Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

Captain Grove said, “What’s your point, sir?”

“That these men may come from a different time, a time more remote than any Pashtun.”

The two strangers listened to this conversation, mouths open. Then they jabbered excitedly, wide-eyed with fear, unable to drag their gaze from the sepoys’ guns.

“That sounds like Greek,” Ruddy muttered.

Josh said, “Greeks? In India?”

Bisesa held her phone up to the strangers. “Phone, can you—”

“I’m smart technology, but not that smart,” the phone said. “I think it’s some archaic dialect.”

Cecil de Morgan stepped out of the crowd, adjusting his mud-spattered morning jacket with an easy self-awareness. “A rather fine education was once wasted on me. I still recall a little of my Euripides …” He spoke rapidly to the strangers. They jabbered back. De Morgan held his hands up, obviously telling them to slow down, and spoke again.

After a minute of this de Morgan turned to Grove. “I think we’re getting through, Captain, if imperfectly.”

Grove said, “Ask them where they’re from. And when. ”

Ruddy said, “They wouldn’t understand the question, Captain. And we probably wouldn’t understand the answer.”

Grove nodded; Bisesa admired his imperturbability. “Then ask them who commands them.”

It took de Morgan a couple of tries to get that across. But Bisesa could understand the answer without interpretation.

“Al-e-han-dreh! Al-e-han-dreh! …”

Abdikadir stepped forward, his eyes alive with a wild surmise. “He did come this way. Is it possible? Is it possible ? …”

The retro-rocket burn was brief, a push in the back. But it was enough to knock them out of orbit.

So it was done, the decision made, and whatever remained of Kolya’s life—minutes or years—was irrevocably shaped as a consequence.

After launch, reentry was the most dangerous part of a space mission, for the great energies expended to inject them into orbit now had to be dissipated in friction against the air. The only in-flight casualties of Kolya’s country’s space program had occurred at reentry, and he remembered those poor cosmonauts in his heart now, as he remembered the crew of the lost space shuttle Columbia . But there was nothing to do but wait. The Soyuz was designed to bring itself home without support from the ground, or instructions from its crew. Kolya, who had been trained as a pilot, longed to be less a passenger, to be more in control of events—to have a joystick in front of him, to do something to bring the ship home.

He glanced out of his window. The tangled jungles of South America, laced by cloud, passed for the last time beneath the prow of the spaceship. He wondered if anybody would ever see such a sight again—and how soon it would be before even the existence of such a place as this remote continent was forgotten. But as the Soyuz passed over the Americas toward the Atlantic he saw a storm, a creamy-white spiral, that sat like an immense spider across the Gulf of Mexico. Minor storms spun off across the Caribbean islands, Florida, Texas and Mexico. These children of the monster in the Gulf were themselves devastatingly powerful, and had scratched deep gouges into the forest that covered central America. Worse, the central mother storm system was itself edging north, and surely little would be spared from Houston to New Orleans. This was the second superstorm system they had seen in the last few days—the remnants of the first were still coursing across the eastern United States and the western Atlantic. But there was nothing the cosmonauts could do for anybody on the ground, not even warn them.

Right on time there was a series of bangs from above and below. The craft shuddered, feeling subtly lighter. Explosive bolts had detonated, jettisoning the descent compartment from the other two sections of the Soyuz: the rocket engines and their garbage would now burn up like meteors, to baffle whoever was down there on the ground.

They endured the next few minutes in a silence broken only by the ticking of their instruments, the humming of the air supply. But the small noises of the various gadgets were almost cozy, like being in a home workshop, Kolya thought. He knew he was going to miss this environment.

As they fell across the sky, the resistance of the thickening air began to bite. Kolya watched the deceleration build up on the meter before him: 0.1 g, 0.2 g. Soon he began to feel it. Pushed back into his couch, his straps felt loose, and he tightened them. But the rise in pressure wasn’t steady; the upper atmosphere was lumpy, and the compartment shuddered as it fell, like an airliner passing through turbulence. Kolya was aware, as he had been during no previous descent, of the smallness and fragility of the capsule within which he was falling to the ground.

Through his window now he could see only the blackness of space. But a deep color seeped into that blackness: first brown, like old, dried blood, but quickly lighter, climbing the spectrum through red, orange, yellow. As the air thickened the deceleration became savage, rising rapidly through a single gravity and climbing to two, three, four g’s. The light outside, of atoms of air smashed to bits by their passage, climbed to white now, and a pearly glow shone through the windows, casting a pale, beautiful illumination over their suited laps. It was like being inside a fluorescent lightbulb, he thought. But the windows blackened as the outside of the capsule was scorched by the ionized air, and the angelic light was obscured.

And still the buffeting continued. The capsule shuddered, throwing them from side to side and against each other, despite the straps. It was a much more severe ride even than the launch had been, and after three months in space Kolya wasn’t well equipped to cope with it. He found it hard even to breathe, and he knew that he could not have lifted a finger, no matter how urgent the task.

At last the ride smoothed out. There was another sharp bang from outside the wall, startling him. A window shield had blown off, taking the soot with it, to reveal a slab of startlingly clear blue sky. Not the sky of Earth: the sky of a new world, the sky of Mir.

The first parachute deployed, a drogue that snatched at the air. The descent compartment swung violently, through two, three, four swings, and then the main chute yanked at the capsule, making it rock again. Kolya could just make out the wide orange canopy of the main chute above him. It was hard to believe it was only ten minutes or so since they had jettisoned the other parts of the Soyuz , perhaps five since first entering the atmosphere. He could feel gravity’s invisible fingers pulling at his internal organs: even his head was heavy, as if made of concrete, too heavy for his neck. But he felt only a huge relief; the most dangerous part of the descent was already over.

As touchdown approached compressed gas hissed. Kolya found his seat rising up as its base was pressurized to serve as a shock absorber, pushing him up against the instrument console and increasing his discomfort further.

“Christ,” Sable growled, similarly squashed up, “I will be so damn glad to get out of this tractor cabin.”

“It has served you well,” was Musa’s level reply. “Only a few minutes more.”

But Kolya relished those minutes, uncomfortable as he was: the last minutes in which the ship’s automated systems cushioned him, perhaps the last minutes of his old life.

“Proximity light,” called Musa.

Kolya braced. There was a brief roar as rockets fired, just a couple of meters from the ground. And then there was a slam as they hit the ground—and bounced up again. After a breathless second the cabin came down again, scraped loudly, and leapt into the air once more with a shudder. Kolya knew what that meant: the Soyuz was being dragged over the ground by its parachute.