Kitabı oku: «The Time Ships», sayfa 9
19
HOW I CROSSED INTER-PLANETARY SPACE
I was forced to wait three days until Nebogipfel pronounced himself ready to depart; it was, he said, a matter of waiting until the earth and our part of the Sphere entered the proper configuration with each other.
My thoughts turned to the journey ahead with some anticipation – I would not say fear, for I had, after all, already survived one such crossing of interplanetary space, although insensible at the time – but rather with quickening interest. I speculated on the means by which Nebogipfel’s space-yacht might be propelled. I thought of Verne, who had his argumentative Baltimore gun clubbers firing that ludicrous cannon, with its man-bearing shell, across the gap between the earth and moon. But it only took a little mental calculation to show that an acceleration sufficient to launch a projectile beyond the earth’s gravity would also have been so strong as to smear my poor flesh, and Nebogipfel’s, across the interior of the shell like strawberry jam.
What, then?
It is a commonplace that inter-planetary space is without air; and so we could not fly like birds to the earth, for the birds rely on the ability of their wings to push against the air. No air – no push! Perhaps, I speculated, my space yacht would be driven by some advanced form of firework rocket – for a rocket, which flies by pushing out behind it masses of its own spent propellant, would be able to function in the airlessness of space, if oxygen were carried to sustain its combustion …
But these were mundane speculations, grounded in my nineteenth-century understanding. How could I tell what might be possible by the year A.D. 657,208? I imagined yachts tacking against the sun’s gravity as if against an invisible wind; or, I thought, there might be some manipulation of magnetic or other fields.
Thus my speculations raged, until Nebogipfel came to summon me, for the last time, from the Interior.
As we dropped into Morlock darkness I stood with my head tipped back, peering up at the receding sunlight; and – just before I donned my goggles – I promised myself that the next time my face felt the warmth of man’s star, it would be in my own century!
I think I had been expecting to be transported to some Morlock equivalent of a port, with great ebony space yachts nuzzling against the Sphere like liners against a dock.
Well, there was none of that; instead Nebogipfel escorted me – across a distance of no more than a few miles, via strips of moving Floor – to an area which was kept clear of artefacts and partitions, and Morlocks in general, but was otherwise unremarkable. And in the middle of this area was a small chamber, a clear-walled box a little taller than I was – like a lift compartment – which sat there, squat, on the star-spattered Floor.
At Nebogipfel’s gesture, I stepped into the compartment. Nebogipfel followed, and behind us the compartment sealed itself shut with a hiss of its diaphragm door. The compartment was roughly rectangular, its rounded corners and edges giving it something of the look of a lozenge. There was no furniture; there were, however, upright poles fixed at intervals about the cabin.
Nebogipfel wrapped his pale fingers around one of these poles. ‘You should prepare yourself. At our launch, the change in effective gravity is sudden.’
I found these calm words disturbing! Nebogipfel’s eyes, blackened by the goggles, were on me with their usual disconcerting mixture of curiosity and analysis; and I saw his fingers tighten their grip on the pillar.
And then – it happened faster than I can relate it – the Floor opened. The compartment fell out of the Sphere, and I and Nebogipfel with it!
I cried out, and I grabbed at a pole like an infant clinging to its mother’s leg.
I looked upwards, and there was the surface of the Sphere, now turned into an immense, black Roof which occluded half the universe from my gaze. At the centre of this ceiling I could see a rectangle of paler darkness which was the door through which we had emerged; even as I watched, that door diminished with our distance, and in any event it was already folding closed against us. The door tracked across my view with magisterial slowness, showing how our compartment-capsule was starting to tumble in space. It was clear to me what had happened: any schoolboy can achieve the same effect by whirling a conker around his head, and then releasing the string. Well, the ‘string’ which had held us inside the rotating Sphere – the solidity of its Floor – had now vanished; and we had been thrown out into space, without ceremony.
And below me – I could hardly bear to glance down – there was a pit of stars, a floorless cavern into which I, and Nebogipfel, were falling forever!
‘Nebogipfel – for the love of God – what has happened to us? Has some disaster occurred?’
He regarded me. Disconcertingly, his feet were hovering a few inches above the floor of the capsule – for, while the capsule fell through space, so we, within it, fell too, like peas in a matchbox!
‘We have been released from the Sphere. The effects of its spin are –’
‘I understand all that,’ I said, ‘but why? Are we intending to fall all the way to the earth?’
