“Was the Mediterranean ever known to be dry land?” “Yes, Lemmy,” said Jet. “Well, parts of it anyway.”
“How long ago?”
“Fifty thousand years, maybe less. Thirty or even twenty-five thousand.”
“And that would line up with the ice theory, too,” I said. “The fourth Ice Age was receding then.”
“And what kind of animals were there?” It was Lemmy again.
“Oh, all kinds. Most of the animals that we knew in our age were in existence then. Others, like the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, were rapidly dying out.”
“Were there any men?” persisted Lemmy. “Like us, I mean?”
“Well,” I told him, “it has been estimated that men, not very different from us, have inhabited some parts of the Earth for something like 200,000 years.”
“Could they have planted those crops?”
“I doubt it,” said Jet thoughtfully.
“Then who did plant them, and where are they, and when they turn up, what will they do to us?”
“That’s something we’ll only find out when it happens.”
Another day has passed under a clear blue sky and in warm sunshine. But for our circumstances, life here could be very pleasant. There has still been no sign of the creatures, human or otherwise, that cultivate the fields along the banks of the river, and strangely enough, the crops don’t seem to need any attention. They grow stronger and larger every day, and there are no weeds that we can see to choke them. In fact, they seem to thrive in ideal conditions which often makes me think that if we have moved in time at all, it is forward, to a period when knowledge of cultivation is so advanced that crops can be planted and then left to take care of themselves until harvest time.
It was on the morning of the tenth day that we caught our second glimpse of the ships that we had first seen nestled in the crater on the far side of the Moon. Jet and Lemmy had been collecting fuel for the fire and I had been cutting and cleaning the fish ready for the next meal. Only Mitch was inside the cabin, working on a plan for building a windmill to supply us with electricity.
I don’t know what compelled me to look up when I did but there, high in the sky, picked out by the Sun, were about twenty brilliant spots of light in circular formation. They had appeared over the horizon beyond the forest and were idly climbing, tracing a large arc in the sky. Within a few moments, they were directly over our heads and there they stopped, poised above us. Excitedly I drew Jet’s and Lemmy’s attention to them.
“The telescope,” said Jet urgently. “Let’s get inside the ship and take a look at them.” He ran towards the extended ladder as he spoke, with Lemmy and me hard on his heels.
Mitch got a bit of a fright as we went crashing into the cabin. He thought at first that some animal was chasing us. But when we explained what we had seen, he immediately dashed into the pilot’s cabin to take a look for himself. Meanwhile Jet was already in the astrodome.
“They’re still directly above us,” he said, as he adjusted the telescope, “and there’s the same blue light flashing on and off underneath every one of them.”
“They must be observing us,” I suggested. “Why else should they hang up there like that?”
“Well, let them take a good look,” said Lemmy, “then maybe they’ll do something about us.” “What?” I asked.
“How should I know? But they’ve never been short of ideas before, have they? I know,” he said suddenly, “perhaps they’ve come to help us. Maybe they realise they’ve put us down in quite the wrong place and now want to take us back again.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I told him. “How could they do that?”
“By the same methods as they got us here, of course. We take off and reach free orbit and they surround us, see. Then they do whatever it is they did before, but this time they reverse the process and--whoops--we’re back where we started, on our way home from the Moon, back in 1965.”
“This ship isn’t big enough to take off and reach free orbit,” I told Lemmy. “Not from the Earth, she’s not. She needs a booster stage full of fuel, and we haven’t got one and no hope of ever getting one.”
“But with the power those ships have, perhaps we don’t even need to go that high. Maybe all we need do is take off and they’ll do the rest.”
I didn’t answer him.
“You don’t want to, do you?” Lemmy raised his voice, appealing to Jet and Mitch. “None of you do. But you can’t want to stay here for the rest of your lives, with mammoths and things trampling all over your backyard.”
Of course we didn’t, but there was nothing we could do to prevent it, so far as we could see.
The strange craft were still hovering above us, motionless. Mitch, from the pilot’s canopy, and Jet, from his position at the telescope, continued to watch them.
“I’m sorry, Lemmy,” I said after a long silence, “the only thing we can depend on this ship for now is to get from one part of the globe to another. She’ll never travel through space again.”
