The Time MachineAge-adapted version

I am going to tell you a story as I heard it, and as I saw the remains of it with my own eyes. It began one evening in the house of my friend, the one we used to call the Time Traveller because he always talked about time as if it were something one could turn on. We sat around a handsomely set table with lamps and vegetables, candles and misted bottles, when the door suddenly opened.

He came in dusty and dirty, with a bloody cut on his face and a limping foot. He did not say hello. He went straight to the table, seized a glass of wine, drank it, pointed at the bottle, and drank another glass. Some colour returned to his cheeks. He looked at us with a strange little smile, as if he had just woken from a peculiar dream.

“What in the world has happened to you?” asked the Doctor. “Do not let me disturb you,” said the Time Traveller. “I am merely hungry. I shall wash and dress, and then I will explain everything. Save a little meat for me. I long for proper food.”

He limped out, and I noticed he had no shoes, only ragged, bloody socks. The door closed. We stared at one another. The Editor, who always thought in newspaper language, muttered: “Remarkable behaviour from a distinguished man of science.” The Journalist laughed and said this would make a fine column.

I met the eye of the Psychologist, and the two of us shared the same thought: This had something to do with the time machine he had shown us earlier, the strange, half-finished thing of brass rods, quartz, and ivory that stood in his laboratory.

When he returned, he was washed and dressed, but still haggard in the face. “Tell us!” cried the Editor. “A story from the day after tomorrow!

What happens the week after next?” “The story can wait,” said the Time Traveller. “Fetch me the salt.” He ate like one who had starved for several days. We sat uneasily.

I felt a thousand questions pressing, but I held my tongue. At last he pushed his plate away. “Excuse me,” he said. “I have had an… astonishing time.

Let us go into the smoking-room. I have not the energy to argue tonight, but I can tell.”

We moved. The light was dim in there, only a small lamp casting a round circle over his face. “No interruptions,” he said, and we promised.

“Most of it will sound like lies. So be it. I left my laboratory at four o’clock today. Since then… I have lived eight days. Such as no man has lived before.” He leaned back. His eyes were sharp and tired at once. “The machine stood almost finished yesterday,” he began.

“A nickel bar was an inch too short, so I had it remade. This morning everything was ready. I tightened every screw, put a drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat down in the seat. I felt like a poor wretch holding a pistol to his head and wondering what happens at the next click. I took the starting lever in one hand, the stopping lever in the other.

I pressed start… and almost at once, stop. Everything seemed to sway, as if falling. The room around me looked as before. Had nothing happened?

Then I looked at the clock.

A moment ago it had stood a little past ten. Now it was nearly half past three.” He took a sip. “I drew breath, clenched my teeth, and pulled the starting lever all the way forward.

The laboratory became blurred and grey. Mrs. Watchett came in and went out, but so quickly that she was like a streak. Night and day fluttered like black and white wings. The sun leaped across the sky like a spark, and the moon spun through its phases.

Everything became a wild, rushing murmur. After a while the laboratory vanished, and I seemed to be sitting out in the open.

Hills and trees grew up and faded again before my eyes. The seasons changed so swiftly that the world became a floating tapestry of green and white. At first it was terribly uncomfortable—like being trapped on a roller coaster that never stops.

But then the nausea mixed with something else. I was filled with a mad exhilaration. What would meet me if I stopped? What people? What buildings?

I began to feel afraid and curious at the same time. But all along I had thought of one danger: What if I stopped inside a wall or a stone? So tightly that our atoms mixed and everything exploded?

I had thought about it many times while building the machine, but then it was a cold, distant thought. Now I sat in the midst of it.

I said to myself: Do not stop!

But then I grew annoyed. And like a fool, I pulled the lever sharply back.” He made a small grimace. “I flew through the air and landed on soft grass.

A hailstorm hissed around me. I sat beside the overturned machine on a small lawn, surrounded by rhododendron bushes with purple and mauve flowers being beaten down by the hail. Above the bushes I saw something large and white.

When the shower let up, I saw it was a statue. A gigantic, winged sphinx of white marble on a pedestal of green-rusted bronze.

