The Space Machine Page 8

  “I shall try.”

  It took several more minutes of my fumbling in the eerie light to locate both of the metal bushes from which the rod had been torn, and then it took much longer to manipulate the lever so as to bring it into a suitable position so that I could fit the rod into the bushes.

  “It’s still too short!” I said in some desperation. “No matter how I try, the rod is too short.”

  “But it must have come from there!”

  I found a way of loosening the bush on the lever itself, and this helped to some measure. Now the connection could be made at each end, and with great patience I managed to screw the rod into each of the two sockets (fortunately, Sir William had engineered the screws so that one turn tightened both connections). It was held, but only tenuously so, for barely half a turn had been possible.

  I sat up wearily in the saddle, and Amelia’s arms went around my waist. The Time Machine was still lurching, but far less so than before, and the movement of the brilliant point of light was almost imperceptible. We sat in its harsh glare, hardly believing that I had succeeded in correcting the terrible motion.

  Directly in front of me the fly-wheel continued to turn quickly, but there had been no return to the orderly procession of day and night.

  “I think we are safe again,” I said, but I did not feel sure.

  “We must soon be coming to a halt. As soon as the Machine is at rest, we must neither of us move. It will take three minutes for the automatic return to start.”

  “And will we be taken back to the laboratory?” I said.

  Amelia hesitated before replying, and then said: “Yes.” I felt she was no more sure than I.

  Quite unexpectedly, the Time Machine gave another lurch, and we both gasped. I saw that the fly-wheel was still…and then I realized that air was whistling past us, chilling us instantly. I knew that we were no longer attenuated, that we were falling…and in great desperation I reached forward to seize the lever—

  “Edward!” Amelia screamed in my ear.

  It was the last thing I heard, for at that instant there was a terrible concussion, and the Machine came to a sudden halt. Both Amelia and I were catapulted from it into the night.

  viii

  I was lying in absolute darkness, seeming to be entirely covered by something leathery and wet. As I tried to stand, all I could accomplish was a futile thrashing with my arms and legs, and I slid further into the morass of slippery stuff. A sheet of something fell across my face, and I thrust it aside, gasping for breath. Suddenly I was coughing, trying to suck air into my lungs, and like a drowning man I struck instinctively upwards, feeling I should otherwise suffocate. There was nothing on which I could get a hold, as everything that surrounded me was soft, slippery and moist. It was as if I had been pitched head first into an immense bank of seaweed.

  I felt myself falling, and this time allowed myself to go, despairing. I would surely drown in this dank foliage, for with each turn of my head my face was covered with the repulsive stuff. I could taste it now: a flat, iron-tainted wateriness.

  Somewhere near to hand I heard a gasp.

  I shouted: “Amelia!”

  My voice emerged as a wheezing croak, and at once I was coughing again.

  “Edward?” Her voice was high-pitched and frightened, and then I heard her coughing too. She could not have been more than a few yards away from me, but I could not see her, hardly knew in which direction she lay.

  “Are you unhurt?” I called, then coughed weakly again.

  “The Time Machine, Edward. We must climb aboard…it will be returning…”

  “Where is it?”

  “I am by it. I cannot reach it, but I can feel it with my foot”

  I realized she was over to my left, and I struck out that way, floundering through the noisome weeds, reaching out, hoping to strike something solid.

  “Where are you?” I shouted, trying to make more of my voice than the wretched wheeze which was all I had so far managed.

  “I am here, Edward. Come towards my voice.” She was nearer now, but her words were strangely choked, as if she too were drowning. “I’ve slipped…I can’t find the Time Machine…it’s somewhere here…”

  I struck desperately through the weed, and almost at once I found her. My arm fell across her chest, and as it did so she grabbed me.

  “Edward…we must find the Machine!”

  “You say it is here?”

  “Somewhere…by my legs…”

  I crawled over her, thrashing my arms to and fro, desperately seeking the Machine. Behind me, Amelia had somehow righted herself, and she moved to my side. Face down, slithering and sliding, coughing and wheezing, trembling with the cold that was even now seeping into our bones, we conducted our desperate search well beyond the three minutes neither of us would admit was all the time we had ever had to find it.

  Chapter Six

  FUTURITY’S ALIEN LAND

  i

  Our struggles had been leading us inevitably downwards, and after a few more minutes I found solid ground beneath my feet. At once, I shouted aloud and helped Amelia to her feet. We pressed forward again, trying to maintain our balance while the vegetation tangled around our legs. We were both soaked through, and the air was freezing cold.

  At last we broke free of the vegetation, and found we were on rough, pebbly soil. We walked a few yards beyond the fringe of the vegetation then sank down in exhaustion. Amelia was shaking with cold, and she made no protest when I placed my arm around her and hugged her to me for warmth.

  At last, I said: “We must find cover.”

  I had been glancing around, hoping to see houses, but all I could see by the light of the stars was an apparent wasteland. The only visible feature was the bank of vegetation, looming perhaps a hundred feet into the air.

  Amelia had made no reply, and I could feel her shivering still, so I stood up and started to remove my jacket. “Please put this about your shoulders.”

