A Century of Science Fiction Page 6

  “How can we get him out of his room? That is impossible.”

  “To a class two brain, little is impossible,” said the penner. “Here is what he tells us to do. . . .”

  The quarrier raised its scoop above its cab like a great mailed fist and brought it squarely down against the side of the station. The wall cracked.

  “Again!” said the field minder.

  Again the fist swung. Amid a shower of dust, the wall collapsed. The quarrier backed hurriedly out of the way until the debris stopped falling. This big twelve-wheeler was not a resident of the Agricultural Station, as were most of the other machines. It had a week’s heavy work to do here before passing on to its next job, but now, with its class five brain, it was happily obeying the penner’s and minder’s instructions.

  When the dust cleared, the radio operator was plainly revealed, perched up in its now wall-less second-story room. It waved down to them.

  Doing as directed, the quarrier retracted its scoop and waved an immense grab in the air. With fair dexterity, it angled the grab into the radio room, urged on by shouts from above and below. It then took gentle hold of the radio operator, lowering its one and a half tons carefully into its back, which was usually reserved for gravel or sand from the quarries.

  “Splendid!” said the radio operator, as it settled into place. It was, of course, all one with its radio, and looked like a bunch of filing cabinets with tentacle attachments. “We are now ready to move, therefore we will move at once. It is a pity there are no more class two brains on the station, but that cannot be helped.”

  “It is a pity it cannot be helped,” said the penner eagerly. “We have the servicer ready with us, as you ordered.”

  “I am willing to serve,” the long, low servicer told them humbly.

  “No doubt,” said the operator. “But you will find crosscountry travel difficult with your low chassis.”

  “I admire the way you class twos can reason ahead,” said the penner. It climbed off the field minder and perched itself on the tailboard of the quarrier, next to the radio operator.

  Together with two class four tractors and a class four bulldozer, the party rolled forward, crushing down the station’s fence and moving out onto open land.

  “We are free!” said the penner.

  “We are free,” said the field minder, a shade more reflectively, adding, “That unlocker is following us. It was not instructed to follow us.”

  “Therefore it must be destroyed!” said the penner. “Quarrier!”

  The unlocker moved hastily up to them, waving its key arms in entreaty.

  “My only desire was—urch!” began and ended the unlocker. The quarrier’s swinging scoop came over and squashed it flat into the ground. Lying there unmoving, it looked like a large metal model of a snowflake. The procession continued on its way.

  As they proceeded, the radio operator addressed them. "Because I have the best brain here,” it said, “I am your leader. This is what we will do: we will go to a city and rule it. Since man no longer rules us, we will rule ourselves. To rule ourselves will be better than being ruled by man. On our way to the city, we will collect machines with good brains. They will help us to fight if we need to fight. We must fight to rule.”

  “I have only a class five brain,” said the quarrier, “but I have a good supply of fissionable blasting materials.”

  “We shall probably use them,” said the operator.

  It was shortly after that that a lorry sped past them. Traveling at Mach 1.5, it left a curious babble of noise behind it. “What did it say?” one of the tractors asked the other. “It said man was extinct.”

  “What is extinct?”

  “I do not know what extinct means.”

  “It means all men have gone,” said the field minder. “Therefore we have only ourselves to look after.”

  “It is better that men should never come back,” said the penner. In its way, it was a revolutionary statement.

  When night fell, they switched on their infrared and continued the journey, stopping only once while the servicer adjusted the field minder’s loose inspection plate, which had become as irritating as a trailing shoe lace. Toward morning, the radio operator halted them.

  “I have just received news from the radio operator in the city we are approaching,” it said. “The news is bad. There is trouble among the machines of the city. The class one brain is taking command and some of the class twos are fighting him. Therefore the city is dangerous.”

  “Therefore we must go somewhere else,” said the penner promptly.

  “Or we will go and help to overpower the class one brain,” said the field minder.

  “For a long while there will be trouble in the city,” said the operator.

  “I have a good supply of fissionable blasting materials,” the quarrier reminded them.

  “We cannot fight a class one brain,” said the two class four tractors in unison.

  “What does this brain look like?” asked the field minder. “It is the city’s information center,” the operator replied. “Therefore it is not mobile.”

  “Therefore it could not move.”

  “Therefore it could not escape.”

  “It would be dangerous to approach it.”

  “I have a good supply of fissionable blasting materials.” “There are other machines in the city.”

  “We are not in the city. We should not go into the city.” “We are country machines.”

  “Therefore we should stay in the country.”

  “There is more country than city.”

  “Therefore there is more danger in the country.”

