"As I remarked before," Gregg resumed, coolly, "you were not in a fit state to carry out the investigation. You could not bring yourself to accept even the obvious. Fortunately you remembered some of the most salient facts. Those tubes fitted into the clock, for example; I regard those as highly suggestive. Think of it, Allingham! The energy of generations compressed into a tube and so utilised by a single individual. For that is what must have happened in the year 8000. The scientists must have discovered means of gathering up and storing nervous energy. Everybody has this extra reserve of force. That solved one problem. Then there was the question of a better distribution. They had to invent a new nervous system. If we ever have an opportunity of examining the Clockwork man thoroughly, we shall find out what that system is. Speaking in rough terms, we may assume that it is probably an enlargement of the compass of what we call afferent and efferent impulses. There will also be new centres, both of reflex and voluntary action. Each impulse, in this new system, has a longer range of effectiveness, a greater duration in time." Gregg paused abruptly, as though arriving at some crisis in his thought. "It must be so. There is no other explanation to cover what we have seen. Man, as we know him, is no more or less than what his nervous system allows him to be. A creature of action, his actions are nevertheless strictly prescribed by the limitations of his neural organism. In the case of the Clockwork man we are confronted by the phenomenon of an enormous extension of nervous activity. One imagines terrific waves of energy unimpeded--or, relatively unimpeded--by the inhibitory processes that check expenditure in the case of a normal organism. Of course, there must be inhibition of some sort, but the whole system of the Clockwork man is on so grand a scale that his actions take place in a different order of time. His relapses, as he describes them, are simply the parallel of that degeneration of tissue which accompanies ordinary human fatigue. That is why his ineptitude appears ghastly to us. Again, his perceptions would be different. He would see relatively far more of the universe, and his actions would carry him further and further into the future, far beyond those laws which we have fashioned for ourselves, in accordance with our neural limitations. For, just as man is at the mercy of his nervous system, so his conception of universal laws is the natural outcome of nervous apprehension; and the universe is no more or less than what we think it is."