It transpired that Gibson was not alone. He shouldered his rifle, turned and made a beckoning gesture towards the shadows of the jungle.

Two soldiers emerged from that gloom. Sweat had soaked through the shirts of these laden fellows, and, as they stepped into the growing light of the day, they seemed altogether more suspicious of us, and generally uncomfortable, than had the Wing Commander. These two were Indians, I thought — sepoys, soldiers of the Empire — their eyes glittered black and fierce, and each had a turban and clipped beard. They wore khaki drill shirts and shorts; one of them carried a heavy mechanical gun at his back, and bore two heavy leather pouches, evidently holding ammunition for this weapon. Their heavy, silvery epaulets glittered in the Palaeocene sunlight; they scowled at the corpse of Pristichampus with undisguised ferocity.

Gibson told us that he and these two fellows had been involved in a scouting expedition; they had traveled perhaps a mile from a main base, camp, which was situated inland from the Sea. (It struck me as odd that Gibson did not introduce the two soldiers by name. This little incivility — brought on by an unspoken recognition, by Gibson, of differences of rank — seemed to me altogether absurd, there on that isolated beach in the Palaeocene, with only a handful of humans anywhere in the world!)

I thanked Gibson again for rescuing the Morlock, and invited him to join us for some breakfast at our shelter. “It’s just along the beach,” I said, pointing; and Gibson peaked his hand over his eyes to see.

“Well, that looks — ah — as if it’s going to be a jolly solid construction.”

“Solid? I should say so,” I replied, and began a long and rather rambling discourse on the details of our incomplete shelter, of which I felt inordinately proud, and of how we had survived in the Palaeocene.

Guy Gibson folded his hands behind his back and listened, with a set, polite expression on his face. The sepoys watched me, puzzled and suspicious, their hands never far from their weapons.

After some minutes of this, I became aware, rather belatedly, of Gibson’s detachment. I let my prattle slow to a halt.

Gibson glanced around brightly at the beach. “I think you’ve done remarkably well here. Remarkably. I should have thought that a few weeks of this Robinson Crusoe stuff would pretty much have driven me batty with loneliness. I mean, opening time at the pub won’t be for another fifty million years!”

I smiled at this joke — which I failed to follow — and I felt rather embarrassed at my exaggerated pride at such mean achievements, before this vision of dapper competence.

“But look here,” Gibson went on gently, “don’t you think you’d be better off coming back with us to the Expeditionary Force? We have traveled here to find you, after all. And we’ve some decent provisions there — and modern tools, and so forth.” He glanced at Nebogipfel, and added, a little more dubiously, “And the doc might be able to do something for this poor chap as well. Is there anything you need here? We can always come back later.”

Of course there was not — I had no need to return through those few hundred yards along the beach ever again! — but I knew that, with the arrival of Gibson and his people, my brief idyll was done. I looked into Gibson’s frank, practical face, and knew that I could never find the words to express such a sense of loss to him.

With the sepoys leading the way, and with the Morlock supporting himself against my arm, we set off into the interior of the jungle.

Away from the coast, the air was hot and clammy. We moved in single file, with the sepoys at front and back, and Gibson, the Morlock, and myself sandwiched between; I carried the frail Morlock in my arms for much of the journey. The two sepoys kept up their suspicious, hooded glares at us, although after a time they allowed their hands to stray from their webbing holsters. They said not a single word to Nebogipfel or me, in the whole time we traveled together.

Gibson’s expedition had come from 1944 — six years after our own departure, during the German assault on the London Dome.

“And the War is still continuing?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said, sounding grim. “Of course we responded for that brutal attack on London. Paid them back in spades.”

“You were involved in such actions yourself?”

As he walked, he glanced down — apparently involuntarily — at the service ribbons sewn to the chest of his tunic. I did not recognize these at the time — I am no military buff, and in any case some of these awards hadn’t even been devised in my day — but I learned later that they constituted the Distinguished Service Order, and the Distinguished Flying Cross and Bar: high awards indeed, especially for one so young. Gibson said without drama, “I saw a bit of action, yes. A good few sorties. Pretty lucky to be here to talk about it — plenty of good chaps who aren’t.”

“And these sorties were effective?”

“I’ll say. We broke open their Domes for them, without much of a delay after they did us the same favor!”

“And the cities underneath?”

He eyed me. “What do you think? Without its Dome, a city is pretty much defenseless against attack from the air. Oh, you can throw up a barrage from your eighty-eights—”

“ ’Eighty-eights’?”

“The Germans have an eight-point-eight centimeter Flat 36 anti-aircraft gun — pretty useful as a field gun and anti ’Naut, as well as its main purpose: good bit of design… Anyway, if your bomber pilot can get in under such flak he can pretty much dump what he likes into the guts of an un-Domed city.”

“And the results — after six more years of all this?”

He shrugged. “There’s not much in the way of cities left, I suppose. Not in Europe, anyway.”

We reached the vicinity of South Hampstead, I estimated. Here, we broke through a line of trees into a clearing. This was a circular space perhaps a quarter-mile across, but it was not natural: the tree-stumps at its edge showed how the forest had been blasted back, or cut away. Even as we approached, I could see squads of bare-chested infantrymen hacking their way further into the undergrowth with saws and machetes, extending the space. The earth in the clearing was stripped of undergrowth and hardened by several layers of palm fronds, all stamped down into the mud.

At the heart of this clearing sat four of the great Juggernaut machines which I had encountered before, in 1873 and 1938. These beasts sat at four sides of a square a hundred feet across, immobile, their ports gaping like the mouths of thirsty animals; their anti-mine flails hung limp and useless from the drums held out before them, and the mottled green and black coloration of their metal hides was encrusted with guano and fallen leaves. There were a series of other vehicles and items of material scattered around the encampment, including light armored cars, and small artillery pieces mounted on thick-wheeled trolleys.

This, Gibson gave me to understand, would be the site of a sort of graving-yard for time-traveling Juggernauts, in 1944.

Soldiers worked everywhere, but when I walked into the clearing beside Gibson, and with the limping Nebogipfel leaning against me, to a man the troopers ceased their laboring and stared at us with undiluted curiosity.

We reached the courtyard enclosed by the four ’Nauts. At the center of this square there was a white-painted flag-pole; and from this a Union Flag dangled, gaudy, limp and incongruous. A series of tents had been set up in this yard; Gibson invited us to sit on canvas stools beside the grandest of these. A soldier — thin, pale and evidently uncomfortable in the heat — emerged from one of the ’Nauts. I took this fellow to be Gibson’s batman, for the Wing Commander ordered him to bring us some refreshment.