The Time Ships

[1] Confinement

I opened my eyes — or rather, I had the sensation that my eye lids were lifted back, or perhaps cut away. My vision was cloudy, my view of the world refracted; I wondered if my eyeballs were iced over — perhaps even frozen through. I stared up into a random point in the dark, starless sky; at the periphery of my vision I saw a trace of green — perhaps the moon? — but I could not turn to see.

I was not breathing. That is easy to record, but it is hard to convey the ferocity of that realization! I felt as if I had been lifted out of my body; there was none of that mechanical business — the clatter of breath and heart, the million tiny aches of muscles and membranes — which makes up, all but unnoticed, the surface of our human lives. It was as if my whole being, all of my identity, had become compressed into that open, staring, fixed gaze.

I should have been frightened, I thought; I should have been struggling for another breath, as if drowning. But no such urgency struck me: I felt sleepy, dream-like, as if I had been etherized.

It was that lack of terror, I think, which convinced me I was dead.

Now a shape moved over me, interposing itself between my line of sight and the empty sky. It was roughly pyramidal, its edges indistinct; it was like a mountain, all in shadow, looming over me.

I recognized this apparition, of course: it was the thing which had stood before me, as we lay exposed on the Ice. Now this machine — for such I thought it must be — swept towards me. It moved with an odd, flowing motion; if you think of how the sand in a glass timer might shift in a composite movement of grains if you tilt the device, you will have something of the effect. I saw, at the corner of my vision, how the blurred edge of the machine’s skirt swept over my chest and stomach. Then I felt a series of prickles — tiny jabs — across my chest and belly.

Thus, sensation had returned! — and with the suddenness of a rifle shot. There was a soft scraping against the skin of my chest, as if cloth were being cut away and pulled back. And now the prickles grew deeper; it was as if tiny, insectile palps were reaching below my flesh, infesting me. I felt pain — a million tiny needle-jabs, burrowing into my gut.

So much for Death — so much for Discorporeality! And with the realization of my continued existence came the return of Fear — instantly, and in a great flood of spurting chemicals which swilled around inside me with great intensity.

Now the looming shadow of the mountain-creature, blurred and ominous, crept further along my body, in the direction of my head. Soon I should be smothered! I wanted to scream — but I could feel nothing of my mouth and lips and neck.

I had never, in all my travels, felt so helpless as in that moment. I felt splayed out, like a frog on a dissecting table.

In the last moment, I felt something move over my hand. I could feel an etiolated cold there, a brush of hair: it was Nebogipfel’s hand, holding mine. I wondered if he were lying beside me, even now, as this ghastly vivisection proceeded. I tried to enclose his fingers, but I could not move a muscle.

And now the pyramidal shadow reached my face, and my friendly patch of sky was obscured. I felt needles burrow into my neck, chin, cheeks and forehead. There was a prickle — an unbearable itch — across the surface of my exposed eyes. I longed to look away, to close my eyes; but I could not: it was the most exquisite torture I can imagine!

Then, with that deep fire penetrating even my eyeballs, my grasp on consciousness slipped mercifully away.

When next I woke, my emergence had none of the nightmarish quality of my first arousal. I surfaced towards the world through a layer of sunlit dreams: I swam through fragmentary visions of sand, forest and ocean; I tasted again tough, salty bivalves; and I lay with Hilary Bond in warmth and darkness.

Then, slowly, full awakening came.

I was lying on some hard surface. My back, which responded with a twinge when I tried to move, was real enough; as were my splayed-out legs, my arms, my tingling fingers, the engine-like whistle of air through my nostrils, and the thrum of blood in my veins. I lay in darkness — utter and complete — but that little fact, which once might have terrified me, now seemed incidental, for I was alive again, surrounded by the familiar mechanical rattle of my own body. I felt an access of relief, pure and intense, and I let out a whoop of joy!

I sat up. When I laid my hands on the floor I found coarse-grained particles there, as if a layer of sand sat over some harder surface. Though I wore only my shirt, trousers and boots, I felt quite warm. I remained in complete darkness; but the echoes of that foolish holler had returned swiftly to my ears, and I had the sensation that I was in some enclosed space.

I turned my head this way and that, seeking a window or door; but this was without avail. However I became aware of a heaviness about my head — something was pinching my nose — and when I lifted my hands to investigate, I found a pair of heavy spectacles sitting on my face, the glass integrated with the frame.

I probed at this clumsy device — and the room was flooded with a brilliant light.

At first I was dazzled, and I squeezed my eyes shut. I snatched off the spectacles — and found that the light disappeared, leaving me sunk in darkness. And when I donned the spectacles, the brightness returned.

It did not tax my ingenuity far to understand that the darkness was the reality; and that the light was being furnished for me by the spectacles themselves, which I had inadvertently activated. The spectacles were some equivalent of Nebogipfel’s goggles, which the poor Morlock had lost in the Palaeocene Storm.

My eyes adjusted to the illumination, and I stood up and inspected myself. I was whole, and, it seemed, hale; I could find no trace on my hands or arms of the action of that diffuse pyramid-creature on my skin. I noticed a series of white traces, though, in the fabric of my jungle-twill shirt and trousers; when I ran my finger along these, I found low, ridged seams, as if clumsy repairs had been effected in my clothes.

I was in a chamber perhaps twelve feet across and about as high — and it was the most peculiar room I had visited in all my travels through time so far. To picture it, you must begin with a hotel room of the late nineteenth century. But the room was not constructed on the rectangular pattern common in my day; rather, it was a rounded cone, something like the inside of a tent. There was no door, and no furniture of any sort. The floor was covered by an even layer of sand, in which I could see the indentations where I had slept.

On the walls there was a rather garish paper — a purple, flock concoction — and what looked like window-frames, set about with heavy curtains. But the frames contained not glass, but only panels coated with more of the flock-paper.

There was no light source in the room. Instead, a steady and diffuse glow permeated the air, like the light of a cloudy day. I was by now convinced, however, that the illumination I saw was some artifact of my spectacles rather than anything physical. The ceiling above me was an ornate affair, decorated with the most remarkable paintings. Here and there in that baroque cascade I could make out fragments of the human form, but so jumbled about and distorted that the design was impossible to make out: it was not grotesque, but instead clumsy and confused — as if the artist had the technical ability of a Michelangelo, but the vision of a retarded child. And so you have it: the elements, I suppose, of a cheap hotel room of my day but transmogrified into this peculiar geometry, like something out of a dream!

I walked about, and my boots crunched on the coarse sand. I found no seam in the walls, no hint of a door. In one part of the room there was a cubicle, about three feet on a side, made of white porcelain. When I stepped off the sand and onto the porcelain platform, steam hissed, quite unexpectedly, from vents in the walls. I stepped back, startled, and the jets desisted; the lingering steam lapped about my face.

I found a series of small bowls set on the sand. They were a hand’s-breadth across and had shallow rims, like saucers. Some of the bowls contained water, and others portions of food: simple stuff, fruit and nuts and berries and the like, but nothing I could readily recognize. Finding myself thirsty, I drained a couple of the water-bowls. I found the bowls clumsy to use; their shallow profiles gave them a tendency to dump their contents over my chin, and they were less like cups, I thought, than the dishes one uses to water a dog or cat. I nibbled at a little of the food; the taste of the fruit pieces was bland but acceptable.

After this my hands and lips were left sticky, and I looked about for a sink or toilet facilities. There were none, of course; and I resorted to rinsing myself with the contents of another of the little water-bowls, and drying my face on a corner of my shirt.

I probed at the dummy windows, and leaped up, trying to poke at the clumsy ceiling designs, but to no avail; the surface of the walls and floor was as smooth as an eggshell’s but unbreachable. I dug out some of the sand on the floor and found that it penetrated to a depth of nine inches or a foot; under it lay a mosaic of brightly colored fragments, rather after the Roman style — but, like the ceiling, the mosaic depicted no portrait or scene I could discern, but rather a fragmentary jumble of designs.

I was quite alone, and there was no sound from beyond the walls: no sound in my universe, in fact, save the rustle of my own breathing, the thump of my heart the very noises which I had welcomed back with such vigor, so recently!

After a time, certain human needs asserted themselves. I resisted these pressures as long as I could, but at last was forced to resort to digging shallow pits in the sand, for the purpose of relieving myself.

As I covered over the first of these pits I felt the most extraordinary shame. I wondered what the Starmen of this remote 1891 were making of this performance!

When I tired, I settled myself in the sand, with my back to the wall of the room. At first I kept the light-spectacles on, but I found the illumination too bright to allow me to rest; so I doffed the spectacles, and kept them wrapped around my hand while I slept.

So began my sojourn in that bizarre cage of a room. As my initial fear subsided, a restless boredom crept over me. It was an imprisonment reminiscent of my time in the Morlocks’ Cage of Light, and I had come away from that without any wish to repeat the experience. I came to feel that anything, even the intrusion of danger, would be preferable than to remain in this dull, seamless prison. My exile in the Palaeocene — fifty million years from the nearest newspaper — had cured me of my old impulse to read, I think; but still, at times I thought I should go mad for lack of someone to talk to.

The bowls of food and water were filled up each time I slept. I never determined the mechanism by which this was done. I saw no evidence of an extruding machinery like the Morlocks’; but neither did I ever witness the refilling of a bowl by any semblance of attendant. Once, as an experiment, I went to sleep with a bowl buried beneath my body. I awoke to find a soggy sensation under my ribs. When I lifted myself, I found the bowl had filled with water once more, as if by some miraculous process.

I came to the tentative conclusion that, somehow, a subtle machinery in the bowls themselves was assembling the contents either from the substance of the bowls, or from the material of the air. I thought though I had no desire to investigate! — that my buried waste was broken down by the same discreet mechanisms. It was a bizarre, and not very appetizing, prospect.

[2] Experiments and Reflections

After three or four days I felt the need to get myself properly clean. As I have said, there was no semblance of toilet facilities here, and I grew dissatisfied with the cat-licks I was able to perform with my bowls of drinking water. I longed for a bath, or, better still, a swim in my Palaeocene Sea.

It took me some time — you may think me rather dull on this point — before I turned my attention again to that cubicle of porcelain I have described, ignored since my first tentative exploration of the chamber. I approached that cubicle now, and placed one cautious foot onto the porcelain base. Once more, steam spurted from the walls.

Suddenly I understood. With a surge of enthusiasm I stripped off my boots and garments (I retained my spectacles, though) and stepped into the little cubicle. Steam billowed all around me; the perspiration started from my skin, and moisture gathered over my spectacles. I had expected that the steam would blow out around the room, turning it all into something of a sauna. But the steam confined itself to the cubicle area, no doubt thanks to some arrangement involving differences in air pressure.

This was my bath-room, after all: it was not kitted out like the facilities of my own day — but why should it have been? My house in the Petersham Road was lost in a different History, after all. I recalled that the Romans, for example, had known nothing of soap or detergents; they had been forced to resort to this sort of poaching to sweat the dirt out of their pores. And the steam cleansing proved quite effective in my case, although, lacking the scrapers the Romans had used, I was forced to use my finger-nails to drag the accumulated muck off my flesh.

When I stepped away from the sauna, I looked for a way to dry myself off, lacking a towel. I considered, with reluctance, using my clothes; then, with an inspiration, I turned to the sand. I found that the gritty stuff, though coarse against my skin, took away the moisture pretty well.

My experience with the sauna caused me some self-reflection. How could I have been so narrow of mind that it should take me so long to have deduced the function of so obvious a piece of equipment? There had been many parts of the world in my own time, after all, which had not known the pleasures of modern plumbing and china bath-ware — plenty of districts of London, in fact, if one was to believe the more harrowing tales in the Pall Mall Gazette.

It was clear that a great deal of effort had been taken, by the unknown Starmen of this Age, to provide me with a room to sustain me. I was in a radically different History now, after all; and perhaps the strangeness of this chamber — the lack of recognizable sanitary facilities, the unusual type of food, and so forth — were not so significant or bizarre as they seemed to me.

I had been provided with the elements of a hotel room of my own day, but they were mixed up with what seemed to be sanitary arrangements dating from the birth of Christ; and as for the food, those plates of nuts and fruit which I was expected to nibble seemed more suited to one of my remote, fruit-gathering ancestors — say, from forty thousand years before my birth.

It was a muddle, a melange of fragments from the disparate Ages of Man! But I thought I saw a sort of pattern about it.

I considered the separation between myself and the inhabitants of this world. Since the founding of First London there had been fifty million years of development — more than a hundred times the evolutionary gap between myself and the Morlock. Over such unimaginable Ages, time is compressed — it is like the squeezing of layers of sedimentary rock by the weight of deposits above — until the interval between myself and Gaius Julius Caesar, or even between myself and the first representatives of genus Homo to walk the earth — which seemed so immense to me, from my perspective — dwindles to virtually naught.

