The Time Ships Read online

  He bent down and peered at me. His red-gray eyes were the size of dinner-plates, and I quailed away from him. His odor was sharp, like burnt almonds. His limbs were long and fragile-looking, and his skin seemed stretched over that extended skeleton: I was able to see, embedded in one shin and quite visible through drum-tight skin, the profile of a tibia no less than four feet long. Splints of some soft metal were attached to those long leg-bones, evidently to help strengthen them against snapping. This attenuated beast seemed to have no greater number of follicles than your average Morlock, so that his hair was scattered over that stretched-out frame, in a very ugly fashion.

  He exchanged a few liquid syllables with Nebogipfel, then rejoined his companion and — with many a backward glance at me — went on his way.

  I turned to Nebogipfel, stunned; even he seemed an oasis of normality after that vision.

  Nebogipfel said, “They are” — a liquid word I could not repeat — “from the higher latitudes.” He glanced after our two visitors. “You can see that they are unsuited to this equatorial region. Splints are required to help them walk, and—”

  “I don’t see it at all,” I broke in. “What’s so different about the higher latitudes?”

  “Gravity,” he said.

  Dimly, I began to understand.

  The Morlocks’ Sphere was, as I have recorded, a titanic construction which filled up the orbit once occupied by Venus. And — Nebogipfel told me now — the whole thing rotated, about an axis. Once, Venus’s year had been two hundred and twenty-five days. Now — said Nebogipfel — the great Sphere turned in just seven days and thirteen hours!

  “And so the rotation — ,” Nebogipfel began.

  “ — induces centrifugal effects, simulating the earth’s gravity at the equator. Yes,” I said. “I see it.”

  The spin of the Sphere kept us all plastered to this Floor. But away from the equator, the turning circle of a point on the Sphere about the rotation axis was less, and so the effective gravity was reduced: gravity dwindled to zero, in fact, at the Sphere’s rotation poles. And in those extraordinary, broad continents of lower gravity, such remarkable animals as those two loping Morlocks lived, and had adapted to their conditions.

  I thumped my forehead with the back of my hand.

  “Sometimes I think I am the greatest fool who ever lived!” I exclaimed to the bemused Nebogipfel. For I had never thought to inquire about the source of my “weight,” here on the Sphere. What sort of scientist was it who failed to question — even to observe properly — the “gravity” which, in the absence of anything so convenient as a planet, glued him to the surface of this Sphere? I wondered how many other marvels I was passing by, simply from the fact that it did not occur to me to ask about them — and yet to Nebogipfel such features were merely a part of the world, of no more novelty than a sunset, or a butterfly’s wing.

  I teased out of Nebogipfel details of how the Morlocks lived. It was difficult, for I scarcely knew how to begin even to phrase my questions. That may seem odd to state — but how was I to ask, for instance, about the machinery which underpinned this transforming Floor? It was doubtful if my language contained the concepts required even to frame the query, just as a Neandertaler would lack the linguistic tools to inquire about the workings of a clock. And as to the social and other arrangements which, invisibly, governed the lives of the millions of Morlocks in this immense chamber, I remained as ignorant as might a tribesman arrived in London fresh from Central Africa would have been of social movements, of telephone and telegraph wires, of the Parcels Delivery Company, and the like. Even their arrangements for sewage remained a mystery to me!

  I asked Nebogipfel how the Morlocks governed themselves.

  He explained to me — in a somewhat patronizing manner, I thought — that the Sphere was a large enough place for several “nations” of Morlocks. These “nations” were distinguished mainly by the mode of government they chose. Almost all had some form of democratic process in place. In some areas a representative parliament was selected by a Universal Suffrage, much along the lines of our own Westminster Parliament. Elsewhere, suffrage was restricted to an elite subgroup, composed of those considered especially capable, by temperament and training, of governance: I think the nearest models in our philosophy are the classical republics, or perhaps the ideal form of Republic imagined by Plato; and I admit that this approach appealed to my own instincts.

  But in most areas, the machinery of the Sphere had made possible a form of true Universal Suffrage, in which the inhabitants were kept abreast of current debates by means of the blue windows in their partitions, and then instantly registered their preferences on each issue by similar means. Thus, governance proceeded on a piecemeal basis, with every major decision subject to the collective whim of the populace.

  I felt distrustful of such a system. “But surely there are some in the population who cannot be empowered with such authority! What about the insane, or the feeble-minded?”

  He considered me with a certain stiffness. “We have no such weaknesses.”

  I felt like challenging this Utopian — even here, in the heart of his realized Utopia! “And how do you ensure that?”

  He did not answer me immediately. Instead he went on, “Each member of our adult population is rational, and able to make decisions on behalf of others — and is trusted to do so. In such circumstances, the purest form of democracy is not only possible, it is advisable — for many minds combine to produce decisions superior to those of one.”

  I snorted. “Then what of all these other Parliaments and Senates you have described?”

  “Not everyone agrees that the arrangements in this part of the Sphere are ideal,” he said. “Is that not the essence of freedom? Not all of us are sufficiently interested in the mechanics of governance to wish to participate; and for some, the entrusting of power to another through representation — or even without any representation at all — is preferable. That is a valid choice.”

