Читать книгу The Time Ships - Stephen Baxter - Страница 14

With a spurt of fear – and, I have to acknowledge it, a lust for blood which pulsed in my head – I roared, lifted my poker-club, and pounded back along the path. Careless, I dropped my Kodak; behind me I heard a soft tinkle of breaking glass. For all I know, that camera lies there still – if I may use the phrase – abandoned in the darkness.

As I neared the machine, I saw they were Morlocks all right – perhaps a dozen of them, capering around the machine. They seemed alternately attracted and repelled by my lights, exactly like moths around candles. They were the same ape-like creatures I remembered – perhaps a little smaller – with that long, flaxen hair across their heads and backs, their skin a pasty white, arms long as monkeys’, and with those haunting red-grey eyes. They whooped and jabbered to each other in their queer language. They hadn’t yet touched the Time Machine, I noted with some relief, but I knew it was a matter of moments before those uncanny fingers – ape-like, yet clever as any man’s – reached out for the sparkling brass and nickel.

But there would be no time for that, for I fell upon these Morlocks like an avenging angel.

I laid about me with my poker and my fist. The Morlocks jabbered and squealed, and tried to flee. I grabbed one of the creatures as it ran past me, and I felt again the worm-pallor cold of Morlock flesh. Hair like spider-web brushed across the back of my hand, and the animal nipped at my fingers with its small teeth, but I did not yield. I wielded my club, and I felt the soft, moist collapse of flesh and bone.

Those grey-red eyes widened, and closed.

I seemed to watch all this from a small, detached part of my brain. I had quite forgotten all my intentions to return proof of the working of time travel, or even to find Weena: I suspected at that moment that this was why I had returned into time – for this moment of revenge: for Weena, and for the murder of the earth, and my own earlier indignity. I dropped the Morlock – unconscious or dead, it was no more than a bundle of hair and bones – and grabbed for its companions, swinging my poker.

Then I heard a voice – distinctively Morlock, but quite unlike the others in tone and depth – it issued a single, imperative syllable. I turned, my arms soaked in blood up to the elbows of my jacket, and made ready for more fighting.

Before me, now, stood a Morlock who did not run from me. Though he was naked like the rest, his coat of hair seemed to have been brushed and prepared, so that he had something of the effect of a groomed dog, made to stand upright like a man. I took a massive step forward, my club held firm in both hands.

Calmly, the Morlock raised his right hand – something glinted there – and there was a green flash, and I felt the world tip backwards from under me, pitching me down beside my glowing machine; and I knew no more!