Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

The lights of the fort receded, and the Frontier dusk opened up around them, huge and empty. But Josh could see thick black mounds of cloud on every horizon.

He hurried beside Bisesa. “If it is true—”

“What?”

“This business of slipping through time—you, and the man-ape creatures—how do you think it can have happened?”

“I’ve no idea. And I’m not sure if I’d rather be a castaway in time or a victim of a nuclear war. Anyhow,” she said briskly, “how do you know you’re not the castaway?”

Josh quailed. “I never thought of that. You know, I can scarcely believe I am even holding this conversation! If you had told me this morning that before I slept this night I would see a flying machine powerful enough to carry people inside it—and that those people would, and plausibly too, claim to be from a future a century and a half hence—I would have thought you were insane!”

“But if it’s true,” Ruddy said insistently, jogging alongside them—never very fit, he was panting a little—“if it’s true, there’s so much you know, so much you could tell us! For our future is your past.”

She shook her head. “I’ve seen too many movies. Have you never heard of the chronology protection conjecture?”

Josh was baffled, as was Ruddy.

Bisesa said, “I guess you don’t even know what a movie is, let alone know Terminator … Look—some people think that if you go back in time and change something, so that the future you came from can’t exist any more, you could cause a huge catastrophe.”

“I don’t understand,” Josh confessed.

“Suppose I told you where my great-great-great-grandmother lives, right now, in 1885. Then you go out, find her, and shoot her.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Never mind! But if you did, I would never be born—and so I could never come back to tell you about my grandmother—and you’d never shoot her. In which case—”

“It’s a paradox of logic,” Ruddy breathed. “How delightful! But if we promise not to molest your grandmother, can you tell us nothing of ourselves?”

Josh scoffed. “How would she ever have heard of us , Ruddy?”

Ruddy looked thoughtful. “I have the feeling that she has , you know—heard of me at any rate. A chap knows when he’s been recognized!”

But Bisesa would say no more.

As the last daylight seeped away, and the stars receded to infinity above them, the little party grew closer together, the soldiers’ bantering talk subdued, their lanterns held high. They were walking into strangeness, thought Josh. It wasn’t just that they couldn’t know who lay out there, or where they were going. They couldn’t even be sure when they would find themselves … He thought they all seemed relieved when they passed a low hill and the rising Moon, a quarter full, shed a cold light on the rocky plain. But the air was strange, turbulent, and the Moon’s face an odd yellow-orange.

“Here,” said Bisesa suddenly. She had stopped before a scraping in the ground. Stepping closer, Josh saw that the earth was fresh and moist, as if recently dug.

“It’s a foxhole,” Ruddy said. He hopped down into the hole, and brandished a length of pipe, like a bit of drainpipe. “And is this the fearsome weapon that shot you out of the sky?”

“That’s the RPG launcher, yes.” She peered east. “There was a village just over there. A hundred meters, no more.” The soldiers held up their lanterns. There was no village to be seen, nothing but the rocky plain that seemed to stretch to the horizon. “Perhaps there is a boundary near here,” Bisesa breathed. “A boundary in time. What a strange thought. What is happening to us? …” She lifted her face to the Moon. “Oh. Clavius is gone.”

Josh was at her side. “Clavius?”

“Clavius Base.” She pointed. “Built into a big old crater in the southern highlands.”

Josh stared. “You have cities on the Moon ?”

She smiled. “I wouldn’t call it a city. But you can see its light, like a captured star, the only one in the circle of the crescent Moon. Now it’s gone. That isn’t even my Moon. There is a crew on Mars, and a second on the way—or there was. I wonder what’s become of them …”

There was a grunt of disgust. One of the soldiers had been rooting at the bottom of the foxhole, and now emerged with what looked like a piece of meat, still dripping blood. The stink was sharp.

“A human arm,” Ruddy said flatly. He turned away and vomited.

Josh said, “It looks to me like the work of a great cat … It seems that whoever attacked you did not live long to enjoy his triumph.”

“I suppose he was as lost as I am.”

“Yes. I apologize for Ruddy. He doesn’t have a very strong stomach for such sights.”

“No. And he never will.”

Josh looked at her; her eyes were full of moonlight, her expression empty. “What do you mean?”

“He was right. I do know who he is. You’re Rudyard Kipling, aren’t you? Rudyard bloody Kipling. My God, what a day.”

Ruddy didn’t respond. He was hunched over, still retching, and bile stained his chin.

At that moment the ground trembled, hard enough to raise little clouds of dust everywhere, like invisible footfalls. And rain began to fall, from thick black clouds that came racing across the Moon’s empty face.

For Bisesa the first morning was the worst.

She suspected that some combination of adrenaline and shock had kept her going through the day of what they were starting to call the Discontinuity. But that night, in the room given to them by Grove, a hastily converted storeroom, she had slept badly on her thin down-stuffed mattress. By the next morning, when she had reluctantly woken up to find herself still here , she had come crashing down from her adrenaline high, and felt inconsolable. The second night, at Abdi’s insistence, desperate for sleep, she cracked her survival gear. She donned earplugs and eye shades, swallowed a Halcyon tablet—what Casey called a “Blue Bomber”—and slept for ten hours.

But as the days passed, Bisesa, Abdikadir and Casey were still stuck here in the Jamrud fort. They had no contact on any of their military wavelengths, Bisesa’s phone muttered about its continuing cauterization, no SAR teams came flapping out of the UN base in response to their patiently bleeping beacons—there was no medevac for Casey. And there was not a single contrail to be seen in the sky, not one.

She spent most of her time missing Myra, her daughter. She didn’t even want to confront those feelings, as if acknowledging them would make her separation from Myra real. She longed to have something to do—anything to stop her thinking.

Meanwhile life went on.

After the first couple of days, when it was obvious the Bird crew had no hostile intent, the British troops’ close military scrutiny of them was relaxed a little, though Bisesa suspected Captain Grove was too wary a commander not to keep a weathered eye on them. They certainly weren’t allowed anywhere near the small stash of twenty-first-century pistols, submachine guns, flares and the like that had been extracted from the Bird. But she thought it probably helped these nineteenth-century British accept them that Casey was a white American and that both Bisesa and Abdi could be regarded as belonging to “allied” races. If the Bird’s crew had been Russian, German or Chinese, say—and there were plenty of such troops in Clavius—there might have been more hostility.

But when she thought about it Bisesa was astonished even to be considering such issues, culture clashes spanning the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. The whole business was surreal; she felt as if she was walking around in a bubble. And she was continually amazed at how easily everyone else accepted their situation, the blunt, apparently undeniable reality of the time slips, across a hundred and fifty years in her case, perhaps across a million years or more for the wretched pithecine and her infant in their net cage.