We walked along the flank of the Hill together, heading south in the direction of Richmond Park. We set off without preamble, for the Morlocks were not given to unnecessary conversation.

I have said that my house had stood on the Petersham Road, on the stretch below Hill Rise. As such it had been halfway up the shoulder of Richmond Hill, a few hundred yards from the river, with a good westerly prospector it would have had, if not for the intervening trees — and I had been able to see something of the meadows at Petersham beyond the river. Well, in the Year A.D. 657,208, all of the intervening clutter had been swept away; and I was able to see down the flank of a deepened valley to where the Thames lay in its new bed, glittering in the star-light. I could see, here and there, the coal-hot mouths of the Morlocks’ heat-wells, puncturing the darkened land. Much of the hill-side was bare sand, or given over to moss; but I could see patches of what looked like the soft glass which had carpeted the Sphere, glittering in the enhanced starlight.

The river itself had carved out a new channel a mile or so from its nineteenth-century position; it appeared to have cut off the bow from Hampton to Kew, so that Twickenham and Teddington were now on its east side, and it seemed to me that the valley was a good bit deeper than in my day — or perhaps Richmond Hill had been lifted up by some other geological process. I remembered a similar migration of the Thames in my first voyage into time. Thus, it seemed to me, the discrepancies of human History are mere froth; under it all, the slow processes of geology and erosion would continue their patient work regardless.

I spared a moment to glance up the Hill towards the Park, for I wondered for how long those ancient woodlands and herds of red and fallow deer had survived the winds of change. Now, the Park could be no more than a darkened desert, populated only by cacti and a few olives. I felt my heart harden. Perhaps these Morlocks were wise and patient perhaps their industrious pursuit of knowledge on the Sphere was to be applauded — but their neglect of the ancient earth was a shame!

We reached the vicinity of the Park’s Richmond Gate, close to the site of the Star and Garter, perhaps half a mile from the site of my house. On a level patch of land, a rectangular platform of soft glass had been laid; this platform shimmered in the patchy star-light. It appeared to be manufactured of that marvelous, glassy material of which the Sphere Floor was composed; and from its surface had been evoked a variety of the podiums and partitions which I had come to recognize as the characteristic tools of the Morlocks. These were abandoned now; there was nobody about but Nebogipfel and I. And there — at the heart of the platform — I saw a squat and ugly tangle of brass and nickel, with ivory like bleached bone shining in the star-light, and a bicycle-saddle in the middle of it all: it was my Time Machine, evidently intact, and ready to take me home!

I felt my heart pump; I found it difficult to walk at a steady pace behind Nebogipfel — but walk I did. I dropped my hands into my jacket pockets and I grasped the two control levers there. I was already close enough to the machine to see the studs on which the levers must be fitted for the thing to work — and I meant to launch the machine as soon as I could, and to get away from this place!

“As you can see,” Nebogipfel was saying, “the machine is undamaged — we have moved it, but not attempted to pry into its workings…”

I sought to distract him from his close attention. “Tell me: now that you’ve studied my machine, and listened to my theories on the subject, what is your impression?”

“Your machine is an extraordinary achievement — ahead of its age.”

I have never been one with much patience for compliments. “But it is the Plattnerite which enabled me to construct it,” I said.

“Yes. I would like to study this ’Plattnerite’ more closely.” He donned his goggles, and studied the machine’s shimmering quartz bars. “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…”

“Go on.”

“You said the operation of your machine depended on a twisting about of Space and Time,” he said. “Turning a Journey in Time into one through Space. Well, I agree: that is, indeed, how the Plattnerite exerts its effects. But how is this achieved?

“Picture, now,” he said, “a universe — another History — in which this Space-Time twisting is greatly pronounced.”

He went on to describe a variant of the universe almost beyond my imagining: in which rotation was embedded in the very fabric of the universe.

“Rotation suffuses every point of Space and Time. A stone, thrown outward from any point, would be seen to follow a spiral path: its inertia would act like a compass, swinging around the launch point. It is even thought by some that our own universe might undergo such a rotation, but on an immensely slow scale: taking a hundred thousand million years to complete a single turn…

“The rotating-universe idea was first described some decades after your time — by Kurt Gödel, in fact.”

“Gödel?” It took me a moment to place the name. “The man who will demonstrate the imperfectibility of mathematics?”

“The same.”

We walked around the machine, and I kept my stiff fingers wrapped around the levers. I planned to maneuver myself into precisely the most propitious spot to reach the machine. “Tell me how this explains the operation of my machine.”

“It is to do with axis-twisting. In a rotating universe, a journey through space, but reaching the past or future, is possible. Our universe rotates, but so slowly that such a path would be a hundred thousand million light years long, and would take the best part of a million million years to traverse!”

“Of little practical use, then.”

“But imagine a universe of greater density than ours: a universe as dense, everywhere, as the heart of an atom of matter. There, a rotation would be complete in mere fractions of a second.”

“But we are not in such a universe.” I waved my hand through empty space. “That is evident.”

“But perhaps you are! — for fractions of a second, and thanks to your machine — or at least to its Plattnerite component.

“My hypothesis is that, because of some property of the Plattnerite, your Time Machine is flickering back and forth to this ultra-dense universe, and on each traverse is exploiting that reality’s axis-twisting to travel along a succession of loops into the past or future! So you spiral through time…”

I considered these ideas. They were extraordinary — of course! — but, it seemed to me, no more than a somewhat fantastic extension of my preliminary thoughts of the intertwining of Space and Time, and the fluidity of their relevant axes. And besides, my subjective impression of time travel was bound up with feelings of twisting — of rotation.

“These ideas are startling — but I believe they would bear further examination,” I told Nebogipfel.

He looked up at me. “Your flexibility of mind is impressive, for a man of your evolutionary era.”