Joe Haldeman - The Accidental Time Machine

“Two out of three’s not bad,” Matt said.

It smacked its chest twice. “Dot bad. Good.” It turned to the tree line and roared something. Five others came into the clearing and laid down their spears and clubs.

“Fum Aus’ralia?” it asked.

“No, we’re from here.” La pointed down. “Los Angeles. Twenty-four thousand years ago.”

It looked up at the ship and nodded. “Bime brav’lers.” It turned to the others and repeated the observation in bear language. Then it pointed at Martha and Matt. “Live.” Then at La: “Dead.”

“Not really,” La said. “But I’m not alive, either, the way you appear to be.”

“You know about time machines,” Matt said.

“Sh-ure. Bring in-fu-inza. Most humads die, doe bears. Lods do eat.” It said a long sentence to the other bears, and they laughed in a disturbing way, all snarls and teeth.

“Come bag wi’ us,” the bear said. “We cab dalk.”

“We’ll follow you in the time machine,” La said.

“No.” Its paw swung around faster than the eye could follow. But instead of the paw knocking La’s head off, the pressor field knocked the bear back in a cartoonish backward somersault. When it got back to its feet, the big pressor gun barked and it smacked it to the ground, obviously dead, bones pulverized.

“You two ought to get back up the ramp.” They were already halfway.

The surviving bears were picking up their weapons. “Don’t kill them,” La said. “Knock them down.” The pressor gun did, with a loud quintuple boom, as La walked unhurriedly away.

“I don’t think we’re going to make any progress here.” She took her station. “Might as well push the button.”

“Gladly.”

“You know where we’re headed?” La said. “What position in four-space?”

“We predicted this one was going to be in orbit,” Matt said. “That was going to be a problem.”

“No problem now. Do it.”

Matt pushed the button, and it all went gray except for the face of Jesus. “Stay close to her,” he said. “She is trying to push the button herself. But so far it only works if you do it.”

The Earth was a huge curve above them, and they were dropping up into it.

“How far up are we now?” Martha whispered.

“Call it A.D. 320,000,” Matt said. “Though they might be using a different calendar by now.”

“I mean miles .”

“I don’t know. Hundreds?”

“Three hundred twenty-eight, from sea level,” La said. “Shall we go back and see what’s happening in Australia?”

“They were so friendly there,” Martha said.

“It’s the only place to aim for. I’m getting a strong broad-spectrum carrier wave from the center of the continent. ”

“That’s all, a carrier wave?”

She nodded. “No information, just a position. Eighty minutes.”

“Think I’ll try to nap,” Matt said, not in the mood for a zero-gee romp. Martha nodded and closed her eyes, but she was too agitated to sleep, which probably kept Jesus away.

It was obvious as they approached the continent in their suborbital arc that things were much different. The signal was not coming from the southeastern coastal city; there apparently had been some continent-wide disaster, and as far as the orbital eye could see, there was nothing but ash and slag, giving off a faint aura of gamma rays. Not a trace of plant life.

“The signal’s coming from northeast of here,” La said. “Toward the geometrical center of the continent.”

The ship slewed sideways. “Strap in for de-orbit.”

Coming down was easier, knowing what to expect. When the ship stopped shaking, rattling, and rolling, and started to glide through the lower atmosphere, they could easily see their destination: a two-mile-high obelisk like a silver dagger pointed to the sky. The ground was a plane of tarnished metal.

They rolled to a stop at the base, a couple of hundred yards square, and walked down the ramp. The air was hot and thick and smelled of ashes.

La touched the metal wall. “Platinum. Built to last.”

“Can you read it?” Martha said. The wall was covered up past eye level with incised curlicues that were obviously writing.

“Not yet. I’ve sent a probe around to record and analyze all the markings. The building’s covered with them.”

“Is there a door?” Matt said.

“I’m not sure we’d want to go in. But no, we haven’t found one yet.”

After a couple of minutes, La said, “I’m getting it now. There’s a mathematical Rosetta Stone on the other side.”

“I know about the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Martha said, “but what does the Rosetta Stone have to do with mathematics? ”

“It has to do with language, actually,” La said. “Mathematics is universal, so you can start with logical operators and addition and subtraction and build it into something like a natural language. You put it all on a high-technology artifact like this, and anyone who uses high technology to find it should eventually be able to decipher the language.”

“How long will that take?”

“Maybe thousands of years. More likely, minutes. You could go make a sandwich.”

“I’ll do that,” Matt said, partly out of self-defense since Martha’s idea of a sandwich was pretty basic, and he went up the ramp. But by the time he’d finished, and put the meat and cheese and condiments back into the fridge, La and Martha had followed him up.

“It’s from the future!” Martha said, excited.

“It may be. It is from a time traveler, but he or she or it doesn’t say from which direction, or even whether it came from Earth.”

“So what happened to Australia?”

“It doesn’t say. It notes that this planet used to be the only place humans lived, but there weren’t any here now. After what it called the Truth Wars and the Diaspora, the planet didn’t have any ‘natural’ humans.”

“So what’s an unnatural human?”

“It didn’t say. Maybe something like me. Maybe robots, vampires, werewolves.

“Anyhow, it said it was going out to 61 Cygni. That’s a lot farther than we can go, about eleven light-years. So it came from my future, at least.”

“But it still may have forward-only time travel.” La shrugged.

“Look at the moon,” Martha said.

It was just rising, almost full. But it was like a miniature Earth, blue and brown, white at the poles.

“Terraformed,” Matt said.

“Made like Earth?” Martha said. “Maybe that’s where the people are.”

“It’s not impossible,” La said, “though you’d think the person who made this obelisk would check there before going a million times farther away.”

“It could have been later than the obelisk, though. Matt looked at the artifact, and then the Moon, “Like people came back, but didn’t want to settle on the Earth.”

La nodded. “It’s too radioactive, if it’s all like here. Short-term exposure wouldn’t hurt, but if you settled here, you’d have reproductive problems. Sterility, or at least a high frequency of mutations.”

“So we should look at the Moon,” Martha said. “Can you go that far?”

“Easily. Anywhere in the solar system. But it would be smart to check the rest of the Earth first. Let’s go up into orbit and look around.”

They did one pass in low-Earth orbit, passing North America in a line from Baja California to Maine, all sterile ruins, then back down through Africa, a gray tundra. The radiation wasn’t as bad elsewhere, but there were no signs of human habitation anywhere.

Up in a higher orbit, where they could see the planet as an entire globe, there were still no cities or obvious ports or roads. The gamma radiation diminished to a negligible trace in Africa and most of Asia, but there was still no sign of human life.