Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

Bisesa took a deep breath. Briefly she sketched the geopolitical situation: the standoff of the great powers over the region’s oil, the complex local tensions. Grove seemed to follow this, even if most of it seemed unfamiliar, and at times he showed great surprise. “Russia an ally , you say? …

“Let me tell you how I see the situation here. We’re at a point of tension all right—but the tension is between Britain and Russia. My job is to help defend the frontier of the Empire, and then the security of the Raj. About all I recognized from your little speech was the trouble you have with the Pashtuns. No offense,” he said to Abdikadir.

Bisesa found this impossible to take in. She was reduced to repeating his words. “The Raj ? The Empire ?”

“It seems,” Grove said, “we are here to wage different wars, Lieutenant Dutt.”

But Abdikadir was nodding. “Captain Grove—you have had trouble with your communications in the last few hours?”

Grove paused, evidently deciding what to tell him. “Very well—yes. We lost both the telegraph link, and even the heliograph stations from about noon. Haven’t heard a peep since, and we still don’t know what’s going on. And you?”

Abdikadir sighed. “The time scale is a little different. We lost our radio communications just before the crash—a few hours ago.”

“ Radio? … Never mind,” Grove said, waving a hand. “So we have similar problems, you in your flying roundabout, me in my fortress. And what do you suppose caused this?”

Bisesa said in a rush, “A hot war.” She had been brooding on this possibility since the crash; despite the terror of those moments, and the shock of what had followed, she hadn’t been able to get it out of her head. She said to Abdikadir, “An electromagnetic pulse—what else could knock out both civilian and military comms, simultaneously? The strange lights we saw in the sky—the weather, the sudden winds—”

“But we saw no contrails,” Abdikadir said calmly. “Come to think of it, I haven’t noticed a single contrail since the crash.”

“Once again,” Grove said with irritation, “I have not the first idea what you’re talking about.”

“I mean,” Bisesa said, “I fear a nuclear war has broken out. And that’s what’s stranded us all. It’s happened before in this area, after all. It’s only seventeen years since Lahore was destroyed by the Indian strike.”

Grove stared at her. “Destroyed, you say?”

She frowned. “Utterly. You must know it was.”

Grove stood, went to the door, and gave an order to the private waiting there. After a couple of minutes the bustling young civilian called “Ruddy” came to the door, slightly breathless, evidently summoned by Grove. The other civilian, the young man called Josh who had helped Abdikadir get Casey out of the downed chopper, came pushing his way into the room too.

Grove raised his eyebrows. “I should have expected you to sneak in, Mr. White. But you have your job to do, I suppose. You!” Peremptorily he pointed at Ruddy. “When were you last in Lahore?”

Ruddy thought briefly. “Three—four weeks ago, I believe.”

“Can you describe the place as you saw it then?”

Ruddy seemed puzzled by the request, but he complied: “An old walled city—two hundred thousand and odd Punjabis, and a few thousand Europeans and mixed race—lots of Mughal monuments—since the Mutiny it’s become a center of administration, as well as the platform for military expeditions to see off the Russkie threat. I don’t know what you want me to tell you, sir.”

“Just this. Has Lahore been destroyed? Was it, in fact, devastated seventeen years ago?”

Ruddy guffawed. “Scarcely. My father worked there. He built a house on the Mozang Road!”

Grove snapped at Bisesa, “Why are you lying?”

Foolishly Bisesa felt like crying. Why won’t you believe me? She turned to Abdikadir. He had fallen silent; he was gazing out of the window at the reddening sun. “Abdi? Back me up here.”

Abdikadir said to her softly, “You don’t see the pattern yet.”

“What pattern?”

He closed his eyes. “I don’t blame you. I don’t want to see it myself.” He faced the British. “You know, Captain, the strangest thing of all that happened today was the sun.” He described the sudden shift of the sun across the sky. “One minute noon, the next—late afternoon. As if the machinery of time had come off its cogs.” He glanced at the grandfather clock; its faded face showed the time was a little before seven o’clock. He asked Grove, “Is that correct?”

“Nearly, I suppose. I check it every morning.”

Abdikadir lifted his wrist and glanced at his watch. “And yet I show only fifteen twenty-seven—half past three in the afternoon. Bisesa, do you agree?”

She checked. “Yes.”

Ruddy frowned. He strode over to Abdikadir and took his wrist. “I’ve never seen a watch like this. It’s certainly not a Waterbury! It has numbers, not hands. There isn’t even a dial. And the numbers melt one into the other!”

“It’s a digital watch,” Abdikadir said mildly.

“And—what is this?” Ruddy called out the numbers. “Eight six 2037 …”

“That is the date,” Abdikadir said.

Ruddy frowned, working it out. “A date in the twenty-first century?”

“Yes.”

Ruddy strode over to Grove’s desk and rummaged in a heap of papers there. “Forgive me, Captain.” Even the formidable Grove seemed out of his depth; he raised his hands helplessly. Ruddy extracted a newspaper. “A couple of days old, but it will do.” He held it up for Bisesa and Abdikadir to see; it was a thin rag called the Civil and Military Gazette and Pioneer. “Can you see the date?”

It was a date in March 1885. There was a long, frozen silence.

Grove said briskly, “Do you know, I think we could all do with a cup of tea.”

“No!” The other young man, Josh White, seemed very agitated. “I’m sorry sir, but it all makes sense now—I think it does—oh, it fits, it fits!”

“Calm yourself,” Grove said sternly. “What are you jabbering about?”

“The man-ape,” White said. “Never mind cups of tea—we must show them the man-ape!”

So, with Bisesa and Abdikadir still under armed guard, they all trooped out of the fort.

They came to a kind of encampment a hundred meters or so from the fortress wall. Here a conical tent of netting had been erected. A group of soldiers stood casually around, smoking foul-smelling cigarettes. Lean, grimy, the backs of their necks shaven, the troops gazed at Abdikadir and Bisesa with the usual mixture of curiosity and lust.

Something was moving inside the netting, Bisesa saw—something alive, an animal perhaps—but the setting sun had touched the horizon, and the light was too low, the shadows too long for her to make it out.

At White’s command, the netting was pulled back. Bisesa had been expecting to see a supporting pole. Instead, a silvery sphere, apparently floating unsupported in the air, had provided the tent’s apex. None of the locals gave the sphere a second glance. Abdikadir stepped forward, squinted at his reflection in the floating sphere, and passed his hand underneath it. There was nothing holding the sphere up. “You know,” he said, “on any other day this would seem unusual.”

Bisesa’s gaze was drawn to the floating anomaly, to her own distorted face reflected in its surface. This is the key, she thought, the notion bursting without warning into her mind.

Josh touched her arm. “Bisesa, are you all right?”

Bisesa was distracted by his accent, which sounded to her ears JFK-Bostonian, but his face seemed to show genuine concern. She laughed without humor. “In the circumstances, I think I’m doing pretty well.”