Authors: Stephen Baxter
T
he morning dawned fresh and clear.
I woke before Stubbins. Nebogipfel remained unconscious. I walked down to the beach and to the fringe of the Sea. The sun was rising over the ocean before me, its warmth already strong. I heard the clicks and trills of the forest fauna, busy already with their little concerns; and a smooth black shape – I thought it was a ray – glided through the water a few hundred yards from land.
In those first moments of the new day, it was as if my Palaeocene world was as vigorous and unscarred as it had been before the arrival of Gibson and his expedition. But that pillar of purple fire still guttered from the central wound in the forest, reaching up through a thousand feet or more. Clots of flame – bits of melted rock and soil – hurled themselves along the flanks of that pillar, following glowing parabolic paths. And over it all there lingered still an umbrella-shaped cloud of dust and steam, its edges frayed by the action of the breeze.
We breakfasted on water and the flesh of nuts from the palms. Nebogipfel was subdued, weakened, and his voice was a scratch; but he counselled Stubbins and me against returning to the devastated camp-site. For all we knew, he said, the three of us might have been left alone, there in the Palaeocene, and we must think of our survival into the future. Nebogipfel
argued that we should migrate further away – several miles, he said – and set up camp in some more equable spot, safe from the radiative emissions of the Carolinum.
But I saw in Stubbins’s eyes, and in the depths of my own soul, that this course of action was impossible for both of us.
‘I’m going back,’ Stubbins said at last, with a blunt directness that overcame his natural deference. ‘I hear what you’re telling me, sir, but the fact is there might be people lying sick and dying back there. I couldn’t just leave them to it.’ He turned to me, and his open, honest face was crumpled with concern. ‘It wouldn’t be right, would it, sir?’
‘No, Stubbins,’ I said. ‘Not right at all.’
And so it was, with the day still young, that Stubbins and I set off back along the beach, in the direction of the devastated camp site. Stubbins still wore his jungle-green kit, which had survived the previous day pretty much unscathed; I, of course, was dressed only in the remains of the khaki trousers I had been wearing at the moment of the Bombing. Even my boots were lost, and I felt singularly ill-equipped as we set out. We had no medical supplies whatever, save for the small kit of bandages and ointments Stubbins had been carrying for his own use. But we had gathered some fruit from the palm-trees, emptied out their milk, and filled the shells with fresh water; Stubbins and I each wore five or six such shells around our necks on bits of liana, and we thought with this we might bring some succour to such victims of the Bombing as we found.
There was a steady noise from the Bomb’s slow, continuing detonation: a featureless sound, with the ground-shaking quality of a waterfall’s roar. Nebogipfel had made us promise that we should approach the central Bomb-site no closer than a
mile; and by the time we reached that part of the beach which was, as best as we could judge it, a mile from the epicentre of the blast, the sun was climbing high in the sky. We were already in the shadow of that lingering, poisonous umbrella-cloud; and the crimson-purple glow of the continuing central explosion was so violent that it cast a shadow before me on the beach.
We bathed our feet in the Sea. I rested my aching knees and calves, and relished the warmth of the sunlight on my face. Ironically it remained a beautiful day, with the sky clear and the Sea bathed in light. I observed how the action of the tide had already repaired much of the damage to the beach wrought by the best efforts of we humans the day before: bivalves burrowed again in the sooty sand, and I saw a turtle scampering through the shallows, almost close enough for us to touch.
I felt very old, and immeasurably tired: quite out of place, here at the dawn of the world.
We struck away from the beach and into the forest. I entered the gloom of that battered wood with dread. Our plan was to work through the forest around the camp site, following a circle a safe mile in radius. School-boy geometry was sufficient to provide an estimate of the six-mile hike we would have to complete around the circumference of that circle before we reached the sanctuary of the beach again; but I knew that we would find it difficult, or impossible, to stick to a precise arc, and I expected our full traverse to be considerably longer, and to take some hours.
We were already close enough to the epicentre of the blast that many of the trees had been toppled and smashed up – trees destroyed in a moment, which might otherwise have stood for a century – and we were forced to clamber over the charred, battered
remnants of trunks, and through the forest canopy’s scorched remains. And, even where the effects of the first blast were less marked, we saw the scars of the storm of fire, which had turned whole stands of
dipterocarps
into clusters of charred, denuded trunks, like immense match-stalks. The canopy was quite disrupted; and the daylight piercing through to the forest floor was much more powerful than I had become accustomed to. But still the forest was a place of shadows and gloom; and the purple glow of that deadly, continuing explosion cast a sickly glow over the scorched remains of trees and fauna.
