The Time Ships

I reached to pick up the flask. The greenish glow came from a powder within: it was Plattnerite.

My name was called.

I turned, startled. The voice had been soft, almost masked by the hissing of the rain on the grass.

There was a figure standing not ten feet from me: short, almost childlike, but with scalp and back coated by long, lank hair that had been plastered flat by the rain against pale flesh. Huge eyes, gray-red, were fixed on me.

“Nebogipfel—?”

And then some circuit closed in my bewildered brain.

I turned, and inspected that building’s blocky outline once more. There was the iron balcony, over there the dining-room, the kitchen with a small window ajar, and there was the blocky form of the laboratory…

It was my home; my machine had deposited me on the sloping lawn at the rear, between the house and the Thames. I had returned — after all this! — to Richmond.

[8]

A Circle is Closed

Once more — just as we had done before, so many cycles of History ago — Nebogipfel and I walked along the Petersham Road to my house. The rain hissed on the cobbles. It was almost completely dark — in fact, the only light came from the jar of Plattnerite, which glowed like a faint electric bulb, casting a murky glow over Nebogipfel’s face.

I brushed my fingers over the familiar, delicate metalwork of the rail before the area. Here was a sight I had thought never to see again: this mock-elegant facade, the pillars of the porch, the darkened rectangles of my windows.

“You have both your eyes back,” I observed to Nebogipfel in a whisper.

He glanced down at his renewed body, spreading his palms so that the pale flesh gleamed in the light of the Plattnerite. “I have no need for prosthesis,” he said. “Not any more. Now that I have been rebuilt — as you have.”

I rested my hands against my chest. The shirt fabric was coarse, rough under my palm, and my own breast-bone was hard beneath. It all felt solid enough. And I still felt like me — I mean, I had a continuity of consciousness, a single, shining path of memory, which led back through all that tangling-up of Histories, back to the simpler days when I was a boy. But I could not be the same man — for I had been disassembled in that Optimal History, and remade here. I wondered how much of that shining universe remained in me. “Nebogipfel, do you remember much of it all — after we broke through that Boundary at the start of time — the glowing sky, and so forth?”

“All of it.” His eyes were black. “You do not?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “It all seems a sort of a dream, now — especially here, in this cold English rain.”

“But the Optimal History is the reality,” he whispered. “All of this” — he waved his hands about at i

I hoisted the jar of Plattnerite in my hand. It was a commonplace medicine bottle, plugged with rubber; needless to say, I had no idea of where it had come from, nor how it had got in amongst the struts of my machine. “Well, this is real enough,” I said. “It’s really quite a pretty solution, isn’t it? Like the closing of a circle.” I stepped towards the door. “I think you’d better get back — out of sight — before I ring.”

He stepped backwards, into the shadow of the porch, and soon he was quite invisible.

I tugged at the bell-pull.

From within the house, I heard the opening of a door, a soft shout — “I’ll go!” — and then a heavy, impatient tread on the stair.

A key rattled in the lock, and the door creaked open.

A candle, sputtering in a brass holder, was thrust through the doorway at me; the face of a young man, broad and round, peered out, his eyes puffed up with sleep. He was twenty-three or twenty-four, and he wore a battered, thread-bare gown, thrown over a crumpled night-shirt; his hair, a mousy brown, stuck out from the sides of his odd, broad head. “Yes?” he snapped. “It’s after three in the morning, you know…”

I’d not been sure what I had intended to say, but now that the moment was here, words fled from me altogether. Once again I suffered that queer, uncomfortable shock of recognition. I don’t think a man of my century could ever have grown accustomed to meeting himself, no matter how many times he’d practiced it and now that whole raft of feeling was overlaid with an extra sort of poignancy. For this was no longer just a younger version of me: it was also a direct ancestor of Moses. It was like coming face to face with a younger brother I had thought lost.

He studied my face again, suspicious now. “What the devil do you want? I make a point of having no truck with hawkers, you know — even if this was the appropriate time of day.”

“No,” I said gently. “No, I know you don’t.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” He began to push closed the door, but he had seen something in my face — I could see the look some ghost of recognition. “I think you’d better tell me what you want.”

Clumsily, I produced the medicine jar of Plattnerite from behind my back. “I have this for you.”

His eyebrows went up at the bottle’s odd green glow. “What is it?”

“It’s—” How could I explain? “It’s a sort of sample. For you.”

“A sample of what?”

“I don’t know,” I lied. “I’d like you to find out.”

He looked curious, but still hesitant; and now a certain stubbor

I started to become irritated at these dull questions. “Confound it, man — do you not have any initiative? Run some tests…”

“I’m not sure I like your tone,” he said stuffily. “What sort of tests?”

“Oh!” I ran a hand through my soaked hair; such pomposity did not sit well on such a young man, I thought. “It’s a new mineral — you can see that much!”

He frowned, his suspicion redoubled.

I bent and set the jar down on the step. “I’ll leave it here. You can look at it when you’re ready — and I know you’ll be ready — I don’t want to waste your time.” I turned and began to make my way down the path, my footsteps on the gravel loud through the rainfall.

When I looked back I saw that he had picked up the jar, and its green glow softened the shadows of the candle on his face. He called: “But your name—”

I had an impulse. “It is Plattner,” I said.

“Plattner? Do I know you?”

“Plattner,” I repeated in some desperation, and I sought a more detailed lie in the dim recesses of my brain. “Gottfried Plattner…”

It was as if I had heard someone else say it — but as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew they had had a sort of inevitability.

It was done; the circle was closed!

He continued to call, but I walked resolutely, away from the gate and down the Hill.

Nebogipfel was waiting for me at the rear of the house, close to the Time Machine. “It’s done,” I told him. A first touch of dawn had filtered into the overcast sky, and I could see the Morlock as a grainy sort of silhouette: he had his hands clasped behind him, and his hair was plastered flat against his back. His eyes were huge, blood-red pools.

“You’re a little the worse for wear,” I said kindly. “This rain—”

“It hardly matters.”

“What will you do now?”

“What will you do?”

For answer, I bent over and hauled at the Time Machine. It twisted up, clattering like an old bed, and settled to the lawn with a heavy thump. I ran a hand along the battered frame of the machine; moss and bits of grass clung to the quartz rods and the saddle, and one rail was bent, quite out of shape.

“You can go home, you know,” he said. “To 1891. We have clearly been brought back, by the Watchers, to your original History — to the Primal version of things. You need only travel forward through a few years.”

I considered that prospect. In some ways it would have been comfortable to return to that cozy Age, and to my shell of belongings, companions and achievements. And I should have enjoyed the company of some of those old chums of mine again — Filby and the rest. But…