The Time Ships

[1] Departure

I was outside Time and Space.

It was not like sleep — for even in sleep, the brain is active, functioning, sorting through its freight of information and memories; even in sleep, I contend, one remains conscious, aware of one’s self and of one’s continued existence.

This interval, this timeless spell, was not like that. It was more as if the Plattnerite web had, subtle and silent, disassembled me. I was simply not there; and the fragments of my personality, my shards of memory, had been broken up and disseminated about that immense and invisible Information Sea of which Nebogipfel was so fond.

…And then — more mysterious by far! — I found myself there again — I cannot put it more plainly than that — it was less like a waking than a switching-on, as one operates an electric bulb. One moment — nothing; the next — a full, shuddering awareness.

I could see again. I had a clear view of the world — of the green-glowing hull of the Time Ship all around me, of the earth’s bone-gleam beyond.

I was existent once again! and a deep panic — a horror — of that interval of Absence pumped through my system. I have feared no Hell so much as nonexistence — indeed, I had long resolved that I should welcome whatever agonies Lucifer reserves for the intelligent Non-Believer; if those pains served as proof that my consciousness still endured!

But I was not permitted to brood on my disquietude, for now came the most extraordinary sensation of being lifted. I realized a growing stress upon me, a feeling as though some huge magnet was drawing me upward. The stress grew — I seemed a mote over which huge forces were fighting — and then of a sudden, that tension was resolved. I flew up, feeling exactly as if I was a small child again, being picked up by the strong, safe hands of my father; I had that same lightness of being, the sensation of flying. The substance of the Time Ship arose with me, so that it was like being at the center of an immense, open, green-glowing balloon, lifting from the ground.

I looked down — or at least I tried to; I could not feel my head or neck, but the sweep of my panoramic vision swiveled downwards. You must imagine that the Ship about me had something of the shape of a steam liner, but hugely blown up — its lenticular keel was miles long — and yet it floated above the landscape with the ease of a cloud. I could see through the open, web-like substance of the Ship to the land beyond, and now I was looking down at our Time-Car, from directly above. Although my view was obscured by the complex, evolving sparkle of the Ship, I thought I saw two bodies in the car, a man and a slighter figure, who slid to the car’s floor, their motions already stiff from the invading cold.

My view had an odd sensation about it. It was without focus: or rather, it lacked a central point of observation. When you look at something, say a tea-cup, you see it, and that’s pretty much the center of your world, with everything else relegated to a sort of side-show around the periphery of your vision. But now I found that my world had no center, or periphery. I saw it all — Ice, Ships, Time-Car — it was as if it were all central, or all peripheral, all at once! It was disorienting and very confusing.

My belly and head seemed to have been numbed, gone quite beyond feeling. I could see, all right; but I could feel nothing of my face, my neck, the posture of my body — nothing, in fact, save a light, almost ghostly touch: the fingers of Nebogipfel, still wrapped around my own. I took some comfort in that, for it was good to know that he was here with me at least!

I thought I was dead — but I recalled I had thought that before, when I had been absorbed and remade by the Universal Constructor. What would become of me now I could not tell.

The Ship began to rise again, and now much more rapidly. The Time-Car and the tower on which it sat were swept away from under me. I was raised a mile, two miles, ten miles above the surface; the whole sparse map of this remote London was laid out beneath me, visible through the sparkle of the Time Ship.

Still we rose — we must have been traveling faster than a cannon-ball — and yet I heard no rush of air, felt no wind on my face: I felt secure, with that childlike sense of lightness I have mentioned. The circle of scenery beneath me grew wider, and the details of the buildings and ice-fields grew faint, and a luminous gray mixed more and more with the cold white of the ice. As the veil of atmosphere between myself and outer space grew thinner, the nighttime sky, which had been an iron gray in color, grew deeper in tone.

Now our height was so great that the curving away of the planet became apparent — it was as if London was the highest point of some immense hill — and I could make out the shape of poor Britain, locked within its frozen Sea of Ice.

I remained without hands or feet, without belly or mouth. I seemed to have been cut loose of matter, quite suddenly, and I saw things with a sort of serenity.

And still we climbed — I knew we were already far beyond the atmosphere — and the frozen plains mutated from a landscape into the surface of a spherical world, which turned, white and serene — and quite dead — beneath me. Beyond the earth’s gleaming limb there were more Time Ships — hundreds of them, I saw now, great, green-glowing, lenticular boats miles long; they made up a loose armada which sailed across the face of space, and their light reflected from the wrinkled ice which coated the earth.

I heard my name called: or rather, it was not hearing, but an awareness, by some means I would be loath to try to explain. I tried to turn, but I found my point of view twisting about.

Nebogipfel? Is that you?

Yes. I am here. Are you all right?

Nebogipfel… I can’t see you.

Nor I you. But that does not matter. Can you feel my hand?

Yes.

Now the earth drifted off to one side, and our Ship moved into formation with its fellows. Soon the Time Ships were all about us, in an array that filled the inter-planetary void for many miles about; it was like being in the middle of a school of great, glowing whales. The light of Plattnerite was brilliant and yet there was a surface of unreality about it, as if it was reflecting from some invisible plane; again I had that feeling of contingency about the Ships, as if they did not belong quite in this Reality, or any other.

Nebogipfel, what is happening to us? Where are we being taken?

Gently, he replied, You know the answer to that. We are to travel back through time… back to its Boundary, to its deepest, hidden heart.

Will we start soon?

We have already started, he said. Look at the stars.

I turned — or felt as if I did — so that I looked away from White Earth, and I saw:

All over the sky, the stars were coming out.

[2] The Unraveling of Earth

As we drew back through time, the colonizing fleets from earth were washing back to their origin, in successive waves, and the changes men had wrought to worlds and stars were dismantled. And as that tide of civilization and cultivation receded from the cosmos, the star-masking Spheres were broken apart, one by one. I gazed about in wonder as the old constellations assembled themselves like so many candelabras. Sirius and Orion shone as splendid as on any winter’s night; the Pole Star was over my head, and I could make out the familiar saucepan profile of the Great Bear. Away below me, beyond the curve of earth, were strange groupings of stars I had never seen from England: I did not know the antipodean constellations so well that I could recognize them all, but I could pick out the brutal knife-shape of the Southern Cross, the soft-glowing patches that were the Magellanic Clouds, and those brilliant twins, Alpha and Beta Centauri.

And now, as we sank further into the past, the stars began to slide across the sky. Within moments, it seemed, the familiar constellations were obscured, as the stars’ proper motions — much too slow to be perceptible within a human’s firefly lifetime — became visible to my cosmic gaze.

I pointed out this new phenomenon to Nebogipfel.

Yes. And, see the earth…

I looked. The mask of Glaciation which had disfigured that dear, exhausted globe was already falling away. I saw how the white of it receded towards the Poles, in great pulses, exposing the brown and blue of land and sea beneath.