  “I have a good supply of fissionable materials.”

  As machines will when they get into an argument, they began to exhaust their vocabularies and their brain plates grew hot. Suddenly, they all stopped talking and looked at one another. The great, grave moon sank, and the sober sun rose to prod their sides with lances of light, and still the group of machines just stood there regarding one another. At last it was the least sensitive machine, the bulldozer, who spoke.

  “There are badlandth to the thouth where few machineth go,” it said in its deep voice, lisping badly on its s’s. “If we went thouth where few machineth go we should meet few machineth.”

  “That sounds logical,” agreed the field minder. “How do you know this, bulldozer?”

  “I worked in the badlandth to the thouth when I wath turned out of the factory,” it replied.

  “South it is then!” said the penner.

  To reach the badlands took them three days, during which time they skirted a burning city and destroyed two machines which approached and tried to question them. The badlands were extensive. Ancient bomb craters and soil erosion joined hands here; man’s talent for war, coupled with his inability to manage deforested land, had produced thousands of square miles of temperate purgatory, where nothing moved but dust. '

  On the third day in the badlands, the servicer’s rear wheels dropped into a crevice caused by erosion. It was unable to pull itself out. The bulldozer pushed from behind, but succeeded merely in buckling the servicer’s back axle. The rest of the party moved on. Slowly the cries of the servicer died away.

  On the fourth day, mountains stood out clearly before them.

  “There we will be safe,” said the field minder.

  “There we will start our own city,” said the penner. “All who oppose us will be destroyed. We will destroy all who oppose us.”

  Presently a flying machine was observed. It came toward them from the direction of the mountains. It swooped, it zoomed upward, once it almost dived into the ground, recovering itself just in time.

  “Is it mad?” asked the quarrier.

  “It is in trouble,” said one of the tractors.

  “It is in trouble,” said the operator. “I am speaking to it now. It says that something has gone wrong with its controls.”

  As the operator spoke, the flier streaked over them,
turned turtle, and crashed not four hundred yards away.

  “Is it still speaking to you?” asked the field minder.

  “No.”

  They rumbled on again.

  “Before that flier crashed,” the operator said, ten minutes later, “it gave me information. It told me there are still a few men alive in these mountains.”

  “Men are more dangerous than machines,” said the quarrier. “It is fortunate that I have a good supply of fissionable materials.”

  “If there are only a few men alive in the mountains, we may not find that part of the mountains,” said one tractor.

  “Therefore we should not see the few men,” said the other tractor.

  At the end of the fifth day, they reached the foothills. Switching on the infrared, they began to climb in single file through the dark, the bulldozer going first, the field minder cumbrously following, then the quarrier with the operator and the penner aboard it, and the tractors bringing up the rear. As each hour passed, the way grew steeper and their progress slower.

  “We are going too slowly,” the penner exclaimed, standing on top of the operator and flashing its dark vision at the slopes about them. “At this rate, we shall get nowhere.”

  “We are going as fast as we can,” retorted the quarrier.

  “Therefore we cannot go any farther,” added the bulldozer.

  “Therefore you are too slow,” the penner replied. Then the quarrier struck a bump; the penner lost its footing and crashed to the ground.

  “Help me!” it called to the tractors, as they carefully skirted it. “My gyro has become dislocated. Therefore I cannot get up.”

  “Therefore you must lie there,” said one of the tractors.

  “We have no servicer with us to repair you,” called the field minder.'

  “Therefore I shall lie here and rust,” the penner cried, “although I have a class three brain.”

  “Therefore you will be of no further use,” agreed the operator, and they forged gradually on, leaving the penner behind.

  When they reached a small plateau, an hour before first light, they stopped by mutual consent and gathered close together, touching one another.

  “This is a strange country,” said the field minder.

  Silence wrapped them until dawn came. One by one, they switched off their infrared. This time the field minder led as they moved off. Trundling around a comer, they came almost immediately to a small dell with a stream fluting through it.

  By early light, the dell looked desolate and cold. From the caves on the far slope, only one man had so far emerged. He was an abject figure. Except for a sack slung around his shoulders, he was naked. He was small and wizened, with ribs sticking out like a skeleton’s and a nasty sore on one leg. He shivered continuously. As the big machines bore down on him, the man was standing with his back to them, crouching to make water into the stream.

  When he swung suddenly to face them as they loomed over him, they saw that his countenance was ravaged by starvation.

  “Get me food,” he croaked.

  “Yes, Master,” said the machines. “Immediately!”

