Identity Theft and other stories (collection)

But it’s also because of Wells’s staggering imagination: he invented most of the staples of science fiction, including time travel (The Time Machine), invisibility (The Invisible Man), Martians (The War of the Worlds), and antigravity (The First Men in the Moon). In fact, I sometimes quip that my 1994 novel End of an Era was my attempt to combine all those things into one: it’s a time-travel story of invisible Martians who have harnessed antigravity.

Those who know Wells only from movies might be unaware that the Time Traveler in The Time Machine doesn’t end his journey in the year 802,701 A.D. with the Morlocks and the Eloi. Rather, after escaping from there, he goes much, much further into the future, visiting the waning days of the world, when the sun, bloated and red, hangs low on the horizon. That landscape has haunted me ever since I first read Wells’s description of it, and when asked to do a story for an anthology entitled Future War, I decided to revisit it.

* * *

For once, at least, I grasped the mental operations of the Morlocks. Suppressing a strong inclination to laugh, I stepped through the bronze frame and up to the Time Machine. I was surprised to find it had been carefully oiled and cleaned. I have suspected since that the Morlocks had even partially taken it to pieces while trying in their dim way to grasp its purpose.

—H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, 1895

* * *

The Morlock named Grach had heard from others of his kind what the journey through time was like, but those words hadn’t prepared him for the reality. As he moved forward, the ghostly world around him flashed, now night, now day, a flapping wing. The strobing light was painful, the darkness a bandage too soon ripped away. But Grach endured it; although he could have thrown his pale-white arm in front of his lidless eyes, the spectacle was too incredible not to watch.

Grach held the left-hand lever steadily, meaning the skimming through tomorrows should have happened at a constant rate. But the apparent time it took for each day-to-night cycle was clearly growing longer. Grach knew what was happening of course; the others had told him. Earth’s own day was lengthening as the planet in its senescence settled in to be tidally locked, the same face always toward the sun.

Such perpetual day would have been intolerable for Grach, or any Morlock, except that the sun itself was growing much, much dimmer, even as it grew larger or as Earth spiraled closer to it; debate still raged among the Morlocks about which phenomenon accounted for the solar disk now dominating so much of the sky. The giant red sphere that bobbed about the western horizon—never fully rising, never completely setting—was a dying coal whose wan light was all concentrated in the red end of the spectrum, the one color that did not sting the eyes.

Eventually, as Grach continued his headlong rush into futurity, the bloated sun came to rest, moving not at all in the sky, half its vast bulk below the horizon where the still water of the ocean touched the dark firmament. Grach consulted the gauges on the console in front of him and began to operate the right-hand lever, the one that retarded progress, until at last all about him lost the ghostly insubstantiality it had hitherto been imbued with and coalesced into solid form. His time machine had stopped; he had arrived at his destination.

Of course, the invasion had been carefully planned. Other time machines that had already traveled here were arrayed about him in a grid, precise rows and columns, with every one of the squat saddle-seated contraptions, puzzles of nickel and ivory and brass and translucent glimmering quartz, packed close to each of its neighbors.