Chapter 15 Into the Future Again.
Once again, I felt the strange sensation of hurtling into the future.
I became dizzy and my stomach was queasy.
I had the feeling that I was falling.
It was even worse this time because I was sitting sideways in the seat.
I hung on as the machine swayed and shook.
Still, I was glad to be free from the clutches of the warlocks.
I had left them behind, not by running away from them, but by fleeing through time.
After a few minutes, I looked at the dials in front of me.
The hand that showed the passing of thousands of days was sweeping around like the second hand of a watch.
I was racing through time faster than ever.
I was speeding ahead so rapidly that the blinking of day and night turned into an even gray light.
But then I was puzzled to see the flashing of day and night again.
The sun should have been moving across the sky too fast for me to see it, but for some reason I could see it moving from horizon to horizon.
As I watched, it seemed to slow down.
Then the sky grew dark and the sun disappeared altogether.
Moments later, it rose again.
I was surprised to see this.
The dials did not show that I was slowing down.
It was as if a single day had become thousands of years long.
Finally, the sky turned the color of twilight.
Even though I was still traveling swiftly into the future, there was no more night and day.
The sun sat motionless near the western horizon.
Without rising or setting, it had also grown larger and redder.
The moon had disappeared and the stars shone, even though the sun had not set.
Then I realized what was happening.
Today, the Earth spins around on its axis once every day, so we see the sun and moon move through our sky once every 24 hours.
But far in the future, the spinning of the Earth has slowed and days have become longer.
I had reached a point in time when the turning of the planet had slowed to a complete stop.
The Earth did not spin and the sun didn't rise or set.
I pulled back on the lever very carefully.
The hands on the dial slowed until only one was turning the dial showing the passing of single days.
Slowly the dim outline of a beach grew visible.
I pulled the lever back all the way to its starting point and it came to a halt.
I sat in the time machine and gazed out at the new world.
To the east, the stars shone in a sky of inky blackness.
Overhead, there were no stars and the heavens were a deep red.
To the west, the sky was a brilliant scarlet, lit by the sun sitting on the horizon.
The ground around the time machine was covered with rocks that glowed red in the light.
The only plant life was the green moss that covered the rocks.
Farther from the machine was a beach that sloped down to the sea.
There wasn't a breath of wind, and there were no waves on the surface of the water.
The only motion was the slow rise and fall of a gentle swell.
A thick crust of salt ringed the water's edge.
I felt lightheaded and noticed that I was having trouble breathing.
I could tell that the air had grown thinner.
It was like trying to breathe at the top of a mountain.
I looked up the beach and saw what looked like a huge white butterfly.
It darted about through the air and disappeared over a small hill.
Then I noticed something moving on the ground nearby.
At first I thought one of the large flat rocks was moving.
Then I saw it was a giant crab slowly crawling toward me.
Its shell was as wide as a table, and it had many legs.
As I watched, it unfolded two big claws from under its body and waved them in the air.
The thing raised its long antenna and whipped them about.
Its eyes were small black balls sitting on top of stems that stuck up from the shell.
The crab's broad back was rough, like the surface of a rock, and was spotted with green moss.
Its mouth was an opening near the front edge of the body.
There were small pinchers on either side of the mouth.
The crab probably used those pinchers to feed itself.
As I stared at the strange creature crawling toward me, I felt a tickling on my cheek.
It felt like a fly, and I brushed it away with my hand, but then I felt another tickle on my ear.
I waved at it with my hand and caught something that felt like a piece of string.
The string quickly pulled itself from between my fingers.
I turned and saw that it was the antenna of another giant crab climbing up on the outside of the time machine.
Its eyes wriggled in front of my face and its mouth pinchers moved hungrily.
It reached toward me with one of its large grasping claws.
I quickly grabbed the lever and sped a month into the future.
Because the crab had been on the outside of the machine, it did not travel through time with me.
When I came to a stop it was gone, but dozens of other crabs crawled along the shoreline in the dim light.
As I sat looking at the bleak and barren world of the distant future, I felt a great sense of sadness.
The red sky, the Dead Sea, the giant crabs and the thin air.
Everything made me feel hopeless and alone.
After a few minutes, I pushed the lever and moved forward a hundred years.
The red sun still sat near the horizon, but it seemed even larger and dimmer.
The sea hadn't changed, and the beach remained alive with crabs.
It was still hard to breathe, and in the western sky a thin crescent moon hung over the sea.
I continued my journey through time, halting every thousand years or so.
At every stop the sun appeared larger and dimmer.
I had read books on astronomy.
I knew that as the sun grew older it would turn into a giant red star, but I never imagined I would see it with my own eyes.
I stopped for a final time and saw from the dials that I was more than thirty million years in the future.
The sun was now huge.
The crabs had disappeared and the moss was the only sign of life.
The air was much colder and a light snowfall dusted the rocks.
In the distance I could see snow-covered hillsides.
Along the shore, the white crust of salt was mixed with broken sheets of ice.
I looked out at the ocean and saw that a shallow sandbank had appeared above the oily surface of the water.
As I watched, I thought I saw something move on the sandbank, but finally decided it must have been a wave.
Then I noticed something odd about the sun.
It looked as if a large round object was moving in front of it.
The black shadows slowly blocked more and more of the sun, and the sky began to dim.
It was one of Earth's neighboring planets.
It was much larger than I would have expected.
The planets of the solar systems must have moved much closer together after all these millions of years.
The world was perfectly silent.
It's hard to describe to you just how quiet it was.
There were no sounds of carriages, factories, or people.
There were no bird songs, nor the hum of insects.
As the neighboring planet continued to block more of the sun's light, the silence was broken by the faint sound of a wind from the east.
The snowfall grew heavier.
The distant hills became lost in the growing darkness.
Soon it was as if night had fallen.
The sky became black and the stars appeared.
I began to shiver from the cold and was having trouble breathing.
I thought I would feel warmer if I stretched and moved about, so I climbed out of the machine.
The dark planet was moving away from the sun, but I still felt chilled.
As I stood beside my machine, I saw something stir on the sandbank again.
This time I could see that it was some kind of living creature.
Its round black body was the size of a football.
It dragged itself along the sand by its tentacles.
I tried to fill my lungs with air, but I felt as if I was about to faint.
The thought of lying helpless on the rocks filled me with terror and I found the strength to climb back into my machine.
I put my hand on the lever and pulled.
