by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

Cover images © Shutterstock.com (shapes); NASA (background texture)

Stephen Baxter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Author and Publisher acknowledge the consent of the Literary Executors of the Estate of H.G. Wells for the use of characters and plot from The Time Machine and other works by H.G. Wells. The Time Machine, The Plattner Story and other works of H.G. Wells are copyright the Literary Executors of the Estate of H.G. Wells.

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Source ISBN: 9780008134549

Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007397549

Version 2019-10-28

Dedication

To my wife Sandra,

and the memory of H.G.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Editor’s Note

Prologue

Book One: Dark Night

Chapter 1: Time Travelling

Chapter 2: A New Vision

Chapter 3: In Obscurity

Chapter 4: The Dark Night

Chapter 5: The Well

Chapter 6: My Encounter With the Morlocks

Chapter 7: The Cage of Light

Chapter 8: A Visitor

Chapter 9: Revelations and Remonstrances

Chapter 10: A Dialogue With a Morlock

Chapter 11: Out of the Cage

Chapter 12: The Morlocks of the Sphere

Chapter 13: How the Morlocks Lived

Chapter 14: Constructions and Divergences

Chapter 15: Life and Death Among the Morlocks

Chapter 16: Decision and Departure

Chapter 17: In the Interior

Chapter 18: The New Eloi

Chapter 19: How I Crossed Inter-Planetary Space

Chapter 20: My Account of the Far Future

Chapter 21: On Richmond Hill

Chapter 22: Rotations and Deceptions

Book Two: Paradox

Chapter 1: The Chronic Argo

Chapter 2: Home

Chapter 3: Moses

Chapter 4: The Experiment

Chapter 5: Honesty and Doubt

Chapter 6: Persuasion and Scepticism

Chapter 7: The Juggernaut Lord Raglan

Chapter 8: Old Acquaintance Renewed

Chapter 9: Into Time

Book Three: The War With the Germans

Chapter 1: A New Vision of Richmond

Chapter 2: A Train Journey

Chapter 3: London at War

Chapter 4: The House in Queen’s Gate Terrace

Chapter 5: The Many Worlds Interpretation

Chapter 6: Hyde Park

Chapter 7: The Babble Machine

Chapter 8: The Uplands of the Future

Chapter 9: Imperial College

Chapter 10: Professor Gödel

Chapter 11: The New World Order

Chapter 12: The German Assault on London

Chapter 13: The Shelling

Chapter 14: The Rota-Mine

Chapter 15: The Time-Car

Chapter 16: Falling Into Time

Chapter 17: The Watcher

Book Four: The Palaeocene Sea

Chapter 1: Diatryma Gigantica

Chapter 2: The Palaeocene Sea

Chapter 3: How We Lived

Chapter 4: Illness and Recuperation

Chapter 5: The Storm

Chapter 6: Heart and Body

Chapter 7: Pristichampus

Chapter 8: The Encampment

Chapter 9: The Chronic Expeditionary Force

Chapter 10: The Apparition

Chapter 11: The Bomb

Chapter 12: The Aftermath of the Bombing

Chapter 13: Bond’s Account

Chapter 14: Survivors

Chapter 15: A New Settlement

Chapter 16: The Establishment of First London

Chapter 17: Children and Descendants

Chapter 18: The Feast, and Later

Chapter 19: Lights in the Sky

Chapter 20: The Orbital City

Chapter 21: Instabilities

Chapter 22: Abandonment and Arrival

Book Five: White Earth

Chapter 1: Confinement

Chapter 2: Experiments and Reflections

Chapter 3: The Universal Constructor

Chapter 4: The Billiards Room

Chapter 5: White Earth

Chapter 6: The Multiplicity Generator

Chapter 7: The Mechanical Heirs of Man

Chapter 8: A Proposition

Chapter 9: Options and Introspections

Chapter 10: Preparations

Chapter 11: Forward in Time

Chapter 12: The Ship

Book Six: The Time Ships

Chapter 1: Departure

Chapter 2: The Unravelling of Earth

Chapter 3: The Boundary of Space and Time

Chapter 4: The Nonlinearity Engines

Chapter 5: The Final Vision

Chapter 6: The Triumph of Mind

Chapter 7: Emergence

Chapter 8: A Circle Is Closed

Book Seven: Day 292,495,940

Chapter 1: The Vale of Thames

Chapter 2: A Walk

Chapter 3: In the Darkness

Epilogue

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Stephen Baxter

About the Publisher

EDITOR’S NOTE

The attached account was given to me by the owner of a small second-hand bookshop, situated just off the Charing Cross Road in London. He told me it had turned up as a manuscript in an unlabelled box, in a collection of books which had been bequeathed to him after the death of a friend; the bookseller passed the manuscript on to me as a curiosity – ‘You might make something of it’ – knowing of my interest in the speculative fiction of the nineteenth century.

The manuscript itself was typewritten on commonplace paper, but a pencil note attested that it had been transcribed from an original ‘written by hand on a paper of such age that it has crumbled beyond repair’. That original, if it ever existed, is lost. There is no note as to the manuscript’s author, or origin.

I have restricted my editing to a superficial polishing, meaning only to eliminate some of the errors and duplications of a manuscript which was evidently written in haste.

What are we to make of it? In the Time Traveller’s words, we must ‘take it as a lie – or a prophecy … Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction …’ Without further evidence, we must regard this work as a fantasy – or as an elaborate hoax – but if there is even a grain of truth in the account contained in these pages, then a startling new light is shed, not merely on one of our most famous works of fiction (if fiction it was!), but also on the nature of our universe and our place in it.

I present the account here without further comment.

Stephen Baxter

PROLOGUE

On the Friday morning after my return from futurity, I awoke long after dawn, from the deepest of dreamless sleeps.

I got out of bed and threw back the curtains. The sun was making his usual sluggish progress up the sky, and I remembered how, from the accelerated perspective of a Time Traveller, the sun had fair hopped across heaven! But now, it seemed, I was embedded in oozing time once more, like an insect in seeping amber.

The noises of a Richmond morning gathered outside my window: the hoof-steps of horses, the rattle of wheels on cobbles, the banging of doors. A steam tram, spewing out smoke and sparks, made its clumsy way along the Petersham Road, and the gull-like cries of hawkers came floating on the air. I found my thoughts drifting away from my gaudy adventures in time and back to a mundane plane: I considered the contents of the latest Pall Mall Gazette, and stock movements, and I entertained an anticipation that the morning’s post might bring the latest American Journal of Science, which would contain some speculations of mine on the findings of A. Michelson and E. Morley on certain peculiarities of light, reported in that journal four years earlier, in 1887 …

And so on! The details of the everyday crowded into my head, and by contrast the memory of my adventure in futurity came to seem fantastical – even absurd. As I thought it over now, it seemed to me that the whole experience had had something of a hallucinatory, almost dreamlike quality: there had been that sense of precipitate falling, the haziness of everything about time travel, and at last my plunge into the nightmarish world of A.D. 802,701. The grip of the ordinary on our imaginations is remarkable. Standing there in my pyjamas, something of the uncertainty which had, in the end, assailed me last night returned, and I started to doubt the very existence of the Time Machine itself! – despite my very clear memories of the two years of my life I had expended in the nuts and bolts of its construction, not to mention the two decades previous, during which I had teased out the theory of time travel from anomalies I had observed during my studies of physical optics.

I thought back over my conversation with my companions over dinner the evening before – somehow those few hours were far more vivid, now, than all the days I had spent in that world of futurity – and I remembered their mix of responses to my account: there had been a general enjoyment of a good tale, accompanied by dashes of sympathy or near-derision depending on the temperaments of individuals – and, I recalled, a near-universal scepticism. Only one good friend, who I shall call the Writer in these pages, had seemed to listen to my ramblings with any degree of sympathy and trust.

Standing by the window, I stretched – and my doubts about my memories took a jolt! The ache of my back was real enough, acute and urgent, as were the burning sensations in the muscles of my legs and arms: protests from the muscles of a no-longer-young man forced, against his practice, to exert himself. ‘Well, then,’ I argued with myself, ‘if your trip into the future was truly a dream – all of it, including that bleak night when you fought the Morlocks in the forest – where have these aches and pains come from? Have you been capering around your garden, perhaps, in a moonstruck delirium?’

And there, dumped without ceremony in a corner of my room, I saw a small heap of clothes: they were the garments I had worn to their ruin during my flight to the future, and which now were fit only to be destroyed. I could see grass stains and scorch marks; the pockets were torn, and I remembered how Weena had used those flaps of cloth as impromptu vases, to load up with the etiolated flowers of the future. My shoes were missing, of course – I felt an odd twinge of regret for the comfortable old house-shoes which I had borne unthinking into a hostile future, before abandoning them to an unimaginable fate! – and there, on the carpet, were the filthy, bloodstained remnants of my socks.

Somehow it was those socks – those comical, battered old socks! – whose rude existence convinced me, above anything else, that I was not yet insane: that my flight into the future had not been entirely a dream.

I must return to time, I saw; I must gather evidence that futurity was as real as the Richmond of 1891, to convince my circle of friends and my peers in my scientific endeavours – and to banish the last traces of my own self-doubt.

As I formed this resolve, suddenly I saw the sweet, empty face of Weena, as vivid as if she had been standing there before me. Sadness, and a surge of guilt at my own impetuosity, tore at my heart. Weena, the Eloi child-woman, had followed me to the Palace of Green Porcelain through the depths of the resurgent forest of that distant Thames valley, and had been lost in the confusion of the subsequent fire, and the bleak assaults of the Morlocks. I have always been a man to act first and allow my rational brain to catch up later! In my bachelor life, this tendency had never yet led anyone into serious danger except myself – but now, in my thoughtlessness and headlong rush, I had abandoned poor, trusting Weena to a grisly death in the shadows of that Dark Night of the Morlocks.

I had blood on my hands, and not just the ichor of those foul, degraded sub-men, the Morlocks. I determined I must make recompense – in whatever way I could – for my abominable treatment of poor, trusting Weena.

I was filled with resolve. My adventures, physical and intellectual, were not done yet!

I had Mrs Watchets run me a bath, and I clambered into it. Despite my mood of urgency, I took time to pamper my poor, battered bones; I noted with interest the blistered and scarred state of my feet, and the mild burns I had suffered to my hands.

I dressed quickly. Mrs Watchets prepared me breakfast. I dug into my eggs, mushrooms and tomatoes with vigour – and yet I found the bacon and sausages lying heavy in my mouth; when I bit into the thick meat, its juices, full of salt and oil, filled me with a faint disgust.

I could not help but remember the Morlocks, and the meat I had seen them consume at their foul repasts! My experiences had not dulled my appetite for mutton at dinner the previous evening, I recalled, but then my hunger had been so much greater. Could it be that a certain shock and disquietude, unravelling from my misadventures, were even now working through the layers of my mind?

But a full breakfast is my custom; for I believe that a good dose of peptone in the arteries early in the day is essential for the efficient operation of the vigorous human machine. And today could become as demanding a day as I had faced in my life. Therefore, I put aside my qualms and finished my plate, chewing through my bacon with determination.

Breakfast over, I donned a light but serviceable summer suit. As I think I mentioned to my companions at dinner the previous evening, it had become evident to me during my plummeting through time that winter had been banished from the world of A.D. 802,701 – whether by natural evolution, geogonic planning or the re-engineering of the sun himself I could not say – and so I should have no need of winter greatcoats and scarves in futurity. I donned a hat, to keep the future sun from my pale English brow, and dug out my stoutest pair of walking boots.

I grabbed a small knapsack and proceeded to throw myself about the house, ransacking cupboards and drawers for the equipment I thought I would need for my second journey – much to the alarm of poor, patient Mrs Watchets, who, I am sure, had long since resigned my sanity to the mists of mythology! As is my way, I was in a fever to be off, and yet I was determined not to be quite so impetuous as the first time, when I had travelled across eight thousand centuries with no more protection than a pair of house-shoes and a single box of matches.

I crammed my knapsack with all the matches I could find in the house – in fact, I dispatched Hillyer to the tobacconist’s to purchase more boxes. I packed in camphor, and candles, and, on an impulse, a length of sturdy twine, in case, stranded, I should need to make new candles of my own. (I had little conception of how one goes about such manufacture, incidentally, but in the bright light of that optimistic morning I did not doubt my ability to improvise.)

I took white spirit, salves, some quinine tabloids and a roll of bandage. I had no gun – I doubt if I should have taken it, even if I had possessed one, for what use is a gun when its ammunition is exhausted? – but I slipped my clasp-knife into my pocket. I packed up a roll of tools – a screwdriver, several sizes of spanner, a small hacksaw with spare blades – as well as a range of screws and lengths of nickel, brass and quartz bars. I was determined that no trivial accident befalling the Time Machine should strand me in any disjointed future, for want of a bit of brass: despite my transient plan to build a new Time Machine when my original was stolen by the Morlocks in 802,701, I’d seen no evidence in the decayed Upper-world that I should be able to find the materials to repair so much as a sheared screw. Of course, the Morlocks had retained some mechanical aptitude, but I did not relish the prospect of being forced to negotiate with those bleached worms for the sake of a couple of bolts.

I found my Kodak, and dug out my flash trough. The camera was new-loaded with a roll of a hundred negative frames on a paper-stripping roll. I remembered how damned expensive the thing had seemed when I had bought it – no less than twenty-five dollars, purchased on a trip to New York – but, if I should return with pictures of futurity, each of those two-inch frames would be more valuable than the finest paintings.

Now, I wondered, was I ready? I demanded advice of poor Mrs Watchets, though I would not tell her, of course, where I was intending to travel. That good woman – stolid, square, remarkably plain, and yet with a faithful and imperturbable heart – took a look inside my knapsack, crammed as it was, and she raised one formidable eyebrow. Then she made for my room and returned with spare socks and underwear, and – here I could have kissed her! – my pipe, a set of cleaners, and the jar of tobacco from my mantel.

Thus, with my usual mixture of feverish impatience and superficial intelligence – and with an unending reliance on the good will and common sense of others – I made ready to return into time.

Bearing my knapsack under one arm and my Kodak under the other, I made towards my laboratory, where the Time Machine waited. When I reached the smoking-room, I was startled to find that I had a visitor: one of my guests of the previous evening, and perhaps my closest friend – it was the Writer of whom I have spoken. He stood at the centre of the room in an ill-fitting suit, with his tie knotted about as rough as you could imagine, and with his hands dangling awkward by his side. I recalled again how, of the circle of friends and acquaintances whom I had gathered to serve as the first witnesses to my exploits, it was this earnest young man who had listened with the most intensity, his silence vibrant with sympathy and fascination.

I felt uncommon glad to see him, and grateful that he had come – that he had not shunned me as eccentric, as some might, after my performance of the evening before. I laughed, and, burdened as I was with sack and camera, I held out an elbow; he grasped the joint and shook it solemnly. ‘I’m frightfully busy,’ I said, ‘with that thing in there.’

He studied me; I thought there was a sort of desperation to believe in his pale blue eyes. ‘But is it not some hoax? Do you really travel through time?’

‘Really and truly, I do,’ I said, holding his gaze as long as I could, for I wanted him to be convinced.

He was a short, squat man, with a jutting lower lip, a broad forehead, wispy sideboards and rather ugly ears. He was young – about twenty-five, I believe; two decades younger than myself – yet his lank hair was already receding. His walk had a sort of bounce and he had a certain energy about him – nervous, like a plump bird’s – but he always looked sickly: I know he suffered haemorrhages, from time to time, from a soccer-game kicking to the kidneys he had received when working as a teacher in some Godforsaken private school in Wales. And today, his blue eyes, though tired, were filled, as ever, with intelligence and a concern for me.

My friend worked as a teacher – at that time, of pupils by correspondence – but he was a dreamer. At our enjoyable Thursday-night dinner parties in Richmond, he would pour out his speculations on the future and the past, and share with us his latest thoughts on the meaning of Darwin’s bleak, Godless analysis, and what-not. He dreamed of the perfectibility of the human race – he was just the type, I knew, who would wish with all his heart that my tales of time travel were true!

I call him ‘Writer’ out of an old kindness, I suppose, for as far as I knew, he had only had published various awkward speculations in college journals and the like; but I had no doubt that his lively brain would carve him out a niche in the world of letters of some sort – and, more to the point, he had no doubt of it either.

Though I was eager to be off, I paused a moment. Perhaps the Writer could serve as my witness on this new voyage – in fact, I wondered now, it could be that he was already planning to write up my earlier adventures in some gaudy form for publication.

Well, he would have my blessing!

‘I only want half an hour,’ I said, calculating that I could return to this precise time and place with a mere touch of the levers of my machine, no matter how long I chose to spend in the future or past. ‘I know why you came, and it’s awfully good of you. There’s some magazines here. If you’ll stop to lunch, I’ll prove you this time travelling up to the hilt, specimens and all. If you’ll forgive my leaving you now?’

He consented. I nodded to him and, without further ado, I set off down the corridor to my laboratory.

So I took my leave of the world of 1891. I have never been a man of deep attachments, and I am not one for flowery farewells; but had I known I should never see the Writer again – at least, not in the flesh – I fancy I would have made something more of a ceremony of it!

I entered my laboratory. It was laid out something like a milling-shop. There was a steam lathe attached to the ceiling, which powered various metal-turning machines by means of leather bands; and fixed to benches around the floor were smaller lathes, a sheet-metal stamp, presses, acetylene welding sets, vices and the like. Metal parts and drawings lay about on the bench, and abandoned fruits of my labours lay in the dust of the floor, for I am not by nature a tidy man; lying at my feet now, for example, I found the nickel bar which had held me up before my first sojourn into time – that bar which had proved to be exactly one inch short, so that I had had to get it remade.

I had spent much of two decades of my life in this room, I reflected. The place was a converted conservatory, giving onto the garden. It was built on a framework of slender, white-painted wrought iron, and had once given a decent view of the river; but I had long since boarded up the panes, to assure myself of a consistency of light and to deter the curious eyes of my neighbours. My various tools and devices loomed in that oily darkness, and now they reminded me of my half-glimpses of the great machines in the caverns of the Morlocks. I wondered if I myself might not have some morbid streak of the Morlock! When I returned, I resolved, I would kick out the boards and glaze up the room once again, and make it a place of Eloi light rather than Morlock gloom.

Now I walked forward to the Time Machine.

That bulky, askew thing sat against the north-west side of the workshop – where, eight hundred millennia away, the Morlocks had dragged it, in their efforts to entrap me inside the pedestal of the White Sphinx. I hauled the machine back to the south-east corner of the laboratory, where I had built it. That done, I leaned over and, in the gloom, made out the four chronometric dials which counted the passage of the machine through History’s static array of days; now, of course, the hands were all set to zero, for the machine had returned to its own time. Beside this row of dials, there were the two levers which drove the beast – one for the future, and one for the past.

I reached out and, on impulse, stroked the lever for futurity. The squat, tangled mass of metal and ivory shuddered like a live thing. I smiled. The machine was reminding me that it was no longer of this earth, of this Space and Time! Alone of all the material objects of the universe, save for those I had carried on my own person, this machine was eight days older than its world: for I had spent a week in the era of the Morlocks, but had returned to the day of my departure.

I dropped my pack and camera to the floor of the laboratory, and hung up my hat on the back of the door. Remembering the Morlocks’ fiddling with the machine, I settled myself to checking it over. I did not trouble to clean off the various brown spots and bits of grass and moss which still clung to the machine’s rails; I have never been one for fussy appearances. But one rail was bent out of shape, and I twisted that back, and I tested the screws, and oiled the quartz bars.

As I worked, I remembered my shameful panic when discovering the machine lost to the Morlocks, and I felt a deep surge of affection for the ugly thing. The machine was an open cage of nickel, brass and quartz, ebony and ivory, quite elaborate – like the workings of a church clock, perhaps – and with a bicycle saddle set incongruous in the middle of it all. Quartz and rock crystal, suffused with Plattnerite, glimmered about the framework, giving the whole a sense of unreality and skewness.

Of course, none of it would have been possible without the properties of the strange substance I had labelled ‘Plattnerite’. I remembered how, by chance, I had come into possession of a sample of that material: on that night, two decades earlier, when a stranger had walked up to my door and handed me a packet of the stuff. ‘Plattner,’ he had called himself – he was a bulky chap, a good few years older than myself, with an odd, broad, grey-grizzled head, and dressed in peculiar jungle colours. He instructed me to study the potent stuff he handed me, in a glass medicine jar. Well, the stuff had sat uninvestigated on a shelf in the laboratory for over a year, while I progressed with more substantive work. But at last, on a dull Sunday afternoon, I had taken the jar down from its shelf …

And what I had found out had, at last, led to – this!

