Joe Haldeman - The Accidental Time Machine

Jesus was nodding as they faded back into the sleeping darkness.

La’s amplified voice woke them. “We’re approaching the Moon. Better come strap in.”

The Moon loomed ahead, looking curiously “wrong,” like Earth viewed through a distorting lens. Matt’s science knowledge sorted most of it out: The horizon was too close; the sky looked odd because the air was so dry, and the atmospheric gradient was less steep, which also explained the absence of large cloud masses. There were perfectly round lakes everywhere, craters filled with water, but no large seas.

“It’s funny,” he said to La. “If you took an old map of the Moon and distributed water evenly around it, there would be oceans. At least as much sea surface as land.”

“It must be artificially maintained,” La said. “They keep the water in small lakes because there’s not enough to fill an ocean bed. Oceanus Procellarum and Mare Imbrium would make huge mud puddles. Maybe quicksand. Then dry out.”

“It’s still beautiful,” Martha said. Velvet green, ochre desert, pure white snowcap. The mountaintops a sparkling chain of frost.

Highly magnified pictures of the surface appeared and faded on the screen. “No sign of human habitation,” La said. “Or talking bears or flocks of carnivorous lizards. But the atmosphere is breathable, like a high mountain on Earth. There could be surprises. Better be armed away from the ship.”

Matt thought about what the Jesus apparition had said. If La, rather than the Moon, had a surprise in store for him, his old pistol and a few rounds of ammunition weren’t going to do much.

Landing with atmospheric braking took longer than for Earth, and wasn’t as violent. Out of curiosity, La took them to the last place she had visited on the Moon, Aitken City, but there weren’t even any ruins left after so long, just grassland and a wide lake.

“They were making plans for that back in the twenty-first, ” Matt said. “Did they build underground?”

“They did at first. By the time I got there, they had a force-field dome over everything, so radiation wasn’t a problem.

“Not that I was ‘there’ in the sense that you would be. I’d given up my body long before.” They eased down by the shore of the lake. “Over a quarter of a million years, and it seems like yesterday.” Matt couldn’t tell if she was kidding.

Their ears popped as the ramp went down. “Why don’t you lovers take a stroll? You haven’t been actually alone in a long time. Take the pistol, though. I’ll have the ship go into danger mode if it hears a shot.”

“Thanks.” He felt uneasy, leaving the time machine behind. But she wasn’t going to leave them stranded as long as she needed his thumb … which gave him a macabre thought he didn’t want to linger on. In his home time, people had been murdered for their door-opening thumbs.

They walked down the ramp, bouncing in the lunar gravity. It was cold, barely freezing. The grass crunched under their feet.

“I wonder why it isn’t colder,” Martha said. “It looked like we were pretty close to that ice cap.”

“I think it’s the smallness of the world, along with the slow rotation, mild weather. Long time since I studied it.”

They walked to the edge of the water. Matt followed an ancient impulse and picked up a smooth rock and spun it out over the water’s surface. It went a long way between skips, almost to the horizon.

“Are we far enough away to talk?”

“I don’t know. That she suggested we leave makes me suspicious. But yeah. What do you think?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you.”

“You’re clear on the Jesus part?”

“That was just to get my attention?”

“And confidence. Some of those guys look pretty strange.”

“Demonic. Why do you think they only appear in dreams?”

“Well, La can’t read our thoughts,” he said.

“She can’t invade our dreams, either. So they’re more powerful than her, that way.”

“But they can’t physically intercede. I think that’s because they’re still in our future. Just my guess. They can only send information back, not solid matter.”

There was a long pause, just the quiet lapping of the water. “Does that mean … we’re never going back? It really is impossible?”

He threw out another stone. It sank after one skip, “I’m trying to recall the exact wording.”

“They said they had to catch up with us. That doesn’t sound like they’re in our future. Could it mean distance?”

“I don’t know. But distance is our problem. After a few more jumps, we’ll be too far from Earth to return in one lifetime.”

Staring into the water, she shook her head sadly. “We’d never want to go back there, anyhow.”

She stood closer to him, her shoulder touching his arm. He put his arm around her, and it was a good thing it was his left.

Where the stone had sunk, a huge creature surged out of the water, bigger than a car, all claws and wriggling feelers. A stink of rotten vegetation.

Matt fired at it twice; the second bullet trilled off in a ricochet. Then he remembered what La had said, and pulled Martha to the ground.

When the pressor beam went over them, it felt like a hot wind. It parted the water and hit the creature with explosive force, flipping it over, exposing dozens of wriggling legs.

“Come back,” La’s amplified voice shouted. They had figured that out, and were back on their feet, running hard.

They were both gasping huge, ragged breaths by the time they collapsed on the ramp. It lifted them up, not too slowly.

La was standing, looking out over the water. “That thing was mechanical,” she said. “Maybe a defensive robot.”

“Maybe a fun amusement-park thing,” Matt said, panting. “God knows what amused the people back then. Up then. Whatever.”

“It might be a hundred thousand years old,” La said, “Two hundred thousand. Can you imagine a self-repairing machine lasting for so long?”

“Maybe it’s not self-repairing,” Matt said. “We just haven’t met the people who maintain it.”

“They’re extremely well hidden. What are they hiding for?”

“From,” Martha said quietly. “What are they hiding from, that they need a monster like that?”

“An excellent point. Perhaps we should move along.”

“We should be safe in here,” Matt said, stalling. “We ought to wait and see what happens.”

La gave him an inscrutable look. “Matt, this science could be as far ahead of mine as mine is from primates learning to use sticks. I’m not sure we care to test what they can do.”

He looked at Martha and nodded slowly. “Can’t fight the logic of that. Except that futuristic science is exactly what we’re looking for. Maybe they have mastered backward time travel, and that’s where they all are. Vacationing back in the good old days.”

“This is not a time to joke. We should push the button and get out of here.”

“We could get out of the immediate vicinity by taking off and going into orbit.”

“That would not get us out of danger. Even in my time, it would be trivially easy to knock this thing out of orbit.”

Matt had run out of counterarguments. “You’re right, of course. Let’s strap in, Martha.”

“How far are we going this time?”

“A couple of hundred thousand miles. From Earth, that would have been cislunar space, closer than the Moon. And 3.5 million years.”

“Earth will be a lot different?”

“Maybe better.” He waited for the click of her harness. “Let’s go see.”

Out of the gray swirl, the man who had been Jesus. He was dressed in something like medieval mail. The others were behind him, similarly attired. “Come to Earth as quickly as possible. We’ll find you.”