His answer I found quite terrifying.
‘Essentially,’ he said, ‘yes.’
And then I had no further energy for questions, for I became aware that I too was starting to float about that little cabin like a balloon; and with that realization came a fight with nausea which lasted many minutes.
At length I regained some control over my body.
I had Nebogipfel explain the principles of this flight to the earth. And when he had done so, I realized how elegant and economical was the Morlocks’ solution to travel between the Sphere and its cordon of surviving planets – so much so that I should have anticipated it, and dismissed all my nonsensical speculations of rockets – and yet, here was another example of the inhuman bias of the Morlock soul! Instead of the grandiose space yacht I had imagined, I would travel from Venus’s orbit to the earth in nothing more grand than this lozenge-shaped coffin.
Few men of my century realized quite how much of the universe is vacancy, with a few pockets of warmth and life swimming through it, and what immense speeds are therefore required to traverse interplanetary distances in a practicable time. But the Morlocks’ Sphere was, at its equator, already moving at enormous velocities. So the Morlocks had no need of rockets, or guns, to reach inter-planetary speeds. They simply dropped their capsules out of the Sphere, and let the rotation do the rest.
And so they had done with us. At such speeds, the Morlock told me, we should reach the vicinity of the earth in just forty-seven hours.
I looked around the capsule, but I could see no signs of rockets, or any other motive force. I floated in that little cabin, feeling huge and clumsy; my beard drifted before my face in a grey cloud, and my jacket persisted in rucking itself up around my shoulder-blades. ‘I understand the principles of the launch,’ I said to Nebogipfel. ‘But how is this capsule steered?’
He hesitated for some seconds. ‘It is not. Have you misunderstood what I have told you? The capsule needs no motive force, for the velocity imparted to it by the Sphere –’
‘Yes,’ I said anxiously, ‘I followed all of that. But what if, now, we were to detect that we were off track, by some mistake of our launch – that we were going to miss the earth?’ For I realized that the most minute error at the Sphere, of even a fraction of inter-planetary distances – cause us to miss the earth by millions of miles – and then, presumably, we would go sailing off forever into the void between the stars, allocating blame until our air expired!
He seemed confused. ‘There has been no mistake.’
‘But still,’ I stressed, ‘if there were, perhaps through some mechanical flaw – then how should we, in this capsule, correct our trajectory?’
He thought for some time before answering. ‘Flaws do not occur,’ he repeated. ‘And so this capsule has no need of corrective propulsion, as you suggest.’
At first I could not quite believe this, and I had to have Nebogipfel repeat it several times before I accepted its truth. But true it was! – after launch, the craft flew between the planets with no more intelligence than a hurled stone: my capsule fell across space as helpless as Verne’s lunar cannon-shot.
As I protested the foolishness of this arrangement, I got the impression that the Morlock was becoming shocked – as if I were pressing some debating point of moral dubiety on a vicar of ostensibly open mind – and I gave it up.
The capsule twisted slowly, causing the remote stars and the immense wall that was the Sphere to wheel around us; I think that without that rotation I might have been able to imagine that I was safe and at rest, in some desert night, perhaps; but the tumbling made it impossible to forget that I was in a remote, fragile box, falling without support or attachment or means of direction. I spent the first few of my hours in that capsule in a paralysis of fear! I could not grow accustomed to the clarity of the walls around us, nor to the idea that, now that we were launched, we had no means of altering our trajectory. The journey had the elements of a nightmare – a fall through endless darkness, with no means of adjusting the situation to save myself. And there you have, in a nutshell, the essential difference between the minds of Morlock and human. For what man would trust his life to a ballistic journey, across inter-planetary distances, without any means of altering his course? But such was the New Morlock way: after a half-million years of steadily perfected technology, the Morlock would trust himself unthinkingly to his machines, for his machines never failed him.
I, though, was no Morlock!
Gradually, however, my mood softened. Apart from the slow tumble of the capsule, which continued throughout my journey to the earth, the hours passed in a stillness and silence broken only by the whisper-like breathing of my Morlock companion. The craft was tolerably warm, and so I was suspended in complete physical comfort. The walls were made of that extruding Floor-stuff, and, at a touch from Nebogipfel, I was provided with food, drink and other requirements, although the selection was more limited than in the Sphere, which had a larger Memory than our capsule.
