Now I was confused. “But that’s impossible.” I indicated the pyramid-device. “This is a machine. It is manufactured.”

“I have encountered the limits of your imagination before,” he said severely. “Why should a mechanical worker be built within the limitations of the human design? With machine life—”

“Life?”

“ — one is free to explore other morphologies — other forms.”

I raised an eyebrow at the Constructor. “The morphology of the privet hedge, for example!”

“And besides,” he said, “it could manufacture you. Does that make you less than alive?”

This was becoming far too metaphysical a debate for me! I paced around the Constructor. “But if it is alive, and conscious — is this a person? Or several people? Does it have a name? A soul?”

Nebogipfel turned to the Constructor once more, and let the eye-scope nuzzle into his face. “A soul?” he asked. “This is your descendant. So am I, by a different History path. Do I have a soul? Do you?”

He turned away from me, and peered into the heart of the Constructor.

Later, Nebogipfel joined me in the chamber I had come to think of as the Billiards Room. He ate from a plate of cheese-like fare.

I sat, rather moodily, on the edge of the billiards table, flicking the single ball across the surface. The ball was wont to exhibit some peculiar behavior. I was aiming for a pocket on the far side of the table, and more often than not I hit it, and would trot around to retrieve it from its little net cache beneath. But sometimes the ball’s path would be disturbed. There would be a rattling in the middle of the empty table surface — the ball would jiggle about, oddly, too rapidly to follow — and then, usually, the ball would sail on to the destination I had intended. Sometimes, though, the ball would be diverted markedly from the path I had intended — and once it even returned, from that half-visible disturbance, to my hand!

“Nebogipfel, did you see that? It is most peculiar,” I said. “There does not seem to be any obstruction in the middle of the table. And yet, half the time, the running of this ball is impeded.” I tried some more demonstrations for him, and he watched with an air of distraction.

I said, “Well, I’m glad at any rate that I’m not playing a game here. I can think of one or two fellows who might come to blows over such discrepancies.” Tiring of my idle toying, I sat the ball square in the middle of the table and left it there. “I wonder what the motive of the Constructors was in placing this table in here. I mean, it’s our only substantial piece of furniture — unless you want to count our Constructor out there himself… I wonder if this is intended as a snooker or a billiards table.”

Nebogipfel seemed bemused by the question. “Is there a difference?”

“I’ll say! Despite its popularity, snooker is just a potting game — a fine enough pastime for the bored Army Officers in India who devised it but it has nothing like the science of billiards, to my mind…”

And then — I was watching it as it happened — a second billiard ball popped out of one of the table’s pockets, quite spontaneously, and began to roll, square on, towards my ball at rest at the centre of the table.

I bent closer to see. “What the devil is happening here?” The ball was progressing quite slowly, and I was able to make out details of its surface. My ball was no longer smooth and white; after my various experiments, its surface had become scarred with a series of scratches, one quite distinctive. And this new ball was just as scarred.

The newcomer hit my stationary ball, with a solid clunk; the new ball was brought to rest by the impact, and my ball was knocked across the table.

“Do you know,” I said to Nebogipfel, “if I didn’t know better, I would swear this ball, that has just emerged from nowhere, is the same as the first.” He came a little closer, and I pointed out that distinctive long scratch. “See that? I’d recognize this scar in the dark… The balls are like identical twins.”

“Then,” the Morlock said calmly, “perhaps they are the same ball.”

Now my ball, knocked aside, had collided with a cushion on the far side of the table and had rebounded; such was the nonregular geometry of the table that it was now heading back in the direction of the pocket from which the second ball had emerged.

“But how can that be? I mean, I suppose a Time Machine could deliver two copies of the same object to the same place — think of myself and Moses! — but I see no time travel devices here. And what would be the purpose?”

The original ball had lost much momentum with these various impacts, and it was fairly creeping by the time it reached the pocket; but it slid into the pocket, and disappeared.

We were left with the copy of the ball which had emerged so mysteriously from the pocket. I picked it up and examined it. As far as I could tell it was an identical copy of our ball. And when I checked the cache beneath the pocket — it was empty! Our original ball had gone, as if it had never existed. “Well!” I said to Nebogipfel. “This table is trickier than I imagined. What do you suppose happened there? Is this the sort of thing which goes on, do you think, during the disturbed paths — all that rattling — which I’ve pointed out to you before?”

Nebogipfel did not reply immediately, but — after that — he took to devoting a substantial fraction of his time, with me, to the puzzles of that strange billiards table. As for me, I tried inspecting the table itself, hoping to find some concealed device, but I found nothing — no trickery, no concealed traps which could swallow and disgorge balls. Besides, even if there had been such crude illusion-machinery, I would still have to find an explanation for the apparent identity of “old” and “new” balls!

The thing which caught my mind — though I had no explanation for it at the time — was the odd, greenish glow of the pocket rims. For all the world, that glow reminded me of Plattnerite.

Nebogipfel told me of what he had learned of the Constructors. Our silent friend in Nebogipfel’s living-room was, it seemed, one of a widespread species: the Constructors inhabited the earth, the transformed planets — and even the stars.

He told me, “You must put aside your preconceptions and look at these creatures with an open mind. They are not like humans.”

“That much I can accept.”

“No,” he insisted, “I do not think you can. To begin with, you must not imagine that these Constructors are individual personalities — after the fashion of you, or me. They are not men in cloaks of metal! They are something qualitatively different.”

“Why? Because they are composed of interchangeable parts?”

“Partly. Two Constructors could flow into one another — merging like two drops of liquid, forming one being — and then part as easily, forming two again. It would be all but impossible — and futile — to trace the origins of this component or that.”

Hearing that, I could understand how it was that I never saw the Constructors moving about the ice-coated landscape outside. There was no need for them to lug the weight of their great, clumsy bodies about (unless for a special need, as when Nebogipfel and I had been repaired). It would be enough for the Constructor to disassemble himself, into these molecular components Nebogipfel described. The components could wiggle across the ice, like so many worms!

Nebogipfel went on, “But there is more to the Constructors’ consciousness than that. The Constructors live in a world we can barely imagine — they inhabit a Sea, if you like, a Sea of Information.”

Nebogipfel described how, by phonograph and other links, the Universal Constructors were linked to each other, and they used those links to chatter to each other constantly. Information — and awareness, and a deepening understanding — flowed out of the mechanical mind of each Constructor, and each received news and interpretation from every one of his brothers: even those on the most remote stars.