"The Time Ships" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

[21] On Richmond Hill

Nebogipfel had the capsule dilate open, and I stepped from it, cramming my goggles onto my face. The night-soaked landscape leapt to clarity and detail, and for the first time I was able to make out some detail of this world of A.D. 657,208.

The sky was brilliant with stars and the scar of obscurity made by the Sphere was looming and distinct. There was a rusty smell coming off the ubiquitous sand, and a certain dampness, as of lichen and moss; and everywhere the air was thick with the sweet stink of Morlock.

I was relieved to be out of that lozenge, and to feel firm earth beneath my boots. I strode up the hill to the bronze-plated pedestal of the Sphinx, and stood there, halfway up Richmond Hill, on the site that had once, I knew, been my home. A little further up the Hill there was a new structure, a small, square hut. I could see no Morlocks. It was a sharp contrast to my impressions of my earlier time here, when — as I stumbled in the dark — they had seemed to be everywhere.

Of my Time Machine there was no sign — only grooves dug deep into the sand, and the queer, narrow footprints characteristic of the Morlock. Had the machine been dragged into the base of the Sphinx again? Thus was History repeating itself! — or so I thought. I felt my fists bunching, so rapidly had my elevated inter-planetary mood evaporated; and panic bubbled within me. I calmed myself. Was I a fool, that I could have expected the Time Machine to be waiting for me outside the capsule as it opened? I could not resort to violence — not now! — not when my plan for escape was so ripe. Nebogipfel joined me.

“We appear to be alone here,” I said.

“The children have been moved from this area.”

I felt a renewed access of shame. “Am I so dangerous?… Tell me where my machine is.”

He had removed his goggles, but I could not read those gray-red eyes. “It is safe. It has been moved to a more convenient place. If you wish you may inspect it.”

I felt as if a steel cable attached me to my Time Machine, and was drawing me in! I longed to rush to the machine, and leap aboard its saddle — be done with this world of darkness and Morlocks, and make for the past!… But I must needs be patient. Struggling to keep my voice even, I replied, “That isn’t necessary.”

Nebogipfel led me up the Hill, to the little building I had noticed earlier. It followed the Morlocks’ usual seamless, simple design; it was like a doll’s house, with a simple hinged door and a sloping roof. Inside, there was a pallet for a bed, with a blanket on it, and a chair, and a little tray of food and water — all refreshingly solid-looking. My knapsack was on the bed.

I turned to Nebogipfel. “You have been considerate,” I said, sincere.

“We respect your rights.” He walked away from my shelter. When I took my goggles off, he melted into shadow.

I closed the door with some relief. It was a pleasure to return to my own human company for a while. I felt shame that I was planning, so systematically, to deceive Nebogipfel and his people! But my scheme had brought me across hundreds of millions of miles already — to within a few hundred yards of the Time Machine — and I could not bear the thought of failure now.

I knew that if I had to harm Nebogipfel to escape, I would!

By touch I opened the knapsack, and I found and lit a candle. A comforting yellow light and a curl of smoke turned that inhuman little box into a home. The Morlocks had kept back my poker — as I might have anticipated but much of the other equipment had been left for me. Even my clasp-knife was there. With this, and using a Morlock tray as a crude mirror, I hacked off my irritating growth of beard, and shaved as close as I could. I was able to discard my underwear and don fresh — I would never have anticipated that the feeling of truly clean socks would invoke such feelings of sensual pleasure in me! — and I thought fondly of Mrs. Watchets, who had packed these invaluable items for me.

Finally — and most pleasurably — I took a pipe from the knapsack, packed it with tobacco, and lit it from the candle flame.

It was in this condition, with my few possessions around me, and the rich scent of my finest tobacco still lingering, that I lay down on the little bed, pulled the blanket over me and slept.

I awoke in the dark.

It was an odd thing to wake without daylight — like being disturbed in the small hours — and I never felt refreshed by a sleep, the whole time I was in the Morlocks’ Dark Night; it was as if my body could not calculate what time of day it was.

I had told Nebogipfel that I should like to inspect the Time Machine, and I felt a great nervousness as I went through a brief breakfast and toilet. My plan did not amount to much in the way of strategy: it was merely to take the machine, at the first opportunity! I was gambling that the Morlocks, after millennia of sophisticated machines which could change their very shapes, would not know what to make of a device as crude, in its construction, as my Time Machine. I thought they would not expect that so simple an act as the reattachment of two levers could restore the machine’s functionality — or so I prayed!

I emerged from the shelter. After all my adventures, the levers to the Time Machine were safe in my jacket’s inside pocket.

Nebogipfel walked towards me, his thin feet leaving their sloth-like footprints in the sand, and his two hands empty. I wondered how long he had been near, waiting for my emergence.

We walked along the flank of the Hill together, heading south in the direction of Richmond Park. We set off without preamble, for the Morlocks were not given to unnecessary conversation.

I have said that my house had stood on the Petersham Road, on the stretch below Hill Rise. As such it had been halfway up the shoulder of Richmond Hill, a few hundred yards from the river, with a good westerly prospector it would have had, if not for the intervening trees — and I had been able to see something of the meadows at Petersham beyond the river. Well, in the Year A.D. 657,208, all of the intervening clutter had been swept away; and I was able to see down the flank of a deepened valley to where the Thames lay in its new bed, glittering in the star-light. I could see, here and there, the coal-hot mouths of the Morlocks’ heat-wells, puncturing the darkened land. Much of the hill-side was bare sand, or given over to moss; but I could see patches of what looked like the soft glass which had carpeted the Sphere, glittering in the enhanced starlight.

The river itself had carved out a new channel a mile or so from its nineteenth-century position; it appeared to have cut off the bow from Hampton to Kew, so that Twickenham and Teddington were now on its east side, and it seemed to me that the valley was a good bit deeper than in my day — or perhaps Richmond Hill had been lifted up by some other geological process. I remembered a similar migration of the Thames in my first voyage into time. Thus, it seemed to me, the discrepancies of human History are mere froth; under it all, the slow processes of geology and erosion would continue their patient work regardless.

I spared a moment to glance up the Hill towards the Park, for I wondered for how long those ancient woodlands and herds of red and fallow deer had survived the winds of change. Now, the Park could be no more than a darkened desert, populated only by cacti and a few olives. I felt my heart harden. Perhaps these Morlocks were wise and patient perhaps their industrious pursuit of knowledge on the Sphere was to be applauded — but their neglect of the ancient earth was a shame!

We reached the vicinity of the Park’s Richmond Gate, close to the site of the Star and Garter, perhaps half a mile from the site of my house. On a level patch of land, a rectangular platform of soft glass had been laid; this platform shimmered in the patchy star-light. It appeared to be manufactured of that marvelous, glassy material of which the Sphere Floor was composed; and from its surface had been evoked a variety of the podiums and partitions which I had come to recognize as the characteristic tools of the Morlocks. These were abandoned now; there was nobody about but Nebogipfel and I. And there — at the heart of the platform — I saw a squat and ugly tangle of brass and nickel, with ivory like bleached bone shining in the star-light, and a bicycle-saddle in the middle of it all: it was my Time Machine, evidently intact, and ready to take me home!