Stephen Baxter - The Time Ships

Hilary was weakened, but she was quite coherent, and she was able to give me a sensible account of what she had seen of the Bombing.

After she had left me on the beach, she had plunged through the forest as fast as she could. Even so, she was no closer than a mile to the camp when the Messerschmitt came.

“I saw the Bomb falling through the air,” she whispered. “I knew it was Carolinum from the way it burned — I’ve not seen it before, but I’ve heard accounts — and I thought I was done for. I froze like a rabbit — or like a fool — and by the time I’d got my wits back, I knew I didn’t have time to get to the ground, or duck behind the trees. I threw my arms before my face…”

The flash had been inhumanly bright. “The light burned at my flesh… it was like the doors of Hell opening… I could feel my cheeks melting; and when I looked I could see the tip of my nose burning — like a little candle… it was the most extraordinary…” She collapsed into coughing.

Then the concussion came — “like a great wind” — and she was knocked backwards. She had tumbled across the forest floor, until she had collided with a hard surface — presumably a tree trunk — and, for a spell, knew no more.

When she came to, that pillar of crimson and purple flame was rising like a demon out of the forest, with its attendant familiars of melted earth and steam. Around her the trees were smashed and scorched, although — by chance — she was far enough from the epicenter to have avoided the worst of the damage, and she hadn’t been further injured by falling branches or the like.

She had reached up to touch her nose; and she remembered only a dull curiosity as a great piece of it came away in her hand. “But I felt no pain — it is very odd… although,” she added grimly, “I was compensated for that soon enough…”

I listened to this in a morbid silence, and vivid in my mind’s eye was the slim, rather awkward girl with whom I had hunted bivalves, mere hours before this terrible experience.

Hilary thought she slept. When she came to her senses, the forest was a good deal darker the first flames had subsided and, for some reason, her pain was reduced. She wondered if her very nerves had been destroyed.

With a huge effort, for she was by now greatly weakened by thirst, she pulled herself to her feet and approached the epicenter of the blast.

“I remember the glow of the continuing Carolinum explosion, that unearthly purple, brightening as I moved through the trees… The heat increased, and I wondered how close I would be able to come, before I would be forced back.”

She had reached the fringe of the open space around the parked Juggernauts.

“I could barely see, so bright was the glare of the Carolinum fire-pit, and there was a roar, like rushing water,” she said. “The Bomb had landed slap in the center of our camp — that German was a good marksman — it was like a toy volcano, with smoke and flame pouring up out of it.

“Our camp is flattened and burned, most of our belongings destroyed. Even the ’Nauts are smashed to bits: of the four, only one has retained its shape, and that is gutted; the others are burst open, toppled like toys, burned and exploded. I saw no people,” she said. “I think I had expected…” She hesitated. “Horrors: I expected horrors. But there was nothing — nothing left of them. Oh — save for one thing — the strangest thing.” She laid a hand on my arm; it was reduced by flame to a claw. “On the skin of that ’Naut, most of the paint was blistered away — except in one place, where there was a shaped patch… It was like a shadow, of a crouching man.” She looked up at me, her eyes gleaming from her ruined face. “Do you understand? It was a shadow — of a soldier, I don’t know who — caught in that moment of a blast so intense that his flesh was evaporated, his bones scattered. And yet the shadow in the paint remained.” Her voice remained level, dispassionate, but her eyes were full of tears. “Isn’t that strange?”

Hilary had stumbled about the rim of the encampment for a while. Convinced by now she would not find people alive there, she had a vague idea of seeking out supplies. But, she said, her thoughts were scattered and confused, and her residual pain so intense it threatened to overwhelm her; and, with her damaged hands, she found it impossible to grub through the charred remnants of the camp with any semblance of system.

So she had come away, with the intention of trying to reach the Sea.

After that, she could barely remember anything of her stumble through the forest; it had lasted all night, and yet she had come such a short distance from the explosion site that I surmised she must have been blundering in circles, until Stubbins and I found her.

Stubbins and I resolved that our best course would be to take Hilary out of the forest, away from the damaging Carolinum emissions, and bring her to our encampment along the beach, where Nebogipfel’s advanced ingenuity might be able to concoct some way to make her more comfortable. But it was clear enough that Hilary did not have the strength to walk further. So we improvised a stretcher of two long, straight fallen branches, with my trousers and Stubbins’s shirt tied between them. Wary of her blistered flesh, we lifted Hilary onto this makeshift construction. She cried out when we moved her, but once we had her settled on the stretcher her discomfort eased.

So we set off back through the forest, towards the beach. Stubbins preceded me, and soon I could see how his bare, bony back prickled with sweat and dirt. He stumbled in the forest’s scorched gloom, and lianas and low branches rattled against his unprotected face; but he did not complain, and kept his hands wrapped around the poles of our stretcher. As for me, staggering along in my under-shorts, my strength was soon exhausted, and my emptied-out muscles set up a great trembling. At times, it seemed impossible that I could lift my feet for another step, or keep my stiffening hands wrapped around those rough poles. But, watching the stolid determination of Stubbins ahead of me, I strove to mask my fatigue and to follow his pace.

Hilary lay in a shallow unconsciousness, with her limbs convulsing and mumbled cries escaping her lips, as echoes of pain worked their way through her nervous system.

When we reached the shore we set Hilary down in the shade of the forest’s rim, and Stubbins lifted her head, cupping her skull in one hand, as he fed her sips of water. Stubbins was a clumsy man, but he worked with an unconscious delicacy and sensitivity that overcame the natural limitations of his frame; it seemed to me that he was pouring his whole being into those simple acts of kindness for Hilary. Stubbins struck me as fundamentally a good, kind man; and I accepted that his detailed care of Hilary was motivated largely by nothing more nor less than simple compassion. But I saw, too, that it would have been unbearable for poor Stubbins to have survived — thanks only to the lucky chance of following an assignment away from the camp during the disaster — when all of his fellows had perished; and I foresaw that he would spend a good deal of his remaining days on such acts of contrition as this.

When we had done our best we picked up the stretcher and progressed along the beach. Stubbins and I, all but naked, our bodies coated with the soot and ash of the burned forest, and with the broken body of Hilary Bond suspended between us, walked along the firmer, damp sand at the Sea’s fringe, with cool, wet sand between our toes and brine wavelets lapping against our shins.

When we reached our small encampment, Nebogipfel took command. Stubbins fussed about, but he impeded Nebogipfel’s movements, and the Morlock served me with a series of hostile glares until I took Stubbins’s arm and pulled him away.