It was Plattnerite, suffused into quartz rods, which fuelled the Time Machine, and made its exploits possible. But I flatter myself to think that it took my own combination of analysis and imagination to realize and exploit the properties of that remarkable substance, where a lesser man may have missed the mark.

I had been reluctant to publicize my work, outlandish as the field was, without experimental verification. I promised myself that direct on my return, with specimens and photographs, I would write up my studies for the Philosophical Transactions; it would be a famous addition to the seventeen papers I had already placed there on the physics of light. It would be amusing, I reflected, to call my paper something dry such as ‘Some Reflections on the Anomalous Chronologic Properties of the Mineral “Plattnerite”’, and to bury within it the thunderous revelation of the existence of time travel!

At last I was done. I set my hat square over my eyes once more, and I picked up my pack and camera and fixed them under the saddle. Then, on an impulse, I went to the fireplace of the laboratory and picked up the poker which stood there. I hefted its substantial mass in my hand – I thought it might be useful! – and I lodged it in the machine’s frame.

Then I sat myself in the saddle, and I placed my hand on the white starting levers. The machine shuddered, like the animal of time it had become.

I glanced around at my laboratory, at the earthy reality of it, and was struck how out-of-place we both looked in it now – me in my amateur explorer’s garb, and the machine with its other-worldliness and its stains and scuffs from the future – even though we were both, in a way, children of this place. I felt tempted to linger. What harm would it do to expend another day, week, year here, embedded in my own comfortable century? I could gather my energies, and heal my wounds: was I being precipitate once again in this new venture?

I heard a footstep in the corridor from the house, a turn of the door handle. It must be the Writer, coming to the laboratory.

Of a sudden, my mind was set. My courage would not grow any stronger with the passage of any more of this dull, ossified nineteenth-century time; and besides, I had said all the good-byes I cared to make.

I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. I had that odd sense of spinning that comes with the first instant of time travel, and then there came that helpless, headlong feel of falling. I think I uttered an exclamation at the return of that uncomfortable sensation. I fancy I heard a tinkle of glass: a skylight pane, perhaps, blown in by the displacement of air. And, for a shredded remnant of a second, I saw him standing there in the doorway: the Writer, a ghostly, indistinct figure, with one hand raised to me – trapped in time!

Then he was gone, swept into invisibility by my flight. The walls of the laboratory grew hazy around me, and once more the huge wings of night and day flapped around my head

BOOK ONE
DARK NIGHT

1
TIME TRAVELLING

There are three Dimensions of Space, through which man may move freely. And time is simply a Fourth Dimension: identical in every important characteristic to the others, except for the fact that our consciousness is compelled to travel along it at a steady pace, like the nib of my pen across this page.

If only – I had speculated, in the course of my studies into the peculiar properties of light – if only one could twist about the four Dimensions of Space and Time – transposing Length with Duration, say – then one could stroll through the corridors of History as easily as taking a cab into the West End!

The Plattnerite embedded in the substance of the Time Machine was the key to its operation; the Plattnerite enabled the machine to rotate, in an uncommon fashion, into a new configuration in the framework of Space and Time. Thus, spectators who watched the departure of the Time Machine – like my Writer – reported seeing the machine spin giddily, before vanishing from History; and thus the driver – myself – invariably suffered dizziness, induced by centrifugal and Coriolis forces which made it feel as if I were being thrown off the machine.

But for all these effects, the spin induced by the Plattnerite was of a different quality from the spinning of a top, or the slow revolution of the earth. The spinning sensations were flatly contradicted, for the driver, by the illusion of sitting quite still in the saddle, as time flickered past the machine – for it was a rotation out of Time and Space themselves.

As night flapped after day, the hazy outline of the laboratory fell away from around me, so that I was delivered into the open air. I was once more passing through that future period in which, I guessed, the laboratory had been demolished. The sun shot like a cannonball across the sky, with many days compressed into a minute, illuminating a faint, skeletal suggestion of scaffolding around me. The scaffolding soon fell away, leaving me on the open hill-side.

My speed through time increased. The flickering of night and day merged into a deep twilight blue, and I was able to see the moon, spinning through its phases like a child’s top. And as I travelled still faster, the cannonball sun merged into an arch of light, spreading across space, an arch which rocked up and down the sky. Around me weather fluttered, with successive flurries of snow-white and spring green marking out the seasons. At last, accelerated, I entered a new, tranquil stillness in which only the annual rhythms of the earth itself – the passage of the sun-belt between its solstice extremes – pumped like a heartbeat over the evolving landscape.

I am not sure if I conveyed, in my first report, the silence into which one is suspended when undergoing time travel. The songs of the birds, the distant rattle of traffic over cobbles, the ticks of clocks – even the faint breathing of the fabric of a house itself – all of these things make up a complex, unnoticed tapestry to our lives. But now, plucked from time, I was accompanied only by the sounds of my own breathing and by the soft, bicycle-like creaking of the Time Machine under my weight. I had an extraordinary sensation of isolation – it was as if I had been plunged into some new, stark universe, through the walls of which our own world was visible as if through begrimed window panes – but within this new universe I was the only living thing. A deep sense of confusion descended on me, and worked together with the vertiginous plummeting sensation that accompanies a fall into the future, to induce feelings of deep nausea and depression.

But now the silence was broken: by a deep murmur, sourceless, which seemed to fill my ears; it was a low eddying, like the sound of some immense river. I had noticed this during my first flight; I could not be certain of its cause, but it seemed to me it must be some artefact of my unseemly passage through the stately progress of time.

How wrong I was – as so often in my hasty hypothesis-making!

I studied my four chronometric dials, tapping the face of each with my fingernail to ensure they were working. Already the hand on the second of the dials, which measured thousands of days, had begun to drift away from its rest position.

These dials – faithful, mute servants – were adapted from steam pressure gauges. They worked by measuring a certain shear tension in a quartz bar doped with Plattnerite, a tension induced by the twisting effects of time travel. The dials counted days – not years, or months, or leap years, or movable feasts! – and that was by conscious design.

As soon as I began my investigations into the practicalities of this business of travelling into time, and in particular the need to measure my machine’s position in it, I spent some considerable time trying to build a practical chronometric gauge capable of producing a display in common measures: centuries, years, months and days. I soon found I was likely to spend longer on that project than on the rest of the Time Machine put together!

I developed an immense impatience with the peculiarities of our antique calendar system, which has come from a history of inadequate adjustments: of attempts to fix seed-time and midwinter that go back to the beginnings of organized society. Our calendar is a historical absurdity, without even the redeeming feature of accuracy – at least on the cosmological timescales which I intended to challenge.

I wrote furious letters to The Times, proposing reforms which would enable us to function accurately and without ambiguity on timescales of genuine value to the modern scientist. To begin with, I said, let us discard all this nonsensical clutter of leap years. The year is close to three hundred and sixty five days and a quarter; and that accidental quarter is the cause of all this ridiculous charade of leap year adjustments. I offered two alternative schemes, both guaranteed to remove this absurdity. We could take the day as our base unit, and devise regular months and years based on multiples of days: imagine a three-hundred-day Year made up of ten Months, each of thirty days. Of course the cycle of seasons would soon drift out of synchronization with the structure of the Year, but – in a civilization as advanced as ours – that would surely cause little trouble. The Royal Observatory at Greenwich, for example, could publish diaries each year to show the dates of the various solar positions – the equinoxes and so forth – just as, in 1891, all diaries showed the movable feasts of the Christian churches.

On the other hand, if the cycle of seasons is to be regarded as the fundamental unit, then we should devise a New Day as an exact fraction – say a hundredth – of the year. Naturally, this would mean that the diurnal round, our periods of dark and light, of sleep and wakefulness, would fall at different times each New Day. But what of that? Already, I argued, many modern cities operated on a twenty-four-hour schedule. And as for the human side of it, simple diary keeping is not a difficult skill to acquire; with the help of proper records one would need plan one’s sleeping and wakefulness no more than a few Days in advance.

Finally, I proposed we should look ahead to the day when man’s consciousness is expanded from its nineteenth-century focus on the here-and-now, and consider how things might be when our thinking must span tens of millennia. I envisaged a new Cosmological Calendar, based on the precession of the equinoxes – that is, the slow dipping of the axis of our planet, under the uneven gravitational influence of sun and moon – a cycle which takes twenty millennia to complete. With some such Great Year, we might measure out our destiny in unambiguous and precise terms, now and for all time to come.

Such rectification, I argued, would have a symbolic significance far beyond its practicality – it would be a fitting way to mark the dawn of the new century – for it would serve as an announcement to all men that a new Age of Scientific Thinking had begun.

Needless to say, my contributions were disregarded, save for a ribald response, which I chose to ignore, in certain sections of the popular press.

At any event, after all this, I abandoned my attempts to build a calendar-based chronometric gauge, and reverted to a simple count of days. I have always had a ready mind with figures, and did not find it hard to convert, mentally, my dials’ day-count to years. On my first voyage, I had travelled to Day 292,495,934, which – allowing for leap-year adjustments – turned out to be a date in the year A.D. 802,701. Now, I knew, I must travel forwards until my dials showed Day 292,495,940 – the precise day on which I had lost Weena, and much of my self-respect, in the flames of that forest!

My house had been one of a row of terraces, situated on the Petersham Road – that stretch of it below Hill Rise, a little way up from the river. Now, with my house long demolished, I found myself sitting on an open hill-side. The shoulder of Richmond Hill rose up behind me, a mass embedded in geological time. The trees blossomed and shivered into stumps, their century-long lives compressed into a few of my heartbeats. The Thames was a belt of silver light, made smooth by my passage through time, and it was cutting itself a new channel: it appeared to be wriggling across the landscape after the manner of a huge, slow worm. New buildings rose like gusts of smoke: some of them even blew up around me, on the site of my old house. These buildings astonished me with their dimensions and grace. The Richmond Bridge of my day was long gone, but I saw a new arch, perhaps a mile long, which laced, unsupported, through the air and across the Thames; and there were towers upthrust into the flickering sky, bearing immense masses at their slender throats. I thought of taking up my Kodak and attempting to photograph these phantasms, but I knew that the spectres would be too light-starved to enable any image to be recorded, diluted by time travel as they were. The architectural technologies I made out here seemed to me as far beyond the capabilities of the nineteenth century as had been the great Gothic cathedrals from the Romans or Greeks. Surely, I mused, in this future era man had gained some freedom from the relentless tugging of gravity; for how else could these great structures have been raised against the sky?

But before long the great Thames arch grew stained with brown and green, the colours of irreverent, destructive life, and – in a twinkling, it seemed to me – the arch crumbled from its centre, collapsing to two bare stumps on the banks. Like all the works of man, I saw, even these great structures were transient chimeras, destined to impermanence compared to the chthonian patience of the land.

I felt an extraordinary detachment from the world, an aloofness brought about by my time travelling. I remembered the curiosity and exhilaration I had felt when I had first soared through these dreams of future architecture; I remembered my brief, feverish speculation as to the accomplishments of these future races of men. Now, I knew different; now I knew that regardless of these great accomplishments, Humanity would inevitably fall backwards, under the inexorable pressure of evolution, into the decadence and degradation of Eloi and Morlock.

I was struck by how ignorant we humans are, or make ourselves, of the passage of time itself. How brief our lives are! – and how meaningless the events which assail our little selves, when seen against the perspective of the great plastic sweep of History. We are less than mayflies, helpless in the face of the unbending forces of geology and evolution – forces which move inexorably, and yet so slowly that, day to day, we are not even aware of their existence!

2
A NEW VISION

I soon passed beyond the Age of Great Buildings. New houses and halls, less ambitious but still huge, shimmered into existence around me, all about the vale of the Thames, and assumed a certain opacity, in the eyes of a Time Traveller, that comes with longevity. The arch of the sun, dipping across the deep blue sky between its solstice extremes, seemed to me to grow brighter, and a green flow spread across Richmond Hill and took possession of the land, banishing the browns and whites of winter. Once more, I had entered that era in which the climate of the earth had been adjusted in favour of Humanity.

I looked out over a landscape reduced by my velocity to the static; only the longest-lived phenomena clung to time long enough to register on my fleeting eye. I saw no people, no animals, not even the passage of a cloud. I was suspended in an eerie stillness. If it had not been for the oscillating sun-band, and the deep, unnatural day-night blue of the sky, I might have been sitting alone in some late summer park.

According to my dials, I was less than a third of the way through my great journey – although a quarter of a million years had already worn away since my own familiar century – and yet, it seemed, the age in which man built upon the earth was already done. The planet had been rendered into that garden within which the folk who would become the Eloi would live out their futile, petty lives; and already, I knew, proto-Morlocks must have been imprisoned beneath the earth, and must even now be tunnelling out their immense, machinery-choked caverns. Little would change over the half-million-year interval I had yet to cross, save for the further degradation of Humanity, and the identity of the victims in the millions of tiny, fearful tragedies which would from now on comprise the condition of man …

But – I observed, rousing myself from these morbid speculations – there was a change, slowly becoming apparent in the landscape. I felt disturbed, over and above the Time Machine’s customary swaying. Something was different – perhaps something about the light.

Sitting in my saddle, I peered about at the ghost-trees, the level meadows about Petersham, the shoulder of the patient Thames.

Then I lifted my face to the time-smoothed heavens, and at last I realized that the sun-band was stationary in the sky. The earth was still spinning on its axis rapidly enough to smear the movement of our star across the heavens, and to render the circling stars invisible, but that band of sunlight no longer nodded back and forth between solstices: it was as steady and unchanging as if it were a construction of concrete.

My nausea and vertigo returned with a rush. I was forced to grip hard at the rails of the machine, and I swallowed, fighting for control of my own body.

It is difficult to convey the impact this simple change in my surroundings had on me! First, I was shocked by the sheer audacity of the engineering involved in the removal of the seasonal cycle. The earth’s seasons had derived from the tilt of the planet’s spin axis compared to the plane of its orbit around the sun. On the earth, it seemed, there would be no more seasons. And that could only mean – I realized it instantly – that the axial tilt of the planet had been corrected.

I tried to envisage how this might have been done. What great machines must have been installed at the Poles? What measures had been taken to ensure that the surface of the earth did not shake itself loose in the process? – Perhaps, I speculated, some immense magnetic device had been used, which had manipulated the molten and magnetic core of the planet.

But it was not just the scale of this planetary engineering which disturbed me: more terrifying still was the fact that I had not observed this regulation of the seasons during my first jaunt into time. How was it possible that I could have missed such an immense and profound change? I am trained as a scientist, after all; my business is to observe.

I rubbed my face and stared up at the sun-band where it hung in the sky, defying me to believe in its lack of motion. Its brightness stung my eyes; and it seemed to me that the band was growing still brighter. I wondered at first if this was my imagination, or some defect of my eyes. I dropped my face, dazzled, wiping tears against my jacket sleeve and blinking to rid my eyes of stripes of bruised light-spots.

I am no primitive, and no coward – and yet, sitting there in my saddle before the evidence of the immense feats of future men, I felt as if I were a savage with painted nakedness and bones in my hair, cowering before gods in the gaudy sky. I felt a deep fear for my own sanity bubbling from the depths of my consciousness; and yet I clung to the belief that – somehow – I had failed to observe this staggering astronomical phenomenon, during my first pass through these years. For the only alternative hypothesis terrified me to the roots of my soul: it was that I had not been mistaken during my first voyage; that the regulation of the earth’s axis had not taken place there – that the course of History itself had changed.

The near-eternal shape of the hill-side was unchanged – the morphology of the ancient land was unaffected by these evolving lights in the sky – but I could see that the tide of greenery which had coated the land had now receded, under the steady glare of the brightened sun.

I became aware now of a remote flickering above my head, and I glanced up with my hand raised. The flickering came from the sun-band in the sky – or what had been the sun-band, for I realized that somehow, once again, I was able to distinguish the cannonball motion of the sun as it shot across the sky on its diurnal round; no longer was its motion too rapid for me to follow, and the passage of night and day was inducing the flickering I saw.

At first, I thought my machine must be slowing. But when I glanced down at my dials, I saw that the hands were twisting across the faces with just as much alacrity as before.

The pearl-grey uniformity of the light dissolved, and the flapping alternation of day and night became marked. The sun slid across the sky, slowing with every arcing trajectory, hot and bright and yellow; and I soon realized that the burning star was taking many centuries to complete one revolution around the sky of earth.

At last, the sun came to a halt altogether; it rested on the western horizon, hot and pitiless and unchanging. The earth’s rotation had been stilled; now, it rotated with one face turned perpetually to the sun!

The scientists of the nineteenth century had predicted that at last the tidal influences of sun and moon would cause the earth’s rotation to become locked to the sun, just as the moon was forced to keep one face turned to earth. I had witnessed this myself, during my first exploration of futurity: but it was an eventuality that should not come about for many millions of years. And yet here I was, little more than half a million years into the future, finding a stilled earth!

Once again, I realized, I had seen the hand of man at work – ape-descended fingers, reaching across centuries with the grasp of gods. Not content with tilting up his world, man had slowed the spin of the earth itself, banishing at last the ancient cycle of day and night.

I looked around at England’s new desert. The land was scoured clean of grass, leaving exposed a dried-out clay. Here and there I saw the flicker of some hardy bush – in shape, a little like an olive – which struggled to survive beneath the unrelenting sun. The mighty Thames, which had migrated across perhaps a mile of its plain, shrank within its banks, until I could no longer see the sparkle of its water. I scarce felt these latest changes had done much to improve the place: at least the world of Morlocks and Eloi had seen the retention of the essential character of the English countryside, with its abundant greenery and water; the effect, looking back on it, had been rather like towing the whole of the British Isles to somewhere in the Tropics.

I pictured the poor planet, one face held in the sunlight forever, the other turned away. On the equator at the centre of the day-side, it must be warm enough to boil the flesh off a man’s bones. And air must be fleeing the overheated sunward side to rush, in immense winds, towards the cooler hemisphere, there to freeze out as a snow of oxygen and nitrogen over the ice-bound oceans. If I were to stop the machine now, perhaps I should be knocked off at once by those great winds, the last exhalations of a planet’s lungs! The process could stop only when the day-side was parched, airless, quite without life; and the dark side was buried under a thin shell of frozen air.

I realized with mounting horror that I could not return home! – for to turn back I must stop the machine, and if I did so I would be tipped precipitately into a land of vacuum and searing heat, as bleak as the surface of the moon. But dare I carry on, into an unknowable future, and hope that somewhere in the depths of time I would find a world I could inhabit?

Now I was sure that something was badly wrong with my perceptions, or memories, of my time travelling. For it was barely conceivable to me that during my first voyage to the future I might have missed the banishing of the seasons – though I found it hard to believe – but I could not countenance that I had failed to notice the slowing of the earth’s spin.

There could be no doubt about it: I was travelling through events which differed, massively, from those I had witnessed during my first sojourn.

I am by nature a speculative man, and am in general not short of an inventive hypothesis or two; but at that moment my shock was such that I was bereft of calculation. It was as if my body still plummeted onwards through time, but my brain had been left behind, somewhere in the glutinous past. I think I had had a veneer of courage earlier, a facade that had come from the complacent consideration that, although I was heading into danger, it was at least a danger I had confronted before. Now, I had no idea what awaited me in these corridors of time!

While I was occupied by these morbid thoughts, I became aware of continuing changes in the heavens – as if the dismantling of the natural order of things had not yet gone far enough! The sun was growing still brighter. And – it was hard to be sure, the glare of it was so strong – it seemed to me that the shape of the star was now changing. It was smearing itself across the sky, becoming an elliptical patch of light. I wondered if the sun was somehow being spun more rapidly, so that it had become flattened by rotation …

And then – it was quite sudden – the sun exploded.

3
IN OBSCURITY

Plumes of light erupted from the star’s poles, like immense flares. Within a handful of heartbeats the sun had surrounded itself with a glowing mantle of light. Heat and light blazed down anew on the battered earth.

I screamed and buried my face in my hands; but I could still see the light of the enhanced sun, leaking even through the flesh of my fingers, and blazing from the nickel and brass of the Time Machine.

Then, as soon as it had begun, the light storm ceased – and a sort of shell closed up around the sun, as if an immense Mouth was swallowing the star – and I was plunged into darkness!

I dropped my hands, and found myself in pitch blackness, quite unable to see, although dazzle-spots still danced in my eyes. I could feel the hard saddle of the Time Machine beneath me, and when I reached out I found the faces of the little dials; and the machine still swayed as it continued to forge through time. I began to wonder – to fear! – if I had lost my sight.

Despair welled up within me, blacker than the external darkness. Was my second great adventure into time to end so soon, so ignobly? I reached out, groping, for the control levers, and my feverish brain began to concoct schemes wherein I broke off the glass of the chronometric dials, and by touch, perhaps, worked my way home.