Its face turned toward me, with a faint smile. Weathered, as if it were sick.” He sank lower in his chair, but his voice was steady. “I felt a sting of panic. What would come into view when the rain gave way entirely? Perhaps the people of this age hated strange, old creatures like me? Perhaps they would kill me at first sight?

I seized the machine to get it up. The sun broke through. The great buildings around me revealed themselves, white and gleaming with moisture. The hail lay like pearls in stripes along the walls.

I felt naked, like a bird in clear air that knows a hawk is circling above. I lifted the machine—it struck my chin so I got this cut—and was about to climb back up…”

He drew his hand over the scar on his knuckle. “… when I saw them.” He smiled oddly.

“Small heads and shoulders came forth from the bushes by the sphinx. A little creature, perhaps four feet tall, in a purple tunic and sandals, came laughing toward me. He was beautiful as a porcelain child, with curly hair and smooth bare skin. The others followed. I took my hands off the machine.

There was something about them that seemed harmless, almost childlike. They spoke in a soft, cooing language. One came and touched my hand, as if to feel whether I was alive. Several smiled, pointed, and laughed—not out of malice, but the way five-year-olds laugh at something new.” He laughed briefly.

“They asked me, as best they could, whether I came from the sun—in the thunderstorm! Then I understood that these people, or whatever I should call them, were no more learned than little children. There and then I felt a disappointment greater than the storm. I had imagined a future full of wiser minds, more art, more everything. Instead, a dozen curious children stood around me making thunder sounds with their mouths.”

He drew breath. “Still, I took no chances. Before I let them touch the machine, I unscrewed the two little levers that start and stop the whole thing. Without them it will not go, no matter how much one pushes. I put them in my pocket.

Then I let myself be led. They made a garland of incredibly beautiful flowers and hung it around my neck. Then they beckoned me to an enormous hall. We went in under a richly carved arch—even the carvings were worn and cracked—and into a great chamber with dark walls and a floor of white metal, so worn by generations of feet that the tracks lay like deep grooves.

Along the hall stood low tables of polished stone, piled with heaps of fruit.

They sat on cushions on the floor and beckoned me to do the same. Then we ate. Fruit, only fruit. Large, sweet, unknown fruits, and one special mealy kind in a triangular shell that was my favourite for as long as I was there. They tossed peels and stalks down into round holes in the tables.

Everything was play. And everything was worn. Window glass with colourful patterns was broken in several places. Curtains hung heavy with dust. A corner of a marble table was chipped off.

They lived beautifully, but they did not care to repair anything.”

We looked at him. He spoke simply, but I noticed how he swallowed sometimes. “I decided to learn their language, at least a few words. I pointed at a fruit and made sounds.

They laughed. A fair-haired little one finally understood what I wanted and said its name. It was like teaching in a nursery, except that I was the pupil. I learned about twenty names on the first day, and the word for ‘to eat.’ But they soon grew tired of me.

They were the most easily exhausted people I have ever met. They came running, laughed and pointed, and vanished again. Soon I sat alone in the great hall.

I went outside again, and the evening was still and warm.” He described the landscape calmly, almost dreamily.

“The world was lush and green. The Thames was there, but not where it is in our time. There were no little houses, no cottages. Only great, palace-like buildings between dense areas of bushes, flowers, and low, brittle ferns the size of trees. No hedges, no signs of property.

The whole country was like one great park. I said to myself: ‘Communism,’ and thought I understood. I also discovered that these people, these little ones, were not men and women as we are.

All were alike in clothes and body. The children were merely smaller copies of the adults.

The differences of sex seemed almost to have vanished. Why? I thought: If the world is entirely safe, if no one must toil, if no one needs to protect children from dangers, much of what shapes families and differences disappears. In safety, things grow softer. Safety rewards weakness.

What was once strength becomes superfluous.” He looked up, and in his face there was both sorrow and a kind of stubborn joy. “I thought I saw humanity’s sunset in the red evening sky.” He was silent for a moment, as if he heard something far away. “Then I went to sleep.

I did not sleep. I looked up at the moon—large, yellow—and at the white sphinx gleaming on its bronze pedestal.

I drew my gaze back to the little lawn where the Time Machine stood. My heart stopped. The lawn was empty.

The machine was gone.” I remember how his pipe trembled between his fingers as he told this. “I ran down the slope, fell and cut myself, got up and ran again. I shouted, but no one answered. I found only a torn furrow in the turf where the machine had stood.

I searched in the bushes, struck with my fists until they bled. I ran into the great hall, tripped over a low stone table, and struck my shin. I lit a match—they had forgotten matches there—and roared like a child: ‘Where is my Time Machine?’

The little ones sleeping there started up in terror, some laughed nervously, most looked horrified. When I saw their faces, I suddenly understood how foolish I was.

I had frightened the only creatures who could help me. I ran out again under the moon. At last I sank down by the sphinx and wept. When I woke, it was day and sparrows hopped on the grass before me.” He rubbed his hands as if he again felt the morning cold.

“In daylight I thought clearly. Perhaps the machine was not destroyed. Perhaps it was hidden. Where? The bronze pedestal of the sphinx was hollow.

I knocked on the panels.

No handles, no keyholes. But I was certain: The machine was within. I beckoned to some of the little ones I knew. When I pointed at the pedestal and mimed that I wanted to open it, they got an expression that is hard to describe—like a polite woman suddenly subjected to something coarse.

They turned and went. I tried again. He in white got the same face and backed away. I grew angry, seized him by his robe at the neck, and dragged him toward the pedestal. Then I saw the terror in his eyes and let go.

I fetched a stone and hammered on the bronze panels so the rust flaked off in little clouds of green dust.

No one came. I saw them only at a distance on the slopes, small, pale specks keeping away. At last I laughed at myself. If I was to get the machine back, I must stop hammering on the door of a mystery.

I must learn this world and find the right keys.” He drew a small smile. “It helped that I saved one of them from drowning. They often bathed in the river. The little one got a cramp and floated out.

No one did anything. No one even cried out. I threw off my clothes, waded out, took her, and dragged her ashore. I rubbed her limbs until she came to herself.

I did not think they would care, but in the afternoon she found me.

Her name was Weena. She had made a garland just for me. She laughed when she saw me, hung the garland on me, took my hands, and kissed them. It was so childish and so real that something melted inside me. From that day she would never be far from me.

She ran after me, she grew sad when I went, she put flowers in my pockets—she had decided that my pockets were vases. I laughed at it every time. She often fell asleep on my arm at night. And she taught me, without meaning to, something important: these little ones were not entirely without fear.

They were terrified of the dark.”

His voice grew darker. “One morning I was out at sunrise. In the grey, pale light I saw white figures on the hillside, close by the ruins. Once or twice I thought they were carrying something dark. They moved silently, and vanished into the bushes.

Later, in a narrow gallery in a ruin, I stood in pitch darkness and saw two eyes glow in the light behind me. Something soft brushed past my hand. A white, small, ape-like creature, with large grey-red eyes and fine hair along its head and back—it ran past me, barely stumbled, and slipped into the shadow. I found one of these well-openings in the floor, half-covered by a pillar.

I lit a match and shone down.

Along the wall were metal brackets, like a ladder. I saw the little white creature climbing down and staring up at me.

The match burned my fingers and fell. When I lit another, it was gone.” He laid his hands in his lap.

“There, at the edges of that well, I understood something terrible. Humanity had divided. The Eloi—the beautiful, childlike creatures of daylight, those who ate only fruit and danced and slept in heaps at night—they were only one branch. Beneath the earth existed another branch: the Morlocks.

Pale as fish from caves. Large eyes that could not bear light. Shoulders a little hunched from walking in tunnels. Fingers that felt their way in the dark. They seldom came up, and then they stumbled in the sunshine.

And everywhere were these round wells, the towers that quivered in the sun, the steady wind that drew downward: ventilation. Beneath us lay an entire world of halls and machines, and there the work was done that kept the Upper-world running. No one in the Upper-world cared or understood. They had lived too long without needing to know.”

He drew forth a theory so clear that even I followed it. “Once, long ago, I thought, humanity divided into rich and poor. The rich enclosed more and more land for themselves, drove the others underground to work. They built tunnels and factories, and gradually the underground ones became adapted to the dark. And the above-ground ones became soft and small, beautiful and… useless. This was my first thought. I believed it explained everything. But soon something came that made me more afraid than before.” He stared at the smoke from his pipe as if it shaped the figures he spoke of.

“I decided to go down one of the wells.

Weena wept and begged me not to. I went anyway. The tube was narrow, the metal brackets small. At one point a bracket bent, and I staggered.

I called up, and in the innocent, little, round face at the top of the circle of light I thought I saw pure despair. I continued.” We said nothing. I felt the hairs on my neck rise. “It was pitch dark down there.

I felt little hands brushing my socks, heard cooing sounds, smelled something damp and sour. I lit a match. The white figures drew back, blinked, hissed, and then, when the light died, came near again. I counted my matches once down there—I did not have many.

I found a hall full of machines, great belts and drums running silently in the dark.

I saw a table with bundles of meat. A cold smell of blood.” He shook his head. “I did not think clearly then. I was too busy staying alive.

I lit and lit, and each time they drew back. When the last match burned down on my fingers, the Morlocks threw themselves upon me. I struck and struck blindly, tore myself free, found the ladder, and climbed up in panic. With the last thin ray of light from the last glow of ember I frightened them back and got out into the daylight again.

I sank down by the well’s edge and breathed until my heart stopped hammering.”

He sighed. “It took a while before my thoughts dared look straight at what I had seen. That piece of meat on the table: It was too familiar in shape. No great cow, no small pig. It was… an arm. When that sank in, I suddenly saw everything in a new light. The Eloi were not masters and the Morlocks their servants. The Morlocks had not only taken my machine. They ate the Eloi.

They came up at night when the Upper-world slept in heaps, and took them. They hated the light and loved the dark.

And the Eloi, who had never had to fight, who had never trained spine or courage, were like free-ranging cattle to them. Thus history took its revenge. Very many generations ago, the rich had driven the poor underground to work for them.

Now the underground ones came up again—changed. Beastly. Hungry. And they fetched their prey without any of the surface people being able or willing to strike back.” He looked down.

“I decided without more ado. I must find a safe place to sleep, a place where Morlocks could not easily reach me, and I must get myself weapons. We went—Weena and I—toward an incredible building I had seen in the distance.

It glittered greenish like porcelain in the sun. I called it the Green Porcelain Palace.

Perhaps a museum. Inside were long galleries with glass cases, old skeletons of enormous animals like the Megatherium and the Brontosaurus, fossils under layers of dust. Cases that were completely airtight, so what was inside had kept surprisingly well.” He smiled sadly. “Weena was entirely human in one thing: she was curious.

She rolled a sea urchin down a slanted glass case and laughed when it rolled and thumped against the edge.” He looked at us. “In a drawer I found matches. And camphor—a wax that burns with a white, bright flame.

I danced—I truly danced—for joy.

Light was my weapon against the dark. In a corner I also found a heavy iron bar, like a lumpish club. Now I had two things to trust. My plan was simple: I would get back to the white sphinx, and either break open the bronze panels like a battering ram, or find another way in. I believed my machine stood inside there.” He trembled a little as he came to the night that followed.

“We left the palace with our arms full of dry twigs and grass. Night fell before we reached the wood. Weena was afraid. She clung to me.

In the dark I saw three soft shadows stirring in the bushes behind us—Morlocks. I dared not carry both Weena and the wood and make light with matches at the same time. So I laid the wood in a heap, set it alight, and marvelled at how rare fire must be in a world without people who make it.

The flames leaped up against the night sky. Weena laughed when she saw the fire; she wanted to run into it as if it were play. I held her back, lifted her onto my arm, and rushed into the wood.”

He turned his face away for a moment and looked back at us with a kind of shame. “It became utterly black beneath the trees. I felt little hands taking hold of my jacket. I set Weena down carefully to get at the matchbox—and at once I felt the soft fingers at my knees.

I struck a match. The white backs sprang this way and that at the edge of the light. I lit a piece of camphor. It burned yellow and white and drove them deep back among the trunks.

