cantor

Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships
v1.0 (02-feb-01) Scanning, layout and quick proofreading by 4i Publications.


To my wife Sandra,
and the memory of H. G.




Editor's Note

The attached account was given to me by the owner of a small second-hand bookshop, situated just off the Charing Cross Road in London. He told me it had turned up as a manuscript in an unlabeled box, in acollection of books which had been bequeathed to him after the death of a friend; the bookseller passed the manuscript on to me as a curiosity-"You might make something of it"-knowing of my interest in the speculative fiction of the nineteenth century.
The manuscript itself was typewritten on commonplace paper, but a pencil note attested that it had been transcribed from an original "written by hand on apaper of such age that it has crumbled beyond repair." That original, if it ever existed, is lost. There is no note as to the manuscript's author, or origin.
I have restricted my editing to a superficial polishing, meaning only to eliminate some of the errors and duplications of a manuscript which was evidently written in haste.
What are we to make of it? In the Time Traveler's words, we must"take it as a lie-or a prophecy... Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction..." Without further evidence, we must regard this work as a fantasy-or as an elaborate hoax-­but if there is even a grain of truth in the account contained in these pages, then a startling new light is shed, not merely on one of our most famous works of fiction (iffiction it was!), but also on the nature of our universe and our place in it.
I present the account here without further comment.

Stephen Baxter
January 1995

Prologue

On the Friday morning after my return from futurity, I awoke long after dawn, from the deepest of dreamless sleeps.
I got out of bed and threw back the curtains. The sun was making his usual sluggish progress up the sky, andI remembered how, from the accelerated perspective of a Time Traveler, the sun had fair hopped across heaven! But now, it seemed, I was embedded in oozing time once more, like an insect in seeping amber.
The noises of a Richmond morning gathered outside my win­dow: the hoof-steps of horses, the rattle of wheels on cobbles, the banging of doors. A steam tram, spewing out smoke and sparks, madeits clumsy way along the Petersham Road, and the gull-like cries of hawkers came floating on the air. I found my thoughts drifting away from my gaudy adventures in time and back to a mundane plane: I considered the contents of the latest Pall Mall Gazette, and stock movements, and I entertained an an­ticipation that the morning's post might bring the latest Ameri­can Journal of Science, which wouldcontain some speculations of mine on the findings of A. Michelson and E. Morley on cer­tain peculiarities of light, reported in that journal four years ear­lier, in 1887...
And so on! The details of the everyday crowded into my head, and by contrast the memory of my adventure in futurity came to seem fantastical-even absurd. As I thought it over now, it seemed to me that the whole experience hadhad something of a hallucinatory almost dreamlike quality there had been that sense of precipitate
falling, the haziness of everything about time travel, and at last my plunge into the nightmarish world of A.D. 802,701. The grip of the ordinary on our imaginations is remarkable. Standing there in my pajamas, something of the uncertainty which had, in the end, assailed rte last night returned,and I started to doubt the very existence of the Time Machine itself - despite my very clear memories of the two years of my life I had expended in the nuts and bolts of its construction, not to mention the two decades previous, during which I had teased out the theory of time travel from anomalies I had observed during my studies of physical optics.
I thought back to my conversation with my...