Stephen Baxter - The Time Ships

The Captain said: “I wasn’t expecting quite such a crowd of passengers — I don’t suppose we knew what we were expecting — but you’re all welcome here, and I’ll ensure you’re treated well.” The voice was light, but raised to a bray above the rumble of the engines. Pale blue eyes swept over Moses and Nebogipfel, with a hint of humor. “Welcome to the Lord Raglan. My name is Hilary Bond; I’m a Captain in the Ninth Battalion of the Royal Juggernaut Regiment.”

It was true! This Captain — experienced and wounded soldier, and commander of a deadlier fighting machine than I could ever have envisaged — was a woman.

She smiled, revealing a scar about her chin, and I saw that she could be no more than twenty-five years of age.

“Look here, Captain,” I said, “I demand to know by what right you’re holding us.”

She was unruffled. “My mission is a priority for the National Defense. I’m sorry if—”

But now Moses stepped forward; in his gaudy masher’s outfit he looked strikingly out of place in that drab, military interior. “Madam Captain, there is no need for National Defense in the Year 1873!”

“But there is in the Year 1938.” This Captain was quite immovable, I saw; she radiated an air of unshakable command. “My mission has been to safeguard the scientific research which is proceeding in that house on Petersham Road — in particular, to discourage anachronistic interference with its due process.”

Moses grimaced. “ ’Anachronistic interference’ — I take it you are talking of Time Travelers.”

I smiled. “A lovely word, that discourage! Have you brought back enough guns, do you think, effectively to discourage?”

Now Nebogipfel stepped forward. “Captain Bond,” the Morlock said slowly, “surely you can see that your mission is a logical absurdity. Do you know who these men are? How can you safeguard the research when its prime progenitor” — he pointed to Moses with one hairy hand — “is being abducted from his rightful time?”

At that Bond stared at the Morlock for long seconds; and then she turned her attention to Moses — and to me — and I thought she saw, as if for the first time, our resemblance! She snapped out questions to us all, aimed at confirming the truth of the Morlock’s remark, and Moses’s identity. I did not deny it — I could see little advantage to us either way — perhaps, I calculated, we should be treated with more consideration if we were thought to be historically significant; but I made as little as I could of my shared identity with Moses.

At last, Hilary Bond whispered brief instructions to the trooper, and he went off to another part of the craft.

“I’ll inform the Air Ministry of this when we get back. I’m sure they will be more than interested in you — and you’ll have plenty of opportunity to debate the issue with the authorities on our return.”

“Return?” I snapped. “ Return — do you mean, to your 1938?”

She looked strained. “The paradoxes of time travel are a bit beyond me, I’m afraid; no doubt the clever chaps at the Ministry will untangle it all.”

I was aware of Moses laughing beside me — loudly, and with a touch of hysteria. “Oh, this is rich!” he said. “Oh, it’s rich — now I needn’t bother building the wretched Time Machine at all!”

Nebogipfel regarded me somberly. “I’m afraid these multiple blows to causality are moving us further and further from the primal version of History — that which existed before the first operation of the Time Machine…”

Now Captain Bond cut us short. “I can understand your consternation. But I can assure you you’ll not be harmed in any way — on the contrary, my mission is to protect you. Also,” she said with an easy grace, “I’ve gone to the trouble of bringing along someone to help you settle in with us. A native of the period, you might say.”

Another figure made its slow way towards us from the darkened rear of the passage. It came to us wearing the ubiquitous epaulets, hand-weapon and mask dangling at the waist; but the uniform — a drab, black affair — bore no military insignia. This new person moved slowly, quite painfully, along the awkward cat-walks, with every sign of age; I saw how uniform fabric was stretched over a sagging belly.

His voice was feeble barely audible above the din of the engines. “Good God, it’s you,” he called to me. “I’m armed to the teeth for Germans — but do you know, I scarcely expected you to turn up again, after that last Thursday dinner-party — and not in circumstances like these!”

As he came into the light, it was my turn for another shock. For, though the eyes were dulled, the demeanor stooped, and barely a trace of red left in that shock of gray hair — and though the man’s forehead was disfigured by an ugly scar, as if he had been burned this was, unmistakably, Filby.

I told him I was damned.

Filby snickered as he came up to me. I grasped his hand — it was fragile and liver-spotted — and I judged him to be aged no less than seventy-five. “Damned you may be. Damned we all are, perhaps! — but it’s good to see you, nevertheless.” He gave Moses some odd looks: not surprising, I thought!

“Filby — Great Scott, man — I’m teeming with questions.”

“I’ll bet you are. That’s why they dug me out of my old people’s shelter in the Bournemouth Dome. I’m in charge of Acclimatization, they call it — to help you natives of the period adjust — do you see?”

“But Filby — it seems only yesterday — how did you come to—”

“This?” He indicated his withered frame with a dismissive, cynical gesture. “How did I come to this? Time, my friend. That wonderful River on whose breast, you would have us believe, you could skate around like a water-boatman. Well, time is no friend of the common man; I’ve been traveling through time the hard way, and here is what the journey has done to me. For me, it’s been forty-seven years since that last session in Richmond, and your bits of magic quackery with the model Time Machine — do you remember? — and your subsequent disappearance into the Day After Tomorrow.”

“Still the same old Filby,” I said with affection, and I grasped his arm. “Even you have to admit — at last — that I was right about time travel!”

“Much good it’s done any of us,” he growled.

“And now,” the Captain said, “if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I’ve a ’Naut to command. We’ll be ready to depart in a few minutes.” And, with a nod to Filby, she turned to her crew.

Filby sighed. “Come on,” he said. “There’s a place at the back where we can sit; it’s a little less noisy, and dirty, than this.”

We made our way towards the rear of the fort.

As we walked through the central passage I was able to get a closer look at the fort’s means of locomotion. Below the central cat-walks I could see an arrangement of long axles, each free to swivel about a common axis, with a metal floor beneath; and the axles were hitched up to those immense wheels. Those elephantine feet we had spotted earlier dangled from the wheels on stumps of legs. The wheels dripped mud and bits of churned-up road surface into the engineered interior. By means of the axles, I saw, the wheels could be raised or lowered relative to the main body of the fort, and it seemed that the feet and legs could also be raised, on pneumatic pistons. It was through this arrangement that the fort’s variable pitch was achieved, enabling it to travel across the most uneven ground, or hold itself level on steep hills.

Moses pointed out the sturdy, box-shaped steel framework which underpinned the construction of the fort. “And look,” he said quietly to me, “can you see something odd about that section? — and that, over there? — the rods which look rather like quartz. It’s hard to see what structural purpose they serve.”