The British contingent was in two Nissen huts: twenty men in one, twenty women in the other. They had a committee of three men, three women, and a chairman, and they spent a lot of time trying to regulate sexual relations. It was all very British and messy, uncomfortably between the strict puritanism of the Chinese comrades and the easygoing, if occasionally violent, mores of the Latin Americans and Africans. My unit decided to ignore all that and do what we considered the proper British thing.
We set up an escape committee.
“What the hell are you doing, Matheson?”
I waved my free hand. “Just a minute – ”
It didn’t interrupt my counting. When I’d finished, I put the one-meter line and the two-hundred-and-fifty-gram tin of peas on the table and glanced over my calculations before looking up at Purdie. The young Englishman was on our hut committee and the camp committee, but not the escape committee, which he regarded as a diversion in both senses of the word.
“We’re not on Venus,” I said.
He glanced over his shoulder, as if to confirm that we were still alone in the hut, then sat on a corner of the table.
“How d’you figure that out?”
“Pendulum swing,” I said. “Galileo’s experiment. The gravity here is exactly the same as on Earth. Venus has about eighty percent of the mass of Earth.”
“H’mm,” he said. “Well done. Most people begin by wondering why nothing feels lighter and then put it down to our muscles adapting to the supposed lower gravity. Still, can’t say it’s a surprise, old chap. Some of us reckon they keep us in at night because if we went outside we could see the moon through the cloud cover, and even the least educated of us is aware that Venus doesn’t have a bloody moon.”
“So where are we?” I waved a hand. “It seems a wee bit out of the way, if this is Earth.”
He crooked one leg over the other and lit a cigarette.
“Well, the camp committee has considered that. The usual explanation is that we’re in some unexplored region of a South American jungle, something like what’s-his-name’s The Lost World.”
“Conan Doyle,” I said automatically. I screwed up my eyes against the smoke and the glaring light from the open door of the hut. “Doesn’t seem likely to me.”
“Me neither,” said Purdie cheerfully. “For one thing, the mid-day sun isn’t high enough in the sky for this to be a tropical latitude, but it’s bloody hot. Any other ideas?”
“What if instead we’re in somewhere out of The Time Machine? Well, you know . . . dinosaurs?”
Purdie frowned and probed in his ear with a finger.
“That has come up. Our Russian comrades shot it down in flames. Time travel is ruled out by dialectical materialism, I gather. But I must say, this place does strike me as frightfully Cretaceous, the anomaly of hot-blooded dinosaurs aside. My personal theory is that we’re on a planet around another star, which resembles Earth in the Cretaceous period.”
He cracked a smile. “That, however, implies a vastly more advanced civilization that either isn’t communist or is communist and fights on the side of the imperialists. Neither of which are acceptable speculations to the, ah, leading comrades here, who thus stick with the line that the self-styled Venusians and Martians are the spawn of Nazi medical experiments, or some such.”
“Bollocks,” I said.
Purdie shrugged. “You may well say that, but I wouldn’t. I myself am troubled by the thought that my own theory at least strongly suggests – even if it doesn’t, strictly speaking, require – faster-than-light travel, which is ruled out by Einstein – an authority who to me carries more weight on matters of physics than Engels or Lenin, I’m afraid.”
“Relativity doesn’t rule out time travel,” I said. “Even if dialectical materialism does.”
“And no science whatever rules out lost-world relict dinosaur populations,” said Purdie. He shrugged. “Occam’s razor and all that, keeps up morale, so lost-world is the official line.”
“First I’ve heard of it,” I said. “Nobody’s even suggested we’re not on Venus in the two weeks I’ve been here.”
“Bit of a test, comrade,” he said dryly. He stubbed out his cigarette, hopped off the table, and stuck out his right hand for me to shake. “Congratulations on passing it. Now, how would you like to join the real escape committee?”
The official escape committee had long since worked through and discarded the laughable expedients – tunnels, gliders, and so on – that I and my mates, perhaps over-influenced by such tales of derring-do as The Colditz Story and The Wooden Horse, had earnestly evaluated. The only possibility was for a mass breakout, exploiting the only factor of vulnerability we could see in the camp’s defenses, and one which itself was implicitly part of them: the dinosaur herds. It would also exploit the fact that, as far as we knew, the guards were reluctant to use lethal force on prisoners. So far, at least, they’d only ever turned on us the kind of electrical shock that had knocked out me and my team, and indeed most people here at the time of their capture or subsequent resistance.
The tedious details of how a prison-camp escape attempt is prepared have been often enough recounted in the genre of POW memoirs referred to above, and need not be repeated here. Suffice it to say that about fifty days after my arrival, the preparations were complete. From then on, all those involved in the scheme waited hourly for the approach of a suitably large herd, and on the second day of our readiness, conveniently soon after breakfast, one arrived.