… And then I found I was not blind: I did see something.

In some ways this was the queerest aspect of the whole journey so far – so queer, that at first I was quite beyond fear.

First of all, I made out a lightening in the darkness. It was a vague, suffused brightening, something like a sun-rise, and so faint that I was unsure if my bruised eyes were not playing some trick on me. I thought I could see stars, all about me; but they were faint, their light tempered as if seen through a murky stained-glass window.

And now, by the dim glow, I began to see that I was not alone.

The creature stood a few yards before the Time Machine – or rather, it floated in the air, unsupported. It was a ball of flesh: something like a hovering head, all of four feet across, with two bunches of tentacles which dangled like grotesque fingers towards the ground. Its mouth was a fleshy beak, and it had no nostrils that I could make out. I noticed now that the creature’s eyes – two of them, large and dark – were human. It seemed to be making a noise – a low, murmuring babble, like a river – and I realized, with a stab of fear, that this was exactly the noise I had heard earlier in the expedition, and even during my first venture into time.

Had this creature – this Watcher, I labelled it – accompanied me, unseen, on both my expeditions through time?

Of a sudden, it rushed towards me. It loomed up, no more than a yard from my face!

I was unhinged at last. I screamed and, regardless of the consequences, hauled at my lever.

The Time Machine tipped over – the Watcher vanished – and I was flung into the air!

I was left insensible: for how long, I cannot say. I revived slowly, finding my face pressed down against a hard, sandy surface. I fancied I felt a hot breath at my neck – a whisper, a brush of soft hair against my cheek – but when I moaned and made to get up, these sensations vanished.

I was immersed in inky darkness. It felt neither warm nor cold. I was sitting on some hard, sandy surface. There was a scent of staleness in the still air. My head ached from the bump it had received, and I had lost my hat.

I reached out my arms and cast about all around me. To my great relief, I was rewarded almost immediately by a soft collision with a tangle of ivory and brass: it was the Time Machine, pitched like me into this darkened desert. I reached out with both hands and fingered the rails and studs of the machine. It was tipped over, and in the dark I could not tell if it was damaged.

I needed light, of course. I reached for some matches from my pocket – only to find none there; like a blessed fool I had packed my entire supply into the knapsack! A moment of panic assailed me; but I managed to suppress it, and I stood, shaking, and walked to the Time Machine. I investigated it by touch, searching between the bent rails until I found the knapsack, still stowed secure under the saddle. Impatient, I pulled the pack open and rummaged through it. I found two boxes of matches and tucked them into my jacket pockets; then I took out a match and struck it against its box.

… There was a face, immediately before me, not two feet away, glowing in the match’s circle of light: I saw dull white skin, flaxen hair draping down from the skull, and wide, grey-red eyes.

The creature let out a queer, gurgling scream, and disappeared into the darkness beyond the glow of my light.

It was a Morlock!

The match burned down against my fingers and I dropped it; I scrabbled for another, in my panic almost dropping my precious box.

4
THE DARK NIGHT

The sharp sulphur smell of the matches filled my nostrils, and I backed across the sandy surface until my spine was pressed against the brass rods of the Time Machine. After some minutes of this submission to terror, I had the wit to retrieve a candle from my knapsack. I held the candle close to my face and stared into its yellow flame, ignorant of the warm wax which flowed over my fingers.

I gradually began to discern some structure in the world around me. I could see the tangled brass and quartz of the upturned Time Machine, sparkling in the candlelight, and a form – like a large statue, or a building – which loomed, pale and huge, not far from where I stood. The land was not completely without light. The sun might be gone, but in patches above me the stars still shone, though slid about by time from the constellations of my boyhood. There was no sign of our friendly moon.

In one part of the sky, though, no stars shone: in the west, protruding over the black horizon, there was a flattened ellipse, unbroken by stars, spanning fully a quarter of the sky. This was the sun, shrouded in its astonishing shell!

As I came out of my funk, I decided my first action should be to secure my passage home: I must right the Time Machine – but I would not do it in the dark! I knelt down and felt about on the ground. The sand was hard, the grains fine-packed. I dug into it with my thumb, and pushed out a little depression; into this improvised holder I popped my candle, confident that in a few moments sufficient wax would melt to hold it more firmly in place. Now I had a steady light to guide my operations, and my hands were free.

I set my teeth, drew my breath, and grappled with the weight of the machine. I wedged my wrists and knees under its framework, trying to wrestle the thing from the ground – its construction had been intended for solidity, not ease of handling – until, at last, it gave under my onslaught and tipped over. One nickel rod struck my shoulder, quite painfully.

I rested my hand on the saddle, and felt where its leather surface was scuffed by the sand of this new future. In the dark of my own shadow, I reached out and found the chronometric dials with my probing fingertips – one glass had shattered, but the dial itself seemed in working order – and the two white levers with which I could bring myself home. As I touched the levers, the machine shivered like a ghost, reminding me that it – and I – were not of this time: that at any moment now, of my choosing, I only had to board my device to return to the security of 1891, at the risk of nothing more than a little bruised pride.

I lifted the candle from its socket in the sand and held it over my dials. It was, I found, Day 239,354,634: therefore – I estimated – the year was A.D. 657,208. My wild imaginings about the mutability of past and future must be correct; for this darkened hill-side was located in time a hundred and fifty millennia before Weena’s birth, and I could not envisage a way in which that sunlit garden-world could develop from this rayless obscurity!

In my remote childhood, I remember being entertained by my father with a primitive wonder-toy called a ‘Dissolving View’. Crudely coloured pictures were thrown onto a screen by a double-barrelled arrangement of lenses. A picture would be projected first by the right-hand lens of the contraption; then the light would be shifted to the left-hand side, so that the picture cast from the right faded as the other grew in brightness. As a child I was deeply impressed by the way in which a bright reality turned into a phantom, to be replaced by a successor whose form was at first visible only as an outline. There were exhilarating moments when the two images were exactly in balance, and it was hard to determine which details were advancing and which were receding realities, or whether any part of the ensemble of images was truly ‘real’.

Thus, as I stood in that darkened landscape, I felt the sturdy description of the world I had constructed for myself growing misty and faint, to be replaced only by the barest bones of a successor, and with more confusion than clarity!

The divergence of the twin Histories I had witnessed – in the first, the building of the Eloi’s garden world; in the second, the extinguishing of the sun, and the establishment of this planetary desert – was incomprehensible to me. How could events be, and then not be?

I remembered the words of Thomas Aquinas, that: ‘God cannot effect that anything which is past should not have been. It is more impossible than raising the dead …’ So I had believed, too! I am not much given to philosophical speculation, but I had thought of the future as an extension of the past: fixed and immutable, even for a God – and certainly for the hand of man. Futurity, in my mind, was like a huge room, fixed and static. And into the furniture of the future my Time Machine could take me, exploring.

But now, it seemed, I had learned that the future might not be a fixed thing, but something mutable! If so, I mused, what meaning could be given to the lives of men? It was bad enough to endure the thought that all of one’s achievements would be worn away to insignificance by the erosion of time – and I, of all men, knew that well enough! – but, at least, one would always have the feeling that one’s monuments, and the things one had loved, had once been. But if History were capable of this wholesale erasure and alteration, what possible worth could be ascribed to any human activity?

Reflecting on these startling possibilities, I felt as if the solidity of my thought, and the firmness of my apprehension of the world, were melting away. I stared into my candle flame, seeking the outlines of a new understanding.

I was not done yet, I decided; my fear was subsiding, and my mind stayed resilient and strong. I would explore this bizarre world, and take what pictures I could with my Kodak, and then return to 1891. There, better philosophers than I could puzzle over this conundrum of two futurities exclusive of each other.

I reached over the bars of the Time Machine, unscrewed the little levers that would launch me into time, and stored them safe in my pocket. Then I felt about until I found the sturdy form of my poker, still lodged where I had left it in the structure of the machine. I grasped its thick handle and hefted it in my hand. My confidence grew as I imagined cracking a few of the Morlocks’ soft skulls with this piece of primitive engineering. I stuck the poker in a loop of my belt. It hung there a little awkward but hugely reassuring, with its weight and solidity, and its resonance of home, and my own fireside.

I raised my candle into the air. The spectral statue, or building, which I had noticed close by the machine, came into shadowy illumination. It was indeed a monument of some kind – a colossal figure carved of some white stone, its form difficult to discern in the flickering candlelight.

I walked towards the monument. As I did so, on the edge of my vision, I fancied I saw a pair of grey-red eyes widen, and a white back which shivered away across the sandy surface with a shushing of bare feet. I rested my hand on the club of brass tucked in my belt, and continued.

The statue was set on a pedestal which appeared to be of bronze, and decorated with deep-framed, filigreed panels. The pedestal was stained, as if it had once been attacked by verdigris, now long dried out. The statue itself was of white marble, and from a leonine body great wings were spread, so that they seemed to hover over me. I wondered how those great sheets of stone were supported, for I could see no struts. Perhaps there was some metal frame, I mused – or perhaps some elements of that mastery of gravity, which I had hypothesized in my latest jaunt through the Age of Great Buildings, lingered on in this desolate era. The face of the marble beast was human, and was turned towards me; I felt as if those blank stone eyes were watching me, and there was a smile, sardonic and cruel, on the weather-beaten lips …

And with a jolt I recognized this construction; if not for fear of Morlocks I would have whooped with the joy of familiarity! This was the monument I had come to call the White Sphinx – a structure I had become familiar with, in this very spot, during my first flight to the future. It was almost like greeting an old friend!

I paced around the sandy hill-side, back and forth past the machine, remembering how it had been. This spot had been a lawn, surrounded by mauve and purple rhododendrons – bushes which had dropped their blossoms over me in a hail storm on my first arrival. And, looming over it all, indistinct at first in that hail, had been the imposing form of this Sphinx.

Well, here I was again, a hundred and fifty thousand years before that date. The bushes and lawn were gone – and would never come to be, I suspected. That sunlit garden had been replaced by this bleak, darkened desert, and now existed only in the recesses of my own mind. But the Sphinx was here, solid as life and almost indestructible, it seemed.

I patted the bronze panels of the Sphinx’s pedestal with something resembling affection. Somehow the existence of the Sphinx, lingering from my previous visit, reassured me that I was not imagining all of this, that I was not going mad in some dim recess of my house in 1891! All of this was objectively real, and – no doubt, like the rest of Creation – it all conformed to some logical pattern. The White Sphinx was a part of that pattern, and it was only my ignorance and limitation of mind that prevented me from seeing the rest of it. I was bolstered up, and felt filled with a new determination to continue with my explorations.

On impulse, I walked around to the side of the pedestal closest to the Time Machine, and, by candlelight, I inspected the decorated bronze panel there. It was here, I recalled, that the Morlocks – in that other History – had opened up the hollow base of the Sphinx, and dragged the Time Machine inside the pedestal, meaning to trap me. I had come to the Sphinx with a pebble and hammered at this panel – just here; I ran over the decorations with my fingertips. I had flattened out some of the coils of the panel, though to no avail. Well, now I found those coils firm and round under my fingers, as good as new. It was strange to think that the coils would not meet the fury of my stone for millennia yet – or perhaps, never at all.

I determined to move away from the machine and proceed with my exploration. But the presence of the Sphinx had reminded me of my horror at losing the Time Machine to the clutches of the Morlocks. I patted my pocket – at least without my little levers the machine could not be operated – but there was no obstacle to those loathsome creatures crawling over my machine as soon as I was gone from it, perhaps dismantling it or stealing it again.

And besides, in this darkened landscape, how should I avoid getting lost? How should I be sure of finding the machine again, once I had gone more than a few yards from it?

I puzzled over this for a few moments, my desire to explore further battling with my apprehension. Then an idea struck me. I opened my knapsack and took out my candles and camphor blocks. With rough haste I shoved these articles into crevices in the Time Machine’s complex construction. Then I went around the machine with lighted matches until every one of the blocks and candles was ablaze.

I stood back from my glowing handiwork with some pride. Candle flames glinted from the polished nickel and brass, so that the Time Machine was lit up like some Christmas ornament. In this darkened landscape, and with the machine poised on this denuded hill-side, I would be able to see my beacon from a fair distance. With any luck, the flames would deter any Morlocks – or if they did not, I should see the diminution of the flames immediately and could come running back, to join battle.

I fingered the poker’s heavy handle. I think a part of me hoped for just such an outcome; my hands and lower arms tingled as I remembered the queer, soft sensation of my fists driving into Morlock faces!

At any rate, now I was prepared for my expedition. I picked up my Kodak, lit a small oil lamp, and made my way across the hill, pausing after every few paces to be sure the Time Machine rested undisturbed.

5
THE WELL

I raised my lamp, but its glow carried only a few feet. All was silent – there was not a breath of wind, not a trickle of water; and I wondered if the Thames still flowed.

For lack of a definite destination, I decided to make towards the site of the great food hall which I remembered from Weena’s day. This lay a little distance to the north-west, further along the hill-side past the White Sphinx, and so this was the path I followed once more – reflecting in Space, if not in Time, my first walk in Weena’s world.

When last I made this little journey, I remembered, there had been grass under my feet – untended and uncropped, but growing neat and short and free of weeds. Now, soft, gritty sand pulled at my boots as I tramped across the hill.

My vision was becoming quite adapted to this night of patchy star-light, but, though there were buildings hereabout, silhouetted against the sky, I saw no sign of my hall. I remembered it quite distinctly: it had been a grey edifice, dilapidated and vast, of fretted stone, with a carved, ornate doorway; and as I had walked through its carved arch, the little Eloi, delicate and pretty, had fluttered about me with their pale limbs and soft robes.

Before long I had walked so far that I knew I must have passed the site of the hall. Evidently – unlike the Sphinx and the Morlocks – the food palace had not survived in this History – or perhaps had never been built, I thought with a shiver; perhaps I had walked – slept, even taken a meal! – in a building without existence.

The path took me to a well, a feature which I remembered from my first jaunt. Just as I recalled, the structure was rimmed with bronze and protected from the weather by a small, oddly delicate cupola. There was some vegetation – jet-black in the star-light – clustered around the cupola. I studied all this with some dread, for these great shafts had been the means by which the Morlocks ascended from their hellish caverns to the sunny world of the Eloi.

The mouth of the well was silent. That struck me as odd, for I remembered hearing from those other wells the thud-thud-thud of the Morlocks’ great engines, deep in their subterranean caverns.

I sat down by the side of the well. The vegetation I had observed appeared to be a kind of lichen; it was soft and dry to the touch, though I did not probe it further, nor attempt to determine its structure. I lifted up the lamp, meaning to hold it over the rim and to see if there might be returned the reflection of water; but the flame flickered, as if in some strong draught, and, in a brief panic at the thought of darkness, I snatched the lamp back.

I ducked my head under the cupola and leaned over the well’s rim, and was greeted by a blast of warm, moist air into the face – it was like opening the door to a Turkish bath – quite unexpected in that hot but arid night of the future. I had an impression of great depth, and at the remote base of the well I fancied my dark-adapted eyes made out a red glow. Despite its appearance, this really was quite unlike the wells of the first Morlocks. There was no sign of the protruding metal hooks in the side, intended to support climbers, and I still detected no evidence of the machinery noises I had heard before; and I had the odd, unverifiable impression that this well was far deeper than those Morlocks’ cavern-drilling.

On a whim, I raised my Kodak and dug out the flash lamp. I filled up the trough of the lamp with blitzlichtpulver, lifted the camera and flooded the well with magnesium light. Its reflections dazzled me, and it was a glow so brilliant that it might not have been seen on earth since the covering of the sun, a hundred thousand years or more earlier. That should have scared away the Morlocks if nothing else! – and I began to concoct protective schemes whereby I could connect the flash to the unattended Time Machine, so that the powder would go off if ever the machine was touched.

I stood up and spent some minutes loading the flash lamp and snapping at random across the hillside around the well. Soon a dense cloud of acrid white smoke from the powder was gathering about me. Perhaps I would be lucky, I reflected, and would capture for the wonderment of Humanity the rump of a fleeing, terrified Morlock!

… There was a scratching, soft and insistent, from a little way around the well rim, not three feet from where I stood.

With a cry, I fumbled at my belt for my poker. Had the Morlocks fallen on me, while I daydreamed?

Poker in hand, I stepped forward with care. The rasping noises were coming from the bed of lichen, I realized; there was some form, moving steady through those tiny, dark plants. There was no Morlock here, so I lowered my club, and bent over the lichen bed. I saw a small, crab-like creature, no wider than my hand; the scratching I heard was the rasp of its single, outsize claw against the lichen. The crab’s case seemed to me to be jet black, and the creature was quite without eyes, like some blind creature of the ocean depths.

So, I reflected as I watched this little drama, the struggle to survive went on, even in this benighted darkness. It struck me that I had seen no signs of life – save for the glimpses of Morlock – away from this well, in all my visit here. I am no biologist, but it seemed clear that the presence of this fount of warm, moist air would be bound to attract life, here on a world turned to desert, just as it had attracted this blind farmer-crab and his crop of lichen. I speculated that the warmth must come from the compressed interior of the earth, whose volcanic heat, evident in our own day, would not have cooled significantly in the intervening six hundred thousand years. And perhaps the moisture came from aquifers, still extant below the ground.

It may be, I mused, the surface of the planet was studded with such wells and cupolas. But their purpose was not to admit access to the interior world of the Morlocks – as in that other History – but to release the earth’s intrinsic resources to warm and moisten this planet deprived of its sun; and such life as had survived the monstrous engineering I had witnessed now clustered around these founts of warmth and moisture.

My confidence was increasing – making sense of things is a powerful tonic for my courage, and after that false alarm with the crab, I had no sense of threat – and I sat again on the lip of the well. I had my pipe and some of my tobacco in my pocket, and I packed the bowl full and lit up. I began to speculate on how this History might have diverged from the first I had witnessed. Evidently there had been some parallels – there had been Morlocks and Eloi here – but their grisly duality had been resolved, in ages past.

I wondered why should such a show-down between the races occur – for the Morlocks, in their foul way, were as dependent on the Eloi as were Eloi on Morlock, and the whole arrangement had a sort of stability.

I saw a way it might have come about. The Morlocks were of debased human stock, after all, and it is not in man’s heart to be logical about things. The Morlock must have known that he depended on the Eloi for his very existence; he must have pitied and scorned him – his remote cousin, yet reduced to the status of cattle. And yet –

And yet, what a glorious morning made up the brief life of the Eloi! The little people laughed and sang and loved across the surface of the world made into a garden, while your Morlock must toil in the stinking depths of the earth to provide the Eloi with the fabric of their luxurious lives. Granted the Morlock was conditioned for his place in creation, and would no doubt turn in disgust from the Eloi’s sunlight and clear water and fruit, even were it offered to him – but still, might he not, in his dim and cunning fashion, have envied the Eloi their leisure?

Perhaps the flesh of the Eloi turned sour in the Morlock’s rank mouth, even as he bit into it in his dingy cave.

I envisaged, then, the Morlocks – or a faction of them – arising one night from their tunnels under the earth, and falling on the Eloi with their weapons and whip-muscled arms. There would be a great Culling – and this time, not a disciplined harvesting of flesh, but a full-blooded assault with one, unthinking purpose: the final extinction of the Eloi.

How must the lawns and food palaces have run with blood, those ancient stones echoing to the childish bleating of the Eloi!

In such a contest there could be only one victor, of course. The fragile people of futurity, with their hectic, consumptive beauty, could never defend themselves against the assaults of organized, murderous Morlocks.

I saw it all – or so I thought! The Morlocks, triumphant at last, had inherited the earth. With no more use for the garden-country of the Eloi, they had allowed it to fall into ruin; they had erupted from the earth and – somehow – brought their own Stygian darkness with them to cover the sun! I remembered how Weena’s folk had feared the nights of the new moon – she had called them ‘The Dark Nights’ – now, it seemed to me, the Morlocks had brought about a final Dark Night to cover the earth, forever. The Morlocks had at last murdered the last of earth’s true children, and even murdered earth herself.

Such was my first hypothesis, then: wild and gaudy – and wrong, in every particular!

… And I became aware, with almost a physical shock, that in the middle of all this historical speculation I had quite forgotten my regular inspections of the abandoned Time Machine.

I got to my feet and glared across the hill-side. I soon picked out the machine’s candle-lit glow – but the lights I had built flickered and wavered, as if opaque shapes were moving around the machine.

They could only be Morlocks!

6
MY ENCOUNTER WITH THE MORLOCKS

With a spurt of fear – and, I have to acknowledge it, a lust for blood which pulsed in my head – I roared, lifted my poker-club, and pounded back along the path. Careless, I dropped my Kodak; behind me I heard a soft tinkle of breaking glass. For all I know, that camera lies there still – if I may use the phrase – abandoned in the darkness.