  “Fine. But what happens when such choices conflict?”

  “We have room,” he said — heavily. “You must not forget that fact; you are still dominated by planet-bound expectations. Any dissenter is free to depart, and to establish a rival system elsewhere…”

  These “nations” of the Morlocks were fluid things, with individuals joining and leaving as their preferences evolved. There was no fixed territory or possessions, nor even any fixed boundaries, as far as I could make out; the “nations” were mere groupings of convenience, clusterings across the Sphere.

  There was no war among the Morlocks.

  It took me some time to believe this, but at last I was convinced. There were no causes for war. Thanks to the mechanisms of the Floor there was no shortage of provision, so no “nation” could argue for goals of economic acquisition. The Sphere was so huge that the empty land available was almost unlimited, so that territorial conflicts were meaningless. And — most crucially — the Morlocks’ heads were free of the canker of religion, which has caused so much conflict through the centuries.

  “You have no God, then,” I said to Nebogipfel, with something of a thrill: though I have some religious tendencies myself, I imagined shocking the clerics of my own day with an account of this conversation!

  “We have no need of a God,” Nebogipfel retorted.

  The Morlocks regarded a religious set of mind — as opposed to a rational state — as a hereditable trait, with no more intrinsic meaning than blue eyes or brown hair.

  The more Nebogipfel outlined this notion, the more sense it made to me.

  What notion of God has survived through all of Humanity’s mental evolution? Why, precisely the form it might suit man’s vanity to conjure up: a God with immense powers, and yet still absorbed in the petty affairs of man. Who could worship a chilling God, even if omnipotent, if He took no interest whatsoever in the flea-bite struggles of humans?

  One might imagine that, in any conflict between rational humans and religious humans, t
he rational ought to win. After all, it is rationality that invented gunpowder! And yet — at least up to our nineteenth century — the religious tendency has generally won out, and natural selection operated, leaving us with a population of religiously-inclined sheep — it has sometimes seemed to me — capable of being deluded by any smooth-tongued preacher.

  The paradox is explained because religion provides a goal for men to fight for. The religious man will soak some bit of “sacred” land with his blood, sacrificing far more than the land’s intrinsic economic or other value.

  “But we have moved beyond this paradox,” Nebogipfel said to me. “We have mastered our inheritance: we are no longer governed by the dictates of the past, either as regards our bodies or our minds…”

  But I did not follow up this intriguing notion — the obvious question to ask was, “In the absence of a God, then, what is the purpose of all of your lives?” — for I was entranced by the idea of how Mr. Darwin, with all his modern critics in the Churches, would have loved to have witnessed this ultimate triumph of his ideas over the Religionists!

  In fact — as it turned out my understanding of the true purpose of the Morlocks’ civilization would not come until much later.

  I was impressed, though, with all I saw of this artificial world of the Morlocks — I am not sure if my respectful awe has been reflected in my account here. This brand of Morlock had indeed mastered their inherited weaknesses; they had put aside the legacy of the brute — the legacy bequeathed by us — and had thereby achieved a stability and capability almost unimaginable to a man of 1891: to a man like me, who had grown up in a world torn apart daily by war, greed and incompetence.

  And this mastery of their own nature was all the more striking for its contrast with those other Morlocks — Weena’s Morlocks — who had, quite obviously, fallen foul of the brute within, despite their mechanical and other aptitudes.

  [14]

  Constructions and Divergences

  I discussed the construction of the Sphere with Nebogipfel. “I imagine great engineering schemes which broke up the giant planets — Jupiter and Saturn — and—”

  “No,” Nebogipfel said. “There was no such scheme; the primal planets — from the earth outward — still orbit the sun’s heart. There would not have been sufficient material in all the planets combined even to begin the construction of such an entity as this Sphere.”

  “Then how—?”

  Nebogipfel described how the sun had been encircled by a great fleet of space-faring craft, which bore immense magnets of a design — involving electrical circuits whose resistance was somehow reduced to zero — I could not fathom. The craft circled the sun with increasing speed, and a belt of magnetism tightened around the sun’s million-mile midriff. And — as if that great star were no more than a soft fruit, held in a crushing fist great founts of the sun’s material, which is itself magnetized, were forced away from the equator to gush from the star’s poles.

  More fleets of space-craft then manipulated this huge cloud of lifted material, forming it at last into an enclosing shell; and the shell was then compressed, using shaped magnetic fields once more, and transmuted into the solid structures I saw around me.

  The enclosed sun still shone, for even the immense detached masses required to construct this great artifact were but an invisible fraction of the sun’s total bulk; and within the Sphere, sunlight shone perpetually over giant continents, each of which could have swallowed millions of splayed-out earths.

  Nebogipfel said, “A planet like the earth can intercept only an invisible fraction of the sun’s output, with the rest disappearing, wasted, into the sink of space. Now, all of the sun’s energy is captured by the enclosing Sphere. And that is the central justification for constructing the Sphere: we have harnessed a star…”

  In a million years, Nebogipfel told me, the Sphere would capture enough additional solar material to permit its thickening by one-twenty-fifth of an inch — an invisibly small layer, but covering a stupendous area! The solar material, transformed, was used to further the construction of the Sphere. Meanwhile, some solar energy was harnessed to sustain the Interior of the Sphere and to power the Morlocks’ various projects.

