Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperVoyager

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London SE1 9GF

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First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 1995

Copyright © Stephen Baxter 1995

Illustrations © Les Edwards

Stephen Baxter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Author and Publisher acknowledge the consent of the Literary Executors of the Estate of H.G. Wells for the use of characters and plot from The Time Machine and other works by H.G. Wells. The Time Machine, The Plattner Story and other works of H.G. Wells are copyright the Literary Executors of the Estate of H.G. Wells.

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Source ISBN: 9780008134549

Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007397549

Version 2016-10-12

Dedication

To my wife Sandra,

and the memory of H.G.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Editor’s Note

Prologue

Book One: Dark Night

Chapter 1: Time Travelling

Chapter 2: A New Vision

Chapter 3: In Obscurity

Chapter 4: The Dark Night

Chapter 5: The Well

Chapter 6: My Encounter With the Morlocks

Chapter 7: The Cage of Light

Chapter 8: A Visitor

Chapter 9: Revelations and Remonstrances

Chapter 10: A Dialogue With a Morlock

Chapter 11: Out of the Cage

Chapter 12: The Morlocks of the Sphere

Chapter 13: How the Morlocks Lived

Chapter 14: Constructions and Divergences

Chapter 15: Life and Death Among the Morlocks

Chapter 16: Decision and Departure

Chapter 17: In the Interior

Chapter 18: The New Eloi

Chapter 19: How I Crossed Inter-Planetary Space

Chapter 20: My Account of the Far Future

Chapter 21: On Richmond Hill

Chapter 22: Rotations and Deceptions

Book Two: Paradox

Chapter 1: The Chronic Argo

Chapter 2: Home

Chapter 3: Moses

Chapter 4: The Experiment

Chapter 5: Honesty and Doubt

Chapter 6: Persuasion and Scepticism

Chapter 7: The Juggernaut Lord Raglan

Chapter 8: Old Acquaintance Renewed

Chapter 9: Into Time

Book Three: The War With the Germans

Chapter 1: A New Vision of Richmond

Chapter 2: A Train Journey

Chapter 3: London at War

Chapter 4: The House in Queen’s Gate Terrace

Chapter 5: The Many Worlds Interpretation

Chapter 6: Hyde Park

Chapter 7: The Babble Machine

Chapter 8: The Uplands of the Future

Chapter 9: Imperial College

Chapter 10: Professor Gödel

Chapter 11: The New World Order

Chapter 12: The German Assault on London

Chapter 13: The Shelling

Chapter 14: The Rota-Mine

Chapter 15: The Time-Car

Chapter 16: Falling Into Time

Chapter 17: The Watcher

Book Four: The Palaeocene Sea

Chapter 1: Diatryma Gigantica

Chapter 2: The Palaeocene Sea

Chapter 3: How We Lived

Chapter 4: Illness and Recuperation

Chapter 5: The Storm

Chapter 6: Heart and Body

Chapter 7: Pristichampus

Chapter 8: The Encampment

Chapter 9: The Chronic Expeditionary Force

Chapter 10: The Apparition

Chapter 11: The Bomb

Chapter 12: The Aftermath of the Bombing

Chapter 13: Bond’s Account

Chapter 14: Survivors

Chapter 15: A New Settlement

Chapter 16: The Establishment of First London

Chapter 17: Children and Descendants

Chapter 18: The Feast, and Later

Chapter 19: Lights in the Sky

Chapter 20: The Orbital City

Chapter 21: Instabilities

Chapter 22: Abandonment and Arrival

Book Five: White Earth

Chapter 1: Confinement

Chapter 2: Experiments and Reflections

Chapter 3: The Universal Constructor

Chapter 4: The Billiards Room

Chapter 5: White Earth

Chapter 6: The Multiplicity Generator

Chapter 7: The Mechanical Heirs of Man

Chapter 8: A Proposition

Chapter 9: Options and Introspections

Chapter 10: Preparations

Chapter 11: Forward in Time

Chapter 12: The Ship

Book Six: The Time Ships

Chapter 1: Departure

Chapter 2: The Unravelling of Earth

Chapter 3: The Boundary of Space and Time

Chapter 4: The Nonlinearity Engines

Chapter 5: The Final Vision

Chapter 6: The Triumph of Mind

Chapter 7: Emergence

Chapter 8: A Circle Is Closed

Book Seven: Day 292,495,940

Chapter 1: The Vale of Thames

Chapter 2: A Walk

Chapter 3: In the Darkness

Epilogue

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Stephen Baxter

About the Publisher

EDITOR’S NOTE

The attached account was given to me by the owner of a small second-hand bookshop, situated just off the Charing Cross Road in London. He told me it had turned up as a manuscript in an unlabelled box, in a collection of books which had been bequeathed to him after the death of a friend; the bookseller passed the manuscript on to me as a curiosity – ‘You might make something of it’ – knowing of my interest in the speculative fiction of the nineteenth century.

The manuscript itself was typewritten on commonplace paper, but a pencil note attested that it had been transcribed from an original ‘written by hand on a paper of such age that it has crumbled beyond repair’. That original, if it ever existed, is lost. There is no note as to the manuscript’s author, or origin.

I have restricted my editing to a superficial polishing, meaning only to eliminate some of the errors and duplications of a manuscript which was evidently written in haste.

What are we to make of it? In the Time Traveller’s words, we must ‘take it as a lie – or a prophecy … Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction …’ Without further evidence, we must regard this work as a fantasy – or as an elaborate hoax – but if there is even a grain of truth in the account contained in these pages, then a startling new light is shed, not merely on one of our most famous works of fiction (if fiction it was!), but also on the nature of our universe and our place in it.

I present the account here without further comment.

Stephen Baxter

PROLOGUE

On the Friday morning after my return from futurity, I awoke long after dawn, from the deepest of dreamless sleeps.

I got out of bed and threw back the curtains. The sun was making his usual sluggish progress up the sky, and I remembered how, from the accelerated perspective of a Time Traveller, the sun had fair hopped across heaven! But now, it seemed, I was embedded in oozing time once more, like an insect in seeping amber.

The noises of a Richmond morning gathered outside my window: the hoof-steps of horses, the rattle of wheels on cobbles, the banging of doors. A steam tram, spewing out smoke and sparks, made its clumsy way along the Petersham Road, and the gull-like cries of hawkers came floating on the air. I found my thoughts drifting away from my gaudy adventures in time and back to a mundane plane: I considered the contents of the latest Pall Mall Gazette, and stock movements, and I entertained an anticipation that the morning’s post might bring the latest American Journal of Science, which would contain some speculations of mine on the findings of A. Michelson and E. Morley on certain peculiarities of light, reported in that journal four years earlier, in 1887 …

And so on! The details of the everyday crowded into my head, and by contrast the memory of my adventure in futurity came to seem fantastical – even absurd. As I thought it over now, it seemed to me that the whole experience had had something of a hallucinatory, almost dreamlike quality: there had been that sense of precipitate falling, the haziness of everything about time travel, and at last my plunge into the nightmarish world of A.D. 802,701. The grip of the ordinary on our imaginations is remarkable. Standing there in my pyjamas, something of the uncertainty which had, in the end, assailed me last night returned, and I started to doubt the very existence of the Time Machine itself! – despite my very clear memories of the two years of my life I had expended in the nuts and bolts of its construction, not to mention the two decades previous, during which I had teased out the theory of time travel from anomalies I had observed during my studies of physical optics.

I thought back over my conversation with my companions over dinner the evening before – somehow those few hours were far more vivid, now, than all the days I had spent in that world of futurity – and I remembered their mix of responses to my account: there had been a general enjoyment of a good tale, accompanied by dashes of sympathy or near-derision depending on the temperaments of individuals – and, I recalled, a near-universal scepticism. Only one good friend, who I shall call the Writer in these pages, had seemed to listen to my ramblings with any degree of sympathy and trust.

Standing by the window, I stretched – and my doubts about my memories took a jolt! The ache of my back was real enough, acute and urgent, as were the burning sensations in the muscles of my legs and arms: protests from the muscles of a no-longer-young man forced, against his practice, to exert himself. ‘Well, then,’ I argued with myself, ‘if your trip into the future was truly a dream – all of it, including that bleak night when you fought the Morlocks in the forest – where have these aches and pains come from? Have you been capering around your garden, perhaps, in a moonstruck delirium?’

