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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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