As I neared the machine, I saw they were Morlocks all right – perhaps a dozen of them, capering around the machine. They seemed alternately attracted and repelled by my lights, exactly like moths around candles. They were the same ape-like creatures I remembered – perhaps a little smaller – with that long, flaxen hair across their heads and backs, their skin a pasty white, arms long as monkeys’, and with those haunting red-grey eyes. They whooped and jabbered to each other in their queer language. They hadn’t yet touched the Time Machine, I noted with some relief, but I knew it was a matter of moments before those uncanny fingers – ape-like, yet clever as any man’s – reached out for the sparkling brass and nickel.

But there would be no time for that, for I fell upon these Morlocks like an avenging angel.

I laid about me with my poker and my fist. The Morlocks jabbered and squealed, and tried to flee. I grabbed one of the creatures as it ran past me, and I felt again the worm-pallor cold of Morlock flesh. Hair like spider-web brushed across the back of my hand, and the animal nipped at my fingers with its small teeth, but I did not yield. I wielded my club, and I felt the soft, moist collapse of flesh and bone.

Those grey-red eyes widened, and closed.

I seemed to watch all this from a small, detached part of my brain. I had quite forgotten all my intentions to return proof of the working of time travel, or even to find Weena: I suspected at that moment that this was why I had returned into time – for this moment of revenge: for Weena, and for the murder of the earth, and my own earlier indignity. I dropped the Morlock – unconscious or dead, it was no more than a bundle of hair and bones – and grabbed for its companions, swinging my poker.

Then I heard a voice – distinctively Morlock, but quite unlike the others in tone and depth – it issued a single, imperative syllable. I turned, my arms soaked in blood up to the elbows of my jacket, and made ready for more fighting.

Before me, now, stood a Morlock who did not run from me. Though he was naked like the rest, his coat of hair seemed to have been brushed and prepared, so that he had something of the effect of a groomed dog, made to stand upright like a man. I took a massive step forward, my club held firm in both hands.

Calmly, the Morlock raised his right hand – something glinted there – and there was a green flash, and I felt the world tip backwards from under me, pitching me down beside my glowing machine; and I knew no more!

7
THE CAGE OF LIGHT

I came to my senses slowly, as if emerging from a deep and untroubled sleep. I was lying on my back, with my eyes closed. I felt so comfortable that for a moment I imagined I must be in my own bed, in my house in Richmond, and that the pink glow showing through my eyelids must be the morning sun seeping around my curtains …

But then I became aware that the surface beneath me – though yielding and quite warm – did not have the softness of a mattress. I could feel no sheets beneath me, nor blankets above me.

Then, in a flash, it returned to me: all of it – my second flight through time, the darkening of the sun, and my encounter with the Morlocks.

Fear flooded me, stiffening my muscles and tightening my stomach. I had been taken by the Morlocks! I snapped my eyes open –

And I was instantly dazzled by a brilliant illumination. It came from a remote disc of intense white light, directly above me. I cried out and flung an arm across my blinded eyes; I rolled over, pressing my face against the floor.

I pushed myself up to a crawling position. The floor was warm and giving, like leather. At first, my vision was full of dancing images of that blazing disc, but at last I was able to make out my own shadow under me. And then, still on all fours, I noticed the queerest thing yet: that the surface beneath me was clear, as if made of some flexible glass, and – where my shadow shielded out the light – I could see stars, quite clearly visible through the floor beneath me. I had been deposited on some transparent platform, then, with this starry diorama below: it was as if I had been brought to some inverted planetarium.

I felt queasy to the stomach, but I was able to stand up. I had to shield my eyes with my hand against the unremitting glare from above; I wished I had not lost the hat I had brought from 1891! I still wore my light suit, although it now bore stains of sand and blood, particularly around the sleeves – though some efforts had been made to clean me up, I noticed with surprise, and my hands and arms were clear of Morlock blood, mucus and ichor. My poker was gone, and I could see no sign of my knapsack. I had been left my watch, which hung on a chain from my waistcoat, but my pockets were empty of matches or candles. My pipe and tobacco were gone, too, and I felt an incongruous stab of regret for that – in the middle of all that mystery and peril!

A thought struck me, and my hands flew to my vest pocket – and they found the Time Machine’s twin levers still there. I breathed relief.

I looked around. I was standing on a flat, even Floor of the leather-like, clear substance I have described. I was close to the centre of a splash of light perhaps thirty yards wide, cast on that enigmatic Floor by the source above me. The air was quite dusty, so that it was easy to pick out the rays of light as they flooded down over me. You must imagine me standing there in the light, as if at the bottom of some dusty mine shaft, blinking up at the noonday sun. And indeed it looked like sunlight – but I could not understand how the sun could have been uncovered, nor come to be stationary above me. My only hypothesis was that I had been moved, while unconscious, to some point on the Equator.

Fighting a mounting panic, I paced around my circle of light. I was quite alone, and the Floor was bare – save for trays, two of them, bearing containers and cartons, which rested on the Floor perhaps ten feet from where I had been laid. I peered out into the encircling gloom, but could make out nothing, even with my eyes quite shielded. I could see no containing walls to this chamber. I clapped my hands, causing dust motes to dance in the lit-up air. The sound was deadened, and no echo was returned. Either the walls were impossibly remote, or they were lagged with some absorbent substance; either way, I had no clue as to their distance.

There was no sign of the Time Machine.

I felt a deep, peculiar fear, there on that plain of soft glass; I felt naked and exposed, with nowhere to shelter my back, no corner to make into a fastness.

I approached the trays. I peered at the cartons, and lifted their lids: there was one large, empty pail, and a bowl of what looked like clear water, and in the last dish there were fist-sized bricks of what I guessed to be food – but it was food processed into smooth yellow, green or red slabs, so that its origins were quite unrecognizable. I poked at the food with a reluctant fingertip: they were cold and smooth, rather like cheese. I had not eaten since Mrs Watchets’s breakfast, many hours of my tangled life ago, and I was aware of a mounting pressure in my bladder: a pressure which, I guessed, the empty pail was intended to help relieve. I could see no reason why the Morlocks, having preserved me this long, should choose to poison me, but nevertheless I was reluctant to accept their hospitality – and even more so to lose my dignity by using the pail!

So I stalked around the tray, and around that circle of light, sniffing like some animal suspicious of a trap. I even picked up the cartons and trays, to see if I could make some weapon of them – perhaps I could hammer out some kind of blade – but the trays were manufactured of a silvery metal, a little like aluminium, so thin and soft it crumpled in my hands. I could no more stab a Morlock with this than with a sheet of paper.

It struck me that these Morlocks had behaved with remarkable gentleness. It would have been the work of a moment to have finished me off while I lay unconscious, but they had stayed their brutish hands – even, with surprising skill, it seemed, made efforts to clean me up.

I was immediately suspicious, of course. For what purpose had they preserved my life? Did they intend to keep me alive, in order to dig out of me – by whatever foul means – the secret of the Time Machine?

I turned away from the food deliberately, and I stepped out of the ring of light, and into the darkness beyond. My heart was hammering; there was nothing tangible to stop me leaving that illuminated shaft, but my apprehension, and my craving for light, held me in there almost as effectively.

At last, I chose a direction at random, and walked into the darkness, my arms held loose at my side, my fists curled and ready. I counted out the paces – eight, nine, ten … Beneath my feet, more clearly visible now that I was away from the light, I could see the stars, an inverted hemisphere of them; I felt again as if I were standing on the roof of some planetarium. I turned and looked back; there was the dusty light pillar, reaching up to infinity, with the scattering of dishes and food at its base on the bare Floor.

It was all quite incomprehensible to me!

As the unchanging Floor wore away beneath me, I soon gave up counting my steps. The only light was the glow of that central needle-shaft of light and the faint gleam of the stars beneath me, by which I could just make out the profile of my own legs; the only sounds were the scratch of my own breathing, and the soft impacts of my boots on the glassy surface.

After perhaps a hundred yards, I turned through a corner and began to pace out a path around my light-needle. Still I found nothing but darkness, and the stars beneath my feet. I wondered if in all this blackness I should encounter those strange, floating Watchers who had accompanied me on my second voyage through time.

Despair began to sink deep into my soul as I blundered on, and I soon began to wish that I could be transported from this place to Weena’s garden-world, or even that night landscape where I had been captured – anywhere with rocks, and plants, and animals, and a recognizable sky, for me to work with! What kind of place was this? Was I in some chamber, buried deep in the hollowed-out earth? What terrible tortures were the Morlocks devising for me? Was I doomed to spend the rest of my life in this alien barrenness?

For a period I was quite unhinged, by my isolation and my awful sense of being stranded. I did not know where I was, nor where the Time Machine was, and I did not expect to see my home again. I was a strange beast, stranded in an alien world. I called out to the dark, alternately issuing threats and entreaties for mercy or release; and I slammed my fists against the bland, unyielding Floor, without result. I sobbed, and ran, and cursed myself for my unmatched folly – having once escaped the clutches of the Morlocks – to have immediately returned myself to the same trap!

In the end I must have bawled like a frustrated child, and I used up my strength, and I sank in the darkness to the ground, quite exhausted.

I think I dozed a while. When I came to myself, nothing in my condition had changed. I got myself to my feet. My anger and frenzy had burned themselves out and, though I felt as desolate as ever in my life, I made room for my body’s simple human needs: hunger and thirst being primary among them.

I returned, tired out, to my light shaft. That pressure in my bladder had continued to build. With a feeling of resignation, I picked up the pail that had been provided for me, carried it off into the dark a little way – for modesty’s sake, as I knew Morlocks must be watching – and when I had done I left it there, out of sight.

I surveyed the Morlock food. It was a bleak prospect: it looked no more appetizing than earlier, but I was just as hungry. I picked up the bowl of water – it was the size of a soup bowl – and raised it to my lips. It was not a pleasant drink – tepid and tasteless, as if all the minerals had been distilled out of it – but it was clear and it refreshed my mouth. I held the liquid on my tongue for a few seconds, hesitating at this final hurdle; then, deliberately, I swallowed.

After a few minutes I had suffered no ill effects I could measure, and I took a little more of the water. I also dabbed a corner of my handkerchief on the bowl, and wiped the water across my brow and hands.

I turned to the food itself. I picked up one greenish slab of it. I snapped off a corner: it broke easily, was green all the way through, and crumbled a little like a Cheddar. My teeth slid into the stuff. As to its flavour: if you have ever eaten a green vegetable, say broccoli or sprouts, boiled to within an inch of disintegration, then you have something of its savour; members of the less well-appointed London clubs will recognize the symptoms! But I bit into my slab until it was half gone. Then I picked up the other slabs to try them; although their colours varied, their texture and flavour differed not a whit.

It did not take many mouthfuls of that stuff to sate me, and I dropped the fragments on their tray and pushed it away.

I sat on the Floor and peered into the dark. I felt an intense gratitude that the Morlocks had at least provided me with this illumination, for I imagined that had I been deposited on this empty, featureless surface in a darkness broken only by the star images beneath me, I might have gone quite mad. And yet I knew, at the same time, that the Morlocks had provided this ring of light for their own purposes, as an effective means to keep me in this place. I was all but helpless, a prisoner of a mere light ray!

A great weariness descended on me. I felt reluctant to lose consciousness once more – to leave myself defenceless – but I could see little prospect of staying awake forever. I stepped out of the ring of light and a little way away into the darkness, so that I felt, at least, some security from its cover of night. I took off my jacket and folded it up into a pillow for my head. The air was quite warm, and the soft Floor also seemed heated, so I should not go cold.

So, with my portly body stretched out over the stars, I slept.

8
A VISITOR

I awoke after an interval I could not measure. I lifted my head and glanced around. I was alone in the dark, and all seemed unchanged. I patted my vest pocket; the Time Machine levers were still safely there.

As I tried to move, stiffness sent pain shooting along my legs and back. I sat up, awkward, and got to my feet feeling every year of my age; I was inordinately grateful that I had not had to leap into action to fend off a tribe of marauding Morlocks! I performed a few rusty physical jerks to loosen up my muscles; then I picked up my jacket, smoothing out its creases, and donned it.

I stepped forward into the light ring.

The trays, with food cartons and toilet pail, had been changed, I found. So they were watching me! – well, it was no more than I had suspected. I took the lids off the cartons, only to find the same depressing slabs of anonymous fodder. I made a breakfast of water and some of the greenish stuff. My fear was gone, to be replaced by a numbing sense of tedium: it is remarkable how rapidly the human mind can accommodate the most remarkable of changed circumstances. Was this to be my fate from now on? – boredom, a hard bed, lukewarm water, and a diet of slabs of boiled cabbage? It was like being back at school, I reflected with gloom.

‘Pau.’

The single syllable, softly spoken, sounded as loud to me in all that silence as a gun shot.

I cried out, scrambled to my feet, and held out my food slabs – it was absurd, but I lacked any other weapon. The sound had come from behind me, and I whirled around, my boots squealing on the Floor.

A Morlock stood there, just beyond the edge of my light circle, half-illuminated. He stood upright – he did not share the crouching, ape-like gait of those creatures I had encountered before – and he wore goggles that made a shield of blue glass which coated his huge eyes, turning them black to my view. ‘Tik. Pau,’ this apparition pronounced, his voice a queer gurgle.

I stumbled backwards, stepping on a tray with a clatter. I held up my fists. ‘Don’t come near me!’

The Morlock took a single pace forward, coming closer to the light shaft; despite his goggles, he flinched a little from the brightness. This was one of that new breed of advanced-looking Morlock, one of which had stunned me, I realized; he seemed naked, but the pale hair which coated his back and head was cut and shaped – deliberately – into a rather severe style, square about the breast bone and shoulders, giving it something of the effect of a uniform. He had a small, chinless face, something like an ugly child’s.

A ghost of memory of that sweet sensation of Morlock skull cracking under my club returned to me. I considered rushing this fellow, knocking him to the ground. But what would it avail me? There were uncounted others, no doubt, out there in the dark. I had no weapons, not even my poker, and I recalled how this chap’s cousin had raised that queer gun against me, knocking me down without effort.

I decided to bide my time.

And besides – this might seem strange! – I found my anger was dissipating, into an unaccountable feeling of humour. This Morlock, despite the standard wormy pallor of his skin, did look comical: imagine an orang-utan, his hair clipped short and dyed pale yellow-white, and then encouraged to stand upright and wear a pair of gaudy spectacles, and you’ll have something of the effect of him.

‘Tik. Pau,’ he repeated.

I took a step towards him. ‘What are you saying to me, you brute?’

He flinched – I imagined he was reacting to my tone rather than my words – and then he pointed, in turn, to the food slabs in my hands. ‘Tik,’ he said. ‘Pau.’

I understood. ‘Good heavens,’ I said, ‘you are trying to talk to me, aren’t you?’ I held up my food slabs in turn. ‘Tik. Pau. One. Two. Do you speak English? One. Two …’

The Morlock cocked his head to one side – the way a dog will sometimes – and then he said, not much less clearly than I had, ‘One. Two.’

‘That’s it! And there’s more where that came from – one, two, three, four … ’

The Morlock strode into my light circle, though I noticed he kept out of my arm’s reach. He pointed to my water bowl. ‘Agua.’

‘Agua?’ That had sounded like Latin – though the Classics were never my strong point. ‘Water,’ I replied.

Again the Morlock listened in silence, his head on a tilt.

So we continued. The Morlock pointed to common things – bits of clothing, or parts of the body like a head or a limb – and would come up with some candidate word. Some of his tries were frankly unrecognizable to me, and some of them sounded like German, or perhaps old English. And I would come back with my modern usage. Once or twice I tried to engage him in a longer conversation – for I could not see how this simple register of nouns was going to get us very far – but he stood there until I fell silent, and then continued with his patient matching game. I tried him with some of what I remembered of Weena’s language, that simplified, melodic tongue of two-word sentences; but again the Morlock stood patiently until I gave up.

This went on for several hours. At length, without ceremony, the Morlock took his leave – he walked off into the dark – I did not follow (Not yet! I told myself again). I ate and slept, and when I awoke he returned, and we resumed our lessons.

As he walked around my light cage, pointing at things and naming them, the Morlock’s movements were fluid and graceful enough, and his body seemed expressive; but I came to realize how much one relies, in day to day business, on the interpretation of the movements of one’s fellows. I could not read this Morlock in that way at all. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking or feeling – was he afraid of me? was he bored? – and I felt greatly disadvantaged as a result.

At the end of our second session of this, the Morlock stepped back from me.

He said: ‘That should be sufficient. Do you understand me?’

I stared at him, stunned by this sudden facility with my language! His pronunciation was blurred – that liquid Morlock voice is not designed, it seems, for the harsher consonants and stops of English – but the words were quite comprehensible.

When I did not reply, he repeated, ‘Do you understand me?’

‘I – yes. I mean: yes, I understand you! But how did you do this – how can you have learned my language – from so few words?’ For I judged we had covered a bare five hundred words, most of those concrete nouns and simple verbs.

‘I have access to records of all of the ancient languages of Humanity – as reconstructed – from Nostratic through the Indo-European group and its prototypes. A small number of key words is sufficient for the appropriate variant to be retrieved. You must inform me if anything I say is not intelligible.’

I took a cautious step forward. ‘Ancient? And how do you know I am ancient?’

Huge lids swept down over those goggled eyes. ‘Your physique is archaic. And the contents of your stomach, when analysed.’ He actually shuddered, evidently at the thought of the remnants of Mrs Watchets’s breakfast. I was astonished: I had a fastidious Morlock! He went on, ‘You are out of time. We do not yet understand how you came to arrive on the earth. But no doubt we will learn.’

‘And in the meantime,’ I said with some strength, ‘you keep me in this – this Cage of Light. As if I were a beast, not a man! You give me a floor to sleep on, and a pail for my toilet –’

The Morlock said nothing; he observed me, impassive.

The frustration and embarrassment which had assailed me since my arrival in this place welled up, now that I was able to express them, and I decided that sufficient pleasantries had been exchanged. I said, ‘Now that we can speak to each other, you’re going to tell me where on earth I am. And where you’ve hidden my machine. Do you understand that, fellow, or do I have to translate it for you?’ And I reached for him, meaning to grab at the hair clumps on his chest.

When I came within two paces of him, he raised his hand. That was all. I remember a queer green flash – I never saw the device he must have held, all the time he was near me – and then I fell to the Floor, quite insensible.

9
REVELATIONS AND REMONSTRANCES

I came to, spread-eagled on the Floor once more, and staring up into that confounded light.

I hoisted myself up onto my elbows, and rubbed my dazzled eyes. My Morlock friend was still there, standing just outside the circle of light. I got to my feet, rueful. These New Morlocks were going to be a handful for me, I realized.

The Morlock stepped into the light, its blue goggles glinting. As if nothing had interrupted our dialogue, he said, ‘My name is –’ his pronunciation reverted to the usual shapeless Morlock pattern – ‘Nebogipfel.’

‘Nebogipfel. Very well.’ In turn, I told him my name; within a few minutes he could repeat it with clarity and precision.

This, I realized, was the first Morlock whose name I had learned – the first who stood out from the masses of them I had encountered, and fought; the first to have the attributes of a distinguishable person.

‘So, Nebogipfel,’ I said. I sat cross-legged beside my trays, and rubbed at the rash of bruises my latest fall had inflicted on my upper arm. ‘You have been assigned as my keeper, here in this zoo.’

‘Zoo.’ He stumbled over that word. ‘No. I was not assigned. I volunteered to work with you.’

‘Work with me?’

‘I – we – want to understand how you came to be here.’

‘Do you, by Jove?’ I got to my feet and paced around my Cage of Light. ‘What if I told you that I came here in a machine that can carry a man through time?’ I held up my hands. ‘That I built such a machine, with these hands? What then, eh?’

He seemed to think that over. ‘Your era, as dated from your speech and physique, is very remote from ours. You are capable of achievements of high technology – witness your machine, whether or not it carries you through time as you claim. And the clothes you wear, the state of your hands, and the wear patterns of your teeth – all of these are indicative of a high state of civilization.’

‘I’m flattered,’ I said with some heat, ‘but if you believe I’m capable of such things – that I am a man, not an ape – why am I caged up in this way?’

‘Because,’ he said evenly, ‘you have already tried to attack me, with every intent of doing me harm. And on the Earth, you did great damage to –’

I felt fury burning anew. I stepped towards him. ‘Your monkeys were pawing at my machine,’ I shouted. ‘What did you expect? I was defending myself. I –’

He said: ‘They were children.’

His words pierced my rage. I tried to cling to the remnants of my self-justifying anger, but they were already receding from me. ‘What did you say?’