And there, dumped without ceremony in a corner of my room, I saw a small heap of clothes: they were the garments I had worn to their ruin during my flight to the future, and which now were fit only to be destroyed. I could see grass stains and scorch marks; the pockets were torn, and I remembered how Weena had used those flaps of cloth as impromptu vases, to load up with the etiolated flowers of the future. My shoes were missing, of course – I felt an odd twinge of regret for the comfortable old house-shoes which I had borne unthinking into a hostile future, before abandoning them to an unimaginable fate! – and there, on the carpet, were the filthy, bloodstained remnants of my socks.

Somehow it was those socks – those comical, battered old socks! – whose rude existence convinced me, above anything else, that I was not yet insane: that my flight into the future had not been entirely a dream.

I must return to time, I saw; I must gather evidence that futurity was as real as the Richmond of 1891, to convince my circle of friends and my peers in my scientific endeavours – and to banish the last traces of my own self-doubt.

As I formed this resolve, suddenly I saw the sweet, empty face of Weena, as vivid as if she had been standing there before me. Sadness, and a surge of guilt at my own impetuosity, tore at my heart. Weena, the Eloi child-woman, had followed me to the Palace of Green Porcelain through the depths of the resurgent forest of that distant Thames valley, and had been lost in the confusion of the subsequent fire, and the bleak assaults of the Morlocks. I have always been a man to act first and allow my rational brain to catch up later! In my bachelor life, this tendency had never yet led anyone into serious danger except myself – but now, in my thoughtlessness and headlong rush, I had abandoned poor, trusting Weena to a grisly death in the shadows of that Dark Night of the Morlocks.

I had blood on my hands, and not just the ichor of those foul, degraded sub-men, the Morlocks. I determined I must make recompense – in whatever way I could – for my abominable treatment of poor, trusting Weena.

I was filled with resolve. My adventures, physical and intellectual, were not done yet!

I had Mrs Watchets run me a bath, and I clambered into it. Despite my mood of urgency, I took time to pamper my poor, battered bones; I noted with interest the blistered and scarred state of my feet, and the mild burns I had suffered to my hands.

I dressed quickly. Mrs Watchets prepared me breakfast. I dug into my eggs, mushrooms and tomatoes with vigour – and yet I found the bacon and sausages lying heavy in my mouth; when I bit into the thick meat, its juices, full of salt and oil, filled me with a faint disgust.

I could not help but remember the Morlocks, and the meat I had seen them consume at their foul repasts! My experiences had not dulled my appetite for mutton at dinner the previous evening, I recalled, but then my hunger had been so much greater. Could it be that a certain shock and disquietude, unravelling from my misadventures, were even now working through the layers of my mind?

But a full breakfast is my custom; for I believe that a good dose of peptone in the arteries early in the day is essential for the efficient operation of the vigorous human machine. And today could become as demanding a day as I had faced in my life. Therefore, I put aside my qualms and finished my plate, chewing through my bacon with determination.

Breakfast over, I donned a light but serviceable summer suit. As I think I mentioned to my companions at dinner the previous evening, it had become evident to me during my plummeting through time that winter had been banished from the world of A.D. 802,701 – whether by natural evolution, geogonic planning or the re-engineering of the sun himself I could not say – and so I should have no need of winter greatcoats and scarves in futurity. I donned a hat, to keep the future sun from my pale English brow, and dug out my stoutest pair of walking boots.

I grabbed a small knapsack and proceeded to throw myself about the house, ransacking cupboards and drawers for the equipment I thought I would need for my second journey – much to the alarm of poor, patient Mrs Watchets, who, I am sure, had long since resigned my sanity to the mists of mythology! As is my way, I was in a fever to be off, and yet I was determined not to be quite so impetuous as the first time, when I had travelled across eight thousand centuries with no more protection than a pair of house-shoes and a single box of matches.

I crammed my knapsack with all the matches I could find in the house – in fact, I dispatched Hillyer to the tobacconist’s to purchase more boxes. I packed in camphor, and candles, and, on an impulse, a length of sturdy twine, in case, stranded, I should need to make new candles of my own. (I had little conception of how one goes about such manufacture, incidentally, but in the bright light of that optimistic morning I did not doubt my ability to improvise.)

I took white spirit, salves, some quinine tabloids and a roll of bandage. I had no gun – I doubt if I should have taken it, even if I had possessed one, for what use is a gun when its ammunition is exhausted? – but I slipped my clasp-knife into my pocket. I packed up a roll of tools – a screwdriver, several sizes of spanner, a small hacksaw with spare blades – as well as a range of screws and lengths of nickel, brass and quartz bars. I was determined that no trivial accident befalling the Time Machine should strand me in any disjointed future, for want of a bit of brass: despite my transient plan to build a new Time Machine when my original was stolen by the Morlocks in 802,701, I’d seen no evidence in the decayed Upper-world that I should be able to find the materials to repair so much as a sheared screw. Of course, the Morlocks had retained some mechanical aptitude, but I did not relish the prospect of being forced to negotiate with those bleached worms for the sake of a couple of bolts.

I found my Kodak, and dug out my flash trough. The camera was new-loaded with a roll of a hundred negative frames on a paper-stripping roll. I remembered how damned expensive the thing had seemed when I had bought it – no less than twenty-five dollars, purchased on a trip to New York – but, if I should return with pictures of futurity, each of those two-inch frames would be more valuable than the finest paintings.

Now, I wondered, was I ready? I demanded advice of poor Mrs Watchets, though I would not tell her, of course, where I was intending to travel. That good woman – stolid, square, remarkably plain, and yet with a faithful and imperturbable heart – took a look inside my knapsack, crammed as it was, and she raised one formidable eyebrow. Then she made for my room and returned with spare socks and underwear, and – here I could have kissed her! – my pipe, a set of cleaners, and the jar of tobacco from my mantel.

Thus, with my usual mixture of feverish impatience and superficial intelligence – and with an unending reliance on the good will and common sense of others – I made ready to return into time.

Bearing my knapsack under one arm and my Kodak under the other, I made towards my laboratory, where the Time Machine waited. When I reached the smoking-room, I was startled to find that I had a visitor: one of my guests of the previous evening, and perhaps my closest friend – it was the Writer of whom I have spoken. He stood at the centre of the room in an ill-fitting suit, with his tie knotted about as rough as you could imagine, and with his hands dangling awkward by his side. I recalled again how, of the circle of friends and acquaintances whom I had gathered to serve as the first witnesses to my exploits, it was this earnest young man who had listened with the most intensity, his silence vibrant with sympathy and fascination.

I felt uncommon glad to see him, and grateful that he had come – that he had not shunned me as eccentric, as some might, after my performance of the evening before. I laughed, and, burdened as I was with sack and camera, I held out an elbow; he grasped the joint and shook it solemnly. ‘I’m frightfully busy,’ I said, ‘with that thing in there.’

He studied me; I thought there was a sort of desperation to believe in his pale blue eyes. ‘But is it not some hoax? Do you really travel through time?’

‘Really and truly, I do,’ I said, holding his gaze as long as I could, for I wanted him to be convinced.

He was a short, squat man, with a jutting lower lip, a broad forehead, wispy sideboards and rather ugly ears. He was young – about twenty-five, I believe; two decades younger than myself – yet his lank hair was already receding. His walk had a sort of bounce and he had a certain energy about him – nervous, like a plump bird’s – but he always looked sickly: I know he suffered haemorrhages, from time to time, from a soccer-game kicking to the kidneys he had received when working as a teacher in some Godforsaken private school in Wales. And today, his blue eyes, though tired, were filled, as ever, with intelligence and a concern for me.

My friend worked as a teacher – at that time, of pupils by correspondence – but he was a dreamer. At our enjoyable Thursday-night dinner parties in Richmond, he would pour out his speculations on the future and the past, and share with us his latest thoughts on the meaning of Darwin’s bleak, Godless analysis, and what-not. He dreamed of the perfectibility of the human race – he was just the type, I knew, who would wish with all his heart that my tales of time travel were true!