Given all that, I thought, my unseen hosts had done a pretty good job at guessing at the conditions which might make me comfortable.

In any event it appeared that my expectations, even after all my experiences, were still rooted in my own century, and in one small part of the globe! This was a chastening thought — a recognition of my own smallness of spirit — and I gave up some time, reluctantly, to inward contemplation. But I am not by nature a reflective man, and soon I found myself chafing once more at my conditions of restraint. Ungrateful as it might be, I wanted my liberty back! — though I could see no means of obtaining it.

I think I was in that cage for perhaps a fortnight. When my release came, it was as sudden as it was unexpected.

I awoke in the dark.

I sat up, without my spectacles. At first I could not determine what had disturbed me — and then I heard it: a soft sound, a gentle, remote breathing. It was the most subtle of noises — almost inaudible and I knew that, if it had come floating up from the Richmond streets in the small hours of the morning, I should not have been disturbed by it. But here my senses had been heightened in sensitivity by my lengthy isolation: here I had heard no sounds for a fortnight — save for the soft hiss of the steam-bath — not generated by myself. I jammed my glasses onto my face. Light flooded my eyes, and I blinked away tears, impatient to see.

The glasses showed me a gentle glow, moonlight-pale, seeping into my room. A door was open, in the wall of my cell. It was lozenge-shaped, with a sill perhaps six inches from the floor, and it cut through a fake window frame.

I got to my feet, pulled on my shirt — for I had become accustomed to sleeping with the shirt as a rough pillow — and stepped towards the door-frame. That soft breathing increased in volume, and — overlaid on it, like the whisper of a brook over a breeze — I heard the liquid gurgle of a voice: an almost-human sound, a voice I recognized instantly!

The door-way led to another chamber, about the size and shape of my own. But here there were no false window-frames, no clumsy attempts at decoration, no sand on the floor; instead the walls were bare, a plain metallic gray, and there were several windows, covered by screens, and a door with a simple handle. There was no furniture here, and the room was dominated by a single, immense artifact: it was the pyramid-machine (or one identical to it) which I had last seen as it began its slow, painful crawl over my body. I have said that it was the height of a man, and was correspondingly broad at the base; its surface was metallic, by and large, but of a complex, shifting texture. If you will picture a great pyramidal frame, six feet tall, and covered with a blur of busy, metallic soldier-ants, then you will have the essence of it.

But this monstrosity barely attracted my attention; for — standing primly before it, and apparently peering into the pyramid’s hide with some kind of eye-scope device — there was Nebogipfel.

I stumbled forward, and I held out my arms with pleasure. But the Morlock merely stood, patiently, and did not react to my presence.

“Nebogipfel,” I said, “I cannot tell you how delighted I am to have found you. I think I was going crazy in there — crazy with isolation!”

I saw now that one of his eyes — the wounded right was covered by the eye-scope device; this tube extended to the pyramid, merging with the body of that object, and the whole affair crawled with the miniature ant-motion that plastered the pyramid. I looked at this with some revulsion, for I should not have liked to have inserted such a device into my eye-socket.

Nebogipfel’s other, naked eye swiveled towards me, huge and gray-red. “Actually it was I who found you, and asked to see you. And whatever your mental state, I see you are healthy, at least,” he said. “How is your frostbite?”

I was confused by this. “What frost-bite?” I pawed at my skin, but I knew well enough that it was unmarked.

“Then they have done a good job,” Nebogipfel said.

“Who?”

“The Universal Constructors.” By this I took it he meant the pyramid-machine and its cousins.

I noticed how straight was his bearing, how neat and well-groomed his pelt of hair. I realized that in this moonlight glow he needed no goggles here, as I did, to aid his vision; evidently these chambers of ours had been designed more with his needs in mind than mine. “You’re looking fine, Morlock,” I said warmly. “Your leg’s been straightened out — and that bad arm too.”

“The Constructors have managed to repair my most ancient of injuries — frankly, I am now as healthy as when I first climbed aboard your Time Machine.”

“All save that eye of yours,” I said with some regret, for I referred to the eye I had all but destroyed in my fear and rage. “I take it they — these Constructors of yours — were unable to save it.

“My eye?” He sounded puzzled. He pulled his face from the eye-scope; the tube came away from his face with a soft, pulpy noise, and dangled from the pyramid-thing, retracting into its metallic hide. “Not at all,” he said. “I chose to have it rebuilt this way. It has certain conveniences, although I admit I had some difficulty explaining my wishes to the Constructors…”

He turned to me now. His socket was a bare hole. The ruin of his eye had been scooped out, and it looked as if the bone had been opened up, the hole deepened — and the socket glistened throughout with moist, squirming metal.

[3] The Universal Constructor

In contrast to my sparse cell, Nebogipfel, it turned out, had been provided with a veritable suite. There were four rooms, each as large as mine and roughly conical in form, and fitted with doors and windows, which our hosts had not thought fit to provide for me: it was evident that they had a higher view of his intellect than mine!

There was the same lack of furniture that I had suffered, although Morlocks have sample needs, and it was not such an incongruity for Nebogipfel. In one room, though, I found a bizarre object: a table-like affair perhaps twelve feet long and six wide, topped with a soft orange covering. There were pockets arranged around the rim of this table, all edged with a hard substance that glowed green. The table was an approximate rectangle, although its edges were irregularly shaped; and a single ball — white, of some dense material — sat on the table-top. When I pushed the ball across the table-top it ran well enough, although, without a covering of baize, its speed was a little free, and it caromed off cushions at the rim with a satisfying solidity.

I tried to discern some deeper meaning of this device; but, for all the world — as you will have guessed from my description — it was like nothing so much as a billiards table! I wondered at first if this was some other distorted echo of a nineteenth-century hotel room — but a rather bizarre selection if so, and, lacking anything in the way of cues, and only a single ball, it was not likely to give me much sport.

Baffled, I abandoned the table, and tested the doors and windows. The doors worked by simple handles, to be grasped and turned, but the doors led only to other rooms within the suite, or to my original chamber; there were no ways out to the world beyond. I found, though, that the panels covering the transparent windows could be lifted up, and for the first time I was able to inspect this new 1891, this White Earth.

My viewpoint was raised some thousand feet or more from the ground! we seemed to be at the apex of some immense cylindrical tower, whose flanks I could see sweeping down below me. Everything I saw reinforced the first impression I had gained when I had obtained that last glimpse over the rim of the Time-Car, just before the cold overcame me: that this was a world forever sunk into the Ice. The sky was the color of gunmetal, and the icebound land a gray-white like exposed bone, with none of that attractive blueness one sees sometimes about prettier snow-fields. Looking out now, I could see quite clearly how dreadfully stable this world-state truly was, just as Nebogipfel had described: the daylight glinted fiercely from the mantle of scarred Ice which sheathed the earth, and the whiteness of that world-wide carapace hurled the warmth of the sun back into the sink of space. The poor earth was dead, caught at the bottom of this pit of icy, climatic stability, for evermore — it was the ultimate Stability of Death.

Here and there I saw a Constructor — in form just like our own, here in Nebogipfel’s apartment — standing on the frozen landscape. Each Constructor was always alone, standing there like some ill-wrought monument, a splash of steel gray against the bone white of the ice. I never saw any of them move! It was as if they simply appeared in the sites where they stood, reassembling themselves, perhaps, from the air. (Indeed, as I found later, this first assessment of mine was not so far from the truth.)

Dead the land was, but not without the evidence of intelligence. There were more great buildings — like our own — puncturing the landscape. They took simple geometric forms: cylinders, cones and cubes. My vantage point showed me the south and west, and from my aerie I could see these great buildings scattered as far afield as Battersea, Fulham, Mitcham and beyond. They were spaced perhaps a mile apart on average, as far as I could see; and the whole prospect — the fields of Ice, the mute Constructors, the sparse, anonymous buildings — combined to make up a bleak, inhuman London.

I returned to Nebogipfel, who still stood before his Constructor. The metal pelt of the thing rippled and shone, as if it were the surface of some tilted pond with metal fish moving beneath, and then a protuberance — a tube a few inches wide — thrust out of the surface, glistening with the silvery metal texture of the pyramid, and pressed towards Nebogipfel’s waiting face.

I recognized this arrangement, of course; it was the return of the eye-scope device I had seen earlier. In a moment it would be fitted to Nebogipfel’s skull.

I prowled around the rim of the Constructor. As I have described, in appearance the Constructor was like a heap of melted slag; it was animate to some degree — and mobile, for I had seen this object, or one similar, crawl over my own body — but I could not begin to guess as to its purpose. Inspecting closely, I saw how the surface was covered by a series of metal hairs: cilia, like iron filings, which waved about in the air, quite active and intelligent. And I had the infuriating, eye-hurting sensation that there were further levels of detail to all this, beyond the grasp of my aging vision. The texture of this mobile surface was at the same time fascinating and repulsive: mechanical, but with something of the quality of life. I was not tempted to touch it — I could not bear the thought of those squirming cilia latching onto my skin — and I had no instruments with which to probe. Without any means of making a closer examination, I was unable to undertake a study of the pyramid’s internal structure.

I noticed a certain degree of activity about the lowest rim of the pyramid. Crouching down, I saw how tiny communities of metal cilia — the size of ants, or smaller — were continually breaking away from the Constructor. Generally these fallen pieces seemed to dissolve as they fell against the floor, doubtless breaking up into components too small for me to see; but at times I saw how these discarded bits of Constructor trekked hither and thither across the floor, again after the fashion of ants, to unknown destinations. In a similar fashion — I observed now — more clumps of the cilia emerged from the floor, clambered up the skirts of the Constructor, and merged into its substance, as if they had always been a part of it!

I remarked on this to Nebogipfel. “It is astonishing,” I said, “but it is not hard to surmise what is going on. The components of the Constructor attach and detach themselves. They squirm off over the floor — or even fly away through the air, for all I know, or can see. The discarded pieces must either die off, in some fashion, if they are defective — or else join the glistening carcass of some other unfortunate Constructor.

“Confound it,” I said, “the planet must be covered with a thin slime of these detached cilia, squirming this way and that! And, in some interval of time — perhaps a century — there must be nothing left of the original body of this beast we see here. All its bits, its analogues of hair and teeth and eyes, have trekked off for a visit to its neighbors!”

“It is not a unique design,” Nebogipfel said. “In your body — and mine — cells die and are replaced continually.”

“Perhaps, but even so — what does it mean to say that this Constructor, here, is — an individual? I mean: if I buy a brush — and then replace the handle, and then the head — do I have the same brush?”

The Morlock’s red-gray eye turned back to the pyramid, and that tube of extruded metal sank into the hole in his face with a liquid noise.

“This Constructor is not a single machine, like a motor-car,” he retorted. “It is a composite, made up of many millions of submachines — limbs, if you like. These are arranged in a hierarchical form, radiating out from a central trunk along branches and twigs, after the manner of a bush. The smallest limbs, at the periphery, are too small for you to see: they work at the molecular or atomic levels.”

“But what use,” I asked, “are these insectile limbs? One may push atoms about, and molecules — but why? What a tedious and unproductive business.”

“On the contrary,” he said wearily. “If you can do your engineering at the most fundamental level of matter — and if you have enough time, and sufficient patience — you can achieve anything.” He looked up at me. “Why, without the Constructors’ molecular engineering, you — and I — would not even have survived our first exposure to White Earth.”

“What do you mean?”

“The ’surgery’ performed on you,” Nebogipfel said, “was at the level of the cell — the level where the frost damage occurred…”

Nebogipfel described, in some grisly detail, how, in the severe cold we had encountered, the walls of my very cells (and his) had been burst open by the freezing and expansion of their contents — and no surgery, of the type I was familiar with, could have saved my life.

Instead, the microscopic outer limbs of the Constructor had become detached from the parent body, and had traveled through my damaged system, effecting repairs of my frost-bitten cells at the molecular level. When they reached the other side — crudely speaking — they had emerged from my body and rejoined their parent.

I had been rebuilt, from the inside out, by an army of swarming metal ants — and so had Nebogipfel.

I shuddered at this, feeling colder than at any time since my rescue. I scratched at my arms, almost involuntarily, as if seeking to scrape out this technological infection. “But such an invasion is monstrous,” I protested to Nebogipfel. “The thought of those busy little workers, passing through the substance of my body…”

“I take it you would prefer the blunt, invasive scalpels of the surgeons of your own age.”

“Perhaps not, but—?”

“I remind you that, by contrast, you could not even set a broken bone without rendering me lame.”

“But that was different. I’m no doctor!”

“Do you imagine this creature is? In any event, if you would prefer to have died, no doubt that could be arranged.”

