Stephen Baxter - The Time Ships

“Perhaps that’s true,” she said. “I don’t think Britain has strength left to do much but rebuild her own smashed-up countryside, once the War is done. We’ll not be going conquering for a long time! And, the situation being as even as it is, the view of things from Berlin must be pretty similar.”

“Then why go on?”

“Because we can’t afford to stop.” Beneath the tan she had acquired in this deep Palaeocene, I could see traces of Bond’s former weary pallor. “There are all sorts of reports — some rumors, but some better substantiated, from what I hear — of German technical developments…”

“Technical developments? You mean weapons.”

We walked away from the forest, now, and down to the edge of the Sea. The air burned hot against my face, and we let the water lap around the soles of our boots.

I pictured the Europe of 1944: the smashed cities, and, from Denmark to the Alps, millions of men and women trying to inflict irreparable damage to each other… In this Tropical peace, it all seemed absurd — a fevered dream!

“But what can you possibly hope to invent,” I protested, “that can do significantly more damage than has already been achieved?”

“There is talk of Bombs. A new sort — more powerful than anything we’ve yet seen… Bombs containing Carolinum, they say.” I remembered Wallis’s speculations on those lines in 1938. “And, of course,” Bond said, “there is Chronic-Displacement warfare.

“You see, we can’t stop fighting if it means letting the Germans have a monopoly on such weapons.” Her voice had a sort of quiet desperation. “You can see that, can’t you? That’s why there’s been such a rush to build atomic piles, to acquire Carolinum, to produce more Plattnerite… that’s why so much expense and resource has been invested in these time-traveling Juggernauts.”

“And all to leap back in time before the Germans? To do unto them before they get the chance to do unto you?”

She lifted her chin and looked defiant. “Or to fix the damage they do. That’s another way of looking at it, isn’t it?”

I did not debate, as Nebogipfel might have done, the ultimate futility of this quest; for it was clear that the philosophers of 1944 had not yet come to such an understanding of the Multiplicity of Histories as I had, under the Morlock’s tuition.

“But,” I protested, “the past is a pretty huge place. You came looking for us, but how could you know we would end up here — how could you settle near us, even to within a million years or so.”

“We had clues,” she said.

“What sort of clues? You mean the wreckage left behind in Imperial?”

“Partly. But also archaeological.”

“Archaeological?”

She looked at me quizzically. “Look here, I’m not sure you’d want to hear this—”

That, of course, made my curiosity burn! I insisted — she told me.

“Very well. They — the boffins — knew the general area where you had left for the past — in the grounds of Imperial College, of course — and so they began an intensive archaeological survey of the area. Pits were dug.”

“Good heavens,” I said. “You were looking for my fossilized bones!”

“And Nebogipfel’s. It was reasoned that if any anomalies were found — bones, or tools — we should be able to place you tolerably well by your position in the strata…”

“And were they? Hilary—” She held back again, and I had to insist she answer.

“They found a skull.”

“Human?”

“Sort of.” She hesitated. “Small, and rather misshapen — placed in a stratum fifty million years older than any human remains had a right to be — and bitten clean in two.”

Small and misshapen — it must, I realized, have been Nebogipfel’s! Could that have been the relic of his encounter with Pristichampus — but in some other History, in which Gibson did not intervene?

And did my bones lie, crushed and turned to stone, in some neighboring, undiscovered pit?

I felt a chill, despite the heat of the sun on my back and head. Suddenly this brilliant Palaeocene world seemed faded — a transparency, through which shone the pitiless light of time.

“So you detected your traces of Plattnerite, and you found us,” I said. “But I imagine you were disappointed merely to find me — again! — and no horde of warmongering Prussians. But — look here — can’t you see there is a certain paradox?

“You develop your time ironclads because you fear the Germans are doing the same. Very well. But the situation is symmetrical: from their point of view, the Germans must fear that you will exploit such time machinery first. Each side is behaving precisely in such a way as to provoke the worst reaction in its opponents. And so you both slide towards the worst situation for all.”

“That’s as may be,” Bond said. “But the possession of time technology by the Germans would be catastrophic for the Allied Cause. The role of this Expedition is to hunt down German travelers, and to avert any damage the Germans inflict on History.”

I threw my hands in the air, and Palaeocene water rippled about my ankles. “But — confound it, Captain Bond — it is fifty million years until the birth of Christ! What meaning can that firefly struggle between England and Germany — in such a remote future — have here?”

“We cannot relax,” she said with a grim weariness. “Can’t you see that? We must hunt the Germans, right back to the dawn of Creation — if necessary.”

“And where will this War stop? Will you consume all of Eternity before you are done? Don’t you see that that —” I waved a hand, meaning to summarize all of that awful future of shattered cities and populations huddling in subterranean eaves “ — all that — is impossible? Or will you go on until there are two men left — just two — and the last turns to his neighbor and bashes out his brain with a lump of shattered masonry? Eh?”

Bond turned away — the light of the Sea picked out the lines in her face — and she would not reply.

This period of calm, after our first encounter with Gibson, lasted five days.

It was noon of a cloudless, brilliant day, and I had spent the morning putting my clumsy nursing skills at the service of the gurkha doctor. It was with a sense of relief that I accepted Hilary Bond’s invitation to join her for another of our walks to the beach.

We cut through the forest easily enough — by now, the troopers had cleared respectable paths radiating from the central encampment — and, when we reached the beach, I hauled off my boots and socks and dumped them at the fringe of the forest, and I scampered down to the water’s edge. Hilary Bond discarded her own footwear, a little more decorously, and she piled it on the sand with the hand-weapon she carried. She rolled up the legs of her trousers — I was able to see how her left leg was misshapen, the skin shrunken by an ancient burn — and she waded into the foamy surf after me.

I stripped off my shirt (we were pretty much informal in that camp in the ancient forest, men and women all) and I dunked my head and upper body in the transparent water, disregarding the soaking my trouser legs were receiving. I breathed deep, relishing it all: the heat of the sun prickling on my face, the sparkle of the water, the softness of the sand between my toes, the sharp scents of salt and ozone.

“You’re glad to get here, I see,” Hilary said with a tolerant smile.

“Indeed I am.” I told her how I had been assisting the doctor.

“You know I’m willing enough — more than willing — to help. But by about ten o’clock today my head had got so full of the stench of chloroform, of ether, of various antiseptic fluid — as well as more earthy smells! — that—”