I call him ‘Writer’ out of an old kindness, I suppose, for as far as I knew, he had only had published various awkward speculations in college journals and the like; but I had no doubt that his lively brain would carve him out a niche in the world of letters of some sort – and, more to the point, he had no doubt of it either.

Though I was eager to be off, I paused a moment. Perhaps the Writer could serve as my witness on this new voyage – in fact, I wondered now, it could be that he was already planning to write up my earlier adventures in some gaudy form for publication.

Well, he would have my blessing!

‘I only want half an hour,’ I said, calculating that I could return to this precise time and place with a mere touch of the levers of my machine, no matter how long I chose to spend in the future or past. ‘I know why you came, and it’s awfully good of you. There’s some magazines here. If you’ll stop to lunch, I’ll prove you this time travelling up to the hilt, specimens and all. If you’ll forgive my leaving you now?’

He consented. I nodded to him and, without further ado, I set off down the corridor to my laboratory.

So I took my leave of the world of 1891. I have never been a man of deep attachments, and I am not one for flowery farewells; but had I known I should never see the Writer again – at least, not in the flesh – I fancy I would have made something more of a ceremony of it!

I entered my laboratory. It was laid out something like a milling-shop. There was a steam lathe attached to the ceiling, which powered various metal-turning machines by means of leather bands; and fixed to benches around the floor were smaller lathes, a sheet-metal stamp, presses, acetylene welding sets, vices and the like. Metal parts and drawings lay about on the bench, and abandoned fruits of my labours lay in the dust of the floor, for I am not by nature a tidy man; lying at my feet now, for example, I found the nickel bar which had held me up before my first sojourn into time – that bar which had proved to be exactly one inch short, so that I had had to get it remade.

I had spent much of two decades of my life in this room, I reflected. The place was a converted conservatory, giving onto the garden. It was built on a framework of slender, white-painted wrought iron, and had once given a decent view of the river; but I had long since boarded up the panes, to assure myself of a consistency of light and to deter the curious eyes of my neighbours. My various tools and devices loomed in that oily darkness, and now they reminded me of my half-glimpses of the great machines in the caverns of the Morlocks. I wondered if I myself might not have some morbid streak of the Morlock! When I returned, I resolved, I would kick out the boards and glaze up the room once again, and make it a place of Eloi light rather than Morlock gloom.

Now I walked forward to the Time Machine.

That bulky, askew thing sat against the north-west side of the workshop – where, eight hundred millennia away, the Morlocks had dragged it, in their efforts to entrap me inside the pedestal of the White Sphinx. I hauled the machine back to the south-east corner of the laboratory, where I had built it. That done, I leaned over and, in the gloom, made out the four chronometric dials which counted the passage of the machine through History’s static array of days; now, of course, the hands were all set to zero, for the machine had returned to its own time. Beside this row of dials, there were the two levers which drove the beast – one for the future, and one for the past.

I reached out and, on impulse, stroked the lever for futurity. The squat, tangled mass of metal and ivory shuddered like a live thing. I smiled. The machine was reminding me that it was no longer of this earth, of this Space and Time! Alone of all the material objects of the universe, save for those I had carried on my own person, this machine was eight days older than its world: for I had spent a week in the era of the Morlocks, but had returned to the day of my departure.

I dropped my pack and camera to the floor of the laboratory, and hung up my hat on the back of the door. Remembering the Morlocks’ fiddling with the machine, I settled myself to checking it over. I did not trouble to clean off the various brown spots and bits of grass and moss which still clung to the machine’s rails; I have never been one for fussy appearances. But one rail was bent out of shape, and I twisted that back, and I tested the screws, and oiled the quartz bars.

As I worked, I remembered my shameful panic when discovering the machine lost to the Morlocks, and I felt a deep surge of affection for the ugly thing. The machine was an open cage of nickel, brass and quartz, ebony and ivory, quite elaborate – like the workings of a church clock, perhaps – and with a bicycle saddle set incongruous in the middle of it all. Quartz and rock crystal, suffused with Plattnerite, glimmered about the framework, giving the whole a sense of unreality and skewness.

Of course, none of it would have been possible without the properties of the strange substance I had labelled ‘Plattnerite’. I remembered how, by chance, I had come into possession of a sample of that material: on that night, two decades earlier, when a stranger had walked up to my door and handed me a packet of the stuff. ‘Plattner,’ he had called himself – he was a bulky chap, a good few years older than myself, with an odd, broad, grey-grizzled head, and dressed in peculiar jungle colours. He instructed me to study the potent stuff he handed me, in a glass medicine jar. Well, the stuff had sat uninvestigated on a shelf in the laboratory for over a year, while I progressed with more substantive work. But at last, on a dull Sunday afternoon, I had taken the jar down from its shelf …

And what I had found out had, at last, led to – this!

It was Plattnerite, suffused into quartz rods, which fuelled the Time Machine, and made its exploits possible. But I flatter myself to think that it took my own combination of analysis and imagination to realize and exploit the properties of that remarkable substance, where a lesser man may have missed the mark.

I had been reluctant to publicize my work, outlandish as the field was, without experimental verification. I promised myself that direct on my return, with specimens and photographs, I would write up my studies for the Philosophical Transactions; it would be a famous addition to the seventeen papers I had already placed there on the physics of light. It would be amusing, I reflected, to call my paper something dry such as ‘Some Reflections on the Anomalous Chronologic Properties of the Mineral “Plattnerite”’, and to bury within it the thunderous revelation of the existence of time travel!

At last I was done. I set my hat square over my eyes once more, and I picked up my pack and camera and fixed them under the saddle. Then, on an impulse, I went to the fireplace of the laboratory and picked up the poker which stood there. I hefted its substantial mass in my hand – I thought it might be useful! – and I lodged it in the machine’s frame.

Then I sat myself in the saddle, and I placed my hand on the white starting levers. The machine shuddered, like the animal of time it had become.

I glanced around at my laboratory, at the earthy reality of it, and was struck how out-of-place we both looked in it now – me in my amateur explorer’s garb, and the machine with its other-worldliness and its stains and scuffs from the future – even though we were both, in a way, children of this place. I felt tempted to linger. What harm would it do to expend another day, week, year here, embedded in my own comfortable century? I could gather my energies, and heal my wounds: was I being precipitate once again in this new venture?

I heard a footstep in the corridor from the house, a turn of the door handle. It must be the Writer, coming to the laboratory.

Of a sudden, my mind was set. My courage would not grow any stronger with the passage of any more of this dull, ossified nineteenth-century time; and besides, I had said all the good-byes I cared to make.

I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. I had that odd sense of spinning that comes with the first instant of time travel, and then there came that helpless, headlong feel of falling. I think I uttered an exclamation at the return of that uncomfortable sensation. I fancy I heard a tinkle of glass: a skylight pane, perhaps, blown in by the displacement of air. And, for a shredded remnant of a second, I saw him standing there in the doorway: the Writer, a ghostly, indistinct figure, with one hand raised to me – trapped in time!

Then he was gone, swept into invisibility by my flight. The walls of the laboratory grew hazy around me, and once more the huge wings of night and day flapped around my head

BOOK ONE
DARK NIGHT

1
TIME TRAVELLING

There are three Dimensions of Space, through which man may move freely. And time is simply a Fourth Dimension: identical in every important characteristic to the others, except for the fact that our consciousness is compelled to travel along it at a steady pace, like the nib of my pen across this page.

If only – I had speculated, in the course of my studies into the peculiar properties of light – if only one could twist about the four Dimensions of Space and Time – transposing Length with Duration, say – then one could stroll through the corridors of History as easily as taking a cab into the West End!

The Plattnerite embedded in the substance of the Time Machine was the key to its operation; the Plattnerite enabled the machine to rotate, in an uncommon fashion, into a new configuration in the framework of Space and Time. Thus, spectators who watched the departure of the Time Machine – like my Writer – reported seeing the machine spin giddily, before vanishing from History; and thus the driver – myself – invariably suffered dizziness, induced by centrifugal and Coriolis forces which made it feel as if I were being thrown off the machine.

