The Time Ships

impression that I had seen this arrangement before: it was as familiar as my own hand, I thought, and yet, in this transformed context, I could not recognize it…

And then the realization rushed upon me. The rods and other components were my Time Machine — the lines over there, obscuring that constellation, were the bars of brass which made up the fundamental frame of the device; and those discs, wreathed about with galaxies, must be my chronometric dials. It was my original machine, which I had thought lost, dismantled and finally destroyed in that German attack on London in 1938!

The coalescing of this vision proceeded apace. The brass rods glittered — I saw there was a sprinkling of dust over the faces of the chronometric dials, whose hands whirled about and I recognized the green glow of Plattnerite which suffused the doped quartz of the infrastructure. I looked down and made out two wide, fat, darker cylinders — they were my own legs, clothed in jungle twill! — and those pale, hairy, complex objects must be my hands, resting on the machine’s control levers.

And now, at last, I understood the meaning of that “cavemouth” around my vision. It was the frame of my eye-sockets, nose and cheeks about my field of view: once more I was looking out from that darkest of caves — my own skull.

I felt as if I was being lowered into my body. Fingers and legs attached themselves to my consciousness. I could feel the levers, cool and firm, in my hand, and there was a light prickling of sweat on my brow. It was a little, I suppose, like recovering from the oblivion of chloroform; slowly, subtly, I was coming into myself. And now I felt a swaying, and that plummeting sensation of time travel.

Beyond the Time Machine there was only dark — I could make out nothing of the world — but I could feel, from its decreasing lurching, that the machine was slowing. I looked around — I was rewarded with the weight of a laden skull on a stem of a neck; after my disembodied state it felt as if I were swiveling an artillery piece — but there were only the faintest traces of the Optimal History left in my view: here a wisp of galaxy clusters, there a fragment of star-light. In that last instant, before my intangible link was finally broken, I saw again the round, solemn visage of my Watcher, with his immense, thoughtful eyes.

Then it was gone — all of it — and I was fully in myself again; and I felt a surge of savage, primitive joy!

The Time Machine lurched to a halt. The thing went rolling over, and I was flung headlong through the air, into pitch darkness.

There was a crack of thunder in my ears. A hard, steady rain was pounding with a brute force against my scalp and jungle shirt. In a moment I was wet to the skin: it was a fine welcome back to corporeality, I thought!

I had been deposited on a patch of sodden, soft turf in front of the overturned machine. It was quite dark. I seemed to be on a little lawn, surrounded by bushes whose leaves were dancing under the rain-drops. The rebounding drops shimmered about the machine. Close by I heard the bubble of a mass of water, and rain pattered into that greater mass of liquid.

I stood up and looked about. There was a building close by, visible only as a silhouette against the charcoal-gray sky. I noticed now that there was a faint green glow, coming from beneath the tipped-over machine. I saw that it came from a vial, a cylinder of glass perhaps six inches tall: it was a common eight-ounce graduated medicine bottle. This had evidently been lodged in the frame of the machine, but now it had fallen to the grass.

I reached to pick up the flask. The greenish glow came from a powder within: it was Plattnerite.

My name was called.

I turned, startled. The voice had been soft, almost masked by the hissing of the rain on the grass.

There was a figure standing not ten feet from me: short, almost childlike, but with scalp and back coated by long, lank hair that had been plastered flat by the rain against pale flesh. Huge eyes, gray-red, were fixed on me.

“Nebogipfel—?”

And then some circuit closed in my bewildered brain.

I turned, and inspected that building’s blocky outline once more. There was the iron balcony, over there the dining-room, the kitchen with a small window ajar, and there was the blocky form of the laboratory…

It was my home; my machine had deposited me on the sloping lawn at the rear, between the house and the Thames. I had returned — after all this! — to Richmond.

[8] A Circle is Closed

Once more — just as we had done before, so many cycles of History ago — Nebogipfel and I walked along the Petersham Road to my house. The rain hissed on the cobbles. It was almost completely dark — in fact, the only light came from the jar of Plattnerite, which glowed like a faint electric bulb, casting a murky glow over Nebogipfel’s face.

I brushed my fingers over the familiar, delicate metalwork of the rail before the area. Here was a sight I had thought never to see again: this mock-elegant facade, the pillars of the porch, the darkened rectangles of my windows.

“You have both your eyes back,” I observed to Nebogipfel in a whisper.

He glanced down at his renewed body, spreading his palms so that the pale flesh gleamed in the light of the Plattnerite. “I have no need for prosthesis,” he said. “Not any more. Now that I have been rebuilt — as you have.”

