The Time Ships. Stephen Baxter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Well, he would have my blessing!

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

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

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

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

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

      Now I walked forward to the Time Machine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

      It was Plattnerite, suffused into quartz rods, which fuelled the Time Machine, and made its exploits СКАЧАТЬ