‘Children. They were children. Since the completion of the Sphere, the Earth is become a … nursery, a place for children to roam. They were curious about your machine. That is all. They would not have done you, or it, any conscious harm. Yet you attacked them, with great savagery.’

I stepped back from him. I remembered – now I let myself think about it – that the Morlocks capering ineffectually around my machine had struck me as smaller than those I’d encountered before. And they had made no attempt to hurt me … save only the poor creature who I had captured, and who had then nipped my hand – before I clubbed its face!

‘The one I struck. Did he – it – survive?’

‘The physical injuries were reparable. But –’

‘Yes?’

‘The inner scars, the scars of the mind – these may never heal.’

I dropped my head. Could it be true? Had I been so blinded by my loathing of Morlocks that I had been unable to see those creatures around the machine for what they were: not the rat-like, vicious creatures of Weena’s world – but harmless infants? ‘I don’t suppose you know what I’m talking about – but I feel as if I’m trapped in another one of those “Dissolving Views” …’

‘You are expressing shame,’ Nebogipfel said.

Shame … I never thought I should hear, and accept, such remonstrance from a Morlock! I looked at him, defiant. ‘Yes. Very well! And does that make me more than a beast, in your view, or less of one?’

He said nothing.

Even while I was confronting this personal horror, some calculating part of my mind was running over something Nebogipfel had said. Since the completion of the Sphere, the Earth is become a nursery …

‘What Sphere?’

‘You have much to learn of us.’

‘Tell me about the Sphere!’

‘It is a Sphere around the sun.’

Those seven simple words – startling! – and yet … Of course! The solar evolution I had watched in the time-accelerated sky, the exclusion of the sunlight from the Earth – ‘I understand,’ I said to Nebogipfel. ‘I watched the sphere’s construction.’

The Morlock’s eyes seemed to widen, in a very human mannerism, as he considered this unexpected news.

And now, for me, other aspects of my situation were becoming clear.

‘You said,’ I essayed to Nebogipfel, ‘“On the Earth, you did great damage –” Something on those lines.’ It was an odd thing to say, I thought now – if I was still on the Earth. I lifted my face and let the light beat down on me. ‘Nebogipfel – beneath my feet. What is visible, through this clear Floor?’

‘Stars.’

‘Not representations, not some kind of planetarium –’

‘Stars.’

I nodded. ‘And this light from above –’

‘It is sunlight.’

Somehow, I think I had known it. I stood in the light of a sun, which was overhead for twenty-four hours of every day; I stood on a Floor above the stars …

I felt as if the world were shifting about me; I felt light-headed, and there was a remote ringing in my ears. My adventures had already taken me across the deserts of time, but now – thanks to my capture by these astonishing Morlocks – I had been lifted across space. I was no longer on the Earth – I had been transported to the Morlocks’ solar Sphere!

10
A DIALOGUE WITH A MORLOCK

‘You say you travelled here on a Time Machine.’

I paced across my little disc of light, caged, restless. ‘The term is precise. It is a machine which can travel indifferently in any direction in time, and at any relative rate, as the driver determines.’

‘So you claim that you have journeyed here, from the remote past, on this machine – the machine found with you on the earth.’

‘Precisely!’ I snapped. The Morlock seemed content to stand, almost immobile, for long hours, as he developed his interrogation. But I am a man of a modern cut, and our moods did not coincide. ‘Confound it, fellow,’ I said, ‘you have observed yourself that I myself am of an archaic design. How else, but through time travel, can you explain my presence, here in the Year A.D. 657,208?’

Those huge curtain-eyelashes blinked slowly. ‘There are a number of alternatives: most of them more plausible than time travel.’

‘Such as?’ I challenged him.

‘Genetic resequencing.’

‘Genetic?’ Nebogipfel explained further, and I got the general drift. ‘You’re talking of the mechanism by which heredity operates – by which characteristics are transmitted from generation to generation.’

‘It is not impossible to generate simulacra of archaic forms by unravelling subsequent mutations.’

‘So you think I am no more than a simulacrum – reconstructed like the fossil skeleton of some Megatherium in a museum? Yes?’

‘There are precedents, though not of human forms of your vintage. Yes. It is possible.’

I felt insulted. ‘And to what purpose might I have been cobbled together in this way?’ I resumed my pacing around the Cage. The most disconcerting aspect of that bleak place was its lack of walls, and my constant, primeval sense that my back was unguarded. I would rather have been hurled in some prison cell of my own era – primitive and squalid, no doubt, but enclosed. ‘I’ll not rise to any such bait. That’s a lot of nonsense. I designed and built a Time Machine, and travelled here on it; and let that be an end to it!’

‘We will use your explanation as a working hypothesis,’ Nebogipfel said. ‘Now, please describe to me the machine’s operating principles.’

I continued my pacing, caught in a dilemma. As soon as I had realized that Nebogipfel was articulate and intelligent, unlike those Morlocks of my previous acquaintance, I had expected some such interrogation; after all, if a Time Traveller from Ancient Egypt had turned up in nineteenth century London I would have fought to be on the committee which examined him. But should I share the secret of my machine – my only advantage in this world – with these New Morlocks?

After some internal searching, I realized I had little choice. I had no doubt that the information could be forced out of me, if the Morlocks so desired. Besides, the construction of my machine was intrinsically simpler than that of, say, a fine clock. A civilization capable of throwing a shell around the sun would have little trouble reproducing the fruit of my poor lathes and presses! And if I spoke to Nebogipfel, perhaps I could put the fellow off while I sought some advantage from my difficult situation. I still had no idea where the machine was being held, still less how I should reach it and have a prospect of returning home.

But also – and here is the honest truth – the thought of my savagery among the child-Morlocks on the earth still weighed on my mind! I had no desire that Nebogipfel should think of me – nor the phase of Humanity which I, perforce, represented – as brutish. Therefore, like a child eager to impress, I wanted to show Nebogipfel how clever I was, how mechanically and scientifically adept: how far above the apes men of my type had ascended.

Still, for the first time I felt emboldened to make some demands of my own.

‘Very well,’ I said to Nebogipfel. ‘But first …’

‘Yes?’

‘Look here,’ I said, ‘the conditions under which you’re holding me are a little primitive, aren’t they? I’m not as young as I was, and I can’t do with this standing about all day. How about a chair? Is that so unreasonable a thing to ask for? And what about blankets to sleep under, if I must stay here?’

‘Chair.’ He had taken a second to reply, as if he was looking up the referent in some invisible dictionary.

I went on to other demands. I needed more fresh water, I said, and some equivalent of soap; and I asked – expecting to be refused – for a blade with which to shave my bristles.

For a time, Nebogipfel withdrew. When he returned he brought blankets and a chair; and after my next sleep period I found my two trays of provisions supplemented by a third, which bore more water.

The blankets were of some soft substance, too finely manufactured for me to detect any evidence of weaving. The chair – a simple upright thing – might have been of a light wood from its weight, but its red surface was smooth and seamless, and I could not scratch through its paint work with my fingernails, nor could I detect any evidence of joints, nails, screws or mouldings; it seemed to have been extruded as a complete whole by some unknown process. As to my toilet, the extra water came without soap, and nor would it lather, but the liquid had a smooth feel to it, and I suspected it had been treated with some detergent. By some minor miracle, the water was delivered warm to the touch – and stayed that way, no matter how long I let the bowl stand.

I was brought no blade, though – I was not surprised!

When next Nebogipfel left me alone, I undressed myself by stages and washed away the perspiration of some days, as well as lingering traces of Morlock blood; I also took the opportunity of rinsing through my underwear and shirt.

So my life in the Cage of Light became a little more civilized. If you imagine the contents of a cheap hotel room dumped into the middle of the floor of some vast ball room, you will have the picture of how I was living. When I pulled together the chair, trays and blankets I had something of a cosy nest, and I did not feel quite so exposed; I took to placing my jacket-pillow under the chair, and so sleeping with my head and shoulders under the protection of this little fastness. Most of the time I was able to dismiss the prospect of stars beneath my feet – I told myself that the lights in the Floor were some elaborate illusion – but sometimes my imagination would betray me, and I would feel as if I were suspended over an infinite drop, with only this insubstantial Floor to save me.

All this was quite illogical, of course; but I am human, and must needs pander to the instinctive needs and fears of my nature!

Nebogipfel observed all this. I could not tell if his reaction was curiosity or confusion, or perhaps something more aloof – as I might have watched the antics of a bird in building a nest, perhaps.

And in these circumstances, the next few days wore away – I think four or five – as I strove to describe to Nebogipfel the workings of my Time Machine – and as well seeking subtly to extract from him some details of this History in which I had landed myself.

I described the researches into physical optics which had led me to my insights into the possibility of time travel.

‘It is becoming well known – or was, in my day – that the propagation of light has anomalous properties,’ I said. ‘The speed of light in a vacuum is extremely high – it travels hundreds of thousands of miles each second – but it is finite. And, more important, as demonstrated most clearly by Michelson and Morley a few years before my departure, this speed is isotropic … ’

I took some care to explain this rum business. The essence of it is that light, as it travels through space, does not behave like a material object, such as an express train.

Imagine a ray of light from some distant star overtaking the earth in, say, January, as our planet traverses its orbit around the sun. The speed of the earth in its orbit is some seventy thousand miles per hour. You would imagine – if you were to measure the speed of that passing ray of star-light as seen from the earth – that the result would be reduced by that seventy thousand-odd miles per hour.

Conversely, in July, the earth will at the opposite side of its orbit: it will now be heading into the path of that faithful star-light beam. Measure the speed of the beam again, and you would expect to find the recorded speed increased by the earth’s velocity.

Well, if steam trains came to us from the stars, this would no doubt be the case. But Michelson and Morley proved that for star-light, this is not so. The speed of the star-light as measured from the earth – whether we are overtaking or heading into the beam – is exactly the same!’

These observations had correlated with the sort of phenomenon I had noted about Plattnerite for some years previously – though I had not published the results of my experiments – and I had formulated an hypothesis.

‘One only needs to loosen the shackles of the imagination – particularly regarding the business of Dimensions – to see what the elements of an explanation might be. How do we measure speed, after all? Only with devices which record intervals in different Dimensions: a distance travelled through Space, measured with a simple yardstick, and an interval in Time, which may be recorded with a clock.

‘So, if we take the experimental evidence of Michelson and Morley at face value, then we have to regard the speed of light as the fixed quantity, and the Dimensions as variable things. The universe adjusts itself in order to render our light-speed measurements constant.

‘I saw that one could express this geometrically, as a twisting of the Dimensions.’ I held up my hand, with two fingers and thumb held at right angles. ‘If we are in a framework of Four Dimensions – well, imagine rotating the whole business around, like this –’ I twisted my wrist ‘– so that Length comes to rest where Breadth used to be, and Breadth where Height was – and, most important, Duration and a Dimension of Space are interchanged. Do you see? One would not need a full transposition, of course – just a certain intermingling of the two to explain the Michelson-Morley adjustment.

‘I have kept these speculations to myself,’ I said. ‘I am not well-known as a theoretician. Besides, I have been reluctant to publish without experimental verification. But there are – were – others thinking along the same lines – I know of Fitzgerald in Dublin, Lorentz in Leiden, and Henri Poincaré in France – and it cannot be long before some more complete theory is expounded, dealing with this relativeness of frames of reference …

‘Well, then, this is the essence of my Time Machine,’ I concluded. ‘The machine twists Space and Time around itself, thus mutating Time into a Spatial Dimension – and then one may proceed, into past or future, as easy as riding a bicycle!’

I sat back in my chair; given the uncomfortable circumstances of this lecture, I told myself, I had acquitted myself remarkably well.

But my Morlock was not an appreciative audience. He stood there, regarding me through his blue goggles. Then, at length, he said, ‘Yes. But how, exactly?’

11
OUT OF THE CAGE

This response irritated me intensely! I got out of my chair and began to pace about my Cage. I came near to Nebogipfel, but I managed to resist the impulse to lapse into threatening simian gestures. I flatly refused to answer any more questions until he showed me something of his Sphere-world.

‘Look here,’ I said, ‘don’t you think you’re being a little unfair? After all, I’ve travelled across six hundred thousand years to see something of your world. And all I’ve had so far is a darkened hill-side in Richmond, and –’ I waved a hand at the encircling darkness ‘– this, and your endless questions!

‘Look at it this way, Nebogipfel. I know you will want me to give you a full account of my journey through time, and what I saw of History as it unfolded to your present. How can I tell such a tale if I have no understanding of its conclusion? – let alone of that other History which I witnessed.’

I left my speech there, hoping I had done enough to convince him.

He lifted his hand to his face; his thin, pallid fingers adjusted the goggles resting there, like any gentleman adjusting a pince-nez. ‘I will consult about this,’ he said at last. ‘We will speak again.’

And he departed. I watched him walk away, his bare soles pad-padding across the soft, starry Floor.

After I had slept once more, Nebogipfel returned. He raised his hand and beckoned; it was a stiff, unnatural gesture, as if he had learned it only recently.

‘Come with me,’ he said.

With a surge of exhilaration – tinged with not a little fear – I snatched my jacket up from the Floor.

I walked beside Nebogipfel, into the darkness which had encircled me for so many days. My shaft of sunlight receded behind me. I glanced back at the little spot which had been my inhospitable home, with its disordered trays, its heap of blankets, and my chair – perhaps the only chair in the world! I will not say I watched it go with any nostalgia, for I had been miserable and fearful during the whole of my stay in that Cage of Light, but I did wonder whether I would ever see it again.

Beneath our feet, the eternal stars hung like a million Chinese lanterns, borne on the breast of an invisible river.

As we walked, Nebogipfel held out blue goggles, very like the set he wore himself. I took these, but I protested: ‘What do I need of these? I am not dazzled, as you are –’

‘They are not for light. They are for darkness. Put them on.’

I lifted the goggles to my face. The set was built on two hoops of some pliable substance, which sandwiched the blue glass of the goggles itself; when I lifted the goggles to my face, the hoops slipped easily around my head and gripped there lightly.

I turned my head. I had no impression of blueness, despite the tint of my goggles. That shaft of sunlight seemed as bright as ever, and the image of Nebogipfel was as clear as it had been before. ‘They don’t seem to work,’ I said.

For answer, Nebogipfel tipped his head downwards.

I followed his gaze – and my step faltered. For, beneath my feet and through the soft Floor, the stars blazed. Those lights were no longer masked by the sheen of the Floor, or by my eyes’ poor dark-adaptation; it was as if I stood poised above some starry night in the mountains of Wales or Scotland! I suffered an intense stab of vertigo, as you might imagine.

I detected a trace of impatience about Nebogipfel now – he seemed anxious to proceed. We walked on in silence.

Within a very few paces, it seemed to me, Nebogipfel slowed, and I saw now, thanks to my goggles, that a wall lay a few feet from us. I reached out and touched its soot-black surface, but it had only the soft, warm texture of the Floor. I could not understand how we had reached the boundaries of this chamber so quickly. I wondered if somehow we had walked along some moving pavement which had assisted our footsteps; but Nebogipfel volunteered no information.

‘Tell me what this place is, before we leave it,’ I said.

His flaxen-haired head turned towards me. ‘An empty chamber.’

‘How wide?’

‘Approximately two thousand miles.’

I tried to conceal my reaction to this. Two thousand miles? Had I been alone, in a prison cell large enough to hold an ocean? ‘You have a great deal of room here,’ I said evenly.

‘The Sphere is large,’ he said. ‘If you are accustomed only to planetary distances, you may find it difficult to appreciate how large. The Sphere fills the orbit of the primal planet you called Venus. It has a surface area corresponding to nearly three hundred million earths –’

‘Three hundred million?’

My amazement met only with a blank stare from the Morlock, and more of that subtle impatience. I understood his restlessness, and yet I felt resentful – and a little embarrassed. To the Morlock, I was like some irritating man from the Congo come to London, who must ask the purpose and provenance of the simplest items, such as a fork or a pair of trousers!

To me, I reasoned, the Sphere was a startling construction! – but so might the Pyramids have been to some Neandertaler. For this complacent Morlock, the Sphere around the sun was part of the historic furniture of the world, no more to be remarked on than a landscape tamed by a thousand years of agriculture.

A door opened before us – it did not fold back, you understand, but rather it seemed to scissor itself away, much as does the diaphragm of a camera – and we stepped forward.

I gasped, and almost stumbled backwards. Nebogipfel watched me with his usual analytical calm.

From a room the size of a world – a room carpeted with stars – a million Morlock faces swivelled towards me.

12
THE MORLOCKS OF THE SPHERE

You must imagine that place: a single immense room, with a carpet of stars and a complex, engineered ceiling, and all of it going on forever, without walls. It was a place of black and silver, without any other colour. The Floor was marked out by partitions that came up to chest-height, though there were no dividing walls: there were no enclosed areas, nothing resembling our offices or homes, anywhere.

And there were Morlocks, a pale scattering of them, all across that transparent Floor; their faces were like grey flakes of snow sprinkled over the starry carpet. The place was filled with their voices: their constant, liquid babbling washed over me, oceanic in itself, and remote from the sounds of the human palate – and removed, too, from the dry voice Nebogipfel had become accustomed to using in my company.

There was a line at infinity, utterly straight and a little blurred by dust and mist, where the Roof met the Floor. And that line showed none of the bowing effect that one sometimes sees as one studies an ocean. It is hard to describe – it may seem that such things are beyond one’s intuition until they are experienced – but at that moment, standing there, I knew I was not on the surface of any planet. There was no far horizon beyond which rows of Morlocks were hidden, like receding sea-going ships; instead I knew that the earth’s tight, compact contours were far away. My heart sank, and I was quite daunted.

Nebogipfel stepped forward to me. He had doffed his goggles, and I had an impression it was with relief. ‘Come,’ he said gently. ‘Are you afraid? This is what you wanted to see. We will walk. And we will talk further.’

With great hesitation – it took me a genuine effort to step forward, away from the wall of my immense prison cell – I came after him.

I caused quite a stir in the population. Their little faces were all around me, huge-eyed and chinless. I shrank away from them as I walked, my dread of their cold flesh renewed. Some of them reached towards me, with their long, hair-covered arms. I could smell something of their bodies, a sweet, musty smell that was all too familiar. Most walked as upright as a man, although some preferred to lope along like an orang-utan, with knuckles grazing the Floor. Many of them had their hair, on scalp and back, coiffed in some style or other, some in a plain and severe fashion, like Nebogipfel, and some in a more flowing, decorative style. But there were one or two whose hair ran as wild and ragged as any Morlock’s I had encountered in Weena’s world, and at first I suspected that these individuals still ran savage, even here in this city-room; but they behaved as easily as the rest, and I hypothesized that these unkempt manes were simply another form of affectation – much as a man will sometimes allow his beard to grow to great profusion.

I became aware that I was passing by these Morlocks with remarkable speed – much quicker than my pace allowed. I almost stumbled at this realization. I glanced down, but I could see nothing to differentiate the stretch of transparent Floor on which I walked from any other; but I knew I must be on some form of moving pavement.

The crowding, pallid Morlock faces, the absence of colour, the flatness of the horizon, my unnatural speed through this bizarre landscape – and above all, the illusion that I was floating above a bottomless well of stars – combined into the semblance of a dream! – But then some curious Morlock would come too close, and I would get a whiff of his sickly scent, and reality pressed in again.

This was no dream: I was lost, I realized, marooned in this sea of Morlocks, and again I had to struggle to keep walking steadily, to avoid bunching my fists and driving them into the curious faces pressing around me.

I saw how the Morlocks were going about their mysterious business. Some were walking, some conversing, some eating food of the bland, uninteresting type which had been served to me, all as uninhibited as kittens. This observation, combined with the utter lack of any enclosed spaces, led me to understand that the Morlocks of the Sphere had no need of privacy, in the sense we understand it.

Most of the Morlocks seemed to me to be working, though at what I could not fathom. The surfaces of some of their partitions were inlaid with panes of a blue, glowing glass, and the Morlocks touched these panes with their thin, wormlike fingers, or talked earnestly into them. In response, graphs, pictures and text scrolled across the glass slabs. In some places this remarkable machinery was carried a stage further, and I saw elaborate models – representing what I could not say – springing into existence in mid-air. At a Morlock’s command, a model would rotate, or split open, displaying its interior – or fly apart, in dwindling arrays of floating cubes of coloured light.

And all of this activity, you must imagine, was immersed in a constant flow of the Morlocks’ liquid, guttural tongue.

Now we passed a place where a fresh partition was emerging from the Floor below. It rose up complete and finished like something emerging from a vat of mercury; when its growth was done it had become a thin slab about four feet high featuring three of the omnipresent blue windows. When I crouched down to peer through the transparent Floor, I could see nothing beneath the surface: no box, or uplifting machinery. It was as if the partition had appeared out of nothing. ‘Where does it come from?’ I asked Nebogipfel.