Not surprisingly, the surviving animals and birds – even the insects – had fled the wounded forest, and we proceeded in an eerie stillness broken only by the rustle of our own footsteps, and by the steady, hot breath of the Bomb’s fire-pit.
In some places the fallen wood was still hot enough to steam, or even to glow dull red, and my bare feet were soon blistered and burned. I tied grass around my soles to protect them, and I was reminded of how I had done the same as I made my way out of the forest I had burned in the Year 802,701. Several times we came across the corpse of some poor animal, caught in a disaster beyond its comprehension; despite the blaze, the putrefactive processes of the forest worked vigorously, and we were forced to endure a stink of decay and death as we walked. Once I stepped on the liquefying remains of some little creature – it had been a
planetetherium
, I think – and poor Stubbins was forced to wait for me as, with noises of disgust, I scraped the remains of the little animal from the sole of my foot.
After perhaps an hour, we came across a still, hunched form on the floor of the forest. The stench was so bad that I was forced to hold the remains of my handkerchief over my face. The body was so
badly burned and misshapen that at first I thought it might be the corpse of some beast – a young
diatryma
perhaps – but then I heard Stubbins exclaim. I stepped to his side; and there I saw, at the end of a blackened limb stretched out along the ground, the hand of a woman. The hand, by some bizarre accident, was quite undamaged by the fire; the fingers were curled, as if in sleep, and a small gold ring sparkled on the fourth finger.
Poor Stubbins stumbled away into the trees, and I heard him retching. I felt foolish, helpless and desolate, standing there in the ruined forest with those shells of water dangling useless from my neck.
‘What if it’s all like this, sir?’ Stubbins asked. ‘You know –
this
.’ He could not bear to look at the corpse, or in any way point to it. ‘What if we find no-one alive – what if they’re all gone, all burnt to a crisp like
this
?’
I laid a hand on his shoulder, and sought a strength I did not feel. ‘If that’s so, then we’ll go back to the beach, and find a way to live,’ I said. ‘We’ll make the best of it; that’s what we’ll do, Stubbins. But you mustn’t give up, man – we’ve barely started our searching.’
His eyes were white, in a face as soot-dark as a chimney-sweep’s. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re right. We mustn’t give up. We’ll make the best of it; what else can we do? But –’
‘Yes?’
‘Oh –
nothing
,’ he said; and he began to straighten his kit, in readiness to go on.
He did not have to finish his sentiment for me to understand what he meant! If all the Expedition were finished save the two of us and the Morlock, then, Stubbins knew, the three of us would sit in our huts on the beach, until we died. And then the tide would cover our bones, and that would be that; we should be lucky to leave behind a fossil, to be found by some
curious householder digging a garden in Hampstead or Kew, fifty million years from now.
It was a grim, futile prospect; and what – Stubbins would want to know – what was the
best
that could be made out of all that?
In grim silence, we left the girl’s charred corpse, and pressed on.
We had no way of judging time in the forest, and the day was long in that grisly wreckage; for even the sun seemed to have suspended his daily traverse around the sky, and the shadows of the broken stumps of trees seemed neither to shorten nor to track across the ground. But in reality it was perhaps only an hour later that we heard a crackling, crashing noise, approaching us from the interior of the wood.
At first we could not see the source of the noise – Stubbins’s eyes, wide with fear, were white as ivory in the gloom – and we waited, holding our breath.
A form approached us, coalescing from the charred shadows, stumbling and colliding with the tree stumps; it was a slight figure, clearly in distress but, nonetheless, undoubtedly human.
With my heart in my mouth, I rushed forward, careless now of the crusty, blackened undergrowth under my feet. Stubbins was at my side.
It was a woman, but with her face and upper body burned and so blackened I could not recognize her. She fell into our arms with a gurgled sigh, as if with relief.
Stubbins sat the woman on the ground with her back to a snapped-off tree stump. He muttered clumsy endearments as he worked: ‘Don’t you worry – you’ll be fine, I’ll look after you –’ and so forth, in a voice that was choked. She still wore the charred remnants of a twill shirt and khaki trousers, but the whole was blackened and torn; and her arms were
badly scorched, particularly on the underside of the forearms. Her face was burned – she must have been facing the blast – but there were, I saw now, strips of healthy flesh across her mouth and eyes, which remained comparatively unharmed. I surmised that she had thrown her arms across her face when the blast had come, damaging her forearms, but protecting at least some of her face.
She opened her eyes now: they were a piercing blue. Her mouth opened, and an insect-whisper emerged; I bent close to hear, suppressing my revulsion and horror at the blackened ruin of her nose and ears.
