“Perhaps we should work out how we might stop this car’s headlong drive into time. If we find an equable age—”

“I do not drink we have any way of terminating the flight of the car.”

“What?”

The Morlock spread his hands — I saw how the hair on the back of them was sprinkled with a light frost — and then we were plunged once more into a darkened sepulcher of Ice, and his voice floated out of the obscurity. “This is a crude, unfinished test vehicle, remember. Many of the controls and indicators are disconnected; those that do have connections largely appear nonfunctional. Even if we knew how to modify the workings with out wrecking the vehicle, I can see no way for us to get out of the cabin to reach the inner mechanism.”

We emerged from the Ice into that reshaped tundra once more. Nebogipfel watched the landscape with some fascination. “Think of it: the fjords of Scandinavia are not yet cut, and the lakes of Europe and North America — deposited by melting ice — are phantasms of the future.

“Already, we have passed beyond the dawn of human history. In Africa we might find races of Australopithecines some of them clumsy, some gracile, some carnivorous, but all with a bipedal gait and ape-like features: a small brain-case and large jaws and teeth…”

A great, cold loneliness descended on me. I had been lost in time before, but never, I thought, had I suffered quite this intensity of isolation! Was it true — could it be true — that Nebogipfel and I, in our damaged Time-Car, represented the only candle-flames of intelligence on the whole of the planet?

“So we are out of control,” I said. “We may not stop until we reach the beginning of time…”

“I doubt it will come to that,” Nebogipfel said. “The Plattnerite must have some finite capacity. It cannot propel us deeper into time, forever; it must exhaust itself: We must pray that it does so before we pass through the Ordovician and Cambrian time-layers — before we reach an Age in which there is no oxygen to sustain us.”

“That’s a cheerful prospect,” I said. “And things may become worse still, I suppose.”

“How?”

I got my stiff legs out from under me and sat on the cold, ribbed metal floor. “We have no provisions, of any kind. No water, no food. And we’re both injured. We don’t even have warm clothing! How long can we survive, in this freezing time-ark? A few days? Less?”

Nebogipfel did not reply.

I am not a man to submit easily to Fate, and I invested some energy in studying Nebogipfel’s controls and wires. I soon learned he was right — there was no way I could find to build this tangle of components into a dirigible vehicle — and my energy, sapped as it was, was soon spent: I reverted to a sort of dull apathy.

We passed through one more brief, brutal Glaciation; and then we entered a long, bleak winter. The seasons still brought snow and ice flickering across the land, but the Age of Permanent Ice lay in the future now. I saw little change in the nature of the landscape, millennium on millennium: perhaps there was a slow enrichment of the texture of the blur of greenery that coated the hills. An immense skull — it reminded me of an elephant’s — appeared on the ground not far from the Time-Car, bleached, bare and crumbled. It persisted long enough for me to make out its contours, a second or so, before it vanished as fast as it had appeared.

“Nebogipfel — about your face. I — you have to understand…”

He regarded me from his one good eye. I saw he had reverted to his Morlock mannerisms, losing the human coloration he had adopted. “What? What must I understand?”

“I didn’t mean to injure you.”

“You do not now,” he said with a surgeon’s precision. “But you did then. Apology is futile — absurd. You are what you are… we are different species, as divergent from each other as from the Australopithecines.”

I felt like a clumsy animal, my huge fists stained once more with the blood of a Morlock. “You shame me,” I said.

He shook his head a brief, curt gesture. “Shame? The concept is without meaning, in this context.”

I should no more feel shame — I saw he meant — than should some savage animal of the jungle. If attacked by such a creature, would I argue the morals of the case with it? No — without intelligence, it could not help its behavior. I should merely deal with its actions.

To Nebogipfel, I had proved myself — again! — to be little better than those clumsy brutes of the African plains, the precursors of men in this desolate period.

I retreated to the wooden benches. I lay there, cradling my aching head with my arm, and watched the flicker of Ages beyond the still-open door of the car.

The bleak, wintry cold passed, and the sky took on a more complex, mottled texture. Occasionally the rocking sun-band would be blotted out by a shell of dark cloud, for as long as a second. New species of trees flourished in this milder climate: deciduous types, as best I could make out, maple, oak, poplar, cedars and others. Sometimes these antique forests lapped over the car, shutting us into a twilight of flickering green-brown, and then they receded, as if a curtain had been drawn aside.

We had entered a time of powerful earth movements, Nebogipfel said. The Alps and Himalayas were being forced out of the ground, and immense volcanoes were spewing ash and dust into the air, sometimes obscuring the sky for years on end. In the oceans — the Morlock said — great sharks cruised, with teeth like daggers. And in Africa, the ancestors of Humanity were shriveling back into primitive mindlessness, with shrinking brains, stooping gait and blunted, clumsy fingers.

We fell through that long, savage Age for perhaps twelve hours.

I tried to ignore the hunger and thirst that clawed at my belly, while centuries and forests flickered past the cabin. This was the longest journey through time I had taken since my first plunge into the remote future beyond Weena’s History, and the immense, futile emptiness of it all — for hour after unchanging hour — began to depress my soul. Already the brief flourishing of Humanity was a remote sliver of light, far away in time; even the distance between man and Morlock — of whatever variety — was but a fraction of the great distance I had traveled.

The hugeness of time, and the littleness of man and his achievements, quite crushed me; and my own, petty concerns seemed of absurd insignificance. The story of Humanity seemed trivial, a flash-lamp moment lost in the dark, mindless halls of Eternity.

The earth’s crust heaved like the chest of a choking man, and the Time-Car was lifted or dropped with the evolving landscape; it felt like the swell of an immense sea. The vegetation grew more lush and green, and new forests pressed up against the Time-Car — I thought they were deciduous trees by now, though flowers and leaves were reduced to a uniform green blur by our velocity — and the air grew warmer.

The ache of those eons of cold left my fingers at last, and I discarded my jacket and loosened the buttons of my shirt; I abandoned my boots and flexed the circulation back into my toes. Barnes Wallis’s numbered security badge fell out of my jacket pocket. I picked it up, this little symbol of man’s suspicious fencing-off of his fellow man, and I do not think I could have found, in that primeval greenness, a more perfect symbol of the narrowness and absurdity on which so much human energy is wasted! I threw the badge into a dark corner of the car.

The long hours, suspended in that cloaking greenery, passed more slowly than ever, and I slept for a while. When I woke, the quality of the greenness around me seemed to have changed — it was more translucent, with something of the shade of Plattnerite, and I thought I saw a hint of star-fields — it was like being immersed in emeralds, rather than leaves.