“Of course not.” But I scratched at my skin, and I knew it would be a long time before I felt comfortable again in my own rebuilt body! I thought of a drop of comfort, though. “At least,” I said, “these limb-things of the Constructor are merely mechanical.”

“What do you mean?”

“They are not alive. If they had been—”

He pulled his face free of the Constructor and faced me, the hole in his face sparkling with metal cilia. “No. You are wrong. These structures are alive.”

“What?”

“By any reasonable definition of the word. They can reproduce themselves. They can manipulate the external world, creating local conditions of increased order. They have internal states which can change independently of external inputs; they have memories which can be accessed at will… All these are characteristics of Life, and Mind. The Constructors are alive, and conscious — as conscious as you or I. More so, in fact.”

Now I was confused. “But that’s impossible.” I indicated the pyramid-device. “This is a machine. It is manufactured.”

“I have encountered the limits of your imagination before,” he said severely. “Why should a mechanical worker be built within the limitations of the human design? With machine life—”

“Life?”

“ — one is free to explore other morphologies — other forms.”

I raised an eyebrow at the Constructor. “The morphology of the privet hedge, for example!”

“And besides,” he said, “it could manufacture you. Does that make you less than alive?”

This was becoming far too metaphysical a debate for me! I paced around the Constructor. “But if it is alive, and conscious — is this a person? Or several people? Does it have a name? A soul?”

Nebogipfel turned to the Constructor once more, and let the eye-scope nuzzle into his face. “A soul?” he asked. “This is your descendant. So am I, by a different History path. Do I have a soul? Do you?”

He turned away from me, and peered into the heart of the Constructor.

[4] The billiards Room

Later, Nebogipfel joined me in the chamber I had come to think of as the Billiards Room. He ate from a plate of cheese-like fare.

I sat, rather moodily, on the edge of the billiards table, flicking the single ball across the surface. The ball was wont to exhibit some peculiar behavior. I was aiming for a pocket on the far side of the table, and more often than not I hit it, and would trot around to retrieve it from its little net cache beneath. But sometimes the ball’s path would be disturbed. There would be a rattling in the middle of the empty table surface — the ball would jiggle about, oddly, too rapidly to follow — and then, usually, the ball would sail on to the destination I had intended. Sometimes, though, the ball would be diverted markedly from the path I had intended — and once it even returned, from that half-visible disturbance, to my hand!

“Nebogipfel, did you see that? It is most peculiar,” I said. “There does not seem to be any obstruction in the middle of the table. And yet, half the time, the running of this ball is impeded.” I tried some more demonstrations for him, and he watched with an air of distraction.

I said, “Well, I’m glad at any rate that I’m not playing a game here. I can think of one or two fellows who might come to blows over such discrepancies.” Tiring of my idle toying, I sat the ball square in the middle of the table and left it there. “I wonder what the motive of the Constructors was in placing this table in here. I mean, it’s our only substantial piece of furniture — unless you want to count our Constructor out there himself… I wonder if this is intended as a snooker or a billiards table.”

Nebogipfel seemed bemused by the question. “Is there a difference?”

“I’ll say! Despite its popularity, snooker is just a potting game — a fine enough pastime for the bored Army Officers in India who devised it but it has nothing like the science of billiards, to my mind…”

And then — I was watching it as it happened — a second billiard ball popped out of one of the table’s pockets, quite spontaneously, and began to roll, square on, towards my ball at rest at the centre of the table.

I bent closer to see. “What the devil is happening here?” The ball was progressing quite slowly, and I was able to make out details of its surface. My ball was no longer smooth and white; after my various experiments, its surface had become scarred with a series of scratches, one quite distinctive. And this new ball was just as scarred.

The newcomer hit my stationary ball, with a solid clunk; the new ball was brought to rest by the impact, and my ball was knocked across the table.

“Do you know,” I said to Nebogipfel, “if I didn’t know better, I would swear this ball, that has just emerged from nowhere, is the same as the first.” He came a little closer, and I pointed out that distinctive long scratch. “See that? I’d recognize this scar in the dark… The balls are like identical twins.”

“Then,” the Morlock said calmly, “perhaps they are the same ball.”

Now my ball, knocked aside, had collided with a cushion on the far side of the table and had rebounded; such was the nonregular geometry of the table that it was now heading back in the direction of the pocket from which the second ball had emerged.

“But how can that be? I mean, I suppose a Time Machine could deliver two copies of the same object to the same place — think of myself and Moses! — but I see no time travel devices here. And what would be the purpose?”

The original ball had lost much momentum with these various impacts, and it was fairly creeping by the time it reached the pocket; but it slid into the pocket, and disappeared.

We were left with the copy of the ball which had emerged so mysteriously from the pocket. I picked it up and examined it. As far as I could tell it was an identical copy of our ball. And when I checked the cache beneath the pocket — it was empty! Our original ball had gone, as if it had never existed. “Well!” I said to Nebogipfel. “This table is trickier than I imagined. What do you suppose happened there? Is this the sort of thing which goes on, do you think, during the disturbed paths — all that rattling — which I’ve pointed out to you before?”

Nebogipfel did not reply immediately, but — after that — he took to devoting a substantial fraction of his time, with me, to the puzzles of that strange billiards table. As for me, I tried inspecting the table itself, hoping to find some concealed device, but I found nothing — no trickery, no concealed traps which could swallow and disgorge balls. Besides, even if there had been such crude illusion-machinery, I would still have to find an explanation for the apparent identity of “old” and “new” balls!

The thing which caught my mind — though I had no explanation for it at the time — was the odd, greenish glow of the pocket rims. For all the world, that glow reminded me of Plattnerite.

Nebogipfel told me of what he had learned of the Constructors. Our silent friend in Nebogipfel’s living-room was, it seemed, one of a widespread species: the Constructors inhabited the earth, the transformed planets — and even the stars.

He told me, “You must put aside your preconceptions and look at these creatures with an open mind. They are not like humans.”

“That much I can accept.”

“No,” he insisted, “I do not think you can. To begin with, you must not imagine that these Constructors are individual personalities — after the fashion of you, or me. They are not men in cloaks of metal! They are something qualitatively different.”

“Why? Because they are composed of interchangeable parts?”

“Partly. Two Constructors could flow into one another — merging like two drops of liquid, forming one being — and then part as easily, forming two again. It would be all but impossible — and futile — to trace the origins of this component or that.”

Hearing that, I could understand how it was that I never saw the Constructors moving about the ice-coated landscape outside. There was no need for them to lug the weight of their great, clumsy bodies about (unless for a special need, as when Nebogipfel and I had been repaired). It would be enough for the Constructor to disassemble himself, into these molecular components Nebogipfel described. The components could wiggle across the ice, like so many worms!

Nebogipfel went on, “But there is more to the Constructors’ consciousness than that. The Constructors live in a world we can barely imagine — they inhabit a Sea, if you like, a Sea of Information.”

Nebogipfel described how, by phonograph and other links, the Universal Constructors were linked to each other, and they used those links to chatter to each other constantly. Information — and awareness, and a deepening understanding — flowed out of the mechanical mind of each Constructor, and each received news and interpretation from every one of his brothers: even those on the most remote stars.

So rapid and all-encompassing was the Constructors’ mode of communication, in fact, that it was not really analogous to human speech, said Nebogipfel.

“But you’ve spoken to them. You’ve managed to get Information out of them. How so?”

“By mimicking their own ways of interacting,” Nebogipfel said. He fingered his eye-socket, gingerly. “I had to make this sacrifice.” His natural eye gleamed.

Nebogipfel had sought a way, as it were, to immerse his brain into the Information Sea of which he’d spoken. Through the eyesocket, he was able to absorb Information directly from the Sea — without its passing through the conventional medium of speech.

I found myself shuddering, at the thought of such an invasion of the comfortable darkness of my own skull! “And do you think it was worth it?” I asked him. “This sacrifice of an eye?”

“Oh, yes. And more… Look — can you see how it is for the Constructors?” he asked me. “They are a different order of life — united, not just by this sharing at the gross physical level, but by this pooling of their experiences. Can you imagine how it is to exist in such a medium of Information as their Sea?”

I reflected. I thought of seminars at the Royal Society — those rich discussions when some new idea has been tossed into the pool, and three dozen agile minds battled over it, reshaping and refining it as they go — or even some of my old Thursday night dinner parties, when, with the help of liberal quantities of wine, the rattle of ideas could come so thick and fast it was hard to tell where one man had stopped speaking and the next resumed.

“Yes,” Nebogipfel cut in when I related this last. “Yes, that is exactly it. Do you see? But with these Universal Constructors, such conversations proceed continuously — and at the speed of light, with thoughts passing directly from the mind of one to another.

“And in such a miasma of communication, who can say where the consciousness of one finishes, and that of another begins? Is this my thought, my memory — or yours? Do you see? Do you follow the implications?”

On the earth — perhaps on each inhabited world — there must be immense central Minds, composed of millions of the Constructors, fused together into great, God-like entities, which maintained the awareness of the race. In a sense, Nebogipfel said, the race itself was conscious.

Again I had the feeling that we were straying too far into metaphysics. “All of that is fascinating stuff,” I said, “and it’s all as may be; but perhaps we should return to the practicalities of our own situation. What does it all have to do with you and me?” I turned to our own patient Constructor, who sat there, shimmering, in the middle of the floor. “What of this fellow?” I said. “All of this stuff about consciousness and so forth is all very well — but what does he want? Why is he here? Why did he save our lives? And — what does he want with us now? Or is it a case of these mechanical men all working together — like bees in a hive, united by these common Minds you speak of — so that we are faced with a species with common aims?”

Nebogipfel rubbed his face. He walked up to the Constructor, peered into his eye-scope, and was rewarded, within a few minutes, by the extrusion, from within the Constructor’s glistening body, of a plate of that bland, cheese-like food of which I had seen so much in Nebogipfel’s home century. I watched with disgust, as Nebogipfel took the plate and bit into his regurgitated food. It was no more horrible, truthfully, than the extrusion of materials from the Floor of the Morlocks’ Sphere, but there was something about the Constructor’s liquid mixture of Life and Machine which repelled me. I averted my thoughts, with determination, from speculations as to the source of my own food and water!

“We cannot talk of these Constructors as united,” Nebogipfel was saying. “They are linked. But they do not share a common purpose — in the fashion, let us say, of the various components of your own personality.”

“But why not? That would seem eminently sensible. With perfect, continuous communication there need be no understanding — no conflict.”

“But it is not like that. The totality of the Constructors’ mental universe is too big.” He referred to the Information Sea again, and described how structures of thought and speculation — complex, evolving, evanescent — came and went, emerging from the raw materials of that ocean of mentation. “These structures are analogous to the scientific theories of your own day — constantly under stress, from new discoveries and the insights of new thinkers. The world of understanding does not stay still, you see…

“And besides, remember your friend Kurt Gödel, who taught us that no body of knowledge can be codified and made complete.

“The Information Sea is unstable. The hypotheses and intentions which emerge from it are complex and multi-faceted; there is rarely complete unanimity among the Constructors about any point. It is like a continuing, emerging debate; and within that debate, factions may emerge: groupings of quasi-individuals, coalescing around some scheme. One might say that the Constructors are united in their drive to advance the understanding of their species, but not so as regards the means by which this might be achieved. In fact, one might hypothesize in general, the more advanced the mentation, the more factions appear to emerge, because the more complex the world appears…

“And thus, the race progresses.”

I remembered what Barnes Wallis had told me of the new order of Parliamentary debate, in 1938, where Opposition had essentially been banned as a criminal activity — a divergence of energy from the one, selfevidently correct approach to things! — But if what Nebogipfel was saying was correct, there can be no universally correct answer to any given question: as these Constructors had learned, multifarious views are a necessary feature of the universe in which we find ourselves!

Nebogipfel chewed patiently on his cheese stuff; when he was done, he pushed the plate back into the substance of the Constructor, where it was absorbed — it was comforting for him, I thought, for it was a process so like the extruding Floor of his own home Sphere.

[5] White Earth

I spent many hours alone, or with Nebogipfel, at the windows of our apartment.

I saw no evidence of animal or vegetable life on the surface of White Earth. As far as I could tell, we were isolated in our little bubble of light and warmth, atop that immense tower; and we never left that bubble, in all the time we were there.

At night the sky beyond our windows was generally clear, with only a light frosting of cirrus cloud high in the depleted, lethal atmosphere. But, despite this clarity — I still could not understand it — there were no stars — or rather, very few, a handful compared to the multitude which had once blazed down on the earth. I had made this observation on our first arrival here, but I think I had dismissed it as some artifact of the cold, or my disorientation. To have it confirmed, now that I was warm and clear-headed, was disturbing — perhaps the strangest single thing in this new world.

