But, you may not be surprised to read if you have followed me this far, this mood – it was a sort of elegiac acceptance – did not persist with me for long!
I took to peering about. I strained myself to hear, to see any detail, the slightest mottling in that shell of illumination that surrounded me; but – for a while – there was naught but infinite silence, intolerable brightness.
I had become a disembodied mote, presumably immortal, and embedded in this greatest of artifices: a universe whose forces and particles were entirely given over to Mind. It was magnificent – but it was terrible, inhuman, chilling – and a sort of crushing dismay fell on me.
Had I passed out of being, into something that was neither being nor not-being? Well, if I had – I was discovering – I did not yet have the peace of the Eternal. I still had the soul of a man, with all the freight of inquisitiveness and thirst for action which has always been part of human nature. There is too much of the Occidental about me, and soon I had had my fill of this interval of disembodied Contemplation! …
Then, after an unmeasured interval, I realized that the brilliancy of the sky was not absolute. There was a sort of hazing at the edge of my vision – the slightest darkening.
I watched for geological ages, it seemed to me, and through that long waiting the hazing grew more distinct: it was a sort of circle about my vision, as if I was peering out through the mouth of a cave. And then, in the middle of that spectral cave-mouth, I made out an irregular cloud, a mottling against the general glare; I saw a collection of rough rods and discs, all indistinct, arranged like phantoms over the stars. In one corner of this view there was a cylinder coloured pure green.
I felt a passionate impatience. What was this irruption of shadows into the interminable Noon of this Optimal History?
The surrounding cave-shape grew more clear; I wondered if this was some submerged memory of the Palaeocene. And as for that misty collection of rods and discs, I was struck by an impression that I had seen this arrangement before: it was as familiar as my own hand, I thought, and yet, in this transformed context, I could not recognize it …
And then the realization rushed upon me. The rods and other components were my Time Machine – the lines over there, obscuring that constellation, were the bars of brass which made up the fundamental frame of the device; and those discs, wreathed about with galaxies, must be my chronometric dials. It was my original machine, which I had thought lost, dismantled and finally destroyed in that German attack on London in 1938!
The coalescing of this vision proceeded apace. The brass rods glittered – I saw there was a sprinkling of dust over the faces of the chronometric dials, whose hands whirled about – and I recognized the green glow of Plattnerite which suffused the doped quartz of the infrastructure. I looked down and made out two wide, fat, darker cylinders – they were my own legs, clothed in jungle twill! – and those pale, hairy, complex objects must be my hands, resting on the machine’s control levers.
And now, at last, I understood the meaning of that ‘cave-mouth’ around my vision. It was the frame of my eye-sockets, nose and cheeks about my field of view: once more I was looking out from that darkest of caves – my own skull.
I felt as if I was being lowered into my body. Fingers and legs attached themselves to my consciousness. I could feel the levers, cool and firm, in my hand, and there was a light prickling of sweat on my brow. It was a little, I suppose, like recovering from the oblivion of chloroform; slowly, subtly, I was coming into myself. And now I felt a swaying, and that plummeting sensation of time travel.
Beyond the Time Machine there was only dark – I could make out nothing of the world – but I could feel, from its decreasing lurching, that the machine was slowing. I looked around – I was rewarded with the weight of a laden skull on a stem of a neck; after my disembodied state it felt as if I were swivelling an artillery piece – but there were only the faintest traces of the Optimal History left in my view: here a wisp of galaxy clusters, there a fragment of star-light. In that last instant, before my intangible link was finally broken, I saw again the round, solemn visage of my Watcher, with his immense, thoughtful eyes.
Then it was gone – all of it – and I was fully in myself again; and I felt a surge of savage, primitive joy!
The Time Machine lurched to a halt. The thing went rolling over, and I was flung headlong through the air, into pitch darkness.
There was a crack of thunder in my ears. A hard, steady rain was pounding with a brute force against my scalp and jungle shirt. In a moment I was wet to the skin: it was a fine welcome back to corporeality, I thought!
I had been deposited on a patch of sodden, soft turf in front of the overturned machine. It was quite dark. I seemed to be on a little lawn, surrounded by bushes whose leaves were dancing under the raindrops. The rebounding drops hung in a little cloud about the machine. Close by I heard the bubble of a mass of water, and rain pattered into that greater mass of liquid.
I stood up and looked about. There was a building close by, visible only as a silhouette against the charcoal-grey sky. I noticed now that there was a faint green glow, coming from beneath the tipped-over machine. I saw that it came from a vial, a cylinder of glass perhaps six inches tall: it was a common eight-ounce graduated medicine bottle. This had evidently been lodged in the frame of the machine, but now it had fallen to the grass.
I reached to pick up the flask. The greenish glow came from a powder within: it was Plattnerite.
My name was called.
I turned, startled. The voice had been soft, almost masked by the hissing of the rain on the grass.
There was a figure standing not ten feet from me: short, almost childlike, but with scalp and back coated by long, lank hair that had been plastered flat by the rain against pale flesh. Huge eyes, grey-red, were fixed on me.
‘Nebogipfel –?’
And then some circuit closed in my bewildered brain.
I turned, and inspected that building’s blocky outline once more. There was the iron balcony, over there the dining-room kitchen with a small window ajar, and there was the blocky form of the laboratory …
It was my home; my machine had deposited me on the sloping lawn at the rear, between the house and the Thames. I had returned – after all this! – to Richmond.