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Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 1995

Copyright © Stephen Baxter 1995

Illustrations © Les Edwards

Cover design by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

Cover images © Shutterstock.com (shapes); NASA (background texture)

Stephen Baxter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Author and Publisher acknowledge the consent of the Literary Executors of the Estate of H.G. Wells for the use of characters and plot from The Time Machine and other works by H.G. Wells. The Time Machine, The Plattner Story and other works of H.G. Wells are copyright the Literary Executors of the Estate of H.G. Wells.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780008134549

Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007397549

Version 2019-10-28

Dedication

To my wife Sandra,

and the memory of H.G.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Editor’s Note

Prologue

Book One: Dark Night

Chapter 1: Time Travelling

Chapter 2: A New Vision

Chapter 3: In Obscurity

Chapter 4: The Dark Night

Chapter 5: The Well

Chapter 6: My Encounter With the Morlocks

Chapter 7: The Cage of Light

Chapter 8: A Visitor

Chapter 9: Revelations and Remonstrances

Chapter 10: A Dialogue With a Morlock

Chapter 11: Out of the Cage

Chapter 12: The Morlocks of the Sphere

Chapter 13: How the Morlocks Lived

Chapter 14: Constructions and Divergences

Chapter 15: Life and Death Among the Morlocks

Chapter 16: Decision and Departure

Chapter 17: In the Interior

Chapter 18: The New Eloi

Chapter 19: How I Crossed Inter-Planetary Space

Chapter 20: My Account of the Far Future

Chapter 21: On Richmond Hill

Chapter 22: Rotations and Deceptions

Book Two: Paradox

Chapter 1: The Chronic Argo

Chapter 2: Home

Chapter 3: Moses

Chapter 4: The Experiment

Chapter 5: Honesty and Doubt

Chapter 6: Persuasion and Scepticism

Chapter 7: The Juggernaut Lord Raglan

Chapter 8: Old Acquaintance Renewed

Chapter 9: Into Time

Book Three: The War With the Germans

Chapter 1: A New Vision of Richmond

Chapter 2: A Train Journey

Chapter 3: London at War

Chapter 4: The House in Queen’s Gate Terrace

Chapter 5: The Many Worlds Interpretation

Chapter 6: Hyde Park

Chapter 7: The Babble Machine

Chapter 8: The Uplands of the Future

Chapter 9: Imperial College

Chapter 10: Professor Gödel

Chapter 11: The New World Order

Chapter 12: The German Assault on London

Chapter 13: The Shelling

Chapter 14: The Rota-Mine

Chapter 15: The Time-Car

Chapter 16: Falling Into Time

Chapter 17: The Watcher

Book Four: The Palaeocene Sea

Chapter 1: Diatryma Gigantica

Chapter 2: The Palaeocene Sea

Chapter 3: How We Lived

Chapter 4: Illness and Recuperation

Chapter 5: The Storm

Chapter 6: Heart and Body

Chapter 7: Pristichampus

Chapter 8: The Encampment

Chapter 9: The Chronic Expeditionary Force

Chapter 10: The Apparition

Chapter 11: The Bomb

Chapter 12: The Aftermath of the Bombing

Chapter 13: Bond’s Account

Chapter 14: Survivors

Chapter 15: A New Settlement

Chapter 16: The Establishment of First London

Chapter 17: Children and Descendants

Chapter 18: The Feast, and Later

Chapter 19: Lights in the Sky

Chapter 20: The Orbital City

Chapter 21: Instabilities

Chapter 22: Abandonment and Arrival

Book Five: White Earth

Chapter 1: Confinement

Chapter 2: Experiments and Reflections

Chapter 3: The Universal Constructor

Chapter 4: The Billiards Room

Chapter 5: White Earth

Chapter 6: The Multiplicity Generator

Chapter 7: The Mechanical Heirs of Man

Chapter 8: A Proposition

Chapter 9: Options and Introspections

Chapter 10: Preparations

Chapter 11: Forward in Time

Chapter 12: The Ship

Book Six: The Time Ships

Chapter 1: Departure

Chapter 2: The Unravelling of Earth

Chapter 3: The Boundary of Space and Time

Chapter 4: The Nonlinearity Engines

Chapter 5: The Final Vision

Chapter 6: The Triumph of Mind

Chapter 7: Emergence

Chapter 8: A Circle Is Closed

Book Seven: Day 292,495,940

Chapter 1: The Vale of Thames

Chapter 2: A Walk

Chapter 3: In the Darkness

Epilogue

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Stephen Baxter

About the Publisher

EDITOR’S NOTE

The attached account was given to me by the owner of a small second-hand bookshop, situated just off the Charing Cross Road in London. He told me it had turned up as a manuscript in an unlabelled box, in a collection of books which had been bequeathed to him after the death of a friend; the bookseller passed the manuscript on to me as a curiosity – ‘You might make something of it’ – knowing of my interest in the speculative fiction of the nineteenth century.

