The Time Ships

star-fields, gaudy and crowded, trying to break through the diluted surface of things, all about me… And here, hovering a few yards before the machine, was the Watcher: my impossible companion. Its eyes were fixed on me, and I grabbed at a rail. I stared at that distorted parody of a human face, and those dangling tentacles — and again I was struck by the similarity with the flopping creature I had seen on that remote beach thirty million years hence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around me the Hill flickered through night and day, with here and there a splash of color as some picnic party stayed on the grass long enough for them to register on my vision. At last, with the dials reading six thousand, five hundred and sixty days before my departure, I pressed the levers again.

I brought the Time Machine to rest, in the depths of a cloudy, moonless night. If I had got my calculations right, I had landed in July of 1873. With my Morlock goggles, I saw the slope of the Hill, and the river’s flank, and dew glittering on the grass; and I could see that — although the Morlocks had deposited my machine on an open stretch of hill-side, a half-mile from my house — there was nobody about to witness my arrival. The sounds and scents of my century flooded over me: the sharp tang of wood burning in some grate somewhere, the distant murmur of the Thames, the brush of a breeze through the trees, the naphtha flares of hawkers’ barrows. It was all delicious, and familiar, and welcome!

Nebogipfel stood up cautiously. He had slipped his arms into my jacket sleeves, and now that heavy garment hung from him as if he were a child. “Is this 1891?”

“No,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I have brought us back further in time.” I glanced along the Hill, in the direction of my house. “Nebogipfel, in a laboratory up there, a brash young man is embarking on a series of experiments which will lead, ultimately, to the creation of a Time Machine…”

“You are saying—”

“That this is the year 1873 — and I anticipate, soon, meeting myself as a young man!”

His goggled, chinless face swiveled towards me in what appeared to be astonishment.

“Now come, Nebogipfel, and assist me in finding a place of concealment for this contraption.”

[2] Home

I cannot describe how odd it seemed to me to walk through the night air along the Petersham Road, coming at last to my own house — with a Morlock at my side!

The house was an end terrace, with big bay windows, rather unambitious carvings about the door frame, and a porch with mock-Grecian pillars. At the front there was an area with steps which went down to the basement, railed off by a bit of delicate, black-painted metal-work. The whole effect was really a sort of imitation of the genuinely grand houses on the Green, or in the Terrace at the top of the Hill; but it was a big, roomy, comfortable place which I had bought as a bargain as a younger man, and from which I had since had no thoughts of moving away.

I walked past the front door and around towards the rear of the house. At the rear there were balconies, with delicate iron pilasters painted white, giving a view to the west. I could make out the windows of the smoking-room and dining-room, darkened now (it occurred to me that I was not sure what time of the night it was), but I was aware of an odd absence to the rear of the smoking-room. It took me some moments to remember what this represented — an unexpected absence of something is so much harder to identify than an incongruous presence — it was, in fact, the site of the bathroom which I would later have built there. Here, in 1873, I was still forced to wash in a hip-bath brought into my bedroom by a servant!

And, in that ill-proportioned conservatory protruding from the rear of the house, there was my laboratory, where — I saw with a thrill of anticipation — a light still burned. Any dinner guests had gone, and the servants had long retired; but still he — I — was working on.

I suffered a mixture of emotions I imagine no man has shared before; here was my home, and yet I could lay no claim to it!

I returned to the front door. Nebogipfel was standing a little way into the deserted road; he seemed cautious of approaching the area steps, for the pit into which they descended was quite black, even with the goggles.

“You don’t need to be fearful,” I said. “It’s quite common to have kitchens and the like underground in houses like this… The steps and railings are sturdy enough.”

Nebogipfel, anonymous behind his goggles, inspected the steps suspiciously. I supposed his caution came from an ignorance of the robustness of nineteenth-century technology — I had forgotten how strange my crude era must seem to him — but, nevertheless, something about his attitude disturbed me.

I was reminded, and it disconcerted me, of an odd fragment of my own childhood. The house where I grew up was large and rambling — impractical, actually — and it had underground passages which ran from the house to the stable block, larder and the like: such passages are a common feature of houses of that age. There were gratings set in the ground at intervals: black- painted, round things, covering shafts which led down to the passages, for ventilation. I recalled, now, my own fear, as a child, of those enclosed pits in the ground. Perhaps they had been simple air-shafts; but what, my childish imagination had prompted me, if some bony Hand came squirming through those wide bars and grabbed my ankle?

It occurred to me now — I think something in Nebogipfel’s cautious stance was triggering all this — that there was something of a similarity between those shafts in the grounds of my childhood, and the sinister wells of the Morlocks… Was that why, in the end, I had lashed out so at that Morlock child, in A.D. 657,208?

I am not a man who enjoys such insights into his own character! Quite unfairly, I snapped at Nebogipfel, “Besides, I thought you Morlocks liked the dark!” And I turned from him and walked up to the front door.

It was all so familiar — and yet disconcertingly different. Even at a glance I could see a thousand small changes from my day, eighteen years into the future. There was the sagging lintel I would later have replaced, for instance, and there the vacant site which would hold the arched lamp-holder I would one day install, at the prompting of Mrs. Watchets.

I came to realize, anew, what a remarkable business this time traveling was! One might expect the most dramatic changes in a flight across thousands of centuries — and such I had found — but even this little hop, of mere decades, had rendered me an anachronism.

“What shall I do? Should I wait for you?”

I considered Nebogipfel’s silent presence beside me. Wearing his goggles and with my jacket still drooped about him, he looked comical and alarming in equal measure! “I think there is more danger in the situation if you stay outside. What if a policeman were to spot you? — he might think you were some odd burglar.” Without his web of Morlock machinery, Nebogipfel was quite defenseless; he had launched himself into History quite as unprepared as I had been on my first jaunt. “And what of dogs? Or cats? I wonder what the average Tom of the eighteen-seventies would make of a Morlock. A fine meal, I should think… No, Nebogipfel. All in all, I think it would be safer if you stayed with me.”

“And the young man you are visiting? What of his reaction?”

I sighed. “Well, I have always been blessed by an open and flexible mind. Or so I like to think!… Perhaps I am soon to find out. Besides, your presence might convince me — him — of the veracity of my account.”

And, without allowing myself any further hesitation, I tugged at the bell-pull.

From within the house, I heard doors slamming, an irritable shout: “It’s all right, I’ll go!” — and then footsteps which clattered along the short corridor linking the rest of the house to my laboratory.

“It’s me,” I hissed at Nebogipfel. “Him. It must be late — the servants are abed.”

A key rattled in the lock of the door.

Nebogipfel hissed: “Your goggles.”