Stephen Baxter - The Time Ships

The Morlock pointed out my folly in this prejudice, of course.

“The sub-atomic transmutation of which the Constructor is capable is a far more refined process than that mess of melting, mixing and hammering you describe — a process which sounds as if it had barely evolved since your departure from the caves.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “but even so… It’s the invisibility of all this!” I picked up a wrench; like all the tools we had specified, this had been disgorged by the Constructor within moments of Nebogipfel’s request for it, and it was a smooth, seamless thing, without joints, screws or mold marks. “When I pick up this thing, I half-expect it to feel warm, or to be dripping with stomach-acid, or to be covered with those dreadful iron cilia…”

Nebogipfel shook his head, his gesture a conscious mockery. “You are so intolerant of ways of doing things other than your own!”

Despite my reservations, I was forced to allow to the Constructor providing us with more equipment and supplies. I reasoned that the journey should take thirty hours, if we retreated all the way to the Palaeocene — but no more than thirty minutes if we performed the limited hop to the future of the Time Ships. So, determined not to be unprepared this time, I stocked up our new car with enough food and water, to our varying requirements, to last us for some days; and I asked for thick, warm clothing to be provided for us both. Still, I was uneasy as I lifted the heavy coat the Constructor had made for me over the battered remains of my jungle-twill shirt; the coat was an affair of silvery, unidentifiable cloth, quite heavily quilted.

“It just doesn’t seem natural,” I protested to Nebogipfel, “to wear something which has been vomited up in such a fashion!”

“Your reservations are becoming tedious,” the Morlock replied. “It is clear enough to me that you have a morbid fear of the body and its functions. This is evidenced not only by that irrational response to the Constructor’s manufacturing capabilities, but also by your earlier reaction to Morlocks—”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I retorted, startled.

“You have repeatedly described to me your encounters with those — cousins — of mine, using terms associated with the body: fecal analogies, fingers like worms, and so on.”

“So you’re saying — wait a minute — you’re saying that, in fearing the Morlock, and the products of the Constructors, I fear my own biology?”

Without warning, he flashed his fingers in my face; the pallor of the naked flesh of his palm, the worm-like quality of his fingers — all of it was horrifying to me, of course, as it always was! — and I could not help but flinch away.

The Morlock evidently felt he had made his point; and I remembered, too, my earlier connection between my dread of the Morlocks’ dark subterranean bases and my childhood fear of the ventilation shafts set in the grounds of my parents’ home.

Needless to say I felt distinctly uncomfortable at this brusque diagnosis of Nebogipfel’s: at the thought that my reactions to things were governed, not by the force of my intellect as I might have supposed, but by such odd, hidden facets of my nature! “I think,” I concluded with all the dignity I could muster, “that some things are best left unsaid!” — and I stopped the conversation.

The finished Time-Car was quite a crude design: just a box of metal, open at the top, unpainted and roughly finished. But the controls were by some distance advanced over the limited mechanisms Nebogipfel had been able to manufacture with the materials available in the Palaeocene — they even included simple chronometric dials, albeit hand-lettered — and we would have about as much freedom of movement in time as I had been afforded by my own first machine.

As I worked, and the day approached on which we had set ourselves to depart, my fear and uncertainty mounted. I knew that I could never return home — but if I went on from here, on with Nebogipfel into future and past, I might enter such strangeness that I might not survive, either in mind or body. I might, I knew, be approaching the end of my life; and a soft, human terror settled over me.

Finally it was done. Nebogipfel set himself on his saddle. He was done up in a heavy, quilted overall of the Constructor’s silvery cloth; and new goggles were fixed over his small face. He looked a little like a small child bundled up against the winter at least until one made out the hair cascading from his face, and the luminous quality of the eye behind the blue glasses he wore.

I sat down beside him, and made a last check over the contents of our car.

Now — as we sat there, in a startling second — the walls of our apartment melted, silently, to glass! All around us, visible now through the translucent walls of our room, the bleak plains of White Earth stretched off to the distance, gilded red by an advanced sunset. The Constructor’s cilia — again to Nebogipfel’s specification — had reworked the material of the walls of the chamber within which the Time-Car sat. We should continue to need some protection from the savage climate of White Earth; but we wished to have a view of the world as we progressed.

Although the temperature of the air was unchanged, I immediately felt much colder; I shivered, and pulled my coat closer around me.

“I think we are set,” Nebogipfel said.

“Set,” I agreed “save for one thing — our decision! Do we travel to the future of the completed Ships, or—?”

“I think the decision is yours,” he said. But he had — I like to think — some sympathy in his alien expression.

Still that soft fear quivered inside me, for, save for those first few desperate hours after I lost Moses, I have never been a man to welcome the prospect of death! — and yet I knew that my choice now might end my life. But still -

“I really don’t think I have much choice,” I told Nebogipfel. “We cannot stay here.”

“No,” he said. “We are exiles, you and I,” he said. “I think there is nothing for us to do but continue — on to the End.”

“Yes,” I said. “To the End of Time itself, it seems… Well! So be it, Nebogipfel. So be it.”

Nebogipfel pressed forward the levers of the Time-Car — I felt my breathing accelerate, and blood pounded in my temples — and we fell into the gray clamor of time travel.

Once more the sun rocketed across the sky, and the moon, still green, rolled through its phases, the months going by more quickly than heartbeats; soon, the velocities of both orbs had increased to the point where they had merged into those seamless, precessing bands of light I have described before, and the sky had taken on that steely grayness which was a compound of day and night. All around us, clearly visible from our elevated viewpoint, the ice-fields of White Earth swept away and over the horizon, all but unchanging as the meaningless years flapped past, displaying only a surface sheen smoothed over by the rapidity of our transition.

I should have liked to have seen those magnificent interstellar sail-craft soar off into space; but the rotation of the earth rendered those fragile ships impossible for me to make out, and as soon as we entered time travel the sail-ships became invisible to us.

Within seconds of our departure — as seen from our diluted point of view — our apartment was demolished. It vanished around us like dew, to leave our transparent blister sitting isolated on the flat roof of our tower. I thought of our bizarre, yet comfortable, set of chambers — with my steam-bath, that ludicrous flock wallpaper, the peculiar billiards table, and all the rest — all of it had been melted back, now, into general formlessness, and our apartment, no longer required, had been reduced to a dream: a Platonic memory, in the metal imagination of the Universal Constructors!