The Time Machine - International World History Project

The Time Machinegeneration die and leave ghosts, he argued, the world atlast will get overcrowded with them. On that theory theywould have grown innumerable some Eight HundredThousand Years hence, and it was no great wonder to seefour at once. But the jest was unsatisfying, and I wasthinking of these figures all the morning, until Weena’srescue drove them out of my head. I associated them insome indefinite way with the white animal I had startledin my first passionate search for the Time Machine. ButWeena was a pleasant substitute. Yet all the same, theywere soon destined to take far deadlier possession of mymind.‘I think I have said how much hotter than our own wasthe weather of this Golden Age. I cannot account for it. Itmay be that the sun was hotter, or the earth nearer thesun. It is usual to assume that the sun will go on coolingsteadily in the future. But people, unfamiliar with suchspeculations as those of the younger Darwin, forget thatthe planets must ultimately fall back one by one into theparent body. As these catastrophes occur, the sun willblaze with renewed energy; and it may be that some innerplanet had suffered this fate. Whatever the reason, the factremains that the sun was very much hotter than we knowit.72 of 148