He said, after some thought – evidently he had to choose his words: ‘The Sphere has a Memory. It has machines which enable it to store that Memory. And the form of the data blocks –’ he meant the partitions ‘– is held in the Sphere’s Memory, to be retrieved in this material form as desired.’

For my entertainment, Nebogipfel caused more extrusions: on one pillar I saw a tray of foodstuffs and water rising out of the floor, as if prepared by some invisible butler!

I was struck by this idea of extrusions from the uniform and featureless Floor. It reminded me of the Platonist theory of thought expounded by some philosophers: that to every object there exists, in some realm, an ideal Form – an essence of Chair, the summation of Table-ness, and so on – and when an object is manufactured in our world, templates stored in the Platonic over-world are consulted.

Well, here I was in a Platonic universe made real: the whole of this mighty, sun-girdling Sphere was suffused by an artificial, god-like Memory – a Memory within whose rooms I walked even as we spoke. And within the Memory was stored the Ideal of every object the heart could desire – or at least, as desired by a Morlock heart.

How very convenient it would be to be able to manufacture and dissolve equipment and apparatus as one required! My great, draughty house in Richmond could be reduced to a single Room, I realized. In the morning, the bedroom furniture could be commanded to fade back into the carpet, to be replaced by the bathroom suite, and next the kitchen table. Like magic, the various apparatuses of my laboratory could be made to flow from the walls and ceiling, until I was ready to work. And at last, of an evening, I could summon up my dinner table, with its comfortable surrounds of fireplace and wallpaper; and perhaps the table could be manufactured already replete with food!

All our professions of builders, plumbers, carpenters and the like would disappear in a trice, I realized. The householder – the owner of such an Intelligent Room – would need to engage no more than a peripatetic cleaner (though perhaps the Room could take care of that too!), and perhaps there would be occasional boosts to the Room’s mechanical memory, to keep pace with the latest vogues …

So my fecund imagination ran on, quite out of my control.

I soon began to feel fatigued. Nebogipfel took me to a clear space – though there were Morlocks in the distance, all about me – and he tapped his foot on the Floor. A sort of shelter was extruded; it was perhaps four feet high, and little more than a roof set on four fat pillars: something like a substantial table, perhaps. Within the table there arose a bundle of blankets and a food-stand. I climbed into the hut gratefully – it was the first enclosure I had enjoyed since my arrival on the Sphere – and I acknowledged Nebogipfel’s consideration at providing it. I made a meal of water and some of the greenish cheese stuff, and I took off my goggles – I was immersed in the endless darkness of that Morlock world – and was able to sleep, with my head settled on a rolled-up blanket.

This odd little shelter was my home for the next few days, as I continued my tour of the Morlock’s city-chamber with Nebogipfel. Each time I arose, Nebogipfel had the Floor absorb the shelter once again, and he evoked it afresh in whatever place we stopped – so we had no luggage to carry! I have noted that the Morlocks did not sleep, and I think my antics in my hut were the source of considerable fascination to the natives of the Sphere – just as those of an orang-utan catch the eye of the civilized man, I suppose – and they would have crowded around me as I tried to sleep, pressing their little round faces in on me, and rest would have been impossible, had not Nebogipfel stayed by me, and deterred such sightseeing.

13
HOW THE MORLOCKS LIVED

In all the days Nebogipfel led me through that Morlock world, we never encountered a wall, door or other significant barrier. As near as I could make it out, we were restricted – the whole time – to a single chamber: but it was a chamber of a stupendous size. And it was, in its general details, homogenous, for everywhere I found this same carpet of Morlocks pursuing their obscure tasks. The simplest practicalities of such arrangements were startling enough; I considered, for example, the prosaic problems of maintaining a consistent and stable atmosphere, at an even temperature, pressure and humidity, over such scales of length. And yet, Nebogipfel gave me to understand, this was but one chamber in a sort of mosaic of them, that tiled the Sphere from Pole to Pole.

I soon came to understand that there were no cities on this Sphere, in the modern sense. The Morlock population was spread over these immense chambers, and there were no fixed sites for any given activity. If the Morlocks wished to assemble a work area – or clear it for some other purpose – the relevant apparatuses could be extruded directly from the Floor, or else absorbed back. Thus, rather than cities, there were to be found nodes of population of higher density – nodes which shifted and migrated, according to purpose.

After one sleep I had clambered out of the shelter and was sitting cross-legged on the Floor, sipping water. Nebogipfel remained standing, seemingly without fatigue. Then I saw approaching us a brace of Morlocks, the sight of which made me swallow a mouthful of water too hastily; I sputtered, and droplets of water sprayed across my jacket and trousers.

I supposed the pair were indeed Morlocks – but they were like no Morlocks I had seen before: whereas Nebogipfel was a little under five feet tall, these were like cartoon caricatures, extended to a height of perhaps twelve feet! One of the long creatures noticed me, and he came loping over, metal splints on his legs clattering as he walked; he stepped over the intervening partitions like some huge gazelle.

He bent down and peered at me. His red-grey eyes were the size of dinner-plates, and I quailed away from him. His odour was sharp, like burned almonds. His limbs were long and fragile-looking, and his skin seemed stretched over that extended skeleton: I was able to see, embedded in one shin and quite visible through drum-tight skin, the profile of a tibia no less than four feet long. Splints of some soft metal were attached to those long leg-bones, evidently to help strengthen them against snapping. This attenuated beast seemed to have no greater number of follicles than your average Morlock, so that his hair was scattered over that stretched-out frame, in a very ugly fashion.

He exchanged a few liquid syllables with Nebogipfel, then rejoined his companion and – with many a backward glance at me – went on his way.

I turned to Nebogipfel, stunned; even he seemed an oasis of normality after that vision.

Nebogipfel said, ‘They are –’ a liquid word I could not repeat ‘– from the higher latitudes.’ He glanced after our two visitors. ‘You can see that they are unsuited to this equatorial region. Splints are required to help them walk, and –’

‘I don’t see it at all,’ I broke in. ‘What’s so different about the higher latitudes?’

‘Gravity,’ he said.

Dimly, I began to understand.

The Morlocks’ Sphere was, as I have recorded, a titanic construction which filled up the orbit once occupied by Venus. And – Nebogipfel told me now – the whole thing rotated, about an axis. Once, Venus’s year had been two hundred and twenty-five days. Now – said Nebogipfel – the great Sphere turned in just seven days and thirteen hours!

‘And so the rotation –’ Nebogipfel began.

‘– induces centrifugal effects, simulating the earth’s gravity at the equator. Yes,’ I said, ‘I see it.’

The spin of the Sphere kept us all plastered to this Floor. But away from the equator, the turning circle of a point on the Sphere about the rotation axis was less, and so the effective gravity was reduced: gravity dwindled to zero, in fact, at the Sphere’s rotation poles. And in those extraordinary, broad continents of lower gravity, such remarkable animals as those two loping Morlocks lived, and had adapted to their conditions.

I thumped my forehead with the back of my hand.

‘Sometimes I think I am the greatest fool who ever lived!’ I exclaimed to the bemused Nebogipfel. For I had never thought to inquire about the source of my ‘weight’, here on the Sphere. What sort of scientist was it who failed to question – even to observe properly – the ‘gravity’ which, in the absence of anything so convenient as a planet, glued him to the surface of this Sphere? I wondered how many other marvels I was passing by, simply from the fact that it did not occur to me to ask about them – and yet to Nebogipfel such features were merely a part of the world, of no more novelty than a sunset, or a butterfly’s wing.

I teased out of Nebogipfel details of how the Morlocks lived. It was difficult, for I scarcely knew how to begin even to phrase my questions. That may seem odd to state – but how was I to ask, for instance, about the machinery which underpinned this transforming Floor? It was doubtful if my language contained the concepts required even to frame the query, just as a Neandertaler would lack the linguistic tools to inquire about the workings of a clock. And as to the social and other arrangements which, invisibly, governed the lives of the millions of Morlocks in this immense chamber, I remained as ignorant as might a tribesman arrived in London fresh from Central Africa would have been of social movements, of telephone and telegraph wires, of the Parcels Delivery Company, and the like. Even their arrangements for sewage remained a mystery to me!

I asked Nebogipfel how the Morlocks governed themselves.

He explained to me – in a somewhat patronizing manner, I thought – that the Sphere was a large enough place for several ‘nations’ of Morlocks. These ‘nations’ were distinguished mainly by the mode of government they chose. Almost all had some form of democratic process in place. In some areas a representative parliament was selected by a Universal Suffrage, much along the lines of our own Westminster Parliament. Elsewhere, suffrage was restricted to an elite sub-group, composed of those considered especially capable, by temperament and training, of governance: I think the nearest models in our philosophy are the classical republics, or perhaps the ideal form of Republic imagined by Plato; and I admit that this approach appealed to my own instincts.

But in most areas, the machinery of the Sphere had made possible a form of true Universal Suffrage, in which the inhabitants were kept abreast of current debates by means of the blue windows in their partitions, and then instantly registered their preferences on each issue by similar means. Thus, governance proceeded on a piecemeal basis, with every major decision subject to the collective whim of the populace.

I felt distrustful of such a system. ‘But surely there are some in the population who cannot be empowered with such authority! What about the insane, or the feeble-minded?’

He considered me with a certain stiffness. ‘We have no such weaknesses.’

I felt like challenging this Utopian – even here, in the heart of his Utopia! ‘And how do you ensure that?’

He did not answer me immediately. Instead, he went on, ‘Each member of our adult population is rational, and able to make decisions on behalf of others – and is trusted to do so. In such circumstances, the purest form of democracy is not only possible, it is advisable – for many minds combine to produce decisions superior to those of one.’

I snorted. ‘Then what of all these other Parliaments and Senates you have described?’

‘Not everyone agrees that the arrangements in this part of the Sphere are ideal,’ he said. ‘Is that not the essence of freedom? Not all of us are sufficiently interested in the mechanics of governance to wish to participate; and for some, the entrusting of power to another through representation – or even without any representation at all – is preferable. That is a valid choice.’

‘Fine. But what happens when such choices conflict?’

‘We have room,’ he said heavily. ‘You must not forget that fact; you are still dominated by planet-bound expectations. Any dissenter is free to depart, and to establish a rival system elsewhere …’

These ‘nations’ of the Morlocks were fluid things, with individuals joining and leaving as their preferences evolved. There was no fixed territory or possessions, nor even any fixed boundaries, as far as I could make out; the ‘nations’ were mere groupings of convenience, clusterings across the Sphere.

There was no war among the Morlocks.

It took me some time to believe this, but at last I was convinced. There were no causes for war. Thanks to the mechanisms of the Floor there was no shortage of provision, so no ‘nation’ could argue for goals of economic acquisition. The Sphere was so huge that the empty land available was almost unlimited, so that territorial conflicts were meaningless. And – most crucially – the Morlocks’ heads were free of the canker of religion, which has caused so much conflict through the centuries.

‘You have no God, then,’ I said to Nebogipfel, with something of a thrill: though I have some religious tendencies myself, I imagined shocking the clerics of my own day with an account of this conversation!

‘We have no need of a God,’ Nebogipfel retorted.

The Morlocks regarded a religious set of mind – as opposed to a rational state – as a hereditable trait, with no more intrinsic meaning than blue eyes or brown hair.

The more Nebogipfel outlined this notion, the more sense it made to me.

What notion of God has survived through all of Humanity’s mental evolution? Why, precisely the form it might suit man’s vanity to conjure up: a God with immense powers, and yet still absorbed in the petty affairs of man. Who could worship a chilling God, even if omnipotent, if He took no interest whatsoever in the flea-bite struggles of humans?

One might imagine that, in any conflict between rational humans and religious humans, the rational ought to win. After all, it is rationality that invented gunpowder! And yet – at least up to our nineteenth century – the religious tendency has generally won out, and natural selection operated, leaving us with a population of religiously-inclined sheep – it has sometimes seemed to me – capable of being deluded by any smooth-tongued preacher.

The paradox is explained because religion provides a goal for men to fight for. The religious man will soak some bit of ‘sacred’ land with his blood, sacrificing far more than the land’s intrinsic economic or other value.

‘But we have moved beyond this paradox,’ Nebogipfel said to me. ‘We have mastered our inheritance: we are no longer governed by the dictates of the past, either as regards our bodies or our minds …’

But I did not follow up this intriguing notion – the obvious question to ask was, ‘In the absence of a God, then, what is the purpose of all of your lives?’ – for I was entranced by the idea of how Mr Darwin, with all his modern critics in the Churches, would have loved to have witnessed this ultimate triumph of his ideas over the Religionists!

In fact – as it turned out – my understanding of the true purpose of the Morlocks’ civilization would not come until much later.

I was impressed, though, with all I saw of this artificial world of the Morlocks – I am not sure if my respectful awe has been reflected in my account here. This brand of Morlock had indeed mastered their inherited weaknesses; they had put aside the legacy of the brute – the legacy bequeathed by us – and had thereby achieved a stability and capability almost unimaginable to a man of 1891: to a man like me, who had grown up in a world torn apart daily by war, greed and incompetence.

And this mastery of their own nature was all the more striking for its contrast with those other Morlocks – Weena’s Morlocks – who had, quite obviously, fallen foul of the brute within, despite their mechanical and other aptitudes.

14
CONSTRUCTIONS AND DIVERGENCES

I discussed the construction of the Sphere with Nebogipfel. ‘I imagine great engineering schemes which broke up the giant planets – Jupiter and Saturn – and –’

‘No,’ Nebogipfel said. ‘There was no such scheme; the primal planets – from the earth outward – still orbit the sun’s heart. There would not have been sufficient material in all the planets combined even to begin the construction of such an entity as this Sphere.’

‘Then how –?’

Nebogipfel described how the sun had been encircled by a great fleet of space-faring craft, which bore immense magnets of a design – involving electrical circuits whose resistance was somehow reduced to zero – I could not fathom. The craft circled the sun with increasing speed, and a belt of magnetism tightened around the sun’s million-mile midriff. And – as if that great star were no more than a soft fruit, held in a crushing fist – great founts of the sun’s material, which is itself magnetized, were forced away from the equator to gush from the star’s poles.

More fleets of space-craft then manipulated this huge cloud of lifted material, forming it at last into an enclosing shell; and the shell was then compressed, using shaped magnetic fields once more, and transmuted into the solid structures I saw around me.

The enclosed sun still shone, for even the immense detached masses required to construct this great artefact were but an invisible fraction of the sun’s total bulk; and within the Sphere, sunlight shone perpetually over giant continents, each of which could have swallowed millions of splayed-out earths.

Nebogipfel said, ‘A planet like the earth can intercept only an invisible fraction of the sun’s output, with the rest disappearing, wasted, into the sink of space. Now, all of the sun’s energy is captured by the enclosing Sphere. And that is the central justification for constructing the Sphere: we have harnessed a star …’

In a million years, Nebogipfel told me, the Sphere would capture enough additional solar material to permit its thickening by one-twenty-fifth of an inch – an invisibly small layer, but covering a stupendous area! The solar material, transformed, was used to further the construction of the Sphere. Meanwhile, some solar energy was harnessed to sustain the Interior of the Sphere and to power the Morlocks’ various projects.

With some excitement, I described what I had witnessed during my journey through futurity: the brightening of the sun, and that jetting at the poles – and then how the sun had disappeared into blackness, as the Sphere was thrown around it.

Nebogipfel regarded me, I fancied with some envy. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you did indeed watch the construction of the Sphere. It took ten thousand years …’

‘But to me on my machine, no more than heartbeats passed.’

‘You have told me that this is your second voyage into the future. And that during your first, you saw differences.’

‘Yes.’ Now I confronted that perplexing mystery once more. ‘Differences in the unfolding of History … Nebogipfel, when I first journeyed to the future, your Sphere was never built.’

I summarized to Nebogipfel how I had formerly travelled far beyond this year of A.D. 657,208. During that first voyage, I had watched the colonization of the land by a tide of rich green, as winter was abolished from the earth and the sun grew unaccountably brighter. But – unlike my second trip – I saw no signs of the regulation of the earth’s axial tilt, nor did I witness anything of the slowing of its rotation. And, most dramatic, without the construction of the sun-shielding Sphere, the earth had remained fair, and had not been banished into the Morlocks’ Stygian darkness.

‘And so,’ I told Nebogipfel, ‘I arrived in the year A.D. 802,701 – a hundred and fifty thousand years into your future – yet I cannot believe, if I had travelled on so far this time, that I should find the same world again!’

I summarized to Nebogipfel what I had seen of Weena’s world, with its Eloi and degraded Morlocks. Nebogipfel thought this over. ‘There has been no such state of affairs in the evolution of Humanity, in all of recorded History – my History,’ he said. ‘And since the Sphere, once constructed, is self-sustaining, it is difficult to imagine that such a descent into barbarism is possible in our future.’

‘So there you have it,’ I agreed. ‘I have journeyed through two, quite exclusive, versions of History. Can History be like unfired clay, able to be remade?’

‘Perhaps it can,’ Nebogipfel murmured. ‘When you returned to your own era – to 1891 – did you bring any evidence of your travels?’

‘Not much,’ I admitted. ‘But I did bring back some flowers, pretty white things like mallows, which Weena – which an Eloi had placed in my pocket. My friends examined them. The flowers were of an order they couldn’t recognize, and I remember how they remarked on the gynoecium …’

‘Friends?’ Nebogipfel said sharply. ‘You left an account of your journey, before embarking once more?’

‘Nothing written. But I did give some friends a fullish account of the affair, over dinner.’ I smiled. ‘And if I know one of that circle, the whole thing was no doubt written up in the end in some popularized and sensational form – perhaps presented as fiction …’

Nebogipfel approached me. ‘Then there,’ he said to me, his quiet voice queerly dramatic, ‘there is your explanation.’

‘Explanation?’

‘For the Divergence of Histories.’

I faced him, horrified by a dawning comprehension. ‘You mean that with my account – my prophecy – I changed History?’

‘Yes. Armed with that warning, Humanity managed to avoid the degradation and conflict that resulted in the primitive, cruel world of Eloi and Morlock. Instead, we continued to grow; instead, we have harnessed the sun.’

I felt quite unable to face the consequences of this hypothesis – although its truth and clarity struck me immediately. I shouted, ‘But some things have stayed the same. Still you Morlocks skulk in the dark!’

‘We are not Morlocks,’ Nebogipfel said softly. ‘Not as you remember them. And as for the dark – what need have we of a flood of light? We choose the dark. Our eyes are fine instruments, capable of revealing much beauty. Without the brutal glare of the sun, the full subtlety of the sky can be discerned …’

I could find no distraction in goading Nebogipfel, and I had to face the truth. I stared down at my hands – great battered things, scarred with decades of labour. My sole aim, to which I had devoted the efforts of these hands, had been to explore time! – to determine how things would come out on the cosmological scale, beyond my own few mayfly decades of life. But, it seemed, I had succeeded in far more.

My invention was much more powerful than a mere time-travelling machine: it was a History Machine, a destroyer of worlds!

I was a murderer of the future: I had taken on, I realized, more powers than God himself (if Aquinas is to be believed). By my twisting-up of the workings of History, I had wiped over billions of unborn lives – lives that would now never come to be.

I could hardly bear to live with the knowledge of this presumption. I have always been distrustful of personal power – for I have met not one man wise enough to be entrusted with it – but now, I had taken to myself more power than any man who had ever lived!

If I should ever recover my Time Machine – I promised myself then – I would return into the past, to make one final, conclusive adjustment to History, and abolish my own invention of the infernal device.

… And I realized now that I could never retrieve Weena. For, not only had I caused her death – now, it turned out, I had nullified her very existence!

Through all this turmoil of the emotions, the pain of that little loss sounded sweet and clear, like the note of an oboe in the midst of the clamour of some great orchestra.

15
LIFE AND DEATH AMONG THE MORLOCKS

One day, Nebogipfel led me to what was, perhaps, the most disquieting thing I saw in all my time in that city-chamber.

We approached an area, perhaps a half-mile square, where the partitions seemed lower than usual. As we neared, I became aware of a rising level of noise – a babble of liquid throats – and a sharply increased smell of Morlock, of their characteristic musty, sickly sweetness. Nebogipfel bade me pause on the edge of this clearing.

Through my goggles I was able to see that the surface of the cleared-out area was alive – it pulsated – with the mewling, wriggling, toddling form of babies. There were thousands of them, these tumbling Morlock infants, their little hands and feet pawing at each other’s clumps of untidy hair. They rolled, just like young apes, and poked at junior versions of the informative partitions I have described elsewhere, or crammed food into their dark mouths; here and there, adults walked through the crowd, raising one who had fallen here, untangling a miniature dispute there, soothing a wailing infant beyond.