  “But you will freeze to death.”

  “You are soaked through, Amelia.”

  “We are both wet. We must exercise to keep warm.”

  “In a moment,” I said, and sat down beside her once more. I kept my jacket on, but I opened it so that she was partially covered by it when I placed my arm around her shoulders. “First I must regain my breath.”

  Amelia pressed herself close to me, then said: “Edward, where have we landed?”

  “I cannot say. We are somewhere in futurity.”

  “But why is it so cold? Why is it so difficult to breathe?”

  I could only surmise.

  “We must be very high,” I said. “We are in a mountainous region.”

  “But the ground is flat.”

  “Then we must be on a plateau,” I said. “The air is thin because of the altitude.”

  “I think I have reached the same conclusion,” Amelia said. “Last summer I was mountaineering in Switzerland, and on the higher peaks we found a similar difficulty with breathing.”

  “But this is obviously not Switzerland.”

  “We will have to wait until morning to discover our whereabouts,” Amelia said, decisively. “There must be people near here.”

  “And suppose we are in a foreign country, which does seem probable?”

  “I have four languages, Edward, and can identify several others. All we need to know is the location of the nearest town, and there we will likely find a British Consul.”

  Through all this I had been remembering that moment of violence I had glimpsed through the windows of the laboratory.

  “We have seen that there is a war in 1903,” I said. “Wherever we are now, or whichever year this is, could that war still be in progress?”

  “We see no sign of it. Even if a war has started, innocent travellers will be protected. There are Consuls in every major city of the world.”

  She seemed remarkably optimistic under the circumstances, and I was reassured. On first realizing that we had lost the Machi
ne I had been plunged into despair. Even so, our prospects were doubtful, to say the very least, and I wondered if Amelia appreciated the full scale of our disaster. We had very little money with us, and no knowledge of the political situation, the breakdown of which had certainly caused the war of 1903. For all we knew we could be in enemy territory, and were likely to be imprisoned as soon as we were discovered.

  Our immediate problem—that of surviving the rest of the night exposed to the elements—grew worse with every moment. Fortunately, there was no wind, but that was the only clemency we were being afforded. The very soil beneath us was frozen hard, and our breath was clouding about our faces.

  “We must exercise,” I said. “Otherwise we will contract pneumonia.”

  Amelia did not dissent, and we climbed to our feet. I started jogging, but I must have been weaker than I knew, for I stumbled almost at once. Amelia too was having difficulties, for in swinging her arms about her head she staggered backwards.

  “I am a little light-headed,” I said, gasping unexpectedly.

  “And I.”

  “Then we must not exert ourselves.”

  I looked around desperately; in this Stygian gloom all that could be seen was the bank of weeds silhouetted against the starlight. It seemed to me that dank and wet as they were, they offered the only hope of shelter, and I put this to Amelia. She had no better proposal, and so with our arms around one another we returned to the vegetation. We found a clump of fronds standing about two feet high, on the very edge of the growth, and I felt experimentally with my hands. The stalks seemed to be dry, and beneath them the ground was not as hard as that on which we had been sitting.

  An idea came to me, and I took one of the stalks and broke it off with my hand. At once, I felt cold fluid run over my fingers.

  “The plants issue sap if they are broken,” I said, holding out the stalk for Amelia to take. “If we can climb under the leaves without snapping the branches, we should remain dry.”

  I sat down on the soil and began to move forward, feet first. Crawling gently in this fashion I was soon beneath the vegetation, and in a dark, silent cocoon of plants. A moment later, Amelia followed, and when she was beside me we lay still.

  To say that lying there under the fronds was pleasant would be utterly misleading, but it was certainly preferable to being exposed on the plain. Indeed, as the minutes passed and we made no movement I felt a little more comfortable, and realized that the confinement of our bodies was warming us a little.

  I reached out to Amelia, who was lying not six inches from me, and placed my hand on her side. The fabric of her jacket was still damp, but I sensed that she too was rather warmer.

  “Let us hold each other,” I said. “We must not get any colder.”

  I placed my arm around her back, and pulled her towards me. She came willingly enough, and soon we were lying together, face to face in the dark. I moved my head and our noses touched; I pressed forward and kissed her full on the lips.

  At once she pulled her face away from mine.

  “Please don’t take advantage of me, Edward.”

  “How can you accuse me of that? We must stay warm.”

  “Then let us do just that. I do not want you to kiss me.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Circumstance has thrown us together. Let us not forget that we barely know each other.”

  I could hardly believe my ears. Amelia’s friendly manner during the day had seemed an unmistakable confirmation of my own feelings, and in spite of our dreadful situation her very presence was enough to inflame my passions. I had expected her to allow me to kiss her, and after this rebuff I lay in silence, hurt and embarrassed.

  A few minutes later Amelia moved again, and kissed me briefly on my forehead.

  “I’m very fond of you, Edward,” she said. “Is that not enough?”

  “I thought…well, I’d been feeling that you—”

  “Have I said or done anything to indicate that I felt for you more than friendship?”

  “Well…no.”

  “Then please, lie still.”

