The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  As she picked over the bivalves with the fascination of a child, Hilary’s face, with her cropped hair plastered flat by the water, shone with pleasure at her simple achievement. We were quite alone on that beach — we might have been the only two humans in all that Palaeocene world — and I could feel the sparkle of every bead of perspiration on my scalp, the rasp of every grain of sand against my shins. And it was all suffused by the animal warmth of the woman beside me; it was as if the Multiple Worlds through which I had traveled had collapsed down to this single moment of vividness to Here and Now.

  I wanted to communicate something of this to Hilary. “You know—”

  But she had straightened up, and turned her face to the Sea. “Listen.”

  I gazed about, baffled, at the forest’s edge, the lapping Sea, the lofty emptiness of the sky. The only sounds were the rustle of a soft breeze in the forest canopy, and the gentle gurgle of the lapping wavelets. “Listen to what?”

  Her expression had become hard and suspicious — the face of the soldier, intelligent and fearful. “Single-engined,” she said, her concentration apparent. “That’s a Daimler-Benz DB — a twelve-cylinder, I think…” She jumped to her feet and pressed her hands to her brow, shielding her eyes.

  And then I heard it too, my older ears following hers. It was a distant thrum — like some immense, remote insect — which came drifting to us off the Sea.

  “Look,” Hilary said, pointing. “Out there. Can you see it?”

  I sighted along Hilary’s arm, and was rewarded with a glimpse of something: a distortion, hanging over the Sea, far to the east. It was a patch of otherness — a whorl no bigger than the full moon, a kind of sparkling refraction tinged with green.

  Then I had an impression of something solid in the middle of it all, congealing and spinning — and then there was a hard, dark shape, like a cross, which came hurtling low out of the sky — from the east, from the direction of a Germany yet to be born. That thrumming noise grew much louder.

  “My God,” Hilary Bond said. “It is a Messerschmitt — an Eagle; it looks like a Bf 109F…”

  “Messerschmitt… That’s a German name,” I said, rather stupidly.

  She glanced at me. “Of course it’s a German name. Don’t you understand?”

  “What?”

  “That’s a German plane. It is die Zeitmaschine, come to hunt us down!”

  As it approached the coast, the craft tipped in the air, like a seagull in flight, and began to run parallel to the Sea’s edge. With a noisy whoosh, and so fast that Hilary and I were forced to swivel on the sand to follow its progress, it passed over our heads, not a hundred feet from the ground.

  The machine was some thirty feet long, and perhaps a little more from wing-tip to wing-tip. A propeller whirled at its nose, blurred by speed. The craft’s underside was painted blue-gray, and its upper sections were done out in mottled brown and green. Strident black crosses on the fuselages and wings marked the craft’s country of origin, and there were more gaudy militaristic designs on the painted skin, of an eagle’s head, an upraised sword, and so on. The underside was quite smooth, save for the craft’s single load: a tear-drop mass of metal perhaps six feet long, painted in the ubiquitous blue.

  For some moments Bond and I stood there, as stunned by this sudden apparition as if by some religious visitation.

  The excitable young man buried inside me — the shade of poor, lost Moses — thrilled at the sight of that elegant machine. What an adventure for that pilot! What a glorious view! And what extraordinary courage it must have taken to haul that machine into the smoke-blackened air of 1944 Germany — to take that plane so high that the landscape of the heart of Europe would be reduced to a kind of map, a textured table-top coated with sand and sea and forest, and tiny, doll-like people — and then to close the switch which launched the craft into time. I imagined how the sun would arc over the ship like a meteorite, while beneath the prow, the landscape, made plastic by time, would flow and deform…

  Then the gleaming wings tipped again, and the propeller’s noise came crashing down over us. The craft swooped upwards and away, over the forest and in the direction of the Expeditionary Force.

  Hilary ran up the beach, and her uneven limping left asymmetric craters in the sand.

  “Where are you going?”

  She reached her boots, and began to haul them on roughly, ignoring her socks. “To the camp, of course.”

  “But…” I stared at our small, pathetic pile of bivalves. “But you can’t outrun that Messerschmitt. What will you do?”

