Saturday Night Serial - HG Wells - The Time Machine - Chapter 15 - The Time Traveller Returns

The Time Machine is an 1895 dystopian post-apocalyptic science fiction novella by H. G. Wells about a Victorian scientist known as the Time Traveller who travels to the year 802,701. The work is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle or device to travel purposely and selectively forward or backward through time. The term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle or device.

Chapter One 
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Time Machine by H. Yewells, Chapter fifteen, The Time
Traveler's Return. So I came back for a long time.
I must have been insensible upon the machine. A blinking
succession of days and nights was suzum. The sun got
golden again, the sky blew. I breathed with greater freedom.

(00:21):
The fluctuating contours of the land ebbed and flowed. The
hands spun backwards upon the dials. At last I saw
the dim shadows of the houses, the evidences of decked
and humanity. These two changed and passed, and others came presently.
When the million dial was at zero, I slackened speed.
I began to recognize our own pretty and familiar architecture.

(00:43):
Thousand hands ran backwards to the starting point. The night
and day flapped slower and slower, and the old walls
of the laboratory came back around me very gently. Now
I slowed the machine down. I saw one little thing
that seemed odd to me. I think I told you
that when I set out before my velocity became very high.

(01:04):
Missus Watchett had walked in across the room, traveled, as
it seemed to me, like a rocket. As I returned
and I passed again across that minute when she traversed
the laboratory, but now her every motion appeared to be
the exact inversion of her previous ones. The door at
the lower end opened, and she glided quietly up the
laboratory back foremost, and disappeared behind a door by which

(01:26):
she had previously entered just before that. I see Hilia
for a moment, but he passed like a flash. Then
I stopped the machine and saw about me again the old,
familiar laboratory, my tools, my plans, is just as I
had left them. I got off the thing very shakily
and sat down upon my bench. Several minutes I trembled violently.

(01:50):
Then I became calmer. Round me was my old workshop again,
exactly as it had been. I might have slept there,
and the whole thing may have been a dream, and
yet not exactly the thing that had started from the
southeast corner of the laboratory to come to rest again
in the northwest against the wall where you saw it.

(02:12):
That gives you the exact distance from my little lawn
to the pedestal of the white sphinxed into which the
Morlocks had carnied my machine. For a time, my brain
went stagnant. Presently, I got up and came through the
passage here, limping because my heel was still painful and
still sorely begrimed. I saw the pow Mal gazette on

(02:33):
the table by the door. I found the date was
indeed to day, and looking at the time piece, I
saw the hour was almost eight o'clock. I heard your
voices and a clatter of plates. I hesitated. I felt
so sick and weak. Then I sniffed a good wholesome
meat and opened the door on you. You know the rest.

(02:54):
I washed and dined, and now I am telling you
the story.