The Time Ships

And with that I threw him over my shoulder, and stalked out of our hut and towards the forest. Instantly I found myself wading through inches of cold, muddy water. I slipped more than once on the squirming sand, but I kept one arm wrapped around the wriggling body of the Morlock.

I reached the fringe of the forest. Under the shelter of the canopy, the pressure of the rain was lessened. It was still pitch black, and I was forced to stumble forward into darkness, tripping on roots and colliding with boles, and the ground under me was sodden and treacherous. Nebogipfel gave up his struggling and lay passive over my shoulder.

At last I reached a tree I thought I remembered: thick and old, and with low side-branches that spread out from the trunk at a little above head-height. I hooked the Morlock over a branch, where he hung like a soaked-through coat. Then — with some effort, for I am long past my climbing days — I hauled myself off the ground and got myself sat on a branch with my back against the trunk.

And there we stayed as the Storm played itself out. I kept one hand resting on the Morlock’s back, to ensure he did not fall or strive to return to the hut; and I was forced to endure a sheet of water which ran down the trunk of the tree and over my back and shoulders.

As the dawn approached, it picked out an eerie beauty in that forest. Peering up into the canopy I could make out how the rain trickled across the engineered forms of the leaves, and was channeled down the trunks to the ground; I am not much of a botanist but now I saw that the forest was like a great machine designed to survive the predations of such a Storm as this, far better than man’s crude constructions.

As the light increased I tore a strip from the remains of my trousers — I was without a shirt — and tied it over Nebogipfel’s face, to protect his naked eyes. He did not stir.

The rains died at midday, and I judged it safe to descend. I lifted Nebogipfel to the ground, and he could walk, but I was forced to lead him by the hand, for he was blind without his goggles.

The day beyond the jungle was bright and fresh; there was a pleasant breeze off the Sea, and light clouds scudded across an almost English sky. It was as if the world was remade, and there was nothing left of yesterday’s oppressiveness.

I approached the remains of the hut with some reluctance. I saw scraps — bits of smashed-up structure, the odd nut-shell cup, and so forth — all half-buried in the damp sand. In the midst of it all was a baby Diatryma, pecking with its great clumsy beak at the rubble. I shouted, “Hoi!” — and ran forward, clapping my hands over my head. The bird-beast ran off, the loose yellow flesh of its legs wobbling.

I poked through the debris. Most of our possessions were lost — washed away. The shelter had been a mean thing, and our few belongings mere shards of improvisation and repair; but it had been our home — and I felt a shocking sense of violation.

“What of the device?” Nebogipfel asked me, turning his blinded face this way and that. “The Time-Car — what of it?”

After some digging about, I found a few struts and tubes and plates, bits of battered gun-metal now even more twisted and damaged than before; but the bulk of the car had been swept into the Sea. Nebogipfel fingered the fragments, his eyes closed. “Well,” he said, “well, this will have to do.”

And he sat down on the sand and cast about blindly for bits of cloth and vine, and he began the patient construction of his time-device once more.

[6] Heart and Body

We never managed to retrieve Nebogipfel’s goggles after the Storm, and this proved to be a great handicap to him. But he did not complain. As before, he restricted himself to the shade during the hours of daylight, and if he was forced to emerge into the light of twilight or dawn he would wear his wide-brimmed hat and, over his eyes, a slitted mask of animal skin which I made for him, to afford him some sight.

The Storm was a mental as well as a physical shock to me, for I had begun to feel as if I had protected myself against such calamities as this world might throw at me. I decided that our lives must be put on a more secure footing. After some thought I decided that a hut of some form, solidly founded, and placed on stilts — that is, above the run-off from future monsoons — was the thing to aim for. But I could not rely on fallen branches for my construction material, for these, by their nature, were often irregular of form and sometimes rotten. I needed tree trunks — and for that I would need an ax.

So I spent some time as an amateur geologist, hunting about the countryside for suitable rock formations. At last I found, in a layer of gravelly debris in the area of Hampstead Heath, some dark, rounded flints, together with cherts. I thought this debris must have been washed here by some vanished river.

I carried these treasures back to our encampment with as much care as if they were made of gold — or more; for that weight of gold would not have been of any value to me.

I took to bashing up the flint on open spaces of the beach. It took a good deal of experimentation, and a considerable wasting of flint, before I found ways to crack open the nodules in sympathy with the planes of the stone, to form extensive and sharp edges. My hands felt clumsy and inexpert. I had marveled before at the fine arrow-heads and ax blades which are displayed in glass cases in our museums, but it was only when I tried to construct such devices for myself that I understood what a deep level of skill and engineering intuition our forefathers had possessed in the Age of Polished Stone.

At last I constructed a blade with which I was satisfied. I fixed it to a short length of split wood, binding it in with strips of animal-skin, and I set off a high mood for the forest.

I returned not fifteen minutes later with the fragments of my ax-head in my hand; for it had shattered on the second blow, with barely a cut made in the tree’s bark!

However, with a little more experimentation I got it correct, and soon I was chopping my way through a forest of young, straight trees.