But for all these effects, the spin induced by the Plattnerite was of a different quality from the spinning of a top, or the slow revolution of the earth. The spinning sensations were flatly contradicted, for the driver, by the illusion of sitting quite still in the saddle, as time flickered past the machine – for it was a rotation out of Time and Space themselves.

As night flapped after day, the hazy outline of the laboratory fell away from around me, so that I was delivered into the open air. I was once more passing through that future period in which, I guessed, the laboratory had been demolished. The sun shot like a cannonball across the sky, with many days compressed into a minute, illuminating a faint, skeletal suggestion of scaffolding around me. The scaffolding soon fell away, leaving me on the open hill-side.

My speed through time increased. The flickering of night and day merged into a deep twilight blue, and I was able to see the moon, spinning through its phases like a child’s top. And as I travelled still faster, the cannonball sun merged into an arch of light, spreading across space, an arch which rocked up and down the sky. Around me weather fluttered, with successive flurries of snow-white and spring green marking out the seasons. At last, accelerated, I entered a new, tranquil stillness in which only the annual rhythms of the earth itself – the passage of the sun-belt between its solstice extremes – pumped like a heartbeat over the evolving landscape.

I am not sure if I conveyed, in my first report, the silence into which one is suspended when undergoing time travel. The songs of the birds, the distant rattle of traffic over cobbles, the ticks of clocks – even the faint breathing of the fabric of a house itself – all of these things make up a complex, unnoticed tapestry to our lives. But now, plucked from time, I was accompanied only by the sounds of my own breathing and by the soft, bicycle-like creaking of the Time Machine under my weight. I had an extraordinary sensation of isolation – it was as if I had been plunged into some new, stark universe, through the walls of which our own world was visible as if through begrimed window panes – but within this new universe I was the only living thing. A deep sense of confusion descended on me, and worked together with the vertiginous plummeting sensation that accompanies a fall into the future, to induce feelings of deep nausea and depression.

But now the silence was broken: by a deep murmur, sourceless, which seemed to fill my ears; it was a low eddying, like the sound of some immense river. I had noticed this during my first flight; I could not be certain of its cause, but it seemed to me it must be some artefact of my unseemly passage through the stately progress of time.

How wrong I was – as so often in my hasty hypothesis-making!

I studied my four chronometric dials, tapping the face of each with my fingernail to ensure they were working. Already the hand on the second of the dials, which measured thousands of days, had begun to drift away from its rest position.

These dials – faithful, mute servants – were adapted from steam pressure gauges. They worked by measuring a certain shear tension in a quartz bar doped with Plattnerite, a tension induced by the twisting effects of time travel. The dials counted days – not years, or months, or leap years, or movable feasts! – and that was by conscious design.

As soon as I began my investigations into the practicalities of this business of travelling into time, and in particular the need to measure my machine’s position in it, I spent some considerable time trying to build a practical chronometric gauge capable of producing a display in common measures: centuries, years, months and days. I soon found I was likely to spend longer on that project than on the rest of the Time Machine put together!

I developed an immense impatience with the peculiarities of our antique calendar system, which has come from a history of inadequate adjustments: of attempts to fix seed-time and midwinter that go back to the beginnings of organized society. Our calendar is a historical absurdity, without even the redeeming feature of accuracy – at least on the cosmological timescales which I intended to challenge.

I wrote furious letters to The Times, proposing reforms which would enable us to function accurately and without ambiguity on timescales of genuine value to the modern scientist. To begin with, I said, let us discard all this nonsensical clutter of leap years. The year is close to three hundred and sixty five days and a quarter; and that accidental quarter is the cause of all this ridiculous charade of leap year adjustments. I offered two alternative schemes, both guaranteed to remove this absurdity. We could take the day as our base unit, and devise regular months and years based on multiples of days: imagine a three-hundred-day Year made up of ten Months, each of thirty days. Of course the cycle of seasons would soon drift out of synchronization with the structure of the Year, but – in a civilization as advanced as ours – that would surely cause little trouble. The Royal Observatory at Greenwich, for example, could publish diaries each year to show the dates of the various solar positions – the equinoxes and so forth – just as, in 1891, all diaries showed the movable feasts of the Christian churches.

On the other hand, if the cycle of seasons is to be regarded as the fundamental unit, then we should devise a New Day as an exact fraction – say a hundredth – of the year. Naturally, this would mean that the diurnal round, our periods of dark and light, of sleep and wakefulness, would fall at different times each New Day. But what of that? Already, I argued, many modern cities operated on a twenty-four-hour schedule. And as for the human side of it, simple diary keeping is not a difficult skill to acquire; with the help of proper records one would need plan one’s sleeping and wakefulness no more than a few Days in advance.

Finally, I proposed we should look ahead to the day when man’s consciousness is expanded from its nineteenth-century focus on the here-and-now, and consider how things might be when our thinking must span tens of millennia. I envisaged a new Cosmological Calendar, based on the precession of the equinoxes – that is, the slow dipping of the axis of our planet, under the uneven gravitational influence of sun and moon – a cycle which takes twenty millennia to complete. With some such Great Year, we might measure out our destiny in unambiguous and precise terms, now and for all time to come.

Such rectification, I argued, would have a symbolic significance far beyond its practicality – it would be a fitting way to mark the dawn of the new century – for it would serve as an announcement to all men that a new Age of Scientific Thinking had begun.

Needless to say, my contributions were disregarded, save for a ribald response, which I chose to ignore, in certain sections of the popular press.

At any event, after all this, I abandoned my attempts to build a calendar-based chronometric gauge, and reverted to a simple count of days. I have always had a ready mind with figures, and did not find it hard to convert, mentally, my dials’ day-count to years. On my first voyage, I had travelled to Day 292,495,934, which – allowing for leap-year adjustments – turned out to be a date in the year A.D. 802,701. Now, I knew, I must travel forwards until my dials showed Day 292,495,940 – the precise day on which I had lost Weena, and much of my self-respect, in the flames of that forest!

My house had been one of a row of terraces, situated on the Petersham Road – that stretch of it below Hill Rise, a little way up from the river. Now, with my house long demolished, I found myself sitting on an open hill-side. The shoulder of Richmond Hill rose up behind me, a mass embedded in geological time. The trees blossomed and shivered into stumps, their century-long lives compressed into a few of my heartbeats. The Thames was a belt of silver light, made smooth by my passage through time, and it was cutting itself a new channel: it appeared to be wriggling across the landscape after the manner of a huge, slow worm. New buildings rose like gusts of smoke: some of them even blew up around me, on the site of my old house. These buildings astonished me with their dimensions and grace. The Richmond Bridge of my day was long gone, but I saw a new arch, perhaps a mile long, which laced, unsupported, through the air and across the Thames; and there were towers upthrust into the flickering sky, bearing immense masses at their slender throats. I thought of taking up my Kodak and attempting to photograph these phantasms, but I knew that the spectres would be too light-starved to enable any image to be recorded, diluted by time travel as they were. The architectural technologies I made out here seemed to me as far beyond the capabilities of the nineteenth century as had been the great Gothic cathedrals from the Romans or Greeks. Surely, I mused, in this future era man had gained some freedom from the relentless tugging of gravity; for how else could these great structures have been raised against the sky?

But before long the great Thames arch grew stained with brown and green, the colours of irreverent, destructive life, and – in a twinkling, it seemed to me – the arch crumbled from its centre, collapsing to two bare stumps on the banks. Like all the works of man, I saw, even these great structures were transient chimeras, destined to impermanence compared to the chthonian patience of the land.

I felt an extraordinary detachment from the world, an aloofness brought about by my time travelling. I remembered the curiosity and exhilaration I had felt when I had first soared through these dreams of future architecture; I remembered my brief, feverish speculation as to the accomplishments of these future races of men. Now, I knew different; now I knew that regardless of these great accomplishments, Humanity would inevitably fall backwards, under the inexorable pressure of evolution, into the decadence and degradation of Eloi and Morlock.

I was struck by how ignorant we humans are, or make ourselves, of the passage of time itself. How brief our lives are! – and how meaningless the events which assail our little selves, when seen against the perspective of the great plastic sweep of History. We are less than mayflies, helpless in the face of the unbending forces of geology and evolution – forces which move inexorably, and yet so slowly that, day to day, we are not even aware of their existence!

