The Time Machine

by H.G. Wells

You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence.

“Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?”

There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.

our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.”

There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.

Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness,

We are always getting away from the present moment.

“You can move about in all directions of Space, but you cannot move about in Time.” “That is the germ of my great discovery.

Interesting

But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you

“But now you begin to see the object of my investigations into the geometry of Four Dimensions. Long ago I had a vague inkling of a machine———”

Time Machine idea introduced

“But I have experimental verification,” said the Time Traveller. “It would be remarkably convenient for the historian,” the Psychologist suggested. “One might travel back and verify the accepted account of the Battle of Hastings, for instance!”

“Then there is the future,” said the Very Young Man. “Just think! One might invest all one’s money, leave it to accumulate at interest, and hurry on ahead!” “To discover a society,” said I, “erected on a strictly communistic basis.”

Communism

It is my plan for a machine to travel through time.

as though it was in some way unreal.”

Unrealness of machine

“Now I want you clearly to understand that this lever, being pressed over, sends the machine gliding into the future, and this other reverses the motion.

How machine works

the little machine suddenly swung round, became indistinct, was seen as a ghost

the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him;

“You have told Blank, and Dash, and Chose about the machine?” he said to me, leaning back in his easy-chair and naming the three new guests. “But the thing’s a mere paradox,” said the Editor.

I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things.

The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me.

interesting

I saw some further peculiarities in their Dresden-china type of prettiness. Their hair, which was uniformly curly, came to a sharp end at the neck and cheek; there was not the faintest suggestion of it on the face, and their ears were singularly minute. The mouths were small, with bright red, rather thin lips, and the little chins ran to a point. The eyes were large and mild; and

description of inhabitants

“For a moment I was staggered, though the import of his gesture was plain enough. The question had come into my mind abruptly: were these creatures fools? You may hardly understand how it took me.

However, I felt like a schoolmaster amidst children, and persisted, and presently I had a score of noun substantives at least at my command; and then I got to

demeaning the creatures

“Looking round with a sudden thought, from a terrace on which I rested for a while, I realized that there were no small houses to be seen. Apparently the single house, and possibly even the household, had vanished. Here and there among the greenery were palace-like buildings, but the house and the cottage, which form such characteristic features of our own English landscape, had disappeared. “‘Communism,’ said I to myself.

“Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness.

energy

To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in the sunlight: so much was left of the artistic spirit, and no more.

It took no very great mental effort to infer that my Time Machine was inside that pedestal. But how it got there was a different problem.

But I was too restless to watch long; I am too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours—that is another matter.

That way lies monomania. Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.’

the thought of the years I had spent in study and toil to get into the future age, and now my passion of anxiety to get out of it.

There seemed to be few, if any, abstract terms, or little use of figurative language. Their sentences were usually simple and of two words, and I failed to convey or understand any but the simplest propositions.

Conceive the tale of London which a negro, fresh from Central Africa, would take back to his tribe! What would he know of railway companies, of social movements, of telephone and telegraph wires, of the Parcels Delivery Company, and postal orders and the like? Yet we, at least, should be willing enough to explain these things to him! And even of what he knew, how much could he make his untravelled friend either apprehend or believe? Then, think how narrow the gap between a negro and a white man of our own times, and how wide the interval between myself and these of the Golden Age!

They spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping. I could not see how things were kept going.

found that her name was Weena, which, though I don’t know what it meant, somehow seemed appropriate enough. That was the beginning of a queer friendship which lasted a week, and ended—as I will tell you!

Upper-world people

The notion was so plausible that I at once accepted it, and went on to assume the how of this splitting of the human species. I dare say you will anticipate the shape of my theory; though, for myself, I very soon felt that it fell far short of the truth.

underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilization; there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance, there are new electric railways, there are subways, there are underground work-rooms and restaurants, and they increase and multiply.

And this same widening gulf—which is due to the length and expense of the higher educational process and the increased facilities for and temptations towards refined habits on the part of the rich—will make that exchange between class and class, that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along lines of social stratification, less and less frequent.

So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour.

That I could see clearly enough already. What had happened to the Undergrounders I did not yet suspect; but from what I had seen of the ‘Morlocks’—that, by the by, was the name by which these creatures were called

the ‘Eloi,’ the beautiful race that I already knew.

Why, too, if the Eloi were masters, could they not restore the machine to me? And why were they so terribly afraid of the dark?

Probably my shrinking was largely due to the sympathetic influence of the Eloi, whose disgust of the Morlocks I now began to appreciate.

“I was in an agony of discomfort. I had some thought of trying to go up the shaft again, and leave the Under-world alone.

When I had started with the Time Machine, I had started with the absurd assumption that the men of the Future would certainly be infinitely ahead of our selves in all their appliances.

If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under-world in a second, and examined it at leisure.

I disengaged myself from the clutches of the Morlocks and was speedily clambering up the shaft, while they stayed peering and blinking up at me:

by some unknown forces which I had only to understand to overcome; but there was an altogether new element in the sickening quality of the Morlocks—a something inhuman and malign.

It was the darkness of the new moon.

The Upper-world people might once have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical servants: but that had long since passed away.