The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF

by Mike Ashley

  “What’s to explore, for God’s sake?”

  “The . . . whatever you call it. The bubble. The interface. I’ve been into it.”

  Norton felt irritated. Carver seemed incapable of taking their situation seriously. He had attached himself to Norton four days ago as he sat getting drunk and had sought him out every day since, full of jokes of dubious merit and colourful stories of his life in some unspecified, but probably menial, branch of the diplomatic service. He was the sort of person Norton hated finding himself next to in a bar. Now he was obviously fantasizing.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’d be dead.”

  “Do I look dead?” Carver gestured at himself. His face, tanned and plump with eyes of a disconcertingly pure aquamarine, looked as healthy as ever.

  “It’s impossible,” Norton repeated.

  “Don’t you want to know what I found?”

  Losing patience, Norton shouted: “I know what you’d have found. You’d have found a fucking nuclear explosion. Don’t tell me you went for a stroll through that!”

  The café owner came up and slapped a cup on to the table in front of Carver, slopping the coffee into the saucer. Carver took a long slow sip of the dark liquid, looking at Norton expressionlessly over the rim of the cup as he did so. Norton subsided, feeling foolish.

  “But I did, Norton,” Carver finally said calmly. “I did.”

  Norton remained silent, stubbornly refusing to play his part in the choreography of the conversation, knowing that Carver would carry on without further prompting.

  “I didn’t just walk in,” Carver said, after a few seconds. “I’m not suicidal. I tried probing first, with a stick. I waggled it about a bit, pulled it out. It wasn’t damaged. That set me thinking. So I tried with a pet mouse of mine. No damage – except that its eyes were burned out, poor little sod. So I thought, all right, it’s very bright, but nothing more. What does that suggest?”

  Norton shrugged.

  “It suggested to me that the whole process is slowed down in there, that there’s a whole series of wavefronts – the light flash, the fireball, the blastwave – all expanding slowly, but all separate.”

  “It seems incredible.”

  “Well, the whole situation isn’t precisely normal, you know—”

  They were interrupted by a commotion at another table. There seemed to be some disagreement between two men over a hand of cards. One of them, a heavy-set middle-aged man wearing a greying string vest through which his bodily hair sprouted abundantly, was standing and waving a handful of cards. The other, an older man, remained seated, banging his fist repeatedly on the table. Their voices rose in a fast, threatening gabble. Then the man in the vest threw the cards across the table with a furious jerk of his arm and stamped into the café. The other continued to talk loudly and aggrievedly to the onlookers, his words augmented by a complex mime of gesture.

  Norton was glad of the distraction. He couldn’t understand what Carver was getting at, and wasn’t sure he wanted to. “It’s amazing the way they carry on,” he said. “It’s as though nothing had happened, as though everything was normal.”

  “Very sensible of them. At least they’re consistent.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Of course I am. The whole thing has been inevitable for years. We all knew that, but we tried to pretend otherwise even while we carried on preparing for it. We said that it wouldn’t happen, because so far it hadn’t happened – some logic! We buried our heads like ostriches and pretended as hard as we could. Now it’s here – it’s just down the road and we can see it coming and we know there’s no escape. But we knew that all along. If you tie yourself to a railway line you don’t have to wait until you can see the train coming before you start to think you’re in danger. So why not just carry on as usual?”

  “I didn’t know you felt like that.”

  “Of course you didn’t. As far as you’re concerned I’m just the old fool in the saloon bar. End of story.”

  Carver had a point, Norton supposed. If anyone had asked him whether there was going to be a nuclear war in his lifetime he would probably have said yes. If anyone had asked what he was doing about it he would have shrugged and said, well, what could you do? He had friends active in the various protest movements, but couldn’t help viewing their efforts as futile. Some of them would virtually admit as much sometimes, if pressed. The difference was that they couldn’t bear to sit still while some hope – however remote – remained, whereas he couldn’t be bothered with gestures which seemed extremely unlikely to produce results. He would rather watch TV or spend the evening in the pub.