2
A NEW VISION

I soon passed beyond the Age of Great Buildings. New houses and halls, less ambitious but still huge, shimmered into existence around me, all about the vale of the Thames, and assumed a certain opacity, in the eyes of a Time Traveller, that comes with longevity. The arch of the sun, dipping across the deep blue sky between its solstice extremes, seemed to me to grow brighter, and a green flow spread across Richmond Hill and took possession of the land, banishing the browns and whites of winter. Once more, I had entered that era in which the climate of the earth had been adjusted in favour of Humanity.

I looked out over a landscape reduced by my velocity to the static; only the longest-lived phenomena clung to time long enough to register on my fleeting eye. I saw no people, no animals, not even the passage of a cloud. I was suspended in an eerie stillness. If it had not been for the oscillating sun-band, and the deep, unnatural day-night blue of the sky, I might have been sitting alone in some late summer park.

According to my dials, I was less than a third of the way through my great journey – although a quarter of a million years had already worn away since my own familiar century – and yet, it seemed, the age in which man built upon the earth was already done. The planet had been rendered into that garden within which the folk who would become the Eloi would live out their futile, petty lives; and already, I knew, proto-Morlocks must have been imprisoned beneath the earth, and must even now be tunnelling out their immense, machinery-choked caverns. Little would change over the half-million-year interval I had yet to cross, save for the further degradation of Humanity, and the identity of the victims in the millions of tiny, fearful tragedies which would from now on comprise the condition of man …

But – I observed, rousing myself from these morbid speculations – there was a change, slowly becoming apparent in the landscape. I felt disturbed, over and above the Time Machine’s customary swaying. Something was different – perhaps something about the light.

Sitting in my saddle, I peered about at the ghost-trees, the level meadows about Petersham, the shoulder of the patient Thames.

Then I lifted my face to the time-smoothed heavens, and at last I realized that the sun-band was stationary in the sky. The earth was still spinning on its axis rapidly enough to smear the movement of our star across the heavens, and to render the circling stars invisible, but that band of sunlight no longer nodded back and forth between solstices: it was as steady and unchanging as if it were a construction of concrete.

My nausea and vertigo returned with a rush. I was forced to grip hard at the rails of the machine, and I swallowed, fighting for control of my own body.

It is difficult to convey the impact this simple change in my surroundings had on me! First, I was shocked by the sheer audacity of the engineering involved in the removal of the seasonal cycle. The earth’s seasons had derived from the tilt of the planet’s spin axis compared to the plane of its orbit around the sun. On the earth, it seemed, there would be no more seasons. And that could only mean – I realized it instantly – that the axial tilt of the planet had been corrected.

I tried to envisage how this might have been done. What great machines must have been installed at the Poles? What measures had been taken to ensure that the surface of the earth did not shake itself loose in the process? – Perhaps, I speculated, some immense magnetic device had been used, which had manipulated the molten and magnetic core of the planet.

But it was not just the scale of this planetary engineering which disturbed me: more terrifying still was the fact that I had not observed this regulation of the seasons during my first jaunt into time. How was it possible that I could have missed such an immense and profound change? I am trained as a scientist, after all; my business is to observe.

I rubbed my face and stared up at the sun-band where it hung in the sky, defying me to believe in its lack of motion. Its brightness stung my eyes; and it seemed to me that the band was growing still brighter. I wondered at first if this was my imagination, or some defect of my eyes. I dropped my face, dazzled, wiping tears against my jacket sleeve and blinking to rid my eyes of stripes of bruised light-spots.

I am no primitive, and no coward – and yet, sitting there in my saddle before the evidence of the immense feats of future men, I felt as if I were a savage with painted nakedness and bones in my hair, cowering before gods in the gaudy sky. I felt a deep fear for my own sanity bubbling from the depths of my consciousness; and yet I clung to the belief that – somehow – I had failed to observe this staggering astronomical phenomenon, during my first pass through these years. For the only alternative hypothesis terrified me to the roots of my soul: it was that I had not been mistaken during my first voyage; that the regulation of the earth’s axis had not taken place there – that the course of History itself had changed.

The near-eternal shape of the hill-side was unchanged – the morphology of the ancient land was unaffected by these evolving lights in the sky – but I could see that the tide of greenery which had coated the land had now receded, under the steady glare of the brightened sun.

I became aware now of a remote flickering above my head, and I glanced up with my hand raised. The flickering came from the sun-band in the sky – or what had been the sun-band, for I realized that somehow, once again, I was able to distinguish the cannonball motion of the sun as it shot across the sky on its diurnal round; no longer was its motion too rapid for me to follow, and the passage of night and day was inducing the flickering I saw.

At first, I thought my machine must be slowing. But when I glanced down at my dials, I saw that the hands were twisting across the faces with just as much alacrity as before.

The pearl-grey uniformity of the light dissolved, and the flapping alternation of day and night became marked. The sun slid across the sky, slowing with every arcing trajectory, hot and bright and yellow; and I soon realized that the burning star was taking many centuries to complete one revolution around the sky of earth.

At last, the sun came to a halt altogether; it rested on the western horizon, hot and pitiless and unchanging. The earth’s rotation had been stilled; now, it rotated with one face turned perpetually to the sun!

The scientists of the nineteenth century had predicted that at last the tidal influences of sun and moon would cause the earth’s rotation to become locked to the sun, just as the moon was forced to keep one face turned to earth. I had witnessed this myself, during my first exploration of futurity: but it was an eventuality that should not come about for many millions of years. And yet here I was, little more than half a million years into the future, finding a stilled earth!

Once again, I realized, I had seen the hand of man at work – ape-descended fingers, reaching across centuries with the grasp of gods. Not content with tilting up his world, man had slowed the spin of the earth itself, banishing at last the ancient cycle of day and night.

I looked around at England’s new desert. The land was scoured clean of grass, leaving exposed a dried-out clay. Here and there I saw the flicker of some hardy bush – in shape, a little like an olive – which struggled to survive beneath the unrelenting sun. The mighty Thames, which had migrated across perhaps a mile of its plain, shrank within its banks, until I could no longer see the sparkle of its water. I scarce felt these latest changes had done much to improve the place: at least the world of Morlocks and Eloi had seen the retention of the essential character of the English countryside, with its abundant greenery and water; the effect, looking back on it, had been rather like towing the whole of the British Isles to somewhere in the Tropics.

I pictured the poor planet, one face held in the sunlight forever, the other turned away. On the equator at the centre of the day-side, it must be warm enough to boil the flesh off a man’s bones. And air must be fleeing the overheated sunward side to rush, in immense winds, towards the cooler hemisphere, there to freeze out as a snow of oxygen and nitrogen over the ice-bound oceans. If I were to stop the machine now, perhaps I should be knocked off at once by those great winds, the last exhalations of a planet’s lungs! The process could stop only when the day-side was parched, airless, quite without life; and the dark side was buried under a thin shell of frozen air.

I realized with mounting horror that I could not return home! – for to turn back I must stop the machine, and if I did so I would be tipped precipitately into a land of vacuum and searing heat, as bleak as the surface of the moon. But dare I carry on, into an unknowable future, and hope that somewhere in the depths of time I would find a world I could inhabit?

Now I was sure that something was badly wrong with my perceptions, or memories, of my time travelling. For it was barely conceivable to me that during my first voyage to the future I might have missed the banishing of the seasons – though I found it hard to believe – but I could not countenance that I had failed to notice the slowing of the earth’s spin.

There could be no doubt about it: I was travelling through events which differed, massively, from those I had witnessed during my first sojourn.

I am by nature a speculative man, and am in general not short of an inventive hypothesis or two; but at that moment my shock was such that I was bereft of calculation. It was as if my body still plummeted onwards through time, but my brain had been left behind, somewhere in the glutinous past. I think I had had a veneer of courage earlier, a facade that had come from the complacent consideration that, although I was heading into danger, it was at least a danger I had confronted before. Now, I had no idea what awaited me in these corridors of time!

While I was occupied by these morbid thoughts, I became aware of continuing changes in the heavens – as if the dismantling of the natural order of things had not yet gone far enough! The sun was growing still brighter. And – it was hard to be sure, the glare of it was so strong – it seemed to me that the shape of the star was now changing. It was smearing itself across the sky, becoming an elliptical patch of light. I wondered if the sun was somehow being spun more rapidly, so that it had become flattened by rotation …

And then – it was quite sudden – the sun exploded.

