The Time Ships

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 artifact 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 traveled 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 traveled 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 full-ish 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 labor. 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-traveling 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 clamor 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 table-top 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