The manuscript itself was typewritten on commonplace paper, but a pencil note attested that it had been transcribed from an original ‘written by hand on a paper of such age that it has crumbled beyond repair’. That original, if it ever existed, is lost. There is no note as to the manuscript’s author, or origin.

I have restricted my editing to a superficial polishing, meaning only to eliminate some of the errors and duplications of a manuscript which was evidently written in haste.

What are we to make of it? In the Time Traveller’s words, we must ‘take it as a lie – or a prophecy … Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction …’ Without further evidence, we must regard this work as a fantasy – or as an elaborate hoax – but if there is even a grain of truth in the account contained in these pages, then a startling new light is shed, not merely on one of our most famous works of fiction (if fiction it was!), but also on the nature of our universe and our place in it.

I present the account here without further comment.

Stephen Baxter

PROLOGUE

On the Friday morning after my return from futurity, I awoke long after dawn, from the deepest of dreamless sleeps.

I got out of bed and threw back the curtains. The sun was making his usual sluggish progress up the sky, and I remembered how, from the accelerated perspective of a Time Traveller, the sun had fair hopped across heaven! But now, it seemed, I was embedded in oozing time once more, like an insect in seeping amber.

The noises of a Richmond morning gathered outside my window: the hoof-steps of horses, the rattle of wheels on cobbles, the banging of doors. A steam tram, spewing out smoke and sparks, made its clumsy way along the Petersham Road, and the gull-like cries of hawkers came floating on the air. I found my thoughts drifting away from my gaudy adventures in time and back to a mundane plane: I considered the contents of the latest Pall Mall Gazette, and stock movements, and I entertained an anticipation that the morning’s post might bring the latest American Journal of Science, which would contain some speculations of mine on the findings of A. Michelson and E. Morley on certain peculiarities of light, reported in that journal four years earlier, in 1887 …

And so on! The details of the everyday crowded into my head, and by contrast the memory of my adventure in futurity came to seem fantastical – even absurd. As I thought it over now, it seemed to me that the whole experience had had something of a hallucinatory, almost dreamlike quality: there had been that sense of precipitate falling, the haziness of everything about time travel, and at last my plunge into the nightmarish world of A.D. 802,701. The grip of the ordinary on our imaginations is remarkable. Standing there in my pyjamas, something of the uncertainty which had, in the end, assailed me last night returned, and I started to doubt the very existence of the Time Machine itself! – despite my very clear memories of the two years of my life I had expended in the nuts and bolts of its construction, not to mention the two decades previous, during which I had teased out the theory of time travel from anomalies I had observed during my studies of physical optics.

I thought back over my conversation with my companions over dinner the evening before – somehow those few hours were far more vivid, now, than all the days I had spent in that world of futurity – and I remembered their mix of responses to my account: there had been a general enjoyment of a good tale, accompanied by dashes of sympathy or near-derision depending on the temperaments of individuals – and, I recalled, a near-universal scepticism. Only one good friend, who I shall call the Writer in these pages, had seemed to listen to my ramblings with any degree of sympathy and trust.

Standing by the window, I stretched – and my doubts about my memories took a jolt! The ache of my back was real enough, acute and urgent, as were the burning sensations in the muscles of my legs and arms: protests from the muscles of a no-longer-young man forced, against his practice, to exert himself. ‘Well, then,’ I argued with myself, ‘if your trip into the future was truly a dream – all of it, including that bleak night when you fought the Morlocks in the forest – where have these aches and pains come from? Have you been capering around your garden, perhaps, in a moonstruck delirium?’

And there, dumped without ceremony in a corner of my room, I saw a small heap of clothes: they were the garments I had worn to their ruin during my flight to the future, and which now were fit only to be destroyed. I could see grass stains and scorch marks; the pockets were torn, and I remembered how Weena had used those flaps of cloth as impromptu vases, to load up with the etiolated flowers of the future. My shoes were missing, of course – I felt an odd twinge of regret for the comfortable old house-shoes which I had borne unthinking into a hostile future, before abandoning them to an unimaginable fate! – and there, on the carpet, were the filthy, bloodstained remnants of my socks.

Somehow it was those socks – those comical, battered old socks! – whose rude existence convinced me, above anything else, that I was not yet insane: that my flight into the future had not been entirely a dream.

I must return to time, I saw; I must gather evidence that futurity was as real as the Richmond of 1891, to convince my circle of friends and my peers in my scientific endeavours – and to banish the last traces of my own self-doubt.

As I formed this resolve, suddenly I saw the sweet, empty face of Weena, as vivid as if she had been standing there before me. Sadness, and a surge of guilt at my own impetuosity, tore at my heart. Weena, the Eloi child-woman, had followed me to the Palace of Green Porcelain through the depths of the resurgent forest of that distant Thames valley, and had been lost in the confusion of the subsequent fire, and the bleak assaults of the Morlocks. I have always been a man to act first and allow my rational brain to catch up later! In my bachelor life, this tendency had never yet led anyone into serious danger except myself – but now, in my thoughtlessness and headlong rush, I had abandoned poor, trusting Weena to a grisly death in the shadows of that Dark Night of the Morlocks.

