moon-men, as tall and spindly as the low-gravity Morlocks I had encountered in the Year 657,208! Of course I could not make out any detail, as the moon’s month-long orbit took it spinning across my accelerated sky; and of that I was regretful, for I would have loved to have had a telescope and to make out the waters of new oceans lapping those deep, ancient craters, and the forests spreading across the dust of the great
Well, it was a sight I should never witness. With an effort, I returned in imagination from the moon, and fixed my attention on our situation.
Now there was some movement in the western sky, low against the horizon: firefly lights flickered into life, jerked across the heavens, and settled into place, there to remain for long millennia, before fading to be replaced by others. There was soon quite a crowd of these sparks, and they coalesced into a sort of bridge, which spanned the sky from horizon to horizon; at its peak, I counted several dozen lights in this city in the sky.
I pointed this out to Nebogipfel. “Are they stars?”
“No,” he said evenly. “The earth rotates still, and the true stars must be too obscured to be visible. The lights we see are hanging in a fixed position over the earth…”
“Then what are they? Artificial moons?”
“Perhaps. They are certainly placed there by the actions of men. The objects may be artificial — constructed of materials hauled up from the earth, or from the moon, whose gravity well is so much shallow. Or they may be natural objects towed into place around the earth by rockets: captured asteroids or comets, perhaps.”
I peered at those jostling lights with as much awe as any cave-dweller might stare at the light of a comet beating over his upturned, ignorant head!
“What would be the purpose of such stations in space?”
“Such a satellite is like a tower, fixed over the earth, twenty thousand miles tall…”
I grimaced. “Quite a view! One could sit in it and watch the evolution of weather patterns over a hemisphere.”
“Or the station could serve for the transmission of telegraphic messages from one continent to another. Or, more radically, one could imagine the transfer of great industries — heavy manufacture, or the generation of power, perhaps — to the comparative safety of high earth orbit.”
He opened his hands. “You can observe for yourself the degradation of the air and water around us. The earth has a limited capacity to absorb the waste products of human industry, and with enough development, the planet could even be rendered uninhabitable.
“In orbit, though, the limits to growth are virtually infinite: witness the Sphere, constructed by my own species.”
The temperature continued to increase, as the air grew more foul. Nebogipfel’s improvised Time-Car was functional, but poorly balanced, and it swayed and rocked; I clung to my bench miserably, for the combination of the heat, the swaying and the usual vertigo induced by time travel gave me a most nauseous feeling.
[20]
The Orbital City
There was a further evolution of our equatorial Orbital City. The chaotic arrangement of those artificial lights had become significantly more regular, I saw. Now there was a band of seven or eight stations, all dazzling bright, positioned at regular intervals around the globe; I imagined that more such stations must be in position below the horizon, continuing their steady march about the waist of the planet.
Now threads of light, fine and delicate, grew steadily down from the gleaming stations, reaching towards the earth like tentative fingers. The motion was even, and slow enough for us to follow, and I realized that I was watching stupendous engineering projects — projects spanning thousands of miles of space, and occupying whole millennia — and I was awed by the dedication and grasp of the New Humans.
After several seconds of this, the leading threads had descended into the obscuring mist of the horizon. Then one such thread disappeared, and the station to which it had been fixed was snuffed out like a candle-flame in a breeze. Evidently the thread had fallen, or broken loose, and its anchoring station was destroyed. I watched the pale, soundless images, wondering what immense disaster — and how many deaths — they represented! Within moments, though, a new station had been fixed into the vacant position in the equator-girdling array, and a fresh thread extended.
“I’m not sure I believe my eyes,” I told the Morlock. “It looks to me as if they are fixing those cables from space to the earth!”
“So I imagine is happening,” the Morlock said. “We are witnessing the construction of a Space Elevator — a link, fixed between the surface of the earth and the stations in orbit.”
I grinned at the thought. “A Space Elevator! I should relish riding such a device: to rise up through the clouds, and into the silent grandeur of space — but, if the Elevator were glass-walled, it would not be a ride for the vertiginous.”
“Indeed not.”
Now I saw that more lines of light were extending between the geosynchronous stations. Soon the glowing points were linked, and the traces thickened into a glowing band, as broad and bright as the stations themselves. Again — though I had no real wish to curtail our time-traveling — I wished I could see more of this huge, world-girdling City in the sky.