Abruptly the ice was gone — banished back to its fastnesses at the Poles — and the world turned slowly beneath us, its familiar continents restored. But the earth was wreathed about by clouds; and the clouds were stained with virulent, unnatural colors — browns, purples, oranges. The coasts were ringed with light, and great cities glowed at the heart of every continent. There were even huge, floating towns in the middle of the oceans, I saw. But the air was so foul that in those great cities — if anyone went about on the surface — masks or filters would surely have to be worn, to enable humans to breathe.

Evidently we are witnessing the final days of the modification of the earth by my New Men, I said. We must be traversing millions of years with each minute…

Yes.

Then, why do we not see the earth spin like a top on its axis, and hurtle around the sun?

It is not so simple… These Ships are not like your prototype Time Machine.

Everything we see is a reconstruction, Nebogipfel went on. It is a sort of projection, based on the observations which, as we travel, are entering the Information Sea: that part of the Sea transported by the Ships, at any rate. Such phenomena as the rotation of the earth have been suppressed.

Nebogipfel, what am I? Am I still a man?

You are still yourself, he said firmly. The only difference now is that the machinery which sustains you is not made up of bone and flesh, but of constructs within the Information Sea… You have limbs, not of sinew and blood, but of Understanding.

His voice seemed to float about in space, somewhere around me; I had lost that comforting sensation of his hand in mine, and I could no longer tell if he was near — but I had the feeling that “nearness” was no longer a relevant idea, for I had no clear idea even where “I” was. Whatever I had become, I knew that I was no longer a point of awareness, looking out from a cave of bone.

The air of earth cleared. All over the planet, with startling abruptness, the city-lights dimmed and winked out, and soon the hand of man made no mark on the earth.

There were flurries of volcanism, great flashing spurts which threw up ash clouds that flickered over the world — or, rather, as we receded in time, the clouds drained away into those volcanic punctures — and it seemed to me that the continents were drifting away from their school-room neap positions. Across the great plains of the northern hemisphere, there seemed to be a sort of struggle — slow, millennial — progressing between two classes of vegetation: on the one hand, the pale green-brown grasslands and deciduous forests which lined the continents at the rim of the ice-cap; and on the other, the virulent green of the tropical jungles. For a moment, the jungles won, and in a great flourish, they swept north from the Equator, until they coated the lands from the Tropics, all the way up through Europe and North America. Even Greenland became, briefly, verdant. Then, as fast as they had conquered the earth, the great jungles retreated to their equatorial fastnesses once more, and paler shades of green and brown chased across the faces of the northern continents.

The sliding-about and spinning of the continents became more marked. And as the continents were brought into different climatic regions, their life-colors changed accordingly, so that great bands of green and brown swept across the hapless lands. Huge, devastating spasms of volcanism punctuated these geological waltz-steps.

Now the continents slid together — it was like watching a jigsaw assemble — to form a single, immense land-mass which straddled half the globe. The interior of this great country immediately shriveled to desert.

Nebogipfel said, We have already descended three hundred million years into the past… There are no mammals, no birds, and even the reptiles are barely born.

I replied, I had no idea it was all so graceful, like some rocky ballet — the geologists of my day have so much to understand! It is as if the whole planet is alive, and evolving.

Now the great continent split into three huge masses. I could no longer make out the familiar shapes of the lands of my own time, for the continents spun like dinner-plates on a polished table top. As that immense central desert was broken up the climate became much more variegated; and I could see a series of shallow seas fringing the lands.

Nebogipfel said, Now the amphibians are sliding back to the seas, their prototypical limbs melting away. But there are insects and other invertebrates still on the land: millipedes, mites, spiders and scorpions…

Not a very hospitable place, I remarked.

There are giant dragonflies too, and other wonders — the world is not without beauty.

Now the land began to lose its greenness — a kind of bony brown poked through the receding tide of life — and I surmised that we were passing beyond the appearance of the first leafed plants on land. Soon, the surface of the earth had become a sort of featureless mask of brown and a muddy blue. I knew that life persisted in the seas, but it was simplifying there too, with whole phyla disappearing into History’s womb: first the fish, now the mollusca, now the sponges and jellyfish and worms… At last, I realized, only a thin, green algae — laboring to convert the beating sunlight into oxygen — must remain in the darkened seas. The land was barren and rocky, and the atmosphere had turned thick, stained yellow and brown by noxious gases. Great fires erupted over the earth, all at once. Thick clouds masked the globe, and the seas retreated like drying puddles. But the clouds did not persist for long. The atmosphere became thin, then quite wispy, until at last it vanished altogether. The exposed crust glowed a uniform, dull red, save where great orange scars opened and closed like mouths. There were no seas, no distinction between the ocean and the land: only this endless, battered crust, over which the Time Ships soared, observant and graceful.

And next the glowing of the crust grew brighter — intolerably bright and, with an explosion of glowing fragments, the young earth shook on its axis, shuddered, and flew into bits!

It was as if some of those fragments had hurtled through me. The glowing rock battered its way through my awareness, and dwindling off into space.

And then it was done! Now there was only the sun… and a disc of rubble and gas, formless, eddying, which spun about the shining star.

A sort of ripple passed through our cloud of Time Ships, as if the reversed coalescence of the earth had sent a physical shock through that loose armada.

This is a strange Age, Nebogipfel, I said.

Look around you…

I did so, and saw that, from all around the sky, there were several stars — perhaps a dozen — which were growing in brightness. Now the stars had reached a sort of formation, an array scattered over the sky, though still so distant they showed only as points. Gas wisps seemed to be collecting into a cloud, scattered over the sky and wrapped about this collection of stars.

These are the sun’s true companions, Nebogipfel said. Its siblings, if you like: the stars which shared the sun’s nursery-cloud. Once, they formed a cluster as bright and as close as the Pleiades… but gravity will not hold them together, and before the birth of life on earth they will drift apart.

One of the young stars, directly over my head, flared. It expanded, soon becoming large enough to show a disc, but growing more red, and fainter… until at last it expired, and the glow of that part of the cloud died.

Now another star, almost diametrically opposed in position to the first, went through the same cycle: the flare, followed by the expansion into a brilliant crimson disc, and then extinction.

All of this magnificent drama, you must imagine, was played out against a background of utter silence.

We are witnessing the birth of stars, I said, but in reverse.

Yes. The embryonic stars light up their birthing gas cloud such nebulae are a beautiful sight but after the stellar ignition, the lighter gases are made to flee the heat, leaving only heavier rubble —

A rubble which condenses into worlds, I said.

Yes.

And now — so soon! — it was the turn of the sun. There was that uncertain flaring of yellow-white light, a glare that glinted from the Time Ships’ Plattnerite prows — and the rapid swelling into an immense globe, which briefly swamped the armada of Time Ships in a cloud of crimson light… and then, at last, that final dispersal into the general void.