I gazed out over this sea of infants, bemused. Perhaps such a collection of human children might be found appealing by some – not by me, a confirmed bachelor – but these were Morlocks … You must remember that the Morlock is not an attractive entity to human sensibilities, even as a child, with his worm-pallor flesh, his coolness to the touch, and that spider-webbing of hair. If you think of a giant tabletop covered in wriggling maggots, you will have something of my impression as I stood there!

I turned to Nebogipfel. ‘But where are their parents?’

He hesitated, as if searching for the right phrase. ‘They have no parents. This is a birth farm. When old enough, the infants will be transported from here to a nursery community, either on the Sphere or …’

But I had stopped listening. I glanced at Nebogipfel, up and down, but his hair masked the form of his body.

With a jolt of wonder, I saw now another of those facts which had stared me in the eyeball since my arrival here, but which I was too clever by far to perceive: there was no evidence of sexual discrimination – not in Nebogipfel, nor in any of the Morlocks I had come across – not even in those, like my low-gravity visitors, whose bodies were sparsely coated with hair, and so easier to make out. Your average Morlock was built like a child, undifferentiated sexually, with the same lack of emphasis on hips or chest … I realized with a shock that I knew nothing of – nor had I thought to question – the Morlocks’ processes of love and birth!

Nebogipfel told me something now of the rearing and education of the Morlock young.

The Morlock began his life in these birth farms and nursery communities – the whole of the Earth, to my painful recollection, had been given over to one such – and there, in addition to the rudiments of civilized behaviour, the youngster was taught one essential skill: the ability to learn. It is as if a schoolboy of the nineteenth century – instead of having drummed into his poor head a lot of nonsense about Greek and Latin and obscure geometric theorems – had been taught, instead, how to concentrate, and to use libraries, and the mechanisms of how to assimilate knowledge – how, above all, to think. After that, the acquisition of any specific knowledge depended on the needs of the task in hand, and the inclination of the individual.

When Nebogipfel summarized this to me, its simplicity of logic struck me with an almost physical force. Of course! – I said to myself – so much for schools! What a contrast to the battleground of Ignorance with Incompetence that made up my own, unlamented schooldays!

I was moved to ask Nebogipfel about his own profession.

He explained to me that once the date of my origin had been fixed, he had made himself into something of an expert in my period and its mores from the records of his people; and he had become aware of several significant differences between the ways of our races.

‘Our occupations are not as consuming as yours,’ he said. ‘I have two loves – two vocations.’ His eyes were invisible, making his emotions even more impossible to read. He said: ‘Physics, and the training of the young.’

Education, and training of all sorts, continued throughout a Morlock’s lifetime, and it was not unusual for an individual to pursue three or four ‘careers’, as we might call them, in sequence, or even in parallel. The general level of intelligence of the Morlocks was, I got the impression, rather higher than that of the people of my own century.

Still, Nebogipfel’s choice of vocations startled me; I had thought that Nebogipfel must specialize solely in the physical sciences, such was his ability to follow my sometimes rambling accounts of the theory of the Time Machine, and the evolution of History.

‘Tell me,’ I said lightly, ‘for which of your talents were you appointed to supervise me? Your expertise in physics – or your nannying skills?’

I thought his black, small-toothed mouth stretched in a grin.

Then the truth struck me – and I felt a certain humiliation burn in me at the thought. I am an eminent man of my day, and yet I had been put in the charge of one more suited to shepherding children!

… And yet, I reflected now, what was my blundering about, when I first arrived in the Year 657,208, but the actions of a comparative child?

Now Nebogipfel led me to a corner of the nursery area. This special place was covered by a structure about the size and shape of a small conservatory, done out in the pale, translucent material of the Floor – in fact, this was one of the few parts of that city-chamber to be covered over in any way. Nebogipfel led me inside the structure. The shelter was empty of furniture or apparatus, save for one or two of the partitions with glowing screens which I had noticed elsewhere. And, in the centre of the Floor, there was what looked like a small bundle – of clothing, perhaps – being extruded from the glass.

The Morlocks who attended here had a more serious bent than those who supervised the children, I perceived. Over their pale hair they wore loose smocks – vest-like garments with many pockets – crammed with tools which were mostly quite incomprehensible to me. Some of the tools glowed faintly. This latest class of Morlock had something of the air of the engineer, I thought: it was an odd attribute in this sea of babies; and, although they were distracted by my clumsy presence, the engineers watched the little bundle on the Floor, and passed instruments over it periodically.

My curiosity engaged, I stepped towards that central bundle. Nebogipfel hung back, letting me proceed alone. The thing was only a few inches long, and was still half-embedded in the glass, like a sculpture being hewn from some rocky surface. In fact it did look a little like a statue: here were the buds of two arms, I thought, and there was what might become a face – a disc coated with hair, and split by a thin mouth. The bundle’s extrusion seemed slow, and I wondered what was so difficult for the hidden devices about manufacturing this particular artefact. Was it especially complex, perhaps?

And then – it was a moment which will haunt me as long as I live – that tiny mouth opened. The lips parted with a soft popping sound, and a mewling, fainter than that of the tiniest kitten, emerged to float on the air; and the miniature face crumpled, as if in some mild distress.

I stumbled backwards, as shocked as if I had been punched.

Nebogipfel seemed to have anticipated something of my distress. He said, ‘You must remember that you are dislocated in Time by a half million years: the interval between us is ten times the age of your species …’

‘Nebogipfel – can it be true? That your young – you yourself – are extruded from this Floor, manufactured with no more majesty than a cup of water?’ The Morlocks had indeed ‘mastered their genetic inheritance’, I thought – for they had abolished gender, and done away with birth.

‘Nebogipfel,’ I protested, ‘this is – inhuman.’

He tilted his head; evidently the word meant nothing to him. ‘Our policy is designed to optimize the potential of the human form – for we are human too,’ he said severely. ‘That form is dictated by a sequence of a million genes, and so the number of possible human individuals – while large – is finite. And all of these individuals may be –’ he hesitated ‘– imagined by the Sphere’s intelligence.’

Sepulture, he told me, was also governed by the Sphere, with the abandoned bodies of the dead being passed into the Floor without ceremony or reverence, for the dismantling and reuse of their materials.

‘The Sphere assembles the materials required to give the chosen individual life, and –’

‘“Chosen”?’ I confronted the Morlock, and the anger and violence which I had excluded from my thoughts for so long flooded back into my soul. ‘How very rational. But what else have you rationalized out, Morlock? What of tenderness? What of love?’

‘And then – it was a moment which will haunt me as long as I live – that tiny mouth opened.’

16
DECISION AND DEPARTURE

I stumbled out of that grisly birthing-hut and stared around at the huge city-chamber, with its ranks of patient Morlocks pursuing their incomprehensible activities. I longed to shout at them, to shatter their repulsive perfection; but I knew, even in that dark moment, that I could not afford to allow their perception of my behaviour to worsen once more.

I wanted to flee even from Nebogipfel. He had shown some kindness and consideration to me, I realized: more than I deserved, perhaps, and more, probably, than men of my own age might have afforded some violent savage from a half-million years before Christ. But still, he had been, I sensed, fascinated and amused by my reactions to the birthing process. Perhaps he had engineered this revelation to provoke just such an extreme of emotion in me! Well, if such was his intention, Nebogipfel had succeeded. But now my humiliation and unreasoning anger were such that I could scarcely bear to look on his ornately-coiffed features.

And yet I had nowhere else to go! Like it or not, I knew, Nebogipfel was my only point of reference in this strange Morlock world: the only individual alive whose name I knew, and – for all I knew of Morlock politics – my only protector.

Perhaps Nebogipfel sensed some of this conflict in me. At any rate, he did not press his company on me; instead, he turned his back, and once more evoked my small sleeping-hut from the Floor. I ducked into the hut and sat in its darkest corner, with my arms wrapped around me – I cowered like some forest animal brought to New York!

I stayed in there for some hours – perhaps I slept. At last, I felt some resilience of mind returning, and I took some food and performed a perfunctory toilet.

I think – before the incident of the birth farm – I had come to be intrigued by my glimpses of this New Morlock world. I have always thought myself above all a Rational man, and I was fascinated by this vision of how a society of Rational Beings might order things – of how Science and Engineering might be applied to build a better world. I had been impressed by the Morlocks’ tolerance of different approaches to politics and governance, for instance. But the sight of that half-formed homunculus had quite unhinged me. Perhaps my reaction demonstrates how deep embedded are the basic values and instincts of our species.

If it was true that the New Morlocks had conquered their genetic inheritance, the taint of the ancient oceans, then, at that moment of inner turmoil, I envied them their equanimity!

I knew now that I must get away from the company of the Morlocks – I might be tolerated, but there was no place for me here, any more than for a gorilla in a Mayfair hotel – and I began to formulate a new resolve.

I emerged from my shelter. Nebogipfel was there, waiting, as if he had never left the vicinity of the hut. With a brush of his hand over a pedestal, he caused the discarded shelter to dissolve back into the Floor.

‘Nebogipfel,’ I said briskly, ‘it must be obvious to you that I am as out of place here as some zoo animal, escaped in a city.’

He said nothing; his gaze seemed impassive.

‘Unless it is your intention to hold me as a prisoner, or as a specimen in some laboratory, I have no desire to stay here. I request that you allow me access to my Time Machine, so that I might return to my own Age.’

‘You are not a prisoner,’ he said. ‘The word has no translation in our language. You are a sentient being, and as such you have rights. The only constraints on your behaviour are that you should not further harm others by your actions –’

‘Which constraints I accept,’ I said stiffly.

‘– and,’ he went on, ‘that you should not depart in your machine.’

‘Then so much for my rights,’ I snarled at him. ‘I am a prisoner here – and a prisoner in time!’

‘Although the theory of time travel is clear enough – and the mechanical structure of your device is obvious – we do not yet have any understanding of the principles involved,’ the Morlock said. I thought this must mean that they did not yet understand the significance of Plattnerite. ‘But,’ Nebogipfel went on, ‘we think this technology could be of great value to our species.’

‘I’m sure you do!’ I had a sudden vision of these Morlocks, with their magical devices and wondrous weapons, returning on adapted Time Machines to the London of 1891.

The Morlocks would keep my Humanity safe and fed. But, deprived of his soul, and perhaps at last of his children, I foresaw that modern man would survive no more than a few generations!

My horror at this prospect got the blood pumping through my neck – and yet even at that moment, some remote, rational corner of my mind was pointing out to me certain difficulties with this picture. ‘Look here,’ I told myself, ‘if all modern men were destroyed in this way – but modern man is nevertheless the ancestor of the Morlock – then the Morlocks could never evolve in the first place, and so never capture my machine and return through time … It’s a paradox, isn’t it? For you can’t have it both ways.’ You have to remember that in some remote part of my brain the unsolved problem of my second flight through time – with the divergence of Histories I had witnessed – was still fermenting away, and I knew in my heart that my understanding of the philosophy behind this time travelling business was still limited, at best.

But I pushed all that away as I confronted Nebogipfel. ‘Never. I will never assist you to acquire time travel.’

Nebogipfel regarded me. ‘Then – within the constraints I have set out for you – you are free, to travel anywhere in our worlds.’

‘In that case, I ask that you take me to a place – wherever it might be in this engineered solar system – where men like me still exist.’

I think I threw out this challenge, expecting a denial of any such possibility. But, to my surprise, Nebogipfel stepped towards me. ‘Not precisely like you,’ he said. ‘But still – come.’

And, with that, he stepped out once more across that immense, populated plain. I thought his final words had been more than ominous, but I could not understand what he meant – and, in any event, I had little choice but to follow him.

We reached a clear area perhaps a quarter-mile across. I had long since lost any sense of direction in that immense city-chamber. Nebogipfel donned his goggles, and I retained mine.

Suddenly – without warning – a beam of light arced down from the roof above and skewered us. I peered up into a warm yellowness, and saw dust-motes cascading about in the air; for a moment I thought I had been returned to my Cage of Light.

For some seconds we waited – I could not see that Nebogipfel had issued any commands to the invisible machines that governed this place – but then the Floor under my feet gave a sharp jolt. I stumbled, for it had felt like a small earthquake, and was quite unexpected; but I recovered quickly.

‘What was that?’

Nebogipfel was unperturbed. ‘Perhaps I should have warned you. Our ascent has started.’

‘Ascent?’

A disc of glass, perhaps a quarter-mile wide, was rising up out of the Floor, I saw now, and was bearing me and Nebogipfel aloft. It was as if I stood atop some immense pillar, which thrust out of the ground. Already we had risen through perhaps ten feet, and our pace upwards seemed to be accelerating; I felt a whisper of breeze on my forehead.

I walked a little way towards the lip of the disc and I watched as that immense, complex plain of Morlocks opened up below me. The chamber stretched as far as I could see, utterly flat, evenly populated. The Floor looked like some elaborate map, perhaps of the constellations, done out in silver thread and black velvet – and overlaying the real star vista beneath. One or two silvery faces were turned up to us as we ascended, but most of the Morlocks seemed quite indifferent.

‘Nebogipfel – where are we going?’

‘To the Interior,’ he said calmly.

I was aware of a change in the light. It seemed much brighter, and more diffuse – it was no longer restricted to a single ray, as might be seen at the bottom of a well.

I craned up my neck. The disc of light above me was widening, even as I watched, so that I could now make out a ring of sky, around the central disc of sun. That sky was blue, and speckled with high, fluffy clouds; but the sky had an odd texture, a blotchiness of colour which at first I attributed to the goggles I still wore.

Nebogipfel turned from me. He tapped with his foot at the base of our platform, and an object was extruded – at first I could not recognize it – it was a shallow bowl, with a stick protruding from its centre. It was only when Nebogipfel picked it up and held it over his head that I recognized it for what it was: a simple parasol, to keep the sun from his etiolated flesh.

Thus prepared, we rose up into the light – the shaft widened – and my nineteenth-century head ascended into a plain of grass!

17
IN THE INTERIOR

‘Welcome to the Interior,’ Nebogipfel announced, comical with his parasol.

Our quarter-mile-wide pillar of glass ascended through its last few yards quite soundlessly. I felt as if I were rising like some illusionist’s assistant on a stage. I took off my goggles, and shaded my eyes with my hands.

The platform slowed to a halt, and its edge merged with the meadow of short, wiry grass which ringed it, as seamless as if it were some foundation of concrete which had been laid there. My shadow was a sharp dark patch, directly beneath me. It was noon here, of course; everywhere in the Interior, it was noon, all day and every day! The blinding sun beat down on my head and neck – I suspected I should soon get burned – but the pleasurable feel of this captive sunlight was worth the cost, at that moment.

I turned, studying the landscape.

Grass – a featureless plain of it – grass grew everywhere, all the way to the horizon – except that there was no horizon, here on this flattened-out world. I looked up, expecting to see the world curve upwards: for I was, after all, no longer glued to the outer surface of a little ball of rock like the earth, but standing on the inside of an immense, hollow shell. But there was no such optical effect; I saw only more grass, and perhaps some clumps of trees or bushes, far in the distance. The sky was a blue-tinged plain of high, light cloud, which merged with the land at a flat seam of mist and dust.

‘I feel as if I’m standing on some immense tabletop,’ I said to Nebogipfel. ‘I thought it would be like some huge bowl of landscape. What a paradox it is that I cannot tell if I am inside a great Sphere, or on the outside of a gigantic planet!’

‘There are ways to tell,’ Nebogipfel replied from beneath his parasol. ‘Look up.’

I craned my neck backwards. At first I could see only the sky and the sun – it could have been any sky of earth. Then, gradually, I began to make out something beyond the clouds. It was that blotchiness of texture about the sky which I had observed as we ascended, and attributed to some defect of the goggles. The blotches were something like a distant water-colouring, done in blue and grey and green, but finely detailed, so that the largest of the patches was dwarfed by the tiniest scrap of cloud. It looked rather like a map – or several maps, jammed up together and viewed from a great distance.

And it was that analogy which led me to the truth.

‘It is the far side of the Sphere, beyond the sun … I suppose the colours I can see are oceans, and continents, and mountain ranges and prairies – perhaps even cities!’ It was a remarkable sight – as if the rocky coats of thousands of flayed earths had been hung up like so many rabbit furs. There was no sense of curvature, such was the immense scale of the Sphere. Rather, it was as if I was sandwiched between layers, between this flattened prairie of grass and the lid of textured sky, with the sun suspended like a lantern in between – and with the depths of space a mere mile or two beneath my feet!

‘Remember that when you look at the Interior’s far side you are looking across the width of the orbit of Venus,’ Nebogipfel cautioned me. ‘From such a distance, the earth itself would be reduced to a mere point of light. Many of the topographic features here are built on a much larger scale than the earth itself.’

‘There must be oceans that could swallow the earth!’ I mused. ‘I suppose that the geological forces in a structure like this are –’

‘There is no geology here,’ Nebogipfel cut in. ‘The Interior, and its landscapes, is artificial. Everything you see was, in essence, designed to be as it is – and it is maintained that way, quite consciously.’ He seemed unusually reflective. ‘Much is different in this History, from that other you have described. But some things are constant: this is a world of perpetual day – in contrast to my own world, of night. We have indeed split into species of extremes, of Dark and Light, just as in that other History.’

Nebogipfel led me now to the edge of our glass disc. He stayed on the platform, his parasol cocked over his head; but I stepped boldly out onto the surrounding grass. The ground was hard under my feet, but I was pleased to have the sensation of a different surface beneath me, after days of that bland, yielding Floor. Though short, the grass was tough, wiry stuff, of the kind commonly encountered close to sea shores; and when I reached down and dug my fingers into the ground, I found that the soil was quite sandy and dry. I unearthed one small beetle, there in the row of little pits I had dug with my fingers; it scuttled out of sight, deeper into the sand.

A breeze hissed across the grass. There was no bird song, I noticed; I heard no animal’s call.

‘The soil’s none too rich,’ I called back to Nebogipfel.

‘No,’ he said. ‘But the –’ a liquid word I could not recognize ‘– is recovering.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I mean the complex of plants and insects and animals which function together, interdependent. It is only forty thousand years since the war.’

‘What war?’

Now Nebogipfel shrugged – his shoulders lurched, causing his body hair to rustle – a gesture he could only have copied from me! ‘Who knows? Its causes are forgotten, the combatants – the nations and their children – all dead.’

‘You told me there was no warfare here,’ I accused him.

‘Not among the Morlocks,’ he said. ‘But within the Interior … This one was very destructive. Great bombs fell. The land here was destroyed – all life obliterated.’

‘But surely the plants, the smaller animals –’

‘Everything. You do not understand. Everything died, save the grass and the insects, across a million square miles. And it is only now that the land has become safe.’

‘Nebogipfel, what kind of people live here? Are they like me?’

He paused. ‘Some mimic your archaic variant. But there are even some older forms; I know of a colony of reconstructed Neandertalers, who have reinvented the religions of that vanished folk … And there are some who have developed beyond you: who diverge from you as much as I do, though in different ways. The Sphere is large. If you wish I will take you to a colony of an approximation of your own kind …’

‘Oh – I’m not sure what I want!’ I said. ‘I think I’m overwhelmed by this place, this world of worlds, Nebogipfel. I want to see what I can make of it all, before I choose where I will spend my life. Can you understand that?’

He did not debate the proposal; he seemed eager to get out of the sunlight. ‘Very well. When you wish to see me again, return to the platform and call my name.’

And so began my solitary sojourn in the Interior of the Sphere.

In that world of perpetual noon there was no cycle of days and nights to count the passage of time. However, I had my pocket watch: the time it displayed was, of course, meaningless, thanks to my transfers across time and space; but it served to map out twenty-four-hour periods.

Nebogipfel had evoked a shelter from the platform – a plain, square hut with one small window and a door of the dilating kind I have described before. He left me a tray of food and water, and showed me how I could obtain more: I would push the tray back into the surface of the platform – this was an odd sensation – and after a few seconds a new tray would rise out of the surface, fully laden. This unnatural process made me queasy, but I had no other source of food, and I mastered my qualms. Nebogipfel also demonstrated how to push objects into the platform to have them cleaned, as he cleansed even his own fingers. I used this feature to clean my clothes and boots – although my trousers were returned without a crease! – but I could never bring myself to insert a part of my body in this way. The thought of pushing a hand or foot – or worse, my face – into that bland surface was more than I could bear, and I continued to wash in water.

I was still without shaving equipment, incidentally; my beard had grown long and luxuriant – but it was a depressingly solid mass of iron grey.

