Chapter 14The Further Vision

"I’m telling you, time travelling messes with you, big time. And this time, I wasn’t sitting right on the machine, but sideways and totally unstable. For a long time, I just held on as it swayed and vibrated, not even paying attention to where I was going."

When I finally looked at the dials again, I was shocked to see where I’d ended up. One dial shows days, another shows thousands of days, another millions, and another thousands of millions.

"Instead of reversing the levers, I’d accidentally yanked them forward, and when I checked the indicators, the thousands hand was spinning as fast as the seconds hand on a watch - way into the future. "As I kept going, things started to look really weird.

The pulsing grayness got darker, then - even though I was still moving super fast - the quick flashes of day and night, which usually mean you’re going slower, came back and got more and more obvious. That totally threw me for a loop at first.

The changes between night and day got slower and slower, and so did the sun moving across the sky, until they seemed to stretch out over centuries. Finally, a steady twilight settled over the earth, only broken now and then when a comet flashed across the dark sky.

The band of light that used to show the sun was long gone; the sun had stopped setting - it just rose and fell in the west, getting bigger and redder all the time. There was no sign of the moon. The stars, circling slower and slower, faded into faint points of light.

Eventually, sometime before I stopped, the sun, huge and red, just froze in place on the horizon, a giant glowing dome radiating a dull heat, sometimes flickering and going out for a moment. Then it would glow brighter again, but quickly go back to its gloomy red color.

I realized that the slowing down of its rising and setting meant the tidal drag had done its job. The Earth had stopped, facing the sun, just like the moon faces Earth now. Very carefully - remembering my last wild fall - I started to reverse my motion.

"The circling hands went slower and slower until the thousands hand seemed to stop and the daily hand was just a blurry smudge on its scale. Even slower, until I could make out the faint outline of a desolate beach. "I stopped gently and sat on the Time Machine, looking around.

The sky wasn’t blue anymore. To the northeast, it was pitch black, and bright white stars shone steadily out of the darkness.

Overhead, it was a deep reddish-brown and completely starless, and to the southeast, it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, against the horizon, lay the massive hull of the sun, red and motionless.

The rocks around me were a harsh reddish color, and the only sign of life I could see at first was the intensely green vegetation covering every jutting point on their southeastern face. It was the same rich green you see on forest moss or lichen in caves: plants that grow in perpetual twilight.

"The machine was parked on a sloping beach. The sea stretched away to the southwest, rising to a sharp, bright horizon against the pale sky. There were no crashing waves and no ripples, because not a single breeze was stirring."

Only a slight oily swell rose and fell like gentle breathing, showing that the eternal sea was still moving and alive. And along the edge where the water sometimes broke was a thick layer of salt - pink under the weird sky.

I felt a sense of pressure in my head, and I noticed I was breathing really fast. The feeling reminded me of my only time climbing a mountain, and from that, I figured the air was thinner than it is now.

"Far away up the desolate slope, I heard a harsh scream and saw something like a huge white butterfly shoot up into the sky, circling and disappearing over some low hills. Its voice was so creepy that I shivered and sat down more firmly on the machine."

Looking around, I realized that what I thought was a reddish pile of rocks was actually moving slowly towards me. Then I saw it was a monstrous crab-like creature.

Can you imagine a crab as big as that table over there, with its many legs moving slowly and awkwardly, its big claws swaying, its long antennae, like carters’ whips, waving and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at you on either side of its metallic face?

Its back was bumpy and decorated with ungainly lumps, and a greenish crust blotched it here and there. I could see the many feelers around its complicated mouth flickering and feeling as it moved.

"As I stared at this creepy thing crawling towards me, I felt something tickling my cheek, like a fly had landed there. I tried to brush it away with my hand, but it came back in a moment, and then again near my ear. I swatted at it and caught something threadlike."

It was pulled quickly out of my hand. With a terrible feeling of dread, I turned, and I saw that I had grabbed the antenna of another monster crab that stood just behind me.

