"Yes, you wouldn't know about them, although you're not unlike a maker yourself. Only you wear clothes like us, and the makers don't wear clothes. That was what puzzled me about you. The look in your eyes reminded me of a maker. They came after the last wars. It's all written in history. There was a great deal of fighting and killing and blowing up and poisoning, and then the makers came and they didn't fight. It was they who invented the clock for us, and after that every man had to have a clock fitted into him, and then he didn't have to fight any more, because he could move about in a multiform world where there was plenty of room for everybody." "But didn't the other people object?" said Arthur. "Object to what?" "To having the clock fitted into them." "Would you object," said the Clockwork man, "to having all your difficulties solved for you?" "I suppose not," Arthur admitted, humbly. "That was what the makers did for man," resumed the other. "Life had become impossible, and it was the only practical way out of the difficulty. You see, the makers were very clever, and very mild and gentle. They were quite different to ordinary human beings. To begin with, they were _real_." "But aren't you real?" Arthur could not refrain from asking. "Of course not," rapped out the Clockwork man, "I'm only an invention." "But you look real," objected Arthur. The Clockwork man emitted a faint, cacophonous cackle. "We feel real when the dream states unroll within us, or the music records. But the makers _are_ real, and they live in the real world. No clockwork man is allowed to get back into the real world. The clock prevents us from doing that. It was because we were such a nuisance and got in the way of the makers that they invented the clock." "But what is the real world like?" questioned Arthur. "How can I know?" said the Clockwork man, flapping his ears in despair. "I'm _fixed_. I can't be anything beyond what the clock permits me to be. Only, since I've been in your world, I've had a suspicion. It's such a jolly little place. And you have women." Arthur caught his breath. "No women?" "No. You see, the makers kept all the women because they were more real, and they didn't want the fighting to go on, or the world that the men wanted. So the makers took the women away from us and shut us up in the clocks and gave us the world we wanted. But they left us no loophole of escape into the real world, and we can neither laugh nor cry properly." "But you try," suggested Arthur. "It's only breakdown," said the Clockwork man, sadly. "With us laughing or crying are symptoms of breakdown. When we laugh or cry that means that we have to go and get oiled or adjusted. Something has got out of gear. Because in our life there's no necessity for these things."