The Ships hung in the sudden darkness. The last of the sun’s companions flared, ballooned out, and died; and we were left in a cloud of cold, inert hydrogen, which reflected our glow of Plattnerite green.

Only the remote stars marked the sky, and I saw how they too shimmered and flared, fading in their turn. Soon the skies grew darker, and I surmised that fewer and fewer stars yet existed.

Then, suddenly, a new breed of stars flared across the sky. There was a whole host, it seemed: dozens of them were close enough to show a disc, and the light of these new stars was, I was sure, bright enough to read a newspaper by — not that I was in a position to try such an experiment!

Confound it, Nebogipfel, what an astonishing sight! Astronomy should have been a little different under a sky like this — eh?

This is the very first generation of stars. These are the only lights, anywhere in the new cosmos… Each of these stars amass a hundred thousand times as much as our sun, but they burn their fuel prodigiously — their life-spans are counted in mere millions of years.

And indeed, even as he spoke, I saw that the stars were expanding, reddening, and dispersing, like great, overheated balloons.

Soon it was done; and the sky was left dark again — dark, save only for the green glow of the Time Ships, which forged, steady and determined, into the past.

[3] The Boundary of Space and Time

A new, uniform glow began to permeate space around me. I wondered if some earlier generation of stars was shining in this primeval age — a generation undreamed of by Nebogipfel and the Constructors with whom he communed. But I soon saw that the glow did not come from an array of point sources, like stars; rather, it was a light which appeared to shine, all about me, as if from the structure of space itself — although here and there the glow was mottled, as, I surmised, dense clumps of embryonic star-matter shone more brightly. This light was the deepest crimson at first — it reminded me of a sunset breaking through clouds — but it brightened, and escalated through the familiar spectrum colors, through orange, yellow, blue, towards violet.

I saw that the fleet of Time Ships had gathered more closely together; they were rafts of green wire, silhouetted against the dazzling emptiness, and clustering as if for comfort. Tentacles — ropes of Plattnerite — snaked out across the glowing void between the Ships, and were connected, their terminations assimilated into the Ships’ complex structures. Soon, the whole armada about me was connected by a sort of web of cilia filament.

Even at this early stage, Nebogipfel told me, the universe has structure. The nascent galaxies are present as pools of cold gas, gathered in gravitational wells… But the structure is imploding, contracting, as we travel back towards the Boundary.

It is like an explosion in reverse, then, I suggested to Nebogipfel. Cosmic shrapnel, collapsing to site of detonation. At last, all the matter in the universe will merge in a single point — at some arbitrary center of things — and it will be as if a great Sun has been born, in the midst of infinite and empty space.

No. It’s rather more subtle than that…

He reminded me of the bending-about of the axes of Space and Time — the distortion which lay behind the principle of time travel. That twisting of axes is going on now, all around us, he said. As we travel back through time, it is not that matter and energy are converging through a fixed volume, like a gathering of flies at the center of an empty room… Rather, space itself is folding up — compressing — crumpling, like a deflated balloon, or like a piece of paper, crushed in the hand.

I followed his description — but it filled me with awe, and dread, for I could not see how life or Mind could survive such a crumpling!

The universal light grew in intensity, and it climbed the spectral scale to a glaring violet with startling speed. Clumps and eddies in that sea of hydrogen swirled about, like flames within a furnace; the Time Ships, connected by their ropes, were barely visible as gaunt silhouettes against that uneven glow. At last the sky was so bright I had only an impression of white-ness; it was like staring into the sun.

There was a soundless concussion — I felt as if I had heard a clash of cymbals — the light rushed in towards me, like some encroaching liquid — and I fell into a sort of white blindness. I was immersed in the most brilliant light, a light which seemed to suffuse my being. I could no longer make out those mottled clumps, and nor could I see the Time Ships — not even my own!

I called to Nebogipfel. I cannot see. The light —

His voice was small and calm, in that clamor of illumination.

We have reached the Epoch of Last Scattering… Space is now everywhere as hot as the surface of the sun, and filled with electrically charged matter. The universe is no longer transparent, as it will be in our day…

I could see why the Ships had been joined up by those ropes of Constructor stuff, for surely no signal could propagate through this glare. The dazzle grew more intense, until I was sure that it must have passed far beyond the range of visibility of normal human eyes — not that a man could have lasted for a moment in that glowing cosmic furnace!

It was as if I hung, alone, in all that immensity. If the Constructors were there, I had no sense of them. My feeling for the passage of time loosened and fell away; I could not tell if I was witnessing events on the scale of centuries or seconds, or if I was watching the evolution of stars or atoms. Before entering this last soup of light I had retained a residual sense of place — I had kept a feeling of up and down — of near and far… The world around me had been structured like a great room, within which I was suspended. But now, in this Epoch of Last Scattering, all of that fell away from me. I was a mote of awareness, bobbing about on the surface of that great River which was winding back to its source all about me, and I could only allow that ultimate stream to carry me where it would.

The soup of radiation became hotter — it was unbearably intense — and I saw that the matter of the universe, the matter which would one day compose the stars, planets and my own abandoned body, was but a thin trace of solidity, a contaminant in that seething maelstrom of light and stars. At last — I seemed to be able to see it — even the cores of atoms fizzed apart, under the pressure of that unbearable light. Space was filled with a soup of still more elemental particles, which combined and recombined in a sort of complex, microscopic melee, all about me.

We are close to the Boundary, Nebogipfel whispered. The beginning of time itself… and yet you must imagine that we are not alone: that our History — this young, glowing universe — is but one of an infinite number which has emerged from that Boundary; and that as we retreat all the members of that Multiplicity are converging towards this moment, this Boundary, like swooping birds…

But still the contraction of it all continued — still the temperature climbed, still the density of matter and energy grew; and now even those final fragments of radiation and matter were absorbed back into the shearing carcass of Space and Time, their energies stored in the stress of that great Twisting.

Until, in the end…

The last, sparkling particles fell away from me softly, and the glare of radiation heightened to a sort of invisibility.

Now, only a gray-white light filled my awareness: but that is a metaphor, for I knew that what I was experiencing now was not the light of Physics, but that glow hypothesized by Plato, the light which underlies all awareness — the light against which matter, events and minds are mere shadows.

We have reached the Nucleation, whispered Nebogipfel. Space and Time are so twisted over that they are indistinguishable. There is no Physics here… There is no Structure. One cannot point and say: that is there, such a distance away; and I am here. There is no Measurement — no Observation… It is all as One.

And, just as our History has shriveled to a single, searing point, so the Multiplicity of Histories has converged. The Boundary itself is melting away — can you understand it? — lost in the infinite possibilities of the collapsed Multiplicity…

And then there was a single, very brilliant, pulse of light: of Plattnerite green.

[4] The Nonlinearity Engines

The merged Multiplicity convulsed. I felt twisted about — stretched and battered — as if the great River of causality which bore me had grown turbulent and hostile.

Nebogipfel?…

His voice was joyful — exultant. It is the Constructors! The Constructors…

The buffeting faded. The green glow fell away, leaving me immersed again in the gray-white of that moment of Creation. Then a new, plain white light emerged, but that persisted for only a moment; and then I watched as energy and matter condensed like dew out of a new unraveling of Space and Time.

I was traveling forward in time once more, away from the Boundary. I had been pitched into a new History, unfolding out of the Nucleation. The universal glare remained brilliant, surely still many orders of magnitude brighter than the center of the sun.

The Time Ships no longer accompanied me — perhaps their physical forms had been unable to survive that journey through the Nucleation — and the Plattnerite netting around me had gone. But I was not alone; all about me — like snowflakes caught in a flash-lamp’s burst — were speckles of Plattnerite-green light, which bobbed and drifted about each other. These were the elemental consciousness of the Constructors, I knew, and I wondered if Nebogipfel was among this disembodied host, and indeed if I, too, appeared to the rest as a dancing point.

Had my journey through time been reversed? Was I to swim up the streams of History, to my own era once more?

… Nebogipfel? Can you still hear me?

I am here.

What is happening? Are we traveling through time again?

No, he said. Still he had that note of exultation — of triumph — in his disembodied voice.

Then what? What is happening to us?

Do you not see? Could you not understand? We passed beyond the Nucleation. We reached the Boundary. And —

Yes?

Think of the Multiplicity as a surface, he said. The totality of the Multiplicity is smooth, closed, featureless — a globe. And Histories are like lines of longitude, drawn between the poles of the sphere…

And, in the Time Ships, we reached one pole.

Yes. That point where all the longitude lines converge. And, in that precise instant of infinite possibility, the Constructors fired their Nonlinearity Engines…

The Constructors have traveled across the Histories, he said. They — and we — have followed paths of Imaginary Time, paths scrawled sideways across the surface of the Multiplicity globe, until we have reached this new History…

Now the cloud of Constructors — there were millions of them, I thought — drifted apart, like fragments of a child’s firework. It was as if they were trying to fill up the infant vacuum with the light and awareness we had brought from a different cosmos. And as the new universe unraveled, the afterglow of Creation faded to an immense darkness.

It was the end-result — the logical conclusion — of my own dabbling with the properties of light, and the distortion of the frames of Space and Time that went with it. All of this, I realized, even the collapsing of the universe and this great progression across Histories — all of it had come about, growing inevitably, from my experiments, from my first, dear machine of brass and quartz…

It had led to this: the passage of Mind between universes.

But where have we come to? What is this History? Is it like ours?

No, Nebogipfel said. No, it is not like ours.

Will we be able to live here?

I do not know… it was not chosen for us. Remember that the Constructors have sought, he said, a universe — out of all the in finite sheaf of possibilities that is the Multiplicity — a universe which is optimal for them.

Yes. But what can “optimal “mean for a Constructor? I conjured up vague images of Heaven — of peace, security, beauty, light — but I knew these imaginings were hopelessly anthropomorphic.

Now I saw a new light emerging, from the darkness all around us. At first I thought it was the returned glow of that fireball at the beginning of time — but it was too gentle, too insistent, for that; it was more like star-light…

The Constructors are not men, the Morlock said. But they are the Heirs of Humanity. And the audacity of what they have accomplished is astonishing.

Nebogipfel said, Among all the myriad possibilities, the Constructors have sought out that universe — the single one — which is Infinite in extent, and Eternal in age: where that Boundary at the Beginning of Time has been pushed into the infinite past.

We have traveled beyond the Nucleation, to the Boundary of Time and Space themselves. And ape-fingers have reached out to the Singularity that lies there — and pushed it back!

Star-light, now, was erupting from beneath the darkness, all around me; the stars were igniting everywhere; and soon the sky blazed, as bright everywhere as the surface of the sun.

[5] The Final Vision

An infinite universe!

You might look out, through the smoky clouds of London, at the stars which mark out the sky’s cathedral roof; it is all so immense, so unchanging, that it is easy to suppose that the cosmos is an unending thing, and that it has endured forever.

…But it cannot be so. And one only need ask a common sense question — why is the night sky dark? — to see why.

If you had an infinite universe, with stars and galaxies spread out through an endless void, then whichever direction in the sky you looked, your eye must meet a ray of light coming from the surface of a star. The night sky would glow everywhere as brightly as the sun…

The Constructors had challenged the darkness of the sky itself.

My impressions had an adamantine hardness: there was no blurring softness, no atmosphere, nothing but that infinite brilliancy set with myriad acute points and specks of light. Here and there I thought I could make out patterns and distinguishing features — constellations of brighter stars against the general background — but the whole effect was so dazzling that I could never find a given pattern twice.

My companion sparks of Plattnerite light — the Constructors, with Nebogipfel among them — receded from me, above and below, like green-glowing fragments of a dream. I was left isolated. I felt no fear, no discomfort. The buffeting I had experienced at the moment of Nonlinearity had faded, leaving me without a sense of place, time or duration…

But then — after an interval I could not measure — I perceived I was no longer alone.

The form before me coalesced against the star-light, as if a magic-lantern slide had been held up before me. It began as a mere shadow against that universal glare — at first I was not sure if there was anything there at all, save for the projections of my own desperate imagination — but at last it gained a sort of solidity.

It was a ball, apparently of flesh, dangling in space, as unsupported as I was. I judged it to be eight or ten feet from me (wherever, and whatever, I was) and perhaps four feet across. Tentacles dangled from its underside. I heard a soft, babbling sound. There was a fleshy beak, no sign of nostrils, and two huge eyelids which now wrinkled up like curtains, to reveal eyes — human eyes! — that fixed on me.

I recognized him, of course; he was one of the creatures which I had labeled Watchers — those enigmatic visions which had visited me during my trips through time.

The thing drifted closer to me. He held out his tentacles, and I saw those digits were articulated and gathered in two bunches, like distorted, elongated hands. The tentacles were not soft and boneless things, like a squid’s, but multiply jointed, and seemed to terminate in nails or hoofs — they were more like fingers, in fact.

Now it was as if he gathered me up. None of this could be real — I thought desperately — for I was no longer real — was I? I was a point of awareness; there was nothing of me to pick up, in this way…

And yet I felt cradled by him — oddly safe.

The Watcher was immense before me. His flesh was smooth, and covered with fine, downy hairs; his eyes were immense — sky-blue — with all the beautiful complexity of human eyes — and I could even smell him now; he had a soft animal musk about him, a scent of milk, perhaps. I was struck by how human he was. This may seem odd to you, but there — so close to the beast, and suspended in all that unstructured immensity — his common points with the human form were more striking than his grosser differences. I grew convinced that this was human: distorted by tremendous sweeps of evolutionary time, perhaps, but somehow akin to me.

Soon the Watcher released me, and I felt myself float away from him.

His eyes blinked; I heard the slow rustle of his eyelids. Then his huge gaze tracked around the searing, featureless sky, as if seeking something. With the softest of sighs, he drifted away from me. He turned as he did so, and his tentacles dangled after him.

For a moment a stab of panic flooded me — for I had no wish to be stranded again with my own company, here in the desolate perfection of Optimality — but in a moment I drifted after the Watcher. I went without volition, like an autumn leaf swept along by the passage of a carriage’s wheels.

I have mentioned those suggestions of constellations I had seen, shining against the background of light-drenched, infinite space. Presently it seemed to me that one group of stars, in the direction ahead of us, was scattering apart, like a flock of birds; while another, behind me (I was able to turn my point of view) was contracting.

Could it be so? I wondered. Could I be traveling with such enormous rapidity, that even the stars themselves moved across my field of view, like lamp-posts seen from a train?

Suddenly there came a flying multitude of particles of rock, glittering like dust-specks in a sunbeam; they swirled all about me, and vanished again in a twinkling, far behind. I saw nothing of planets, or other rocky objects, in my time in that Optimal History, save for that shoal of dust-motes; and I wondered if the great heat and intense radiation here would disrupt the coalescing of planets from the general debris.

Faster and faster the universe rushed by, a hail of whirling motes against the general brilliancy. Stars grew brighter, to shine out, explode from points into globes that hurtled at me, only to vanish in moments behind me.

We soared upwards, and hovered over the plane of a galaxy; it was a great Catherine-wheel of stars whose variegated colors shone, pale and attenuated, against the general whiteness of the background. But soon even this immense system was dwindling below me, now to a whirling, luminous disc, and at last to a minute patch of hazy light, lost amid millions of others.

And, throughout all this astonishing flight you must picture it — I had the vision of the dark, round shoulders of the Watcher, as he bobbed through that tide of light just ahead of me, quite unperturbed by the star-scapes through which we traveled.

I thought of the times I had witnessed this creature and his companions. There had been that faint hint of babbling during my first expeditions in time — and then my first clear view of a Watcher when, in the light of the dying sun of far futurity, I had watched that object struggling on the distant shoal — a thing like a football, glistening with the water. I had thought it, then, a denizen of that doomed world — but it had not been, any more than I. And, later, there had been those later visions — glimpsed through a glow of Plattnerite green — of the Watchers as they hovered about the machine, as I fled through time.

Throughout my brief, spectacular career as a Time Traveler, I saw now, I had been followed — studied — by the Watchers.

The Watchers must be able to follow at will the lines of Imaginary Time, crossing the infinite Histories of the Multiplicity with the ease of a steamship traversing an ocean’s currents; the Watchers had taken the crude, explosive Nonlinearity Engines developed by the Constructors and developed them to a fine pitch.

Now we journeyed into an immense void — a Hole in Space — which was walled off by threads and planes, sheets of light composed of galaxies and clouds of loose stars. Even here, millions of light years from the nearest of those star nebulae, the general wash of radiation persisted, and the sky all around me was alive with light. And beyond the rough walls of this cavity I could make out a larger structure: I could see that “my” void was but one of many in a greater field of star-systems. It was as if the universe was filled with a sort of foam, with bubbles blown into a froth of shining star-stuff.

Soon, I began to make out an odd sort of regularity about this foam. On one side, for instance, my void was marked off by a flat plane of galaxies. This plane, of matter gathered together so densely that it glowed significantly more brilliant than the general background, was so marked and clearly defined — so flat and extensive — that the thought popped into my fecund mind that it might not be a natural arrangement.

Now I looked about more carefully. Over here, I thought, I could see another plane — clean and well-defined — and there I made out a sort of lance of light, utterly rectilinear, which seemed to span space from side to side — and there again I saw a void, but in the shape of a cylinder, quite clearly delineated…

The Watcher was rolling about before me now, his tentacle-clumps bathed in star-light, and his eyes were wide and fixed on me.

Artificial. The word was inescapable — the conclusion so clear that I should have drawn it long before, I realized, had it not been for the monstrous scale of all this!

This Optimal History was engineered — and this artifice must be what the Watcher had brought me on this immense journey to understand.

I recalled old predictions that an infinite universe would be prone to disastrous gravitational collapse — it was another reason why our own cosmos could not, logically, be infinite. For, just as the earth and other planets had coalesced from knots in that turbulent cloud of debris around the infant sun, so there would be eddies in this greater cloud of galaxies which populated the Optimal History — eddies into which stars and galaxies should tumble, on an immense scale.

But the Watchers were evidently managing the evolution of their cosmos to avoid such catastrophes: I had learned how Space and Time are themselves dynamic, adjustable entities. The Watchers were manipulating the bending, collapsing, twisting and shearing of Space and Time themselves, in order to achieve their objective of a stable cosmos.

Of course there could be no end to this careful engineering, if this universe were to remain viable — and, I thought, if the universe was eternal, there could have been no beginning to it either. That reflection troubled me, briefly: for it was a paradox, a causal circle. Life would be required to exist, in order to engineer the conditions which were prerequisite to the existence of Life here…

But I soon dismissed such confusions! I was, I realized, being much too parochial in my thinking: I was not allowing for the Infinitude of things. Since this universe was infinitely old — and Life had existed here for an infinitely long time — there was no beginning to the benign cycle of Life’s maintenance of the conditions for its own survival. Life existed here because the universe was viable; and the universe was viable because Life existed here to manage it… and on, an infinite regression, without beginning — and without paradox!

I felt loftily amused at my own confusion. It was clearly going to take me some time to come to terms with the meaning of Infinity and Eternity!

[6] The Triumph of Mind

My Watcher halted and rotated in space like some fleshy balloon. Those huge eyes came towards me, dark, immense, the glare of the light-drenched sky reflected in pupils the size of saucers; at last, it seemed, my world was filled by that immense, compelling gaze, to the exclusion of all else — even the fiery sky…

But then the Watcher seemed to melt away. The scattering of distant constellations, the foamy galactic structure — even the glare of the burning sky — I saw them no more — or rather, I was aware of these things as an aspect of reality, but only as a surface. If you imagine focusing on a pane of glass before you — and then deliberately relaxing the muscles of your eye, to fix on a landscape beyond, so that the dust on that pane disappears from your awareness — then you will have something of the effect I am describing.

But, of course, my change in perception was caused by nothing so physical as a tug of eye muscles, and the shift in perspective I endured involved rather more than depth of focus.

I saw — I thought — into the structure of Nature.

