The Time Ships

was reminded of how I had done the same as I made my way out of the forest I had burned in the Year 802,701. Several times we came across the corpse of some poor animal, caught in a disaster beyond its comprehension; despite the blaze, the putrefactive processes of the forest worked vigorously, and we were forced to endure a stink of decay and death as we walked. Once I stepped on the liquefying remains of some little creature — it had been a planetetherium, I think — and poor Stubbins was forced to wait for me as, with noises of disgust, I scraped the remains of the little animal from the sole of my foot.

After perhaps an hour, we came across a still, hunched form on the floor of the forest. The stench was so bad that I was forced to hold the remains of my handkerchief over my face. The body was so badly burned and misshapen that at first I thought it might be the corpse of some beast — a young diatryma perhaps — but then I heard Stubbins exclaim. I stepped to his side; and there I saw, at the end of a blackened limb stretched out along the ground, the hand of a woman. The hand, by some bizarre accident, was quite undamaged by the fire; the fingers were curled, as if in sleep, and a small gold ring sparkled on the fourth finger.

Poor Stubbins stumbled away into the trees, and I heard him retching. I felt foolish, helpless and desolate, standing there in the ruined forest with those shells of water dangling useless from my neck.

“What if it’s all like this, sir?” Stubbins asked. “You know — this.” He could not bear to look at the corpse, or in any way point to it. “What if we find no one alive — what if they’re all gone, all burnt to a crisp like this?”

I laid a hand on his shoulder, and sought a strength I did not feel. “If that’s so, then we’ll go back to the beach, and find a way to live,” I said. “We’ll make the best of it; that’s what we’ll do, Stubbins. But you mustn’t give up, man — we’ve barely started our searching.”

His eyes were white, in a face as soot-dark as a chimneysweep’s. “No,” he said. “You’re right. We mustn’t give up. We’ll make the best of it; what else can we do? But—”

“Yes?”

“Oh — nothing,” he said; and he began to straighten his kit, in readiness to go on.

He did not have to finish his sentiment for me to understand what he meant! If all the Expedition were finished save the two of us and the Morlock, then, Stubbins knew, the three of us would sit in our huts on the beach, until we died. And then the tide would cover our bones, and that would be that; we should be lucky to leave behind a fossil, to be found by some curious householder digging a garden in Hampstead or Kew, fifty million years from now.

It was a grim, futile prospect; and what — Stubbins would want to know — what was the best that could be made out of all that?

In grim silence, we left the girl’s charred corpse, and pressed on.

We had no way of judging time in the forest, and the day was long in that grisly wreckage; for even the sun seemed to have suspended his daily traverse around the sky, and the shadows of the broken stumps of trees seemed neither to shorten nor to track across the ground. But in reality it was perhaps only an hour later that we heard a crackling, crashing noise, approaching us from the interior of the wood.

At first we could not see the source of the noise — Stubbins’s eyes, wide with fear, were white as ivory in the gloom — and we waited, holding our breath.

A form approached us, coalescing from the charred shadows, stumbling and colliding with the tree stumps; it was a slight figure, clearly in distress but, nonetheless, undoubtedly human.

With my heart in my mouth, I rushed forward, careless now of the crusty, blackened undergrowth under my feet. Stubbins was at my side.

It was a woman, but with her face and upper body burned and so blackened I could not recognize her. She fell into our arms with a gurgled sigh, as if with relief.

Stubbins sat the woman on the ground with her back to a snapped-off tree stump. He muttered clumsy endearments as he worked: “Don’t you worry — you’ll be fine, I’ll look after you—” and so forth, in a voice that was choked. She still wore the charred remnants of a twill shirt and khaki trousers, but the whole was blackened and torn; and her arms were badly scorched, particularly on the underside of the forearms. Her face was burned — she must have been facing the blast — but there were, I saw now, strips of healthy flesh across her mouth and eyes, which remained comparatively unharmed. I surmised that she had thrown her arms across her face when the blast had come, damaging her forearms, but protecting at least some of her face.

She opened her eyes now: they were a piercing blue. Her mouth opened, and an insect-whisper emerged; I bent close to hear, suppressing my revulsion and horror at the blackened ruin of her nose and ears.

“Water. In the name of God — water…”

It was Hilary Bond.

[13] Bond’s Account

Stubbins and I stayed with Hilary for some hours, feeding her sips of water from our shells. Periodically Stubbins set off on little circular tours of the forest, calling boldly to attract the attention of more survivors. We tried to ease Hilary’s wounds with Stubbins’s medical kit; but the contents of the kit — intended to treat bruises and cuts and the like — were quite inadequate to cope with burns of the extent and severity of Hilary’s.

Hilary was weakened, but she was quite coherent, and she was able to give me a sensible account of what she had seen of the Bombing.

After she had left me on the beach, she had plunged through the forest as fast as she could. Even so, she was no closer than a mile to the camp when the Messerschmitt came.

“I saw the Bomb falling through the air,” she whispered. “I knew it was Carolinum from the way it burned — I’ve not seen it before, but I’ve heard accounts — and I thought I was done for. I froze like a rabbit — or like a fool — and by the time I’d got my wits back, I knew I didn’t have time to get to the ground, or duck behind the trees. I threw my arms before my face…”

The flash had been inhumanly bright. “The light burned at my flesh… it was like the doors of Hell opening… I could feel my cheeks melting; and when I looked I could see the tip of my nose burning — like a little candle… it was the most extraordinary…” She collapsed into coughing.

