Suddenly – without warning – a beam of light arced down from the roof above and skewered us. I peered up into a warm yellowness, and saw dust-motes cascading about in the air; for a moment I thought I had been returned to my Cage of Light.
For some seconds we waited – I could not see that Nebogipfel had issued any commands to the invisible machines that governed this place – but then the Floor under my feet gave a sharp jolt. I stumbled, for it had felt like a small earthquake, and was quite unexpected; but I recovered quickly.
‘What was that?’
Nebogipfel was unperturbed. ‘Perhaps I should have warned you. Our ascent has started.’
‘Ascent?’
A disc of glass, perhaps a quarter-mile wide, was rising up out of the Floor, I saw now, and was bearing me and Nebogipfel aloft. It was as if I stood atop some immense pillar, which thrust out of the ground. Already we had risen through perhaps ten feet, and our pace upwards seemed to be accelerating; I felt a whisper of breeze on my forehead.
I walked a little way towards the lip of the disc and I watched as that immense, complex plain of Morlocks opened up below me. The chamber stretched as far as I could see, utterly flat, evenly populated. The Floor looked like some elaborate map, perhaps of the constellations, done out in silver thread and black velvet – and overlaying the real star vista beneath. One or two silvery faces were turned up to us as we ascended, but most of the Morlocks seemed quite indifferent.
‘Nebogipfel – where are we going?’
‘To the Interior,’ he said calmly.
I was aware of a change in the light. It seemed much brighter, and more diffuse – it was no longer restricted to a single ray, as might be seen at the bottom of a well.
I craned up my neck. The disc of light above me was widening, even as I watched, so that I could now make out a ring of sky, around the central disc of sun. That sky was blue, and speckled with high, fluffy clouds; but the sky had an odd texture, a blotchiness of colour which at first I attributed to the goggles I still wore.
Nebogipfel turned from me. He tapped with his foot at the base of our platform, and an object was extruded – at first I could not recognize it – it was a shallow bowl, with a stick protruding from its centre. It was only when Nebogipfel picked it up and held it over his head that I recognized it for what it was: a simple parasol, to keep the sun from his etiolated flesh.
Thus prepared, we rose up into the light – the shaft widened – and my nineteenth-century head ascended into a plain of grass!
‘Welcome to the Interior,’ Nebogipfel announced, comical with his parasol.
Our quarter-mile-wide pillar of glass ascended through its last few yards quite soundlessly. I felt as if I were rising like some illusionist’s assistant on a stage. I took off my goggles, and shaded my eyes with my hands.
The platform slowed to a halt, and its edge merged with the meadow of short, wiry grass which ringed it, as seamless as if it were some foundation of concrete which had been laid there. My shadow was a sharp dark patch, directly beneath me. It was noon here, of course; everywhere in the Interior, it was noon, all day and every day! The blinding sun beat down on my head and neck – I suspected I should soon get burned – but the pleasurable feel of this captive sunlight was worth the cost, at that moment.
I turned, studying the landscape.
Grass – a featureless plain of it – grass grew everywhere, all the way to the horizon – except that there was no horizon, here on this flattened-out world. I looked up, expecting to see the world curve upwards: for I was, after all, no longer glued to the outer surface of a little ball of rock like the earth, but standing on the inside of an immense, hollow shell. But there was no such optical effect; I saw only more grass, and perhaps some clumps of trees or bushes, far in the distance. The sky was a blue-tinged plain of high, light cloud, which merged with the land at a flat seam of mist and dust.
‘I feel as if I’m standing on some immense tabletop,’ I said to Nebogipfel. ‘I thought it would be like some huge bowl of landscape. What a paradox it is that I cannot tell if I am inside a great Sphere, or on the outside of a gigantic planet!’
‘There are ways to tell,’ Nebogipfel replied from beneath his parasol. ‘Look up.’
I craned my neck backwards. At first I could see only the sky and the sun – it could have been any sky of earth. Then, gradually, I began to make out something beyond the clouds. It was that blotchiness of texture about the sky which I had observed as we ascended, and attributed to some defect of the goggles. The blotches were something like a distant water-colouring, done in blue and grey and green, but finely detailed, so that the largest of the patches was dwarfed by the tiniest scrap of cloud. It looked rather like a map – or several maps, jammed up together and viewed from a great distance.
And it was that analogy which led me to the truth.
‘It is the far side of the Sphere, beyond the sun … I suppose the colours I can see are oceans, and continents, and mountain ranges and prairies – perhaps even cities!’ It was a remarkable sight – as if the rocky coats of thousands of flayed earths had been hung up like so many rabbit furs. There was no sense of curvature, such was the immense scale of the Sphere. Rather, it was as if I was sandwiched between layers, between this flattened prairie of grass and the lid of textured sky, with the sun suspended like a lantern in between – and with the depths of space a mere mile or two beneath my feet!
‘Remember that when you look at the Interior’s far side you are looking across the width of the orbit of Venus,’ Nebogipfel cautioned me. ‘From such a distance, the earth itself would be reduced to a mere point of light. Many of the topographic features here are built on a much larger scale than the earth itself.’
‘There must be oceans that could swallow the earth!’ I mused. ‘I suppose that the geological forces in a structure like this are –’
‘There is no geology here,’ Nebogipfel cut in. ‘The Interior, and its landscapes, is artificial. Everything you see was, in essence, designed to be as it is – and it is maintained that way, quite consciously.’ He seemed unusually reflective. ‘Much is different in this History, from that other you have described. But some things are constant: this is a world of perpetual day – in contrast to my own world, of night. We have indeed split into species of extremes, of Dark and Light, just as in that other History.’
Nebogipfel led me now to the edge of our glass disc. He stayed on the platform, his parasol cocked over his head; but I stepped boldly out onto the surrounding grass. The ground was hard under my feet, but I was pleased to have the sensation of a different surface beneath me, after days of that bland, yielding Floor. Though short, the grass was tough, wiry stuff, of the kind commonly encountered close to sea shores; and when I reached down and dug my fingers into the ground, I found that the soil was quite sandy and dry. I unearthed one small beetle, there in the row of little pits I had dug with my fingers; it scuttled out of sight, deeper into the sand.
A breeze hissed across the grass. There was no bird song, I noticed; I heard no animal’s call.
‘The soil’s none too rich,’ I called back to Nebogipfel.
‘No,’ he said. ‘But the –’ a liquid word I could not recognize ‘– is recovering.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I mean the complex of plants and insects and animals which function together, interdependent. It is only forty thousand years since the war.’