Then I saw it: it hovered in the moist, gloomy air of the cabin, immune to the rocking of the car, with its huge eyes, fleshy “V” of a mouth, and those articulated tentacles which trailed towards, but did not touch, the floor. This was no phantasm — I could not see through it, to details of the forest beyond — and it was as real as me, Nebogipfel, or the boots I had set on the bench.

The Watcher regarded me with a cool analysis.

I felt no fear. I reached out towards it, but it bobbled away through the air. I had no doubt that its gray eyes were fixed on my face. “Who are you?” I asked. “Can you help us?”

If it could hear, it did not respond. But the illumination was already changing; that light-suffused quality of the air was fading back to a vegetable greenness. I caught a sensation, then, of spinning — that great skull was like some improbable toy, turning on its axis — and then it was gone.

Nebogipfel walked up to me, his long feet picking over the floor’s ribs. He had discarded his nineteenth-century clothes, and he went naked, save for his battered goggles and the coat of white hair on his back, now tangled and grown out. “What is it? Are you ill?”

I told him of the Watcher, but he had seen nothing of it. I returned to my rest on the bench, uncertain if what I had witnessed was real — or a lingering dream.

The heat was oppressive, and the air in the cabin grew stifling.

I thought of Gödel, and of Moses.

That unprepossessing man, Gödel, had deduced the existence of Multiple Histories, purely from ontological principles — while I, poor fool that I am, had needed several trips through time before the possibility had even occurred to me! But now, that man who had dreamed his magnificent dreams of the Final World, a world in which all Meaning is resolved, lay crushed and broken under a heap of masonry killed by the narrowness and stupidity of his fellow men.

And as for Moses: for him, I simply grieved. It was something of the desolation one might feel if a child is killed, I think, or a younger brother. Moses was dead at twenty-six; and yet I — the same person — breathed on at four-and-forty! My past had been cut out from under me; it was as if the ground had evaporated, leaving me stranded in the air. But beyond this I had come to know Moses, if briefly, as a person in his own regard. He had been cheerful, erratic, impulsive, a little absurd — just like me! — and immensely likable.

It was another death on my hands!

All Nebogipfel’s double-talk of a Multiplicity of Worlds — all the possible arguments that the Moses I had known was never, in the end, destined to be me, but some other variant of me — none of that made any difference to the way it felt to have lost him.

My thoughts dissolved into half-coherent fragments — I struggled to keep my eyes open, fearing I should not wake again — but, once more, consumed by confusion and grief, I slept.

I was woken by my name, pronounced in the Morlock’s odd, liquid guttural. The air was as foul as before, and a new throb, caused by the heat and lack of oxygen, was jostling for room in my skull with the residue of my earlier injuries.

Nebogipfel’s battered eyes were huge in that arboreal gloom. “Look around,” he said.

The greenery pressed about us with as much persistence as before — and yet now the texture seemed different. I found that — with care — I was able to follow the evolution of single leaves on the crowding branches. Each leaf sprang from the dust, went through a sort of reverse withering, and crumpled into its bud in less than a second, but even so -

“We are slowing,” I breathed.

“Yes. The Plattnerite is losing its potency, I think.”

I uttered a prayer of thanks — for my strength had recovered sufficiently that I no longer wished to die on some airless, rocky plain at the dawn of the earth!

“Do you know where we are?”

“Somewhere in the Palaeocene Era. We’ve been traveling for twenty hours. We are perhaps fifty million years before the present…”

“Whose present? — mine, of 1891, or yours?”

He touched the blood still matted over his face. “On such time-scales it scarcely matters.”

The blossoming of leaves and flowers was now quite slow — almost stately. I became aware of a flickering, of impermanent intrusions of deeper darkness, superimposed on the general green gloom. “I can distinguish night and day,” I said. “We’re slowing.”

“Yes.” The Morlock sat on the bench opposite me and gripped its edge with his long fingers. I wondered if he was afraid — he had every right to be! I thought I saw a motion in the floor of the car, a gentle, upward bulging below Nebogipfel’s bench.

“What should we do?”

He shook his head. “We can only wait on events. We are hardly in a controlled situation…”

The flapping of night and day slowed further, until it became a steady pulse around us, like a heartbeat. The floor creaked, and I saw stress-marks appear in its steel plates…

Suddenly I understood!

I cried, “Look out!” I stood, reached over and grabbed Nebogipfel by the shoulders. He did not resist. I lifted him as if he were a skinny, hairy child, and stumbled backwards -

— and a tree accreted out of the air before me, ripping the car’s metal like paper. One immense branch probed towards the controls like the arm of some huge, purposeful man of wood, and smashed through the casing’s front panel.

We were evidently arriving in the space occupied by this tree, in this remote era!

I fell backwards against a bench, cradling Nebogipfel. The tree shrank a little, as we receded towards the moment of its birth. The flapping of night and day grew slower, still more ponderous. The trunk narrowed further — and then, with an immense crack, the cabin of the car broke in two, snapped open from within like an egg-shell.

I lost hold of Nebogipfel, and the Morlock and I tumbled to the soft, moist earth, amid a hail of metal and wood.

I found myself on my back, peering up at the tree which had riven through our Time-Car as we fell out of diluted presentation. I heard Nebogipfel’s shallow breathing close by, but I could not see him.

Our tree, now frozen in time, soared up to join its fellows in a canopy, thick and uniform, far above me, and shoots and seedlings sprouted from the ground around its base, and through the wrecked components of the car. The heat was intense, the air moist and difficult for my straining lungs, and the world around me was filled with the coughs, trills and sighs of a jungle, all overlaid on a deep, richer rumble which made me suspect the presence of a large body of water nearby: either a river — some primeval version of the Thames — or a sea.

It was more like the Tropics than England!

Now, as I lay there and watched, an animal came clambering down the trunk towards us. It was something like a squirrel, about ten inches long, but its coat was wide and loose, and hung about its body like a cloak. It carried a fruit in its little jaws. Ten feet from the ground this creature spotted us; it cocked its sharp head, opened its mouth — dropping its fruit and hissed. I saw that its incisor teeth divided at their tips, into five-pronged combs. Then it leapt headlong from its tree trunk. It spread its arms and legs wide and its cloak of skin opened out with a snap, turning the animal into a sort of fur-covered kite. It soared away into the shadows, and was lost to my view.

“Quite a welcome,” I gasped. “It was like a flying lemur. But did you see its teeth?”

Nebogipfel — still out of my sight — replied, “It was a planetatherium. And the tree is a dipterocarps — not much changed from the species which will survive in the forests of your own day.