  The other difficulty was that he couldn’t really picture it in his mind’s eye, couldn’t visualize London consumed by blast and fire, couldn’t imagine the millions of deaths, the survivors of the blast explosion dying in fallout shelters, the ensuing chaos and anarchy. And because he found it unimaginable, on some level he told himself it could never happen, not here, not to him.

  Being apathetic about politics – especially Middle-Eastern politics – he hadn’t even been properly aware of the crisis developing until it reached flashpoint, with Russian and American troops clashing outside Riyadh. Then there had been government announcements, states of emergency, panic. Despite advice to stay at home the great mass of the population had headed out of the cities; unconfirmed rumours filtered back of clashes with troops on roads commandeered for military use. A few had stayed behind: some dutifully obeying government instructions, some doubtless oblivious to the whole thing, some, like Norton, unable to imagine an aftermath they would want to live in.

  And then the sirens had sounded and he had sat waiting for the end; and they had stopped, and there was a silence which went on and on and on until Norton, like others, had gone into the streets and found himself in the middle of a situation far stranger than anything he could have imagined. The small urban island in which they stood – an irregular triangle no more than half a mile on a side – was bracketed by three virtually simultaneous groundburst explosions which had caused . . . what? A local fracture in space-time? That was as good an explanation as any. Whatever the cause, the effect was to slow down subjective time in the locality by a factor of millions, reducing the spread of the detonations to a matter of a few yards every day, hemming them into their strange and fragile-seeming shells.

  At first people hoped that the miracle – for so it seemed – allowed some possibility of rescue, but they soon learned better. Between two of the wavefronts was a narrow corridor which coincided with a side road and led apparently to safety. One family, who had miscalculated their evacuation plans, piled into a car and drove off down the corridor, but halfway their car seemed suddenly to halt, as if frozen. Norton still looked at it occasionally. Through the rear window could be seen two young children, faces caught in smiles, hands arrested in mid-wave. It was clear that the phenomenon was only local, and crossing some invisible threshold they had emerged into the real-time world. At least, he thought, they would never have time to realise that their escape attempt had failed; it was left to those still trapped to experience anguish on their behalf.

  Norton wondered what one of the many spy satellites which he supposed crossed overhead would make of the scene, if any of their equipment was sensitive enough to register anything. Perhaps some future historian, analysing the destruction of London, would slow down the film and wonder at an apparent burst of high-speed motion in the area on which the explosions converged. The historian would probably rub his or her eyes in puzzlement and dismiss it as an optical trick, like the after-images which played behind one’s eyelids after staring into a bright light.

  “So will you come?” Carver was saying.

  Norton dragged his attention back to the conversation, aware that Carver had been talking and that he had not been taking in what he was saying.

  “Come? Where?”

  “Through the interface. I want somebody else to see this. It’s amazing, Norton. The experienc
e of a lifetime. The last experience of a lifetime. Why miss it?”

  Norton’s first instinct was to protest that he wasn’t interested, that there seemed little point in seeking out new experiences when extinction was, at best, days away, but then he realized that in fact some purposeful action – even a pretence at purposeful action would be welcome. Terminal patients given the bad news by their doctors didn’t just lie down and wait to die, if they had any spirit; they got up and got on with their lives for as long as they could. In the last analysis that was all anyone could do, and here everybody – the Greek card players, the partygoers, Carver – seemed to be doing it except him.

  “Sure,” he said. “But what about protective clothing? You’ve got all that . . .” He gestured at Carver’s bulky and absurd-looking outfit.

  “It’s unnecessary. In fact it’s hotter out here than it is there. I don’t know what I was thinking about – if I had run into the heat a thousand of these would have been no protection. All you need is goggles, and I’ve got a spare pair at home.”

