The Time Ships

“Come,” he said. “The Destiny of the Race can wait for a few hours.”

I slept deeply — remarkably so. I was wakened by Moses, who brought me a pitcher of hot water.

I’d folded up my clothes on a chair; after my adventures in time, they were rather the worse for wear. “I don’t suppose you could lend me a suit of clothes, could you?”

“You can have a house-coat, if you like. I’m sorry, old man — I hardly think anything of mine would fit you!”

I was angered by this casual arrogance. “One day, you too will grow a little older. And then I hope you remember — Oh — never mind!” I said.

“Look — I’ll have my man brush out these clothes for you, and patch the worst damage. Come down when you’re ready.”

In the dining-room, breakfast had been set out as a sort of buffet. Moses and Nebogipfel were already there. Moses wore the same costume as yesterday — or at least, an identical copy of it. The bright morning sun turned the parakeet colors of his coat into a clamor even more ghastly than before. And as for Nebogipfel, the Morlock was now dressed — ludicrously! — in short trousers and battered blazer. He had a cap tucked over his goggled, hairy face, and he stood patiently by the buffet.

“I told Mrs. Penforth to keep out of here,” Moses said. “As for Nebogipfel, that battered jacket of yours — it’s over the back of that chair, by the way — seemed hardly sufficient for him. So I dug out an old school uniform — the only thing I could find that might fit him: he reeks of moth-balls, but he seems a little happier.

“Now then.” He walked up to Nebogipfel. “Let me help you, sir. What would you like? You can see we have bacon, eggs, toast, sausages—”

In his quiet, fluid tones, Nebogipfel asked Moses to explain the provenance of these various items. Moses did so, in graphic terms: he picked up a slice of bacon on his fork, for example, and described the Nature of the Pig.

When Moses was done, Nebogipfel picked up a single piece of fruit — an apple — and walked with that, and a glass of water, to the room’s darkest corner.

As for me, after subsisting for so long on a diet of the Morlocks’ bland stuff, I could not have relished my breakfast more if I had known — which I did not — that it was the last nineteenth- century meal I should ever enjoy!

With breakfast done, Moses escorted us to his smoking-room. Nebogipfel installed himself in the darkest corner, while Moses and I sat on opposed armchairs. Moses dug out his pipe, filled it from a small pouch in his pocket, and lit it.

I watched him, seething. He was so maddeningly calm! “Do you have nothing to say? I have brought you a dire warning from the future — from several futures — which—”

“Yes,” he said, “it is dramatic stuff. But,” he went on, tamping down his pipe, “I’m still not sure if—”

“Not sure?” I cried, jumping to my feet. “What more proof — what persuasion — do you want?”

“It seems to me that your logic has a few holes. Oh, do sit down.”

I sat, feeling weak. “Holes?”

“Look at it this way. You claim that I’m you — and you’re me. Yes?”

“Exactly. We are two slices of a single Four-Dimensioned entity, taken at different points, and juxtaposed by the Time Machine.”

“Very well. But let us consider this: if you were once me, then you should share my memories.”

“I—” I fell silent.

“Then,” Moses said with a note of triumph, “what memories do you have of a rather burly stranger, and an odd companion of this sort, turning up on the door-step one night? Eh?”

The answer, of course — horrifying! impossible! — was that I had no such memories. I turned to Nebogipfel, stricken. “How can this not have occurred to me? Of course, my mission is impossible. It always was. I could never persuade young Moses, because I have no memories of how I, when I was Moses, was persuaded in my turn!”

The Morlock retorted, “Cause and Effect, when Time Machines are about, are rather awkward concepts.”

Moses said, with more of that insufferable cockiness, “Here’s another puzzle for you. Suppose I agree with you. Suppose I accept your story about your trips into time and your visions of Histories and so forth. Suppose I agree to destroy the Time Machine.”

I could anticipate his argument. “Then, if the Time Machine were never built—”

“You would not be able to return through time, to put a stop to its building”

“ — and so the machine would be built after all…”

“ — and you would return through time to stop the building once more — and on it would go, like an endless merry-go-round!” he cried with a flourish.

“Yes. It is a pathological causal loop,” Nebogipfel said. “The Time Machine must be built, in order to put a stop to its own building…”

I buried my face in my hands. Apart from my despair at the destruction of my case, I had the uncomfortable feeling that young Moses was more intelligent than I. I should have spotted these logical difficulties! — perhaps it was true, horribly, that intelligence, like more gross physical faculties, declines as age comes on.

“But — despite all this logic-chopping — it is nevertheless the truth,” I whispered. “And the machine must never be built.”

“Then you explain it,” Moses said with less sympathy. “ ’To Be, or Not to Be’ — that, it seems, is not the question. If you are me, you will remember being forced to play the part of Hamlet’s Father in that dire production at school.”

