The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online Page A

from the compressed interior of the earth, whose volcanic heat, evident in our own day, would not have cooled significantly in the intervening six hundred thousand years. And perhaps the moisture came from aquifers, still extant below the ground.
    It may be, I mused, the surface of the planet was studded with such wells and cupolas. But their purpose was not to admit access to the interior world of the Morlocks – as in that other History – but to release the earth’s intrinsic resources to warm and moisten this planet deprived of its sun; and such life as had survived the monstrous engineering I had witnessed now clustered around these founts of warmth and moisture.
    My confidence was increasing – making sense of things is a powerful tonic for my courage, and after that false alarm with the crab, I had no sense of threat – and I sat again on the lip of the well. I had my pipe and some of my tobacco in my pocket, and I packed the bowl full and lit up. I began to speculate on how this History might have diverged from the first I had witnessed. Evidently there had been some parallels – there had been Morlocks and Eloi here – but their grisly duality had been resolved, in ages past.
    I wondered why should such a show-down between the races occur – for the Morlocks, in their foul way, were as dependent on the Eloi as were Eloi on Morlock, and the whole arrangement had a sort of stability.
    I saw a way it might have come about. The Morlocks were of debased human stock, after all, and it is not in man’s heart to be logical about things. The Morlock must have known that he depended on the Eloi for his very existence; he must have pitied and scorned him – his remote cousin, yet reduced to the status of cattle. And yet –
    And yet, what a glorious morning made up the brief life of the Eloi! The little people laughed and sang and loved across the surface of the world made into a garden, while your Morlock must toil in the stinking depths of the earth to provide the Eloi with the fabric of their luxurious lives. Granted the Morlock was conditioned for his place in creation, and would no doubt turn in disgust from the Eloi’s sunlight and clear water and fruit, even were it offered to him – but still, might he not, in his dim and cunning fashion, have envied the Eloi their leisure ?
    Perhaps the flesh of the Eloi turned sour in the Morlock’s rank mouth, even as he bit into it in his dingy cave.
    I envisaged, then, the Morlocks – or a faction of them – arising one night from their tunnels under the earth, and falling on the Eloi with their weapons and whip-muscled arms. There would be a great Culling – and this time, not a disciplined harvesting of flesh, but a full-blooded assault with one, unthinking purpose: the final extinction of the Eloi.
    How must the lawns and food palaces have run with blood, those ancient stones echoing to the childish bleating of the Eloi!
    In such a contest there could be only one victor, of course. The fragile people of futurity, with their hectic, consumptive beauty, could never defend themselves against the assaults of organized, murderous Morlocks.
    I saw it all – or so I thought! The Morlocks, triumphant at last, had inherited the earth. With no more use for the garden-country of the Eloi, they had allowed it to fall into ruin; they had erupted from the earth and – somehow – brought their own stygian darkness with them to cover the sun! I remembered how Weena’s folk had feared the nights of the new moon – she had called them ‘The Dark Nights’ – now, it seemed to me, the Morlocks had brought about a final Dark Night to cover the earth, forever. The Morlocks had at last murdered the last of earth’s true children, and even murdered earth herself.
    Such was my first hypothesis, then: wild and gaudy – and wrong, in every particular!
    … And I became aware, with almost a physical shock, that in the middle of all this historical speculation I had quite forgotten