The Time Ships Cosmology Page (2025)

“We have talked—a little—of multiple Histories: of the possible existence of several editions of the world. You have witnessed two yourself—”

“The history of Eloi and Morlock, and the History of the Sphere.”

“You must think of these versions of History as parallel corridors, stretching ahead of you. Your machine allows you to go back and forth along a corridor. The corridors exist independently of each other: looking ahead from any point, a man looking along one corridor will see a complete and self-consistent History—he can have no knowledge of another corridor, and nor can the corridors influence each other.

“But in some corridors conditions may be very different. In some, even the laws of physics may differ . . .”

“There is—will be—a new philosophy called the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” Nebogipfel said, and the sound of his queer, liquid voice, delivering such a striking phrase, sent shivers along my spine. “There is another ten or twenty years to elapse before the crucial papers are published—I remember the name of Everett . . .”

“It’s like this,’ Moses said. “Suppose you have a Particle which can be in just two places—here or there, we will say—with some chance associated with each place. All right? Now you take a look with your microscope, and find it here...”

“According to the Many Worlds idea,” Nebogipfel said, “‘History splits into two when you perform such an experiment. In the other History, there is another you—who has just found the object there, rather than here.”

“Another History?” Moses said, “With all the reality and consistency of this one.” He grinned. “There is another you—there is an infinite number of ‘you’s’—propagating like rabbits at every moment!”

I swore. "I thought I was done with all this. But even in the Palaeocene, one cannot avoid meeting one's relatives!" I studied the tiny corpse. "So here is the ancestor of monkey, and man, and Morlock! The insignificant little acorn from which will grow an oak which will smother more worlds than this earth... I wonder how many men, and nations, and species, would have sprung from the loins of this modest little fellow, had I not killed him. Once again, perhaps I have destroyed my own past!"

Nebogipfel said, "We cannot help but interact with History, you and I. With every breath we take, every tree you cut down, every animal we kill, we create a new world in the Multiplicity of Worlds. That is all. It is unavoidable."

I remembered my determination to eradicate the existence of the Time Machine before it was ever launched—to put a stop to this endless splintering of Histories. Now, thanks to my blundering about, I had indirectly induced the establishment of this human colony deep in the past, an establishment which would surely cause the most significant Historical fracturing yet! I had a sudden feeling of falling—it was a little like the vertiginous plummeting one feels when Traveling into time—and I felt that this diverging of History must already be far beyond my control.

And then, I thought of the expression on Stubbins's face as he gazed at his first child.

I am man, not a god! I must let myself be influenced by my human instincts, for I was surely incapable of managing the evolution of Histories with any conscious direction. Each of us, I thought, could do little to change the course of things—indeed, anything we tried was likely to—be so uncontrolled as to inflict more damage than benefit—and yet, conversely, we should not allow the huge panorama about us, the immensity of the Multiplicity of Histories, to overwhelm us. The perspective of the Multiplicity rendered each of us, and our actions, tiny—but not without meaning;and each of us must proceed with our lives with stoicism and fortitude, as if the rest of it—the final Doom of mankind, the endless Multiplicity—were not so.

Whatever the impact on the future of fifty million years hence, there was a sense of health and rightness about this Palaeocene colony, I thought. So my reply to Nebogipfel's question was inevitable.

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.

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 . . .

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.

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 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.

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.

“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.”

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."

"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."

“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.”

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.”

“Men may have become extinct,” Nebogipfel said. “Any biological species will, on a long enough timescale, 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.

"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.

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!

“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.”

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!

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.

Now we passed a place where a fresh partition was emerging from the Floor below. It rose up complete and finished like something emerging from a vat of mercury; when its growth was done it had become a thin slab about four feet high featuring three of the omnipresent blue windows. When I crouched down to peer through the transparent Floor, I could see nothing beneath the surface: no box, or uplifting machinery. It was as if the partition had appeared out of nothing. “Where does it come from?” I asked Nebogipfel.

He said, after some thought—evidently he had to choose his words: “The Sphere has a Memory. It has machines which enable it to store that Memory. And the form of the data blocks”—he meant the partitions—‘is held in the Sphere’s Memory, to be retrieved in this material form as desired.”

For my entertainment, Nebogipfel caused more extrusions: on one pillar I saw a tray of foodstuffs and water rising out of the floor, as if prepared by some invisible butler!

I was struck by this idea of extrusions from the uniform and ‘featureless Floor. It reminded me of the Platonist theory of thought expounded by some philosophers: that to every object there exists, in some realm, an ideal Form—an essence of Chair, the summation of Table-ness, and so on—and when an object is manufactured in our world, templates stored in the Platonic over-world are consulted.

Well, here I was in a Platonic universe made real: the whole of this mighty, sun-girdling Sphere was suffused by an artificial, god-like Memory—a Memory within whose rooms I walked even as we spoke. And within the Memory was stored the Ideal of every object the heart could desire—or at least, as desired by a Morlock heart.

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 eye socket, 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.

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."

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.

"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."

"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.”

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 fora 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 fora 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.

I was lost, disembodied, immersed in emerald light.

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.

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.

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 wasnot 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.

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...

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!

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.

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.

I turned from him, and I realized that the extraordinary optical effects which I had observed during my voyage to the year A.D. 657,208 were again becoming apparent. I had the impression of star- fields, gaudy and crowded, trying to break through the diluted surface of things, all about me... And here, hovering a few yards before the machine, was the Watcher: my impossible companion. Its eyes were fixed on me, and I grabbed at a rail. I stared at that distorted parody of a human face, and those dangling tentacles— and again I was struck by the similarity with the flopping creature I had seen on that remote beach thirty million years hence.

It is an odd thing, but my goggles—which had been so useful in resolving the Morlock darkness—were of no help to me as I studied this creature; I saw it no more clearly than I could with my naked eyes.

I became aware of a low mumbling, like a whimper. It was Nebogipfel, clinging to his place in the machine with every evidence of distress.

"You've no need to be afraid," I said, a little awkwardly. "I told you of my encounter with this creature on my way to your century. It is a strange sight, but it seems to be without harm."

Through his shuddery whimpering, Nebogipfel said, "You do not understand. What we see is impossible. Your Watcher apparently has the ability to cross the corridors to traverse between potential versions of History... even to enter the attenuated environs of a traveling Time Machine. It is impossible!"

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 steam-ship 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.

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.

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!

"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."