The moon — that patient companion planet — still turned about the earth, going through its phases with its immemorial regularity; but its ancient plains remained stained green. Moonlight was no longer a thing of cool silver, but washed the landscape of White Earth with the gentlest verdant glow, returning to the earth an echo of that green-ness she had once enjoyed, and which was now locked under the unforgiving ice.

I saw again that gleam, as if of a captive star, that shone steadily at us from the moon’s extreme easterly limb. My first speculation had been that I was seeing the reflection of the sun from some lunar lake, but the glare was so steady that eventually I decided that it must be purposeful. I imagined a mirror — an artificial construct — perhaps fixed to some lunar mountain-top, and designed so that its reflection always falls on the earth. As to the purpose of such a device, I speculated that it might date from a time when the degradation of atmospheric conditions, here on the Mother Planet, had not yet become so bad as to drive men off the earth, but, perhaps, were so severe that they had caused the collapse of whatever culture had survived.

I imagined moon-men: Selenites, as we might call them, themselves descended from Humanity. The Selenites must have watched the lethal progress of the great fires which broke across the crust of the oxygen-choked earth. The Selenites had known that men still lived on the earth — but they were men fallen from civilization, men living as savages, even as animals once more, sliding back into some pre-rational state. Perhaps the collapse of the earth impacted them too — for it may be that Selenite society could not survive without provision from Mother Earth.

The Selenites could grieve for their cousins on the Mother World, but could not reach them… and so they attempted to signal. They built their immense mirror — it must have been half a mile across, or more, to be visible across inter-planetary distances.

The Selenites may even have had some more ambitious aim in mind than simple inspiration from the sky. For example, they may have sent — by making the mirror flicker, using some equivalent of Morse — instructions on crop-rearing, or engineering — the lost secrets of the steam engine, perhaps — something, at any rate, rather more useful than mere good-luck messages.

But in the end it was to no avail. In the end, the fist of Glaciation closed about the land. And the great lunar mirror was abandoned, as men disappeared from the earth.

Such, at any rate, was my speculation, as I stood gazing through the windows of my tower; I have no means of knowing if I was right — for Nebogipfel was unable to read this new History of Humanity in such detail — but in any event the gleam of that isolated mirror on the moon became, for me, a most eloquent symbol of the collapse of Humanity.

The most striking feature of our night sky was not the moon, however, nor even that absence of stars: it was the great, weblike disc, a dozen times Luna’s width, that I had noticed on our first arrival. This structure was extraordinarily complex and alive with motion. Think of a spider-web, perhaps lit from behind, with drops of dew glistening and rolling over its surface; now envisage a hundred tiny spiders crawling over that surface, their motion slow but quite visible, evidently working to strengthen and extend the structure — and then cast your vision across many miles of inter-planetary space! — and you will have something of what I saw.

I made out the web-disc most clearly in the early hours of the morning — perhaps around three o’clock — and at such times I was able to make out ghostly threads of light — tenuous and thin — which reached up, from the far side of the earth, and out through the atmosphere towards the disc.

I discussed these features with Nebogipfel. “It’s quite extraordinary… it’s as if those beams make up a kind of rigging of light, which attach the disc to the earth; so that the whole affair is like a sail, towing the earth through space on some spectral wind!”

“Your language is picturesque,” he said, “but it captures something of the flavor of that enterprise.”

“What do you mean?”

“That it is a sail,” he said. “But it is not towing the earth: rather, the earth is providing a base for the wind which drives the sail.”

Nebogipfel described this new type of space yacht. It would be constructed in space, he said, for it would be much too fragile to haul upwards from the earth. Its sail consisted, essentially, of a mirror; and the ’wind’ which filled the sail was light: for particles of light falling on a mirrored surface deliver a pushing force, just as do the molecules of air which make up a breeze.

“The ’wind’ comes from beams of coherent light, generated by earthbound projectors as wide as a city,” he said. “It is these beams which you have observed as ’threads’ joining planet to sail. The pressure of the light is small but insistent, and it is extraordinarily efficient in transferring momentum — especially as light speed is approached.”

He imagined that the Constructors would not sail upon such a ship as discrete entities, as had the passengers of the great ships of my day. Rather, the Constructors might have disassembled themselves, and allowed their components to run off and knit themselves into the ship. At the destination, they would reassemble as individual Constructors, in whatever form was most efficient for the worlds they found there.

“But where is the space yacht’s destination, do you think? The moon, or one of the planets — or—”

In his flat, undramatic Morlock way, Nebogipfel said: “No. The stars.”

[6] The Multiplicity Generator

Nebogipfel continued his experiments with the billiards table. Repeatedly the ball would encounter that peculiar clattering I had observed about the middle of the table, and several times I thought I saw billiard balls — more copies of our original — appearing from nowhere and interfering with the trajectory of our ball. Sometimes the ball emerged from these collisions and continued along the path it might have followed regardless of the clattering-about; sometimes, though, it was knocked onto quite a different path, and — once or twice — we observed the type of incident I described earlier, in which a stationary ball was knocked out of its place, without my, or Nebogipfel’s, intervention.

This all made for an entertaining game — and clearly something fishy was going on — but for the life of me I could not see it, despite that hint of Plattnerite glow about the pockets. My only observation was that the slower the ball traveled, the more likely it was to be diverted from its path.

The Morlock, though, grew gradually more excited about all this. He would immerse himself in the hide of the patient Constructor, delving once more into the Information Sea, and emerge with some new fragment of knowledge he’d fished up — he mumbled to himself in that obscure, liquid dialect of his kind — and then he would hurry straight to the billiards table, there to test his new understanding.

At last, he seemed ready to share his hypotheses with me; and he summoned me from my steam bath. I dried myself on my shirt and hurried after him to the Billiards Room; his small, narrow feet pattered on the hard floor as he half-ran back to the table. He was as excited as I could remember seeing him.

“I think I understand what this table is for,” he said, breathless.

“Yes?”

“It is — how can I express it? — it is only a demonstration, little more than a toy but it is a Multiplicity Generator. Do you see?”

I held up my hands. “I fear I don’t see a thing.”

“You are familiar enough with the idea of the Multiplicity of Histories, by now…”

“I should be; it’s the basis of your explanation of the divergent Histories we have visited.”

At every moment, in every event (I summarized), History bifurcates. A butterfly’s shadow may fall here or there; the assassin’s bullet may graze and pass on without harm, or lodge itself fatally in the heart of a King… To each possible outcome of each event, there corresponds a fresh version of History. “And all of these Histories are real,” I said, “and — if I understand it right they lie side by side with each other, in some Fourth Dimension, like the pages of a book.”

“Very well. And you see, also, that the action of a Time Machine — including your first prototype — is to cause wider bifurcations, to generate new Histories… some of them impossible without the Machine’s intervention — like this one!” He waved his hands about. “Without your machine, which started off the whole series of events, humans could never have been transported back to the Palaeocene. We should not now be sitting on top of fifty million years of intelligent modification of the cosmos.”

“I see all that,” I said, my patience wearing thin. “But what has it to do with this table?”

“Look.” He set the single ball rolling across the table. “Here is our ball. We must imagine many Histories — a sheaf of them — fanning out around the ball at every moment. The most likely History, of course, is the one containing the classical trajectory — meaning a straightforward roll of the ball across the table. But other Histories — neighboring, but some widely divergent — exist in parallel. It is even possible, though very unlikely, that in one of those Histories the thermal agitation of the ball’s molecules will combine, and cause it to leap up in the air and hit you in the eye.”

“Very well.”

“Now—” He ran his finger around the rim of the nearest pocket. “This green inlay is a clue.”

“It is Plattnerite.”

“Yes. The pockets act as miniature Time Machines — limited in scope and size, but quite effective. And, as we have seen from our own experience, when Time Machines operate — when objects travel into future or past to meet themselves — the chain of cause and effect can be disrupted, and Histories grow like weeds…”

He reminded me of the odd incident we had witnessed with the stationary ball. “That was, perhaps, the clearest example of what I am describing. The ball sat at rest on the table — our ball, we will call it. Then a copy of our ball emerged from a pocket, and knocked our ball aside. Our ball traveled to the cushion, rebounded, and fell into the pocket, leaving the copy at rest on the table, in the precise position of the original.

“Then,” Nebogipfel said slowly, “our ball traveled back through time — do you see? — and emerged from the pocket in the past…”

“And proceeded to knock itself out of the way, and took its own place.” I stared at the innocent-looking table. “Confound it, I see it now! It was the same ball after all. It was resting quite happily on the table — but, because of the bizarre possibilities of time travel, it was able to loop through time and knock itself aside!”

“You have it,” the Morlock said.

“But what made the ball start moving in the first place? Neither of us gave it a shove towards the pocket.”

“A ’shove’ was not necessary,” Nebogipfel said. “In the presence of Time Machines — and this is the point of the demonstration, really — you must abandon your old ideas of causality. Things are not so simple! The collision with the copy was just one possibility for the ball, which the table demonstrated for us. Do you see? In the presence of a Time Machine, causality is so damaged that even a stationary ball is surrounded by an infinite number of such bizarre possibilities. Your questions about ’how it started’ are without meaning, you see: it is a closed causal loop — there was no First Cause.”

“Maybe so,” I said, “but look here: I still have an uneasy feeling about all this. Let’s go back to the two balls on the table again — or rather, the one real ball and its copy. Suddenly, there is twice as much material present as there was before! Where has it all come from?”

He eyed me. “You are worried about the violation of Conservation Laws — the appearance, or disappearance, of Mass.”

“Exactly.”

“I did not notice any such concern when you dived into time in search of your younger self. For that was just as much — more! — of a violation of any Conservation Principle.”

“Nevertheless,” I said, refusing to be goaded, “the objection is valid — isn’t it?”

“In a sense,” he said. “But only in a narrow, single-History sort of way.

“The Universal Constructors have been studying these paradoxes of time travel for centuries now,” he said. “Or rather, apparent paradoxes. And they have formulated a type of Conservation Law which works in the higher Dimension of the Multiplicity of Histories.

“Start with an object like yourself. If, at any given moment, you add in a copy of yourself which may be absent because you have traveled away into past or future — and then subtract any copies doubly present because one of you has traveled to the past then you will find that the sum, overall, stays constant there is ’really’ only one of you — no matter how many times you travel up and down through time. So there is Conservation, of a sort — even though, at any moment in any given History, it may seem that Conservation Laws are broken, because there are suddenly two of you, or none of you.”

I saw it, on thinking it through. “There is only a paradox if you restrict your thinking to a single History,” I observed. “The paradox disappears, if you think in terms of Multiplicity.”

“Exactly. Just as problems of causality are resolved, within the greater frame of the Multiplicity.

“It is the power of this table, you see,” he told me, “that it is able to demonstrate these extraordinary possibilities to us… It is able to use Time Machine technology to show us the possibility — no, the existence — of Multiple, divergent Histories at the macroscopic level. Indeed, it can pick out particular Histories of interest: it has a very subtle design.”

He told me more of the Constructors’ Laws of the Multiplicity.

“One can imagine situations,” he said, “in which the Multiplicity of Histories is zero, one, or many. It is zero if that History is impossible — if it is not self consistent. A Multiplicity of one is the situation imagined by your earlier philosophers — of Newton’s generation, perhaps — in which a single course of events unfolds out of each point in time, consistent and immovable.”

I understood him to be describing my own original — and naive! — view of History, as a sort of immense Room, more or less fixed, through which my Time Machine would let me wander at will.

“A ’dangerous’ path for an object — like you, or our billiard ball — is one which can reach a Time Machine,” he said.

“Well, that’s clear enough,” I said. “It’s been obvious that I’ve been splitting off new Histories right, left and center since the moment the Time Machine was first switched on. Dangerous indeed!”

“Yes. And as the machine, and its successors, delve ever deeper into the past, so the Multiplicity generated tends towards infinity, and the divergence of the new copies of History grows wider.”

“But,” I said, a little frustrated, “coming back to the matter at hand — what is the purpose of this table? Is it just a trick? — Why have the Constructors given it to us? What are they trying to tell us?”

“I do not know,” he said. “Not yet. It is difficult… The Information Sea is wide, and there are many factions among the Constructors. Information is not offered freely to me — do you understand? — I have to pick up what I can, make the best understanding of it, and so build up an interpretation that way…

I think there is a faction of them who have some scheme — an immense Project whose outlines I can barely make out.”

“What is the nature of this Project?”

Nebogipfel said for answer, “Look: we know that there are many — perhaps an infinite number — of Histories emerging from each event. Imagine yourself, in two such neighboring Histories, separated by — let us say — the details of the rebound of your billiard ball. Now: could those two copies of you communicate with each other?”

I thought about that. “We have discussed this before. I don’t see how. A Time Machine would take me up and down a single History branch. If I’d gone back to change the rebound of the ball, then I would expect to travel forward and observe a difference, because, it seems, if the machine causes a bifurcation, it then tends to follow the newly generated History. No,” I said confidently. “The two versions of me could not communicate.”

“Not even if I allow you any conceivable machine, or measuring device?”

“No. There would be two copies of any such device — each as disconnected from its twin as I was.”

“Very well. That is a reasonable, and defensible, position. It is based on an implicit assumption that twin Histories, after their split, do not affect each other in any way. Technically speaking, you are assuming that Quantum-Mechanical Operators are linear… But,” and now that note of excitement returned to his voice, “it turns out there may be a way to talk to the other History — if, on some fundamental level, the universe and its twin do remain entangled. If there is the smallest amount of Nonlinearity in the Quantum Operators — almost too small to detect—”

“Then such communication would be possible?”

“I have seen it done… in the Sea, I mean… the Constructors have managed it, but only on the smallest of experimental scales.”

Nebogipfel described to me what he called an “Everett phonograph” — “after the twentieth-century scientist, of your History, who first dreamed up the idea. Of course the Constructors have another label — but it is not easily rendered into English.”

The Nonlinearities of which Nebogipfel spoke worked at the most subtle of levels.

“You must imagine that you perform a measurement — perhaps of the spin of an atom.” He described a “Nonlinear” interaction between an atom’s spin and its magnetic field. “The universe splits in two, of course, depending on the experiment’s outcome. Then, after the experiment, you allow the atom to pass through your Nonlinear field. This is the anomalous Quantum Operator I mentioned. Then — it turns out you can arrange affairs so that your action in one History depends on a decision taken in the second History…”

He went into a great deal of detail about this, involving the technicalities of what he called a “Stem-Gerlach device,” but I let this wash past me; my concern was to grasp the central point.

“So,” I interrupted him, “is it possible? Are you telling me that the Constructors have invented such inter-History communication devices? Is our table one such?” I began to feel excitement at the thought. All this chatter of billiard balls and spinning atoms was all very well; but if I could talk, by some Everett phonograph, to my selves in other Histories — perhaps to my home in Richmond in 1891…

But Nebogipfel was to disappoint me. “No,” he said. “Not yet. The table utilizes the Nonlinear effect, but only to — ah — to highlight particular Histories. At least some selection, some control, over the processes is displayed, but… The effects are so small, you see. And the Nonlinearities are suppressed by time evolution.”

“Yes,” I said with impatience, “but what is your guess? By placing this table here, is our Constructor trying to tell us that all this stuff — Nonlinearity, and communication between Histories — that it’s all important to us?”

“Perhaps,” Nebogipfel said. “But it is certainly important to him.”

[7] The Mechanical Heirs of Man

Nebogipfel reconstructed something of the history of Humanity, across fifty million years. Much of this picture was tentative, he warned me — an edifice of speculation, founded on the few unambiguous facts he had been able to retrieve from the Information Sea.

There had probably been several waves of star colonization by man and his descendants, said Nebogipfel. During our journey through time in the car, we had seen the launch of one generation of such ships, from the Orbital City.

“It is not difficult to build an interstellar craft,” he said, “if one is patient. I imagine your 1944 friends in the Palaeocene could have devised such a vessel a mere century or two after we left them. One would need a propulsion unit, of course — a chemical, ion or laser rocket; or perhaps a solar sail of the type we have observed. And there are strategies to use the resources of the solar system to escape from the sun. You could, for instance, swing past Jupiter, and use that planet’s bulk to hurl your star-ship in towards the sun. With a boost at perihelion, you could very easily reach solar escape velocity.”

“And then one would be free of the solar system?”

“At the other end a reverse of the process, the exploitation of the gravity wells of stars and planets, would be necessary, to settle into the new system. It might take ten, a hundred thousand years to complete such a journey, so great are the gulfs between the stars…”

“A thousand centuries? But who could survive so long? What ship — the supply question alone—”

“You miss the point,” he said. “One would not send humans. The ship would be an automaton. A machine, with manipulative skills, and intelligence at least equivalent to a human’s. The task of the machine would be to exploit the resources of the destination stellar system — using planets, comets, asteroids, dust, whatever it could find — to construct a colony.”

“Your ’automatons,’ “ I remarked, “sound rather like our friends, the Universal Constructors.”

He did not reply.

“I can see the use of sending a machine to gather information. But other than that — what is the point? What is the meaning of a colony without humans?”

“But such a machine could construct anything, given the resources and sufficient time,” the Morlock said. “With cell synthesis and artificial womb technology, it could even construct humans, to inhabit the new colony. Do you see?”

I protested at this — for the prospect seemed unnatural and abhorrent to me — until I remembered, with reluctance, that I had once watched the “construction” of a Morlock, in just such a fashion!

Nebogipfel went on, “But the probe’s most important task would be to construct more copies of itself. These would be fueled up — for example, with gases mined from the stars — and sent on, to further star systems.

“And so, slow but steady, the colonization of the Galaxy would proceed.”

“But,” I protested, “even so, it would take so much time. Ten thousand years to reach the nearest star, which is some light years away—”

“Four.”

“And the Galaxy itself—”

“Is a hundred thousand light years across. It would be slow,” he said. “At least at first. But then the colonies would begin to interact with each other. Do you see? Empires could form, straddling the stars. Other groups would oppose the empires. The diffusion would slow further… but it would proceed, inexorably. By such techniques as I have described, it would take tens of millions of years to complete the colonization of the Galaxy — but it could he done. And, since it would be impossible to recall or redirect the mechanical probes, once launched, it would be done. It must have been done by now, fifty million years after the founding of First London.”

He went on, “The first few generations of Constructors were, I think, built with anthropocentric constraints incorporated into their awareness. They were built to serve man. But these Constructors were not simple mechanical devices — these were conscious entities. And when they went out into the Galaxy, exploring worlds undreamed of by man and redesigning themselves, they soon passed far beyond the understanding of Humanity, and broke the constraints of their authors… The machines broke free.”

“Great Scott,” I said. “I can’t imagine the military chaps of that remote Age taking to that idea very kindly.”

“Yes. There were wars… The data is fragmented. In any event, there could be only one victor in such a conflict.”

“And what of men? How did they take to all this?”

“Some well, some badly.” Nebogipfel twisted his face a little and swiveled his eyes. “What do you think? Humans are a diverse species, with multiple and fragmented goals — even in your day; imagine how much more diverse things became when people were spread across a hundred, a thousand star systems. The Constructors, too, rapidly fragmented. They are more unified as a species than man has ever been, by reason of their physical nature, but because of the much greater Information pool to which they have access — their goals are far more complex and varied.”

But, through all this conflict, Nebogipfel said, the slow Conquest of the stars had proceeded.

The launching of the first star-ships, Nebogipfel said, had marked the greatest deviation we had yet witnessed from my original, unperturbed History. “Men — your friends, the New Humans — have changed everything about the world, even on a geological — a cosmic scale. I wonder if you can understand—”

“What?”

“I wonder if you understand, really, the meaning of a million years — or ten million — or fifty.”

“Well, I ought to. I’ve traversed through such intervals, with you, on the way to the Palaeocene and back.”

“But then we traveled through a History free of intelligence. Look — I have told you of interstellar migration. If Mind is given the chance to work on such scales—”

“I’ve seen what can be done to the earth.”

“More than that! — more than a single planet! The patient, termite-burrowing of Mind can undermine even the fabric of the universe,” he whispered, “if given enough time… Even we only had a half-million years since the plains of Africa, and we captured a sun…

“Look at the sky,” he said. “Where are the stars? There is hardly a naked star in the sky. This is 1891, or thereabouts, remember: here can be no cosmological reason for the extinction of the stars, as compared to the sky of your own Richmond.

“With my dark-evolved eyes, I can see a little more than you. And I tell you there is an array of dull-red pinpoints up there: it is infra-red radiation — heat.”

Then it struck me, with almost a physical force. “It is true,” I said. “It is true… Your hypothesis of Galactic conquest. The proof of it is visible, in the sky itself! The stars must be cloaked about — almost all of them — by artificial shells, like your Morlock Sphere.” I stared out at the empty sky. “Dear God, Nebogipfel; human beings — and their machines — have changed Heaven itself!”

“It was inevitable that it would come to this, once the first Constructor was launched — do you see?”

I stared into that darkened sky, oppressed by awe. It was not so much the changed nature of the sky that astonished me so, but the notion that all this — all of it, to the furthest end of the Galaxy — had been brought about by my shattering of History with the Time Machine!

“I can see that men have gone from the earth,” I said. “The climatic instability has done for us here. But somewhere” — I waved a hand — “somewhere out there must be men and women, in those scattered homes!”

“No,” he said. “The Constructors see everywhere, remember; they know everything. And I have seen no evidence of men like you. Oh, here and there you may find biological creatures descended from man — but as diverse, in their way, from your form of human as I am. And would you count me a man? And the biological forms are, besides, mostly degenerated…”

“There are no true men?”

“There are descendants of man everywhere. But nowhere will you find a creature who is more closely related to you than — say — a whale or an elephant…”

I quoted to him what I remembered of Charles Darwin: “ ’Judging by the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity…’ “

“Darwin was right,” Nebogipfel said gently.

That idea — that, of your type, you are alone in the Galaxy! — is hard to accept, and I fell silent, gazing up at the blanked-out stars. Was each of those great globes as densely populated as Nebogipfel’s Sphere? My fertile mind began to inhabit those immense world-buildings with the descendants of true men — with fish-men, and bird-men, men of fire and ice — and I wondered what a tale might be brought back if some immortal Gulliver were able to travel from world to world, visiting all the diverse offspring of Humanity.

“Men may have become extinct,” Nebogipfel said. “Any biological species will, on a long enough time-scale, become extinct. But the Constructors cannot become extinct. Do you see that? With the Constructors, the essence of the race is not the form, biological or otherwise — it is the Information the race has gathered, and stored. And that is immortal. Once a race has committed itself to such Children, of Metal and Machines and Information, it cannot die out. Do you see that?”

I turned to the prospect of White Earth beyond our window.

I saw it, all right — I saw it all, only too well!

Men had launched off these mechanical workers to the stars, to find new worlds, build colonies. I imagined that great argosy of light reaching out from an earth which had grown too small, going glittering up into the sky, smaller and smaller until the blue had swallowed them up… There were a million lost stories, I thought, of how men had come to know how to bear the strange gravitations, the attenuated and unfamiliar gases and all the stresses of space.

It was an epochal migration — it changed the nature of the cosmos — but its launch was, perhaps, a last effort, a spasm before the collapse of civilization on the Mother World. In the face of the disintegration of the atmosphere, men on earth weakened, dwindled — we had the evidence of the pathetic mirror on the moon to show us that — and, at last, died.

But then, much later, to the deserted earth, back came the colony machines man had sent out — or their descendants, the Universal Constructors, enormously sophisticated. The Constructors were descended from men, in a way and yet they had gone far beyond the boundaries of what men could achieve; for they had discarded old Adam, and all the vestiges of brutes and reptiles that had lurked in his body and spirit.

I saw it all! The earth had been repopulated; and — not by man — but by the Mechanical Heirs of Man, who had returned, changed, from the stars.

And all of this — all of it — had propagated out of the little colony which had been founded in the Palaeocene. Hilary had foreseen something of this, I thought: the re-engineering of the cosmos had unfolded from that little, fragile huddle of twelve people, that unremarkable seed planted fifty million years deep.

[8] A Proposition

Time wore away slowly, in that bizarre, cocooned place.

For his part, Nebogipfel seemed quite content with our arrangements. He spent most of each day with his face pressed up against the glistening hide of the Universal Constructor, immersed in the Information Sea. He had little time, or patience, for me; it was clearly an effort — a loss — for him to break away from that rich vein of ancient wisdom, and to confront my ignorance — and even more so my primitive desire for company.

I took to mooching, aimlessly, about the apartment. I munched at my plates of food; I used the steam bath; I toyed with the Multiplicity table; I peered out of the windows at an earth which had become as inhospitable to me as the surface of Jupiter.

I had nothing to do! — and in this mood of futility, for I was now so remote from home and my own kind that I could not see how I might live, I began to plumb new depths of depression.

Then, one day, Nebogipfel came to see me, with what he called a proposition.

We were in the room in which our friendly Constructor sat, as squat and placid as ever. Nebogipfel, as usual, was connected to the Constructor by his tube of glistening cilia.

“You must understand the background to all this,” he said, and his natural eye rotated so he could watch me. “To begin with, you must see that the goals of the Constructors are very different from those of your species — or from mine.”

