The Time Machine directed by George Pal, 1970

Spissitude
A Time Traveler Sci-Fi Short

By Anthony Grooms The Time Traveler shifted the machine into the idle mode. As far as he could determine from his chronometer, he had traveled but ten minutes into the future, but to his senses, it seemed that he had been several hours listening to the whine of the machine. There had been no sensation of movement and nothing to see around him except the black. Not darkness, for there was no sensation of the Grooms 1 Spissitude

absence of light and no sensation of any object beyond his contraption, no sound except the whine of the machine and of his own body lungs and heart. His mind wanted to see and hear, and he fought with himself not to hallucinate, though colorful spots and splashes of light floated around him from time to time. Then, he saw a pinpoint of light, white and steady. It did not swim around in the black like the others and he thought that it was a feature of this spissitude, this fourth dimension, which he expected. His hand shook as he pressed the gas mask to his face and breathed deeply. History was catching up to him. The pinpoint of light disorientated him, for it seemed a very definite and single point, yet he saw it in any direction which he looked in. The point soon became a bright thread, a line that seemed to surround him, whether he looked left or right up or down. The line broadened and became mottled with colors. The colors seemed to sparkle within the quickly broadening band. As the line thickened, it became speckled, as if fuzzy points of light were unevenly strung along an invisible wire. Then he noticed that the points were clouds of pinwheel and saucer shapes hanging at odd angles. As the clouds grew in size they became grainer and the darkness between them wider. His breath caught. Even in this wondrous situation, there was a surprise. The clouds were clouds of stars! Christ, my Lord, he thought. How beautiful. In all the many long cold nights he and his friend Filby had peered through their telescopes at the stars, he never imagined such agglomerations, continents and continents of stars! The pinwheels of stars seemed to surround him, and yet they seemed to be moving toward him as if he were in the hub toward which they sped. Soon he Grooms 2 Spissitude

seemed to have centered on one, or it centered on him, and he seemed to move inside a great tentacle of the agglomeration. Some moments he seemed to travel through long stretches of emptiness where the fiery orbs and blooms of colored clouds seemed far away, and then in the next moment, a great red fireball of a sun would whiz close by his machine. He ducked in the contraption, thinking that it might collide with him, but as if it were an insect that sensed a hand about to slap it, the sun zigzagged out of his way. That, he thought strange enough, even while he adjusted his expectations to the fact that all was strange to him here, but it was stranger still that he felt no heat from these suns. They appeared ten times the size of Sol, from which his pale skin had received many a reddening, but here was no sensation of temperature, no sound, only pictures moving past. Then one star seemed central, and immediately he knew it was Sol, his own history catching up to him in this void of history he had entered. The spissitude, he thought, must have breadth, length and height for, as far as he could tell, he had maintained his shape. It must also have time, for his machines chronometer was spinning down. He was just ninety seconds ahead of history. But history, all of existence as he knew it, was something separate from time. He imagined that it ran through the web of time and space much as electricity ran on a copper wire, integrated with it, and yet, not apart of it. The machine began to rock gently, much as a small boat rising on a wave in a harbor. The movement startled him and he gripped the sides of his seat, though there was no threat of him falling out. And what if he fell out? he thought. No more harm would come to him than being where he was inside of the machine, except that it was the electro-magnetic bubble created by the machine that allowed him to squeeze into Grooms 3 Spissitude

the spissitude and slide along its surface. Suddenly, Sol was upon him, and filled his vision. He thought it might skip to the side at the last moment like the other suns had done, but instead he found himself falling into it, surrounded by great arches of flame and then crashing into what appeared to be a ocean of fire. But there was no splash. It was as if he were submerged into a bucket of paint, which was at first the color of citrus, and then a bright white. The sensation was pleasant, neither hot nor blinding. When, after must a moment, he emerged from the other side, he found himself bearing down on a blue planet. It took him a second to recognize itblue oceans, white cloudsthe Earth! then Europe, England, London, and before he could take a breath he was inside his own house, in the solarium among his plants. His friends were there, Filby and the Psychologist arguing. The Doctor, palms over his eyes, slumped in the ergonomic chair. He seemed to have been landing on top of the Young Man, a student friend of Filbys just down from Cambridge. Home, at last! The Young Man did not jump out of the way of the time contraption. Instead, he seemed to walk right through it, passing within a hairs breadth of the Time Traveler. My God! I am here, the Traveler shouted. He fumbled at the machines console, finally finding the ignition switch and flipping it off. The machines whine became a moan as the engine began to wind down. He looked out at Filby who, waving his arm in a grand gesture, continued his argument with the Psychologist. Then Filby looked in his direction, and the Time Traveler thought his friend saw him, but in nearly the same instant, Filby turned back to the Psychologist and raised his index finger.

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I am here, the Traveler said. But he was no longer there. Before the words left his mouth, the solarium shrank away from him and he was in a pool of black watching the city, the country, the planet, the Sun, go away from him in much the same way they had come. He was for a moment in history, but now as if it were foam on a wave, and he in a boat in a black sea, it had passed him by. ###

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