I saw atoms: points of light, like little stars, filling space in a sort of array which stretched off around me, unending — I saw it all as clearly as a doctor might study a pattern of ribs beneath the skin of a chest. The atoms fizzed and sparkled; they spun on their little axes, and they were connected by a complex mesh of threads of light — or so it seemed to me; I realized that I must be seeing some graphical presentation of electrical, magnetic, gravitational and other forces. It was as if the universe was filled with a sort of atomic clockwork — and, I saw, the whole of it was dynamic, with the patterns of links and atoms constantly shifting.

The meaning of this bizarre vision was immediately clear to me, for I saw more of the regularity here which I had observed among the galaxies and stars. I could see — suffused in every wisp of gas, in every stray atom — meaning and structure. There was a purpose to the orientation of each atom, the direction of its spin, and the linkages between it and its neighbors. It was as if the universe, the whole of it, had become a sort of Library, to store the collective wisdom of this ancient variant of Humanity; every scrap of matter, down to the last stray wisp, was evidently catalogued and exploited… Just as Nebogipfel had predicted as the final goal of Intelligence!

But this arrangement was more than a Library — more than a passive collection of dusty data — for there was a sense of life, of urgency, all about me. It was as if consciousness was distributed across these vast assemblages of matter.

Mind filled this universe, seeping down into its very fabric! — I seemed to see thought and awareness wash across this universal array of fact in great waves. I was astonished by the scale of all this — I could not grasp its boundless nature — by comparison, my own species had been limited to the manipulation of the outer skin of an insignificant planet, the Morlocks to their Sphere; and even the Constructors had only had a Galaxy — a single star-system, out of millions…

Here, though, Mind had it all — an Infinitude.

Now, at last, I understood — I saw for myself — the meaning and purpose of infinite and eternal Life.

The universe was infinitely old, and infinite in extent; and Mind, too, was infinitely old. Mind had gained control of all Matter and Forces, and had stored an infinite amount of Information.

Mind here was omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. The Constructors, by means of their bold challenge to the beginnings of time, had achieved their ideal. They had transcended the finite, and colonized the infinite.

The atoms and forces faded to the background of my immediate attention, and my eyes were filled once more with the unending light and star-patterns of this cosmos. My Watcher companion had gone now, and I was suspended alone, a sort of disembodied point of view, slowly rotating.

The star-light was all about me, deep, unending. I had a sense of the smallness of things, of myself, the irrelevance of my petty concerns. In an infinite and eternal universe, I saw, there is no Center; there can be no Beginning, no End. Each event, each point, is rendered identical to every other by the endless setting within which it is placed… In an infinite universe, I had become infinitesimal.

I have never been much of a poetry buff, but I remembered a verse of Shelley’s: on how life, like a dome of many-colored glass/ stains the white radiance of Eternity… and so forth. Well, I was done with life now; the covering of the body, the shallow illusion of matter itself — all that had been torn from me, and I was immersed, perhaps forever, in that white radiance of which Shelley spoke.

For a while I felt a peculiar sort of peace. When I had first witnessed the impact of my Time Machine on the unraveling of History, I had come to believe that my invention was a device of unparalleled evil, for its arbitrary destruction and distortion of Histories: for the elimination of millions of unborn human souls, with the barest flicker of my control levers. But now, at last, I saw that the Time Machine had not destroyed Histories: rather, it had created them. All possible Histories exist in the greater Multiplicity, lying against one another in an endless catalogue of What-Can-Be. Every History which was possible, with all its cargo of Mind, Love and Hope, had an existence somewhere in the Multiplicity.

But it was not so much the reality of the Multiplicity but what it signified for the destiny of man which moved me now.

Man — it had always seemed to me since I first read Darwin — had been caught in a conflict: between the aspirations of his soul, which were lofty without limit, and the baseness of his physical nature, which, in the end, might floor him. I thought I had seen, in the Eloi, how the dead hand of Evolution — the legacy of the beast in us — would in the end destroy man’s dreams, and turn his tenure of the earth into nothing but a brief, glorious glow of intellect.

That conflict, implicit in the human form, had, I think, worked itself into me as a conflict in my own mind. If Nebogipfel had been right that I had a sort of loathing for the Body — well, perhaps my over-awareness of this million-year conflict was its root! I had veered, in my views and arguments, between a sort of bleak despair, a loathing of our minds’ bestial casings, and a fond, rather foolish Utopianism — a dream that one day our heads would become clear, as if from a mass delirium, and we would settle on a society founded on principles of logic, self-evident justice, and science.

But now, the discovery — or construction — and colonization of this final History had changed all that. Here, man had at last overcome his origins and the degradation of Natural Selection; here, there would be no return to the oblivion of that primal, mindless sea from which we had emerged: rather, the future had become infinite, a climbing into an air of endless Histories.

I felt I had emerged, at last, from out of the Darkness of evolutionary despair, and into the Light of infinite wisdom.

[7] Emergence

But, you may not be surprised to read if you have followed me so far, this mood — it was a sort of elegiac acceptance — did not persist with me for long!

I took to peering about. I strained myself to hear, to see any detail, the slightest mottling in that shell of illumination that surrounded me; but for a while — there was naught but infinite silence, intolerable brightness.

I had become a disembodied mote, presumably immortal, and embedded in this greatest of artifices: a universe whose forces and particles were entirely given over to Mind. It was magnificent — but it was terrible, inhuman, chilling — and a sort of crushing dismay fell on me.

Had I passed out of being, into something that was neither being nor not being? Well, if I had — I was discovering — I did not yet have the peace of the Eternal. I still had the soul of a man, with all the freight of inquisitiveness and thirst for action which has always been part of human nature. There is too much of the Occidental about me, and soon I had had my fill of this interval of disembodied Contemplation!…

Then, after an unmeasured interval, I realized that the brilliancy of the sky was not absolute. There was a sort of hazing at the edge of my vision — the slightest darkening.

I watched for geological ages, it seemed to me, and through that long waiting the hazing grew more distinct: it was a sort of circle about my vision, as if I was peering out through the mouth of a cave. And then, in the middle of that spectral cave-mouth, I made out an irregular cloud, a mottling against the general glare; I saw a collection of rough rods and discs, all indistinct, arranged like phantoms over the stars. In one corner of this view there was a cylinder colored pure green.

I felt a passionate impatience. What was this irruption of shadows into the interminable Noon of this Optimal History?

The surrounding cave-shape grew more clear; I wondered if this was some submerged memory of the Palaeocene. And as for that misty collection of rods and discs, I was struck by an impression that I had seen this arrangement before: it was as familiar as my own hand, I thought, and yet, in this transformed context, I could not recognize it…

And then the realization rushed upon me. The rods and other components were my Time Machine — the lines over there, obscuring that constellation, were the bars of brass which made up the fundamental frame of the device; and those discs, wreathed about with galaxies, must be my chronometric dials. It was my original machine, which I had thought lost, dismantled and finally destroyed in that German attack on London in 1938!