“That’s understandable,” I said. “The physical differences alone—”

“It goes beyond that.”

Generally, when we got into this sort of debate — with myself cast in the role of the Ignoramus — Nebogipfel showed signs of impatience, of a salmon-like longing to return to the gleaming depths of his Information Sea. This time, though, his speech was patient and deliberate, and I realized that he was taking unusual care over what he had to say.

I began to feel uneasy. Clearly the Morlock felt he had to convince me of something.

He continued to discuss the goals of the Constructors. “You see, a species cannot survive for long if it continues to carry around the freight of antique motivations that you bear. No offense.”

“None taken,” I said drily.

“I mean, of course, territoriality, aggression, the violent settlement of disputes… Imperialist designs and the like become unimaginable when technology advances past a certain point. With weapons of the power of die Zeitmaschine’s Carolinum Bomb — or worse — things must change. A man of your own age said that the invention of atomic weapons had changed everything — except Humanity’s way of thinking.”

“I can’t argue with your thesis,” I said, “for it does seem that — as you say — the limits of Humanity, the vestiges of old Adam, were at last enough to bring us down… But what of the goals of your metal super-men, the Constructors?”

He hesitated. “In a sense a species, taken as a whole, does not have goals. Did men have goals in common, in your day, save to keep on breathing, eating, and reproducing?”

I grunted. “Goals shared with the lowest bacillus.”

“But; despite this complexity, one can — I think — classify the goals of a species, depending on its state of advancement, and the resources it requires as a consequence.”

A Pre-Industrial civilization, Nebogipfel said — I thought of England in the Middle Ages — needs raw materials: for food, clothing, warmth and so forth.

But once Industry has developed, materials can be substituted for each other, to accommodate the shortage of a particular resource. And so the key requirements then are for capital and labor. Such a state would describe my own century, and I saw how one could indeed regard, in a generic sense, the activities of mankind in that benighted century as driven in the large by competition for those two key resources: labor and capital.

“But there is a stage beyond the Industrial,” Nebogipfel said. “It is the Post-Industrial. My own species had entered this stage — we had been there for the best part of half a million years, on your arrival — but it is a stage without an end.”

“Tell me what it means. If capital and labor are no longer the determinants of social evolution…”

“They are not, because Information can compensate for their lack. Do you see? Thus, the transmutating Floor of the Sphere by means of the knowledge invested in its structure — could compensate for any shortage of resource, beyond primal energy…”

“And so you are saying that these Constructor — given their fragmentation into a myriad complex factions — are, at base, driving for more knowledge?”

“Information — its gathering, interpretation and storage — is the ultimate goal of all intelligent life.” He regarded me somberly. “We had understood that, and had begun to translate the resources of the solar system to that goal; you men of the nineteenth century had barely begun to grope your way to that realization.”

“Very well,” I said. “So, we must ask, what is it that limits the gathering of Information?” I peered out at the enclosed stars. “These Universal Constructors have already fenced off much of this Galaxy, it seems to me.”

“And there are more Galaxies beyond,” Nebogipfel said. “A million million star systems, as large as this one.”

“Perhaps, then, even now, the Constructors’ great sail-ships are drifting out, like dandelion seeds, to whatever lies beyond the Galaxy… Perhaps, in the end, the Constructors can conquer all of this material universe, and turn it over to the storage and classification of Information which you describe. It would be a universe become a great Library — the greatest imaginable, infinite in scope and depth—”

“It is a grand project indeed — and, yes, the bulk of the energy of the Constructors is devoted to that goal: and to studies of how intelligence can survive into the far fixture — when Mind has encompassed the universe, and when all the stars have died, and the planets have drifted from their suns… and matter itself begins to decay.

“But you are wrong: the universe is not infinite. And as such, it is not enough. Not for some factions of the Constructors. Do you see? This universe is bounded in Space and Time; it began at a fixed period in the past, and it must finish with the final decay of matter, at the ultimate end of time…

“Some of the Constructors — a faction — are not prepared to accept this finitude,” Nebogipfel said. “They will not countenance any limits to knowledge. A finite universe is not enough for them! — and they are preparing to do something about it.”

That sent a chill — of pure, unadulterated awe — prickling over my scalp. I looked out at the hidden stars. This was a species which was already Immortal, which had conquered a Galaxy, which would absorb a universe — how could their ambitions stretch further still?

And, I wondered grimly, how could it involve us?

Nebogipfel, still locked to his eye-scope, rubbed his face with the back of his hand, in the manner of a cat, removing fragments of food from the hair about his chin. “I do not yet have a full understanding of this scheme of theirs,” he said. “It is to do with time travel, and Plattnerite; and — I think — the concept of the Multiplicity of Histories. The data is complex — so bright…” I thought this was an extraordinary word to use; for the first time it occurred to me what courage and intellectual strength it must take for the Morlock to descend into the Constructors’ Information Sea — to confront that ocean of blazing Ideas.

He said, “A fleet of Ships is being constructed — huge Time Machines, far beyond the capabilities of your century or mine. With these, the Constructors intend — I think — to penetrate the past. The deep past.”

“How far back? Beyond the Palaeocene?”

He regarded me. “Oh, much further than that.”

“Well. And what of us, Nebogipfel? What is this ’proposition’ you have?”

“Our patron — the Constructor here with us — is of this faction. He was able to detect our approach through time — I cannot give you details; they are very advanced — they were able to sense our coming, on our crude Time-Car, up from the Palaeocene. And so, he was here to greet us.”

Our Constructor had been able to follow our progress, up towards the surface of time, as if we were timid deep-sea fish! “Well, I’m grateful he was. After all, if he hadn’t been on hand to meet us as he did, and treat us with his molecular surgery, we’d be dead as nails.”

“Indeed.”

“And now?”

He withdrew his face from the Constructor’s eye-scope; it came loose with an obscene plop. “I think,” — he said slowly, “that they understand your significance — the fact that your initial invention propagated the changes, the explosion in Multiplicity, which led to all this.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think they know who you are. And they want us to come with them. In their great Ships — to the Boundary at the Beginning of Time.”

[9] Options and Introspections

To travel to the Beginning of Time… My soul quailed at the prospect!

You may think me something of a coward for this reaction. Well, perhaps I was. But you must remember that I had already been granted a vision of one extremity of Time — its bitter End — in one of the Histories I had investigated: the very first, where I had watched the dying of the sun over that desolate beach. I remembered, too, my nausea, my sickness and confusion; and how it had only been a greater dread of lying helpless in that rayless obscurity which had impelled me to get aboard the Time Machine once more and haul myself back into the past.

I knew that the picture I should find at the dawn of things would be rather different — unimaginably so! — but it was the memory of that dread and weakness which made me hesitate.

I am a human — and proud of it! — but my extraordinary experiences, I dare say more unusual than any man of my generation, had led me to understand the limitations of the human soul — or, at any rate, of my soul. I could deal with the descendants of man, like the Morlocks, and I could make a fair fist of coping with your prehistoric monstrosities like Pristichampus. And, when it was a mere intellectual exercise — in the warmth of the lounge of the Linnaean — I could conceive of going much further: I could have debated for long hours the Finitude of Time, or von Helmholtz’s views on the inevitability of the Heat Death of the universe.

…But, the truth is, I found the reality altogether more daunting.

The available alternative, however, was hardly attractive!

I have always been a man of action — I like to get hold of things! — but here I was, cushioned in the hands of metal creatures so advanced they could not conceive even of talking to me, any more than I should think of holding spiritual conversations with a flask of bacillus. There was nothing I could do here on White Earth — for the Universal Constructors had done it all.

Many times, I wished I had ignored Nebogipfel’s invitation and stayed in the Palaeocene! There, I had been a part of a growing, developing society, and my skills and intellect as well as my physical strength — could have played a major part in the survival and development of Humanity in that hospitable Age. I found my thoughts, inwardly directed as they were, turning also to Weena — to that world Of A.D. 802,701 to which I had first traveled through time, and to which I had intended to return — only to be blown off my course by the first Bifurcation of History. If things had been different, I thought — if I had behaved differently, that first time, perhaps I could have retrieved Weena from the flames, even at the cost of my own health or life. Or, if I had survived that, perhaps I could have gone on to make a genuine difference in that unhappy History, by somehow leading Eloi and Morlock to confront their common degradation.

I had done none of that, of course; I had run for home, as soon as I retrieved my Time Machine again. And now I was forced to accept that, because of the endless calving-off of Histories, I could never return to 802,701 — or, indeed, to my own time.

It seemed that my nomadic trail had ended here, in these meaningless few rooms!

I would be kept alive by these Constructors, it seemed, as long as my body continued to function. Since I have always been robust, I supposed I could look forward to several decades more of life — and perhaps even longer; for if Nebogipfel was right about the sub-molecular capabilities of these Constructors, perhaps (so Nebogipfel speculated, to my astonishment) they would be able to halt, or reverse, even the aging processes of my body!

But it seemed I would be deprived of companionship forever — save for my unequal relationship with a Morlock who, already being my intellectual superior, and with his continuing immersion in the Information Sea, would surely soon pass on to concerns advanced far beyond my understanding.

I faced a long and comfortable life, then — but it was the life of a zoo animal, caged up in these few rooms, with nothing meaningful to achieve. It was a future that had become a tunnel, closed and unending…

But, on the other hand, I knew that concurring with the Constructors’ plan was a course of action quite capable of destroying my intellect.

I confided these doubts to Nebogipfel.

“I understand your fears, and I applaud your honesty in confronting your own weakness. You have grown in understanding of yourself, since our first meeting—”

“Spare me this kindness, Nebogipfel!”

“There is no need for a decision now.”

“What do you mean?”

Nebogipfel went on to describe the immense technical scope of the Constructors’ project. To fuel the Ships, vast amounts of Plattnerite would have to be prepared.

“The Constructors work on long time-scales,” the Morlock said. “But, even so, this project is ambitious. The Constructors’ own estimates of completion (and this is vague, because the Constructors do not plan in the sense that human builders do; rather they simply build, cooperative and incremental and utterly dedicated, in the manner of termites) are that another million years will pass before the Ships are made ready.”

“A million years?… The Constructors must be patient indeed, to devise schemes on such scales!”

My imagination was caught by the scale of all this, so startled was I by that number! To consider a project spanning geological ages, and designed to send ships to the Dawn of Time: I felt a certain awe settling over me, I told Nebogipfel: a sense, perhaps, of the numinous.

Nebogipfel favored me with a sort of skeptical glare. “That is all very well,” he said. “But we must strive to be practical.”

He said that he had negotiated to have the remains of our improvised Time-Car brought to us; as well as tools, raw materials, and a supply of fresh Plattnerite…

I understood his thinking immediately. “You’re suggesting we just hop on the Time-Car, and skip forward through a million-year interval, while our patient Constructors complete the Ships’ development?”

“Why not? We have no other way to reach the launch of the Ships. The Constructors may be functionally immortal, but we are not.”

“Well — I don’t know! — it just seems… I mean, can the Constructors be so sure of completing their building program on time, and as they have envisaged it over such immense intervals? Why, in my day, the human species itself was only a tenth that age.”

“You must remember,” Nebogipfel said, “the Constructors are not human. They are, truly, an immortal species. Individual foci of awareness may form and dissolve back into the general Sea, but the continuity of Information-gathering, and their consistency of purpose, is unwavering…

“In any event;” he said, regarding me, “what have you to lose? If we travel up through time and find that, after all, the Constructors gave up before completing their Ships — what of it?”

“Well, we could die, for one thing. What if no Constructor is available to greet us, and tend to our needs, at the distant end of your million years?”

“What of it?” the Morlock repeated. “Can you look into your heart, now, and say that you are happy” — he waved a hand at our little apartment — “to live like this for the rest of your life?”

I did not answer; but I think he read my response in my face.

“And besides — ,” he went on.

“Yes?”

“Once it is built, it is possible we may choose to use the Time-Car to travel in a different direction.”

“What do you mean?”

“We will be given plenty of Plattnerite — we could even reach the Palaeocene again, if you would like.”

I glanced about furtively, feeling like some plotting criminal! “Nebogipfel, what if the Constructors hear you saying such things?”

“What if they do? We are not prisoners here. The Constructors find us interesting — and they feel that you should accompany the Ships on their final quest, because of your historical and causal significance. But they would not force us, or keep us here if our distress was so deep that we could not survive.”

“And you?” I asked him carefully. “What do you want to do?”

“I have made no decision,” he retorted. “My main concern now is to open as many options to the future as I can.”

This was eminently sensible advice, and so — having done with introspection! — I concurred with Nebogipfel that we should make a start at rebuilding the Time-Car. We fell into a detailed discussion as to the requirements we would have for materials and tools.

[10] Preparations

The Time-Car was brought in from the ice by the Constructor. To achieve this, the Constructor split himself into four small sub-pyramids, and positioned these child-machines beneath each corner of the car’s battered frame. The child-machines moved with a kind of oily, flowing motion — think of the way a sand-dune advances, grain by grain, under the influence of a wind — and I saw how migrating threads of metal cilia connected the child-machines to each other as the strange procession continued.

When the remains of our car had been deposited in the middle of one room, the child-machines coalesced into their parent Constructor once more; they flowed upwards and into each other, as if melting. I found it a fascinating sight, if repulsive; but soon Nebogipfel was happily plugged into his eye-scope once more without a qualm.

The essential sub-structure of the Time-Car came from the skeleton of our 1938 Chronic Displacement Vehicle, but its super-structure — such as it was, merely a few panels for walls and floor — had been improvised, by Nebogipfel, from the wreckage of the Expeditionary Force’s bombed-out Juggernauts and the Messerchmitt Zeitmaschine. The simple controls had been a similarly crude affair. Much of this, now, was depleted and wrecked. So, in addition to the replacement of the Plattnerite, it was pretty clear that we needed to perform some pretty extensive renovation work on the car.

I contributed much of the skilled manual work, under the direction of Nebogipfel. At first I resented this arrangement, but it was Nebogipfel who had the access to the Information Sea, and thereby the accumulated wisdom of the Constructors; and it was he who was able to specify to the Constructor the materials we needed: pipe of such-and-such a diameter, with a thread of this-or-that pitch; and so forth.

The Constructor produced the raw materials we needed in his usual novel fashion; he simply extruded the stuff from his hide. It cost him nothing, it seemed, save a material depletion; but that was soon made up by an increased flow into the apartment of the migrating cilia which sustained him.

I found it difficult to trust the results of this process. I had visited steelworks and the like during the manufacture of components of my own Time Machine, and earlier devices: I had watched molten iron run from the blast-furnaces into Bessemer converters, there to be oxidized and mixed with spiegel and carbon… And so on. By comparison, I found it hard to put my faith in something which had been disgorged by a shapeless, glistening heap!

The Morlock pointed out my folly in this prejudice, of course.

“The sub-atomic transmutation of which the Constructor is capable is a far more refined process than that mess of melting, mixing and hammering you describe — a process which sounds as if it had barely evolved since your departure from the caves.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “but even so… It’s the invisibility of all this!” I picked up a wrench; like all the tools we had specified, this had been disgorged by the Constructor within moments of Nebogipfel’s request for it, and it was a smooth, seamless thing, without joints, screws or mold marks. “When I pick up this thing, I half-expect it to feel warm, or to be dripping with stomach-acid, or to be covered with those dreadful iron cilia…”

Nebogipfel shook his head, his gesture a conscious mockery. “You are so intolerant of ways of doing things other than your own!”

Despite my reservations, I was forced to allow to the Constructor providing us with more equipment and supplies. I reasoned that the journey should take thirty hours, if we retreated all the way to the Palaeocene — but no more than thirty minutes if we performed the limited hop to the future of the Time Ships. So, determined not to be unprepared this time, I stocked up our new car with enough food and water, to our varying requirements, to last us for some days; and I asked for thick, warm clothing to be provided for us both. Still, I was uneasy as I lifted the heavy coat the Constructor had made for me over the battered remains of my jungle-twill shirt; the coat was an affair of silvery, unidentifiable cloth, quite heavily quilted.

“It just doesn’t seem natural,” I protested to Nebogipfel, “to wear something which has been vomited up in such a fashion!”

“Your reservations are becoming tedious,” the Morlock replied. “It is clear enough to me that you have a morbid fear of the body and its functions. This is evidenced not only by that irrational response to the Constructor’s manufacturing capabilities, but also by your earlier reaction to Morlocks—”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I retorted, startled.

“You have repeatedly described to me your encounters with those — cousins — of mine, using terms associated with the body: fecal analogies, fingers like worms, and so on.”

“So you’re saying — wait a minute — you’re saying that, in fearing the Morlock, and the products of the Constructors, I fear my own biology?”

Without warning, he flashed his fingers in my face; the pallor of the naked flesh of his palm, the worm-like quality of his fingers — all of it was horrifying to me, of course, as it always was! — and I could not help but flinch away.

The Morlock evidently felt he had made his point; and I remembered, too, my earlier connection between my dread of the Morlocks’ dark subterranean bases and my childhood fear of the ventilation shafts set in the grounds of my parents’ home.

Needless to say I felt distinctly uncomfortable at this brusque diagnosis of Nebogipfel’s: at the thought that my reactions to things were governed, not by the force of my intellect as I might have supposed, but by such odd, hidden facets of my nature! “I think,” I concluded with all the dignity I could muster, “that some things are best left unsaid!” — and I stopped the conversation.

The finished Time-Car was quite a crude design: just a box of metal, open at the top, unpainted and roughly finished. But the controls were by some distance advanced over the limited mechanisms Nebogipfel had been able to manufacture with the materials available in the Palaeocene — they even included simple chronometric dials, albeit hand-lettered — and we would have about as much freedom of movement in time as I had been afforded by my own first machine.

As I worked, and the day approached on which we had set ourselves to depart, my fear and uncertainty mounted. I knew that I could never return home — but if I went on from here, on with Nebogipfel into future and past, I might enter such strangeness that I might not survive, either in mind or body. I might, I knew, be approaching the end of my life; and a soft, human terror settled over me.

Finally it was done. Nebogipfel set himself on his saddle. He was done up in a heavy, quilted overall of the Constructor’s silvery cloth; and new goggles were fixed over his small face. He looked a little like a small child bundled up against the winter at least until one made out the hair cascading from his face, and the luminous quality of the eye behind the blue glasses he wore.

I sat down beside him, and made a last check over the contents of our car.

Now — as we sat there, in a startling second — the walls of our apartment melted, silently, to glass! All around us, visible now through the translucent walls of our room, the bleak plains of White Earth stretched off to the distance, gilded red by an advanced sunset. The Constructor’s cilia — again to Nebogipfel’s specification — had reworked the material of the walls of the chamber within which the Time-Car sat. We should continue to need some protection from the savage climate of White Earth; but we wished to have a view of the world as we progressed.

Although the temperature of the air was unchanged, I immediately felt much colder; I shivered, and pulled my coat closer around me.

“I think we are set,” Nebogipfel said.

“Set,” I agreed “save for one thing — our decision! Do we travel to the future of the completed Ships, or—?”

“I think the decision is yours,” he said. But he had — I like to think — some sympathy in his alien expression.

Still that soft fear quivered inside me, for, save for those first few desperate hours after I lost Moses, I have never been a man to welcome the prospect of death! — and yet I knew that my choice now might end my life. But still -

“I really don’t think I have much choice,” I told Nebogipfel. “We cannot stay here.”

“No,” he said. “We are exiles, you and I,” he said. “I think there is nothing for us to do but continue — on to the End.”

“Yes,” I said. “To the End of Time itself, it seems… Well! So be it, Nebogipfel. So be it.”

Nebogipfel pressed forward the levers of the Time-Car — I felt my breathing accelerate, and blood pounded in my temples — and we fell into the gray clamor of time travel.

[11] Forward in Time

Once more the sun rocketed across the sky, and the moon, still green, rolled through its phases, the months going by more quickly than heartbeats; soon, the velocities of both orbs had increased to the point where they had merged into those seamless, precessing bands of light I have described before, and the sky had taken on that steely grayness which was a compound of day and night. All around us, clearly visible from our elevated viewpoint, the ice-fields of White Earth swept away and over the horizon, all but unchanging as the meaningless years flapped past, displaying only a surface sheen smoothed over by the rapidity of our transition.

I should have liked to have seen those magnificent interstellar sail-craft soar off into space; but the rotation of the earth rendered those fragile ships impossible for me to make out, and as soon as we entered time travel the sail-ships became invisible to us.

Within seconds of our departure — as seen from our diluted point of view — our apartment was demolished. It vanished around us like dew, to leave our transparent blister sitting isolated on the flat roof of our tower. I thought of our bizarre, yet comfortable, set of chambers — with my steam-bath, that ludicrous flock wallpaper, the peculiar billiards table, and all the rest — all of it had been melted back, now, into general formlessness, and our apartment, no longer required, had been reduced to a dream: a Platonic memory, in the metal imagination of the Universal Constructors!

But we were not abandoned by our own, patient Constructor, however. From my accelerated point of view I saw how he seemed to rest here, a few yards from us — a squat pyramid, the writhing of his cilia smoothed over by our time passage — and then he would jump, abruptly, to there, to linger for a few seconds — and so on. Since a mere second for us lasted centuries in the world beyond the Time-Car, I could calculate that the Constructor was remaining close to our site, all but immobile, for as much as a thousand years at a time.

I remarked on this to Nebogipfel. “Imagine that, if you can! To be Immortal is one thing, but to be so devoted to a single task… He is like a solitary Knight guarding his Grail, while historical ages, and the mayfly concerns of ordinary men, flutter away.”

As I have described, the buildings which neighbored ours were towers, standing two to three miles apart, all across the Thames valley. In the several weeks we had spent in our apartment I had seen no evidence of change about these towers — not even the opening of a door. Now, though, with the benefit of my accelerated perceptions, I saw how slow evolutions crept over the buildings’ surfaces. One cylindrical affair in Hammersmith had its mirror-smooth face swell up, as if raddled by some metallic disease, before settling into a new pattern of angular bumps and channels. Another tower, in the vicinity of Fulham, disappeared altogether! — One moment it was there, the next not, without even the shadow of foundations on the ground to show where it had been, for the ice closed over the exposed earth more rapidly than I could follow.

This sort of flowing evolution went on all the time. The pace of change in this new London must be measured in centuries, I realized — rather than the years within which sections of my own London had been transformed — but change there was, nevertheless.

I pointed this out to Nebogipfel.

“We can only speculate as to the purpose of this rebuilding,” he said. “Perhaps the change in outer appearance signifies a change in inner utilization. But the slow processes of decay are working even here. And perhaps there are, occasionally, more spectacular incidents, such as the fall of a meteorite.”

“Surely intelligences so vast as these Constructors could plan for such accidents as the fall of a meteor! — by tracking the falling rocks with their telescopes, perhaps using their Ships with rockets and sails to knock the things away.”

“To some extent. But the solar system is a random and chaotic place,” Nebogipfel said. “One could never be sure of eliminating all calamities, no matter what resources were available, and no matter what planning and watching was performed… And so, even the Constructors must sometimes rebuild — even the tower we inhabit.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think it out,” Nebogipfel said. “Are you warm? Do you feel comfortable?”

As I have noted, my apparent exposure to the wastes of White Earth, sheltered only by this invisible dome of the Constructors, had left me feeling chilled; but I knew this could only be an internal reaction. “I’m quite satisfactory.”

“Of course. So am I. And — since we have now been traveling perhaps a quarter-hour — we know that equable conditions have persisted in this building for more than half a million years.”

“But,” I said, following his thinking, “this tower of ours is just as prone to the predations of time as any other… therefore our Constructor must be repairing the place, continually, to allow it to continue to serve us.”

“Yes. Otherwise this dome which shelters us would surely have splintered and fallen away a long time ago.”

Nebogipfel was right, of course — it was another facet of the extraordinary steadiness of purpose of the Constructors — but it scarcely made me feel more comfortable! I glanced about, studying the floor beneath us; I felt as if the tower had become as insubstantial as a termite hill, being endlessly burrowed through and rebuilt by the Universal Constructors, and I was filled with vertigo!

Now I became aware of a change in the quality of light. The glaciated landscape stretched around us, apparently unchanged; but it seemed to me that the ice was rather more darkly lit than before.

The bands of sun and moon, rendered diffuse and indistinct by their precessional motions, still rocked through the sky; but — though the moon still seemed to be shining with the violent green of its transplanted vegetation — the sun appeared to be undergoing a cycle of change.

“It seems,” I observed, “that the sun is flickering — varying in brightness, on a scale covering centuries or more.”

“I think you are right.”

It was this uncertainty of light, I was sure now, which was casting that odd, disorienting illusion of a shadow over the icy landscape. If you will stand by a window, hold your hand before your face with fingers outspread, and rattle your hand to and fro before your eyes — then, perhaps, you will get some impression of what I mean.

“Confound that flickering,” I protested, “it has a way of getting under the surface of the eye — of disturbing the rhythms of the mind, perhaps…”

“But watch the light,” Nebogipfel said. “Follow its quality. It is changing again.”

I stuck to my task, and presently I was rewarded by glimpses of a new aspect of the sun’s peculiar behavior. There was a greenness about it — only at odd moments, when I would see a sort of pale verdancy streak along the sun’s celestial path — but real, nevertheless.

