Stephen Baxter - The Time Ships

VIP免费

2024-12-05 0 0 1.43MB 194 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships

v1.0 (02-feb-01) Scanning, layout and quick proofreading by 4i Publications.

To my wife Sandra,

and the memory of H. G.

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 unlabeled 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 Traveler'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

January 1995

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 Traveler, 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 pajamas, something of the

uncertainty which had, in the end, assailed rte 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 to 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 nearuniversal skepticism. 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 endeavors-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 childwoman,

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 submen, 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 vigor-

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, unraveling 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 of, and

yet I was determined not to be quite so impetuous as the first time, when I had traveled 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 $02,701, I'd seen no ev-

idence in the decayed Upper-world that T 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 hearttook 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

center 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 fore head, 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'-but he always looked

sickly: I know he suffered hemorrhages, from time to time, from a soccer-game kick ing 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 traveling 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 labors 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 neighbors. 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 labeled

"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, graygrizzled head,

and dressed in peculiar jungle colors. 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 fueled 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 a sudden thought, I went to the fireplace of the laboratory and picked up the poker

which stood there. I hefted its substantial mass in my hand-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 otherworldliness 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 Traveling

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 Machinelike 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 atop, 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 traveled 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 artifact of my unseemly passage through the stately progress of time.

How wrong I was-as so often in my hasty hypothesismaking!

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 traveling 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 modem 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 traveled 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 specters would be too lightstarved 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 colors of irreverent, destructive

life, and-in a twinkling, it seemed to me-the arch crumbled from its center, 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 traveling. 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 mold 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 the opacity, in the eyes of a Time Traveler,

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 favor 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 sunband, 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, pretty lives; and already, I knew, proto-Morlocks must have been imprisoned beneath

the earth, and must even now be tunneling 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 some thing 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 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 fret 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 as much alacrity as before.

The pearl-gray 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-apedescended 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-whichstruggled 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 center

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 traveling. 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 traveling 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 faro 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 labeled 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, grayred eyes.

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

It was a Morlock!

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

StephenBaxter:TheTimeShipsv1.0(02-feb-01)Scanning,layoutandquickproofreadingby4iPublications.TomywifeSandra,andthememoryofH.G.Editor'sNoteTheattachedaccountwasgiventomebytheownerofasmallsecond-handbookshop,situatedjustofftheCharingCrossRoadinLondon.Hetoldmeithadturnedupasamanuscriptinanunlabeledbox,...

展开>> 收起<<

Stephen Baxter - The Time Ships.pdf

共194页,预览10页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Stephen Baxter - The Time Ships

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: