The Accidental Time Machine

18

The massive door to the time-machine hangar stood open. When they walked into the cavernous room there was a quiet whir, and a ramp slowly dropped out of the belly of the machine. They walked up it, footsteps echoing.

La was waiting at the top of the ramp, wearing a one-piece suit that seemed to be made of metal. “Let me show you your room.”

Matt had expected something along the lines of a submarine or a spaceship, but it was actually roomy and austere rather than cramped and cluttered. It seemed bigger inside than outside; that was a good trick.

Their room was like a medium-small motel room, windowless, with a double bed and a closet. Two silvery outfits like La’s were laid out on the bed.

“You might want to put those on before we jump. They’ll protect you against things like bullets and lasers. A caveman could still knock you down with a club.” She motioned for them to follow her.

“Galley and head.” She opened a door to a small room with a table for two and lots of labeled drawers and a few appliances. The head was evidently behind a curtain.

“The rest here is the living room and control room.” There was a comfortable-looking couch and chair, almost identical to the one in their sitting room, and in the front, a setup that looked more like a proper time machine: three acceleration couches in a triangle facing a windshield. The front one had controls like an airplane’s; the two behind it were passenger seats, each with an elaborate safety harness. Of course the pilot wouldn’t need such protection, not being material when she didn’t want to be.

“This is where your box goes.” There was a rectangular inset next to one of the couches, just the right size. “When we’re ready to go, just strap in and push the button.”

“Okay.” He looked at Martha, and she made a “what next” gesture with her hands. “You could go ahead and put on the suit?” She nodded and went back.

“Weapons,” La said. “That pistol you have in your bag—are you skilled with it?”

“No, I just … found it. I don’t even know whether it works.”

“It will. There’s a pocket for it in your suit, on the right. Or I could give you something more sophisticated.”

“I hope we won’t need anything like that.”

“Let’s hope. But the pistol or …”

“I’ll stick with the pistol.” He’d actually fired one, a BB pistol, in high school, at a bad friend’s house.

He checked out the head, which had a toilet and cramped shower, and the galley—hundreds of prepackaged meals. What would happen, though, when they were gone? He asked La, and she said as long as there was a source of radiant energy, everything was recycled. That was a real comfort.

Martha came out, looking like a pulp-fiction heroine. She looked at herself in the head mirror and blushed, and plucked at the costume’s chest in an unsuccessful attempt to make it less revealing. “It looks fine,” Matt said lamely, trying not to stare.

“I’m sure you think so.”

He went to put on his and found that it was similarly revealing. He looked like Buck Rogers with no airbrushing and a small beer belly. When he came out, Martha hid a giggle behind her hand.

“Might as well get started.” He put the box in place, attached the alligator clip to an obvious metal stud, helped Martha with her harness, and then strapped in himself. He had to take the gun out of its special pocket, above his right hip, and stuff it into a front pocket.

La sat in the pilot’s chair and put her hands on the wheel. “Ready when you are.”

“Okay.” Matt reached down and pried off the plastic dome. He pushed the button.

This time he was determined to be observant about the gray-out. But this time it was different.

The Jesus figure appeared again. There were three other people with him, but they were indistinct. “This jump should not be dangerous,” he said. “Just keep your wits about you and watch out for large animals. Go to Australia. ”

Jesus and his companions disappeared just as light came back—and motion, extremely. They were maybe ten meters above a storm-tossed ocean. Lightning crackled all around. The craft was buffeted up and down and sideways, then La pulled back on the wheel and they surged straight up, roaring and shuddering.

They broke out of the storm into bright sunshine, a solid swirl of storm cloud underneath them. They floated free, weightless inside their harnesses, until the craft leveled off into a ride as smooth as sitting in a chair.

“I’m going to head west,” she said, “and get out of this storm. We should be over land soon, Indonesia.”

“You can open your eyes,” Matt said softly.

Martha had both hands clamped over her eyes. “That was horrible,” she said in a tight, small voice. She was ghostly pale. Matt took one hand and it was cold and wet with tears. Her breath came in shallow gasps. She looked directly into his eyes. “But God told me not to worry.”

“Score one for God,” La said. “This craft could handle far worse weather.

“We aren’t getting any electromagnetic radiation from the shore.” She looked back at Martha. “Radio signals. There’s something farther south. But I’d like to land first and look around.”

“In the middle of that storm?” Matt said.

She pointed at the windshield and it became a radar screen. “Looks dry. We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

The clouds began to thin out, and soon they were flying high over a calm dark blue sea. Then land, a few rocks offshore, then a thick green jungle.

La followed the coastline for a minute. Pictures projected on the windshield showed magnifications of wildness. “No sign of civilization, not surprising.”

“They might have gone past the need for electromagnetic radiation,” Matt said.

“Sure,” La said. “What would they use instead? There.” A sliver of white beach appeared. She slowed and banked toward it.

They came in dead slow over gentle breakers and settled lightly onto the beach, well above the windrow that marked high tide. The ramp whirred down and settled in the sand with a solid crunch. A refreshing sea smell wafted up.

“Shall we?” La started down the ramp. Matt and Martha followed as soon as they could get untangled from the harnesses.

It seemed idyllic. It was warm, but the sea breeze was pleasant, the bulk of the craft shielding them from the tropical sun. Seabirds cried out above them.

Above the tall trees, a dinosaur’s head reared up and looked down at them, tilting in curiosity.

“Trouble,” La said. Matt had the pistol out just in time for a dinosaur the size and apparent disposition of a large mastiff. It came loping down toward them with a murderous ululation.

Matt fired, the sudden bang loud as a cannon, and the creature stopped dead. But it hadn’t been hit. It advanced more slowly, clawed hands out, jaws open, white mouth with too many teeth. Matt aimed and fired again, and the bullet blew through its lower jaw. A gout of red blood rib-boned out. It screamed and staggered backward, and then a flying reptile appeared and dropped on its back with a dull thud and ripped off its face. Three more of them landed, then a fourth and fifth, and they started fighting over the carcass.

“Defense,” La shouted, perhaps belatedly. Weapon barrels bristled out all over the ship, and they began firing, a screech and a sound like a sledgehammer hitting on a metal wall.

Whatever the nature of the weapon, it was effective. One after another, the flying creatures dropped to the ground, to die in convulsions.

One hopped, half-flying, straight toward them. It went over Matt’s head and scampered up the ramp. He fired one shot and it ricocheted off metal.

Behind him, Martha had fainted dead away.

“Get back!” La said. “Into the ship!”

“Are you crazy? That thing’s in there!”

“Not anymore. Carry Martha.”

He scooped her up clumsily and staggered up the ramp, waving the gun around.

When he got inside the ship, there was no trace of the monster except a slight smell of fried chicken.

La hurried up the ramp as it rose. It sealed with a clunk and a slight drop in air pressure.

He’d put Martha on the couch and was kneeling by her head. “You couldn’t have killed it out there? Before it—”

“No,” she said calmly. “It wasn’t me out there; just a projection of me. Once it came inside the ship, I was in total control.”

“I guess we’d better behave ourselves. In the ship.”

“Ha.” She looked through the windshield at the carnage below. Three new flying reptiles were tearing apart the corpses of their brothers, wary of each other in spite of the abundance of food.

“Those creatures didn’t come about by natural selection, ” Matt said. “Not in twenty-four thousand years.”

“I’d assume not; they were bioengineered. By whom and what for is the question.”

He remembered what the Jesus figure had said. “Go south? Toward the radio waves?”

She nodded. “New Zealand or Australia.”

“Australia,” Martha said, sitting up on the couch, groggy. “Watch out for large animals.”

“Always good advice,” La said. To Matt: “I’ll go slowly. You don’t have to strap in, but you’d better sit down. I’d suggest the couch.”

He sat next to Martha and put his arm around her. She leaned into him, and they eased back as the ship rose gently.

“This will be a couple of hours,” La said, “staying in the atmosphere. Might as well try to rest.”

Sleep after that? Matt thought. But Martha was already nodding off, from nightmare to dream. He closed his eyes and enjoyed her closeness, resting without sleep.

“Wake up,” La said. “We’re under someone else’s control. Better strap in.”

They scrambled into the acceleration couches, staring out at a wonderland. A city that looked like a huge ice sculpture, an abstraction of sweeping curves and gossamer threads glowing amber in the light of the setting sun. There were no other aircraft visible. A large harbor had quiet enough water to mirror perfectly the fantastic skyline.

“We’re being hauled in by some kind of tractor beam. I can’t understand what’s coming in on the radio.”

“You wouldn’t expect to, would you? After so long?”

“You could hope. But I’m just broadcasting a few phrases over and over in fifteen languages. See what they—”

“Hello, there,” the speakers said. The husky voice could have been either male or female; it had a slight Australian twang. “Please don’t be upset that we have taken control of your vehicle. All traffic near the city is regulated by the city.”

“I used to do that myself,” La said.

“From how far in the past did you come?”

“Twenty-four thousand years,” La said. “Do you get many time travelers?”

“Not really. The last one was several centuries ago. Does your machine involve an inexplicable anomaly having to do with gravitons, lots of them, in another dimension? ”

“It does, in fact. Can you help us explain it?”

“We can’t, actually. We don’t currently have working time machines.”

“Damn,” Matt said. “Another jump.”

“Maybe not,” La said. “We may hold the key for them to produce one.”

There was a flat area ahead, blinking yellow. They settled into it, in front of rows of streamlined vehicles of various shapes and sizes.

The ramp eased down and let in cold air. Their suits warmed as they walked down it.

Just before La stepped off, someone appeared. Nude, with small female breasts and small male genitals. “You still have gender,” it, or she, or he, said. “Except for you. You’re like me.”

“In some ways, I suppose,” La said. “You’re a projection? ”

“Yes. No one alive speaks anything like your language. People, physical people, are also cautious about coming into contact with you. There has been no disease in about twenty thousand years, except for an outbreak of influenza brought by a time traveler.”

“From the past, or the future?” Matt asked.

“Always from the past. If people have come from the future, they’ve kept it secret.” He looked closely at Matt. “You’re not from the future?”

“No, I’m from the 2050s.”

“As I told you,” La said, with a trace of asperity.

“Well, you look like you could be from the future. Dressed like that. And the way your ship is armed.”

“It helps,” Matt said, “when you run into huge flying reptiles with teeth.”

“Oh … you were up there, what you’d call Indonesia. That was not a great success.”

“Bioengineering?” La said.

“In a way. Sort of an amusement park, which turned out too dangerous to be really amusing.

“We’ve been more successful, working with species that already exist. In Africa, we have elephants and apes and such with augmented intelligence; they’re delightful. Starting from scratch, as we did with the dinosaurs and Martians … you’d think they’d be easier to control, but they aren’t; they tend to go their own way.”

“You’ve made Martians on Earth?” Matt said.

He squinted, an unreadable expression. “Why would you want to do that? On Mars, of course. Big puffballs that bounce around and keep to themselves. They stopped talking to us centuries ago, millennia. And their language now, if it is still a language, is incomprehensible.”

After an uncomfortable silence, La said, “Can you take us to someone in authority?”

“No. You can’t come into the city’s biosphere. And no one’s coming out here. Some were in favor of destroying you, to make sure you couldn’t infect us. But more wanted to investigate you.”

“That’s good. Shall we begin the investigation?”

“It’s over. You may go.” He tilted his head, as if listening to something. “I think you’d better go, now. Where did you come from, in the past?”

“Los Angeles.”

“Go there. You’ll find it amusing.”

“Will the people there be expecting us?”

“There are no people there. Nowhere but down here. Go now.” He disappeared.

“We should take him at his word,” La said. “I suspect we’re in more danger here than we were from the dinosaurs. ”

They hurried up the ramp and strapped in.

“This could be a little bumpy,” La said. “We’re going suborbital.” Three bells rang, and then the machine roared. Matthew and Martha were pushed back into the cushions by several gees.

La looked back at them, unaffected. “This will only take a couple of minutes,” she shouted. “Then we’ll coast.”

“What’s going on?” Martha screamed.

“It’s just a different kind of flying,” Matt shouted. “A lot faster. When it ends, we’ll be weightless for a while.”

“How can you be weightless?”

“You’ll enjoy it,” he said hopefully. He knew people who really didn’t. He’d done it once, and barely kept his lunch down.

The ship was suddenly silent, and they were floating free.

“You can undo your straps and move around,” La said. “Just be strapped in before reentry, about forty minutes.”

Martha unclicked and drifted free. “Oh my,” she said. “It’s like being on a swing!”

“Yeah, exactly,” Matt said, choking back gastric juices. He was glad he hadn’t eaten in hours.

She closed her eyes and shuddered all over, smiling, hugging herself. Was she having an orgasm? Her first?

She grabbed her knees and rotated slowly. “Oh … this is glorious. Matt?”

“It’s … it’s really fine.” He needed a drink of water in the worst way. Would the faucets work? “La? I need—”

“Bottled water in the fridge.”

He clambered over the acceleration couch and pushed himself in that direction, which unfortunately caused him to rotate backward. After two and a half turns, he was able to snag the galley door, then drift toward the fridge.

“Bring me one?” Martha called.

“Sure.” He got the top off one and stopped spinning by grabbing on to the fridge handle. He drank greedily from it and snorted some out his nose, which caused some dignified sneezing, coughing, and retching. A small universe, globules of water, saliva, and snot, radiated away from him. But the nausea passed, and he kicked himself gently back into the control room, a bottle of water in each hand.

Martha squeezed the bottle experimentally, and a string of globes floated free, flexing in and out of globular symmetry. “Have you ever seen anything like that?” He had, but it from was somebody else’s missed barf bag.

“Don’t do too much of that,” La said. “It all winds up on the floor.”

“Oh—of course it will.” She chased after a bubble and bit it.

Matt discreetly crawled back into the seat and belted himself in while Martha cavorted. He drank the whole bottle of water and hoped there would be gravity again before he had to urinate.

After what seemed to Matt like more than forty minutes, La told Martha to strap herself back in.