Then the concussion came — “like a great wind” — and she was knocked backwards. She had tumbled across the forest floor, until she had collided with a hard surface — presumably a tree trunk — and, for a spell, knew no more.

When she came to, that pillar of crimson and purple flame was rising like a demon out of the forest, with its attendant familiars of melted earth and steam. Around her the trees were smashed and scorched, although — by chance — she was far enough from the epicenter to have avoided the worst of the damage, and she hadn’t been further injured by falling branches or the like.

She had reached up to touch her nose; and she remembered only a dull curiosity as a great piece of it came away in her hand. “But I felt no pain — it is very odd… although,” she added grimly, “I was compensated for that soon enough…”

I listened to this in a morbid silence, and vivid in my mind’s eye was the slim, rather awkward girl with whom I had hunted bivalves, mere hours before this terrible experience.

Hilary thought she slept. When she came to her senses, the forest was a good deal darker the first flames had subsided and, for some reason, her pain was reduced. She wondered if her very nerves had been destroyed.

With a huge effort, for she was by now greatly weakened by thirst, she pulled herself to her feet and approached the epicenter of the blast.

“I remember the glow of the continuing Carolinum explosion, that unearthly purple, brightening as I moved through the trees… The heat increased, and I wondered how close I would be able to come, before I would be forced back.”

She had reached the fringe of the open space around the parked Juggernauts.

“I could barely see, so bright was the glare of the Carolinum fire-pit, and there was a roar, like rushing water,” she said. “The Bomb had landed slap in the center of our camp — that German was a good marksman — it was like a toy volcano, with smoke and flame pouring up out of it.

“Our camp is flattened and burned, most of our belongings destroyed. Even the ’Nauts are smashed to bits: of the four, only one has retained its shape, and that is gutted; the others are burst open, toppled like toys, burned and exploded. I saw no people,” she said. “I think I had expected…” She hesitated. “Horrors: I expected horrors. But there was nothing — nothing left of them. Oh — save for one thing — the strangest thing.” She laid a hand on my arm; it was reduced by flame to a claw. “On the skin of that ’Naut, most of the paint was blistered away — except in one place, where there was a shaped patch… It was like a shadow, of a crouching man.” She looked up at me, her eyes gleaming from her ruined face. “Do you understand? It was a shadow — of a soldier, I don’t know who — caught in that moment of a blast so intense that his flesh was evaporated, his bones scattered. And yet the shadow in the paint remained.” Her voice remained level, dispassionate, but her eyes were full of tears. “Isn’t that strange?”

Hilary had stumbled about the rim of the encampment for a while. Convinced by now she would not find people alive there, she had a vague idea of seeking out supplies. But, she said, her thoughts were scattered and confused, and her residual pain so intense it threatened to overwhelm her; and, with her damaged hands, she found it impossible to grub through the charred remnants of the camp with any semblance of system.

So she had come away, with the intention of trying to reach the Sea.

After that, she could barely remember anything of her stumble through the forest; it had lasted all night, and yet she had come such a short distance from the explosion site that I surmised she must have been blundering in circles, until Stubbins and I found her.

[14] Survivors

Stubbins and I resolved that our best course would be to take Hilary out of the forest, away from the damaging Carolinum emissions, and bring her to our encampment along the beach, where Nebogipfel’s advanced ingenuity might be able to concoct some way to make her more comfortable. But it was clear enough that Hilary did not have the strength to walk further. So we improvised a stretcher of two long, straight fallen branches, with my trousers and Stubbins’s shirt tied between them. Wary of her blistered flesh, we lifted Hilary onto this makeshift construction. She cried out when we moved her, but once we had her settled on the stretcher her discomfort eased.

So we set off back through the forest, towards the beach. Stubbins preceded me, and soon I could see how his bare, bony back prickled with sweat and dirt. He stumbled in the forest’s scorched gloom, and lianas and low branches rattled against his unprotected face; but he did not complain, and kept his hands wrapped around the poles of our stretcher. As for me, staggering along in my under-shorts, my strength was soon exhausted, and my emptied-out muscles set up a great trembling. At times, it seemed impossible that I could lift my feet for another step, or keep my stiffening hands wrapped around those rough poles. But, watching the stolid determination of Stubbins ahead of me, I strove to mask my fatigue and to follow his pace.

Hilary lay in a shallow unconsciousness, with her limbs convulsing and mumbled cries escaping her lips, as echoes of pain worked their way through her nervous system.

When we reached the shore we set Hilary down in the shade of the forest’s rim, and Stubbins lifted her head, cupping her skull in one hand, as he fed her sips of water. Stubbins was a clumsy man, but he worked with an unconscious delicacy and sensitivity that overcame the natural limitations of his frame; it seemed to me that he was pouring his whole being into those simple acts of kindness for Hilary. Stubbins struck me as fundamentally a good, kind man; and I accepted that his detailed care of Hilary was motivated largely by nothing more nor less than simple compassion. But I saw, too, that it would have been unbearable for poor Stubbins to have survived — thanks only to the lucky chance of following an assignment away from the camp during the disaster — when all of