So we sailed through the grand cathedral of interplanetary space with utter ease. I began to feel as if I were disembodied, and a mood of utter detachment and independence settled on me. It was not like a journey, nor even – after those first hours – a nightmare; instead, it took on the qualities of a dream.
20
MY ACCOUNT OF THE FAR FUTURE
On the second day of our flight, Nebogipfel asked me once again about my first journey into futurity.
‘You managed to retrieve your machine from the Morlocks,’ he prompted. ‘And you went on, further into the future of that History …’
‘For a long period I simply held onto the machine,’ I remembered, ‘much as now I am clinging to these poles, uncaring where I went. At last I brought myself to look at my chronometric dials, and I found that the hands were sweeping, with immense rapidity, further into futurity.
‘You must recall,’ I told him, ‘that in this other History the axis of the earth, and its rotation, had not been straightened out. Still day and night flickered like wings over the earth, and still the sun’s path dipped between its solstices as the seasons wore away. But gradually I became aware of a change: that, despite my continuing velocity through time, the flickering of night and day returned, and grew more pronounced.’
‘The earth’s rotation was slowing,’ Nebogipfel said.
‘Yes. At last, the days spread across centuries. The sun had become a dome – huge and angry – glowing with its diminished heat. Occasionally, its illumination brightened – spasms which recalled its former brilliancy. But each time it reverted to its sullen crimson.
‘I began to slow my plummeting through time …’
When I stopped, it was on such a landscape as I had always imagined might prevail on Mars. The huge, motionless sun hung on the horizon; and in the other half of the sky, stars like bones still shone. The rocks strewn across the land were a virulent red, stained an intense green, as if by lichen, on every west-facing plane.
My machine stood on a beach which sloped down to a sea, so still it might have been coated in glass. The air was cold, and quite thin; I felt as if I were suspended atop some remote mountain. Little remained of the familiar topography of the Thames valley; I imagined how the scraping of glaciation, and the slow breathing of the seas, must have obliterated all trace of the landscape I had known – and all trace of Humanity …
Nebogipfel and I hovered there, suspended in space in our shining box, and I whispered my tale of far futurity to him; in that calm, I rediscovered details I may not have recounted to my friends in Richmond.
‘I saw a thing like a kangaroo,’ I recalled. ‘It was perhaps three feet tall … squat, with heavy limbs and rounded shoulders. It loped across the beach – it looked forlorn, I remember – its coat of grey fur was tangled, and it pawed feebly at the rocks, evidently trying to prise free handfuls of lichen, to make its miserable repast. I got a sense of great degeneration about it. Then, I was surprised to see that the thing had five feeble digits to both its fore and hind-feet … And it had a prominent forehead and forward-looking eyes. Its hints of humanity were most disagreeable!
‘But then there was a touch at my ear – like a hair, stroking me – and I turned in my saddle.
‘There was a creature just behind the machine. It was like a centipede, I suppose, but wrought on a huge scale! – three or four feet wide, perhaps thirty feet in length, its body segmented and the chitin of its plates – they were crimson – scraping as it moved. Cilia, each a foot long, waved in the air, moist; and it was one of these which had touched me. Now this beast lifted up its stump of a head, and its mouth gaped wide, with damp mandibles waving before it; it had a hexagonal arrangement of eyes which swivelled about, fixing on me.
‘I touched my lever, and slipped through time away from this monster.
‘I emerged onto the same dismal beach, but now I saw a swarm of the centipede-things, which clambered heavily over each other, their cases scraping. They had a multitude of feet on which they crawled, looping their bodies as they advanced. And in the middle of this swarm I saw a mound – low and bloody – and I thought of the sad kangaroo-beast I had observed before.
‘I could not bear this scene of butchery! I pressed at my levers, and passed on through a million years.
‘Still that awful beach persisted. But now, when I turned from the sea, I saw, far up the barren slope behind me, a thing like an immense white butterfly which shimmered, fluttering, across the sky. Its torso might have been the size of a small woman’s, and the wings, pale and translucent, were huge. Its voice was dismal – eerily human – and a great desolation settled over my soul.
‘Then I noticed a motion across the landscape close to me: a thing like an outcropping of Mars-red rock which shifted across the sand towards me. It was a sort of crab: a thing the size of a sofa, its several legs picking their way over the beach, and with eyes – a greyish red, but human in shape – on stalks, waving towards me. Its mouth, as complex as some bit of machinery, twitched and licked as the thing moved, and its metallic hull was stained with the green of the patient lichen.
