Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

Already Ruddy had his hand up. “Of course the landmasses haven’t shifted, as you put it. Why should they? …”

Casey growled, “For you, Alfred Wegener is a five-year-old boy. Tectonic plates. Drifting continents. Long story. Take my word.”

Bisesa asked, “How deep in time, Casey?”

“We don’t think there can be any scrap that’s more than two million years old.”

Ruddy laughed, a little wildly. “ Only two million years—that’s a comfort, is it?”

Casey said, “The time slices presumably extend up from the surface of the Earth, and down at least some distance to its center—maybe all the way. Maybe each slice is a great spiky wedge of core, mantle, crust and sky.”

Grove said, “And each patch brought its own vegetation, inhabitants, a column of air above it?”

“Looks like it. It’s the mixing of the patches that we think is stirring up the weather.” He tapped the softscreen. It displayed images of massive tropical storms, creamy-white swirls pouring up from the southern Atlantic to batter the eastern American seaboard, and fronts of bubbling black cloud laced across Asia. Casey said, “Some of the slices must be from summer, some from winter. And the Earth’s climate fluctuates on longer cycles—Ice Ages come and go—and that’s all mixed in too.” He showed images of a slab of icebound land, a neat near-rectangle set square over the site of Paris in France. “Hot air rises above cold, and that causes the winds; hot air holds more water vapor than cold air, and over cool land it dumps it out, and that’s your rain. And so on. As all that works itself out, we get this screwed-up weather.”

Abdikadir said, “How far do these slices extend upward?”

“We don’t know,” Casey said.

“Not as far as the Moon, surely,” piped up Corporal Batson. “Or that body would have vanished, or be scattered about its orbit.”

Casey raised his eyebrows. “Good point. Hadn’t thought of that. But we do know it reaches out at least as far as low Earth orbit.”

“The Soyuz ,” Bisesa said.

“Yeah. Bis, their clocks agree with ours, to the second. They must have been flying overhead—pure chance—when the Discontinuity hit, and they were brought along with us.” He rubbed his fleshy nose. “We’ve tried to map the time slices, and in some places we can. Here’s the Sahara …” He showed patches of greenery in the desert, mostly irregularly shaped, but some were bounded by geometrically pure arcs and straight lines. “One patch of desert looks much the same as another, even if they’re half a million years apart in time. Still, it’s possible to date some of the patches, roughly, from geological changes.”

He turned and drew a big chalk asterisk on central Africa. “This seems to be the oldest area of all. You can tell by the width of the Rift Valley … And look; the Sahara doesn’t extend nearly so far south, and there are lakes, patches of green. That’s just an average, though; on the ground it’s all mixed up.” More images blurred by. “We think much of Asia is from the last couple of thousand years or so. You see scattered human habitations out on those steppes, but nothing advanced—streaks of smoke from campfires, no electric lights. The biggest concentration of people looks to be here. “ He tapped an area north of China, in eastern Asia. “We don’t know who they are.”

He continued his show-and-tell, guiding his reluctant audience around a transformed world. Australia looked exotic. Though much of its center was burned red raw, just as in Bisesa’s time, around the coasts and in the river valleys the greenery was thick and luxurious. A few high-magnification shots were detailed enough to show animals. Bisesa made out a thing like a hippo, browsing at greenery at the edge of a forest scrap—and, in a short animated sequence, a herd of some huge upright creature came leaping out of cover, perhaps fleeing some predator. They were giant kangaroos, Bisesa thought; Australia seemed to have reverted to its virgin state before the arrival of humans. South America meanwhile was a bank of solid green: the rain forest, decimated and dying in Bisesa’s time, restored to its antique glory here.

In North America a great slab of ice lay sprawled across the north and east, extending up to the pole and down to the latitude of the Great Lakes. Casey said, “The ice in this area comes from different ages. You can see that by the gaps, and the ragged edges.” He showed close-ups of the southern edge of the cap, which looked like a piece of paper, ripped across roughly. Bisesa could see glaciers pouring off that ragged edge, great ice-dammed lakes of floodwater building up—and ferocious storm systems pooling, presumably where cold Ice Age air spilled off the cap and ran over warmer land. To the south of the ice the land was a bare green-brown: tundra, locked in by permafrost, scoured by the winds off the ice cap. At first glance she could see no sign of people; but then, she recalled, people were a recent addition to America’s fauna.

Abdikadir said, “What about Alaska? The shape looks odd to me.”

Casey said, “It’s extending toward Beringia—you know, the land bridge that once stretched from Asia to America across the Bering Straits—the way the first humans walked into North America. But it’s been cut off; the sea has broken through …”

The tour continued, relentlessly; they watched the flickering images uneasily.

“And Europe?” Ruddy asked, his voice tight. “England?”

Casey showed them Europe. Much of the continent was covered by dense green forest. On the more open southern regions in France, Spain, Italy there were settlements, but they were just scattered villages—perhaps not even constructed by humans, Bisesa mused, recalling that southern Europe had been in the range of the Neanderthals. There was certainly nothing human to be seen in England, which, south of the line of what would have been Hadrian’s Wall, was a slab of dense, unbroken forest. Further north the pine forest was marred by a great white scar that straddled the Scottish Highlands, a rogue section of ice cap escaped from a glaciation age.

“It is gone,” said Ruddy. Bisesa was surprised to see his eyes, behind his thick spectacles, were misting. “Perhaps it is because I was born abroad that this affects me so. But Home is gone , all of it, all that history down to the Romans and even deeper, vanished like dew.”

Captain Grove put a scarred hand on his shoulder. “Chin up, man. We’ll clear that bloody forest and build our own history if we have to, you’ll see.”

Ruddy nodded, seeming unable to speak.

Casey watched this little melodrama wide-eyed, his gum-chewing briefly suspended. Then he said, “I’ll cut to the chase. The Soyuz found only three sites, on the whole damn planet, where there’re signs of any advanced technical culture—and one of them is right here. The second—” He tapped his graffiti map, at the southern tip of the unmistakable shape of Lake Michigan.

“Chicago,” Josh breathed.

“Yeah,” Casey said. “But don’t get your hopes up. We can see dense urban settlement—a lot of smoke, as if from factories—even what look like steamboats on the lake. But they didn’t respond to the Soyuz ’s radio signals.”

“They could be from any era before the development of radio,” Abdikadir said. “Say, 1850. Even then the population was sizable.”

“Yeah,” Casey growled, pulling up images on his softscreen. “But they have problems of their own right now. They are surrounded by ice. The hinterland has gone—no farmland—and no trade, because there’s nobody to trade with.”

“And where,” Bisesa said slowly, “is the third advanced site?”