The coalescing of this vision proceeded apace. The brass rods glittered — I saw there was a sprinkling of dust over the faces of the chronometric dials, whose hands whirled about and I recognized the green glow of Plattnerite which suffused the doped quartz of the infrastructure. I looked down and made out two wide, fat, darker cylinders — they were my own legs, clothed in jungle twill! — and those pale, hairy, complex objects must be my hands, resting on the machine’s control levers.

And now, at last, I understood the meaning of that “cavemouth” around my vision. It was the frame of my eye-sockets, nose and cheeks about my field of view: once more I was looking out from that darkest of caves — my own skull.

I felt as if I was being lowered into my body. Fingers and legs attached themselves to my consciousness. I could feel the levers, cool and firm, in my hand, and there was a light prickling of sweat on my brow. It was a little, I suppose, like recovering from the oblivion of chloroform; slowly, subtly, I was coming into myself. And now I felt a swaying, and that plummeting sensation of time travel.

Beyond the Time Machine there was only dark — I could make out nothing of the world — but I could feel, from its decreasing lurching, that the machine was slowing. I looked around — I was rewarded with the weight of a laden skull on a stem of a neck; after my disembodied state it felt as if I were swiveling an artillery piece — but there were only the faintest traces of the Optimal History left in my view: here a wisp of galaxy clusters, there a fragment of star-light. In that last instant, before my intangible link was finally broken, I saw again the round, solemn visage of my Watcher, with his immense, thoughtful eyes.

Then it was gone — all of it — and I was fully in myself again; and I felt a surge of savage, primitive joy!

The Time Machine lurched to a halt. The thing went rolling over, and I was flung headlong through the air, into pitch darkness.

There was a crack of thunder in my ears. A hard, steady rain was pounding with a brute force against my scalp and jungle shirt. In a moment I was wet to the skin: it was a fine welcome back to corporeality, I thought!

I had been deposited on a patch of sodden, soft turf in front of the overturned machine. It was quite dark. I seemed to be on a little lawn, surrounded by bushes whose leaves were dancing under the rain-drops. The rebounding drops shimmered about the machine. Close by I heard the bubble of a mass of water, and rain pattered into that greater mass of liquid.

I stood up and looked about. There was a building close by, visible only as a silhouette against the charcoal-gray sky. I noticed now that there was a faint green glow, coming from beneath the tipped-over machine. I saw that it came from a vial, a cylinder of glass perhaps six inches tall: it was a common eight-ounce graduated medicine bottle. This had evidently been lodged in the frame of the machine, but now it had fallen to the grass.

I reached to pick up the flask. The greenish glow came from a powder within: it was Plattnerite.

My name was called.

I turned, startled. The voice had been soft, almost masked by the hissing of the rain on the grass.

There was a figure standing not ten feet from me: short, almost childlike, but with scalp and back coated by long, lank hair that had been plastered flat by the rain against pale flesh. Huge eyes, gray-red, were fixed on me.

“Nebogipfel—?”

And then some circuit closed in my bewildered brain.

I turned, and inspected that building’s blocky outline once more. There was the iron balcony, over there the dining-room, the kitchen with a small window ajar, and there was the blocky form of the laboratory…

It was my home; my machine had deposited me on the sloping lawn at the rear, between the house and the Thames. I had returned — after all this! — to Richmond.

[8] A Circle is Closed

Once more — just as we had done before, so many cycles of History ago — Nebogipfel and I walked along the Petersham Road to my house. The rain hissed on the cobbles. It was almost completely dark — in fact, the only light came from the jar of Plattnerite, which glowed like a faint electric bulb, casting a murky glow over Nebogipfel’s face.

I brushed my fingers over the familiar, delicate metalwork of the rail before the area. Here was a sight I had thought never to see again: this mock-elegant facade, the pillars of the porch, the darkened rectangles of my windows.

“You have both your eyes back,” I observed to Nebogipfel in a whisper.

He glanced down at his renewed body, spreading his palms so that the pale flesh gleamed in the light of the Plattnerite. “I have no need for prosthesis,” he said. “Not any more. Now that I have been rebuilt — as you have.”

I rested my hands against my chest. The shirt fabric was coarse, rough under my palm, and my own breast-bone was hard beneath. It all felt solid enough. And I still felt like me — I mean, I had a continuity of consciousness, a single, shining path of memory, which led back through all that tangling-up of Histories, back to the simpler days when I was a boy. But I could not be the same man — for I had been disassembled in that Optimal History, and remade here. I wondered how much of that shining universe remained in me. “Nebogipfel, do you remember much of it all — after we broke through that Boundary at the start of time — the glowing sky, and so forth?”

“All of it.” His eyes were black. “You do not?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “It all seems a sort of a dream, now — especially here, in this cold English rain.”

“But the Optimal History is the reality,” he whispered. “All of this” — he waved his hands about at innocent Richmond — “these partial, sub-Optimal Histories — this is the dream.”

I hoisted the jar of Plattnerite in my hand. It was a commonplace medicine bottle, plugged with rubber; needless to say, I had no idea of where it had come from, nor how it had got in amongst the struts of my machine. “Well, this is real enough,” I said. “It’s really quite a pretty solution, isn’t it? Like the closing of a circle.” I stepped towards the door. “I think you’d better get back — out of sight — before I ring.”

He stepped backwards, into the shadow of the porch, and soon he was quite invisible.

I tugged at the bell-pull.

From within the house, I heard the opening of a door, a soft shout — “I’ll go!” — and then a heavy, impatient tread on the stair.

A key rattled in the lock, and the door creaked open.

A candle, sputtering in a brass holder, was thrust through the doorway at me; the face of a young man, broad and round, peered out, his eyes puffed up with sleep. He was twenty-three or twenty-four, and he wore a battered, thread-bare gown, thrown over a crumpled night-shirt; his hair, a mousy brown, stuck out from the sides of his odd, broad head. “Yes?” he snapped. “It’s after three in the morning, you know…”

I’d not been sure what I had intended to say, but now that the moment was here, words fled from me altogether. Once again I suffered that queer, uncomfortable shock of recognition. I don’t think a man of my century could ever have grown accustomed to meeting himself, no matter how many times he’d practiced it and now that whole raft of feeling was overlaid with an extra sort of poignancy. For this was no longer just a younger version of me: it was also a direct ancestor of Moses. It was like coming face to face with a younger brother I had thought lost.

He studied my face again, suspicious now. “What the devil do you want? I make a point of having no truck with hawkers, you know — even if this was the appropriate time of day.”

“No,” I said gently. “No, I know you don’t.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” He began to push closed the door, but he had seen something in my face — I could see the look some ghost of recognition. “I think you’d better tell me what you want.”

Clumsily, I produced the medicine jar of Plattnerite from behind my back. “I have this for you.”

