So rapid and all-encompassing was the Constructors’ mode of communication, in fact, that it was not really analogous to human speech, said Nebogipfel.

“But you’ve spoken to them. You’ve managed to get Information out of them. How so?”

“By mimicking their own ways of interacting,” Nebogipfel said. He fingered his eye-socket, gingerly. “I had to make this sacrifice.” His natural eye gleamed.

Nebogipfel had sought a way, as it were, to immerse his brain into the Information Sea of which he’d spoken. Through the eyesocket, he was able to absorb Information directly from the Sea — without its passing through the conventional medium of speech.

I found myself shuddering, at the thought of such an invasion of the comfortable darkness of my own skull! “And do you think it was worth it?” I asked him. “This sacrifice of an eye?”

“Oh, yes. And more… Look — can you see how it is for the Constructors?” he asked me. “They are a different order of life — united, not just by this sharing at the gross physical level, but by this pooling of their experiences. Can you imagine how it is to exist in such a medium of Information as their Sea?”

I reflected. I thought of seminars at the Royal Society — those rich discussions when some new idea has been tossed into the pool, and three dozen agile minds battled over it, reshaping and refining it as they go — or even some of my old Thursday night dinner parties, when, with the help of liberal quantities of wine, the rattle of ideas could come so thick and fast it was hard to tell where one man had stopped speaking and the next resumed.

“Yes,” Nebogipfel cut in when I related this last. “Yes, that is exactly it. Do you see? But with these Universal Constructors, such conversations proceed continuously — and at the speed of light, with thoughts passing directly from the mind of one to another.

“And in such a miasma of communication, who can say where the consciousness of one finishes, and that of another begins? Is this my thought, my memory — or yours? Do you see? Do you follow the implications?”

On the earth — perhaps on each inhabited world — there must be immense central Minds, composed of millions of the Constructors, fused together into great, God-like entities, which maintained the awareness of the race. In a sense, Nebogipfel said, the race itself was conscious.

Again I had the feeling that we were straying too far into metaphysics. “All of that is fascinating stuff,” I said, “and it’s all as may be; but perhaps we should return to the practicalities of our own situation. What does it all have to do with you and me?” I turned to our own patient Constructor, who sat there, shimmering, in the middle of the floor. “What of this fellow?” I said. “All of this stuff about consciousness and so forth is all very well — but what does he want? Why is he here? Why did he save our lives? And — what does he want with us now? Or is it a case of these mechanical men all working together — like bees in a hive, united by these common Minds you speak of — so that we are faced with a species with common aims?”

Nebogipfel rubbed his face. He walked up to the Constructor, peered into his eye-scope, and was rewarded, within a few minutes, by the extrusion, from within the Constructor’s glistening body, of a plate of that bland, cheese-like food of which I had seen so much in Nebogipfel’s home century. I watched with disgust, as Nebogipfel took the plate and bit into his regurgitated food. It was no more horrible, truthfully, than the extrusion of materials from the Floor of the Morlocks’ Sphere, but there was something about the Constructor’s liquid mixture of Life and Machine which repelled me. I averted my thoughts, with determination, from speculations as to the source of my own food and water!

“We cannot talk of these Constructors as united,” Nebogipfel was saying. “They are linked. But they do not share a common purpose — in the fashion, let us say, of the various components of your own personality.”

“But why not? That would seem eminently sensible. With perfect, continuous communication there need be no understanding — no conflict.”

“But it is not like that. The totality of the Constructors’ mental universe is too big.” He referred to the Information Sea again, and described how structures of thought and speculation — complex, evolving, evanescent — came and went, emerging from the raw materials of that ocean of mentation. “These structures are analogous to the scientific theories of your own day — constantly under stress, from new discoveries and the insights of new thinkers. The world of understanding does not stay still, you see…

“And besides, remember your friend Kurt Gödel, who taught us that no body of knowledge can be codified and made complete.

“The Information Sea is unstable. The hypotheses and intentions which emerge from it are complex and multi-faceted; there is rarely complete unanimity among the Constructors about any point. It is like a continuing, emerging debate; and within that debate, factions may emerge: groupings of quasi-individuals, coalescing around some scheme. One might say that the Constructors are united in their drive to advance the understanding of their species, but not so as regards the means by which this might be achieved. In fact, one might hypothesize in general, the more advanced the mentation, the more factions appear to emerge, because the more complex the world appears…

“And thus, the race progresses.”

I remembered what Barnes Wallis had told me of the new order of Parliamentary debate, in 1938, where Opposition had essentially been banned as a criminal activity — a divergence of energy from the one, selfevidently correct approach to things! — But if what Nebogipfel was saying was correct, there can be no universally correct answer to any given question: as these Constructors had learned, multifarious views are a necessary feature of the universe in which we find ourselves!

Nebogipfel chewed patiently on his cheese stuff; when he was done, he pushed the plate back into the substance of the Constructor, where it was absorbed — it was comforting for him, I thought, for it was a process so like the extruding Floor of his own home Sphere.

I spent many hours alone, or with Nebogipfel, at the windows of our apartment.

I saw no evidence of animal or vegetable life on the surface of White Earth. As far as I could tell, we were isolated in our little bubble of light and warmth, atop that immense tower; and we never left that bubble, in all the time we were there.

At night the sky beyond our windows was generally clear, with only a light frosting of cirrus cloud high in the depleted, lethal atmosphere. But, despite this clarity — I still could not understand it — there were no stars — or rather, very few, a handful compared to the multitude which had once blazed down on the earth. I had made this observation on our first arrival here, but I think I had dismissed it as some artifact of the cold, or my disorientation. To have it confirmed, now that I was warm and clear-headed, was disturbing — perhaps the strangest single thing in this new world.

The moon — that patient companion planet — still turned about the earth, going through its phases with its immemorial regularity; but its ancient plains remained stained green. Moonlight was no longer a thing of cool silver, but washed the landscape of White Earth with the gentlest verdant glow, returning to the earth an echo of that green-ness she had once enjoyed, and which was now locked under the unforgiving ice.

I saw again that gleam, as if of a captive star, that shone steadily at us from the moon’s extreme easterly limb. My first speculation had been that I was seeing the reflection of the sun from some lunar lake, but the glare was so steady that eventually I decided that it must be purposeful. I imagined a mirror — an artificial construct — perhaps fixed to some lunar mountain-top, and designed so that its reflection always falls on the earth. As to the purpose of such a device, I speculated that it might date from a time when the degradation of atmospheric conditions, here on the Mother Planet, had not yet become so bad as to drive men off the earth, but, perhaps, were so severe that they had caused the collapse of whatever culture had survived.