On the Surface

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The Morlock named Grach had heard from others of his kind what the journey through time was like, but those words hadn’t prepared him for the reality. As he moved forward, the ghostly world around him flashed, now night, now day, a flapping wing. The strobing light was painful, the darkness a bandage too soon ripped away. But Grach endured it; although he could have thrown his pale-white arm in front of his lidless eyes, the spectacle was too incredible not to watch.

Grach held the left-hand lever steadily, meaning the skimming through tomorrows should have happened at a constant rate. But the apparent time it took for each day-to-night cycle was clearly growing longer. Grach knew what was happening of course; the others had told him. Earth’s own day was lengthening as the planet in its senescence settled in to be tidally locked, the same face always toward the sun.

Such perpetual day would have been intolerable for Grach, or any Morlock, except that the sun itself was growing much, much dimmer, even as it grew larger or as Earth spiraled closer to it; debate still raged among the Morlocks about which phenomenon accounted for the solar disk now dominating so much of the sky. The giant red sphere that bobbed about the western horizon—never fully rising, never completely setting—was a dying coal whose wan light was all concentrated in the red end of the spectrum, the one color that did not sting the eyes.

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