  She placed one of her arms around me, and pressed me to her a little more tightly. We lay like that for a long time, barely moving except to ease cramped muscles, and during the rest of that long night we managed to doze for only a few short periods.

  Sunrise came more suddenly than either of us had expected. One moment we had been lying in that dark, silent growth, the next there was a brilliance of light, filtering through the fronds. We moved simultaneously in response, both sensing that the day ahead was to be momentous.

  We rose painfully, and walked haltingly away from the vegetation, towards the sun. It was still touching the horizon, dazzlingly white. The sky above us was a deep blue. There were no clouds.

  We walked for ten yards, then turned to look back at the bank of vegetation.

  Amelia, who had been holding my arm, now clutched me suddenly. I too stared in amazement, for the vegetation stretched as far as we could see to left and right of us. It stood in a line that was generally straight, but parts of it advanced and others receded. In places the weeds heaped together, forming mounds two hundred feet or more in height. This much we could have expected from our experience of it during the night, but nothing could have warned us of the profoundest surprise of all: that there was not a stem, not a leaf, not a bulbous, spreading tuber lying grotesquely across the sandy soil that was not a vivid blood-red.

  ii

  We stared for a long time at that wall of scarlet plant-life, lacking the vocabulary to express our reactions to it.

  The higher part of the weed-bank had the appearance of being smooth and rounded, especially towards its visible crest. Here it looked like a gentle, undulating hill, although by looking in more detail at its surface we could see that what appeared to be an unbroken face was in fact made up of thousands or millions of branches.

  Lower down, in the part of the growth where we had laid, its appearance was quite different. Here the newer plants were growing, presumably from seeds thrown out from the main bulk of vegetation. Both Amelia and I remarked on a horrible feeling that the wall was inexorably advancing, throwing out new shoots and piling up its mass behind.

  Then, even as we looked aghast at this incredible weed-bank, we saw that the impact of the sun’s rays was having an effect, for from all along the wall there came a deep-throated groaning, and a thrashing, breaking sound. One branch moved, then another…then all along that living cliff-face branches and stems moved in a semblance of unthinking animation.

  Amelia clutched my arm again, and pointed directly in front of us.

  “See Edward!” she said. “My bag is there! We must have my bag!”

  I saw that about thirty feet up the wall of vegetation there was what appeared to be a broken hole in the smooth-seeming surface. As Amelia started forward towards it, I realized that that must be the place where the Time Machine had so precipitately deposited us.

  A few feet away, absurd in its context, lay Amelia’s hand-bag, caught on a stem.

  I hurried forward and caught up with Amelia, just as she was preparing to push through the nearest plants, her skirt raised almost to her knees.

  “You can’t go in there,” I said. “The plants are coming to life!”

  As I spoke to her a long, creeper like plant snaked silently towards us, and a seed-pod exploded with a report like a pistol. A cloud of dust-like seeds drifted away from the plant.

  “Edward, it is imperative that I have my bag!”

  “You can’t go up there to get it!”

  “I must.”

  “You will have to manage without your powders and creams.”

  She glared angrily at me for a moment. “There is more in it than face-powder. Money…and my brandy-flask. Many things.”

  She plunged desperately into the vegetation, but as she did so a branch creaked into apparent life, and raised itself up. It caught the hem of her skirt, tore the fabric and spun her round.
She fell, screaming.

  I hurried to her, and helped her away from the plants. “Stay here…I’ll go.”

  Without further hesitation I plunged into that forest of groaning, moving stems, and scrambled towards where I had last seen her bag. It was not too difficult at first; I quickly learned which stems would, and which would not, bear my weight. As the height of the plants grew to a point where they were above my head I started to climb, slipping several times as the branch I gripped broke in my hand and released a flood of sap. All around me the plants were moving; growing and waving like the arms of a cheering crowd. Glancing up, I saw Amelia’s hand-bag on one such stem, dangling some twenty feet above my head. I had managed to climb only three or four feet towards it. There was nothing here that would bear my weight.

  There came a crashing noise a few yards to my right, and I ducked, imagining in my horror that some major trunk was moving into life…but then I saw that it had been Amelia’s bag, slipping from its perch.

  Thankfully, I abandoned my futile attempt to climb, and thrust myself through the waving lower stems. The noise of this riotous growth was now considerable, and when another seed-pod exploded by my ear I was temporarily deafened by it. My only thought now was to retrieve Amelia’s bag and get away from this nightmare vegetation. Not caring where I placed my feet, nor how many stems I broke and how much I drenched myself, I pushed wildly through the stalks, seized the bag and headed at once for the edge of the growth.

  Amelia was sitting on the ground, and I threw the bag down beside her. Unreasonably, I felt angry with her, although I knew it was simply a reaction to my terror.

  As she thanked me for collecting the bag, I turned away from her and stared at the wall of scarlet vegetation. It was visibly much more disordered than before, with branches and stems swinging out from every place. In the soil at the very edge of the growth I saw new, pink seedlings appearing. The plants were advancing on us, slowly but relentlessly. I watched the process for a few minutes more, seeing how sap from the adult plants dripped down on the soil, crudely irrigating the new shoots.