  With some excitement, I described what I had witnessed during my journey through futurity: the brightening of the sun, and that jetting at the poles — and then how the sun had disappeared into blackness, as the Sphere was thrown around it.

  Nebogipfel regarded me, I fancied with some envy. “So,” he said, “you did indeed watch the construction of the Sphere. It took ten thousand years…”

  “But to me on my machine, no more than heartbeats passed.”

  “You have told me that this is your second voyage into the future. And that during your first, you saw differences.”

  “Yes.” Now I confronted that perplexing mystery once more. “Differences in the unfolding of History… Nebogipfel, when I first journeyed to the future, your Sphere was never built.”

  I summarized to Nebogipfel how I had formerly traveled far beyond this year of A.D. 657,208. During that first voyage, I had watched the colonization of the land by a tide of rich green, as winter was abolished from the earth and the sun grew unaccountably brighter. But — unlike my second trip — I saw no signs of the regulation of the earth’s axial tilt, nor did I witness anything of the slowing of its rotation. And, most dramatic, without the construction of the sun-shielding Sphere; the earth had remained fair, and had not been banished into the Morlocks’ stygian darkness.

  “And so,” I told Nebogipfel, “I arrived in the year A.D. 802,701 — a hundred and fifty thousand years into your future — yet I cannot believe, if I had traveled on so far this time, that I should find the same world again!”

  I summarized to Nebogipfel what I had seen of Weena’s world, with its Eloi and degraded Morlocks. Nebogipfel thought this over. “There has been no such state of affairs in the evolution of Humanity, in all of recorded History — my History,” he said. “And since the Sphere, once constructed, is self-sustaining, it is difficult to imagine that such a descent into barbarism is possible in our future.”

  “So there you have it,” I agreed. “I have journeyed through two, quite exclusive, versions of History. Can History be like unfired clay, able to be remade?”

  “Perhaps it can,” Nebogipfel murmured. “When you returned to your own era — to 1891 — did you bring any evidence of your travels?”

  “Not much,” I admitted. “But I did bring back some flowers, pretty white things like mallows, which Weena — which an Eloi had placed in my pocket. My friends examined them. The flowers were of an order they couldn’t recognize, and I remember how they remarked on the gynoecium…”

  “Friends?” Nebogipfel said sharply. “You left an account of your journey, before embarking once more?”

  “Nothing written. But I did give some friends a full-ish account of the affair, over dinner.” I smiled. “And if I know one of that circle, the whole thing was no doubt written up in the end in some popularized and sensational form — perhaps presented as fiction…”

  Nebogipfel approached me. “Then there,” he said to me, his quiet voice queerly dramatic, “there is your explanation.”

  “Explanation?”

  “For the Divergence of Histories.”

  I faced him, horrified by a dawning comprehension. “You mean that with my account — my prophecy — I changed History?”

  “Yes. Armed with that warning, Humanity managed to avoid the degradation and conflict that resulted in the primitive, cruel world of Eloi and Morlock. Instead, we continued to grow; instead, we have harnessed the sun.”

  I felt quite unable to face the consequences of this hypothesis — although its truth and clarity struck me immediately. I shouted, “But some things have stayed the same. Still you Morlocks skulk in the dark!”

  “We are not Morlocks,” Nebogipfel said softly. “Not as you remember them. And as for the dark — what need have we of a flood of ligh
t? We choose the dark. Our eyes are fine instruments, capable of revealing much beauty. Without the brutal glare of the sun, the full subtlety of the sky can be discerned…”

  I could find no distraction in goading Nebogipfel, and I had to face the truth. I stared down at my hands — great battered things, scarred with decades of labor. My sole aim, to which I had devoted the efforts of these hands, had been to explore time! — to determine how things would come out on the cosmological scale, beyond my own few mayfly decades of life. But, it seemed, I had succeeded in far more.

  My invention was much more powerful than a mere time-traveling machine: it was a History Machine, a destroyer of worlds!

  I was a murderer of the future: I had taken on, I realized, more powers than God himself (if Aquinas is to be believed). By my twisting-up of the workings of History, I had wiped over billions of unborn lives — lives that would now never come to be:

  I could hardly bear to live with the knowledge of this presumption. I have always been distrustful of personal power — for I have met not one man wise enough to be entrusted with it — but now, I had taken to myself more power than any man who had ever lived!

  If I should ever recover my Time Machine — I promised myself then — I would return into the past, to make one final, conclusive adjustment to History, and abolish my own invention of the infernal device.

  And I realized now that I could never retrieve Weena. For, not only had I caused her death — now, it turned out, I had nullified her very existence!

  Through all this turmoil of the emotions, the pain of that little loss sounded sweet and clear, like the note of an oboe in the midst of the clamor of some great orchestra.

  [15]

  Life and Death Among the Morlocks

  One day, Nebogipfel led me to what was, perhaps, the most disquieting thing I saw in all my time in that city-chamber.