  She picked up her hand-gun and stood up straight. For answer, she looked at me, her expression blank. And then she turned and shoved her way through the fringe of palm trees which lined the edge of the forest, and disappeared into the shadows of the dipterocarps.

  The noise of the Messerschmitt aircraft was fading, absorbed by the forest canopy. I was alone on the beach, with the bivalves and the lapping of the surf.

  It all seemed quite unreal: War, imported to this Palaeocene idyll? I felt no fear — nothing but a sense of bizarre dislocation.

  I shook off my immobility, and prepared to follow Bond into the forest.

  I had not even reached my boots when a small, liquid voice came floating across the sand to me: “…No!… go to the water…no!…”

  It was Nebogipfel: the Morlock came stumbling across the sand towards me, his improvised crutch digging a series of deep, narrow pits. I saw how a loose edge of his face-mask flapped as he staggered along.

  “What is it? Can’t you see what’s happening? Die Zeitmaschine—”

  “The water.” He leaned on his crutch, as limp as a rag doll, and his panting tore at his frame. His wheezing had grown so pronounced that his syllables were barely distinguishable. “The water… we must get in the…”

  “This is no time for a swim, man!” I bellowed, indignant. “Can’t you see—”

  “Do not understand,” he gasped. “You. You do not… Come…”

  I turned, abstracted, and looked over the forest. Now I could see the elusive form of die Zeitmaschine as it skimmed over the tree-tops, its green and blue paint making vivid splashes against the foliage. Its speed was extraordinary, and its distant noise was like an insect’s angry buzz.

  Then I heard the staccato cough of artillery pieces, and the whistle of shells.

  “They’re fighting back,” I said to Nebogipfel, caught up by this spark of War. “Can you see? The flying machine has evidently spotted the Expeditionary Force, but they are firing off their guns at it…”

  “The Sea,” Nebogipfel said. He plucked at my arm with fingers as feeble as a baby’s, and it was a gesture of such immediacy, such pleading, that I had to tear my eyes from the aerial battle. The grubby slit-mask exposed mere slivers of his eyes, and his mouth was a down-turned, quivering gash. “It is the only shelter close enough. It might be sufficient…”

  “Shelter? The battle is two miles away. How can we be hurt, standing here on this empty beach?”

  “But the Bomb… the Bomb carried by the German; did you not see it?…” His hair was lank against his small skull. “The Bombs of this History are not sophisticated — little more than lumps of pure Carolinum… But they are effective enough, for all that.

  “There is nothing you can do for the Expedition! — not now… we must wait until the battle is done.” He stared up at me. “Can you see that? Come,” he said, and he tugged, again, at my arm. He had dropped his crutch, now, so that my arm was supporting him.

  Like a child, I allowed myself to be led into the water.

  Soon we had reached a depth of four feet or more. The Morlock was covered up to his shoulders; he bade me crouch down, so that I, too, was more or less immersed in salt water.

  Over the forest, the Messerschmitt banked and came back for another pass, swooping like some predatory bird of metal and oil; the artillery pieces shouted up at die Zeitmaschine, and shells burst into clouds of smoke, which drifted off thr
ough the Palaeocene air.

  I admit that I thrilled to this aerial contest — the first I had witnessed. My mind raced with visions of the extended conflicts in the air which must have filled the skies over Europe in 1944: I saw men who rode upon the wind, and slough and fell like Milton’s angels. This was the Apotheosis of War, I thought: what was the brutish squalor of the trenches beside this lofty triumph, this headlong swoop to glory or death?

  Now the Messerschmitt spiraled away from the bursting shells, almost lazily, and began to climb higher. At the top of this maneuver, it seemed to hover just for a moment, hundreds of feet above the earth.

  Then I saw the Bomb — that deadly blue-painted metal pod detach from its parent, quite delicately, and it began its fall to earth.

  A single shell arced up, out of the forest, and it punched a hole in the wing of the flying machine. There was an eruption of flame, and die Zeitmaschine looped crazily away, enveloped by smoke.

