John Schettler - Meridian

“Robert,” he said softly.

Nordhausen was savoring his coffee, studying the clouds overhead as they were driven by a rising wind. “What now?” He said, his reverie interrupted.

“You know you were right about that.”

“Right about what?”

“We do have to kill ourselves if we get stuck here.”

“What? God, you really are a piece of work. Things are bad enough and now you’re talking about suicide.”

“But we’d have to do it, Robert. Don’t you understand? This bit with the fire is the least of our worries. Did you notice that I used up all the water?”

“What’s that got to do with anything, were you planning on drowning me?”

“No, you idiot. I used all the water so we could boil it and prevent any organisms from getting into this environment.”

Nordhausen gave him a dismissive wave. “That’s nonsense. We’re both walking nurseries for a host of parasites, bacteria and possibly even viruses in our own bodies. In fact, if you want to look at things from an evolutionary standpoint, we’re just a convenient way for bacteria to get around on the planet. It once took take decades for bugs to migrate from one habitat to another. Now, when some idiot drinks bad water in Kinshasa and takes a midnight flight to Paris, everything in his gut is along for the ride! Look, don’t worry about this. The environment here is robust enough to deal with anything we’ve brought back with us. I’d be more worried about taking things forward in time, if I were you. Suppose this muck is crawling with some super bacteria that died out millions of years ago. If your fail-safe thing works, then we’d be bringing the damn bug home with a vengeance.”

“I guess we’d have to kill ourselves first then, wouldn’t we?”

“Oh, be quiet.” Nordhausen was tired of arguing with him.

“How would we do it?” Paul tacked on one last thought.

“I suppose I could wait until you go to sleep tonight and just bash your skull in with one of these rocks.” Nordhausen gave him a look that was intended to end the conversation.

“No,” Paul lapsed on foolishly. “I think the best thing would be to just find a high cliff somewhere and throw ourselves off. We’d have to hope you are right about the environment fending off the bugs in our gut. I’d hate to think about the prospect of burning ourselves alive.”

“Will you shut up about this!”

Paul held up an arm in a placating gesture. At least, he thought, he wouldn’t die here alone. He looked at the fire, seeing the flames burning low. “I’ll see about finding some more of that dead fern,” he said wandering off. He went round the shoulder of the hill and spied out some beds of dry grass and fern in the distance. By the time he had gathered enough for the fire and returned he was surprised to find Nordhausen gone.

“Robert?” The fire had gone out and the tin cup Nordhausen had been using lay tilted on its side. It was fearsomely cold. He was taken by an involuntary shiver as he looked around in the gloom for any sign of the professor. He shouted again, but his voice seemed to die in the heavy stillness of the air. Now where would Nordhausen go? Was he out collecting shocked quartz? He searched the ground for any obvious sign of disturbance but there were no footprints to be seen. A queasy feeling came to him as he squinted at the gloomy horizon.

“Nordhausen?” His voice seemed very distant, thin and distended, almost an echo. He realized that he was loosing consciousness, and he slipped to the damp, pasty ground, thinking that the noxious gasses in the atmosphere must be overcoming him. Maybe Nordhausen wandered off to look for something and collapsed. Maybe they weren’t going to make it out of here alive after all. They wouldn’t have to jump off a cliff or burn themselves up. The fire and brimstone of the fifth extinction was going to chalk up its first two primates, long before they ever had the chance to evolve… His head swam and his vision blurred.

He was very cold.

Dorland remembered the dizzying spin in his head and the awful sensation of cold. He suddenly felt light as a feather, insubstantial, his life ebbing away on the chilled breath of the wind. The dark morning faded and he seemed to drift for a moment, vapor-like, a phantom hovering over the wrecked barren landscape about him. Then strange lights rushed at him from all directions and he shut his eyes, fighting off a rising sensation of nausea as he slipped away into unconsciousness.

When he regained his awareness again he was lying on the ground, shivering and wet. The air had a strangely sweet smell to it, cleaned by a recent rain and laden with the scent of fresh washed stones. He moved, struggling to his feet on instinct, his body driven by some involuntary compulsion that he seemed to have no control over. The dizziness that had felled him a moment before was still with him, though not as severe. His vision swam, a blur of shadow and wet mist.

He felt his legs moving in a jerky, reflexive rhythm as he struggled for footing on the damp earth. He was walking; stumbling across the undulating ground in the night, a solitary ghost on a dark, lifeless plain. Time passed unheeded, and he heard a faint sound rumbling in the distance, like rolling thunder that never ceased. He moved on, with aimless abandon, entranced by the fading memory of the brilliant lights in his mind. Some inner compass carried him west, though he did not know that at the time. As he walked and stumbled over sharp-edged shale and clumps of gray rock, he heard a strangely familiar sound emerging from the low rumble in the distance.

There was a rhythm to the sound, and a steady urgency as it resolved itself in his mind. A faint, high note sounded above the churning wash and his brain attached a meaning to the sound at last. He struggled to focus his eyes, looking around him to try and locate the sound. A dim light glazed across his field of vision and he turned towards it, his ambling pathway suddenly attached to the wavering light on the black horizon.

A cool wind struck him full in the face when he turned. The ground under his feet was suddenly flat and firm, a bed of smaller rocks reducing to a fine gravel. Each footfall made a distinctive crunch on the scattered stone, and then his feet struck something hard and he fell.

He passed a moment of darkness where his awareness faded with a prickly sensation of light headedness. Then the blood rushed to his temples and he felt the icy touch of hard metal against his cheek. A strange humming rang in his ears, an eerie resonance of the sound he had heard earlier. He moved his arm, hand groping forward in the murky night, until he was able to sense the cold rim of an iron-hard shape on the ground near his head. His mind began to make gradual sense of the clues it was fed and he realized, at last, that he had stumbled upon the bed of a railroad.

The emergence of something familiar in the bleak landscape gave him a reference point to rally on. His sense of self gathered strength and he remembered who he was now, and what he was supposed to be doing. An inner voice, the voice that had narrated his experience for as long as he could remember, began to speak to him again. We were wrong, it said. We must have simply landed on the volcanic debris fields earlier, far from our intended drop point. I was looking for Nordhausen and must have fallen and hit my head. Who knows how long I’ve been wandering around out here?