3
IN OBSCURITY

Plumes of light erupted from the star’s poles, like immense flares. Within a handful of heartbeats the sun had surrounded itself with a glowing mantle of light. Heat and light blazed down anew on the battered earth.

I screamed and buried my face in my hands; but I could still see the light of the enhanced sun, leaking even through the flesh of my fingers, and blazing from the nickel and brass of the Time Machine.

Then, as soon as it had begun, the light storm ceased – and a sort of shell closed up around the sun, as if an immense Mouth was swallowing the star – and I was plunged into darkness!

I dropped my hands, and found myself in pitch blackness, quite unable to see, although dazzle-spots still danced in my eyes. I could feel the hard saddle of the Time Machine beneath me, and when I reached out I found the faces of the little dials; and the machine still swayed as it continued to forge through time. I began to wonder – to fear! – if I had lost my sight.

Despair welled up within me, blacker than the external darkness. Was my second great adventure into time to end so soon, so ignobly? I reached out, groping, for the control levers, and my feverish brain began to concoct schemes wherein I broke off the glass of the chronometric dials, and by touch, perhaps, worked my way home.

… And then I found I was not blind: I did see something.

In some ways this was the queerest aspect of the whole journey so far – so queer, that at first I was quite beyond fear.

First of all, I made out a lightening in the darkness. It was a vague, suffused brightening, something like a sun-rise, and so faint that I was unsure if my bruised eyes were not playing some trick on me. I thought I could see stars, all about me; but they were faint, their light tempered as if seen through a murky stained-glass window.

And now, by the dim glow, I began to see that I was not alone.

The creature stood a few yards before the Time Machine – or rather, it floated in the air, unsupported. It was a ball of flesh: something like a hovering head, all of four feet across, with two bunches of tentacles which dangled like grotesque fingers towards the ground. Its mouth was a fleshy beak, and it had no nostrils that I could make out. I noticed now that the creature’s eyes – two of them, large and dark – were human. It seemed to be making a noise – a low, murmuring babble, like a river – and I realized, with a stab of fear, that this was exactly the noise I had heard earlier in the expedition, and even during my first venture into time.

Had this creature – this Watcher, I labelled it – accompanied me, unseen, on both my expeditions through time?

Of a sudden, it rushed towards me. It loomed up, no more than a yard from my face!

I was unhinged at last. I screamed and, regardless of the consequences, hauled at my lever.

The Time Machine tipped over – the Watcher vanished – and I was flung into the air!

I was left insensible: for how long, I cannot say. I revived slowly, finding my face pressed down against a hard, sandy surface. I fancied I felt a hot breath at my neck – a whisper, a brush of soft hair against my cheek – but when I moaned and made to get up, these sensations vanished.

I was immersed in inky darkness. It felt neither warm nor cold. I was sitting on some hard, sandy surface. There was a scent of staleness in the still air. My head ached from the bump it had received, and I had lost my hat.

I reached out my arms and cast about all around me. To my great relief, I was rewarded almost immediately by a soft collision with a tangle of ivory and brass: it was the Time Machine, pitched like me into this darkened desert. I reached out with both hands and fingered the rails and studs of the machine. It was tipped over, and in the dark I could not tell if it was damaged.

I needed light, of course. I reached for some matches from my pocket – only to find none there; like a blessed fool I had packed my entire supply into the knapsack! A moment of panic assailed me; but I managed to suppress it, and I stood, shaking, and walked to the Time Machine. I investigated it by touch, searching between the bent rails until I found the knapsack, still stowed secure under the saddle. Impatient, I pulled the pack open and rummaged through it. I found two boxes of matches and tucked them into my jacket pockets; then I took out a match and struck it against its box.

… There was a face, immediately before me, not two feet away, glowing in the match’s circle of light: I saw dull white skin, flaxen hair draping down from the skull, and wide, grey-red eyes.

The creature let out a queer, gurgling scream, and disappeared into the darkness beyond the glow of my light.

It was a Morlock!

The match burned down against my fingers and I dropped it; I scrabbled for another, in my panic almost dropping my precious box.

4
THE DARK NIGHT

The sharp sulphur smell of the matches filled my nostrils, and I backed across the sandy surface until my spine was pressed against the brass rods of the Time Machine. After some minutes of this submission to terror, I had the wit to retrieve a candle from my knapsack. I held the candle close to my face and stared into its yellow flame, ignorant of the warm wax which flowed over my fingers.

I gradually began to discern some structure in the world around me. I could see the tangled brass and quartz of the upturned Time Machine, sparkling in the candlelight, and a form – like a large statue, or a building – which loomed, pale and huge, not far from where I stood. The land was not completely without light. The sun might be gone, but in patches above me the stars still shone, though slid about by time from the constellations of my boyhood. There was no sign of our friendly moon.

In one part of the sky, though, no stars shone: in the west, protruding over the black horizon, there was a flattened ellipse, unbroken by stars, spanning fully a quarter of the sky. This was the sun, shrouded in its astonishing shell!

As I came out of my funk, I decided my first action should be to secure my passage home: I must right the Time Machine – but I would not do it in the dark! I knelt down and felt about on the ground. The sand was hard, the grains fine-packed. I dug into it with my thumb, and pushed out a little depression; into this improvised holder I popped my candle, confident that in a few moments sufficient wax would melt to hold it more firmly in place. Now I had a steady light to guide my operations, and my hands were free.

I set my teeth, drew my breath, and grappled with the weight of the machine. I wedged my wrists and knees under its framework, trying to wrestle the thing from the ground – its construction had been intended for solidity, not ease of handling – until, at last, it gave under my onslaught and tipped over. One nickel rod struck my shoulder, quite painfully.

I rested my hand on the saddle, and felt where its leather surface was scuffed by the sand of this new future. In the dark of my own shadow, I reached out and found the chronometric dials with my probing fingertips – one glass had shattered, but the dial itself seemed in working order – and the two white levers with which I could bring myself home. As I touched the levers, the machine shivered like a ghost, reminding me that it – and I – were not of this time: that at any moment now, of my choosing, I only had to board my device to return to the security of 1891, at the risk of nothing more than a little bruised pride.

I lifted the candle from its socket in the sand and held it over my dials. It was, I found, Day 239,354,634: therefore – I estimated – the year was A.D. 657,208. My wild imaginings about the mutability of past and future must be correct; for this darkened hill-side was located in time a hundred and fifty millennia before Weena’s birth, and I could not envisage a way in which that sunlit garden-world could develop from this rayless obscurity!

In my remote childhood, I remember being entertained by my father with a primitive wonder-toy called a ‘Dissolving View’. Crudely coloured pictures were thrown onto a screen by a double-barrelled arrangement of lenses. A picture would be projected first by the right-hand lens of the contraption; then the light would be shifted to the left-hand side, so that the picture cast from the right faded as the other grew in brightness. As a child I was deeply impressed by the way in which a bright reality turned into a phantom, to be replaced by a successor whose form was at first visible only as an outline. There were exhilarating moments when the two images were exactly in balance, and it was hard to determine which details were advancing and which were receding realities, or whether any part of the ensemble of images was truly ‘real’.

Thus, as I stood in that darkened landscape, I felt the sturdy description of the world I had constructed for myself growing misty and faint, to be replaced only by the barest bones of a successor, and with more confusion than clarity!

The divergence of the twin Histories I had witnessed – in the first, the building of the Eloi’s garden world; in the second, the extinguishing of the sun, and the establishment of this planetary desert – was incomprehensible to me. How could events be, and then not be?

I remembered the words of Thomas Aquinas, that: ‘God cannot effect that anything which is past should not have been. It is more impossible than raising the dead …’ So I had believed, too! I am not much given to philosophical speculation, but I had thought of the future as an extension of the past: fixed and immutable, even for a God – and certainly for the hand of man. Futurity, in my mind, was like a huge room, fixed and static. And into the furniture of the future my Time Machine could take me, exploring.

