The Time Machine Chapter 16

Books at bedtime, the time machine. Chapter 16. After the story. I know, he said, after a pause, that all this will be absolutely incredible to you. But to me, the one incredible thing is that I am here tonight in this old familiar room looking into your friendly faces and telling you these strange adventures. He looked at the medical man. No, I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my ascitation of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest and taking it as a story. What do you think of it? He took up his pipe and began in his older custom manner to tap it nervously upon the bars of the grade. There was a momentary stillness.

Then chairs began to creak and shoes to scrape upon the carpet. I took my eyes off the time traveller's face and looked around at his audience. They were in the dark and little spots of colour swam before them. The medical man seemed absorbed in the contemplation of our host. The editor was looking hard at the end of his cigar, the sick. The journalist fumbled for his watch. The others, as far as I remember, were motionless. The editor stood up with a sigh. "What a pity it is that you're not a writer of stories," he said, putting his hand on the time traveller's shoulders. "You don't believe it?"

"Well, I thought not." The time traveller turned to us. "Where are the matches," he said. He let one and spoke over his pipe, perfect. "To tell you the truth, I hardly believe that myself, and yet, his eye fell with a mutant query upon the withered white flower upon the little table." Then he turned over the hand holding the pipe, and I saw he was looking at some half-heeled scars on his knuckle. The medical man rose, came to the lamp and examined the flowers.

"Well, this is odd," he said. The psychologist lent forward to see holding out his hand for a specimen. "I'm hanged if it isn't a quarter to one," said the journalist. "How should we get home?" Plenty of caps at the station said the psychologist. "It's a curious thing," said the medical man, "but I certainly don't know the natural order of these flowers.

May I have them?" The time traveller hesitated, then suddenly, certainly not. "Where did you really get them?" said the medical man. The time traveller put his hand to his head. He spoke like one who was trying to keep hold of an idea that eluded him. They were put in my pocket by Weiner when I travelled into time. He stared around the room. "I'm damned if it isn't all living this room and you, and the atmosphere of every day is just too much of my memory. Did I ever make a time machine, or a model of a time machine? Or is it all only a dream?" They say life is a dream, a precious poor dream at times, but I can't stand another that won't fit. "It's madness, and where did the dream come from? I must look at that machine if there is one."

He caught up the lamp swiftly and carried it, flaring red through the door into the corridor. We followed him. There, in the flickering light of the lamp was the machine sure enough, squat, ugly, and askew. A thing of brass, ebony, ivory, and translucent, glimmering quartz. Solid to the touch, for I put my hand out and felt the rail of it, and with brown spots and smears upon the ivory and bits of grass and moss upon the lower parts, and one bent rail awry. The time traveller put the lamp down on the bench and ran his hand all along the damaged rail. "It's all right now," he said. "The story I told you is true. I'm sorry to have brought you out here in the cold. He took up the lamp and, in an absolute silence, we returned to the smoking-room. He came into the hall with us and helped the editor on with his coat. The medical man looked into his face and, with a certain hesitation, told him he was suffering from overwork, at which he laughed hugely. I remember him standing in the open doorway, bawling goodnight. I shared a cab with the editor. He thought the tale of Gordi Lai. For my own part, I was unable to come to a conclusion. The story was so fantastic and incredible, the telling so credible and sober. I lay awake most of the night thinking about it. I determined to go next day and see the time traveller again." I was told. He was in the laboratory and being on easy terms in the house, I went up to him. The laboratory, however, was empty. I stared for a minute at the time machine and put out my hand and touched the lever. At that, the squat substantial looking mass-swaid, like a bow shaken by the wind. Its instability startled me extremely, and I had a queer reminiscence the childish days when I used to be forbidden to meddle. I came back through the corridor. The time traveller meant me in the smoking-room. He was coming from the house. He had a small camera under one arm and a knapsack under the other. He laughed when he saw me and gave me an elbow to shake. I'm frightfully busy, he said, with that thing in there. But is it not some hoax, I said, "Do you really travel through time?" "Really?" "And truly I do." And he looked frankly into my eyes.

He hesitated. His eye wandered around the room. "I only want half an hour," he said. "I know why you came and it's awfully good of you." There are some magazines here. If you'll stop to lunch, I'll prove you this time that travelling up to the Hilt specimens and all. If you'll forgive my leaving for now. I consented, hardly comprehending then the full import of his works, and he nodded and went on down the corridor. I heard the door of the laboratory slam, seated myself in a chair and took up a daily paper. What was he going to do before lunchtime? Then suddenly I was reminded by an advertisement that I had promised to meet Richardson the publisher at two. I looked at my watch and saw that I could barely save that engagement. I got up and went down the passage to tell the time traveller. As I took hold of the handle of the door, I heard an exclamation, oddly truncated at the end, and a click and a third. A gust of air whirled around me as I opened the door, and from within came a sound a broken glass falling on the floor. The time traveller was not there. I seemed to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling bass of black and brass for a moment. A figure so transparent that the bench behind with its sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct, but this pantasm vanished as I rubbed my eyes. The time machine had gone. Save, precipcyding stir of dust, the further end of the laboratory was empty, a pain of the skylight had apparently just been blown out.

I felt an unreasonable amazement. I knew that something strange had happened, and for the moment could not distinguish what the strange thing might be. As I stood staring, the door into the garden opened, and the man servant appeared. We looked at each other, then ideas began to come. Has Mr. gone out that way? I said I. No sir. No one has come out this way. I was expecting to find him here. At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richston, I stayed on waiting for the time traveller, waiting for the second, perhaps still strange a story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him, but I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The time traveller vanished three years ago, and as everybody knows now, he has never returned. Epilogue. One cannot choose, but wonder, will he ever return? It may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking hairy savages of the age of unpolished stone, or into the abyss of the creotaceous sea, or among the grotesque sorrians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times. He may even now, if I may use the phrase, be wondering on some plate, sorrious haunted, off-lit choral sea, or beside the lonely, saline seas of the triassic age.

Or did he go forward into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of her own time answered, and it's where are some problems solved? Into the manhood of the race, for I, for my own part, cannot think that these latter days of the weak experiment, fragmentary theory, a mutual discord, are indeed man's culminating time. I say for my own part, he, I know, for the question had been discussed among us long before the time machine was made, thought but cheerlessly, of the advancement of mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me, the future is still black and blank, as is vast ignorance. Lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story, and I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers, shriveled now and brown and flat and brittle, to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.