A faint gleam of hope brightened Lemmy’s face. “Then why can’t we do just that--go to England at least, London maybe.”
“Because there isn’t any London, Lemmy. Almost certainly the whole of Britain, as far down as the Thames, is ice-covered, frozen solid.”
A sudden cry from Jet told us that the ships were now on the move again. Lemmy and I rushed over to the pilot’s canopy to see them for ourselves. Sure enough the circle of bright silver dots was now moving rapidly westwards. A few minutes later it had disappeared below the horizon and we saw our fleeting visitors no more. We all returned to the centre of the cabin but none of us could find anything to say.
“Well,” said Lemmy at last, “maybe I’d better start cooking the fish. It is my turn, isn’t it?”
“Cheer up, Lemmy,” said Jet. “This may not be as bad as it looks.”
“I hope it’s not as bad as you look, nor as bad as any of us look. I’ll just resign myself to the fact that I’ve got to learn to be a cave-man and like it.”
That night it was Lemmy’s turn to take first watch in the pilot’s cabin. He was his own, cheerful self again and, while I was preparing for bed, came over to my bunk for a chat. “You know,” he said, “all things considered, I don’t think this need be such a bad life.”
“You think not, Lemmy?” I asked.
“Well, it could be one long holiday. We’re not responsible to anybody but ourselves. We can do what we like when we like and nobody to tell us no.”
“That’s the danger,” I told him. “It would pall after a bit, I’m sure.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Lemmy. “A few months from now and we might be quite proud of ourselves. We might even start an entirely new kind of civilisation.”
“We might,” I told him, “but there’d be nobody to carry it on.”
“No, there wouldn’t, would there?” said Lemmy disconsolately. Then he put his hand into the breast pocket of his crew suit. “Doc,” he said as he did so.
“Yes, Lemmy?” I asked him.
“About what you said just now.”
“Well?”
“If I hung this over my bunk, would it matter?” He pulled a photograph out and showed it to me. It was a picture of Becky, his girl!
“Why should it?” I asked him.
“Well, I usually keep it in my pocket, but I thought it might make the place look more homely if I hung it up.”
“I’m sure it would, Lemmy.”
“I wonder what she’s doing now,” he said, gazing at the photograph. “You know, Doc, I never did tell her where I was going, but she found out once we’d landed on the Moon --what with my picture in all the papers. I told her the day I got back to London I was going to take her out and give her the time of her life. We were going to paint the town red and I was going to give her a bit of rock I’d picked up from the Moon’s surface as a souvenir. And now look at the mess we’re in. There’s her picture and, so far as I know, she’s not even born yet.”
“No,” I said.
“Then how can I have her picture?” said Lemmy brightly. “Doc, do you think she is alive, I mean at the same time as we are--you know, everything going on at once like the pages in a book?”
“I don’t quite see what you’re getting at, Lemmy.”
“Well, supposing you’ve got a book and you’re just sitting down to read it.”
“Well?”
“You begin at chapter one and start ploughing your way through, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you can’t read chapter seven until you’ve read the first six chapters, but that doesn’t mean chapter seven doesn’t exist. You just haven’t reached it yet.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Well, couldn’t time be like that? I mean, the normal thing is to start at the beginning and go on, but I suppose it is possible to skip a few pages, or even turn back a few. Maybe that’s what’s happened to us. Somebody or something’s taken us out of the page where we belong and planted us here on an earlier one, but the other pages are still there. Henry the Eighth is marrying his sixth wife on his proper page and, in our proper place, we are taking off for the Moon or just going to--it all depends on what page you’re at and what part of it you happen to have reached.”
“You mean there’s no such thing as time really. Everything happens at once.”
“Yes, in a way.”
“Then we must be careful, if ever we get back to our right page, as you call it, that we don’t run into ourselves.”
“Eh?”
“I think I’d better get some sleep, Lemmy. We’ve got enough problems without worrying about the true nature of time.”
“Yes, Doc,” he said, and went over to the pilot’s canopy to take over his watch.
We were roused by Lemmy shouting at the top of his voice as he came rushing out of the pilot’s cabin and into the main quarters.
“For heaven’s sake,” called Jet, “what are you yelling about?”
“There’s something outside,” said Lemmy, “coming out of the forest.”
