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

[22] Rotations And Deceptions

I felt my heart pump; I found it difficult to walk at a steady pace behind Nebogipfel — but walk I did. I dropped my hands into my jacket pockets and I grasped the two control levers there. I was already close enough to the machine to see the studs on which the levers must be fitted for the thing to work — and I meant to launch the machine as soon as I could, and to get away from this place!

“As you can see,” Nebogipfel was saying, “the machine is undamaged — we have moved it, but not attempted to pry into its workings…”

I sought to distract him from his close attention. “Tell me: now that you’ve studied my machine, and listened to my theories on the subject, what is your impression?”

“Your machine is an extraordinary achievement — ahead of its age.”

I have never been one with much patience for compliments. “But it is the Plattnerite which enabled me to construct it,” I said.

“Yes. I would like to study this ’Plattnerite’ more closely.” He donned his goggles, and studied the machine’s shimmering quartz bars. “We have talked — a little — of multiple Histories: of the possible existence of several editions of the world. You have witnessed two yourself—”

“The history of Eloi and Morlock, and the History of the Sphere.”

“You must think of these versions of History as parallel corridors, stretching ahead of you. Your machine allows you to go back and forth along a corridor. The corridors exist independently of each other: looking ahead from any point, a man looking along one corridor will see a complete and self-consistent History — he can have no knowledge of another corridor, and nor can the corridors influence each other.

“But in some corridors conditions may be very different. In some, even the laws of physics may differ…”

“Go on.”

“You said the operation of your machine depended on a twisting about of Space and Time,” he said. “Turning a Journey in Time into one through Space. Well, I agree: that is, indeed, how the Plattnerite exerts its effects. But how is this achieved?

“Picture, now,” he said, “a universe — another History — in which this Space-Time twisting is greatly pronounced.”

He went on to describe a variant of the universe almost beyond my imagining: in which rotation was embedded in the very fabric of the universe.

“Rotation suffuses every point of Space and Time. A stone, thrown outward from any point, would be seen to follow a spiral path: its inertia would act like a compass, swinging around the launch point. It is even thought by some that our own universe might undergo such a rotation, but on an immensely slow scale: taking a hundred thousand million years to complete a single turn…

“The rotating-universe idea was first described some decades after your time — by Kurt Gödel, in fact.”

“Gödel?” It took me a moment to place the name. “The man who will demonstrate the imperfectibility of mathematics?”

“The same.”

We walked around the machine, and I kept my stiff fingers wrapped around the levers. I planned to maneuver myself into precisely the most propitious spot to reach the machine. “Tell me how this explains the operation of my machine.”

“It is to do with axis-twisting. In a rotating universe, a journey through space, but reaching the past or future, is possible. Our universe rotates, but so slowly that such a path would be a hundred thousand million light years long, and would take the best part of a million million years to traverse!”

“Of little practical use, then.”

“But imagine a universe of greater density than ours: a universe as dense, everywhere, as the heart of an atom of matter. There, a rotation would be complete in mere fractions of a second.”

“But we are not in such a universe.” I waved my hand through empty space. “That is evident.”

“But perhaps you are! — for fractions of a second, and thanks to your machine — or at least to its Plattnerite component.

“My hypothesis is that, because of some property of the Plattnerite, your Time Machine is flickering back and forth to this ultra-dense universe, and on each traverse is exploiting that reality’s axis-twisting to travel along a succession of loops into the past or future! So you spiral through time…”

I considered these ideas. They were extraordinary — of course! — but, it seemed to me, no more than a somewhat fantastic extension of my preliminary thoughts of the intertwining of Space and Time, and the fluidity of their relevant axes. And besides, my subjective impression of time travel was bound up with feelings of twisting — of rotation.

“These ideas are startling — but I believe they would bear further examination,” I told Nebogipfel.

He looked up at me. “Your flexibility of mind is impressive, for a man of your evolutionary era.”

I barely heard his dismissive remark. I was close enough now. Nebogipfel touched a rail of the machine, with one cautious finger. The device shimmered, belying its bulk, and a breeze ruffled the fine hairs on Nebogipfel’s arm. He snatched his hand back. I stared at the studs, rehearsing in my mind the simple action of lifting the levers out of my pockets and fitting them to the studs. It would take less than a second! Could I complete the action before Nebogipfel could render me unconscious, with his green rays?

The darkness closed in around me, and the stink of Morlock was strong. In a moment, I thought with a surge of irrepressible eagerness, I might be gone from all this.

“Is something wrong?” Nebogipfel was watching my face with those great, dark eyes of his, and his stance was upright and tense. Already he was suspicious! — had I betrayed myself? And already, in the darkness beyond, I knew, the muzzles of countless guns must be raised towards me — I had bare seconds before I was lost!

Blood roared in my ears — I hauled the levers from my pockets — and, with a cry, I fell forward over the machine. I jammed the little bars down on their studs and with a single motion I wrenched the levers back. The machine shuddered — in that last moment there was a flash of green, and I thought it was all up for me! — and then the stars disappeared, and silence fell on me. I felt an extraordinary twisting sensation, and then that dreadful feeling of plummeting — but I welcomed the discomfort, for this was the familiar experience of time travel!

I yelled out loud. I had succeeded — I was journeying back through time — I was free!

…And then I became aware of a coolness around my throat — a softness, as if some insect had settled there, a rustling.

I lifted my hand to my neck — and touched Morlock hair!