Chapter 14 Recovering the Time Machine.
It wasn't long before I came to the yellow metal bench where I had sat on my first day in the future.
Everything looked the same, the beautiful plants, the buildings, and the alloy strolling quietly.
Some of the little people were bathing in the river where I had saved Weena.
Back then I thought the alloy lived a carefree life.
The world had looked like a peaceful garden, free of fear and danger.
But from the bench I could also see the wells.
They reminded me of the Morlocks.
I may have thought the world was a paradise, but I had been very wrong.
It made me sad to think that this was our future.
For all of history we have tried to make life better.
We have tried to make the world a safer, more carefree place, and at some point in our future we must have succeeded.
I could see from the alloy that we had conquered disease, war, and hunger.
We had reached the goal we'd been working toward for thousands of years.
But this peaceful world only came about because half of humanity went underground to work.
They said goodbye to the surface and the sun.
They spent their lives in the dark, taking care of the people who stayed above ground.
And the half who stayed on the surface, they had everything they needed.
Everything was taken care of, so they grew weak and stopped using their brains.
They had no more goals.
And so, by the year 802701, the Morlocks had turned into animals who did nothing but work in the alloy, lived in fear of the dark.
I was exhausted, so I lay down on the grass and had a long sleep.
When I woke up, I saw that I had slept for most of the day.
The sun was setting and the air was getting cool.
I grabbed my metal lever and walked down the hill toward the white sphinx.
I reached into my pocket and made sure I still had some matches.
When I reached the Sphinx, I saw the most unexpected thing.
The doors on the base of the statue were open.
I carefully approached the doorway and looked in.
There, sitting in the darkness, was my time machine.
I wondered why the Morlocks were giving my time machine back.
Were they giving up?
Was I too strong for I dropped my metal lever and took another step toward the doorway.
Then another thought crossed my mind.
Perhaps this was a trap.
I laughed quietly to myself.
If these creatures thought they were smarter than me, they were in for a surprise.
I stepped through the doorway and into the base of the statue.
I walked up to my machine.
It was good to see it again.
I was thankful that it wasn't damaged.
But then, Just as I had expected, the bronze doors quickly closed behind me.
There was a loud clang, and I was suddenly in the dark.
When the echoes of the slamming doors faded, I heard the murmur of the creatures coming toward me.
I wasn't afraid.
This is what I had thought the Morlocks would do.
All I had to do now was put the control lever in the machine and escape through time.
I would disappear, and the underworld creatures wouldn't know what had happened.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a match.
I struck it against a metal rail of the machine, but it did not light.
I had made a terrible mistake.
The match was the kind that would only light if you struck it on the matchbox, and I had left the box in the forest when I fled from the fire.
You can imagine how quickly my calm turned to panic.
The Morlocks were all around me.
I could feel them touching me.
They grabbed at me, and I pushed them away as best as I could.
I climbed into my machine and pulled the control lever from my pocket.
Hairy hands grasped at me as I tried to pull myself into the seat.
In the struggle, I dropped the lever to the ground.
I reached down with one hand and found it in the dark.
While the Morlocks tried to pull me from the machine, I put the lever in place.
As I lay sideways across the seat, I pushed the lever forward.
The clutching hand slipped from me.
A soft grey light appeared, and I felt myself travelling through time once more.