‘Water. In the name of God –
water
…’
It was Hilary Bond.
S
tubbins and I stayed with Hilary for some hours, feeding her sips of water from our shells. Periodically Stubbins set off on little circular tours of the forest, calling boldly to attract the attention of more survivors. We tried to ease Hilary’s wounds with Stubbins’s medical kit; but the contents of the kit – intended to treat bruises and cuts and the like – were quite inadequate to cope with burns of the extent and severity of Hilary’s.
Hilary was weakened, but she was quite coherent, and she was able to give me a sensible account of what she had seen of the Bombing.
After she had left me on the beach, she had plunged through the forest as fast as she could. Even so, she was no closer than a mile to the camp when the Messerschmitt came.
‘I saw the Bomb falling through the air,’ she whispered. ‘I knew it was Carolinum from the way it burned – I’ve not seen it before, but I’ve heard accounts – and I thought I was done for. I froze like a rabbit – or like a fool – and by the time I’d got my wits back, I knew I didn’t have time to get to the ground, or duck behind the trees. I threw my arms before my face …’
The flash had been inhumanly bright. ‘The light burned at my flesh … it was like the doors of Hell
opening … I could feel my cheeks
melting
; and when I looked I could see the tip of my nose burning – like a little candle … it was the most extraordinary …’ She collapsed into coughing.
Then the concussion came – ‘like a great wind’ – and she was knocked backwards. She had tumbled across the forest floor, until she had collided with a hard surface – presumably a tree trunk – and, for a spell, knew no more.
When she came to, that pillar of crimson and purple flame was rising like a daemon out of the forest, with its attendant familiars of melted earth and steam. Around her the trees were smashed and scorched, although – by chance – she was far enough from the epicentre to have avoided the worst of the damage, and she hadn’t been further injured by falling branches or the like.
She had reached up to touch her nose; and she remembered only a dull curiosity as a great piece of it came away in her hand. ‘But I felt no pain – it is very odd … although,’ she added grimly, ‘I was compensated for that soon enough …’
I listened to this in a morbid silence, and vivid in my mind’s eye was the slim, rather awkward girl with whom I had hunted bivalves, mere hours before this terrible experience.
Hilary thought she slept. When she came to her senses, the forest was a good deal darker – the first flames had subsided – and, for some reason, her pain was reduced. She wondered if her very nerves had been destroyed.
With a huge effort, for she was by now greatly weakened by thirst, she pulled herself to her feet and approached the epicentre of the blast.
‘I remember the glow of the continuing Carolinum explosion, that unearthly purple, brightening as I moved through the trees … The heat increased, and
I wondered how close I would be able to come, before I would be forced back.’
She had reached the fringe of the open space around the parked Juggernauts.
‘I could barely see, so bright was the glare of the Carolinum fire-pit, and there was a roar, like rushing water,’ she said. ‘The Bomb had landed slap in the centre of our camp – that German was a good marksman – it was like a toy volcano, with smoke and flame pouring up out of it.
‘Our camp is flattened and burned, most of our belongings destroyed. Even the ’Nauts are smashed to bits: of the four, only one has retained its shape, and that is gutted; the others are burst open, toppled like toys, burned and exploded. I saw no people,’ she said. ‘I think I had expected …’ She hesitated. ‘Horrors: I expected horrors. But there was nothing – nothing left of them. Oh – save for one thing – the strangest thing.’ She laid a hand on my arm; it was reduced by flame to a claw. ‘On the skin of that ’Naut, most of the paint was blistered away – except in one place, where there was a shaped patch … It was like a shadow, of a crouching man.’ She looked up at me, her eyes gleaming from her ruined face. ‘Do you understand? It
was
a shadow – of a soldier, I don’t know who – caught in that moment of a blast so intense that his flesh was evaporated, his bones scattered.
And yet the shadow in the paint remained
.’ Her voice remained level, dispassionate, but her eyes were full of tears. ‘Isn’t that strange?’
Hilary had stumbled about the rim of the encampment for a while. Convinced by now she would not find people alive there, she had a vague idea of seeking out supplies. But, she said, her thoughts were scattered and confused, and her residual pain so intense it threatened to overwhelm her; and, with her damaged hands, she found it impossible to grub
through the charred remnants of the camp with any semblance of system.
So she had come away, with the intention of trying to reach the Sea.
After that, she could barely remember anything of her stumble through the forest; it had lasted all night, and yet she had come such a short distance from the explosion site that I surmised she must have been blundering in circles, until Stubbins and I found her.