For our permanent encampment, we would stay on our beach, but I ensured we were well above the tidal line, and away from the possibilities of flood from our stream. It took me some time to dig pits for the founds, deep enough to satisfy me; but at last I had erected a square framework of upright posts, securely fixed, and with a platform of thin logs attached at perhaps a yard above the ground. This floor was far from even, and I planned to acquire the skills of better plank-making one day; but when I laid down on it at night the floor felt secure and solid, and I had a measure of security that we were raised above the various perils of the ground. I almost wished another Storm down on our heads, so that I could test out my new design!

Nebogipfel hauled his fragments of Time-Car up onto the floor by a little ladder I made for him, and continued his dogged reconstruction there.

One day, as I made my way through the forest, I became aware of a pair of bright eyes studying me from a law branch.

I slowed, taking care not to make any jerky movements, and slipped my bow from my back.

The little creature was perhaps four inches long, and rather like a miniature Lemur. Its tail and face were rodent-like, with gnawing incisors quite clear at the front; it had clawed feet and suspicious eyes. It was either so intelligent that it thought it should fool me into ignoring it by its immobility — or else so stupid that it did not recognize any danger from me.

It was the work of a moment to fit the string of the bow into the notch of an arrow, and fire it off.

Now my hunting and trapping skills had improved with practice, and my slings and traps had become moderately successful; but my bows and arrows much less so. The construction of my arrows was sound enough, but I could never find wood of the right flexibility for the bows. And generally, by the time my clumsy fingers had loaded up the bow, most of my targets, bemused by my antics, were well able to scamper for cover.

Not so this little fellow! He watched with no more than dim curiosity as my skewed arrow limped through the air towards him. For once my aim was true, and the flint head pinned his little body to the tree trunk.

I returned to Nebogipfel, proud of my prize, for mammals were useful to us: not just as sources of meat, but for their fur, teeth, fat and bones. Nebogipfel studied the little rodent-like corpse through his slit-mask.

“Perhaps I shall hunt down more of these,” I said. “The little creature really didn’t seem to understand what danger he was in, right until the end. Poor beast!”

“Do you know what this is?”

“Tell me.”

“I believe it is Purgatorius.”

“And the significance—?”

“It is a primate: the earliest known.” He let himself sound amused.

I swore. “I thought I was done with all this. But even in the Palaeocene, one cannot avoid meeting one’s relatives!” I studied the tiny corpse. “So here is the ancestor of monkey, and man, and Morlock! The insignificant little acorn from which will grow an oak which will smother more worlds than this earth… I wonder how many men, and nations, and species, would have sprung from the loins of this modest little fellow, had I not killed him. Once again, perhaps I have destroyed my own past!”

Nebogipfel said, “We cannot help but interact with History, you and I. With every breath we take, every tree you cut down, every animal we kill, we create a new world in the Multiplicity of Worlds. That is all. It is unavoidable.”

After that, I could not bring myself to touch the flesh of the poor little creature. I took it into the forest and buried it.

One day I set myself to follow our little fresh-water stream westwards towards its source, in the interior of the country.

I set off at dawn. Away from the coast, the tang of salt and ozone faded, to be replaced by the hot, moist scents of the dipterocarps forest, and the overpowering perfume of the crowding flowers. The going was difficult, with heavy growth underfoot. It became much more humid, and my cap of nut-fiber was soon soaked through; the sounds around me, the rustling of vegetation and the endless trills and coughs of the forest, took on a heavier tone in the thickening air.

By mid-morning I had traveled two or three miles, arriving somewhere in Brentford. Here I found a wide, shallow lake, from which flowed our stream and a number of others, and the lake was fed in turn by a series of minor brooks and rivers. The trees grew close around this secluded body of water, and climbing plants clung to their trunks and lower branches, including some I recognized as bottle gourds and loofahs. The water was warm and brackish, and I was wary of drinking it, but the lagoon teemed with life. Its surface was covered by groupings of giant lilies, shaped like upturned bottle-tops and perhaps six feet wide, which reminded me of plants I had once seen in Turner’s Waterlily House in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. (It was ironic, I thought, that the eventual site of Kew itself was less than a mile from where I stood!) The lilies’ saucers looked strong and buoyant enough for me to stand on, but I did not put this hypothesis to the test.

It was the work of a few minutes to improvise a fishing rod, made from the long, straight trunk of a sapling. I fixed a line to this, and I baited a hook of Time-Car metal with grubs.

I was rewarded within a few minutes by brisk tugs of the line. I grinned to imagine the envy of some of my angling friends — dear old Filby, for instance — at my discovery of this un-fished oasis.

I built a fire and ate well that night of broiled fish and tubers.

A little before dawn I was woken by a strange hooting. I sat up and looked about me. My fire had more or less died. The sun was not yet up; the sky had that unearthly tinge of steel blue which prefigures a new day. There was no wind, and not a leaf stirred; a heavy mist lay immobile on the surface of the water.

Then I made out a group of birds, a hundred yards from me around the rim of the lake. Their feathers were dun brown and each had legs as long as a flamingo’s. They stepped about the waters of the lake’s margin, or stood poised on one leg like exquisite sculptures. They had heads shaped like those of modern ducks, and they would dip those familiar-looking beaks through the shimmering surface and sweep through the water, evidently filtering for food.

The mist lifted a little, and more of the lake was revealed; I saw now that there was a great flock of these creatures (which Nebogipfel later identified as Presbyornis) — thousands of them, in a great, open colony. They moved like ghosts through that vaporous haze.