The Time Ships Read Free Page A

of time travel!
    At last I was done. I set my hat square over my eyes once more, and I picked up my pack and camera and fixed them under the saddle. Then, on an impulse, I went to the fireplace of the laboratory and picked up the poker which stood there. I hefted its substantial mass in my hand – I thought it might be useful! – and I lodged it in the machine’s frame.
    Then I sat myself in the saddle, and I placed my hand on the white starting levers. The machine shuddered, like the animal of time it had become.
    I glanced around at my laboratory, at the earthy reality of it, and was struck how out-of-place we both looked in it now – me in my amateur explorer’s garb, and the machine with its other-worldliness and its stains and scuffs from the future – even though we were both, in a way, children of this place. I felt tempted to linger. What harm would it do to expend another day, week, year here, embedded in my own comfortable century? I could gather my energies, and heal my wounds: was I being precipitate once again in this new venture?
    I heard a footstep in the corridor from the house, a turn of the door handle. It must be the Writer, coming to the laboratory.
    Of a sudden, my mind was set. My courage would not grow any stronger with the passage of any moreof this dull, ossified nineteenth-century time; and besides, I had said all the good-byes I cared to make.
    I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. I had that odd sense of spinning that comes with the first instant of time travel, and then there came that helpless, headlong feel of falling. I think I uttered an exclamation at the return of that uncomfortable sensation. I fancy I heard a tinkle of glass: a skylight pane, perhaps, blown in by the displacement of air. And, for a shredded remnant of a second, I saw him standing there in the doorway: the Writer, a ghostly, indistinct figure, with one hand raised to me – trapped in time!
    Then he was gone, swept into invisibility by my flight. The walls of the laboratory grew hazy around me, and once more the huge wings of night and day flapped around my head

BOOK ONE

Dark Night

1

TIME TRAVELLING
    T here are three Dimensions of Space, through which man may move freely. And time is simply a Fourth Dimension: identical in every important characteristic to the others, except for the fact that our consciousness is compelled to travel along it at a steady pace, like the nib of my pen across this page.
    If only – I had speculated, in the course of my studies into the peculiar properties of light – if only one could twist about the four Dimensions of Space and Time – transposing Length with Duration, say – then one could stroll through the corridors of History as easily as taking a cab into the West End!
    The Plattnerite embedded in the substance of the Time Machine was the key to its operation; the Plattnerite enabled the machine to rotate, in an uncommon fashion, into a new configuration in the framework of Space and Time. Thus, spectators who watched the departure of the Time Machine – like my Writer – reported seeing the machine spin giddily, before vanishing from History; and thus the driver – myself – invariably suffered dizziness, induced by centrifugal and Coriolis forces which made it feel as if I were being thrown off the machine.
    But for all these effects, the spin induced by the Plattnerite was of a different quality from the spinning of a top, or the slow revolution of the earth. Thespinning sensations were flatly contradicted, for the driver, by the illusion of sitting quite still in the saddle, as time flickered past the machine – for it was a rotation out of Time and Space themselves .
    As night flapped after day, the hazy outline of the laboratory fell away from around me, so that I was delivered into the open air. I was once more passing through that future period in which, I guessed, the laboratory had been demolished. The sun shot like a cannonball across the sky,