But, through all this conflict, Nebogipfel said, the slow Conquest of the stars had proceeded.

The launching of the first star-ships, Nebogipfel said, had marked the greatest deviation we had yet witnessed from my original, unperturbed History. “Men — your friends, the New Humans — have changed everything about the world, even on a geological — a cosmic scale. I wonder if you can understand—”

“What?”

“I wonder if you understand, really, the meaning of a million years — or ten million — or fifty.”

“Well, I ought to. I’ve traversed through such intervals, with you, on the way to the Palaeocene and back.”

“But then we traveled through a History free of intelligence. Look — I have told you of interstellar migration. If Mind is given the chance to work on such scales—”

“I’ve seen what can be done to the earth.”

“More than that! — more than a single planet! The patient, termite-burrowing of Mind can undermine even the fabric of the universe,” he whispered, “if given enough time… Even we only had a half-million years since the plains of Africa, and we captured a sun…

“Look at the sky,” he said. “Where are the stars? There is hardly a naked star in the sky. This is 1891, or thereabouts, remember: here can be no cosmological reason for the extinction of the stars, as compared to the sky of your own Richmond.

“With my dark-evolved eyes, I can see a little more than you. And I tell you there is an array of dull-red pinpoints up there: it is infra-red radiation — heat.”

Then it struck me, with almost a physical force. “It is true,” I said. “It is true… Your hypothesis of Galactic conquest. The proof of it is visible, in the sky itself! The stars must be cloaked about — almost all of them — by artificial shells, like your Morlock Sphere.” I stared out at the empty sky. “Dear God, Nebogipfel; human beings — and their machines — have changed Heaven itself!”

“It was inevitable that it would come to this, once the first Constructor was launched — do you see?”

I stared into that darkened sky, oppressed by awe. It was not so much the changed nature of the sky that astonished me so, but the notion that all this — all of it, to the furthest end of the Galaxy — had been brought about by my shattering of History with the Time Machine!

“I can see that men have gone from the earth,” I said. “The climatic instability has done for us here. But somewhere” — I waved a hand — “somewhere out there must be men and women, in those scattered homes!”

“No,” he said. “The Constructors see everywhere, remember; they know everything. And I have seen no evidence of men like you. Oh, here and there you may find biological creatures descended from man — but as diverse, in their way, from your form of human as I am. And would you count me a man? And the biological forms are, besides, mostly degenerated…”

“There are no true men?”

“There are descendants of man everywhere. But nowhere will you find a creature who is more closely related to you than — say — a whale or an elephant…”

I quoted to him what I remembered of Charles Darwin: “ ’Judging by the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity…’ “

“Darwin was right,” Nebogipfel said gently.

That idea — that, of your type, you are alone in the Galaxy! — is hard to accept, and I fell silent, gazing up at the blanked-out stars. Was each of those great globes as densely populated as Nebogipfel’s Sphere? My fertile mind began to inhabit those immense world-buildings with the descendants of true men — with fish-men, and bird-men, men of fire and ice — and I wondered what a tale might be brought back if some immortal Gulliver were able to travel from world to world, visiting all the diverse offspring of Humanity.

“Men may have become extinct,” Nebogipfel said. “Any biological species will, on a long enough time-scale, become extinct. But the Constructors cannot become extinct. Do you see that? With the Constructors, the essence of the race is not the form, biological or otherwise — it is the Information the race has gathered, and stored. And that is immortal. Once a race has committed itself to such Children, of Metal and Machines and Information, it cannot die out. Do you see that?”

I turned to the prospect of White Earth beyond our window.

I saw it, all right — I saw it all, only too well!

Men had launched off these mechanical workers to the stars, to find new worlds, build colonies. I imagined that great argosy of light reaching out from an earth which had grown too small, going glittering up into the sky, smaller and smaller until the blue had swallowed them up… There were a million lost stories, I thought, of how men had come to know how to bear the strange gravitations, the attenuated and unfamiliar gases and all the stresses of space.

It was an epochal migration — it changed the nature of the cosmos — but its launch was, perhaps, a last effort, a spasm before the collapse of civilization on the Mother World. In the face of the disintegration of the atmosphere, men on earth weakened, dwindled — we had the evidence of the pathetic mirror on the moon to show us that — and, at last, died.

But then, much later, to the deserted earth, back came the colony machines man had sent out — or their descendants, the Universal Constructors, enormously sophisticated. The Constructors were descended from men, in a way and yet they had gone far beyond the boundaries of what men could achieve; for they had discarded old Adam, and all the vestiges of brutes and reptiles that had lurked in his body and spirit.

I saw it all! The earth had been repopulated; and — not by man — but by the Mechanical Heirs of Man, who had returned, changed, from the stars.

And all of this — all of it — had propagated out of the little colony which had been founded in the Palaeocene. Hilary had foreseen something of this, I thought: the re-engineering of the cosmos had unfolded from that little, fragile huddle of twelve people, that unremarkable seed planted fifty million years deep.

Time wore away slowly, in that bizarre, cocooned place.

For his part, Nebogipfel seemed quite content with our arrangements. He spent most of each day with his face pressed up against the glistening hide of the Universal Constructor, immersed in the Information Sea. He had little time, or patience, for me; it was clearly an effort — a loss — for him to break away from that rich vein of ancient wisdom, and to confront my ignorance — and even more so my primitive desire for company.

I took to mooching, aimlessly, about the apartment. I munched at my plates of food; I used the steam bath; I toyed with the Multiplicity table; I peered out of the windows at an earth which had become as inhospitable to me as the surface of Jupiter.

I had nothing to do! — and in this mood of futility, for I was now so remote from home and my own kind that I could not see how I might live, I began to plumb new depths of depression.

Then, one day, Nebogipfel came to see me, with what he called a proposition.

We were in the room in which our friendly Constructor sat, as squat and placid as ever. Nebogipfel, as usual, was connected to the Constructor by his tube of glistening cilia.

“You must understand the background to all this,” he said, and his natural eye rotated so he could watch me. “To begin with, you must see that the goals of the Constructors are very different from those of your species — or from mine.”

“That’s understandable,” I said. “The physical differences alone—”

“It goes beyond that.”

Generally, when we got into this sort of debate — with myself cast in the role of the Ignoramus — Nebogipfel showed signs of impatience, of a salmon-like longing to return to the gleaming depths of his Information Sea. This time, though, his speech was patient and deliberate, and I realized that he was taking unusual care over what he had to say.