The Time Ships

[5] White Earth

I spent many hours alone, or with Nebogipfel, at the windows of our apartment.

I saw no evidence of animal or vegetable life on the surface of White Earth. As far as I could tell, we were isolated in our little bubble of light and warmth, atop that immense tower; and we never left that bubble, in all the time we were there.

At night the sky beyond our windows was generally clear, with only a light frosting of cirrus cloud high in the depleted, lethal atmosphere. But, despite this clarity — I still could not understand it — there were no stars — or rather, very few, a handful compared to the multitude which had once blazed down on the earth. I had made this observation on our first arrival here, but I think I had dismissed it as some artifact of the cold, or my disorientation. To have it confirmed, now that I was warm and clear-headed, was disturbing — perhaps the strangest single thing in this new world.

The moon — that patient companion planet — still turned about the earth, going through its phases with its immemorial regularity; but its ancient plains remained stained green. Moonlight was no longer a thing of cool silver, but washed the landscape of White Earth with the gentlest verdant glow, returning to the earth an echo of that green-ness she had once enjoyed, and which was now locked under the unforgiving ice.

I saw again that gleam, as if of a captive star, that shone steadily at us from the moon’s extreme easterly limb. My first speculation had been that I was seeing the reflection of the sun from some lunar lake, but the glare was so steady that eventually I decided that it must be purposeful. I imagined a mirror — an artificial construct — perhaps fixed to some lunar mountain-top, and designed so that its reflection always falls on the earth. As to the purpose of such a device, I speculated that it might date from a time when the degradation of atmospheric conditions, here on the Mother Planet, had not yet become so bad as to drive men off the earth, but, perhaps, were so severe that they had caused the collapse of whatever culture had survived.

I imagined moon-men: Selenites, as we might call them, themselves descended from Humanity. The Selenites must have watched the lethal progress of the great fires which broke across the crust of the oxygen-choked earth. The Selenites had known that men still lived on the earth — but they were men fallen from civilization, men living as savages, even as animals once more, sliding back into some pre-rational state. Perhaps the collapse of the earth impacted them too — for it may be that Selenite society could not survive without provision from Mother Earth.

The Selenites could grieve for their cousins on the Mother World, but could not reach them… and so they attempted to signal. They built their immense mirror — it must have been half a mile across, or more, to be visible across inter-planetary distances.

The Selenites may even have had some more ambitious aim in mind than simple inspiration from the sky. For example, they may have sent — by making the mirror flicker, using some equivalent of Morse — instructions on crop-rearing, or engineering — the lost secrets of the steam engine, perhaps — something, at any rate, rather more useful than mere good-luck messages.

But in the end it was to no avail. In the end, the fist of Glaciation closed about the land. And the great lunar mirror was abandoned, as men disappeared from the earth.

Such, at any rate, was my speculation, as I stood gazing through the windows of my tower; I have no means of knowing if I was right — for Nebogipfel was unable to read this new History of Humanity in such detail — but in any event the gleam of that isolated mirror on the moon became, for me, a most eloquent symbol of the collapse of Humanity.

The most striking feature of our night sky was not the moon, however, nor even that absence of stars: it was the great, weblike disc, a dozen times Luna’s width, that I had noticed on our first arrival. This structure was extraordinarily complex and alive with motion. Think of a spider-web, perhaps lit from behind, with drops of dew glistening and rolling over its surface; now envisage a hundred tiny spiders crawling over that surface, their motion slow but quite visible, evidently working to strengthen and extend the structure — and then cast your vision across many miles of inter- planetary space! — and you will have something of what I saw.

I made out the web-disc most clearly in the early hours of the morning — perhaps around three o’clock — and at such times I was able to make out ghostly threads of light — tenuous and thin — which reached up, from the far side of the earth, and out through the atmosphere towards the disc.

I discussed these features with Nebogipfel. “It’s quite extraordinary… it’s as if those beams make up a kind of rigging of light, which attach the disc to the earth; so that the whole affair is like a sail, towing the earth through space on some spectral wind!”

“Your language is picturesque,” he said, “but it captures something of the flavor of that enterprise.”

“What do you mean?”

“That it is a sail,” he said. “But it is not towing the earth: rather, the earth is providing a base for the wind which drives the sail.”

Nebogipfel described this new type of space yacht. It would be constructed in space, he said, for it would be much too fragile to haul upwards from the earth. Its sail consisted, essentially, of a mirror; and the ’wind’ which filled the sail was light: for particles of light falling on a mirrored surface deliver a pushing force, just as do the molecules of air which make up a breeze.

“The ’wind’ comes from beams of coherent light, generated by earthbound projectors as wide as a city,” he said. “It is these beams which you have observed as ’threads’ joining planet to sail. The pressure of the light is small but insistent, and it is extraordinarily efficient in transferring momentum — especially as light speed is approached.”