His eyebrows went up at the bottle’s odd green glow. “What is it?”

“It’s—” How could I explain? “It’s a sort of sample. For you.”

“A sample of what?”

“I don’t know,” I lied. “I’d like you to find out.”

He looked curious, but still hesitant; and now a certain stubbornness was settling over his features. “Find out what?”

I started to become irritated at these dull questions. “Confound it, man — do you not have any initiative? Run some tests…”

“I’m not sure I like your tone,” he said stuffily. “What sort of tests?”

“Oh!” I ran a hand through my soaked hair; such pomposity did not sit well on such a young man, I thought. “It’s a new mineral — you can see that much!”

He frowned, his suspicion redoubled.

I bent and set the jar down on the step. “I’ll leave it here. You can look at it when you’re ready — and I know you’ll be ready — I don’t want to waste your time.” I turned and began to make my way down the path, my footsteps on the gravel loud through the rainfall.

When I looked back I saw that he had picked up the jar, and its green glow softened the shadows of the candle on his face. He called: “But your name—”

I had an impulse. “It is Plattner,” I said.

“Plattner? Do I know you?”

“Plattner,” I repeated in some desperation, and I sought a more detailed lie in the dim recesses of my brain. “Gottfried Plattner…”

It was as if I had heard someone else say it — but as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew they had had a sort of inevitability.

It was done; the circle was closed!

He continued to call, but I walked resolutely, away from the gate and down the Hill.

Nebogipfel was waiting for me at the rear of the house, close to the Time Machine. “It’s done,” I told him. A first touch of dawn had filtered into the overcast sky, and I could see the Morlock as a grainy sort of silhouette: he had his hands clasped behind him, and his hair was plastered flat against his back. His eyes were huge, blood-red pools.

“You’re a little the worse for wear,” I said kindly. “This rain—”

“It hardly matters.”

“What will you do now?”

“What will you do?”

For answer, I bent over and hauled at the Time Machine. It twisted up, clattering like an old bed, and settled to the lawn with a heavy thump. I ran a hand along the battered frame of the machine; moss and bits of grass clung to the quartz rods and the saddle, and one rail was bent, quite out of shape.

“You can go home, you know,” he said. “To 1891. We have clearly been brought back, by the Watchers, to your original History — to the Primal version of things. You need only travel forward through a few years.”

I considered that prospect. In some ways it would have been comfortable to return to that cozy Age, and to my shell of belongings, companions and achievements. And I should have enjoyed the company of some of those old chums of mine again — Filby and the rest. But…

“I had a friend, in 1891,” I said to Nebogipfel. (I was thinking of the Writer.) “Only a young fellow. An odd chap in some ways — very intense — and yet with a way of looking at things…

“He seemed to see beyond the surface of it all — beyond the Here and Now which so obsesses us all — and to the quick of it: to the trends, the deeper currents which connect us to both past and future. He had a view of the littleness of Humanity, I think, against the great sweep of evolutionary time; and I think it made him impatient with the world he found himself stuck in, with the endless, slow processes of society — even with his own, sickly human nature.

“It was as if he was a stranger in his own time, you see,” I concluded. “And, if I went back, that’s how I should feel. Out of time. For, no matter how solid this world seems, I should always know that a thousand universes, different to a small or a great degree, lie all around it just out of reach.

“I am become a monster, I suppose… My friends will have to think me lost in time, and mourn me as they will.”

Even as we had been speaking my resolution had formed. “I still have a vocation. I have not yet completed the task I set myself, when I returned into time after that first visit. A circle has been closed here — but another remains open, dangling like a fractured bone, far into futurity…”

“I understand,” the Morlock said.

I climbed into the saddle of the machine.

“But what of you, Nebogipfel? Will you come with me? I can imagine a role for you there — and I don’t want to leave you stranded here.”

“Thank you — but no. I will not remain here for long.”

“Where will you go?”

He raised his face. The rain was slowing now, but a thin mist of drops still seeped out of the lightening sky and fell against the great corneas of his eyes. “I, too, am aware of the closure of circles,” he said. “But I remain curious as to what lies beyond the circles…”

“What do you mean?”

“If you had returned here and shot your younger self well, there would be no causal contradiction: instead, you would create a new History, a fresh variant in the Multiplicity, in which you died young at the hand of a stranger.”

“That’s all clear enough to me, now. There is no paradox possible within a single History, because of the existence of the Multiplicity.”

“But,” the Morlock went on calmly, “the Watchers have brought you here, so that you could deliver the Plattnerite to yourself that you could initiate the sequence of events which led to the development of the first Time Machine, and the creation of the Multiplicity. So there is a greater closure — of the Multiplicity on itself.”

I saw what he was driving at. “There is a sort of closed loop of causality, after all,” I said, “a worm eating its own tail… The Multiplicity could not have been brought into existence, if not for the existence of the Multiplicity in the first place!”

Nebogipfel said that the Watchers believed that the resolution of this Final Paradox required the existence of more Multiplicities: a Multiplicity of Multiplicities! “The higher order is logically necessary to resolve the causal loop,” Nebogipfel said, “just as our Multiplicity was required to exist to resolve the paradoxes of a single History.”

“But — confound it, Nebogipfel! My mind is reeling at the thought. Parallel ensembles of universes — is it possible?”

“More than possible,” he said. “And the Watchers intend to travel there.” He lowered his head from the sky. The dawn was growing quite bright now, and I could see the pasty flesh around his eyes wrinkle up in discomfort. “And they will take me with them. I can think of no greater adventure… can you?”

Sitting there on the saddle of my machine, I took one last look around, at that plain, soggy dawn somewhere in the nineteenth century. The houses, full of sleeping people, were silhouetted, all the way along the Petersham Road; I smelled the moisture on the grass, and somewhere a door slammed, as some milkman or postman began his day.

I should never come this way again, I knew.

“Nebogipfel — when you reach this greater Multiplicity — what then?”

“There are many orders of Infinity,” Nebogipfel said calmly, the light rain trickling down the contours of his face. “It is like a hierarchy: of universal structures — and of ambitions.” His voice retained that soft Morlock gurgle — its intonations quite alien — and yet it was suffused with wonder. “The Constructors could have owned a universe; but it was not enough. So they challenged Finitude, and touched the Boundary of Time, and reached through that, and enabled Mind to colonize and inhabit all the many universes of the Multiplicity. But, for the Watchers of the Optimal History, even this is not sufficient; and they are seeking ways of reaching beyond, to further Orders of Infinity…”

“And if they succeed? Will they rest?”

“There is no rest. No limit. No end to the Beyond — no Boundaries which Life, and Mind, cannot challenge, and breach.”

My hand tensed on the levers of my machine, and the whole, squat tangle shivered. “Nebogipfel, I—”

He held up his hand. “Go,” he said.

I drew a breath, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud.