The Time Ships. Stephen Baxter

makes my head ache to think about it! – I can imagine the reception this poor Gödel got when he brought this news to the world. Why, my old algebra teacher would have thrown him out of the room.’

      Nebogipfel said, ‘Gödel showed that our quest, to acquire knowledge and understanding, can never be completed.’

      I understood. ‘He has given you an infinite purpose.’ The Morlocks were like a world of patient monks, I saw now, working tirelessly to comprehend the workings of our great universe.

      At last – at the End of Time – that great Sphere, with its machine Mind and its patient Morlock servants, would become a kind of God, embracing the sun.

      I agreed with Nebogipfel that there could be no higher goal for an intelligent species!

      I had rehearsed my next words, and spoke them carefully. ‘Nebogipfel, I wish to return to the earth. I will work with you on my Time Machine.’

      His head dipped. ‘I am pleased. The value to our understanding will be immense.’

      We debated the proposition further, but it took no more persuasion than that! – for Nebogipfel did not seem suspicious, and did not question me.

      And so I made my brief preparations to leave that meaningless prairie. As I worked, I kept my thoughts to myself.

      I had known that Nebogipfel – eager as he was to acquire the technology of time travel – would accept my proposal. And it gave me some pain, in the light of my new understanding of the essential dignity of the New Morlocks, that I was now forced to lie to him!

      I would indeed return to the earth with Nebogipfel – but I had no intention of remaining there; for as soon as I got my hands on my machine again, I meant to escape with it, into the past.

       19

       HOW I CROSSED INTER-PLANETARY SPACE

      I was forced to wait three days until Nebogipfel pronounced himself ready to depart; it was, he said, a matter of waiting until the earth and our part of the Sphere entered the proper configuration with each other.

      My thoughts turned to the journey ahead with some anticipation – I would not say fear, for I had, after all, already survived one such crossing of interplanetary space, although insensible at the time – but rather with quickening interest. I speculated on the means by which Nebogipfel’s space-yacht might be propelled. I thought of Verne, who had his argumentative Baltimore gun clubbers firing that ludicrous cannon, with its man-bearing shell, across the gap between the earth and moon. But it only took a little mental calculation to show that an acceleration sufficient to launch a projectile beyond the earth’s gravity would also have been so strong as to smear my poor flesh, and Nebogipfel’s, across the interior of the shell like strawberry jam.

      What, then?

      It is a commonplace that inter-planetary space is without air; and so we could not fly like birds to the earth, for the birds rely on the ability of their wings to push against the air. No air – no push! Perhaps, I speculated, my space yacht would be driven by some advanced form of firework rocket – for a rocket, which flies by pushing out behind it masses of its own spent propellant, would be able to function in the airlessness of space, if oxygen were carried to sustain its combustion …

      But these were mundane speculations, grounded in my nineteenth-century understanding. How could I tell what might be possible by the year A.D. 657,208? I imagined yachts tacking against the sun’s gravity as if against an invisible wind; or, I thought, there might be some manipulation of magnetic or other fields.

      Thus my speculations raged, until Nebogipfel came to summon me, for the last time, from the Interior.

      As we dropped into Morlock darkness I stood with my head tipped back, peering up at the receding sunlight; and – just before I donned my goggles – I promised myself that the next time my face felt the warmth of man’s star, it would be in my own century!

      I think I had been expecting to be transported to some Morlock equivalent of a port, with great ebony space yachts nuzzling against the Sphere like liners against a dock.

      Well, there was none of that; instead Nebogipfel escorted me – across a distance of no more than a few miles, via strips of moving Floor – to an area which was kept clear of artefacts and partitions, and Morlocks in general, but was otherwise unremarkable. And in the middle of this area was a small chamber, a clear-walled box a little taller than I was – like a lift compartment – which sat there, squat, on the star-spattered Floor.

      At Nebogipfel’s gesture, I stepped into the compartment. Nebogipfel followed, and behind us the compartment sealed itself shut with a hiss of its diaphragm door. The compartment was roughly rectangular, its rounded corners and edges giving it something of the look of a lozenge. There was no furniture; there were, however, upright poles fixed at intervals about the cabin.

      Nebogipfel wrapped his pale fingers around one of these poles. ‘You should prepare yourself. At our launch, the change in effective gravity is sudden.’

      I found these calm words disturbing! Nebogipfel’s eyes, blackened by the goggles, were on me with their usual disconcerting mixture of curiosity and analysis; and I saw his fingers tighten their grip on the pillar.

      And then – it happened faster than I can relate it – the Floor opened. The compartment fell out of the Sphere, and I and Nebogipfel with it!

      I cried out, and I grabbed at a pole like an infant clinging to its mother’s leg.

      I looked upwards, and there was the surface of the Sphere, now turned into an immense, black Roof which occluded half the universe from my gaze. At the centre of this ceiling I could see a rectangle of paler darkness which was the door through which we had emerged; even as I watched, that door diminished with our distance, and in any event it was already folding closed against us. The door tracked across my view with magisterial slowness, showing how our compartment-capsule was starting to tumble in space. It was clear to me what had happened: any schoolboy can achieve the same effect by whirling a conker around his head, and then releasing the string. Well, the ‘string’ which had held us inside the rotating Sphere – the solidity of its Floor – had now vanished; and we had been thrown out into space, without ceremony.

      And below me – I could hardly bear to glance down – there was a pit of stars, a floorless cavern into which I, and Nebogipfel, were falling forever!

      ‘Nebogipfel – for the love of God – what has happened to us? Has some disaster occurred?’

      He regarded me. Disconcertingly, his feet were hovering a few inches above the floor of the capsule – for, while the capsule fell through space, so we, within it, fell too, like peas in a matchbox!

      ‘We have been released from the Sphere. The effects of its spin are –’

      ‘I understand all that,’ I said, ‘but why? Are we intending to fall all the way to the earth?’

      His answer I found quite terrifying.

      ‘Essentially,’ he said, ‘yes.’

      And then I had no further energy for questions, for I became aware that I too was starting to float about that little cabin like a balloon; and with that realization came a fight with nausea which lasted many minutes.

      At length I regained some control over my body.

      I had Nebogipfel explain the principles of this flight to the earth. And when he had done so, I realized how elegant and economical was the Morlocks’ solution to travel between the Sphere and its cordon of surviving planets – so much so that I should have anticipated it, and dismissed all my nonsensical speculations of rockets – and yet, here was another example of the inhuman bias of the Morlock soul! Instead