The Time Ships

—”

But I never completed my sentence, for — without even the warning of a whistle in the air — a new shell fell, and this was the closest of all!

The last flicker of our candle showed me, in a flash-bulb slice of frozen time, how the westerly wall of the workshop burst inwards — simply that; it turned from a smooth, steady panel into a billowing cloud of figments and dust, in less than a heartbeat.

Then we were plunged into darkness.

The car rocked, and — “Down!” Moses called — I ducked — and a hail of masonry shards, quite lethal, rattled against the shell of the Time-Car.

Nebogipfel climbed forward; I could smell his sweet stink. His soft hand grasped my shoulder. “Close the switch,” he said.

I peered through the slit-window — and into utter darkness, of course. “What of Godel?” I cried. “Professor!”

There was no reply. I heard a creak, quite ominous and heavy, from above the car, and there was a further clatter of falling masonry fragments.

“Close the switch,” Nebogipfel said urgently. “Can you not hear? The roof is collapsing — I — we will be crushed!”

“I’ll get him,” Moses said. In pitch darkness, I heard his boots clump over the car’s panels as he made his way to the rear of the cabin. “It will be fine — I’ve more candles…” His voice faded as he reached the rear of the cabin, and I heard his feet crunch on the rubble strewn floor -

— and then there was an immense groan, like a grotesque gasp, and a rushing from above. I heard Moses cry out.

I twisted, intending to dive out of the cabin after Moses — and I felt a nip of small teeth in the soft part of my hand — Morlock teeth!

At that instant, with Death closing in around me, and plunged into primal darkness once more, the presence of the Morlock, his teeth in my flesh, the brush of his hair against my skin: it was all unbearable! I roared and drove my fist into the soft flesh of the Morlock’s face.

…But he did not cry out; even as I struck him, I felt him reach past me to the dash-board.

The darkness fell from my eyes — the roar of collapsing concrete diminished into silence — and I found myself falling once more into the gray light of time travel.

[16] Falling Into Time

The Time-Car rocked. I grasped for the bucket seat, but I was thrown to the floor, clattering my head and shoulders against a wooden bench. My hand ached, irrelevantly, from the Morlock’s nip.

White light flooded the cabin, bursting upon us with a soundless explosion. I heard the Morlock cry out. My vision was blurred, impeded by the mats of blood which clung to my cheeks and eyebrows. Through the rear door and the various slit-windows, a uniform, pale glow seeped into the shuddering cabin; at first it flickered, but it soon settled to a washed-out gray glow. I wondered if there had been some fresh catastrophe: perhaps this workshop was being consumed by flames…

But then I recognized that the quality of light was too steady, too neutral for that. I understood that we had already gone far beyond that War-time laboratory.

The glow was, of course, daylight, rendered featureless and bland by the overlaying of day and night, too fast for the eye to follow. We had indeed fallen into time; this car — though crude and ill-balanced — was functioning correctly. I could not tell if we were falling into future or past, but the car had already taken us to a period beyond the existence of the London Dome.

I got my hands under me and tried to rise, but there was blood — mine or the Morlock’s — on my palms, and they slid out from under me. I tumbled back to the hard floor, thumping my head on the bench once more.

I fell into a huge, bone-numbing fatigue. The pain of my rattling about during the shellings, deferred by the scramble I had been through, now fell on me with a vengeance. I let my head rest against the floor’s metal ribs and closed my eyes. “What’s it all for, anyhow?” I asked, of no one in particular. Moses was dead… lost, with Professor Godel, under tons of masonry in that destroyed lab. I had no idea whether the Morlock was alive or dead; nor did I care. Let the Time-Car carry me to future or past as it would; let it go on forever, until it smashed itself to pieces against the walls of infinity and Eternity! Let there be an end to it — I could do no more. “It’s not worth the candle,” I muttered. “Not worth the candle…”

I thought I felt soft hands on mine, the brush of hair against my face; but I protested, and — with the last of my strength — pushed the hands away.

I fell into a deep, dreamless, comfortless darkness.

I was woken by a severe buffeting.

I was rattled against the floor of the cabin. Something soft lay under my head, but that slipped away, and my skull banged against the hard corner of a bench. This renewed hail of pain brought me to my senses, and, with some reluctance, I sat up.

My head ached pretty comprehensively and my body felt as if it had been through a grueling boxing-bout. But, paradoxically, my mood seemed a little improved. The death of Moses — was still there in my mind — a huge event, which I knew I must confront, in time — but after those moments of blessed unconsciousness I was able to look away from it, as one might turn away from the blinding light of the sun, and consider other things.

That dim, pearly mixture of day and night still suffused the interior of the car. It was quite remarkably cold; I felt myself shiver, and my breath fogged before my face. Nebogipfel sat in the pilot’s bucket seat, his back turned to me. His white fingers probed at the instruments in the rudimentary dash-board, and he traced the wires which dangled from the steering column.

