A realization sunk in his chest like a stone. The wise man Nebogipfel spoke of was Burton himself, over a year ago in the belly of the Nautilus. “Bismillah! It is you. I was uncertain at first, but… Herbert? Is that really you?”
Nebogipfel gave a courtly bow. “At your service, Captain Burton. But more precisely, I was Herbert, until our lives diverged.”
“Diverged? How?”
Nebogipfel ran a hand through his short, dark beard. “When we traveled into the dim past aboard Nemo’s Nautilus, Herbert had trouble coping with the madness that surrounded him.
Burton nodded. “I remember. Poor fellow was almost catatonic for most of the journey.”
“Yes, well, being shown such antediluvian horrors will tend to warp one’s personality. It certainly did poor Herbert’s. That is when I first came into being, when the schism between us first occurred. Perhaps it was a way for Herbert’s mind to heal itself, to deal with everything that was happening. Whatever the cause, I was born, quietly at first. I felt trapped inside the mind of this amorphous other. I accessed Herbert’s memories and figured out what was happening. What Herbert found frightening about his situation, I found fascinating. What filled him with terror filled me with curiosity, and I saw before me the vast sweep of Time!
“Upon our return to the present, Herbert recovered most of his wits, but I remained, a silent passenger within his fractured psyche. After unloading his Time Machine, with the help of some of Captain Nemo’s swarthy sailors, and returning to his home in Kew Gardens, the man you call the Time Traveler hopped onto his contraption and went hurtling into the future, to the year 806,701, arriving at nearly the same moment he left on some errand before he was waylaid by the lovely Miss Marsh. I don’t have to tell you, Burton. The journey was exhilarating! It was then that I knew I must take control. But he was calm there. Happy. The happiest he had ever been, and I should know, for I was him, and he was me. It wasn’t until he returned and met up with your friends again, and you dragged him off on another ghastly adventure being chased by those repulsive shoggoths, that the stress that created me began to swell within Herbert’s mind and body once more.
“After that last horrid affair reached its conclusion, he fell into such a torpor as I have never seen. But through it I saw my escape. I tried moving him. Subtly at first; a finger, a toe. Until I had him upright. I could see through his eyes and talk through his mouth and, bidding his utterly perplexed housekeeper adieu, grabbed coat and hat and set off into the nighttime London streets, looking for a way out of my fleshy prison.”
“And what did you find?” Burton asked.
“Exactly what I sought. I am loathe to admit it now, but I first sought fleshly pleasures in the Cauldron, and it was there that I found my salvation. There was a big, brutish sort prowling the East End called Edward Hyde. One night, in a brothel, I heard him bragging about an elixir that had freed him of his every inhibition. I found this most curious, since this man had no inhibitions whatsoever as far as I could tell. He came and went as he pleased, drank to excess, and roughed up the girls when they refused his aggressive advances. So I cornered him as he was leaving the place, and asked him about this miracle elixir. He said a man called Dr. Henry Jekyll had invented it. Curious, and still not at all entirely sure if this disagreeable brute was telling me the truth, I offered to buy the bottle from him. I handed him a ten-pound note in return for what was left in the bottle, and made my way out of Whitechapel, returning to Kew Gardens with the dawn.
“Still unsure what was in the bottle, I did not drink it, instead getting out Herbert’s old chemistry set. Before he turned to the study of optics, you see, our Herbert was obsessed with chemistry. That knowledge was still inside him, and I could access it. I studied the elixir’s chemical makeup and was able to successfully reproduce it, in any quantity I wanted. Its efficacy wears off with time, you see. The next time Herbert sank into a malaise, I came to the fore and tested it. It tasted bloody awful, but it did the trick, allowing me full control of his body when he was unconscious, and suppressing him. It was as if our consciousnesses swapped places within Herbert’s brain.”
“Your personalities diverged fully,” Burton said, remembering what had happened to his friend Swinburne and the others when the beings from the far future swapped minds with them. “Bismillah.”
Nebogipfel smiled, nodding. “Indeed. More than that. The elixir alters my very appearance. This beard of mine grows in minutes! But it had a positive effect on our Herbert as well. Freed from his darker impulses, our dear Time Traveler was able to once more concentrate on his work. But at night, I came to the fore, and began asking questions of nature that Herbert wouldn’t dare give thought to. I studied Herbert’s work closely, learning how his Time Machine was constructed so that I might do the same, perhaps even improve upon his original design. I also began thinking about the full implications of what he had built.”
“Bismillah! Why not erase Herbert permanently and be done with it? A stronger version of the elixir or something.”
“Because I knew Herbert was onto something. I knew what power the Time Machine would represent. But I also knew I could never reach such lofty heights on my own, without his base intellect.”
He returned to his position at the dirigible’s sparkling brass controls. “Besides, I need Herbert. Just as he needs me. We are two sides of the same coin. One cannot possibly exist without the other.” Something about his tone suggested to Burton that he didn’t entirely believe this.
“But how do you maintain this dichotomy?” asked the explorer. “The human body needs rest. How does Herbert get any with you hopping about whilst he sleeps?”
“You’re still not thinking fourth-dimensionally,” said Nebogipfel. “With the Time Machine, I can remain gone days, weeks, get plenty of rest and come back to the precise moment I left, without Herbert knowing anything has transpired.”
“So what do you want?” asked Burton.
Nebogipfel tapped his chin. “As I watched the Time Machine in action, I began to wonder, what if the Time Machine could move through Space as well? Think of the possibilities. What good does it do to travel to some distant time, only to find that the really interesting stuff is taking place thousands of miles hence? Like standing before Nelson’s Column and trying to travel back through Time to see Alexander the Great destroy Tyre. Now, imagine a conveyance that has no limits in Time or Space, like the Time Machine when it was connected to Nemo’s wondrous Nautilus. Imagine a craft that could travel to distant Mars and move back through Time billions of years to when that cold, red world possibly teemed with life? Or visiting distant locales on this world at any point in history?”
“So you built this dirigible,” said Burton.
“With the help of the Morlocks, yes. I took pity on them, you see. My counterpart has been quite cruel to them, so I went back to the moment when the Morlocks briefly absconded with his Time Machine, in the year 802,701. It took a bit of work to ingratiate myself to them, but once they warmed up to me I found them amiable enough. They are astounding tinkerers, and have a real knack for machines. They learned how the Time Machine worked by taking it apart and putting it back together, with such precision that Herbert couldn’t tell it had ever been tampered with at all.”
“Why are they so friendly toward you?” asked Burton.
“Because I am their savior. Herbert tried to burn them out of their subterranean den. I rescued them, bringing them aboard my bloody balloon, as you called it. And the rest, as they say, is history.”