About a score of the great beasts: bulls, cows, and calves, their tree-trunk-thick legs striding across the plain, their tree-top-high heads swaying to sniff and stooping to browse, were marching straight towards the eastern fence of the camp, which lay athwart their route to the river. The guards were just bestirring themselves to rack up the setting on their plasma rifles when the riot started.
At the western end of the camp a couple of Chinese women started screaming, and on this cue scores of other prisoners rushed to surround them and pile in to a highly realistic and noisy fight. Guards from the perimeter patrol raced towards them, and were immediately turned on and overwhelmed by a further crowd that just kept on coming, leaping or stepping over those who’d fallen to the low-level electric blasts. At that the guards from the watchtowers on that side began to descend, some of them firing.
My team was set for the actual escape, not the diversion. I was crouched behind the door of our hut with Murdo, Andy, Neil, Donald, and a dozen others, including Purdie. We’d grabbed our stashed supplies and our improvised tools, and now awaited our chance. Another human wave assault, this time a crowd of Russians heading for the fence where the guards were belatedly turning to face the oncoming dinosaurs, thundered past. We dashed out behind them and ran for an empty food-delivery truck, temporarily unguarded. It even had a plasma-rifle, which I instantly commandeered, racked inside.
The Russians swarmed up the wire, standing on each others shoulders like acrobats. The guards, trying to deal with them and the dinosaurs, failed to cope with both. A bull dinosaur brought down the fence and two watchtowers, and by the time he’d been himself laid low with concerted plasma fire, we’d driven over the remains of the fence and hordes of prisoners were fleeing in every direction.
Within minutes the first bombers arrived, skimming low, rounding up the escapees. They missed us, perhaps because they’d mistaken the truck – a very standard US Army Dodge – for one of their own. We abandoned it at the foot of the cliffs, scaled them in half an hour of frantic scrambling up corries and chimneys, and by the time the bombers came looking for us we’d disappeared into the trees.
Heat, damp, thorns, and very large dragonflies. Apart from that last and the small dinosaurlike animals – some, to our astonishment, with feathers – scuttling through the undergrowth, the place didn’t look like another planet, or even the remote past. Since my knowledge of what the remote past was supposed to look like was derived entirely from dim memories of Look and Learn and slightly fr
esher memories of a stroll through the geological wing of the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, this wasn’t saying much. I vaguely expected giant ferns and cycads and so forth and found perfectly recognizable conifers, oaks, and maples. The flowers were less instantly recognizable but didn’t look particularly primitive or exotic.
I shared these thoughts with Purdie, who laughed.
“You’re thinking of the Carboniferous, old chap,” he said. “This is all solidly Cretaceous, so far.”
“Could be modern,” I said.
“Apart from the animals,” he pointed out, as though this wasn’t obvious. “And as I said, it’s not tropical, but it’s too bloody hot to be a temperate latitude.”
I glanced back. Our little column was plodding along behind us. We were heading in an approximately upward direction, on a reasonably gentle slope.
“I’ve thought about this,” I said. “What if this whole area is some kind of artificial reserve in North America? If it’s possible to genetically . . . engineer, I suppose would be the word . . . different kinds of humans, why shouldn’t it be possible to do the same with birds and lizards and so on, and make a sort of botched copy of dinosaurs?”
“And keep it all under some vast artificial cloud canopy?” He snorted. “You overestimate the imperialists, let alone the Nazi scientists, comrade.”
“Maybe we’re under a huge dome,” I said, not entirely seriously. I looked up at the low sky, which seemed barely higher than the tree-tops. It really had become lower since we’d arrived. “Buckminster Fuller had plans that were less ambitious than that.”
Purdie wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Now that,” he said, “is quite a plausible suggestion. It sure feels like we’re in a bloody greenhouse. Mind you, none of us saw anything like that from the bomber.”
“That was a screen, not a window.”
“Hmm. A remarkably realistic screen, in that case. Back to implausibly advanced technology.”
We wouldn’t have to speculate for long, because our course was taking us directly up to the cloud level, which we reached within an hour or so. I assigned my lads the task of guiding the others, who were quite unfamiliar with the techniques of low-visibility walking, and we all headed on up. First wisps then dense damp billows of fog surrounded us. I led the way and moved forward cautiously, whistling signals back and forth. Behind me I could just see Purdie and two of the English women comrades. Underfoot the ground became grassier, and around us the trees became shorter and the bushes more sparse. The only way to follow a particular direction was to go upslope, and that – with a few inevitable wrong turnings that led us into declivities – we did.
The fog thinned. Clutching the plasma rifle, hoping I had correctly figured out how to use it, I walked forward and up and into clear air. A breeze blew refreshingly into my face, and as I glanced back I saw that it had pushed back the fog and revealed all of our straggling party. We were on one of the wide, rounded hilltops I’d seen from the bomber. In the far distance I could see other green islands above the clouds. The sky was blue, the sun was bright.
All around us, people rose out of the long grass, aiming plasma rifles. I dropped mine and raised my hands.
About a hundred meters in front of us was the wire fence of another camp.