  I emitted a whoop. “Good shooting! Nebogipfel — did you see that?”

  But the Morlock had reached up out of the Sea, and hauled with his soft hands at my head. “Down,” he said. “Get down into the water…”

  My last glimpse of the battle was of the trail of smoke which marked the path of the tumbling Messerschmitt — and, before it, a glowing star, already almost too bright to look at, which was the falling Bomb.

  I ducked my head into the Sea.

  [11]

  The Bomb

  In an instant, the gentle light of the Palaeocene sun was banished. A crimson-purple glare flooded the air above the water’s surface. An immense, complex sound crashed over me: it was founded on the crack of a great explosion, but all overlaid by a roaring, and by a noise of smashing and tearing. All of this was diluted by the few inches of water above me, but still it was so loud that I was forced to press my hands to my ears; I called out, and bubbles escaped from my mouth and brushed against my face.

  That initial crack subsided, but the roaring went on and on. My air was soon done, and I was forced to push my head above the water. I gasped, and shook water from my eyes.

  The noise was extraordinarily loud. The light from the forest was too bright to look into, but my dazzled eyes had an impression of a great ball of crimson fire that seemed to be whirling about, in the middle of the forest, almost like a living thing. Trees had been smashed down like skittles, all around that pirouetting fire, and huge shards of the broken-up dipterocarps were picked up and thrown around in the air as easily as match-stalks. I saw animals tumbling from the forest, fleeing in terror from the Storm: a family of Diatryma, their feathers ruffled and scorched, stumbled towards the water; and there came a Pristichampus, a handsome adult, its hoofed feet pounding at the sand.

  And now the fireball seemed to be attacking the exposed earth itself, as if burrowing into it. From the heart of the shattered forest, puffs of heavy incandescent vapor and fragments of rock were hurled high and far; each of these was evidently saturated with Carolinum, for each was a center of scorching and blistering energy, so that it was like watching the birth of a family of meteorites.

  A huge, compact fire started up in the heart of the forest now, in response to the Carolinum’s god-like touch of destruction; the flames leaped up, hundreds of feet tall, forming themselves into a tower of billowing light about the epicenter of the blast. A cloud of smoke and ash, laden with flying lumps of debris, began to collect like a thunderhead above the blaze. And, punching through it all like a fist of light, there was a pillar of steam, rising out of the crater made by the Carolinum Bomb, a pillar red-lit from below as if by a miniature volcano.

  Nebogipfel and I could do nothing but cower in the water, keeping under for as long as we could, and, in the intervals when we were forced to surface for air, holding our arms above our heads for fear of the shower of scorched, falling debris.

  At last, after some hours of this, Nebogipfel decreed it safe enough to approach the land.

  I was exhausted, my limbs heavy in the water. My face and neck were stinging with burns, and my thirst raged; but even so I was forced to carry the Morlock for most of the way back to the shore, for his little strength had given out long before the end of our ordeal.

  The beach was scarcely recognizable from the gentle spot where I had hunted for bivalves with Hilary Bond, mere hours before. The sand was strewn with debris from the forest — much of it smashed-up branches and bits of tree trunk, some of it still smoldering — and muddy rivulets worked their way across the pocked surface. The heat emanating from the forest was still all but unbearable — fires burned on in many sections of it — and the tall, purple-red glow of the Carolinum column shone out over the agitated waters. I stumbled past a scorched corpse, I think it was a Diatryma chick, and I found a reasonably clear patch of sand. I brushed away a coating of ash which had settled there, and dumped the Morlock on the ground.

  I found a little rill and cupped my hand to catch the water. The liquid was muddy and flecked with black soot — the stream was polluted by the burnt flesh of trees and animals, I surmised — but my thirst was so great that I had no choice but to drink it down, in great, dirty handfuls.

  “Well,” I said, and my voice was reduced to a croak by the smoke and my exertions, “this is a damned fine fist of things. Man has been present in the Palaeocene for less than a year… and, already — this!”