I had blood on my hands, and not just the ichor of those foul, degraded sub-men, the Morlocks. I determined I must make recompense – in whatever way I could – for my abominable treatment of poor, trusting Weena.

I was filled with resolve. My adventures, physical and intellectual, were not done yet!

I had Mrs Watchets run me a bath, and I clambered into it. Despite my mood of urgency, I took time to pamper my poor, battered bones; I noted with interest the blistered and scarred state of my feet, and the mild burns I had suffered to my hands.

I dressed quickly. Mrs Watchets prepared me breakfast. I dug into my eggs, mushrooms and tomatoes with vigour – and yet I found the bacon and sausages lying heavy in my mouth; when I bit into the thick meat, its juices, full of salt and oil, filled me with a faint disgust.

I could not help but remember the Morlocks, and the meat I had seen them consume at their foul repasts! My experiences had not dulled my appetite for mutton at dinner the previous evening, I recalled, but then my hunger had been so much greater. Could it be that a certain shock and disquietude, unravelling from my misadventures, were even now working through the layers of my mind?

But a full breakfast is my custom; for I believe that a good dose of peptone in the arteries early in the day is essential for the efficient operation of the vigorous human machine. And today could become as demanding a day as I had faced in my life. Therefore, I put aside my qualms and finished my plate, chewing through my bacon with determination.

Breakfast over, I donned a light but serviceable summer suit. As I think I mentioned to my companions at dinner the previous evening, it had become evident to me during my plummeting through time that winter had been banished from the world of A.D. 802,701 – whether by natural evolution, geogonic planning or the re-engineering of the sun himself I could not say – and so I should have no need of winter greatcoats and scarves in futurity. I donned a hat, to keep the future sun from my pale English brow, and dug out my stoutest pair of walking boots.

I grabbed a small knapsack and proceeded to throw myself about the house, ransacking cupboards and drawers for the equipment I thought I would need for my second journey – much to the alarm of poor, patient Mrs Watchets, who, I am sure, had long since resigned my sanity to the mists of mythology! As is my way, I was in a fever to be off, and yet I was determined not to be quite so impetuous as the first time, when I had travelled across eight thousand centuries with no more protection than a pair of house-shoes and a single box of matches.

I crammed my knapsack with all the matches I could find in the house – in fact, I dispatched Hillyer to the tobacconist’s to purchase more boxes. I packed in camphor, and candles, and, on an impulse, a length of sturdy twine, in case, stranded, I should need to make new candles of my own. (I had little conception of how one goes about such manufacture, incidentally, but in the bright light of that optimistic morning I did not doubt my ability to improvise.)

I took white spirit, salves, some quinine tabloids and a roll of bandage. I had no gun – I doubt if I should have taken it, even if I had possessed one, for what use is a gun when its ammunition is exhausted? – but I slipped my clasp-knife into my pocket. I packed up a roll of tools – a screwdriver, several sizes of spanner, a small hacksaw with spare blades – as well as a range of screws and lengths of nickel, brass and quartz bars. I was determined that no trivial accident befalling the Time Machine should strand me in any disjointed future, for want of a bit of brass: despite my transient plan to build a new Time Machine when my original was stolen by the Morlocks in 802,701, I’d seen no evidence in the decayed Upper-world that I should be able to find the materials to repair so much as a sheared screw. Of course, the Morlocks had retained some mechanical aptitude, but I did not relish the prospect of being forced to negotiate with those bleached worms for the sake of a couple of bolts.

I found my Kodak, and dug out my flash trough. The camera was new-loaded with a roll of a hundred negative frames on a paper-stripping roll. I remembered how damned expensive the thing had seemed when I had bought it – no less than twenty-five dollars, purchased on a trip to New York – but, if I should return with pictures of futurity, each of those two-inch frames would be more valuable than the finest paintings.

Now, I wondered, was I ready? I demanded advice of poor Mrs Watchets, though I would not tell her, of course, where I was intending to travel. That good woman – stolid, square, remarkably plain, and yet with a faithful and imperturbable heart – took a look inside my knapsack, crammed as it was, and she raised one formidable eyebrow. Then she made for my room and returned with spare socks and underwear, and – here I could have kissed her! – my pipe, a set of cleaners, and the jar of tobacco from my mantel.

Thus, with my usual mixture of feverish impatience and superficial intelligence – and with an unending reliance on the good will and common sense of others – I made ready to return into time.

Bearing my knapsack under one arm and my Kodak under the other, I made towards my laboratory, where the Time Machine waited. When I reached the smoking-room, 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 possible. But I flatter myself to think that it took my own combination of analysis and imagination to realize and exploit the properties of that remarkable substance, where a lesser man may have missed the mark.

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