The Time Ships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That much I can accept.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And thus, the race progresses.”

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

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