Our morning toilet was brief, our breakfast briefer. We wiped our faces with Amelia’s flannel, and combed our hair. We each took two squares of chocolate, and followed them with a draught of sap. Then we collected our few belongings, and prepared to continue on our way. I noticed that Amelia still carried her corset between the handles of her bag.
“Shall we not leave that behind?” I said, thinking how pleasant it would be if she were never to wear it again.
“And these?” she said, producing my collar and tie from the hand-bag. “Shall we leave these behind too?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I must wear them when we find civilization.”
“Then we are agreed.”
“The difference is,” I said, “that I do not need a servant. Nor have I ever had one.”
“If your intentions for me are sincere, Edward, you must prepare yourself for the prospect of hiring staff.”
Amelia’s tone was as non-committal as ever, but the unmistakable reference to my proposal had the effect of quickening my heart. I took the bag from her, and held her hand in mine. She glanced at me once, and I thought I saw a trace of a smile, but then we were walking and we each kept our gaze directed ahead. The weed-bank was in the full throes of its seeming animation, and we stayed at a wary distance from it.
Knowing that most of our walking must be done before midday, we maintained a good pace, walking and resting at regular periods. As before, we found that the altitude made breathing difficult, and so we talked very little while we were walking.
During one of our rests, though, I brought up a subject which had been occupying me.
“In which year do you suppose we are?” I said.
“I have no idea. It depends on the degree to which you tampered with the controls.”
“I didn’t know what I was doing. I altered the monthly pre-setting dial, and it was then during the summer months of 1902. But I did not move the lever before I broke the nickel rod, and so I am wondering whether the automatic return was not interrupted, and we are now in 1893.”
Amelia considered this for several moments, but then said:
“I think not. The crucial act was the breaking of that rod. It would have interrupted the automatic return, and extended the original journey. At the end of that, the automatic return would come into operation again, as we found when we lost the Machine. On the other hand, your changing of the monthly dial might have had an effect. By how much did you alter it?”
I thought about this with great concentration. “I turned it several months forward.”
“I still cannot say for certain. It seems to me that we are in one of three possible times. Either we returned to 1893, as you suggest, and are dislocated by several thousand miles, or the accident has left us in 1902, at the date showing on the dials when the rod was broken… or we have travelled forward those few months, and are now at, say, the end of 1902 or the beginning of 1903. In any event, one matter is certain: we have been propelled a considerable distance from Richmond.”
None of these postulations was welcome, for any one of them meant that the disastrous day in June 1903 still lay ahead. I did not wish to dwell on the consequences of this, so I raised another topic that had been troubling me.
“If we were now to return to England,” I said, “is it likely that we could meet ourselves?”
Amelia did not answer my question directly. She said:
“What do you mean, if we were to return to England? Surely we will arrange that as soon as possible?”
“Yes, of course,” I said, hastily, regretting that I had phrased my question in that way. “So it is not a rhetorical question: are we soon to meet ourselves?”
Amelia frowned.
“I don’t think it is possible,” she said at length. “We have travelled in Time just as positively as we have travelled in Space, and if my own belief is correct, we have left the world of 1893 as far behind as we seem to have left Richmond. There is at this moment neither Amelia Fitzgibbon nor Edward Turnbull in England.”
“Then what,” I said, having anticipated this answer, “will Sir William have made of our disappearance?”
Amelia smiled unexpectedly. “I’m sure I do not know. Nor am I sure that he will even notice my absence until several days have passed. He is a man of great preoccupations. When he realizes I have gone, I suppose he will contact the police and I will be listed as a Missing Person. That much at least he will see as his responsibility.”
“But you talk of this with such coldness. Surely Sir William will be most concerned at your disappearance?”
“I am merely speaking the facts as I see them. I know that he was preparing his Time Machine for a journey of exploration, and had we not pre-empted him he would have been the first man to travel into futurity. When he returns to his laboratory he will find the Machine apparently untouched—for it would have returned directly from here—and he will continue with his plans without regard for the household.”
I said: “Do you think that if Sir William were to suspect the cause of your disappearance he might use the Machine to try to find us?”
Amelia shook her head at once. “You assume two things. First, that he would realize that we had tampered with the Machine, and second, that even if so he would know where to search for us. The first is almost impossible to suspect, for to all appearances the Machine will appear untouched, and the second is unthinkable, as the Machine has no record of its journeys when the automatic return has been in operation.”
“So we must make our own way back.”
At this Amelia came a little closer and grasped my hand. “Yes, my dear,” she said.
iv
The sun was past its zenith, and already the weed-bank was throwing a shadow, and we walked stoically on. Then, just as I was feeling we should stop for another rest, I caught Amelia’s elbow and pointed forward.
“Look, Amelia!” I shouted. “There… on the horizon!”
Directly in front of us was the most welcome sight either of us could have imagined. Something metallic and polished was ahead of us, for the sun’s rays were being reflected off into our eyes. The steadiness of the dazzle was such that we knew it could not be coming from a natural feature, such as a sea or a lake. It was man-made, and our first sight of civilization.
We started towards it, but in a moment the glare vanished.
“What has happened?” Amelia said. “Did we imagine it?”
“Whatever it was, it has moved,” I said. “But it was no illusion.”
We walked as quickly as we could, but we were still suffering the effects of altitude and were forced to maintain our usual steady pace.
Within two or three minutes we saw the reflected light again, and knew we had not been mistaken. At last sense prevailed and we took a short rest, eating the remainder of our chocolate and drinking as much of the sap as we could stomach. Thus fortified, we continued towards the intermittent light, knowing that at last our long walk was nearly over.
After another hour we were close enough to see the source of the reflection, although by then the sun had moved further across the sky and it had been some time since we had seen the dazzle. There was a metal tower built in the desert, and it was the roof of this that had been catching the sunshine. In this rarefied atmosphere distances were deceptive, and although we had been able to see the tower for some time, it wasn’t until we were almost on it that we were able to estimate its size. By then we were close enough to see that it was not alone, and that some distance beyond it were several more.