We went into the camp without resistance, but without being searched or, in my case, disarmed: I was told to pick up my rifle and sling it over my shoulder. The people were human beings like us, but they were weird. They spoke English, in strange accents and with a lot of unfamiliar words. Several of them were colored or half-caste, but their accents were as English as those of the rest. I found myself walking beside a young woman with part of her hair dyed violet. I knew it was a dye because it was growing out: the roots were black. She had several rings and studs in her ear and not just in the earlobe. She was wearing baggy grey trousers with pockets at the thighs and a silky scarlet sleeveless top with a silver patch shaped like a rabbit. Around her bicep was a tattoo of thorns. Under her tarty make-up her face was quite attractive. Her teeth looked amazingly white and even, like an American’s.
“My name’s Tracy,” she said. She had some kind of Northern English accent; I couldn’t place it more than that. “You?”
Name, rank, serial number . . .
“Where you from?”
Name, rank, serial number . . .
“Forget that,” she said. “You’re not a prisoner.”
A massive gate made from logs and barbed wire was being pushed shut behind us. Nissen huts inside a big square of fence, a bomber parked just outside it.
“Oh no?” I said.
“Keeps the fucking dinosaurs out, dunnit?”
Somebody handed me a tin mug of tea, black with a lot of sugar. I sipped it and looked around. If this was a camp it was one where the prisoners had guns.
Or one run by trusties . . . I was still suspicious.
“Where are the aliens?” I asked.
“The what?”
“The Venusians, the Martians . . .” I held my free hand above my head, then at chest height.
Tracy laughed. “Is that what they told you?”
I nodded. “Not sure if I believe them, though.”
She was still chuckling. “You lot must be from Commie World. Never built the rockets, right?”
“The Russians have rockets,” I said, with some indignation. “The biggest in the world – they have a range of hundreds of kilometers!”
“Exactly. No ICBMs.” She smiled at my frown. “Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles. None of them, and no space-probes. Jeez. You could still half believe this might be Venus, with jungles and tall Aryans. And that the Grays are Martians.”
“Well, what are they?” I asked, becoming irritated by her smug teasing.
“Time travelers,” she said. “From the future.” She shivered slightly. “From another world’s future. The ones you call the Venusians are from about half a million years up ahead of the twentieth century, the Grays are from maybe five million. In your world’s twentieth century they fly bombers and fight Commies. In mine they’re just responsible for flying saucers, alien abductions, cattle mutilations, and odd-sock phenomena.”
I let this incomprehensibility pass.
“So where are we now?”
I meant the camp. I knew where we were in general, but that was what she answered.
“This, Johnny-boy, is the past. They can never go back to the same future, but they can go back to the same place in the past, where they can make no difference. The common past, the past of us all – the Cretaceous.”
She looked at me with a bit more sympathy. My companions were finishing off their tea and gazing around, looking as baffled and edgy as I felt. The other prisoners, if that was what they were, gathered around us seemed more alien than the bomber pilots.
“Come on,” Tracy said, gesturing towards some rows of seats in front of which a table had been dragged. “Debriefing time. You have a lot to learn.”
I have learned a lot.
I tug the reins and the big Clydesdale turns, and as I follow the plough around I see a porpoise leap in the choppy water of the Moray Firth. My hands and back are sore but I’m getting used to it, and the black soil here is rich and arable after the trees have been cut down and their stumps dynamited. The erratic boulders have been cleared away long ago, by the long-dead first farmers of this land, and no glaciers have revisited it since its last farmers passed away. The rougher ground is pasture, grazed by half-wild long-horns, a rugged synthetic species. The village is stockaded on a hilltop nearby. We have no human enemies, but wolves, bears, and lions prowl the forests and moors. We are not barbarians – the plough that turns the furrow I walk has an iron blade, and the revolver on my hip was made in Hartford, Connecticut, millennia ago and worlds away. The post-humans settled us – and other colonies – on this empty Earth with machinery and medicines, weapons and tools and libraries, and enough partly used ball-point pens to keep us all sc
ribbling until our descendants can make their own.
On countless other empty Earths they have done the same. Somewhere unreachable, but close to hand, another man, perhaps another John Matheson, may be tramping a slightly different furrow. I wish him well.
There are many possible worlds, and in almost all of them humanity didn’t survive the time from which most of us have been taken. Either the United States and the Soviet Union destroyed each other and the rest of civilization in an atomic war in the fifties or sixties, or they didn’t, and the collapse of the socialist states in the late twentieth century so discredited socialism and international cooperation that humanity failed utterly to unite in time to forestall the environmental disasters of the twenty-first.
In a few, a very few possible worlds, enough scattered remnants of humanity survived as savages to eventually – hundreds of thousands of years later – become the ancestors of the post-human species we called the Venusians. Who in turn – millions of years later – themselves gave rise to the post-human clade we called the Martians. It was the latter who discovered time travel and, with it, some deep knowledge about the future and past of the universe.
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