  Carver got up, tossed a £5 note on the table and walked away, gesturing Norton to follow. He lived just off the High Road, in a large, double-fronted redbrick Victorian house, most of whose neighbours had been turned into bedsits. His house was still intact, though the front garden was a tangle of hollyhocks choking amid brambles, and the wood in the window sashes was visibly rotten. Little attention was evidently paid to its upkeep.

  Inside was a dim hallway floored with cracked brown linoleum and cluttered with coatstands and hatracks. There was a heavy odour of dust, old leather and indefinable decay.

  Carver went through into one of the rear rooms. Norton followed, then paused in the open doorway. It was a large room, with French windows opening on to the garden. It was impossible to tell what the decorations might have once been like, because the whole room was choked with a profusion of different objects. All the walls were lined from floor to ceiling with books, old and expensive bindings jammed alongside garish paperbacks seemingly at random. More books were heaped on the floor, in chairs and on tables. The rest of the room was a wild assortment of clocks, globes, stuffed animals, model ships and engines, old scientific and medical equipment, porcelain, musical instruments and countless other items. Carver made his way – almost wading through the detritus – to a desk, where some of the clutter had been pushed aside and a second pair of goggles lay amid knives, glues and offcuts of polarized plastic.

  “Don’t mind the mess,” he said jovially, seeing Norton still hovering uncertainly by the door. “The whole house is like this, I’m afraid. Never could stop accumulating stuff. Never could throw anything out. My wife used to say I’d been a jackdaw in my previous lives. That’s why I didn’t leave, you know. I couldn’t start off again somewhere else without all this. Sometimes I think there’s more of me here—” his gesture took in the room, and the other rooms beyond it – “than here.” He tapped the side of his skull.

  Norton suddenly warmed to the man, seeing him properly for the first time as another human being, not just an irritating presence. Carver seemed to sense this and turned to fiddle with the goggles for long seconds while embarrassment dispersed from the atmosphere. “I made these up myself,” he said. “Ordinary dark glasses are no good. You need extra thicknesses, lots of them. Trouble is, if you put the things on anywhere else you can’t see a damn thing.”

  Carver insisted on showing Norton the place where he had gone exploring earlier, though he was equally adamant that this time they would cross over somewhere else. He had stripped off the cumbersome protective suit and now cut an unlikely figure as a pioneer in a Hawaiian-style shirt and corduroy slacks. He had uprooted two stout wooden poles, giving one to Norton and keeping the other himself. They walked away from the High Road, took the second turning on the left, and came face to face with another wall of shimmering, eye-wrenching colourlessness. On its surface, as if holographic images had been pasted to it, were images of Carver’s back as he crossed the interface and his front view as he returned.

  “You see,” Carver said, “light can’t escape, so the image is trapped there like a fly in amber until the thing moves forward far enough for it to break up. It’s already starting to happen.”

  Looking closely Norton could see that indeed the images were taking on a slightly unfocused aspect, as though viewed through a wavering heat haze.

  They walked back to the High Road, passed the café – where a group of men were standing round a table watching five more play out an obviously tense card game; side bets were apparently being exchanged – and approached the interface which blocked the street.

  “Right,” Carver said. “Keep close by me. If in doubt wave the stick in front of you. If not in doubt still wave the stick in front of you.” He laughed, and Norton smiled in return. They pulled on their goggles and then, like blind men, tapping their way with their sticks, they walked through the interface, leaving their departing images stuck to its surface so that to anyone casually watching from the café it would have looked as if they had both suddenly and improbably halted in mid-stride.

  Norton found himself enveloped in a soundless blizzard of brilliant light. Even through the thick laminations of polarized plastic the luminosity was almost painful; it was like looking too near to the sun, except that there was nowhere to turn away. The light seemed to bounce and swirl around him, to cascade on his head and fountain up from the ground. There was a singing in his ears, and he felt as though he was walking into a wind, a zephyr of pure incandescence, its photon pressure sufficient to resist his progress.

