Читать книгу The Time Ships - Stephen Baxter - Страница 27

I was forced to wait three days until Nebogipfel pronounced himself ready to depart; it was, he said, a matter of waiting until the earth and our part of the Sphere entered the proper configuration with each other.

My thoughts turned to the journey ahead with some anticipation – I would not say fear, for I had, after all, already survived one such crossing of interplanetary space, although insensible at the time – but rather with quickening interest. I speculated on the means by which Nebogipfel’s space-yacht might be propelled. I thought of Verne, who had his argumentative Baltimore gun clubbers firing that ludicrous cannon, with its man-bearing shell, across the gap between the earth and moon. But it only took a little mental calculation to show that an acceleration sufficient to launch a projectile beyond the earth’s gravity would also have been so strong as to smear my poor flesh, and Nebogipfel’s, across the interior of the shell like strawberry jam.

What, then?

It is a commonplace that inter-planetary space is without air; and so we could not fly like birds to the earth, for the birds rely on the ability of their wings to push against the air. No air – no push! Perhaps, I speculated, my space yacht would be driven by some advanced form of firework rocket – for a rocket, which flies by pushing out behind it masses of its own spent propellant, would be able to function in the airlessness of space, if oxygen were carried to sustain its combustion …

But these were mundane speculations, grounded in my nineteenth-century understanding. How could I tell what might be possible by the year A.D. 657,208? I imagined yachts tacking against the sun’s gravity as if against an invisible wind; or, I thought, there might be some manipulation of magnetic or other fields.

Thus my speculations raged, until Nebogipfel came to summon me, for the last time, from the Interior.

As we dropped into Morlock darkness I stood with my head tipped back, peering up at the receding sunlight; and – just before I donned my goggles – I promised myself that the next time my face felt the warmth of man’s star, it would be in my own century!

I think I had been expecting to be transported to some Morlock equivalent of a port, with great ebony space yachts nuzzling against the Sphere like liners against a dock.

Well, there was none of that; instead Nebogipfel escorted me – across a distance of no more than a few miles, via strips of moving Floor – to an area which was kept clear of artefacts and partitions, and Morlocks in general, but was otherwise unremarkable. And in the middle of this area was a small chamber, a clear-walled box a little taller than I was – like a lift compartment – which sat there, squat, on the star-spattered Floor.

At Nebogipfel’s gesture, I stepped into the compartment. Nebogipfel followed, and behind us the compartment sealed itself shut with a hiss of its diaphragm door. The compartment was roughly rectangular, its rounded corners and edges giving it something of the look of a lozenge. There was no furniture; there were, however, upright poles fixed at intervals about the cabin.

Nebogipfel wrapped his pale fingers around one of these poles. ‘You should prepare yourself. At our launch, the change in effective gravity is sudden.’

I found these calm words disturbing! Nebogipfel’s eyes, blackened by the goggles, were on me with their usual disconcerting mixture of curiosity and analysis; and I saw his fingers tighten their grip on the pillar.

And then – it happened faster than I can relate it – the Floor opened. The compartment fell out of the Sphere, and I and Nebogipfel with it!

I cried out, and I grabbed at a pole like an infant clinging to its mother’s leg.

I looked upwards, and there was the surface of the Sphere, now turned into an immense, black Roof which occluded half the universe from my gaze. At the centre of this ceiling I could see a rectangle of paler darkness which was the door through which we had emerged; even as I watched, that door diminished with our distance, and in any event it was already folding closed against us. The door tracked across my view with magisterial slowness, showing how our compartment-capsule was starting to tumble in space. It was clear to me what had happened: any schoolboy can achieve the same effect by whirling a conker around his head, and then releasing the string. Well, the ‘string’ which had held us inside the rotating Sphere – the solidity of its Floor – had now vanished; and we had been thrown out into space, without ceremony.

And below me – I could hardly bear to glance down – there was a pit of stars, a floorless cavern into which I, and Nebogipfel, were falling forever!

‘Nebogipfel – for the love of God – what has happened to us? Has some disaster occurred?’

He regarded me. Disconcertingly, his feet were hovering a few inches above the floor of the capsule – for, while the capsule fell through space, so we, within it, fell too, like peas in a matchbox!

‘We have been released from the Sphere. The effects of its spin are –’

‘I understand all that,’ I said, ‘but why? Are we intending to fall all the way to the earth?’

His answer I found quite terrifying.

‘Essentially,’ he said, ‘yes.’