‘As the butterfly, ugly and fragile, fluttered above me, the crab-thing reached up towards it with its big claws. It missed – but I fancy I saw scraps of some pale flesh embedded in that claw’s wide grasp.
‘As I have since reflected on that sight,’ I told Nebogipfel, ‘that sour apprehension has confirmed itself in my mind. For it seems to me that this arrangement of squat predator and fragile prey might be a consequence of the relationship of Eloi and Morlock I had observed earlier.’
‘But their forms were so different: the centipedes, and then the crabs –’
‘Over such deserts of time,’ I insisted, ‘evolutionary pressure is such that the forms of species are quite plastic – so Darwin teaches us – and zoological retrogression is a dynamic force. Remember that you and I – and Eloi and Morlock – are all, if you look at it on a wide enough scale, nothing but cousins within the same antique mudfish family!’
Perhaps, I speculated, the Eloi had taken to the air in that species’ desperate attempt to flee the Morlocks; and those predators had emerged from their caves, abandoning at last all simulation of mechanical invention, and now crawled across those cold beaches, waiting for a butterfly-Eloi to tire and fall from the sky. Thus that antique conflict, with its roots in social decay, had been reduced, at last, to its mindless essentials.
‘I travelled on,’ I told Nebogipfel, ‘in strides a millennium long, on into futurity. Still, that crowd of crustaceans crawled among the lichen sheets and the rocks. The sun grew wider and duller.
‘My last stop was thirty million years into the future, where the sun had become a dome which obscured a wide arc of sky. Snow fell – a hard, pitiless sleet. I shivered, and was forced to tuck my hands into my armpits. I could see snow on the hill-tops, pale in the star-light, and huge bergs drifted across the eternal sea.
‘The crabs were gone, but the vivid green of the lichen mats persisted. On a shoal in the sea, I fancied I saw some black object, which I thought flopped with the appearance of life.
‘An eclipse – caused by the passage of some inner planet across the sun’s face – now caused a shadow to fall over the earth. Nebogipfel, you may have felt at ease there! – but a great horror fell upon me, and I got off the machine to recover. Then, when the first arc of crimson sun returned to the sky, I saw that the thing on the shoal was indeed moving. It was a ball of flesh – like a disembodied head, a yard or more across, with two bunches of tentacles which dangled like fingers across the shoal. Its mouth was a beak, and it was without a nose. Its eyes – two of them, large and dark – seemed human …’
And even as I described the thing to the patient Nebogipfel, I recognized the similarity between this vision of futurity, and my odd companion during my most recent trip through time – the floating, green-lit thing I had called the Watcher. I fell silent. Could it be, I mused, that my Watcher was no more than a visitation to me, from the end of time itself?
‘And so,’ I said at last, ‘I clambered aboard my machine once more – I had a great dread of lying there, helpless, in that awful cold – and I returned to my own century.’
On I whispered, and the huge eyes of Nebogipfel were fixed on me, and I saw in him remnant flickers of that curiosity and wonder which characterizes humankind.
Those few days in space seem to have little relation to the rest of my life; sometimes the period I spent floating in that compartment is like a momentary pause, shorter than a heartbeat in the greater sweep of my life, and at other times I feel as if I spent an eternity in the capsule, drifting between worlds. It was as if I became disentangled from my life, and able to look upon it from without, as if it were an incomplete novel. Here I was as a young man, fiddling with my experiments and contraptions and heaps of Plattnerite, spurning the opportunity to socialize, and to learn of life, and love, and politics, and art – spurning even sleep! – in my quest for an unattainable perfection of understanding. I even supposed I saw myself after the completion of this inter-planetary voyage, with my scheme to deceive the Morlocks and escape to my own era. I still had every intention of carrying that plan through – you must understand – but it was as if I watched the actions of some other, littler figure than I was.
At last, I had the idea that I was becoming something outside not only the world of my birth – but all worlds, and Space and Time as well. What was I to become in my own future but, once again, a mote of consciousness buffeted by the Winds of Time?
It was only as the earth grew perceptibly nearer – a darker shadow against space, with the light of the stars reflected in the ocean’s belly – that I felt drawn back to the ordinary concerns of Humanity; that once again the details of my schemes – and my hopes and fears for my future – worked their life-long clockwork in my brain.