Nebogipfel showed me how I could extend the use of my goggles. By touching the surface in a certain way, I could make them magnify the images of remote objects, bringing them as close, and as sharp, as life. I donned the goggles immediately and focused them on a distant shadow which I had thought was a clump of trees; but it turned out to be no more than an outcropping of rock, which looked rather worn away, or melted.

For the first few days, it was enough for me simply to be there, in that bruised meadow. I took to going for long walks; I would take my boots off, enjoying the feeling of grass and sand between my toes, and I would often strip to my pants in the hot sunlight. Soon I got as brown as a berry – though the prow of my balding forehead got rather burned – it was like a rest cure in Bognor!

In the evenings I retired to my hut. It was quite cosy in there with the door closed, and I slept well, with my jacket for a pillow and with the warm softness of the platform beneath me.

The bulk of my time was spent in the inspection of the Interior with my magnifying goggles. I would sit at the rim of my platform, or lie in a soft patch of grass with my head propped on my jacket, and gaze around the complex sky.

That part of the Interior opposite my position, beyond the sun, must lie on the Sphere’s equator; and so I anticipated that this region would be the most earth-like – where gravity was strongest, and the air was compressed. That central band was comparatively narrow – no more than some tens of millions of miles wide. (I say ‘no more’ easily enough, but I knew of course that the whole of the earth would be lost, a mere mote, against that Titanic background!) Beyond this central band, the surface appeared a dull grey, difficult to distinguish through the sky’s blue filter, and I could make out few details. In one of those high-latitude regions there was a splash of silver-white, with sea-shapes of fine grey embedded in it, that reminded me somewhat of the moon; and in another a vivid patch of orange – quite neatly elliptical – whose nature I could not comprehend at all. I remembered the attenuated Morlocks I had met, who had come from the lower-gravity regions of the outer shells, away from the equator; and I wondered if there were perhaps distorted humans living in those remote, low gravity world-maps of the Interior’s higher latitudes.

When I considered that inner, earth-like central belt, much of that, even, appeared to be unpopulated; I could see immense oceans, and deserts that could swallow worlds, shining in the endless sunlight. These wastes of land or water separated island-worlds: regions little larger than the earth might have been, if skinned and spread out across that surface, and rich with detail.

Here I saw a world of grass and forest, with cities of sparkling buildings rising above the trees. There I made out a world locked in ice, whose inhabitants must be surviving as my forebears had in Europe’s glacial periods: perhaps it was cooled by being mounted on some immense platform, I wondered, to lift it out of the atmosphere. On some of the worlds I saw the mark of industry: a complex texture of cities, the misty smoke of factories, bays threaded by bridges, the plume-like wakes of ships on land-locked seas – and, sometimes, a tracing of vapour across the upper atmosphere which I imagined must be generated by some flying vessel.

So much was familiar enough – but some worlds were quite beyond my comprehension.

I caught glimpses of cities which floated in the air, above their own shadows; and immense buildings which must have dwarfed China’s Wall, sprawling across engineered landscapes … I could not begin to imagine the sort of men which must live in such places.

Some days I awoke to comparative darkness. A great sheet of cloud would clamp down on the land, and before long a heavy rain start to fall. It occurred to me that the weather inside that Interior must have been regulated – as, no doubt, were all other aspects of its fabric – for I could readily imagine the immense cyclonic energies which could be generated by that huge world’s rapid spin. I would walk about in the weather a bit, relishing the tang of the fresh water. On such days, the place would become much more earth-like, with the Interior’s bewildering far side and its dubious horizon hidden by rain and cloud.

After long inspections with the telescopic goggles, I found that the grassy plain around me was just as featureless as it had looked at first sight. One day – it was bright and hot – I decided to try to make for the rocky outcrop I have mentioned, which was the only distinguishable feature within the mist-delineated horizon, even on the clearest day. I bundled up some food and water in a bag I improvised from my long-suffering jacket, and off I set; I got as far as I could before I tired, and then I lay down to attempt to sleep. But I could not settle, not in the open sunlight, and after a few hours I gave up. I walked on a little further, but the rocky outcrop seemed to be getting no nearer, and I began to grow fearful, so far from the platform. What if I were to grow fatigued, or somehow become injured? I should never be able to call Nebogipfel, and I should forfeit any prospect of returning to my own time: in fact, I should die in the grass like some wounded gazelle. And all for a walk to an anonymous clump of rock!

Feeling foolish, I turned and hiked back to my platform.

18
THE NEW ELOI

Some days after this, I emerged from my hut after a sleep, and became aware that the light was a little brighter than usual. I glanced up, and saw that the extra illumination came from a fierce point of light a few degrees of arc from the static sun. I snatched up my goggles and inspected that new star.

It was a burning island-world. As I watched, great explosions shattered the surface, sending up clouds which blossomed like lovely, deadly flowers. Already, I thought, the island-world must be devoid of life, for nothing could live through the conflagration I witnessed, but still the explosions rained across the surface – and all in eerie silence!

The island-world flared brighter than the sun, for several hours, and I knew that I was watching a titanic tragedy, made by man – or descendants of man.

Everywhere in my rocky sky – now I started looking for it – I saw the mark of War.

Here was a world in which great strips of land appeared to have been given over to a debilitating and destructive siege warfare: I saw brown lanes of churned-up countryside, immense trenches, hundreds of miles wide, in which, I imagined, men were fighting and dying, for year after year. Here was a city burning, with white vapour arcs scored over it; and I wondered if some aerial weapon was being exploited there. And here I found a world devastated by the aftermath of war, the continents blackened and barren, with the outlines of cities barely visible through a shifting pile of black cloud.

I wondered how many of these joys had visited my own earth, in the years after my departure!

After some days of this, I took to leaving off my goggles for long periods. I began to find that skyroof, painted everywhere with warfare, unbearably oppressive.

Some men of my time have argued for war – would have welcomed it, I think, as, for example, a release of the tension between the great Powers. Men thought of war – the next one, at least! – as a great cleansing, as the last war that ever need be fought. But it was not so, I could see now: men fought wars because of the legacy of the brute inside them, and any justification was a mere rationalization supplied by our oversized brains.

I imagined how it would be if Great Britain and Germany were projected somewhere here, as two more splashes of colour against the rocky sky. I thought of those two nations which seemed to me now, from my elevated perspective, in a state of aimless economic and moral muddle. And I doubted if there had been a man alive in 1891 in either country who could have told me the benefits of a war, whatever the outcome! – And how ludicrous and futile such a conflict would seem if Britain and Germany were indeed projected up into the Interior of this monstrous Sphere.

All across the Sphere, millions of irreplaceable human lives were being lost to such conflicts – which were as remote and meaningless to me as the paintings on the ceiling of a cathedral – and you would think that men living in that Sphere – and able to see a million island-worlds like their own – would have abandoned their petty little ambitions, and discovered the sort of perspective I now understood. But, it seemed, it was not so; the base parts of human instincts dominated still, even in the Year A.D. 657,208. Here in the Sphere, even the daily education of a thousand, a million wars going on all across the iron sky was not enough, apparently, to make men see the futility and cruelty of it all!

I found my mind turning, for contrast, to Nebogipfel and his people, and their Rational society. I will not pretend that a certain revulsion did not still tinge my mind at the thought of the Morlocks and their unnatural practices, but I understood now that this arose from my own primitive prejudices, and my unfortunate experiences in Weena’s world, which were quite irrelevant to an assessment of Nebogipfel.

I was able, given time to contemplate, to work out how the falling-away of Morlock gender differences might have come about. I considered how, among humans, circles of loyalty spread out around an individual. First of all one must fight to preserve oneself and one’s direct children. Next, one will fight for siblings – but perhaps with only a reduced intensity, since the common inheritance must be halved. In next priority one would fight for the children of siblings, and more remote relations, in diminishing bands of intensity.

Thus, with depressing reliability, men’s actions and loyalties may be predicted; for only with such a hierarchy of allegiance – in a world of shortage and instability – can one’s inheritance be preserved for future generations.

But the Morlocks’ inheritance was secured – and not through an individual child or family, but through the great common resource that was the Sphere. And so the differentiation and specialization of the sexes became irrelevant – even harmful, to the orderly progress of things.

It was a pretty irony, I thought, that it was precisely this diagnosis – of the vanishing of sexes from a world made stable, abundant and peaceful – that I had once applied to the exquisite, and decadent, Eloi; and now here I was coming to see that it was their ugly cousins the Morlocks, who, in this version of things, had actually achieved that remote goal!

All this worked its way through my thinking. And slowly – it took some days – I came to a decision about my future.

I could not remain inside this Interior; after the god-like perspective loaned me by Nebogipfel, I could not bear to immerse my life and energies in any one of the meaningless conflicts sweeping like brush fires across these huge plains. Nor could I remain with Nebogipfel and his Morlocks; for I am not a Morlock, and my essential human needs would make it unbearable to live as Nebogipfel did.

Furthermore – as I have said – I could not live with the knowledge that my Time Machine still existed, an engine so capable of damaging History!

I began to formulate a plan to resolve all this, and I summoned Nebogipfel.

‘When the Sphere was constructed,’ Nebogipfel said, ‘there was a schism. Those who wished to live much as men had always lived came into the Interior. And those who wished to put aside the ancient domination of the gene –’

‘– became Morlocks. And so the wars – meaningless and eternal – wash like waves across this unbounded Interior surface.’

‘Yes.’

‘Nebogipfel, is the purpose of the Sphere to sustain these quasi-humans – these new Eloi – to give them room to wage their wars, without destroying Humanity?’

‘No.’ He held up his parasol, in a dignified pose I no longer found comical. ‘Of course not. The purpose of the Sphere is for the Morlocks, as you call us: to make the energies of a star available for the acquisition of knowledge.’ He blinked his huge eyes. ‘For what goal is there for intelligent creatures, but to gather and store all available information?’

The mechanical Memory of the Sphere, he said, was like an immense Library, which stored the wisdom of the race, accumulated across half a million years; and much of the patient toil of the Morlocks I had seen was devoted to the further gathering of information, or to the classification and reinterpretation of the data already collected.

These New Morlocks were a race of scholars! – and the whole energy of the sun was given over to the patient, coral-like growth of that great Library.

I rubbed my beard. ‘I understand that – the motive at least. I suppose it is not so far from the impulses which have dominated my own life. But don’t you fear that one day you will finish this quest? What will you do when mathematics is perfected, for instance, and the final Theory of the physical universe is demonstrated?’

He shook his head, in another gesture he had acquired from me. ‘That is not possible. A man of your own time – Kurt Gödel – was the first to demonstrate that.’

‘Who?’

‘Kurt Gödel: a mathematician who was born some ten years after your departure in time …’

This Gödel – I was astonished to learn, as Nebogipfel again displayed his deep study of my age – would, in the 1930s, demonstrate that mathematics can never be finished off; instead its logical systems must forever be enriched by incorporating the truth or falsehood of new axioms.

‘It makes my head ache to think about it! – I can imagine the reception this poor Gödel got when he brought this news to the world. Why, my old algebra teacher would have thrown him out of the room.’

Nebogipfel said, ‘Gödel showed that our quest, to acquire knowledge and understanding, can never be completed.’

I understood. ‘He has given you an infinite purpose.’ The Morlocks were like a world of patient monks, I saw now, working tirelessly to comprehend the workings of our great universe.

At last – at the End of Time – that great Sphere, with its machine Mind and its patient Morlock servants, would become a kind of God, embracing the sun.

I agreed with Nebogipfel that there could be no higher goal for an intelligent species!

I had rehearsed my next words, and spoke them carefully. ‘Nebogipfel, I wish to return to the earth. I will work with you on my Time Machine.’

His head dipped. ‘I am pleased. The value to our understanding will be immense.’

We debated the proposition further, but it took no more persuasion than that! – for Nebogipfel did not seem suspicious, and did not question me.

And so I made my brief preparations to leave that meaningless prairie. As I worked, I kept my thoughts to myself.

I had known that Nebogipfel – eager as he was to acquire the technology of time travel – would accept my proposal. And it gave me some pain, in the light of my new understanding of the essential dignity of the New Morlocks, that I was now forced to lie to him!

I would indeed return to the earth with Nebogipfel – but I had no intention of remaining there; for as soon as I got my hands on my machine again, I meant to escape with it, into the past.

19
HOW I CROSSED INTER-PLANETARY SPACE

I was forced to wait three days until Nebogipfel pronounced himself ready to depart; it was, he said, a matter of waiting until the earth and our part of the Sphere entered the proper configuration with each other.

My thoughts turned to the journey ahead with some anticipation – I would not say fear, for I had, after all, already survived one such crossing of interplanetary space, although insensible at the time – but rather with quickening interest. I speculated on the means by which Nebogipfel’s space-yacht might be propelled. I thought of Verne, who had his argumentative Baltimore gun clubbers firing that ludicrous cannon, with its man-bearing shell, across the gap between the earth and moon. But it only took a little mental calculation to show that an acceleration sufficient to launch a projectile beyond the earth’s gravity would also have been so strong as to smear my poor flesh, and Nebogipfel’s, across the interior of the shell like strawberry jam.

What, then?

It is a commonplace that inter-planetary space is without air; and so we could not fly like birds to the earth, for the birds rely on the ability of their wings to push against the air. No air – no push! Perhaps, I speculated, my space yacht would be driven by some advanced form of firework rocket – for a rocket, which flies by pushing out behind it masses of its own spent propellant, would be able to function in the airlessness of space, if oxygen were carried to sustain its combustion …

But these were mundane speculations, grounded in my nineteenth-century understanding. How could I tell what might be possible by the year A.D. 657,208? I imagined yachts tacking against the sun’s gravity as if against an invisible wind; or, I thought, there might be some manipulation of magnetic or other fields.

Thus my speculations raged, until Nebogipfel came to summon me, for the last time, from the Interior.

As we dropped into Morlock darkness I stood with my head tipped back, peering up at the receding sunlight; and – just before I donned my goggles – I promised myself that the next time my face felt the warmth of man’s star, it would be in my own century!

I think I had been expecting to be transported to some Morlock equivalent of a port, with great ebony space yachts nuzzling against the Sphere like liners against a dock.

Well, there was none of that; instead Nebogipfel escorted me – across a distance of no more than a few miles, via strips of moving Floor – to an area which was kept clear of artefacts and partitions, and Morlocks in general, but was otherwise unremarkable. And in the middle of this area was a small chamber, a clear-walled box a little taller than I was – like a lift compartment – which sat there, squat, on the star-spattered Floor.

At Nebogipfel’s gesture, I stepped into the compartment. Nebogipfel followed, and behind us the compartment sealed itself shut with a hiss of its diaphragm door. The compartment was roughly rectangular, its rounded corners and edges giving it something of the look of a lozenge. There was no furniture; there were, however, upright poles fixed at intervals about the cabin.

Nebogipfel wrapped his pale fingers around one of these poles. ‘You should prepare yourself. At our launch, the change in effective gravity is sudden.’

I found these calm words disturbing! Nebogipfel’s eyes, blackened by the goggles, were on me with their usual disconcerting mixture of curiosity and analysis; and I saw his fingers tighten their grip on the pillar.

And then – it happened faster than I can relate it – the Floor opened. The compartment fell out of the Sphere, and I and Nebogipfel with it!

I cried out, and I grabbed at a pole like an infant clinging to its mother’s leg.

I looked upwards, and there was the surface of the Sphere, now turned into an immense, black Roof which occluded half the universe from my gaze. At the centre of this ceiling I could see a rectangle of paler darkness which was the door through which we had emerged; even as I watched, that door diminished with our distance, and in any event it was already folding closed against us. The door tracked across my view with magisterial slowness, showing how our compartment-capsule was starting to tumble in space. It was clear to me what had happened: any schoolboy can achieve the same effect by whirling a conker around his head, and then releasing the string. Well, the ‘string’ which had held us inside the rotating Sphere – the solidity of its Floor – had now vanished; and we had been thrown out into space, without ceremony.

And below me – I could hardly bear to glance down – there was a pit of stars, a floorless cavern into which I, and Nebogipfel, were falling forever!

‘Nebogipfel – for the love of God – what has happened to us? Has some disaster occurred?’

He regarded me. Disconcertingly, his feet were hovering a few inches above the floor of the capsule – for, while the capsule fell through space, so we, within it, fell too, like peas in a matchbox!

‘We have been released from the Sphere. The effects of its spin are –’

‘I understand all that,’ I said, ‘but why? Are we intending to fall all the way to the earth?’

His answer I found quite terrifying.

‘Essentially,’ he said, ‘yes.’

And then I had no further energy for questions, for I became aware that I too was starting to float about that little cabin like a balloon; and with that realization came a fight with nausea which lasted many minutes.

At length I regained some control over my body.

I had Nebogipfel explain the principles of this flight to the earth. And when he had done so, I realized how elegant and economical was the Morlocks’ solution to travel between the Sphere and its cordon of surviving planets – so much so that I should have anticipated it, and dismissed all my nonsensical speculations of rockets – and yet, here was another example of the inhuman bias of the Morlock soul! Instead of the grandiose space yacht I had imagined, I would travel from Venus’s orbit to the earth in nothing more grand than this lozenge-shaped coffin.

Few men of my century realized quite how much of the universe is vacancy, with a few pockets of warmth and life swimming through it, and what immense speeds are therefore required to traverse interplanetary distances in a practicable time. But the Morlocks’ Sphere was, at its equator, already moving at enormous velocities. So the Morlocks had no need of rockets, or guns, to reach inter-planetary speeds. They simply dropped their capsules out of the Sphere, and let the rotation do the rest.

And so they had done with us. At such speeds, the Morlock told me, we should reach the vicinity of the earth in just forty-seven hours.

I looked around the capsule, but I could see no signs of rockets, or any other motive force. I floated in that little cabin, feeling huge and clumsy; my beard drifted before my face in a grey cloud, and my jacket persisted in rucking itself up around my shoulder-blades. ‘I understand the principles of the launch,’ I said to Nebogipfel. ‘But how is this capsule steered?’

He hesitated for some seconds. ‘It is not. Have you misunderstood what I have told you? The capsule needs no motive force, for the velocity imparted to it by the Sphere –’

‘Yes,’ I said anxiously, ‘I followed all of that. But what if, now, we were to detect that we were off track, by some mistake of our launch – that we were going to miss the earth?’ For I realized that the most minute error at the Sphere, of even a fraction of inter-planetary distances – cause us to miss the earth by millions of miles – and then, presumably, we would go sailing off forever into the void between the stars, allocating blame until our air expired!

He seemed confused. ‘There has been no mistake.’

‘But still,’ I stressed, ‘if there were, perhaps through some mechanical flaw – then how should we, in this capsule, correct our trajectory?’

He thought for some time before answering. ‘Flaws do not occur,’ he repeated. ‘And so this capsule has no need of corrective propulsion, as you suggest.’

At first I could not quite believe this, and I had to have Nebogipfel repeat it several times before I accepted its truth. But true it was! – after launch, the craft flew between the planets with no more intelligence than a hurled stone: my capsule fell across space as helpless as Verne’s lunar cannon-shot.

As I protested the foolishness of this arrangement, I got the impression that the Morlock was becoming shocked – as if I were pressing some debating point of moral dubiety on a vicar of ostensibly open mind – and I gave it up.

The capsule twisted slowly, causing the remote stars and the immense wall that was the Sphere to wheel around us; I think that without that rotation I might have been able to imagine that I was safe and at rest, in some desert night, perhaps; but the tumbling made it impossible to forget that I was in a remote, fragile box, falling without support or attachment or means of direction. I spent the first few of my hours in that capsule in a paralysis of fear! I could not grow accustomed to the clarity of the walls around us, nor to the idea that, now that we were launched, we had no means of altering our trajectory. The journey had the elements of a nightmare – a fall through endless darkness, with no means of adjusting the situation to save myself. And there you have, in a nutshell, the essential difference between the minds of Morlock and human. For what man would trust his life to a ballistic journey, across inter-planetary distances, without any means of altering his course? But such was the New Morlock way: after a half-million years of steadily perfected technology, the Morlock would trust himself unthinkingly to his machines, for his machines never failed him.

I, though, was no Morlock!

Gradually, however, my mood softened. Apart from the slow tumble of the capsule, which continued throughout my journey to the earth, the hours passed in a stillness and silence broken only by the whisper-like breathing of my Morlock companion. The craft was tolerably warm, and so I was suspended in complete physical comfort. The walls were made of that extruding Floor-stuff, and, at a touch from Nebogipfel, I was provided with food, drink and other requirements, although the selection was more limited than in the Sphere, which had a larger Memory than our capsule.

So we sailed through the grand cathedral of interplanetary space with utter ease. I began to feel as if I were disembodied, and a mood of utter detachment and independence settled on me. It was not like a journey, nor even – after those first hours – a nightmare; instead, it took on the qualities of a dream.

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