But now, it seemed, I had learned that the future might not be a fixed thing, but something mutable! If so, I mused, what meaning could be given to the lives of men? It was bad enough to endure the thought that all of one’s achievements would be worn away to insignificance by the erosion of time – and I, of all men, knew that well enough! – but, at least, one would always have the feeling that one’s monuments, and the things one had loved, had once been. But if History were capable of this wholesale erasure and alteration, what possible worth could be ascribed to any human activity?

Reflecting on these startling possibilities, I felt as if the solidity of my thought, and the firmness of my apprehension of the world, were melting away. I stared into my candle flame, seeking the outlines of a new understanding.

I was not done yet, I decided; my fear was subsiding, and my mind stayed resilient and strong. I would explore this bizarre world, and take what pictures I could with my Kodak, and then return to 1891. There, better philosophers than I could puzzle over this conundrum of two futurities exclusive of each other.

I reached over the bars of the Time Machine, unscrewed the little levers that would launch me into time, and stored them safe in my pocket. Then I felt about until I found the sturdy form of my poker, still lodged where I had left it in the structure of the machine. I grasped its thick handle and hefted it in my hand. My confidence grew as I imagined cracking a few of the Morlocks’ soft skulls with this piece of primitive engineering. I stuck the poker in a loop of my belt. It hung there a little awkward but hugely reassuring, with its weight and solidity, and its resonance of home, and my own fireside.

I raised my candle into the air. The spectral statue, or building, which I had noticed close by the machine, came into shadowy illumination. It was indeed a monument of some kind – a colossal figure carved of some white stone, its form difficult to discern in the flickering candlelight.

I walked towards the monument. As I did so, on the edge of my vision, I fancied I saw a pair of grey-red eyes widen, and a white back which shivered away across the sandy surface with a shushing of bare feet. I rested my hand on the club of brass tucked in my belt, and continued.

The statue was set on a pedestal which appeared to be of bronze, and decorated with deep-framed, filigreed panels. The pedestal was stained, as if it had once been attacked by verdigris, now long dried out. The statue itself was of white marble, and from a leonine body great wings were spread, so that they seemed to hover over me. I wondered how those great sheets of stone were supported, for I could see no struts. Perhaps there was some metal frame, I mused – or perhaps some elements of that mastery of gravity, which I had hypothesized in my latest jaunt through the Age of Great Buildings, lingered on in this desolate era. The face of the marble beast was human, and was turned towards me; I felt as if those blank stone eyes were watching me, and there was a smile, sardonic and cruel, on the weather-beaten lips …

And with a jolt I recognized this construction; if not for fear of Morlocks I would have whooped with the joy of familiarity! This was the monument I had come to call the White Sphinx – a structure I had become familiar with, in this very spot, during my first flight to the future. It was almost like greeting an old friend!

I paced around the sandy hill-side, back and forth past the machine, remembering how it had been. This spot had been a lawn, surrounded by mauve and purple rhododendrons – bushes which had dropped their blossoms over me in a hail storm on my first arrival. And, looming over it all, indistinct at first in that hail, had been the imposing form of this Sphinx.

Well, here I was again, a hundred and fifty thousand years before that date. The bushes and lawn were gone – and would never come to be, I suspected. That sunlit garden had been replaced by this bleak, darkened desert, and now existed only in the recesses of my own mind. But the Sphinx was here, solid as life and almost indestructible, it seemed.

I patted the bronze panels of the Sphinx’s pedestal with something resembling affection. Somehow the existence of the Sphinx, lingering from my previous visit, reassured me that I was not imagining all of this, that I was not going mad in some dim recess of my house in 1891! All of this was objectively real, and – no doubt, like the rest of Creation – it all conformed to some logical pattern. The White Sphinx was a part of that pattern, and it was only my ignorance and limitation of mind that prevented me from seeing the rest of it. I was bolstered up, and felt filled with a new determination to continue with my explorations.

On impulse, I walked around to the side of the pedestal closest to the Time Machine, and, by candlelight, I inspected the decorated bronze panel there. It was here, I recalled, that the Morlocks – in that other History – had opened up the hollow base of the Sphinx, and dragged the Time Machine inside the pedestal, meaning to trap me. I had come to the Sphinx with a pebble and hammered at this panel – just here; I ran over the decorations with my fingertips. I had flattened out some of the coils of the panel, though to no avail. Well, now I found those coils firm and round under my fingers, as good as new. It was strange to think that the coils would not meet the fury of my stone for millennia yet – or perhaps, never at all.

I determined to move away from the machine and proceed with my exploration. But the presence of the Sphinx had reminded me of my horror at losing the Time Machine to the clutches of the Morlocks. I patted my pocket – at least without my little levers the machine could not be operated – but there was no obstacle to those loathsome creatures crawling over my machine as soon as I was gone from it, perhaps dismantling it or stealing it again.

And besides, in this darkened landscape, how should I avoid getting lost? How should I be sure of finding the machine again, once I had gone more than a few yards from it?

I puzzled over this for a few moments, my desire to explore further battling with my apprehension. Then an idea struck me. I opened my knapsack and took out my candles and camphor blocks. With rough haste I shoved these articles into crevices in the Time Machine’s complex construction. Then I went around the machine with lighted matches until every one of the blocks and candles was ablaze.

I stood back from my glowing handiwork with some pride. Candle flames glinted from the polished nickel and brass, so that the Time Machine was lit up like some Christmas ornament. In this darkened landscape, and with the machine poised on this denuded hill-side, I would be able to see my beacon from a fair distance. With any luck, the flames would deter any Morlocks – or if they did not, I should see the diminution of the flames immediately and could come running back, to join battle.

I fingered the poker’s heavy handle. I think a part of me hoped for just such an outcome; my hands and lower arms tingled as I remembered the queer, soft sensation of my fists driving into Morlock faces!

At any rate, now I was prepared for my expedition. I picked up my Kodak, lit a small oil lamp, and made my way across the hill, pausing after every few paces to be sure the Time Machine rested undisturbed.

5
THE WELL

I raised my lamp, but its glow carried only a few feet. All was silent – there was not a breath of wind, not a trickle of water; and I wondered if the Thames still flowed.

For lack of a definite destination, I decided to make towards the site of the great food hall which I remembered from Weena’s day. This lay a little distance to the north-west, further along the hill-side past the White Sphinx, and so this was the path I followed once more – reflecting in Space, if not in Time, my first walk in Weena’s world.

When last I made this little journey, I remembered, there had been grass under my feet – untended and uncropped, but growing neat and short and free of weeds. Now, soft, gritty sand pulled at my boots as I tramped across the hill.

My vision was becoming quite adapted to this night of patchy star-light, but, though there were buildings hereabout, silhouetted against the sky, I saw no sign of my hall. I remembered it quite distinctly: it had been a grey edifice, dilapidated and vast, of fretted stone, with a carved, ornate doorway; and as I had walked through its carved arch, the little Eloi, delicate and pretty, had fluttered about me with their pale limbs and soft robes.

Before long I had walked so far that I knew I must have passed the site of the hall. Evidently – unlike the Sphinx and the Morlocks – the food palace had not survived in this History – or perhaps had never been built, I thought with a shiver; perhaps I had walked – slept, even taken a meal! – in a building without existence.

The path took me to a well, a feature which I remembered from my first jaunt. Just as I recalled, the structure was rimmed with bronze and protected from the weather by a small, oddly delicate cupola. There was some vegetation – jet-black in the star-light – clustered around the cupola. I studied all this with some dread, for these great shafts had been the means by which the Morlocks ascended from their hellish caverns to the sunny world of the Eloi.

The mouth of the well was silent. That struck me as odd, for I remembered hearing from those other wells the thud-thud-thud of the Morlocks’ great engines, deep in their subterranean caverns.

I sat down by the side of the well. The vegetation I had observed appeared to be a kind of lichen; it was soft and dry to the touch, though I did not probe it further, nor attempt to determine its structure. I lifted up the lamp, meaning to hold it over the rim and to see if there might be returned the reflection of water; but the flame flickered, as if in some strong draught, and, in a brief panic at the thought of darkness, I snatched the lamp back.

