Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

Abdikadir said, “I don’t think the British understand all this at all, and maybe we understand too well. When H. G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895—ten years ahead in this time zone!—he had to spend twenty or thirty pages explaining what a time machine does. Not how it works, you see, but just what it is. For us there has been a process of acculturation. After a century of science fiction you and I are thoroughly accustomed to the idea of time travel, and can immediately accept its implications—strange though the experience is to actually live through.”

“But that doesn’t apply to these Victorian-age Brits. To them a Model T Ford would be a fabulous vehicle from the future.”

“Sure. I think for them, the time slips and their implications are simply beyond their imaginations … But if H. G. Wells was here—did he ever visit India?—of all thinkers, his mind might explode with the implications of what is happening …”

None of this rationalization seemed to help Bisesa. Maybe the truth was that Abdikadir and everybody else felt just as peculiar as she did, but they were just better at hiding it.

Ruddy, though, sympathized with her disorientation. He told her he was occasionally afflicted by hallucinations.

“When I was a child, stranded in an unhappy foster home in England, I once began to punch a tree. Odd behavior I grant you, but nobody understood that I was trying to see if it was my grandmother! More recently in Lahore I came down with a fever that may have been malaria, and since then, on occasion, my ‘blue devils’ have returned. So I know how it is to be plagued by the unreal.” As he spoke to her he leaned forward, intent, his eyes distorted by the thick spectacles Josh called “gig-lamps.” “But you are real enough for me. I’ll tell you what to do about it—work!” He held up stubby fingers stained black with ink. “Sixteen hours a day I put in sometimes. Work, the best bulwark for reality …”

So it went, a therapy session on the nature of reality with nineteen-year-old Rudyard Kipling. She walked away more dazed than before it had begun.

As time passed and both parties, the Victorian-age British and Bisesa’s crew, continued to lack communications with their respective outside worlds, Grove grew very concerned.

There were very practical reasons for this; the stores here at the fort would not last long. But Grove was also disconnected from the vast apparatus of the imperial administration, which Bisesa glimpsed in the rapid talk of Ruddy and Josh. Even on the civilian side there were local Commissioners, with staffs of Deputies and Assistants, who reported to a Lieutenant Governor, who reported to a Viceroy, who reported to a Secretary of State, who reported, at last, to the Empress herself, Queen Victoria herself, in far-off London. The British were encouraged to think of themselves as locked into a unified social structure—wherever you served you were a soldier of the Queen, part of her global empire. For Grove to be isolated from this was as disturbing, Bisesa saw, as it was for her to be cut off from the global telecommunications nets of the twenty-first century.

So Grove began to send out scouting patrols, particularly using his sowars , his Indian cavalry troopers, who seemed able to cover impressive distances quickly. They reached Peshawar, where the local army cantonment and military command center should have been found—but Peshawar was gone. There was no evidence of destruction, not even of the hideous erasing of a nuclear blast that Bisesa had trained the British to recognize. There was only bare rock, a river bank, scrubby vegetation and the spoor of creatures that might have been lions: it was as if Peshawar had never existed at all. It was a similar story, the sowar scouts reported, when they went out to find Clavius, Bisesa’s UN encampment. Not a trace, not even of destruction.

So Grove determined to explore further: down the valley of the Indus, deep into India—and to the north.

Meanwhile Casey, still pretty much immobilized, likewise took on the challenge of making contact with the rest of the world. With the help of a couple of privates from a signal corps assigned by Grove, he scavenged comms gear from the fallen Bird, and improvised a sending and receiving station in a small room in the fort. But no matter how long he spent calling into the dark, there was no reply.

Abdikadir, meanwhile, had his own projects, which concerned the peculiar floating sphere. Bisesa was envious that both Casey and Abdi quickly found useful work to occupy their time, as if they somehow fit in better than she did.

On the fourth morning, Bisesa emerged from the fort to find Abdikadir standing on a stool, holding a battered tin bucket up in the air. Casey and Cecil de Morgan sat on fold-out camp chairs, their faces bathed in the morning sun as they watched the show. Casey waved at Bisesa. “Hey, Bis! Come see the cabaret.” Though de Morgan immediately offered her his chair, Bisesa sat in the dirt beside Casey. She didn’t like de Morgan, and she wasn’t about to give him any kind of leverage over her, however trivial.

Abdikadir’s bucket was full of water, so it must have been heavy. Nevertheless he propped it on his shoulder one-handed, and marked the water’s level with a grease pencil. Then he lowered the bucket, and revealed the floating sphere, the Evil Eye, with water running off its surface; Abdi made sure he caught every drop. The tent containing the two “man-apes” had been set up a few dozen yards away, with some kind of pole at its center.

Casey snickered. “He’s been dunking that damn thing for half an hour already.”

“Why, Abdi?”

“I’m measuring its volume,” Abdikadir murmured. “And I’m repeating it for accuracy. It’s called science. Thanks for your support.” And he lifted the bucket up around the sphere again.

Bisesa said to Casey, “I thought the Surgeon-Captain said you shouldn’t get out of bed.”

Casey blew a raspberry, and thrust his heavily bandaged leg out in front of him. “Ah, bull. It was a clean break and they set it well.” Though without anesthetic, Bisesa knew. “I don’t like sitting around with my thumb up my ass.”

“And you, Mr. de Morgan,” Bisesa said. “What’s your interest in this?”

The factor spread his hands. “I am a businessman, ma’am. That’s why I’m here in the first place. And I am constantly on the lookout for new opportunities. Naturally I am intrigued by your downed flying machine! I accept that both you and Captain Grove want to keep that particular item under wraps. But this , this floating orb of perfection, is neither yours nor Grove’s—and, in these days of strangeness, how strange it remains, though we have quickly become accustomed to it! There it floats, supported by nothing we can see. No matter how hard you hit it—even with bullets, and that’s been tried, somewhat perilously given the ricochets—you can neither knock a chip out of its perfect surface, nor even move it from its station by so much as a fraction of an inch. Who made it? What holds it up? What lies inside it?”

“And how much is it worth?” Casey growled.

De Morgan laughed easily. “You can’t blame a man for trying.”

Josh had told Bisesa something of de Morgan’s background. His family were failed aristocracy, who could trace their ancestry back to William the Conqueror’s first assault on England, more than eight hundred years before, and who had carved a rich estate out of the defeated Saxon kingdoms. In the intervening centuries a “trait of greed and foolishness that transcends the generations,” in de Morgan’s own disarming words, had left the family penniless, though still with a kind of race memory of wealth and power. Ruddy said that in his experience the Raj was plagued by “chancers” like de Morgan. As far as Bisesa was concerned there was nothing to be trusted in de Morgan’s slicked-back black hair, and his darting, questing eyes.