He imagined that the Constructors would not sail upon such a ship as discrete entities, as had the passengers of the great ships of my day. Rather, the Constructors might have disassembled themselves, and allowed their components to run off and knit themselves into the ship. At the destination, they would reassemble as individual Constructors, in whatever form was most efficient for the worlds they found there.

“But where is the space yacht’s destination, do you think? The moon, or one of the planets — or—”

In his flat, undramatic Morlock way, Nebogipfel said: “No. The stars.”

[6] The Multiplicity Generator

Nebogipfel continued his experiments with the billiards table. Repeatedly the ball would encounter that peculiar clattering I had observed about the middle of the table, and several times I thought I saw billiard balls — more copies of our original — appearing from nowhere and interfering with the trajectory of our ball. Sometimes the ball emerged from these collisions and continued along the path it might have followed regardless of the clattering-about; sometimes, though, it was knocked onto quite a different path, and — once or twice — we observed the type of incident I described earlier, in which a stationary ball was knocked out of its place, without my, or Nebogipfel’s, intervention.

This all made for an entertaining game — and clearly something fishy was going on — but for the life of me I could not see it, despite that hint of Plattnerite glow about the pockets. My only observation was that the slower the ball traveled, the more likely it was to be diverted from its path.

The Morlock, though, grew gradually more excited about all this. He would immerse himself in the hide of the patient Constructor, delving once more into the Information Sea, and emerge with some new fragment of knowledge he’d fished up — he mumbled to himself in that obscure, liquid dialect of his kind — and then he would hurry straight to the billiards table, there to test his new understanding.

At last, he seemed ready to share his hypotheses with me; and he summoned me from my steam bath. I dried myself on my shirt and hurried after him to the Billiards Room; his small, narrow feet pattered on the hard floor as he half-ran back to the table. He was as excited as I could remember seeing him.

“I think I understand what this table is for,” he said, breathless.

“Yes?”

“It is — how can I express it? — it is only a demonstration, little more than a toy but it is a Multiplicity Generator. Do you see?”

I held up my hands. “I fear I don’t see a thing.”

“You are familiar enough with the idea of the Multiplicity of Histories, by now…”

“I should be; it’s the basis of your explanation of the divergent Histories we have visited.”

At every moment, in every event (I summarized), History bifurcates. A butterfly’s shadow may fall here or there; the assassin’s bullet may graze and pass on without harm, or lodge itself fatally in the heart of a King… To each possible outcome of each event, there corresponds a fresh version of History. “And all of these Histories are real,” I said, “and — if I understand it right they lie side by side with each other, in some Fourth Dimension, like the pages of a book.”

“Very well. And you see, also, that the action of a Time Machine — including your first prototype — is to cause wider bifurcations, to generate new Histories… some of them impossible without the Machine’s intervention — like this one!” He waved his hands about. “Without your machine, which started off the whole series of events, humans could never have been transported back to the Palaeocene. We should not now be sitting on top of fifty million years of intelligent modification of the cosmos.”

“I see all that,” I said, my patience wearing thin. “But what has it to do with this table?”

“Look.” He set the single ball rolling across the table. “Here is our ball. We must imagine many Histories — a sheaf of them — fanning out around the ball at every moment. The most likely History, of course, is the one containing the classical trajectory — meaning a straightforward roll of the ball across the table. But other Histories — neighboring, but some widely divergent — exist in parallel. It is even possible, though very unlikely, that in one of those Histories the thermal agitation of the ball’s molecules will combine, and cause it to leap up in the air and hit you in the eye.”

“Very well.”

“Now—” He ran his finger around the rim of the nearest pocket. “This green inlay is a clue.”

“It is Plattnerite.”

“Yes. The pockets act as miniature Time Machines — limited in scope and size, but quite effective. And, as we have seen from our own experience, when Time Machines operate — when objects travel into future or past to meet themselves — the chain of cause and effect can be disrupted, and Histories grow like weeds…”

He reminded me of the odd incident we had witnessed with the stationary ball. “That was, perhaps, the clearest example of what I am describing. The ball sat at rest on the table — our ball, we will call it. Then a copy of our ball emerged from a pocket, and knocked our ball aside. Our ball traveled to the cushion, rebounded, and fell into the pocket, leaving the copy at rest on the table, in the precise position of the original.

“Then,” Nebogipfel said slowly, “our ball traveled back through time — do you see? — and emerged from the pocket in the past…”

“And proceeded to knock itself out of the way, and took its own place.” I stared at the innocent-looking table. “Confound it, I see it now! It was the same ball after all. It was resting quite happily on the table — but, because of the bizarre possibilities of time travel, it was able to loop through time and knock itself aside!”

“You have it,” the Morlock said.

“But what made the ball start moving in the first place? Neither of us gave it a shove towards the pocket.”

“A ’shove’ was not necessary,” Nebogipfel said. “In the presence of Time Machines — and this is the point of the demonstration, really — you must abandon your old ideas of causality. Things