I rested my hands against my chest. The shirt fabric was coarse, rough under my palm, and my own breast-bone was hard beneath. It all felt solid enough. And I still felt like me — I mean, I had a continuity of consciousness, a single, shining path of memory, which led back through all that tangling-up of Histories, back to the simpler days when I was a boy. But I could not be the same man — for I had been disassembled in that Optimal History, and remade here. I wondered how much of that shining universe remained in me. “Nebogipfel, do you remember much of it all — after we broke through that Boundary at the start of time — the glowing sky, and so forth?”

“All of it.” His eyes were black. “You do not?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “It all seems a sort of a dream, now — especially here, in this cold English rain.”

“But the Optimal History is the reality,” he whispered. “All of this” — he waved his hands about at innocent Richmond — “these partial, sub-Optimal Histories — this is the dream.”

I hoisted the jar of Plattnerite in my hand. It was a commonplace medicine bottle, plugged with rubber; needless to say, I had no idea of where it had come from, nor how it had got in amongst the struts of my machine. “Well, this is real enough,” I said. “It’s really quite a pretty solution, isn’t it? Like the closing of a circle.” I stepped towards the door. “I think you’d better get back — out of sight — before I ring.”

He stepped backwards, into the shadow of the porch, and soon he was quite invisible.

I tugged at the bell-pull.

From within the house, I heard the opening of a door, a soft shout — “I’ll go!” — and then a heavy, impatient tread on the stair.

A key rattled in the lock, and the door creaked open.

A candle, sputtering in a brass holder, was thrust through the doorway at me; the face of a young man, broad and round, peered out, his eyes puffed up with sleep. He was twenty-three or twenty-four, and he wore a battered, thread-bare gown, thrown over a crumpled night-shirt; his hair, a mousy brown, stuck out from the sides of his odd, broad head. “Yes?” he snapped. “It’s after three in the morning, you know…”

I’d not been sure what I had intended to say, but now that the moment was here, words fled from me altogether. Once again I suffered that queer, uncomfortable shock of recognition. I don’t think a man of my century could ever have grown accustomed to meeting himself, no matter how many times he’d practiced it and now that whole raft of feeling was overlaid with an extra sort of poignancy. For this was no longer just a younger version of me: it was also a direct ancestor of Moses. It was like coming face to face with a younger brother I had thought lost.

He studied my face again, suspicious now. “What the devil do you want? I make a point of having no truck with hawkers, you know — even if this was the appropriate time of day.”

“No,” I said gently. “No, I know you don’t.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” He began to push closed the door, but he had seen something in my face — I could see the look some ghost of recognition. “I think you’d better tell me what you want.”

Clumsily, I produced the medicine jar of Plattnerite from behind my back. “I have this for you.”

His eyebrows went up at the bottle’s odd green glow. “What is it?”

“It’s—” How could I explain? “It’s a sort of sample. For you.”

“A sample of what?”

“I don’t know,” I lied. “I’d like you to find out.”

He looked curious, but still hesitant; and now a certain stubbornness was settling over his features. “Find out what?”

I started to become irritated at these dull questions. “Confound it, man — do you not have any initiative? Run some tests…”

“I’m not sure I like your tone,” he said stuffily. “What sort of tests?”

“Oh!” I ran a hand through my soaked hair; such pomposity did not sit well on such a young man, I thought. “It’s a new mineral — you can see that much!”

He frowned, his suspicion redoubled.

I bent and set the jar down on the step. “I’ll leave it here. You can look at it when you’re ready — and I know you’ll be ready — I don’t want to waste your time.” I turned and began to make my way down the path, my footsteps on the gravel loud through the rainfall.

When I looked back I saw that he had picked up the jar, and its green glow softened the shadows of the candle on his face. He called: “But your name—”

I had an impulse. “It is Plattner,” I said.

“Plattner? Do I know you?”

“Plattner,” I repeated in some desperation, and I sought a more detailed lie in the dim recesses of my brain. “Gottfried Plattner…”

It was as if I had heard someone else say it — but as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew they had had a sort of inevitability.

It was done; the circle was closed!

He continued to call, but I walked resolutely, away from the gate and down the Hill.

Nebogipfel was waiting for me at the rear of the house, close to the Time Machine. “It’s done,” I told him. A first touch of dawn had filtered into the overcast sky, and I could see the Morlock as a grainy sort of silhouette: he had his hands clasped behind him, and his hair was plastered flat against his back. His eyes were huge, blood-red pools.

“You’re a little the worse for wear,” I said kindly. “This rain—”

“It hardly matters.”

“What will you do now?”