I got to my feet. The car’s swaying, together with the battering I had endured in 1938, left me uncertain on my feet; to steady myself I had to cling to the cabin’s ribbed framework, and found the metal ice-cold under my bare hands. The soft item which had been cushioning my head, I found, was the Morlock’s blazer. I folded it up and placed it on a bench. I also saw, dropped on the floor, the heavy wrench which Moses had used to open the Plattnerite flasks. I picked it up with my fingertips; it was splashed with blood.

I still wore my heavy epaulets; disgusted by these bits of armor, I ripped them from my clothes and dropped them with a clatter.

At the noise, Nebogipfel glanced towards me, and I saw that his blue goggles were cracked in two, and that one huge eye was a mess of blood and broken flesh. “Prepare yourself,” he said thickly.

“What for? I—”

And the cabin was plunged into darkness.

I stumbled backwards, almost falling again. An intense cold sucked the remaining warmth out of the cabin air, and from my blood; and my head pounded anew. I wrapped my arms around my torso. “What has happened to the daylight?”

The voice of the Morlock seemed almost harsh in that swaying blackness. “It will last only a few seconds. We must endure…”

And, as quickly as it had come, the blackness receded, and the gray light seeped into the cabin once more. Some of the edge of that immense cold was blunted, but still I shivered violently. I knelt on the floor beside Nebogipfel’s seat. “What is happening? What was that?”

“Ice,” he said. “We are traveling through an Age of Periodic Glaciation; ice-sheets and glaciers are sweeping down from the north and covering the land — overwhelming us in the process — and then melting away. At times, I would hazard, there is as much as a hundred feet of ice above us.”

I peered through the slit-windows in the car’s front panel. I saw a Thames valley made over into a bleak tundra inhabited only by tough grass, defiant blazes of purple heather, and sparse trees; these latter shivered through their annual cycles too fast for me to follow, but they looked to me like the hardier varieties: oak, willow, poplar, elm, hawthorn. There was no sign of London: I could make out not even the ghosts of evanescent buildings, and there was no evidence of man in all that gray landscape, nor indeed of any animal life. Even the shape of the landscape, the hilts and valleys, seemed unfamiliar to me, as it was remade over and again by the glaciers.

And now — I saw it approach in a brief flood of white brilliance, before it overwhelmed us — the great Ice came again. In darkness, I cursed, and dug my hands into my arm-pits; my fingers and toes were numb, and I began to fear frostbite. When the glaciers receded once more, they left a landscape inhabited by much the same variety of hardy plants, as far as I could see, but with its contours adjusted: evidently the intervals of Ice were remaking the landscape, though I could not tell if we were proceeding into future or past. As I watched, boulders taller than men seemed to migrate across the landscape, taking slow slithers or rolls; this was clearly some odd effect of the erosion of the land.

“For how long was I unconscious?”

“Not long. Perhaps thirty minutes.”

“And is the Time-Car taking us into the future?”

“We are penetrating the past,” the Morlock said. He turned to face me, and I saw how his graceful movements had been reduced to stiff jerks by the fresh pummeling I had inflicted on him. “I am confident of it. I caught a few glimpses of the recession of London — its withering, back to its historical origins… From the intervals between Glaciations, I should say we are traveling at some tens of thousands of years every minute.”

“Perhaps we should work out how we might stop this car’s headlong drive into time. If we find an equable age—”

“I do not drink we have any way of terminating the flight of the car.”

“What?”

The Morlock spread his hands — I saw how the hair on the back of them was sprinkled with a light frost — and then we were plunged once more into a darkened sepulcher of Ice, and his voice floated out of the obscurity. “This is a crude, unfinished test vehicle, remember. Many of the controls and indicators are disconnected; those that do have connections largely appear nonfunctional. Even if we knew how to modify the workings with out wrecking the vehicle, I can see no way for us to get out of the cabin to reach the inner mechanism.”

We emerged from the Ice into that reshaped tundra once more. Nebogipfel watched the landscape with some fascination. “Think of it: the fjords of Scandinavia are not yet cut, and the lakes of Europe and North America — deposited by melting ice — are phantasms of the future.

“Already, we have passed beyond the dawn of human history. In Africa we might find races of Australopithecines some of them clumsy, some gracile, some carnivorous, but all with a bipedal gait and ape-like features: a small brain-case and large jaws and teeth…”

A great, cold loneliness descended on me. I had been lost in time before, but never, I thought, had I suffered quite this intensity of isolation! Was it true — could it be true — that Nebogipfel and I, in our damaged Time-Car, represented the only candle-flames of intelligence on the whole of the planet?

“So we are out of control,” I said. “We may not stop until we reach the beginning of time…”

“I doubt it will come to that,” Nebogipfel said. “The Plattnerite must have some finite capacity. It cannot propel us deeper into time, forever; it must exhaust itself: We must pray that it does so before we pass through the Ordovician and Cambrian time-layers — before we reach an Age in which there is no oxygen to sustain us.”

“That’s a cheerful prospect,” I said. “And things may become worse still, I suppose.”

“How?”

I got my stiff legs out from under me and sat on the cold, ribbed metal floor. “We have no provisions, of any kind. No water, no food. And we’re both injured. We don’t even have warm clothing! How long can we survive, in this freezing time-ark? A few days? Less?”

Nebogipfel did not reply.