“What?” asked Mitch sceptically.
“I don’t know, a sort of tank. It’s coming towards us, I tell you, and a bright light keeps flashing on and off.”
Jet pushed Lemmy to one side and made for the pilot’s cabin. A second or two later, Mitch and I had joined him, but all we saw was the distant forest outlined against the starry sky.
“Are you sure you saw something, Lemmy?” demanded Jet.
“Of course I’m sure. That thing was there, I tell you, and when the light came on it lit up the countryside for miles around, like a sheet of lightning.”
“Maybe that’s just what it was,” said Mitch. “Perhaps there’s a storm blowing up.”
“There’s not a cloud in the sky,” Jet pointed out.
“Tell us exactly what you thought you saw, Lemmy,” I told him.
“Well, I was sitting in the cabin and. . .”
He got no farther. At that precise moment a brilliant flash of light penetrated the pilot’s canopy and shone full into our faces. Mitch and I instinctively leapt back into the cabin, falling over in our haste. Jet, who was seated in the pilot’s chair, wasn’t as quick as us and when he did make it he tripped over Mitch who was lying on the floor.
“Get down, quick,” said Jet, “all of you.”
I made my way to the table and groped along the panelling until I found the pilot’s door control. I pressed it, there was a whirr, and the door closed.
“The main door, Doc,” Jet called. “Can you find the switch?” A few more moments’ groping, and the main door closed, too.
None of us could see. The powerful light had blinded us. This was the last straw. To be stranded, as we were, and to be blind as well was more than I could take. I felt like beating on the control table with my fists. And then, much to my surprise and relief, I began to see things again, dimly illuminated by the single bulb which supplied our cabin with light. Slowly my sight returned.
“I don’t think there’s anything to worry about,” I said, trying to reassure the others; “it was a bright light and our eyes had got used to the darkness. It was bound to blind us temporarily.”
“It was like looking directly into the Sun,” said Lemmy. “All I can see are bright green patches.”
“I’m beginning to see better now,” said Jet, “and there’s certainly no pain.”
“What kind of light was it?” I asked.
“Maybe some kind of super searchlight,” volunteered Mitch.
“That’s what you think,” said Lemmy. “What’s your idea then?”
“A death ray.”
“What?”
“You’ve heard of them, haven’t you?”
“Of course we’ve heard of them,” said Mitch, “been hearing about them for years, but no one has ever got round to perfecting one yet.”
“Not in our time,” said Lemmy, “back in 1965. But we’re not back in 1965. There could be a death ray now.”
“Then why aren’t we dead?” Jet remarked flatly.
“Oh,” said Lemmy, “that’s a point, isn’t it?”
“Whatever it was,” Jet went on, “it doesn’t seem to have done us any harm.”
“That doesn’t mean it won’t,” said Lemmy pessimistically. ‘“What’s that thing doing out there?”
“Well, none of us is going out to look, that’s certain,” said Jet. “We’ll remain in here until it’s gone.”
“And when do you think that will be?” asked Mitch. “How do we know it’s still out there anyway?”
“We don’t. We’ll wait a couple of hours. If nothing has happened in that time, we’ll open up the pilot’s cabin and risk another look.”
“How about the televiewer?” I suggested. We had not used the televiewer since we landed but on the last inspection it had been in working order. But it was not working now and it was half an hour before Lemmy managed to bring the screen to life. When, at last, the camera was rotated, there was nothing unusual to be seen outside.
“They must have gone away,” said Jet. He sounded almost disappointed.
After an hour of rotating the camera at ten-minute intervals, Jet decided to open up the pilot’s cabin door and take a look through the window. This we did, but, even with the wider range of vision this gave us, we could still see no sign of anything unusual.
“Well,” I said at last, “there’s only one way to be sure now and that is to go out there and look.”
“Very well, Doc,” Jet said. “Get a flashlight and we’ll go.”
When we reached the main door, Jet turned on the flashlight and slowly threw the beam round a considerable area. Then he almost dropped the torch in surprise for it illuminated three deep furrows which completely encircled the ship. They were about three feet in diameter, just as deep, and the distance between each furrow was about six feet. They appeared to have been made by heavy spheres. We could only conclude they were made by the ‘wheels’ of the tank that Lemmy had seen.