The Time Ships Read Free

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, andI 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.
    I had been reluctant to publicize my work,outlandish as the field was, without experimental verification. I promised myself that direct on my return, with specimens and photographs, I would write up my studies for the Philosophical Transactions ; it would be a famous addition to the seventeen papers I had already placed there on the physics of light. It would be amusing, I reflected, to call my paper something dry such as ‘Some Reflections on the Anomalous Chronologic Properties of the Mineral “Plattnerite”’, and to bury within it the thunderous revelation of the existence