The Time Machine

H. G. Wells's 1895 novella, retold as its narrators tell it — 2 episodes.

The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses.

"You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. Clearly, any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and Duration. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives."

We were a small party that Thursday evening at his house in Richmond: the Psychologist, the Medical Man, the Provincial Mayor, a very young man, and Filby, an argumentative person with red hair. "But you cannot move about in Time," said the Psychologist. "That is the germ of my great discovery," said the Time Traveller. "I have a machine."

He brought out a glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made. There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance. It was a model. He asked the Psychologist to press a little white lever. There was a breath of wind, and the lamp flame jumped. 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! Then he led us down to his laboratory, and showed us the large machine, nearly complete, with parts of nickel, ivory, and rock crystal. "I intend to explore time," he said. None of us quite knew how to take it.

The next Thursday I went again to Richmond, and found a larger party, including an Editor and a Journalist, waiting for our host, who had left a note asking us to begin dinner without him. Halfway through the meal, the door opened, and he stood there. He was in an amazing plight. His coat was dusty and dirty, and smeared with green down the sleeves; his hair disordered, and as it seemed to me greyer, his face ghastly pale; his chin had a brown cut on it. He limped; his feet were bare except for socks stained with blood. "Don't let me disturb you," he said. "I'm all right." He drank a glass of wine. "What a treat it is to stick a fork into meat again!" he said. And after dinner, in the smoking-room, he told us his story.

"I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time Machine, and showed you the actual thing itself, incomplete in the workshop. At ten o'clock to-day the first of all Time Machines began its career. 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. I looked at the laboratory clock. A moment before, 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 night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came to-morrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy. To-morrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour, now brown, now green; they grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams.

"I flung myself upon the lever, and the machine went reeling over, and I was flung headlong through the air. I was on a little lawn in a garden, surrounded by rhododendron bushes, in a hailstorm. The dials showed the year eight hundred and two thousand seven hundred and one. Through the hail I saw, towering, a colossal figure, carved apparently in some white stone, like a winged sphinx, upon a pedestal of bronze, its face toward me, its sightless eyes watching me, with the faint shadow of a smile on the lips.

"Then I saw, coming through the bushes, a slight creature, perhaps four feet high, clad in a purple tunic, girdled at the waist with a leather belt. He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature, but indescribably frail. His flushed face reminded me of the more beautiful kind of consumptive, that hectic beauty of which we used to hear so much. Others came. They had no fear of me; they touched me with soft little tentacles of fingers; they laughed; and one asked me, by signs, if I had come from the sun in a thunderstorm! It let loose the judgment I had suspended upon their clothes, their frail light limbs, and fragile features. A flow of disappointment rushed across my mind. For a moment I felt that I had built the Time Machine in vain.