Its creepy eyes were wiggling on their stalks, its mouth was all alive with hunger, and its vast, awkward claws, smeared with algae slime, were coming down on me. In a flash, my hand was on the lever, and I’d put a month between myself and these monsters.

"But I was still on the same beach, and I saw them clearly now as soon as I stopped. Dozens of them seemed to be crawling here and there in the dim light, among the leafy sheets of intense green. "I can’t explain the sense of awful emptiness that hung over the world.

The red sky in the east, the blackness to the north, the salty Dead Sea, the rocky beach crawling with these nasty, slow-moving monsters, the uniform, poisonous-looking green of the mossy plants, the thin air that hurt my lungs - it all created a shocking effect.

I jumped forward a hundred years, and there was the same red sun - a little bigger, a little duller - the same dying sea, the same chilly air, and the same crowd of earthy crustaceans creeping in and out among the green seaweed and the red rocks.

And in the western sky, I saw a curved pale line like a huge new moon.

"So I travelled, stopping now and then, in giant leaps of a thousand years or more, pulled along by the mystery of the earth’s fate, watching with a strange fascination as the sun grew bigger and duller in the western sky, and the life of the old earth faded away."

Finally, more than thirty million years from now, the huge, red-hot dome of the sun had come to block nearly a tenth part of the darkening sky.

Then I stopped again, because the crawling crowd of crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, except for its sickly green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless. And now it was flecked with white. A bitter cold hit me. Rare white flakes drifted down now and then.

To the north-eastward, the glare of snow lay under the starlight of the dark sky, and I could see an undulating crest of pinkish white hills.

There were edges of ice along the sea, with drifting masses farther out, but the main expanse of that salty ocean, all bloody under the eternal sunset, was still unfrozen.

I looked around to see if there were any signs of animal life left. I still felt this weird, hard-to-explain feeling of unease, keeping me stuck on the machine. But I didn't see anything moving, neither on land, in the sky, or in the sea.

Just this green slime on the rocks showed that life hadn’t completely disappeared. A shallow sandbank had popped up in the sea, and the water had pulled back from the beach. I thought I saw something black flopping around on that bank, but it froze still as I looked at it.

I figured my eyes were playing tricks, and it was just a rock. The stars in the sky were super bright and didn’t seem to twinkle much at all. Suddenly, I noticed the circular shape of the sun on the west side had changed; a curve, like a bay, had appeared. I watched it get bigger.

For a minute, maybe, I just stared, totally freaked out by this darkness creeping over the day. Then I realized it was an eclipse. Either the moon or the planet Mercury was crossing in front of the sun’s face.

At first, I thought it was the moon, but now I think I saw an inner planet passing really close to Earth. The darkness got thicker fast. A cold wind started blowing in stronger gusts from the east, and the white flakes falling from the sky got more and more.

From the edge of the sea came a ripple and a soft whisper. Besides those quiet sounds, the world was totally silent. Silent? It’s almost impossible to describe how still it was.

All the sounds of people - sheep bleating, birds chirping, insects buzzing, the everyday background noise of our lives - it was all gone. As the darkness grew, the swirling flakes got more abundant, dancing in front of my eyes, and the air got colder.

Finally, one by one, quickly, the white peaks of the distant hills disappeared into blackness. The breeze turned into a moaning wind. I saw the black shadow of the eclipse moving towards me. In just a moment, the pale stars were all that was visible. Everything else was just dark and blurry.

The sky was totally black. A real sense of dread washed over me because of this great darkness. The cold, that went right to my bones, and the pain I felt when I breathed, took over. I shivered, and I felt really sick. Then, like a hot red bow in the sky, the edge of the sun appeared.

I got off the machine to try and get myself together. I felt dizzy and couldn’t face going back. As I stood there, sick and confused, I saw the moving thing on the shoal again - there was no doubt now that it was moving - against the red water of the sea.

It was round, about the size of a football, maybe even bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it. It looked black against the swirling, blood-red water, and it was hopping around awkwardly. Then I felt like I was going to faint.

But this terrible fear of being helpless in that far-off, scary twilight kept me going while I climbed back onto the saddle.