The Time Ships

“Look,” Hilary said, pointing. “Out there. Can you see it?”

I sighted along Hilary’s arm, and was rewarded with a glimpse of something: a distortion, hanging over the Sea, far to the east. It was a patch of otherness — a whorl no bigger than the full moon, a kind of sparkling refraction tinged with green.

Then I had an impression of something solid in the middle of it all, congealing and spinning — and then there was a hard, dark shape, like a cross, which came hurtling low out of the sky — from the east, from the direction of a Germany yet to be born. That thrumming noise grew much louder.

“My God,” Hilary Bond said. “It is a Messerschmitt — an Eagle; it looks like a Bf 109F…”

“Messerschmitt… That’s a German name,” I said, rather stupidly.

She glanced at me. “Of course it’s a German name. Don’t you understand?”

“What?”

“That’s a German plane. It is die Zeitmaschine, come to hunt us down!”

As it approached the coast, the craft tipped in the air, like a seagull in flight, and began to run parallel to the Sea’s edge. With a noisy whoosh, and so fast that Hilary and I were forced to swivel on the sand to follow its progress, it passed over our heads, not a hundred feet from the ground.

The machine was some thirty feet long, and perhaps a little more from wing-tip to wing-tip. A propeller whirled at its nose, blurred by speed. The craft’s underside was painted blue-gray, and its upper sections were done out in mottled brown and green. Strident black crosses on the fuselages and wings marked the craft’s country of origin, and there were more gaudy militaristic designs on the painted skin, of an eagle’s head, an upraised sword, and so on. The underside was quite smooth, save for the craft’s single load: a tear-drop mass of metal perhaps six feet long, painted in the ubiquitous blue.

For some moments Bond and I stood there, as stunned by this sudden apparition as if by some religious visitation.

The excitable young man buried inside me — the shade of poor, lost Moses — thrilled at the sight of that elegant machine. What an adventure for that pilot! What a glorious view! And what extraordinary courage it must have taken to haul that machine into the smoke-blackened air of 1944 Germany — to take that plane so high that the landscape of the heart of Europe would be reduced to a kind of map, a textured table-top coated with sand and sea and forest, and tiny, doll-like people — and then to close the switch which launched the craft into time. I imagined how the sun would arc over the ship like a meteorite, while beneath the prow, the landscape, made plastic by time, would flow and deform…

Then the gleaming wings tipped again, and the propeller’s noise came crashing down over us. The craft swooped upwards and away, over the forest and in the direction of the Expeditionary Force.

Hilary ran up the beach, and her uneven limping left asymmetric craters in the sand.

“Where are you going?”

She reached her boots, and began to haul them on roughly, ignoring her socks. “To the camp, of course.”

“But…” I stared at our small, pathetic pile of bivalves. “But you can’t outrun that Messerschmitt. What will you do?”

She picked up her hand-gun and stood up straight. For answer, she looked at me, her expression blank. And then she turned and shoved her way through the fringe of palm trees which lined the edge of the forest, and disappeared into the shadows of the dipterocarps.

The noise of the Messerschmitt aircraft was fading, absorbed by the forest canopy. I was alone on the beach, with the bivalves and the lapping of the surf.

It all seemed quite unreal: War, imported to this Palaeocene idyll? I felt no fear — nothing but a sense of bizarre dislocation.

I shook off my immobility, and prepared to follow Bond into the forest.

I had not even reached my boots when a small, liquid voice came floating across the sand to me: “…No!… go to the water…no!…”

It was Nebogipfel: the Morlock came stumbling across the sand towards me, his improvised crutch digging a series of deep, narrow pits. I saw how a loose edge of his face-mask flapped as he staggered along.

“What is it? Can’t you see what’s happening? Die Zeitmaschine—”

“The water.” He leaned on his crutch, as limp as a rag doll, and his panting tore at his frame. His wheezing had grown so pronounced that his syllables were barely distinguishable. “The water… we must get in the…”

“This is no time for a swim, man!” I bellowed, indignant. “Can’t you see—”

“Do not understand,” he gasped. “You. You do not… Come…”

I turned, abstracted, and looked over the forest. Now I could see the elusive form of die Zeitmaschine as it skimmed over the tree-tops, its green and blue paint making vivid splashes against the foliage. Its speed was extraordinary, and its distant noise was like an insect’s angry buzz.

Then I heard the staccato cough of artillery pieces, and the whistle of shells.

“They’re fighting back,” I said to Nebogipfel, caught up by this spark of War. “Can you see? The flying machine has evidently spotted the Expeditionary Force, but they are firing off their guns at it…”

“The Sea,” Nebogipfel said. He plucked at my arm with fingers as feeble as a baby’s, and it was a gesture of such immediacy, such pleading, that I had to tear my eyes from the aerial battle. The grubby slit-mask exposed mere slivers of his eyes, and his mouth was a down-turned, quivering gash. “It is the only shelter close enough. It might be sufficient…”

“Shelter? The battle is two miles away. How can we be hurt, standing here on this empty beach?”

