The Time Ships

the Republics of antiquity — Carthage, Athens, Rome — which were essentially aristocratic, you see. We have Members of Parliament still, but they are no longer nominated by anything so crude as popular suffrage.

“And all that old business of Opposition — well! We’ve given all of that up. Look, men like you and me know that about most affairs there can be no two respectable and opposed opinions. There is one sole right way and endless wrong ways of doing things. A government is trying to go the right way, or it is criminal. That is all there is to it. The Opposition of the past was mostly just a spoiling job done for advancement. And the sabotage must cease.

“And some of the younger folk are going much further, in their thinking on the future. The family, for instance, is dissolving — so they say. It was the common social cell, if you like, through all our agricultural past. But now, in our modern world, the family is losing its distinctness, and has been dissolving into larger systems of relationships. The domestication of all our young people, including the women, is diminishing greatly.”

I thought, at that, of Captain Hilary Bond. “But what’s to replace the family?”

“Well, the outlines aren’t clear, but the youngsters are talking of a re-nucleation of society around different seeds: teachers, writers, talkers, who will lead us into a new way of thinking — and get us away from this old tribalism and into a better way.”

“ ’Uplands,’ indeed.” I doubted that much — or any! — of this philosophizing originated with Wallis himself; he was acting simply as a mirror of his times, as molded by the chattering opinion- makers in Government and beyond. “And how do you feel about all this?”

“Me?” He laughed, self-deprecating. “Oh, I’m too old to change — and,” his voice was uneven, “I’d hate to lose my daughters… But, likewise, I don’t want to see them growing up in a world like” — he waved a hand at the Dome, the dead Park, the soldiers — “like this! And if that means changing the heart of man, then so be it.

“Now,” he said, “can you see why we need your cooperation? With such a weapon as a CDV — a Time Machine — the establishment of this Modern State becomes, not trivial, but more achievable. And if we fail—”

“Yes?”

He stopped; we were approaching the south wall of the Park now, and there were few people around. He said in a low voice, “We have rumors that the Germans are building a Time Machine of their own. And if they succeed first — if the Reich gets functioning Chronic-Displacement Warfare capabilities…”

“Yes—”

And he painted, for my benefit, a brief but chilling portrait, evidently informed by years of propaganda, of the Time War to come. The old Kaiser’s cold-eyed staff officers would be planning how to project into our noble History their half-doped, crazy lads — their Time Warriors. Wallis portrayed these soldiers as if they were bombs with legs; they would swarm forward into a hundred of our ancient battles like death-dealing dolls…

“They would destroy England — strangle it in its cot. And that’s what we have to stop,” he said to me. “You see that, don’t you? You see it?”

I gazed into his deep, earnest face, quite unable to respond.

Wallis returned me to the house in Queen’s Gate Terrace. “I don’t want to press you for a decision on working with me, old man — I know how difficult all this must be for you; after all, it isn’t your War — but time is short. And yet, what does ’time’ mean, in such a circumstance? Eh?”

I rejoined my companions in the smoking-room. I accepted a whisky-and-water from Filby and threw myself into a chair. “It’s so close out there,” I said. “More like Burma! — that damned Dome. And doesn’t it feel odd? Pitch dark outside, and yet it’s only lunch-time.”

Moses glanced up from the volume he was reading. “ ’Experience is as to intensity and not as to duration,’ “ he quoted. He grinned at me. “Wouldn’t that be a perfect epitaph for a Time Traveler? Intensity — that’s what counts.”

“Who’s the author?”

“Thomas Hardy. Close to a contemporary of yours, wasn’t he?”

“I’ve not read him.”

Moses checked the preface. “Well, he’s gone now… 1928.” He closed the book. “What did you learn from Wallis?”

I summarized my conversations for them. I concluded, “I was glad to get away from him. What a farrago of propaganda and half-baked politics… not to mention the most perfect muddle about causality, and so forth.”

Wallis’s words had deepened the sense of depression I had endured since my arrival here in 1938. It seems to me that there is a fundamental conflict in the heart of man. He is swept along by the forces of his own nature — more than anyone, I have witnessed the remorseless action of the evolutionary currents which pulse through Humanity, deriving even from the primal seas — and yet here were these bright young Britons and Americans, hardened by War, determined to Plan, to Control, to fight against Nature and set themselves and their fellows in a sort of stasis, a frozen Utopia!

If I were a citizen of this new Modern State they intended, I knew, I should soon have become one of the protesting spirits who squirmed in its pitilessly benevolent grip.

But, even as I reflected thus, I wondered, deep in my heart, to what extent I would have fallen into Wallis’s way of thinking — of this Modern State, with its Controls and Plans — before my time-traveling had opened up my eyes to the limitations of Humanity.