“I remember it well.”

“The question is more, it seems to me: How can things Be and — simultaneously — Not Be?”

“But it is true,” Nebogipfel said. The Morlock stepped forward a little way, into the light, and looked from one to the other of us. “But we must construct, it seems to me, a higher logic — a logic which can take account of the interaction of a Time Machine with History — a logic capable of dealing with a Multiplicity of Histories…”

And then just at that moment, when my own uncertainty was greatest — I heard a roar, as of some immense motor, which echoed up the Hill, outside the house. The ground seemed to shudder — it was as if some monster were walking there — and I heard shouting, and — though it was quite impossible that such a thing should happen here, in sleepy, early-morning Richmond! — the rattle of a gun.

Moses and I looked wildly at each other. “Great Scott,” Moses said. “What is that?”

I thought I heard the gun clatter again, and now a shout turned to a scream, suddenly cut off.

Together, we ran out of the smoking-room and into the hall. Moses pulled open the door — it was already unlatched — and we spilled into the street. There was Mrs. Penforth, thin and severe, and Poole, Moses’s manservant of the time. Mrs. Penforth carried a duster, bright yellow, and she clutched at Poole’s arm. They glanced perfunctorily at us, but then looked away — ignoring a Morlock as if he were no more odd than a Frenchman, or Scotsman!

There were a number of people in the Petersham Road, standing there staring. Moses touched my sleeve, and he pointed down the road in the direction of the town. “There,” he said. “There’s your anomaly.”

It was as if an ironclad had been lifted out of the sea and deposited by some great wave, high on Richmond Hill: It was perhaps two hundred yards from the house: it was a great box of metal which lay along the length of the Petersham Road like some immense, iron insect, at least eighty feet long.

But this was no stranded monster: it was, I saw now, crawling towards us, slow but quite deliberate, and where it passed I saw that it had scored the road surface with a series of linked indentations, like the trail of a bird. The ironclad’s upper surface was a complex speckle of ports — I took them to be gun ports, or telescope holes.

The morning traffic had been forced to make way for the thing; two dog-carts lay overturned in the road ahead of it, as did a brewer’s dray, with a distressed horse still caught between the shafts, and beer spilling from broken barrels.

One youth in a cap, foolhardy, hurled a lump of churned-up cobble at the thing’s metal hide. The stone bounced off the hull without leaving so much as a scratch, but there was a response: I saw a rifle poke its snout out of one of those upper ports, and fire off with a crack at the youth.

He fell where he had stood, and lay still.

At that, the crowd dispersed quickly, and there were more screams. Mrs. Penforth seemed to be weeping into her duster; Poole escorted her into the house.

A hatch in the front of the land ironclad opened with a clang — I caught a brief impression of a dim interior — and I saw a face (I thought masked) peer out towards us.

“It is Out of Time,” Nebogipfel said. “And it has come for us.

“Indeed.” I turned to Moses. “Well,” I said to him. “Now do you believe me?”

[7] The Juggernaut Lord Raglan

Moses’s grin was tight and nervous, his face paler than usual and his broad brow slick with sweat. “Evidently you are not the only Time Traveler!”

The mobile fort — if that was what it was — toiled its way up the road towards my house. It was a long, flat box, with something of the aspect of a dish-cover. It was painted in patches of green and mud-brown, as if its natural habitat were some broken-up field. There was a skirt of metal around its base, perhaps to shield its more vulnerable parts from the rifle-shots and shrapnel of opponents. I should say the fort was moving at around six miles per hour, and — thanks to some novel method of locomotion whose details I could not make out, because of that skirt — it managed to keep itself pretty level, in spite of the Hill’s incline.

Save for the three of us — and that wretched brewer’s horse — there was not a living soul left in the road now, and there was a silence broken only by the deep grumbling of the fort’s engines, and the distressed whinnying of the trapped horse.

“I don’t remember this,” I told Nebogipfel. “Any of it this didn’t happen, in my 1873.”

The Morlock studied the approaching fort through his goggles. “Once again,” he said evenly, “we have to consider the possibility of a Multiplicity of Histories. You have seen more than one version of A.D. 657,208: now, it seems, you must endure new variants on your own century.”

The fort came to a halt, its engine growling like some immense stomach; I could see masked faces peering out from the various ports at us, and a pennant fluttered languid above its hull.

“Do you think we can run for it?” Moses hissed.

“I doubt it. See the rifle-barrels protruding from those portholes? I don’t know what the game is here — but these people clearly have the means, and the will, to detain us.

“Let’s show a little dignity. We will go forward,” I said. “Let us demonstrate we are not afraid.”

And so we stepped out, across the mundane cobbles of the Petersham Road, towards the fort.

The various rifles and heavier guns tracked us as we walked, and masked faces — some using field-glasses — marked our progress.