The development of earth over the same period was scarcely so spectacular, however. Indeed, it seemed to me that First London had become static, perhaps abandoned. Some of the buildings became so long-lived that they seemed almost solid to us, although they were dark, squat and ugly; while others were falling into ruin without replacement. (We saw this process as the appearance, with brutal abruptness, of gaps in the complex sky-line). It seemed to me that the air was becoming still thicker, the patient Sea a drabber gray, and I wondered if the battered earth had been abandoned at last, either for the stars or, perhaps, for more palatable havens beneath the ground.
I raised these possibilities with the Morlock.
“Perhaps,” he said. “But you must recognize that already more than a million years have passed since the establishment of the original colony, by Hilary Bond and her people. There is more evolutionary distance between you and the New Humans of this era, than between you and me. So we can make nothing but educated guesses about the way of living of the races extant here, their motives — even their biological composition.”
“Yes,” I said slowly. “And yet—”
“Yes?”
“Evidently not.” He raised his pale hand to the heavens. “In fact, their intent seems altogether more ambitious.”
I turned to see what he was indicating. Once again, I saw, that great Orbital City was showing developments. Now, huge shells — irregular, obviously thousands of miles across — were sprouting around the glowing linear town, like berries on a cane. And as soon as a shell was completed it cast off from earth, blossomed with a fire that illuminated the land, and vanished. From our point of view, the development of such an artifact, from embryonic form to departing fledgling, took a second or less; but each dose of flaring light must, I thought, have bathed the earth for decades.
It was a startling sight, and it continued for some time — for several thousand years, by my estimation.
The shells were, of course, huge ships in space.
“So,” I said to the Morlock, “men are traveling from the earth, in those great space yachts. But where are they going, do you think? The planets? Mars, or Jupiter, or—”
Nebogipfel sat with his masked face tilted up at the sky, and his hands in his lap, and the lights of the ships playing on the hairs of his face. “One does not need such spectacular energies as we have seen here to travel such petty distances. With an engine like that… I think the ambition of these New Humans is wider. I think they are abandoning the solar system, much as they appear to have abandoned the earth.”
I peered after the departing ships in awe. “What remarkable people these must be, these New Humans! I don’t want to be rude about you Morlocks, old chap, but still — what a difference of grasp, of ambition! I mean — a Sphere around the sun is one thing, but to hurl one’s children to the stars…”
“It is true that
“Oh, perhaps,” I said, “but it’s scarcely so
He adjusted his grubby skin-mask and stared around at the ruined earth. “Perhaps not. But the husbandry of a finite resource — even this earth — seems to be a competence not shared by your New Humans.”
I saw that he was right. Even as the star-ships’ fire splashed across the sea, the remains of First London were decaying further — the crumbling ruins seemed to bubble, as if deliquescing — and the Sea became more gray, the air still more foul. The heat was now intense, and I pulled my shirt away from my chest, where it had stuck.
Nebogipfel stirred on his bench, and peered about uneasily. “I think if it happens, it will come quickly…”
“What will?”
He would not reply. The heat was now more severe than I remembered ever suffering in the jungles of the Palaeocene. The ruins of the city, scattered over the hills of brown dirt, seemed to shimmer, becoming unreal…
And then — with a glare so bright it obscured the sun — the city burst into flames!
[21]
Instabilities
That consuming fire swallowed us, for the merest fraction of a second. A new heat — quite unbearable — pulsed over the Time-Car, and I cried out. But, mercifully, the heat subsided as soon as the City’s torching was done.
In that instant of fire, the ancient city had gone. First London was scoured clean of the earth, and left behind were only a few outcroppings of ash and melted brick, and here and there the tracery of a foundation. The bare soil was soon colonized once more by the busy processes of life — a sluggish greenery slid over the hills and about the plain, and dwarfish trees shivered through their cycles at the fringe of the Sea — but the progress of this new wave of life was slow, and seemed doomed to a stunted existence; for a pearl-gray fog lay over everything, obscuring the patient glow of the Orbital City.
“So First London is destroyed,” I said in wonder. “Do you think there was a War? That fire must have persisted for decades, until there was nothing left to burn.”
“It was not a war,” Nebogipfel said. “But it was a catastrophe wrought by man, I think.”
Now I saw the strangest thing. The new, sparse trees began to die back, but not by withering before my accelerated gaze, like the
