This time I was sitting sideways in the saddle, and for a long time I just held on as the machine shook. When at last I looked at the dials, I was amazed. I had not pulled the levers back to return home. I had pushed them forward, and the hand that counted thousands of days was going round as fast as the second hand of a watch, into the future.
As I raced on, day and night came back, and they grew slower and slower. The sun grew bigger and redder, and the moon disappeared. In the end the sun stopped on the horizon, a huge red dome glowing with a dull heat. The earth had stopped turning, and one side of it always faced the sun. Very carefully, because I remembered my fall last time, I slowed down, until I could see a lonely beach.
I stopped gently and looked around me from the saddle. The sky was no longer blue. In the north-east it was black, with pale white stars, and above me it was a deep red. Low in the south-east lay the huge red sun. The rocks around me were red, and the only life I could see was a bright green plant, like moss, on their sides. There were no waves on the sea, because there was no wind. I was breathing very fast, and I thought the air must be thinner than it is now.
Then I saw that what I had taken for a red rock was moving slowly towards me. It was a huge creature like a crab. Can you imagine a crab as large as that table, with its many legs, its big claws, its long feelers waving like whips, and its eyes on stalks shining at you?
As I watched it, something tickled my cheek, as if a fly had landed there. I brushed it away, but it came back. I caught at it, and something like a thread was pulled quickly out of my hand. I turned and saw that I had caught the feeler of another monster crab, just behind me. Its evil eyes were moving on their stalks, and its huge claws were coming down on me. In a moment my hand was on the lever, and I was a month away from those monsters. But I was still on the same beach, and now I saw dozens of them crawling about among the green plants.
I cannot describe how lonely and terrible that world was. So I travelled on, stopping now and then, in great jumps of a thousand years or more. I wanted to know what would happen to the earth in the end. At last, more than thirty million years from now, the huge red sun filled almost a tenth of the dark sky. I stopped once more. The crabs had gone, and the beach seemed dead, except for the green plants on the rocks. It was bitterly cold. White flakes of snow were falling, and there was ice along the edge of the sea. Out on a sandbank I thought I saw something black moving, but then it was still, and I decided it was only a rock.
Then a black curve began to eat into the edge of the sun. An eclipse was beginning. The darkness grew, a cold wind began to blow, and the snow fell faster. Apart from the soft sound of the sea, the world was silent. Silent? I cannot describe how still it was. All the sounds of life—the calls of sheep and birds, the hum of insects—had gone. One by one, the white hills in the distance disappeared into blackness, and then there was only the pale light of the stars.
A horror of this great darkness came over me. The cold went into my bones, and breathing hurt. I felt terribly sick. Then the edge of the sun appeared again, like a red-hot bow in the sky. I got off the machine to recover. And as I stood there, I saw the moving thing on the sandbank again, and this time I was sure. It was a round thing, perhaps the size of a football, with long thin arms hanging down from it. It looked black against the blood-red water, and it was hopping about. Then I felt I was going to faint. But I was terribly afraid of lying helpless in that awful, lonely twilight, and somehow I climbed back into the saddle.