I have never forgotten that brief inter-planetary interlude, and sometimes – when I am between waking and sleeping – I imagine I am again adrift between Sphere and the earth, with only a patient Morlock for company.
Nebogipfel contemplated my vision of the far future. ‘You said you travelled thirty million years.’
‘That or more,’ I replied. ‘Perhaps I can recall the chronology more precisely, if –’
He waved that away. ‘Something is wrong. Your description of the sun’s evolution is plausible, but its destruction – our science tells us – should take place over thousands of millions of years, not a mere handful of millions.’
I felt defensive. ‘I have recounted what I saw, honestly and accurately.’
‘I do not doubt you have,’ Nebogipfel said. ‘But the only conclusion is that in that other History – as in my own – the evolution of the sun did not proceed without intervention.’
‘You mean –’
‘I mean that some clumsy attempt must have been made to adjust the sun’s intensity, or longevity – or perhaps even, as we have, to mine the star for habitable materials.’
Nebogipfel’s hypothesis was that perhaps my Eloi and Morlocks were not the full story of Humanity, in that sorry, lost History. Perhaps – Nebogipfel speculated – some race of engineers had left the earth and tried to modify the sun, just as had Nebogipfel’s own ancestors.
‘But the attempt failed,’ I said, aghast.
‘Yes. The engineers never returned to the earth – which was abandoned to the slow tragedy of Eloi and Morlock. And the sun was rendered unbalanced, its lifetime curtailed.’
I was horrified, and I could bear to speak of this no more. I clung to a pole, and my thoughts turned inward.
I thought again of that desolate beach, of those hideous, devolved forms with their echoes of Humanity and their utter absence of mind. The vision had been foul enough when I had considered it a final victory of the inexorable pressures of evolution and retrogression over the human dream of Mind – but now I saw that it might have been Humanity itself, in its overweening ambition, which had unbalanced those opposing forces, and accelerated its own destruction!
Our capture by the earth was elaborate. It was necessary for us to shed some millions of miles per hour of speed, in order to match the earth’s progress around the sun.
We skimmed several times, on diminishing loops, around the belly of the planet; Nebogipfel told me that the capsule was being coupled with the planet’s gravitational and magnetic fields – a coupling enhanced by certain materials in the hull, and by the manipulation of satellites: artificial moons, which orbited the earth and adjusted its natural effects. In essence, I understood, our velocity was exchanged with that of the earth – which, forever after, would travel around the sun a little further out, and a little more rapid.
I hung close to the wall of the capsule, watching the darkened landscape of earth unfold. I could see, here and there, the glow of the Morlocks’ larger heating-wells. I noted several huge, slender towers which appeared to protrude above the atmosphere itself. Nebogipfel told me that the towers were used for capsules travelling from the earth to Sphere.
I saw specks of light crawling along the lengths of those towers: they were inter-planetary capsules, bearing Morlocks to be borne off to their Sphere. It was by means of just such a tower, I realized, that I – insensible – had been launched into space, and carried to the Sphere. The towers worked as lifts beyond the atmosphere, and a similar series of coupling manoeuvres to ours – performed in reverse, if you understand me – would hurl each capsule off into space.
The speed acquired by the capsules on launch would not match that imparted by the Sphere’s rotation, and the outward journey thereby took longer than the return. But on arrival at the Sphere, magnetic fields would hook the capsules with ease, accelerating them to a seamless rendezvous.
At last, we dipped into the atmosphere of the earth. The hull blazed with frictional heat, and the capsule shuddered – it was the first sensation of motion I had endured for days – but Nebogipfel had warned me, and I was ready braced against the supporting poles.
With this meteoric blaze of fire we shed the last of our inter-planetary speed. With some unease I watched the darkened landscape which spread below us as we fell – I thought I could see the broad, meandering ribbon of the Thames – and I began to wonder if, after all this distance, I would, after all, be dashed against the unforgiving rocks of the earth!
But then –
My impressions of the final phase of our shuddering descent are blurred and partial. Suffice it for me to record a memory of a craft, something like an immense bird, which swept down out of the sky and swallowed us in a moment into a kind of stomach-hold. In darkness, I felt a deep jolt as that craft pushed at the air, discarding its velocity; and then our descent continued with extreme gentleness.
When next I could see the stars, there was no sign of the bird-craft. Our capsule was settled on the dried, lifeless soil of Richmond Hill, not a hundred yards from the White Sphinx.
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