“We have to use atmospheric braking.” They slammed into the atmosphere, and the machine shook violently, making disturbing noises, while the view of Earth dissolved into orange glow.

They were flying over what seemed to be unbroken forest. “This was deep in the middle of LA when it was me,” La said. They slowed, losing altitude and banking.

Abrupt cliffs fell into the sea. “You would expect ruins, at least,” she said.

“I don’t know,” Matt said. “Even the Pyramids were wearing down after a few thousand years. After twenty-four thousand, they probably wouldn’t even be bumps.”

“There’s someone. Or something.” She banked toward a clearing where several small figures were running for the woods. Their approach would be pretty dramatic, screaming in out of an empty sky.

They eased down onto a soft meadow. “Defense,” she said, and with an oiled-metal sound, the gun barrels and lasers and pressors slid out.

“You don’t have to come with me,” she said. “But we should be safe even from dinosaurs.”

The three went down the ramp together, into the smell of pine and wildflowers. “We don’t look very friendly,” Martha said, looking back at the ship.

“Maybe we don’t want to,” Matt said. “There may not be any humans here, by that guy’s definition, but those were upright bipeds.”

“Smart enough to run away from us,” La said. “Let’s see whether they’re curious enough to come back.”

After a few minutes, one of them did. It was a bear, peering at them from behind a tree.

A sort of bear. It held a long spear with a metal tip and held it using an opposable thumb-claw. It stepped into the clearing, exposing a broad leather belt, from which hung two knives, large and small, and a pot and a frying pan.

It turned and spoke, or growled, quietly, to unseen companions, and they could see it was wearing a leather backpack with a tarred leather canteen attached.

It took a few steps toward them, then jammed its spear point first into the ground. It took a few more steps and stood still, facing them, arms folded.

“Do you speak English?” La said.

It growled at her, but the growl seemed gentle, and articulated, like language.

“Can you analyze that?” Matt said.

“Not without any referent. He might be saying that you smell good enough to eat.”

Matt touched his chest. “Matt.”

The bear looked at him for a moment, then touched its own chest. “Bear.” It pointed at Matt. “Mad.” Then at La and Martha. “Womads.”

“Two out of three’s not bad,” Matt said.

It smacked its chest twice. “Dot bad. Good.” It turned to the tree line and roared something. Five others came into the clearing and laid down their spears and clubs.

“Fum Aus’ralia?” it asked.

“No, we’re from here.” La pointed down. “Los Angeles. Twenty-four thousand years ago.”

It looked up at the ship and nodded. “Bime brav’lers.” It turned to the others and repeated the observation in bear language. Then it pointed at Martha and Matt. “Live.” Then at La: “Dead.”

“Not really,” La said. “But I’m not alive, either, the way you appear to be.”

“You know about time machines,” Matt said.

“Sh-ure. Bring in-fu-inza. Most humads die, doe bears. Lods do eat.” It said a long sentence to the other bears, and they laughed in a disturbing way, all snarls and teeth.

“Come bag wi’ us,” the bear said. “We cab dalk.”

“We’ll follow you in the time machine,” La said.

“No.” Its paw swung around faster than the eye could follow. But instead of the paw knocking La’s head off, the pressor field knocked the bear back in a cartoonish backward somersault. When it got back to its feet, the big pressor gun barked and it smacked it to the ground, obviously dead, bones pulverized.

“You two ought to get back up the ramp.” They were already halfway.

The surviving bears were picking up their weapons. “Don’t kill them,” La said. “Knock them down.” The pressor gun did, with a loud quintuple boom, as La walked unhurriedly away.

“I don’t think we’re going to make any progress here.” She took her station. “Might as well push the button.”

“Gladly.”

“You know where we’re headed?” La said. “What position in four-space?”

“We predicted this one was going to be in orbit,” Matt said. “That was going to be a problem.”

“No problem now. Do it.”

Matt pushed the button, and it all went gray except for the face of Jesus. “Stay close to her,” he said. “She is trying to push the button herself. But so far it only works if you do it.”

The Earth was a huge curve above them, and they were dropping up into it.

“How far up are we now?” Martha whispered.

“Call it A.D. 320,000,” Matt said. “Though they might be using a different calendar by now.”

“I mean miles.”

“I don’t know. Hundreds?”

“Three hundred twenty-eight, from sea level,” La said. “Shall we go back and see what’s happening in Australia?”

“They were so friendly there,” Martha said.

“It’s the only place to aim for. I’m getting a strong broad-spectrum carrier wave from the center of the continent. ”

“That’s all, a carrier wave?”

She nodded. “No information, just a position. Eighty minutes.”

“Think I’ll try to nap,” Matt said, not in the mood for a zero-gee romp. Martha nodded and closed her eyes, but she was too agitated to sleep, which probably kept Jesus away.