I fell ill.

I was unable to rise from the crude pallet of fronds and dried leaves I had made for myself. Nebogipfel was forced to nurse me, which duty he performed without much in the way of bedside manner, but with patience and persistence.

Once, in the dark pit of night, I came to a state of half-consciousness with the Morlock’s soft fingers probing at my face and neck. I imagined I was once more entrapped in the pedestal of that White Sphinx, with the Morlocks crowding around to destroy me. I cried out, and Nebogipfel scurried backwards; but not before I was able to lift my fist and strike him a blow in the chest. Enfeebled as I was, I retained sufficient strength to knock the Morlock off his feet.

That done, my energy was spent, and I lapsed into unconsciousness.

When I next cane to wakefulness, there was Nebogipfel at my side again, patiently trying to induce me to take a mouthful of shellfish chowder.

At length my senses returned, and I found myself propped up on my pallet. I was alone in our little hut. The sun was low, but the heat of the day still lay on me. Nebogipfel had left a nutshell of water close to my pallet; I drank this.

The sunlight seeped away, and the warm, Tropical darkness of evening settled over our lean-to. The sunset was tall and magnificent: this was because of a surplus of ash in the atmosphere, Nebogipfel had told me, deposited by volcanoes to the west of Scotland. This vulcanism would one day lead to the formation of the Atlantic Ocean; lava was flowing as far as the Arctic, Scotland and Ireland, and the warm climatic zone in which we found ourselves stretched as far north as Greenland.

Britain was already an island, in this Palaeocene, but compared to its configuration in the nineteenth century, its north-west corner was tipped up to a greater altitude. The Irish Sea had yet to form, so that Britain and Ireland formed a single landmass; but the south-east of England was immersed beneath the Sea whose margins we inhabited. My Palaeocene Sea was an extension of the North Sea; if we could have made a boat, we could have traveled across the English Channel and sailed into the heart of France through the Aquitaine Basin, a tongue of water which connected in turn to the Tethys Sea — a great ocean swamping the Mediterranean countries.

With the coming of night, the Morlock emerged from a deeper shade in the forest. He stretched working his muscles more as a cat will than a human — and he massaged his injured leg. Then he spent some minutes on finger-combing the hair on his face, chest and back.

At length he came hobbling over to me; the purple light of the sunset glinted from his starred and cracked goggles. He fetched me more water, and with my mouth moistened, I whispered, “How long?”

“Three days.”

I had to suppress a shudder at the sound of his queer, liquid voice. You might have thought I would be used to Morlocks by now; but after three days spent lying helpless, it came as something of a shock to be reminded that I was isolated in this hostile world, save only for this alien of the far future!

Nebogipfel made me some chowder. By the time I had eaten, the sunset was gone, and the only illumination came from a sliver of young moon which hung low in the sky. Nebogipfel had discarded his goggles, and I could see his huge, gray-red eye, hovering like the moon’s translucent shadow in the dark of the hut.

“What I want to know is,” I said, “what made me ill?”

“I am not certain.”

“Not certain?” I was surprised at this unusual admission of limitation, for Nebogipfel’s breadth and depth of knowledge were extraordinary. I pictured the mind of a nineteenth-century man as something analogous to my old workshop: full of information, but stored in a quite haphazard way, with open books and scraps of notes and sketches scattered over every flat surface. By comparison with this jumble, the mind of a Morlock — thanks to the advanced educational techniques of the Year 657,208 — was ordered like the contents of a fine encyclopedia, with the books of experience and learning indexed and shelved. All this raised the practical level of intelligence and knowledge to heights undreamed of by men of my time. “Still,” he said, “we should not be surprised at the fact of illness. I am, in fact, surprised you have not succumbed earlier.”

“What do you mean?”

He turned to me. “That you are a man out of your time.”

In a flash, I understood what he meant.

The germs of disease have taken toll of Humanity since the beginning — indeed, were cutting down the prehuman ancestors of man even in this ancient Age. But because of this grim winnowing of our kind we have developed resisting power. Our bodies struggle against all germs, and are altogether immune to some.

I pictured all those human generations which still lay ahead of this deep Age, those firefly human souls which would flicker in the darkness like sparks, before being extinguished forever! But those tiny struggles would not be in vain, for — by this toll of a billion deaths — man would buy his birthright of the earth.

It was different for the Morlock. By Nebogipfel’s century, there was little left of the archetypal human form. Everything in the Morlock’s body — bones, flesh, lungs, liver — had been adjusted by machinery to permit, Nebogipfel said, an ideal balance between longevity and richness of life. Nebogipfel could be wounded, as I had seen, but — according to him — his body was no more likely to catch a germ infection than was a suit of armor. And indeed, I had detected no signs of infection about his injured leg, or his eye. The original world of Eloi and Morlock had devised a different solution, I remembered, for I had seen no disease or infection there either, and little decay, and I had surmised that that was a world cleansed of harmful bacteria.

I, however, had no such protection.

After my first brush with illness, Nebogipfel turned his attention to more subtle aspects of our survival needs. He sent me foraging for supplements for our diet, including nuts, tubers, fruit, and edible fungi, all of which were added to our staples of sea food and the flesh of those animals and birds stupid enough to allow themselves to be entrapped by my clumsy hunting with slings and stones. Nebogipfel also attempted to derive simple medicines: poultices, herbal teas, and the like.

My illness filled me with a deep and abiding gloom, for this was a danger of time travel which had not occurred to me before. I shivered, and wrapped my arms around my still feeble body. My strength and intelligence could beat off Diatryma, and other massive natives of the Palaeocene, but they would offer me no defense against the predations of the invisible monsters borne by air, water and flesh.