I lifted Weena, but she was limp—she had fainted. I wanted to get home, but no longer knew where I was. In all the turning about I had lost my direction.” He drew his hand over his face.

“I built a fire where we stood. Every time I lit a match, I saw Morlocks at the edge of the light. One came too near; I struck him with the iron bar so his bones crunched. I threw on more fuel, broke branches straight from the trees.

The smoke was thick. Heat and camphor fumes made me heavy in the head. I sat down for a moment, Weena at my foot. My eyelids sank shut.”

He clenched his hands. “When I woke, my fire was nearly dead. Their hands were on me. I grabbed at my pocket—the matchbox was gone.

They had taken it while I slept. I tore myself free, swung the iron bar. I rolled and fought in the black as if in a spider’s cluster of sticky threads.

Then, suddenly, I noticed it was growing lighter. A red glow grew between the trees. The heat became strong. The Morlocks screamed.

My first fire had crept out into the wood. It smouldered and hissed in dry crowns, shrieked and cracked in the trunks. I saw them then, clearly in the red light: blind and confused, tumbling in rings around a little mound with a burnt hawthorn on it. Those that struck the burning line turned or rushed straight into the flames. I stood on the mound, struck them away if they came near—and searched, searched, searched for Weena.”

He raised his voice just here, and it hurt to hear. “I did not find her. When morning light came, she was gone. Perhaps she ran into the wood while I slept.

Perhaps they carried her away in the dark.

I thought of what they do with their prey, and at the same time I was relieved that she was not left with me, terrified and waiting for the same fate. But everything in me had a heavy stone as I bound grass around my bare feet—I had thrown away the torn shoes—and limped off through the ashes. I had never felt so alone. She had been the only one in that world who showed me true, human care.”

We sat as if turned to stone. Even the Editor did not say a quick word. The Time Traveller breathed more calmly again.

“I slept a few hours in the daylight, under the open sky. I woke at sunset.

I went down toward the sphinx. I held the levers in my pocket and a club in my hand, as if to feel the weight of something safe. When I came to the pedestal, the bronze doors stood open. I laughed aloud. I understood their tactics at once: They wanted to lure me in.” He tapped lightly on the arm of the chair with his knuckles. “The Time Machine stood inside there on a little elevation, shining clean, oiled, and put in order.”

The Morlocks had been curious, perhaps poking around a bit. I went in. The panel slammed down with a crash. Darkness.

Their cooing sounds came closer at once.

My matches were of the kind that must be struck on the box. The box was gone. In the darkness I felt their hands. I held the levers tightly. One of them nearly wrenched them from me.

I struck my head blindly, heard his skull give off a hard sound—and got the lever back. Fingers clawed at my clothes. I found the fastenings blindly, pressed the levers into place, pulled the starting lever across.

The smooth, cold hands slid off me. The light of the time journey rose up from the grey.

For a moment I thought I would fall off the seat—I sat sideways—but I held on. » He shook his head a little at the memory. «Instead of going home, I went forward again. Many thousands of days rushed past like seconds. Day and night became distinct again, but slower and slower, until at last almost gone.

The sun grew large and red. It ceased to cross the sky; it only rose and sank a little in the west, and hung there like an enormous, mournful dome of red glow.

I slowed down carefully. I stopped on a sloping beach. The air was thin—I breathed as if on a mountain.

Everything was desolate and strange. No waves, only a faint, oily swell that breathed. Salt lay in pink crusts along the water's edge. There were intensely green mats like moss or lichen, climbing up toward the light that now came only from the low, red sun. » He narrowed his eyes, as if he saw it again.

«A sharp cry from high above—I saw a huge, white thing, like a butterfly, flutter away. Then something moved slowly close by me.

A crab. A crab as big as this table. Many legs that lifted and set down, claws that tilted, antennae that whipped, eyes on stalks that stared.

I struck at something that tickled my cheek and caught a thread. I pulled a little, and it was drawn out again—the antenna of another crab standing behind me. It tilted its claws over me. I pulled the lever. A month passed in a heartbeat.

I stopped a little further ahead in time. Crabs everywhere on the red beach. Strange, venom-green quilts of plant cover. The same heavy, dead stillness. I pulled on, in leaps of a thousand years and more.

The sun grew larger and fainter, the sky darker. All life seemed to dwindle. At last, thirty million years ahead, I saw almost nothing move. Snowflakes fell sparsely. Ice lay in ridges along the sea. Then an eclipse began—a black curve ate into the sun's disc. A wind arose. When the eclipse was total, the stars were intense and cold above me. I was afraid. I felt the cold to the marrow.

When it finally grew lighter, I saw out on a shallow sandbank something that hopped. Round like a great ball, with tentacles hanging down. I felt nausea. I pressed the lever backward as much as I dared. I think I fainted for a moment on the way back. »

He leaned forward, his shoulders sank, his smile was almost shy. «Then suddenly the familiar shadows were there again. Our own time flickered past. I saw Mrs. Watchett move backwards across the room, the door closed before it had opened—you understand.

I stopped the machine, in the same workshop where it stood. Only it stood in a different corner than where I had started, for the Morlocks had carried it away with me in that distant time. I got off, sat down on the bench, and shook. Then I forced myself up, washed, ate—and now I have told you everything. »

We said nothing for a long while. The Editor finally rose and laid his hand on his shoulder. «Too bad you're not a writer,» he said, with a crooked smile.

«What a story! » But he had that look that says: I don't believe this. The Doctor bent over two withered, white flowers that the Time Traveller had set down. «These I don't recognize,» he said quietly. We asked to have them, but the Time Traveller shook his head. «They were put in my pocket by Weena,» he said softly. «She picked them for me. »

He looked at his hands, at the scars over his knuckles. «Sometimes I hardly believe myself what I have seen. But I cannot make my brain create a dream that leaves such marks. »

We went home in cabs that evening. The Editor called it a splendid lie. For my part—I could not decide. The story was too strange—and too soberly told.

I decided to go back the next day. He was in the laboratory, said the servant.

I went up. The machine stood there, tilted and ugly, brass and ebony and gleaming quartz, with stains of brown earth, streaks of moss and grass on the lower parts, and a bent rail. I touched it. It swayed, almost like a branch in the wind.

That made me draw my hand back and smile to myself at a childhood warning: Don't touch! I found him in the smoking room.

He came in from the garden with a small camera under his arm and a knapsack over his shoulder. «I'm busy,» he laughed. «Give me half an hour.

If you stay for lunch, I'll give you everything: proof and samples.

Excuse me? » He disappeared down the corridor. The door to the laboratory slammed.

I sat down with a newspaper. Suddenly I remembered I had an appointment at two o'clock, and thought I must stop by the laboratory and let him know. As I took the door handle, I heard a cry, strangely cut off at the end, and a click.

There was a draft through the hallway as I opened. Inside, glass fell and shattered. The room was empty.

I thought, just for a second, I saw a shadowy figure sitting in a whirling darkness and brass—so transparent that I almost saw the drawings on the bench behind right through it. But when I rubbed my eyes, that too was gone.

A trapdoor in the ceiling stood swinging a little in the wind. The time machine was gone. » Here I looked up from my manuscript and thought of how strong the stillness in that room was.

«He never came back,» I said. «Not that day, not the week after, not the year after. Now three years have passed. Some say he went backward—fell among harsh Stone Age men or among bigger beasts; perhaps he fights for his life among enormous sea lizards or on a coral island in a sea age we cannot imagine. I like to think he went forward again, perhaps only a little, to a time when our problems are solved and our riddles answered, and that he walked around there for a while and saw everything we can only dream of.

I know he himself often said dark things about our future. But whether he was right or not, we must live as if we could make it better.

To me the future is black and blank, like a great slate with a few bright spots. One of those spots is two withered, white flowers that I keep in a box. The flowers are brown and flat now, but every time I look at them, I think that even when reason and strength had failed, when humanity had divided and forgotten, there existed gratitude and warm tenderness in a little being named Weena, and she put them in the Time Traveller's pocket. »

Thus ends the story as I heard it and as I saw what I saw. I do not know if you believe him. I am not entirely sure what I believe.

