Christopher Priest - The Space Machine

I checked the hatch once more, making certain that it was quite secure, then took Amelia in my arms and kissed her lightly.

She said: “The craft is awfully big, Edward. Are you sure you know what to do?”

“Leave it to me.”

For once my confidence was not assumed. Once before I had made a reckless act to avert an evil destiny, and now again I saw destiny as being in my own hands. So much depended on my skills and actions, and the responsibility of my homeworld’s future lay on my shoulders. It could not be that I should fail!

I led Amelia up the sloping floor of the cabin, and showed her the pressure tubes that would support and protect us during the firing of the cannon. I judged it best that we should enter them at once, for we had no way of telling when our friends outside would fire the craft. In the confused situation, events were unpredictable.

Amelia stepped into her own tube, and I watched as the eerie substance folded itself about her.

“Can you breathe?” I said to her.

“Yes.” Her voice was muffled, but quite audible. “How do I climb out of this? I feel I am imprisoned.”

“You simply step forward,” I said. “it willnot resist unless we are under acceleration.”

Inside her transparent tube Amelia smiled to show she understood, and so I moved back to my own tube. Here I squeezed past the controls which were placed within easy reach, then felt the soft fabric closing in on me. When my body was contained I allowed myself to relax, and waited for the launch to begin.

A long time passed. There was nothing to do but stare across the few feet that separated us, and watch Amelia and smile to her. We could hear each other if we spoke, but the effort was considerable.

The first hint of vibration, when it came, was so minute as to be attributable to the imagination, but it was followed a few moments later by another. Then there came a sudden jolt, and I felt the folds of fabric tightening about my body.

“We are moving, Amelia!” I shouted, but needlessly, for there was no mistaking what was happening.

After the first concussion there followed several more, of increasing severity, but after a while the motion became smooth and the acceleration steady. The fabric tube was clutching me like a giant hand, but even so I could feel the pressure of our speed against me, far greater than I had experienced on the smaller craft. Furthermore, the period of acceleration was much longer, presumably because of the immense length of the barrel. There was now a noise, the like of which was quite unprecedented: a great rushing and roaring, as the enormous craft shot through its tube of ice.

Just as the acceleration was reaching the point where I felt I could no longer stand it,even inside the protective grasp of the tube, I saw that Amelia’s eyes had closed and that inside her tube she appeared to have fallen unconscious. I shouted out to her, but in the din of our firing there was no hope that she would hear me. The pressure and noise were each now intolerable, and I felt a lightness in my brain and a darkness occluding my sight. As my vision failed, and the roaring became a dull muttering in the background, the pressure abruptly ceased.

The folds of the fabric loosened, and I stumbled forward out of the tube. Amelia, similarly released, fell unconscious to the metal floor. I leant over her, slapping her cheeks gently… and it was not for several moments that I realized that at last we had been flung headlong into the ether of space.

So began the voyage which, in optimism, I had expected to take but a day or two, but which in actuality took nearer sixty days, as near as we could tell. They were two long months; for short periods it was an exciting experience, at other times it became terrifying, but for most of the sixty days it was a journey of the most maddening dullness.

I will not, then, delay this narrative with an account of our daily lives, but indicate those events which most exercised us at the time.

Thinking back over the experience, I recall the flight with mixed feelings. It was not an enjoyable journey in any sense of the word, but it was not without its better sides.

One of these was that Amelia and I were alone together in an environment which provided privacy, intimacy and a certain security, even if it was not the most usual of situations. It is not germane to this narrative to describe what occurred between us—even in these modern times, I feel I should not breach the trusts which we then established—but it would be true to say that I came to know her, and she to know me, in ways and to depths I had never before suspected were possible.

Moreover, the length of the journey itself had a purgatory effect on our outlooks. We had indeed become tainted by Mars, and even I, less involved than Amelia, had felt a conflict of loyalties as we blasted away from the revolution-torn city. But, surrounded as we were by a Martian artifact, and kept alive by Martian food and Martian air, as the days passed and Earth grew nearer, the conflicts faded and we became of single purpose once more. The invasion the monsters schemed was all too real; if we could not help avert such an invasion then we could never again call ourselves human.

But already my synopsis of this incredible journey through space is once more taking my narrative ahead of its natural order.

I have mentioned that certain incidents during the voyage were exciting or terrifying, and the first of these occurred shortly after we were released from the pressure-tubes, and found ourselves in command of a space ironclad.

When I had revived Amelia from her faint, and ensured that neither she nor I had suffered any ill-effects during the rigours of the blast, I went first to the controls to see where we were headed. Such was the ferocity of our firing that I was sure we were about to hurtle into Earth at any moment!

I turned the knob that illuminated the main panel—as my guides had shown me—but to my disappointment nothing could be seen except for a few faint points of light. These, I later realized, were stars. After experimenting for several minutes, and achieving no more than marginally increasing the brilliance of the picture, I turned my attention to one of the smaller panels. This displayed the view behind the craft.

Here the picture was more satisfactory, for it showed a view of the world we had just left. So close to Mars were we still that it filled the entire panel: a chiaroscuro of light and shadow, mottled yellows and reds and browns. When my eyes adjusted to the scale of what I was seeing I found I could pick out certain features of the landscape, the most prominent of which was the immense volcano, standing out from the deserts like a malignant carbuncle. Bulging around its summit was a gigantic white cloud; at first I took this to be the volcano’s own discharge, but later I thought that this must be the cloud of water-vapour that had thrust us on our way.

The city we had left was invisible—it lay presumably beneath the spreading white cloud—and there were few features I could definitely identify. The canals were clearly visible, or at least they became visible by virtue of the banks of weed that proliferated alongside them.

I stared at the view for some time, realizing that for all the force of our departure we had neither travelled very far nor were now moving with much velocity. Indeed, the only apparent movement was the image of the land itself, which was rotating slowly in the panel.

While I was watching this, Amelia called out to me:

“Edward, shall we have some food?”

I turned away from the panel, and said: “Yes, I’m hun…”