“By the way, Nebogipfel,” I said, “I came across an old friend of ours — Kurt Godel—”

And the Morlock uttered a queer, gurgling word in his own language; he spun in his chair and stood up in a rapid, liquid movement that made him seem more animal than human. Filby blanched, and I saw Moses’s fingers tighten around the book he held.

“Godel — is he here?”

“He’s in the Dome, yes. In fact, he’s not a quarter-mile from this spot in Imperial College.” I described the Babble Machine show I had seen.

“A fission pile. That is it,” hissed Nebogipfel. “I understand now. He is the key — Godel is the key to everything. It must have been him, with his insights into rotating universes—”

“I don’t see what you’re talking about.”

“Look: do you want to escape from this dreadful History?”

I did — of course I did! — for a thousand reasons: to escape this dreadful conflict, to try to get home, to put a stop to time traveling before the inception of the insanity of Time War… “But for that we must find a Time Machine.”

“Yes. Therefore you must get us to Godel. You must. Now I see the truth.”

“What truth?”

“Barnes Wallis was wrong about the Germans, Their Time Machine is more than a threat. It has already been built!”

Now we were all on our feet, and talking at once. “What?” “What are you saying?” “How—”

“Already,” the Morlock said, “we are in a strand of History which has been engineered by the Germans.”

“How do you know?” I demanded.

“Remember that I studied your era in my history,” he said. “And — in my history — there was no such European War as this, which has already spanned decades. In my History, there was a War in 1914 — but it finished in 1918, with a victory for the Allies over the Germans. A new War started up in 1939, but under a new form of government in Germany. And—”

I felt odd — dizzy — and I felt behind me for a chair and sat down.

Filby looked terrified. “Those confounded Germans — I told you! I told you they’d cause trouble!”

Moses said, “I wonder if that final battle which Filby described — the Kaiserschlacht — was somehow modified in the Germans’ favor. Perhaps the assassination of an Allied commander might have done it…”

“The bombing in Paris,” Filby said, confused and wondering. “Could that have been it?”

I remembered Wallis’s horrid descriptions, of robotic German soldiers dropping into British History. “What are we to do? We must stop this dreadful Time War!”

“Get us to Godel,” the Morlock said.

“But why?”

“Because it can only be Godel who has manufactured the Germans’ Plattnerite!”

[9] Imperial College

Wallis called for me again after lunch. Immediately he started pressing me for a decision as to whether I would throw in my lot with his Time War project.

I requested that I be taken into Imperial College, to visit this Kurt Godel. At first Wallis demurred: “Godel is a difficult man — I’m not sure what you’d gain out of the meeting — and the security arrangements are pretty elaborate…” But I set my jaw, and Wallis soon caved in. “Give me thirty minutes,” he said, “and I’ll make the arrangements.”

The fabric of Imperial College seemed largely untouched by the intervening years, or by its reestablishment from the constituent colleges I remembered. Here was Queen’s Tower, that central monument of white cut stone flanked by lions, and surrounded by the rather dowdy red brick buildings that comprised this functional place of learning. But I saw that some neighboring buildings had been appropriated for the College’s expanded War-time purposes: in particular the Science Museum had been given over to Wallis’s Directorate of Chronic-Displacement Warfare, and there were several newer structures on the campus — mostly squat, plain and evidently thrown up in haste and without much regard for the architectural niceties — and all of these buildings were joined together by a new warren of closed-over corridors, which ran across the campus like huge worm-casts.

Wallis glanced at his watch. “We’ve a short while yet before Godel will be ready for us,” he said. “Come this way — I’ve got clearance to show you something else.” He grinned, looking boyish and enthusiastic. “Our pride and joy!”

So he led me into the warren of worm-cast corridors. Inside, these proved to be walled with untreated concrete and illuminated at sparse intervals by isolated light bulbs. I remember how the uneven light caught the lie of Wallis’s clumsy shoulders and his awkward gait as he preceded me deeper into that maze. We passed through several gates, at each of which Wallis had his lapel-badge checked, was required to produce various papers, provide thumb- and finger-prints, have his face compared to photographs, and so forth; I, too, had to be validated against pictures; and we were both searched, bodily, twice.

We took several twists and turns on the way; but I took careful note of my bearings, and built up a map of the College’s various annexes in my head.

“The College has been expanded quite a bit,” Wallis said. “I’m afraid we’ve lost the Royal College of Music, the College of Art, and even the Natural History Museum — this damned War, eh? And you can see they’ve had to clear a lot of ground for this new stuff.

“There are still a good few scientific facilities scattered around the country, including the Royal Ordnance factories at Chorley and Woolwich, the Vickers-Armstrong facilities at Newcastle, Barrow, Weybridge, Burhill and Crawford, the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, tire Armament and Aeronautical Experimental Establishment at Boscombe Down… and so forth. Most of