I ducked my head under the cupola and leaned over the well’s rim, and was greeted by a blast of warm, moist air into the face – it was like opening the door to a Turkish bath – quite unexpected in that hot but arid night of the future. I had an impression of great depth, and at the remote base of the well I fancied my dark-adapted eyes made out a red glow. Despite its appearance, this really was quite unlike the wells of the first Morlocks. There was no sign of the protruding metal hooks in the side, intended to support climbers, and I still detected no evidence of the machinery noises I had heard before; and I had the odd, unverifiable impression that this well was far deeper than those Morlocks’ cavern-drilling.

On a whim, I raised my Kodak and dug out the flash lamp. I filled up the trough of the lamp with blitzlichtpulver, lifted the camera and flooded the well with magnesium light. Its reflections dazzled me, and it was a glow so brilliant that it might not have been seen on earth since the covering of the sun, a hundred thousand years or more earlier. That should have scared away the Morlocks if nothing else! – and I began to concoct protective schemes whereby I could connect the flash to the unattended Time Machine, so that the powder would go off if ever the machine was touched.

I stood up and spent some minutes loading the flash lamp and snapping at random across the hillside around the well. Soon a dense cloud of acrid white smoke from the powder was gathering about me. Perhaps I would be lucky, I reflected, and would capture for the wonderment of Humanity the rump of a fleeing, terrified Morlock!

… There was a scratching, soft and insistent, from a little way around the well rim, not three feet from where I stood.

With a cry, I fumbled at my belt for my poker. Had the Morlocks fallen on me, while I daydreamed?

Poker in hand, I stepped forward with care. The rasping noises were coming from the bed of lichen, I realized; there was some form, moving steady through those tiny, dark plants. There was no Morlock here, so I lowered my club, and bent over the lichen bed. I saw a small, crab-like creature, no wider than my hand; the scratching I heard was the rasp of its single, outsize claw against the lichen. The crab’s case seemed to me to be jet black, and the creature was quite without eyes, like some blind creature of the ocean depths.

So, I reflected as I watched this little drama, the struggle to survive went on, even in this benighted darkness. It struck me that I had seen no signs of life – save for the glimpses of Morlock – away from this well, in all my visit here. I am no biologist, but it seemed clear that the presence of this fount of warm, moist air would be bound to attract life, here on a world turned to desert, just as it had attracted this blind farmer-crab and his crop of lichen. I speculated that the warmth must come from the compressed interior of the earth, whose volcanic heat, evident in our own day, would not have cooled significantly in the intervening six hundred thousand years. And perhaps the moisture came from aquifers, still extant below the ground.

It may be, I mused, the surface of the planet was studded with such wells and cupolas. But their purpose was not to admit access to the interior world of the Morlocks – as in that other History – but to release the earth’s intrinsic resources to warm and moisten this planet deprived of its sun; and such life as had survived the monstrous engineering I had witnessed now clustered around these founts of warmth and moisture.

My confidence was increasing – making sense of things is a powerful tonic for my courage, and after that false alarm with the crab, I had no sense of threat – and I sat again on the lip of the well. I had my pipe and some of my tobacco in my pocket, and I packed the bowl full and lit up. I began to speculate on how this History might have diverged from the first I had witnessed. Evidently there had been some parallels – there had been Morlocks and Eloi here – but their grisly duality had been resolved, in ages past.

I wondered why should such a show-down between the races occur – for the Morlocks, in their foul way, were as dependent on the Eloi as were Eloi on Morlock, and the whole arrangement had a sort of stability.

I saw a way it might have come about. The Morlocks were of debased human stock, after all, and it is not in man’s heart to be logical about things. The Morlock must have known that he depended on the Eloi for his very existence; he must have pitied and scorned him – his remote cousin, yet reduced to the status of cattle. And yet –

And yet, what a glorious morning made up the brief life of the Eloi! The little people laughed and sang and loved across the surface of the world made into a garden, while your Morlock must toil in the stinking depths of the earth to provide the Eloi with the fabric of their luxurious lives. Granted the Morlock was conditioned for his place in creation, and would no doubt turn in disgust from the Eloi’s sunlight and clear water and fruit, even were it offered to him – but still, might he not, in his dim and cunning fashion, have envied the Eloi their leisure?

Perhaps the flesh of the Eloi turned sour in the Morlock’s rank mouth, even as he bit into it in his dingy cave.

I envisaged, then, the Morlocks – or a faction of them – arising one night from their tunnels under the earth, and falling on the Eloi with their weapons and whip-muscled arms. There would be a great Culling – and this time, not a disciplined harvesting of flesh, but a full-blooded assault with one, unthinking purpose: the final extinction of the Eloi.

How must the lawns and food palaces have run with blood, those ancient stones echoing to the childish bleating of the Eloi!

In such a contest there could be only one victor, of course. The fragile people of futurity, with their hectic, consumptive beauty, could never defend themselves against the assaults of organized, murderous Morlocks.

I saw it all – or so I thought! The Morlocks, triumphant at last, had inherited the earth. With no more use for the garden-country of the Eloi, they had allowed it to fall into ruin; they had erupted from the earth and – somehow – brought their own Stygian darkness with them to cover the sun! I remembered how Weena’s folk had feared the nights of the new moon – she had called them ‘The Dark Nights’ – now, it seemed to me, the Morlocks had brought about a final Dark Night to cover the earth, forever. The Morlocks had at last murdered the last of earth’s true children, and even murdered earth herself.

Such was my first hypothesis, then: wild and gaudy – and wrong, in every particular!

… And I became aware, with almost a physical shock, that in the middle of all this historical speculation I had quite forgotten my regular inspections of the abandoned Time Machine.

I got to my feet and glared across the hill-side. I soon picked out the machine’s candle-lit glow – but the lights I had built flickered and wavered, as if opaque shapes were moving around the machine.

They could only be Morlocks!

6
MY ENCOUNTER WITH THE MORLOCKS

With a spurt of fear – and, I have to acknowledge it, a lust for blood which pulsed in my head – I roared, lifted my poker-club, and pounded back along the path. Careless, I dropped my Kodak; behind me I heard a soft tinkle of breaking glass. For all I know, that camera lies there still – if I may use the phrase – abandoned in the darkness.

As I neared the machine, I saw they were Morlocks all right – perhaps a dozen of them, capering around the machine. They seemed alternately attracted and repelled by my lights, exactly like moths around candles. They were the same ape-like creatures I remembered – perhaps a little smaller – with that long, flaxen hair across their heads and backs, their skin a pasty white, arms long as monkeys’, and with those haunting red-grey eyes. They whooped and jabbered to each other in their queer language. They hadn’t yet touched the Time Machine, I noted with some relief, but I knew it was a matter of moments before those uncanny fingers – ape-like, yet clever as any man’s – reached out for the sparkling brass and nickel.

But there would be no time for that, for I fell upon these Morlocks like an avenging angel.

I laid about me with my poker and my fist. The Morlocks jabbered and squealed, and tried to flee. I grabbed one of the creatures as it ran past me, and I felt again the worm-pallor cold of Morlock flesh. Hair like spider-web brushed across the back of my hand, and the animal nipped at my fingers with its small teeth, but I did not yield. I wielded my club, and I felt the soft, moist collapse of flesh and bone.

Those grey-red eyes widened, and closed.

I seemed to watch all this from a small, detached part of my brain. I had quite forgotten all my intentions to return proof of the working of time travel, or even to find Weena: I suspected at that moment that this was why I had returned into time – for this moment of revenge: for Weena, and for the murder of the earth, and my own earlier indignity. I dropped the Morlock – unconscious or dead, it was no more than a bundle of hair and bones – and grabbed for its companions, swinging my poker.

Then I heard a voice – distinctively Morlock, but quite unlike the others in tone and depth – it issued a single, imperative syllable. I turned, my arms soaked in blood up to the elbows of my jacket, and made ready for more fighting.

Before me, now, stood a Morlock who did not run from me. Though he was naked like the rest, his coat of hair seemed to have been brushed and prepared, so that he had something of the effect of a groomed dog, made to stand upright like a man. I took a massive step forward, my club held firm in both hands.

Calmly, the Morlock raised his right hand – something glinted there – and there was a green flash, and I felt the world tip backwards from under me, pitching me down beside my glowing machine; and I knew no more!

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