“But the Bomb… the Bomb carried by the German; did you not see it?…” His hair was lank against his small skull. “The Bombs of this History are not sophisticated — little more than lumps of pure Carolinum… But they are effective enough, for all that.

“There is nothing you can do for the Expedition! — not now… we must wait until the battle is done.” He stared up at me. “Can you see that? Come,” he said, and he tugged, again, at my arm. He had dropped his crutch, now, so that my arm was supporting him.

Like a child, I allowed myself to be led into the water.

Soon we had reached a depth of four feet or more. The Morlock was covered up to his shoulders; he bade me crouch down, so that I, too, was more or less immersed in salt water.

Over the forest, the Messerschmitt banked and came back for another pass, swooping like some predatory bird of metal and oil; the artillery pieces shouted up at die Zeitmaschine, and shells burst into clouds of smoke, which drifted off through the Palaeocene air.

I admit that I thrilled to this aerial contest — the first I had witnessed. My mind raced with visions of the extended conflicts in the air which must have filled the skies over Europe in 1944: I saw men who rode upon the wind, and slough and fell like Milton’s angels. This was the Apotheosis of War, I thought: what was the brutish squalor of the trenches beside this lofty triumph, this headlong swoop to glory or death?

Now the Messerschmitt spiraled away from the bursting shells, almost lazily, and began to climb higher. At the top of this maneuver, it seemed to hover just for a moment, hundreds of feet above the earth.

Then I saw the Bomb — that deadly blue-painted metal pod detach from its parent, quite delicately, and it began its fall to earth.

A single shell arced up, out of the forest, and it punched a hole in the wing of the flying machine. There was an eruption of flame, and die Zeitmaschine looped crazily away, enveloped by smoke.

I emitted a whoop. “Good shooting! Nebogipfel — did you see that?”

But the Morlock had reached up out of the Sea, and hauled with his soft hands at my head. “Down,” he said. “Get down into the water…”

My last glimpse of the battle was of the trail of smoke which marked the path of the tumbling Messerschmitt — and, before it, a glowing star, already almost too bright to look at, which was the falling Bomb.

I ducked my head into the Sea.

[11] The Bomb

In an instant, the gentle light of the Palaeocene sun was banished. A crimson-purple glare flooded the air above the water’s surface. An immense, complex sound crashed over me: it was founded on the crack of a great explosion, but all overlaid by a roaring, and by a noise of smashing and tearing. All of this was diluted by the few inches of water above me, but still it was so loud that I was forced to press my hands to my ears; I called out, and bubbles escaped from my mouth and brushed against my face.

That initial crack subsided, but the roaring went on and on. My air was soon done, and I was forced to push my head above the water. I gasped, and shook water from my eyes.

The noise was extraordinarily loud. The light from the forest was too bright to look into, but my dazzled eyes had an impression of a great ball of crimson fire that seemed to be whirling about, in the middle of the forest, almost like a living thing. Trees had been smashed down like skittles, all around that pirouetting fire, and huge shards of the broken-up dipterocarps were picked up and thrown around in the air as easily as match-stalks. I saw animals tumbling from the forest, fleeing in terror from the Storm: a family of Diatryma, their feathers ruffled and scorched, stumbled towards the water; and there came a Pristichampus, a handsome adult, its hoofed feet pounding at the sand.

And now the fireball seemed to be attacking the exposed earth itself, as if burrowing into it. From the heart of the shattered forest, puffs of heavy incandescent vapor and fragments of rock were hurled high and far; each of these was evidently saturated with Carolinum, for each was a center of scorching and blistering energy, so that it was like watching the birth of a family of meteorites.

A huge, compact fire started up in the heart of the forest now, in response to the Carolinum’s god-like touch of destruction; the flames leaped up, hundreds of feet tall, forming themselves into a tower of billowing light about the epicenter of the blast. A cloud of smoke and ash, laden with flying lumps of debris, began to collect like a thunderhead above the blaze. And, punching through it all like a fist of light, there was a pillar of steam, rising out of the crater made by the Carolinum Bomb, a pillar red-lit from below as if by a miniature volcano.

Nebogipfel and I could do nothing but cower in the water, keeping under for as long as we could, and, in the intervals when we were forced to surface for air, holding our arms above our heads for fear of the shower of scorched, falling debris.

At last, after some hours of this, Nebogipfel decreed it safe enough to approach the land.

I was exhausted, my limbs heavy in the water. My face and neck were stinging with burns, and my thirst raged; but even so I was forced to carry the Morlock for most of the way back to the shore, for his little strength had given out long before the end of our ordeal.

The beach was scarcely recognizable from the gentle spot where I had hunted for bivalves with Hilary Bond, mere hours before. The sand was strewn with debris from the forest — much of it smashed-up branches and bits of tree trunk, some of it still smoldering — and muddy rivulets worked their way across the pocked surface. The heat emanating from the forest was still all but