My host looked at me, startled.
Nebogipfel, under my guidance — I felt like a clumsy parent as I fussed about him — pulled out a simple upright and climbed up into it; he sat there with his legs dangling like some hairy child.
“How did you know about my Active Chairs?” my host demanded. “I’ve only demonstrated them to a few friends — the design isn’t even patented yet—”
I did not answer: I simply held his gaze, for long seconds. I could see that the extraordinary answer to his own question was already forming in his mind.
He broke the gaze. “Sit down,” he said to me. “Please. I’ll fetch the brandy.”
I sat with Nebogipfel — at my own transmuted dining-table, with a Morlock for company! — and I glanced around. In one corner of the dining-room, on its tripod, sat the old Gregorian telescope which I had brought from my parents’ home — a simple thing capable of delivering only cloudy images, and yet a window for me as a child into worlds of wonder in the sky, and into the intriguing marvels of physical optics. And, beyond this room, there was the dark passage to the laboratory, with the doors left carelessly open; through the passage I caught tantalizing glimpses of my workshop itself: the clutter of apparatuses on the benches, sheets of drawings laid across the floor, and various tools and appliances.
Our host rejoined us; he carried, clumsily, three glasses for brandy, and a carafe. He poured out three generous measures, and the liquor sparkled in the light of the candles. “Here,” he said. “Are you cold? Would you like the fire?”
“No,” I said, “thank you.” I raised the brandy, sniffed at it, then let it roll over my tongue.
Nebogipfel did not pick up his glass. He dipped a pallid finger into the stuff, withdrew it, and licked a drop from his fingertip. He seemed to shudder. Then, delicately, he pushed the glass away from him, as if it were full to the brim with the most noxious ale imaginable!
My host watched this curiously. Then, with an evident effort, he turned to me. “You have me at a disadvantage. I don’t know you. But you know me, it appears.”
“Yes.” I smiled. “But I’m at something of a quandary as to what to call you.”
He frowned, looking uneasy. “I don’t see why that’s any sort of a problem. My name is—”
I held up my hand; I had an inspiration. “No. I will use — if you will permit — Moses.”
He took a deep pull on his brandy, and gazed at me with genuine anger in his gray eyes. “How do you know about that?”
Moses — my hated first name, for which I had been endlessly tormented at school — and which I had kept a secret since leaving home!
“Never mind,” I said. “Your secret is safe with me.”
“Look here, I’m growing tired of these games. You turn up here with your — companion — and make all sorts of disparagements about my clothes. And I still don’t even know your name!”
“But,” I said, “perhaps you do.”
His long fingers closed around his glass. He knew something strange, and wonderful, was going on — but what? I could see in his face, as clear as day, that mixture of excitement, impatience and a little fear which I had felt so often when confronting the unknown.
“Look,” I said, “I’m prepared to tell you everything you want to know, just as I promised. But first—”
“Yes?”
“I would be honored to view your laboratory. And I’m sure Nebogipfel would be curious. Tell us something of you,” I said. “And in the course of that, you will learn about me.”
He sat for a while, clutching his drink. Then, with a brisk motion, he recharged our glasses, stood up, and took his candle from the mantel.
“Come with me.”
[4]
The Experiment
Bearing his candle aloft, he led us down the cold passage-way to the laboratory. Those few seconds are vivid in my memory: the light of the candle casting huge shadows from Moses’s wide skull, and his jacket and boots glimmering in the uncertain light; behind me the Morlock’s feet padded softly, and in the enclosed space his rotten-sweet stench was strong.
At the laboratory Moses made his way around the walls and benches, lighting candles and incandescent lamps. Soon the place was brightly lit. The walls were whitewashed and free of ornamentation — save for some of Moses’s notes, crudely pinned there — and the single book-case was crammed with journals, standard texts and volumes of mathematical tables and physical measurements. The place was cold; in my shirtsleeves, I found myself shivering, and wrapped my arms about my body.
Nebogipfel padded across the workshop floor towards the book-case. He crouched down and studied the battered spines of the volumes there. I wondered if he could read English; for I had seen no evidence of books or papers in the Sphere, and the lettering on those ubiquitous panels of blue glass had been unfamiliar.
“I’m not very interested in giving you a biographical summary,” Moses said. “And nor” — more sharply — “do I understand yet why you are so interested in me. But I’m willing to play your game. Look here: suppose I run you through my most recent experimental findings. How does that sound?”
I smiled. How in keeping with my — his — character, with little at the surface of the mind but the current puzzle!
He went to a bench, on which stood a haphazard arrangement of retort stands, lamps, gratings and lenses. “I’d be grateful if you wouldn’t touch anything here. It may look a little random, but I assure you there’s a system! I have the devil of a time keeping Mrs. Penforth and her dusters and brooms out of here, I can tell you.”
Mrs. Penforth? I had an impulse to ask after Mrs. Watchets — but then I remembered that Mrs. Penforth had been Mrs. Watchets’s predecessor. I had released her some fifteen years before my departure into time, after I had caught her pilfering from my small stock of industrial diamonds. I thought of warning Moses of this little occurrence, but no real harm had been done; and — I thought with an oddly paternal mood towards my younger self — it would probably do Moses good to take a closer interest in the affairs of his household for once in a while, and not leave it all to chance!
Moses went on, “My general field is physical optics — that is to say, the physical properties of light, which—”
“We know,” I said gently.
He frowned. “All right. Well, recently, I’ve been somewhat diverted by an odd conundrum — it’s the study of a new mineral, a sample of which I came upon by chance two years ago.” He showed me a common eight-ounce graduated medicine bottle, plugged with rubber; the bottle was half-full of a fine, greenish powder, oddly shining. “Look here: can you see how there is a faint translucence about it, as if it were glowing from within?” And indeed the material shone as if it were composed of fine glass beads. “But where,” Moses went on, “is the energy source for such illumination?
“So I began my researches — at first in odd moments, for I have my work to do! — I depend on grants and commissions, which depend in turn on my building up a respectable flow of research results. I have no time for chasing wild geese… But later,” he admitted, “this Plattnerite came to absorb a great deal of my times — for such I had decided to call the stuff, after the rather mysterious chap — Gottfried Plattner, he called himself — who donated it to me.
“I’m no chemist — even within the limits of the Three Gases my practical chemistry has always been a little tentative — but still, I set to with a will. I bought test tubes, a gas supply and burners, litmus paper, and all the rest of that smelly paraphernalia. I poured my green dust into test tubes and tried it with water, and with acids — sulphuric, nitric and hydrochloric — learning nothing. Then I emptied out a heap onto a slate and held it over my gas burner.” He rubbed his nose. “The resulting bang blew out a skylight and made a fearful mess of one wall,” he said.