  Nebogipfel was stirring. He tried to get his arms under him; but he could barely lift his face from the sand. He had lost his face-mask, and the huge, soft lids of his delicate eyes were encrusted with sand. I felt touched by an odd tenderness. Once again, this wretched Morlock had been forced to endure the devastation of War among humans — among members of my own, shoddy race — and had suffered as a consequence.

  As gently as if I were lifting a child, I lifted him from the sand, turned him over, and sat him up; his legs dangled like lengths of string. “Take it easy, old man,” I said. “You’re safe now.”

  His blind head swiveled towards me, his functioning eye leaking immense tears. He murmured liquid syllables.

  “What?” I bent to hear. “What are you saying?”

  He broke into English. “…not safe…”

  “What?”

  “We are not safe here — not at all…”

  “But why? The fire can’t reach us now.”

  “Not the fire… the radiations… Even when the glow is finished… in weeks, or months, still the radiative particles will linger… the radiations will eat into the skin… It is not a safe place.”

  I cupped his thin, papery cheek in my hand; and at that moment — burned, thirsty beyond belief — I felt as if I wanted to chuck it all in, to sit on that ruined beach, regardless of fires, Bombs and radiative particles: to sit and wait for the final Darkness to close about me. But some lingering bits of strength coalesced around my concern at the Morlock’s feeble agitation.

  “Then,” I said, “we will walk away from here, and see if we can find somewhere we can rest.”

  Ignoring the pain of the cracked skin of my own shoulders and face, I slipped my arms under his limp body and picked him up.

  It was late afternoon by now, and the light was fading from the sky. After perhaps a mile, we were far enough from the central blaze that the sky was clear of smoke, but the crimson pillar above the Carolinum crater illuminated the darkling sky, almost as steadily as the Aldis lamps which had lit up the London Dome.

  I was startled by a young Pristichampus who came bursting from the forest’s rim. The yellow-white mouth of the beast was gaping wide as it tried to cool itself, and I saw that it dragged one hind leg quite badly; it looked as if it was almost blind, and quite terrified.

  Pristichampus stumbled past us and fled, screeching in an unearthly fashion.

  I could feel clean sand under my bare feet once more, and I could smell the rich brine of the Sea, a vapor which began the job of washing the stink of smoke and ash out of my head. The ocean remained placid and immovable, its surface oi
ly in the Carolinum light, despite all the foolishness of Humanity; and I pledged my gratitude to that patient body — for now the Sea had cradled me, saving my life even as my fellow humans had blown each other to bits.

  This reverie of walking was broken by a distant call.

  “Ha-llooo…”

  It came drifting along the beach, and, perhaps a quarter-mile away ahead of me, I made out a waving figure, walking towards me.

  For a moment I stood there, quite unable to move; for I suspect that I had assumed, in some morbid recess of my soul, that all the members of the Chronic Expeditionary Force must have been consumed by the atomic explosion, and that Nebogipfel and I had been once more left alone in time.

  The other chap was a soldier who had evidently been far enough away from the action to remain unscathed, for he was dressed in the trooper’s standard jungle-green twill shirt, riflegreen felt hat and trousers with anklets. He carried a light machinegun, with leather ammunition pouches. He was tall, wire-thin, and red-haired; and he seemed familiar. I had no idea how I looked: a frightful mess, I imagine, with scorched and blackened face and hair, white-staring eyes, naked save for my trousers, and with the inhuman bundle of the Morlock in my arms.

  The trooper pushed back his hat. “This is all a fine pickle, isn’t it, sir?” He had the clipped, Teutonic accent of the North-East of England.

  I remembered him. “Stubbins, isn’t it?”

  “That’s me, sir.” He turned and waved up the beach. “I’ve been map-making up that way. Was six or seven miles away when I saw Jerry coming over the water. As soon as I saw that big column of flame go up — well, I knew what was what.” He looked towards the encampment site uncertainly.

  I shifted my weight, trying to hide my fatigue. “But I shouldn’t go back to the encampment yet. The fire’s still burning — and Nebogipfel warns of radiative emissions.”

  For answer, I lifted the Morlock a little.

  “Oh, him.” Stubbins scratched the back of his head; the short hairs there rasped.