Christopher Priest: The Space Machine

I flexed my toes inside the boots I had borrowed from Sir William’s dressing-room, but there seemed to be nothing wrong.

“Come, Turnbull, we must try this further. Miss Fitzgibbon, would you kindly ascend to the next floor? We shall try to follow you in the Machine. Perhaps if you would wait inside the bedroom I am using…?”

Amelia nodded, then left the laboratory. In a moment we heard her running up the stairs.:

“Step aboard, Mr Turnbull. Now we shall see what this Machine can do!”

Almost before I had clambered on to the cushions beside Mr Wells, he had pushed one of the levers and we were moving forward. Around us, silence had fallen abruptly, and the distant clamouring of the weed-banks was absent.

“Let us see if we can fly,” said Mr Wells. His voice sounded flat and deep against the attenuated quiet. He tugged a second lever and at once we lifted smartly towards the ceiling. I raised my hands to ward off the blow… but as we reached the wood and jagged glass of the laboratory roof we passed right through! For a moment I had the queer experience of finding just my head out in the open, but then the bulk of the Space Machine had thrust me through, and it was as if we were hovering in the air above the conservatory-like building. Mr Wells turned one of the horizontally mounted levers, and we moved at quite prodigious speed through the brick wall of the upper storey of the main house. We found ourselves hovering above a landing. Chuckling to himself, Mr Wells guided the Machine towards his guest-room, and plunged us headlong through the closed door.

Amelia was waiting within, standing by the window.

“Here we are!” I called as soon as I saw her. “It flies too!”

Amelia showed no sign of awareness.

“She cannot bear us,” Mr Wells reminded me. “Now… I must see if I can settle us on the floor.”

We were hovering some eighteen inches above the carpet, and Mr Wells made fine adjustments to his controls. Mean while Amelia had left the window and was looking curiously around, evidently waiting for us to materialize. I amused myself first by blowing a kiss to her, then by pulling a face, but she responded to neither.

Suddenly, Mr Wells released his levers, and we dropped with a bump to the floor. Amelia started in surprise.

“There you are!” she said. “I wondered how you would appear.”

“Allow us to take, you downstairs,’ said Mr Wells, gallantly. “Climb aboard, my dear, and let us make a tour of the house.”

So, for the next half-hour, we experimented with the Space Machine, and Mr Wells grew accustomed to making it manoeuvre exactly as he wished. Soon he could make it turn, soar, halt, as if he had been at its controls all his life. At first, Amelia and I clung nervously to the bedstead, for it seemed to turn with reckless velocity, but gradually we too saw that for all its makeshift appearance, the Space Machine was every bit as scientific as its original.

We left the house just once, and toured the garden. Here Mr Wells tried to increase our forward speed, but to our disappointment we found that for all its other qualities, the Space Machine could travel no faster than the approximate speed of a running man.

“It is the shortage of crystals,” said Mr Wells, as we soared through the upper branches of a walnut tree. “If we had more of those, there would be no limit to our velocity.”

“Never mind,” said Amelia. “We have no use for great speed. Invisibility is our prime advantage.”

I was staring out past the house to the overgrown redness of the valley. It was the constant reminder of the urgency of our efforts.

“Mr Wells,” I said quietly. “We have our Space Machine. Now is the time to put it to use.”

When we had landed the Space Machine, and I had loaded several of the hand-grenades on to it, Mr Wells was worried about the time we had left to us.

“The sun will be setting in two hours,” he said. “I should not care to drive the Machine in darkness.”

“But, sir, we can come to no harm in the attenuation.”

“I know, but we must at some time return to the house and leave the attenuated dimension. When we do that, we must be absolutely certain there are no Martians around. How terrible it would be if we returned to the house in the night, and discovered that the Martians were waiting for us!”

“We have been here for more than two weeks,” I said, “and no Martian has so much as glanced our way.”

Mr Wells had to agree with this, but he said: “I think we must not lose sight of the seriousness of our task, Turnbull. Because we have been confined so long in Richmond, we have no knowledge of the extent of the Martians’ success. Certainly they have subdued all the land we can see from here; in all probability they are now the lords of the entire country. For all we know, their domain might be worldwide. If we are, as we suspect, in command of the one weapon they cannot resist, we cannot afford to lose that advantage by taking unnecessary risks. We have a tremendous responsibility thrust upon us.”

“Mr Wells is right, Edward,” said Amelia. “Our revenge on the Martians is late, but it is all we have.”

“Very well,” I said. “’But we must try at least one sortie today. We do not yet know if our scheme will work.”

So at last we mounted the Space Machine, and sat with suppressed excitement as Mr Wells guided us away from the house, above the obscene red tangle of weeds, and out towards the heart, of the Thames Valley.

As soon as we were under way, I saw some of’ the wisdom of the others’ words. Our search for Martian targets was to be unguided, for we had no idea where the evil brutes currently were. We could search all day for just one, and in the boundless scale of the Martians’ intrusion we might never find our goal.

We flew for about half an hour, circling over the river, looking this way and that for some sign of the invaders, but without success.

At last Amelia suggested a plan which presented logic and simplicity. We knew, she said, where the projectiles had fallen, and further, we knew that the Martians used the pits as their headquarters. Surely, if we were seeking the monsters, the pits would be the most sensible places to look first.

Mr Wells agreed with this, and we turned directly for the nearest of the pits. This was the one in Bushy Park, where the fourth projectile had fallen. Suddenly, as I realized we were at last on the right track, I felt my heart pounding with excitement.

The valley was a dreadful sight: the red weed was growing rampantly over almost every physical protuberance, houses included. The landscape seemed from this height to be like a huge undulating field of red grass bent double by heavy rain. In places, the weeds had actually altered the course of the river, and wherever there was low-lying ground stagnant lakes had formed.

The pit had been made in the north-eastern corner of Bushy Park, and was difficult to distinguish by virtue of the fact that it, no less than anywhere else, was heavily overgrown with weed. At last we noticed the cavernous mouth of the projectile itself, and Mr Wells brought the Space Machine down to hover a few feet from the entrance. All was dark within, and there was no sign of either the Martians or their machines.

We were about to move away, when Amelia suddenly pointed into the heart of the projectile.

“Edward, look … it is one of the people!”

Her move had, startled me, but I looked in the direction she was indicating. Sure enough, lying a few feet inside the hold was a human figure. I thought for a moment that this must be one of the hapless victims snatched by the Martians … but then I saw that the body was that of a very tall man, and that he was wearing a black uniform. His skin was a mottled red, and his face, which was turned towards us, was ugly and distorted.