And then I had no further energy for questions, for I became aware that I too was starting to float about that little cabin like a balloon; and with that realization came a fight with nausea which lasted many minutes.

At length I regained some control over my body.

I had Nebogipfel explain the principles of this flight to the earth. And when he had done so, I realized how elegant and economical was the Morlocks’ solution to travel between the Sphere and its cordon of surviving planets – so much so that I should have anticipated it, and dismissed all my nonsensical speculations of rockets – and yet, here was another example of the inhuman bias of the Morlock soul! Instead of the grandiose space yacht I had imagined, I would travel from Venus’s orbit to the earth in nothing more grand than this lozenge-shaped coffin.

Few men of my century realized quite how much of the universe is vacancy, with a few pockets of warmth and life swimming through it, and what immense speeds are therefore required to traverse interplanetary distances in a practicable time. But the Morlocks’ Sphere was, at its equator, already moving at enormous velocities. So the Morlocks had no need of rockets, or guns, to reach inter-planetary speeds. They simply dropped their capsules out of the Sphere, and let the rotation do the rest.

And so they had done with us. At such speeds, the Morlock told me, we should reach the vicinity of the earth in just forty-seven hours.

I looked around the capsule, but I could see no signs of rockets, or any other motive force. I floated in that little cabin, feeling huge and clumsy; my beard drifted before my face in a grey cloud, and my jacket persisted in rucking itself up around my shoulder-blades. ‘I understand the principles of the launch,’ I said to Nebogipfel. ‘But how is this capsule steered?’

He hesitated for some seconds. ‘It is not. Have you misunderstood what I have told you? The capsule needs no motive force, for the velocity imparted to it by the Sphere –’

‘Yes,’ I said anxiously, ‘I followed all of that. But what if, now, we were to detect that we were off track, by some mistake of our launch – that we were going to miss the earth?’ For I realized that the most minute error at the Sphere, of even a fraction of inter-planetary distances – cause us to miss the earth by millions of miles – and then, presumably, we would go sailing off forever into the void between the stars, allocating blame until our air expired!

He seemed confused. ‘There has been no mistake.’

‘But still,’ I stressed, ‘if there were, perhaps through some mechanical flaw – then how should we, in this capsule, correct our trajectory?’

He thought for some time before answering. ‘Flaws do not occur,’ he repeated. ‘And so this capsule has no need of corrective propulsion, as you suggest.’

At first I could not quite believe this, and I had to have Nebogipfel repeat it several times before I accepted its truth. But true it was! – after launch, the craft flew between the planets with no more intelligence than a hurled stone: my capsule fell across space as helpless as Verne’s lunar cannon-shot.

As I protested the foolishness of this arrangement, I got the impression that the Morlock was becoming shocked – as if I were pressing some debating point of moral dubiety on a vicar of ostensibly open mind – and I gave it up.

The capsule twisted slowly, causing the remote stars and the immense wall that was the Sphere to wheel around us; I think that without that rotation I might have been able to imagine that I was safe and at rest, in some desert night, perhaps; but the tumbling made it impossible to forget that I was in a remote, fragile box, falling without support or attachment or means of direction. I spent the first few of my hours in that capsule in a paralysis of fear! I could not grow accustomed to the clarity of the walls around us, nor to the idea that, now that we were launched, we had no means of altering our trajectory. The journey had the elements of a nightmare – a fall through endless darkness, with no means of adjusting the situation to save myself. And there you have, in a nutshell, the essential difference between the minds of Morlock and human. For what man would trust his life to a ballistic journey, across inter-planetary distances, without any means of altering his course? But such was the New Morlock way: after a half-million years of steadily perfected technology, the Morlock would trust himself unthinkingly to his machines, for his machines never failed him.

I, though, was no Morlock!

Gradually, however, my mood softened. Apart from the slow tumble of the capsule, which continued throughout my journey to the earth, the hours passed in a stillness and silence broken only by the whisper-like breathing of my Morlock companion. The craft was tolerably warm, and so I was suspended in complete physical comfort. The walls were made of that extruding Floor-stuff, and, at a touch from Nebogipfel, I was provided with food, drink and other requirements, although the selection was more limited than in the Sphere, which had a larger Memory than our capsule.

So we sailed through the grand cathedral of interplanetary space with utter ease. I began to feel as if I were disembodied, and a mood of utter detachment and independence settled on me. It was not like a journey, nor even – after those first hours – a nightmare; instead, it took on the qualities of a dream.