Stephen Baxter - Last and First Contacts

Day 10. Perhaps I should record distances travelled, rather than times.

It is three days since we left behind the eastern coast of Asia. Over sea, unimpeded by resupplying or bomb-dropping, we make a steady airspeed of two hundred and twenty knots. In the last forty-eight hours alone we should have covered twelve thousand miles.

We should already have crossed the ocean. We should already be flying over the Americas. When I take astronomical sightings, it is as if we have simply flown around a perfectly behaved spherical Earth from which America has been deleted. The geometry of the sky doesn’t fit the geometry of the Earth.

Somehow I hadn’t expected the mystery to come upon us so quickly. Only ten days into the flight, we are still jostling for position at the dinner table. And yet we have sailed into a mystery so strange that we may as well have been projected to the moon.

I still haven’t met the Captain, whose name, I am told, is Fassbender. Even lost as we are in the middle of unfathomable nothingness, the social barriers between us are as rigid as the steel bulkheads of the Beast.

Day 15. Today, a jaunt in a chariot. What fun!

We passed over yet another group of islands, this one larger than most, dark basaltic cones blanketed by greenery and lapped by the pale blue of coral reefs. Observers in the blisters, armed with binoculars and telescopes, claimed to see movement at the fringes of these scattered fragments of jungle. So the Captain ordered the chariots to go down and take a shuftie.

There were four of us in our chariot, myself, Jack, Ciliax, and a crewman who piloted us, a squat young chap called ‘Klaus’ whom I rather like. Both the Germans wore sidearms; Jack and I did not. The chariot is a stubby-winged seaplane, well equipped to land on the back of the Beast; a tough little bugger.

We skimmed low over clearings where lions ran and immense bears growled. Things like elephants, covered in brown hair and with long curling tusks, lifted their trunks as we passed, as if in protest at our engines’ clatter. ‘Christ,’ Jack said. ‘What I wouldn’t give to be down among ‘em with a shotgun.’ Ciliax and I took photographs and cine-films and made notes and spoke commentaries into tape-recorders.

And we thought we saw signs of people: threads of smoke rose from the beaches.

‘Extraordinary,’ Ciliax said. ‘Cave bears. What looked like sabre-tooth cats. Mammoths. This is a fauna that has not been seen in Europe or America since the ice retreated.’

Jack asked, ‘What happened to ‘em?’

‘We hunted them to death,’ I said. ‘Probably.’

‘What with, machine guns?’

I shrugged. ‘Stone axes and flint arrowheads are enough, given time.’

‘So,’ Jack asked practically, ‘how did they get here ?’

‘Sea levels fall and rise,’ Ciliax said. ‘When the ice comes, it locks up the world’s water. Perhaps that is true even of this monstrous world ocean. Perhaps the lower waters expose dry land now submerged, or archipelagos along which one can raft.’

‘So in the Ice Age,’ I said, ‘we hunted the mammoths and the giant sloths until we drove them off the continents. But they kept running, and a few of them made it to one island or another, and now they just continue fleeing, heading ever east.’ And in this immense ocean, I thought, there was room to keep running and running and running. Nothing need ever go extinct.

‘But there are people here,’ Jack pointed out. ‘We saw fires.’

We buzzed along the beach. We dipped low over a kind of camp-site, a mean sort of affair centred on a scrappy hearth. The people, naked, came running out of the forest at our noise – and when they saw us, most of them went running back again. But we got a good look at them, and fired off photographs.

They were people, of a sort. They had fat squat bodies, and big chests, and brows like bags of walnuts. I think it was obvious to us all what they were, even to Jack.

‘Neanderthals.’ Ciliax said it first; it is a German name. ‘Another species of – well, animal – which we humans chased out of Africa and Europe and Asia.’

Jack said, ‘They don’t seem to be smart enough to wipe out the mammoths as we did.’

‘Or maybe they’re too smart,’ I murmured.

Ciliax said, ‘What a remarkable discovery: relics of the evolutionary past, even while the evolutionary future of mankind is being decided in the heart of Asia!’

Standing orders forbid landings. The chariot lifted us back to the steel safety of the Beast, and that was that.

It is now eight days since we crossed the coast of China. We have come thirty-five thousand miles since. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising to find such strange beasts below, mammoths and cave bears and low-browed savages.

And still we go on. What next? How thrilling it all is!

Day 23.Today, a monstrous electrical storm.

We flew under the worst of it, our banks of engines thrumming, as lightning crackled around the W/T masts. Perhaps in this unending ocean there are unending storms – nobody knows, our meteorologists cannot calculate it.

But we came out of it. Bold technicians crawled out to the wing roots to check over the Beast, to replace a mast or two, and to tend to the chariots. I wanted to check my Spitfire, but predictably was not allowed by Ciliax. Still, Klaus kindly looked over the old bird for me and assures me she is A-OK.

Last night both Ciliax and Jack Bovell made passes at me, the one with a steely resolve, the other rather desperately.

Day 25.A rather momentous day.

Our nominal food and water store is intended to last fifty days. Today, therefore, Day 25, is the turn-back point. And yet we are no nearer finding land, no nearer penetrating the great mysteries of the Pacific.

The Captain had us gather in the larger of the restaurants – we being the passengers and senior officers; the scullery maids were not represented, and nor were the helots, the lost souls of the atom-engine compartment. The Captain himself, on his flight deck, spoke to us by speaker tube; I have yet to see his face.

We discussed whether to continue the mission. We had a briefing by the quartermaster on the state of our supplies, then a debate, followed by a vote. A vote, held on a flying Nazi schlachtschiff ! I have no doubt that Captain Fassbender had already made his own decision before we were gathered in the polished oak of the dining room. But he was trying to boost morale – even striving to stave off mutinies in the future. Christopher Columbus used the same tactics, Jack told me, when his crew too felt lost in the midst of another endless ocean.

And, like Columbus, Captain Fassbender won the day. For now we carry on, on half-rations. The movie-makers filmed it all, even though every last man of them , too fond of their grub, voted to turn back.

Day 28. Today we passed over yet another group of islands, quite a major cluster. Captain Fassbender ordered a few hours’ orbit while the chariots went down to explore. Of my little group only I bothered to ride down, with my friend Klaus. Jack Bovell did not answer my knock on his cabin door; I have not seen him all day. I suspect he has been drinking heavily.

So Klaus and I flew low over forests and patches of grassland. We spooked exotic-looking animals: they were like elephants and buffalo and rhinoceroses. Perhaps they are archaic forms from an age even deeper than the era of ice. Living fossils! I snapped pictures merrily and took notes, and fantasised of presenting my observations to the Royal Geographical Society, as Darwin did on returning from his voyage on the Beagle.