Joe Haldeman - The Accidental Time Machine

“Yes. No one alive speaks anything like your language. People, physical people, are also cautious about coming into contact with you. There has been no disease in about twenty thousand years, except for an outbreak of influenza brought by a time traveler.”

“From the past, or the future?” Matt asked.

“Always from the past. If people have come from the future, they’ve kept it secret.” He looked closely at Matt. “You’re not from the future?”

“No, I’m from the 2050s.”

“As I told you,” La said, with a trace of asperity.

“Well, you look like you could be from the future. Dressed like that. And the way your ship is armed.”

“It helps,” Matt said, “when you run into huge flying reptiles with teeth.”

“Oh … you were up there, what you’d call Indonesia. That was not a great success.”

“Bioengineering?” La said.

“In a way. Sort of an amusement park, which turned out too dangerous to be really amusing.

“We’ve been more successful, working with species that already exist. In Africa, we have elephants and apes and such with augmented intelligence; they’re delightful. Starting from scratch, as we did with the dinosaurs and Martians … you’d think they’d be easier to control, but they aren’t; they tend to go their own way.”

“You’ve made Martians on Earth?” Matt said.

He squinted, an unreadable expression. “Why would you want to do that? On Mars, of course. Big puffballs that bounce around and keep to themselves. They stopped talking to us centuries ago, millennia. And their language now, if it is still a language, is incomprehensible.”

After an uncomfortable silence, La said, “Can you take us to someone in authority?”

“No. You can’t come into the city’s biosphere. And no one’s coming out here. Some were in favor of destroying you, to make sure you couldn’t infect us. But more wanted to investigate you.”

“That’s good. Shall we begin the investigation?”

“It’s over. You may go.” He tilted his head, as if listening to something. “I think you’d better go, now. Where did you come from, in the past?”

“Los Angeles.”

“Go there. You’ll find it amusing.”

“Will the people there be expecting us?”

“There are no people there. Nowhere but down here. Go now.” He disappeared.

“We should take him at his word,” La said. “I suspect we’re in more danger here than we were from the dinosaurs. ”

They hurried up the ramp and strapped in.

“This could be a little bumpy,” La said. “We’re going suborbital.” Three bells rang, and then the machine roared. Matthew and Martha were pushed back into the cushions by several gees.

La looked back at them, unaffected. “This will only take a couple of minutes,” she shouted. “Then we’ll coast.”

“What’s going on?” Martha screamed.

“It’s just a different kind of flying,” Matt shouted. “A lot faster. When it ends, we’ll be weightless for a while.”

“How can you be weightless ?”

“You’ll enjoy it,” he said hopefully. He knew people who really didn’t. He’d done it once, and barely kept his lunch down.

The ship was suddenly silent, and they were floating free.

“You can undo your straps and move around,” La said. “Just be strapped in before reentry, about forty minutes.”

Martha unclicked and drifted free. “Oh my,” she said. “It’s like being on a swing!”

“Yeah, exactly,” Matt said, choking back gastric juices. He was glad he hadn’t eaten in hours.

She closed her eyes and shuddered all over, smiling, hugging herself. Was she having an orgasm? Her first?

She grabbed her knees and rotated slowly. “Oh … this is glorious. Matt?”

“It’s … it’s really fine.” He needed a drink of water in the worst way. Would the faucets work? “La? I need—”

“Bottled water in the fridge.”

He clambered over the acceleration couch and pushed himself in that direction, which unfortunately caused him to rotate backward. After two and a half turns, he was able to snag the galley door, then drift toward the fridge.

“Bring me one?” Martha called.

“Sure.” He got the top off one and stopped spinning by grabbing on to the fridge handle. He drank greedily from it and snorted some out his nose, which caused some dignified sneezing, coughing, and retching. A small universe, globules of water, saliva, and snot, radiated away from him. But the nausea passed, and he kicked himself gently back into the control room, a bottle of water in each hand.

Martha squeezed the bottle experimentally, and a string of globes floated free, flexing in and out of globular symmetry. “Have you ever seen anything like that?” He had, but it from was somebody else’s missed barf bag.

“Don’t do too much of that,” La said. “It all winds up on the floor.”

“Oh—of course it will.” She chased after a bubble and bit it.

Matt discreetly crawled back into the seat and belted himself in while Martha cavorted. He drank the whole bottle of water and hoped there would be gravity again before he had to urinate.

After what seemed to Matt like more than forty minutes, La told Martha to strap herself back in.

“We have to use atmospheric braking.” They slammed into the atmosphere, and the machine shook violently, making disturbing noises, while the view of Earth dissolved into orange glow.

They were flying over what seemed to be unbroken forest. “This was deep in the middle of LA when it was me,” La said. They slowed, losing altitude and banking.

Abrupt cliffs fell into the sea. “You would expect ruins, at least,” she said.

“I don’t know,” Matt said. “Even the Pyramids were wearing down after a few thousand years. After twenty-four thousand, they probably wouldn’t even be bumps.”

“There’s someone. Or something.” She banked toward a clearing where several small figures were running for the woods. Their approach would be pretty dramatic, screaming in out of an empty sky.

They eased down onto a soft meadow. “Defense,” she said, and with an oiled-metal sound, the gun barrels and lasers and pressors slid out.

“You don’t have to come with me,” she said. “But we should be safe even from dinosaurs.”

The three went down the ramp together, into the smell of pine and wildflowers. “We don’t look very friendly,” Martha said, looking back at the ship.

“Maybe we don’t want to,” Matt said. “There may not be any humans here, by that guy’s definition, but those were upright bipeds.”

“Smart enough to run away from us,” La said. “Let’s see whether they’re curious enough to come back.”

After a few minutes, one of them did. It was a bear, peering at them from behind a tree.

A sort of bear. It held a long spear with a metal tip and held it using an opposable thumb-claw. It stepped into the clearing, exposing a broad leather belt, from which hung two knives, large and small, and a pot and a frying pan.

It turned and spoke, or growled, quietly, to unseen companions, and they could see it was wearing a leather backpack with a tarred leather canteen attached.

It took a few steps toward them, then jammed its spear point first into the ground. It took a few more steps and stood still, facing them, arms folded.

“Do you speak English?” La said.

It growled at her, but the growl seemed gentle, and articulated, like language.

“Can you analyze that?” Matt said.

“Not without any referent. He might be saying that you smell good enough to eat.”

Matt touched his chest. “Matt.”

The bear looked at him for a moment, then touched its own chest. “Bear.” It pointed at Matt. “Mad.” Then at La and Martha. “Womads.”