  He felt exhilarated, almost ecstatic, as if he was coming face to face with God. The light was cleansing, purifying. He found that he was moving with an involuntary swimming motion of his arms, propelling himself into the cool heart of this artificial sun with a clumsy breaststroke.

  “Norton! Be careful!” Carver’s voice came as if from under water, far away; it splashed faintly against his ears but was washed away in the radiant tide.

  Carver was at his side, tugging at his shirt. He turned and looked at the other man. Carver seemed to glow, to fluoresce. The intense effulgence overpowered ordinary colour, making him a surreal sculpture in degrees of brilliant white. His skin seemed luminous and translucent, and when Norton lifted his own hand he found it was the same; he fancied he could see dim outlines of bone through the flesh. When Carver moved he cut swathes through the light; a sudden motion of his stick sent splintered refractions in all directions.

  “Carver—” Norton said, and his words seemed to be snatched away as if he was talking into a silent hurricane. “This is extraordinary . . . incredible . . .” The sentence trailed away; he had no words to describe the experience.

  Carver laughed. “Who’d have thought that this lay in the heart of a nuclear explosion, eh? I don’t know, though – those slow-motion films always were beautiful if you could forget what they were.”

  “How far can we go?” Norton shouted, turning away and moving towards the heart of the radiance, using his cane like a mine-detector.

  “Only a few yards. You’ll see.”

  Norton moved on a dozen paces, then the tip of his stick abruptly exploded into brilliant fire, like a sparkler on Guy Fawkes’ Night. He withdrew it, stamped on the burning end. Several inches had vanished from its tip in an instant.

  “It’s here,” he called in warning. “Just ahead.”

  Peering forwards he fancied he could see the further interface, the fireball advancing at its own slow, inexorable pace behind the light flash. Even through the radiance he thought he could detect flickering patterns of orange flame dancing across its surface. Norton was suddenly reminded of what lay beyond there . . . but for now it was enough to be drifting, clad in a nimbus of cool white fire.

  Carver, a pale haloed ghost of a figure, was at his side. He swished his stick playfully through the fireball’s surface, coming away each time with a couple of inches less on the tip. He was like a lion-tamer,
holding inconceivable energy at bay with just the stick and the force of his personality.

  “Don’t get too close,” Norton warned, as the other man edged forward. Carver took no notice, so Norton tapped him on the shoulder with his own stick. Carver began to turn, but as he did so his foot caught on the kerbstone. He teetered, began to fall backwards, mouth widening in surprise: fell faster than Norton could lunge forwards, into the fireball.

  Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion, as though Carver had fallen into still another time anomaly. He appeared to hang suspended as his hair burst into flame and his skin began to char. Puffs of steam rose from his body. His shirt was consumed so quickly that it simply seemed to vanish. His lips drew back as if he was about to say something, but they were only shrivelling with the heat. Behind them the gums burned away, exposing bone that blackened swiftly, though the teeth remained anomalously white until the enamel cracked and burst. The goggles melted, exposing steaming sockets in a face that was turning into a skull even as he fell. His body cooked, as if Norton was watching an accelerated film of meat being roasted. The skin crisped, then peeled away; the flesh followed, crumbling and flaking away from bones that snapped and popped from their sockets and themselves began to burn. By the time Carver hit the ground all that was left of him was a charred heap of smouldering detritus which blew away in clouds of ash even as it settled. It had taken only seconds; the only sound which reached Norton was a soft, almost plaintive sigh.

  Norton watched, transfixed with horror. Then as nausea rose in him he stumbled away, dropping his stick. He burst out of the interface into total darkness – then ripped off the goggles and squatted by the pavement, retching until all he could wring from his stomach was a thin trickle of sour yellow bile.

  Now, as Norton looked sidelong at the images recording the beginning and end of yesterday’s tragic adventure, he saw that the interface was undergoing a change. Patterns played more vigorously across its surface; fans of light sprayed outwards briefly; it seemed to vibrate, as if to a deep bass tone. It’s breaking down, he thought. It won’t be long now.