But every time I take the brittle flowers between my fingers, I hear the camphor hiss, see the green gleam in the Green Porcelain Palace and the white line of the sea at the end of the world, and recognize again the same mixture of fear, wonder, and hope that lay over his face in the light of the little lamp that evening he came limping through the door, with blood clotted on his stockings and a look in his eyes that had seen further than any of us.

And if I close my eyes, I see him again, standing in the doorway of his laboratory, hear the strange cry, see a ghostly flash of brass and shadow, and then nothing—only dust settling and a cold draft in the hallway.

Yet there is more in his story than horror. It has laughter too. I still see how the little people figured out that my pockets were flower pots, how they smiled and clapped when I imitated thunder, and how the Time Traveller, tired, hungry, and cross, still had to smile when a little being in purple and white gave him a flower garland that suited him as badly as his theories suited the world he had come to. I also hear again the Journalist's silly joke—«Our special correspondent in the day after tomorrow! »—and laugh at how the Time Traveller replied: «History can go to hell, I want to eat. »

And perhaps that was exactly why he survived: because he held fast to things one can touch—bread, fire, metal—when everything else became strange and vague. Perhaps that is our own little starting lever in our pocket. Perhaps that is all we can do: eat, sleep, laugh, and work; know that we are vulnerable in the dark, yet still, every day, get ourselves matches and hold fast to one another.

For in that world with both flowers and wells, there were two forces that never stopped fighting: the curiosity that pushes us forward, and the fear that tries to hold us back. And in the middle of them, in the light of a match, stood a man and chose to go on.

This evening, when everything had been told and the smoke from the pipes had hung for a while under the ceiling, we bent to take our leave. He followed us out into the hall. The Doctor said, somewhat hesitantly, that he ought to rest. The Time Traveller laughed and said he would sleep long after he had shown us «samples and everything» the next day. He stood in the open door and called good night.

I walked through dark streets and thought that almost everything in the world can be true for a while, just long enough for one to learn what one would otherwise never have learned. The next day I went back, and saw with my own eyes how a thing of brass, ebony, and quartz became a moment of shadow and vanished.

And now it remains only for me to tell you what happened afterwards: nothing. Not a letter. Not a trace. Not a single new footprint on the little lawn in the distant future. Only two flowers, and the choice he made in the dark, when he struggled in a room without light with cold hands tugging at him, and chose the levers, chose to pull—not backward, but onward, out into a time no one else has seen.

Some nights—when the moon is thin and white and rises close before dawn, and everything is grey and sharp and a little unreal—I think of him and of how the moon one day ceased to move swiftly across the sky in the machine's dials and became only a pale band.

I think of the red sun hanging infinitely far in the west, and of the round thing that hopped on the sandbank at the end of the world. And then my thought always returns to something much smaller and much nearer: a little, white face smiling, two small hands picking flowers, and a gentle shadow creeping closer in the twilight.

Weena feared the dark. So do I. But she taught me, with that flower garland and those deep, childish looks, that one can hold something bright close to oneself even when fear stands at the door.

Perhaps that is all the two withered flowers say to me now—when they crackle between my fingers like dry grass: Even after eight hundred thousand years, gratitude and tenderness can live on, if someone only holds out long enough to bring them forth. And in that, perhaps, lies the only certain knowledge I gained from the Time Traveller's story. The rest—crabs, wells, portals of bronze, ivory that cracked, skies that grew redder—we cannot be sure of.

But I saw the scars on his knuckles. I saw the earth and moss on the machine. I heard the glass shatter and the wind rush through the corridor as he vanished for the second time.

And I hold the flowers. They are real. Everything else, I tell myself, may be lies.

But the two withered flower petals, which shook slightly when the air touched them as he took them from his pocket—they are real. They are all I have.

They and the memories of an evening when a man came in to us without shoes, blood on his stockings and a look on his face like one who has eaten fruit at the foot of a white sphinx and heard something laugh behind a bronze wall, and yet wanted salt and meat and warm hands, before he was again to put on his knapsack and camera, open the door, say: «I'll be back shortly», and vanish into time as a man vanishes around a street corner—behind a wall we cannot see through, but which we know is there, because someone on the other side managed to push two small, white flowers through a gap and put them in his pocket.