Now that I knew this green behavior was present, I was able to detect an emerald flashing over the frozen hills and stark buildings of London. It was a poignant sight, like a memory of the life that had vanished from these hills.

Nebogipfel said, “I suspect that the flickering and the green flashes are connected…” The sun, he pointed out, is the solar system’s greatest source of energy and matter. His Morlocks had themselves exploited this, to construct their Sphere about the sun. “Now, I think,” he said, “the Universal Constructors too are delving into that great body: they are mining the sun, for the raw materials they need…”

“Plattnerite,” I said, excitement growing within me. “That’s the meaning of the green flashes, isn’t it? The Constructors are extracting Plattnerite from the sun.”

“Or using their alchemical skills to turn solar matter and energy into the substance of Plattnerite, which amounts to the same thing.”

For the glow of the Plattnerite to be visible to us, Nebogipfel argued, the Constructors must be building great shells of the stuff about the star. When completed, these shells would then be shipped off, in immense convoys, to construction sites elsewhere in the solar system; and the accretion of a fresh shell begun. The flickering we saw must represent the accelerated assembly and dismantling of these great Plattnerite dumps.

“It is extraordinary,” I breathed. “The Constructors must be lifting the stuff out of the sun in batches that compare with the mass of the greatest of the planets! This overshadows even the building of your great Sphere, Nebogipfel.”

“We know that the Constructors are not without ambition.”

Now, it seemed to me, the flickering of the patient sun grew rather less marked, as if the Constructors were nearing the end of their mining. I could see more patches of Plattnerite’s characteristic green about the sky, but these were separate from the sun-band: rather, they hurtled across the sky rather in the manner of false moons. These were Plattnerite structures, I realized — huge, space-spanning buildings of the stuff which were settling into some slow orbit about the earth.

Shifting Plattnerite light glistened from the hide of our patient Constructor, who stood by us while the sky went through these extraordinary evolutions!

Nebogipfel consulted his chronometric gauges. “We have traveled through nearly eight hundred thousand years… time enough, I think.” He hauled on his levers — and the Time-Car lurched, displaying that clumsiness so characteristic of time travel — and I had nausea to contend with in addition to my awe and fear.

Immediately our Constructor disappeared from my view. I cried out — I could not help it! — and gripped the bench of the Time-Car. I think I had never felt so lost and alone, as at that moment when our faithful companion of eight thousand centuries suddenly — or so it seemed — abandoned us to strangeness.

The precessional juddering of the sun-band slowed, smoothed out and disappeared; within seconds, I perceived that disconcerting rattling of light which marks the passage of night and day, and the sky lost its washed-over, luminous-gray quality.

And now the green light of Plattnerite filled the air about me; it was all around our dome, and obscured the impassive plains of White Earth with its milky flickering.

The flapping of day and night slowed, to a beat slower than my pulse. Just in that last instant, I caught a vision — no more than a flash — of a field of stars breaking through the surface of things, dazzling and close; and I caught shadowy glimpses of several wide skulls, and huge, human eyes. Then Nebogipfel pushed his levers to their furthest extreme — the car stopped — and we emerged into History, and the crowd of Watchers vanished; and we were immersed in a flood of green light.

We were embedded in a Ship of Plattnerite!

[12] The Ship

Myself, the Morlock, the workings and apparel of our little Time-Car — all was bathed in the emerald glow of Plattnerite, which was all about us. I had no idea of the true size of the Ship; indeed, I had some difficulty in finding my orientation within its bulk. It was not like a craft of my century, for it lacked a well-defined sub-structure, with walls and panels to fence off internal sections, engine compartments, and the like. Instead, you must imagine a net: a thing of threads and nodes all glowing with that green Plattnerite tinge, thrown about us as if by some invisible fisherman, so that Nebogipfel and I were encased in an immense mesh of rods and curves of light.

This net did not extend inwards all the way to our Time-Car: it seemed to halt at about the distance at which our dome had been resting. I was still breathing easily, and felt no colder than before. The environmental protection of the dome must still be afforded us, by some means; and I thought that the dome itself was still present, for I saw the faintest of reflections in a surface above, but so uncertain and shifting was the Plattnerite light that I could not be sure.

Nor could I make out the floor beneath the Time-Car. The netting seemed to extend below us, on and deep into the fabric of the building I remembered. I could not see how that flimsy webbing could support a mass as great as our Time-Car’s, however, and I felt a sudden, and unwelcome, stab of vertigo. I put such primitive reactions aside with determination. My situation was extraordinary, but I wished to behave well — especially if these were to be the last moments of my life! — and I did not care to waste any energy on salving the discomfiture of the frightened ape within me, who thought he might fall out of this green-glowing tree.

I studied the net around us. Its main threads appeared to be about as thick as my index finger, although they glowed so bright it was hard to be sure if that thickness was merely some artifact of my own optical sensitivity. These threads surrounded cells perhaps a foot across, of irregular shapes: as far as I could see, no two of these cells shared a similar form. Finer threads were cast across and between these main cells, forming a complex pattern of sub-cells; and these sub-cells were themselves divided by finer threads, and so forth, right to the limit of my vision. I was reminded of the branching cilia which coated the outer layer of a Constructor.

At the nodes where the primary threads joined, points of light glowed, as defiantly green as the rest; these lumps did not stay at rest, but would migrate across threads, or would explode, in tiny, soundless flashes. You must imagine these little motions going on, all throughout the extent of the net, so that the whole thing was illuminated by a gentle, shifting glow, and a continuous evolution of structure and light.

I had a sense of fragility — it was like being cocooned in layers of spider-silk — but the whole thing had an organic quality to it, and I had the impression that if I were to reach up, clumsily, and tear great holes in this complex structure, it should soon repair itself.

And about the whole Ship, you must imagine, there was that odd, contingent quality induced by the Plattnerite: a sense that the Ship was not embedded solidly in the world of things, a sense that it was all insubstantial and temporary.

The fabric was open enough for me to be able to see through the filmy outer hull of “our” craft and to the world beyond. The hills and anonymous buildings of the Constructors’ London were still there, and the eternal ice showed no signs of disturbance. It was night-time, and the sky was clear; the moon, a silver crescent, sailed high amid the absence of stars…

And, sliding across the desolate sky of this abandoned earth, I saw more of the Plattnerite Ships. They were lenticular in form, immense, with the suggestion of the same net-structure exhibited by the one which encased me and Nebogipfel; smaller lights, like captive stars, gleamed and rustled through their complex interiors. The ice of White Earth was universally bathed with the glow of Plattnerite; the Ships were like immense, silent clouds, sailing unnaturally close to the land.

Nebogipfel studied me, the Plattnerite lending a rich green luster to the hair coating his body. “Are you well? You seem a little discomposed.”

I had to laugh at that. “You’ve a talent for understating, Morlock. Discomposed? I should say so…” I twisted in my seat, reached behind me, and found a bowl filled with the unidentifiable nuts and fruit with which the Constructor had supplied me. I buried my fingers in the food and stuffed it into my mouth; I found the simple, animal actions of eating a welcome distraction from the astonishing, barely comprehensible matters about me. I wondered, in fact, if this should be the last meal I should take the last supper on earth! “I think I expected our Constructor to be here to greet us.”

“But I think he is here,” Nebogipfel said. He raised his hand, and emerald light gleamed from his pale fingers. “This Ship is clearly designed along the same architectural principles as the Constructors themselves. I think we could say that ’our’ Constructor is still here: but now his consciousness is represented by some set of those sliding points of light, within this net of Plattnerite. And the Ship is surely connected to the Information Sea — indeed, perhaps one could say this is a new Universal Constructor itself. The Ship is alive… as alive as the Constructors.

“And yet, since it is composed of Plattnerite, this craft must be so much more.” He studied me, his single eye deep and dark behind his goggles. “Do you see? If this is life, it is a new sort of life — Plattnerite life — the first sort which is not bound, as the rest of us are, to the slow turning of History’s cogs. And it was constructed here, with ourselves as its focus… The Ship is here for us — to carry us back just as the Constructor promised. He is here, you see.”

Of course, Nebogipfel was right; and now I wondered, with a sort of nervous self-consciousness, how many of those other Ships, which prowled across the star-less skies of earth like huge animals, were also down here, in some way, because of our presence?

But now, gazing up into the Plattnerite-coated sky, another observation struck me. “Nebogipfel — behold the moon!”

The Morlock turned; I saw how the green light which played over the hairs of his face was now overlaid with a delicate silver.

My observation was elementary: that the moon had lost its delicious greenness. The life-color which had reached up from earth and coated it, for all those millions of years, had withered away, exposing the stark bone-white of the dusty mountains and maria beneath. Now, the satellite was quite indistinguishable in its dead pallor from the moon of my own day, save perhaps for a more brilliant glow over its dark side: there was a vivid Old Moon cradled in the New Moon’s arms — and I knew that this greater brightness must be due, solely, to the increased gleam of the ice-coated earth, which must blaze in those airless Lunar skies like a second sun.

“It might have been the enforced variation of the sun,” Nebogipfel speculated. “The Constructors’ Plattnerite project… That, perhaps, finally disrupted the balance of life.”

“You know,” I said with some bitterness, “I think — even after all we’ve seen and heard — I had taken some comfort from the persistence of that patch of earth-green, up in the sky. The thought that somewhere — not so impossibly far away — a scrap of the earth I remembered might still persist: that there might be some improbable, low-gravity jungle, through which the sons of man might still walk… But now there can only be ruins and shallow footprints on that bleak surface — more of them, to match those littered across the carcass of the earth.”

And it was just at that moment, while I was in this maudlin mood, that there was a report uncommonly like a gunshot — and our protective dome fractured, like an eggshell!

I saw that a series of cracks — a complex delta of them — had spread out across the face of the dome. Even as I watched, a small piece of the dome, no bigger than my hand, fell loose and settled through the air, drifting like a snowflake.

And beyond the shattering dome the threads of the Ship’s Plattnerite web were extending — they were growing, down towards me and Nebogipfel.

“Nebogipfel — what is happening? Without the dome, will we die?” I was in a febrile, electric state, in which my every nerve-end was live with suspicion and fear.

“You must try not to be afraid,” Nebogipfel said, and then with a simple, astonishing gesture, he took hold my hand in his thin Morlock fingers, and held it as an adult might a child’s. It was the first time I had felt the touch of his cold fingers since those dreadful moments when the Constructor had rebuilt me, and a distant echo of our companionship in the Palaeocene returned to warm me, here amid the ice of White Faith. I am afraid I cried out then, unhinged by my fear, and pressed myself deeper into my seat, longing only for escape; and Nebogipfel’s weak fingers tightened around my own.

The dome cracked further, and I heard a soft rain of it patter down over the Time-Car. The threads of Plattnerite reached deeper into our splintering dome, with nodules of light squirting along their lengths.

Nebogipfel said, “They mean to carry us with them — the Constructors — these beings of Plattnerite — back to the dawn of time, and perhaps beyond… But not like this.” He indicated his own fragile body. “We could never survive it — not for a minute… Do you see?”

The Plattnerite tentacles brushed against my scalp, forehead and shoulders; I ducked, to avoid their cold grip. “You mean,” I said, “that we must become like them. Like the Constructors… we must submit to the touch of these Plattnerite cilia! Why did you not warn me of this?”

“Would it have helped? It is the only way. Your fear is natural; but you must contain it, just for a moment more, and then — then you will be free…

I could feel the cool weight of Plattnerite coils settling over my legs and shoulders. I tried to hold myself still — and then I got the sense of one of those squirming cables moving across my forehead, and I could feel, quite clearly, the wriggling of cilia against my flesh, and I could not help but scream and struggle against that soft weight, but already I was unable to rise from my seat.

I was immersed in greenness now, and my view of the world beyond — of the moon, the earth’s fields of Ice, even of the greater structure of the Ship — was obscured. Those shifting, quasi-animate nodes of light passed over my body, glaring in my vision. My bowl of fruit slipped from my numbing fingers, and rattled against the floor of the car; but even that rattle subsided quickly, as my senses faded to dimness.

There was a final crumbling of the dome, a hail of fragments about me. On my forehead there was a touch of cold, the distant breath of winter, and then there was only the coolness of Nebogipfel’s fingers about mine — it was all I could feel, save for that omnipresent, liquid fumbling of Plattnerite! I imagined cilia detaching and — as they had once before — squirming into the interstices of my body. So rapidly had this invasion of light progressed, I could no longer move so much as a finger, nor could I cry out — I was pinned as if by a strait-waistcoat — and now the tentacles forced themselves between my lips, like so many worms, and into my mouth, there to dissolve against my tongue; and I felt a cold pressure on the surface of my eyes -

I was lost, disembodied, immersed in emerald light.