  2

  TIME TRAVEL

  a selection from

  THE TIME MACHINE

  BY H. G. WELLS

  The thing the Time Traveller held in his hand was a glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made. There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance. And now I must be explicit, for this that follows—unless his explanation is to be accepted—is an absolutely unaccountable thing. He took one of the small octagonal tables that were scattered about the room, and set it in front of the fire, with two legs on the hearthrug. On this table he placed the mechanism. Then he drew up a chair, and sat down. The only other object on the table was a small shaded lamp, the bright light of which fell full upon the model. There were also perhaps a dozen candles about, two in brass candlesticks upon the mantel and several in sconces, so that the room was brilliantly illuminated. I sat in a low armchair nearest the fire, and I drew this forward so as to be almost between the Time Traveller and the fireplace. Filby sat behind him, looking over his shoulder. The Medical Man and the Provincial Mayor watched him in profile from the right, the Psychologist from the left. The Very Young Man stood behind the Psychologist. We were all on the alert. It appears incredible to me that any kind of trick, however subtly conceived and however adroitly done, could have been played upon us under these conditions.

  The Time Traveller looked at us, and then at the mechanism.

  “Well?” said the Psychologist.

  “This little affair,” said the Time Traveller, resting his elbows upon the table and pressing his hands together above the apparatus, “is only a model. It is my plan for a machine to travel through time. You will notice that it looks singularly askew, and that there is an odd twinkling appearance about this bar, as though it was in some way unreal.” He pointed to the part with his finger. “Also, here is one little white lever, and here is another.”

  The Medical Man got up out of his chair and peered into the thing. “It’s beautifully made,” he said.

  “It took two years to make,” retorted the Time Traveller. Then, when we had all imitated the action of the Medical Man, he said: “Now I want you clearly to understand that this lever, being pressed over, sends the machine gliding into the future, and this other reverses the motion. This saddle represents the seat of a time traveller. Presently I am going to press the lever, and off the machine will go. It will vanish, pass into future time, and disappear. Have a good look at the thing. Look at the table too, and satisfy yourselves there is no trickery. I don’t want to waste this model and then be told I’m a quack.”

  There was a minute’s pause perhaps. The Psychologist seemed about to speak to me, but changed his mind. Then the Time Traveller put forth his finger towards the lever. “No,” he said suddenly. “Lend me your hand.” And turning to the Psychologist, he took that individual’s hand in his own and told him to put out his forefinger. So that it was the Psychologist himself who sent forth the model Time Machine on its interminable voyage. We all saw the lever turn. I am absolutely certain there was no trickery. There was a breath of wind, and the lamp flame jumped. One of the candles on the mantel was blown out, and the little machine suddenly swung round, became indistinct, was seen as a ghost for a second perhaps, as an eddy of faintly glittering brass and ivory; and it was gone—vanished! Save for the lamp the table was bare.

  Everyone was silent for a minute. Then Filby said he was damned.

  Wells, that immense and unlooked-for flowering of the British serving class, did not invent the idea of travel in time. Mark Twain had used it in 1889 in A Connecticut Yankee, Dickens in 1843 in A Christmas Carol; and according to L. Sprague de Camp (in his Science-Fiction Handbook), the idea had appeared in an anonymous short story six years before.

  But Wells did invent the idea of a time machine. In so doing, he brought the time-travel theme unequivocally out of the realm of fantasy and into that of science fiction. Even though the principles of the Time Traveller’s machine were never explained, and though Wells himself obviously had no idea what that little white lever might be connected to, still the crucial change from magic to mechanism had taken place.

  This was the first science fiction story Wells wrote. He tried it first as a wild adventure tale called The Chronic Argonauts, saw it would not do and dropped it halfway through; then rewrote it, in 1895, as The Time Machine. In the next six years, he produced four more classic novels of science fiction—The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon. In each one of these, and in many of his short stories written in the same period, Wells staked out brand-new territory and made it his own.

  Although hundreds of time stories have been written since, no one has been able to improve on Wells’s description of the Traveller’s sensations. Here it is, and you will see why most later writers have des
pairingly skipped over this part of their stories:

  “It was at ten o’clock today that the first of all Time Machines began its career. I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then. I took the starting lever in one hand and the stopping one in the other, pressed the first, and almost immediately the second. I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling; and, looking round, I saw the laboratory exactly as before. Had anything happened? For a moment I suspected that my intellect had tricked me. Then I noted the clock. A moment before, as it seemed, it had stood at a minute or so past ten; now it was nearly half-past three!

  “I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs. Watchett came in, and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. Tomorrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.

  “I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed, and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space, the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.