Polarian-Denebian War 6: Prisoners of the Past

by Jimmy Guieu

  Stunned, Yuln called Dormoy and Angelvin immediately to ask them to come over with their wives Jenny and Doniatchka. The two young couples were intrigued by this nocturnal rendezvous and showed up around 11 pm.

  Over the next few minutes, after listening to the incredible story told by Harrington, they went from disbelief to total astonishment. Nevertheless, they had to accept the facts. They could not deny the authenticity of the newspapers that would not be printed for three days.

  Doniatchka felt dizzy and dropped into an armchair. “In fact, Yuln, I’d gladly accept a strong drink.” She grabbed a bottle on the bar and poured a big glass of Cinzano that she almost downed in one gulp.

  Harrington stood up and said, “Let’s not dawdle, my friends. We’ll finish this very informative conversation later… meaning next week, when we’ll come back.”

  Captain Martin and his men watched the rising, mysterious “spaceship” in which Harrington, Streiler and the three young couples brought from Paris had entered. At a distance of 6,000 miles from Earth, Streiler stopped the Retrotimeship and Professor Harrington turned on the viewer.

  For 20 minutes, Kariven and his friends watched in a daze as the images of their stay—not yet lived—in 1843. Over the speakers the words that they would never speak awoke a strong emotion in them. Yuln’s pretty face was stunned, which in other circumstances would be funny.

  Getting a hold of himself Kariven broke the tension along with his wife when they both said, “It’s unbelievable!” The spontaneous outburst made everyone laugh.

  Harrington turned off the screen and declared, “You have all seen and heard the events that you were… or rather would have been involved in. Engrave them in your memory because they will disappear forever from the recording.”

  “Disappear?”

  “Naturally, Jenny,” Streiler said. “The fact that the Retrotimeship is pulling you out of… circulation during the fall into the Past, you will therefore never have lived through it and this event will be utterly erased from History.”

  “Just look,” Harrington threw down the newspapers that reported their disappearance and lamented their being lost in Time.

  He flipped a switch and worked the controls of time travel. The green light on Streiler’s post went out and the red light on Harrington’s started blinking. The Retrotimeship vibrated and the blackness of space around the ship turned into the gray of Space-Time. All of a sudden the newspapers on the metal floor of the oval cabin disappeared without leaving a single trace, faded into nothingness.

  “A magnificent confirmation of my predictions,” the mathematician smiled. “The event never took place. You were never thrown back into 1843 with any other Parisian from 1961. Therefore, the articles were never published! The demonstration is, I believe, convincing enough, isn’t it? And off to the Present, meaning to next week in your case. We picked you up at 11:30 pm on August 28 and will bring you back to Guyancourt on September 4.”

  With a smile the American started the retrograde system and slowly turned the knob on his half-moon panel. The knob, however, got a little stuck, which was unusual. He said, “We’ll have to check this when we get back to the States, Kurt. I don’t think the shaft got jammed but we should examine it very carefully.”

  “Okay, Red, we’ll see about that tomorrow. Ready?”

  “Ready, Kurt. It’s all yours.”

  Streiler started the field generator and the electromagnetic energy propelled the Retrotimeship—now a simple spaceship—toward Earth. Through the transparent walls of the cockpit they saw the globe rise up toward them at dizzying speed and for a brief moment the sphere left their field of vision: the Retrotimeship had just veered off slightly to enter the atmosphere on a tangent. After slipping into the rarefied layers of the ionosphere, the ship dove into the biosphere before leveling off on a horizontal flight.

  Streiler squinted in surprise at the viewer screen that was showing only a hazy landscape full of thick fog.

  “Damn weather!” he complained, hovering the ship at 1,500 feet altitude. “We’re right over Guyancourt and can’t see a thing. We can’t even make out the lights of Paris or the spotlight on the Eiffel Tower.”

  “But it was a beautiful night,” Leconte noted, “when we took off eight hours ago. Captain Martin and his men must be swearing up a storm. How’s he going to keep watch in this pea soup?”

  “Nah, we’ll land with the radar,” Streiler proposed.

  Piercing the fog, the radar screen showed the middle of the abandoned Guyancourt airfield. The Retrotimeship, with its spotlight turned on, landed gently. When the pads had touched down the side spotlights went on, their blinding glare diffused by the fog into a mass of pale halos.

  “What a beautiful evening!” Kariven joked. “We can’t even see the honor guard.”

  In the outer hatchway the passengers shivered: the temperature had dropped. The handrail of the metal stairs was sticky, almost gooey in the fog. In her pearl gray suit Yuln had goose bumps. Her friends Jenny and Doniatchka were also shivering in their summer outfits.

  On the ground everyone had the unpleasant surprise of sinking up to their ankles in gooey mud.

  “What a rain they must have had to soak the field like this,” Leconte railed, turning up his collar against the cold.

  “Captain Martin!” Professor Harrington boomed.

  His call was muffled by the fog that passed through their clothes all the way to their skin.

  “Captain Martin!” Three more times, cupping his hands around his mouth, he called in vain.

  A heavy silence weighed over them.

  “That they’ve all gone deaf, all right, but that Captain Martin and his men can’t see the ten krypton spotlights through the fog, I can’t believe it.”

  “Maybe they left?” Jenny Angelvin suggested, wrapping her scarf around her neck.

  “Left? Impossible. They had orders to guard the airport until we got back and we couldn’t have been gone from the present for more than a few hours. An order is an order. In the army more than anywhere else,” he insisted.

  The strong spotlights fused together only 15 yards from the Retrotimeship, forming a kind of dull globe. The fog seemed to be compacted, compressed in order to stop the light like a screen.

  The shadows of the nine time travelers were also absorbed by the fog and their outlines looked ghostly in the milky field of light.

  “Our English friends would be jealous of this fog!” Leconte joked, but he got no response. Everyone felt a gnawing worry, a strangling surge of dread.

  From the gray, moving form of Harrington his voice echoed, “Damn it all this weather! For some unknown reason Captain Martin and his men disobeyed orders and abandoned their post. We’ve got two choices: head for the Retrotimeship’s secret base in the USA or wait here for the fog to lift. I don’t advise going back to the States because we’ll just have to come back to France in an ionocruiser and thus lose 24 hours. In less than six hours it’ll be dawn. So, let’s go wait in the ship. You can rest or sleep in the cabin if you want.”

  “Gladly,” Yuln accepted, shivering. “We could get bronchitis our here in this fog.”

  Back in the warmth of their ship they sat in the spacious rectangular cabin, 30 by 15 feet and 10 feet high. The magnetized feet on their soft chairs stuck fast to the metal floor. The walls and ceiling, also metal, gave off a bluish, almost neon light. To the right were lined up cabinets containing the microfilm of a large library. Four mobile viewers were also stored in the micro-library.

  Streiler brought in a tray with plastic cups holding warm water. Using slender thongs he dropped a brown tablet in each. The steaming water quickly turned dark brown and the smell of excellent coffee filled the room.

  “Here’s some coffee—with sugar—that I think we all could use.”

  Of course the hot drink was very appreciated and helped warm up not only the body but the morale as well.

  “It’s still strange, this fog you could cut with a knife,” Don
iatchka mused.

  “Especially at this latitude and at the beginning of September,” Kariven completed. “Even in winter I’ve only rarely seen such thick fog in Paris.”

  Streiler, playing the role of maître d’ to perfection, to distract his guests, turned on the huge radio-television machine standing to the left of the micro-library.

  “Short of weather bulletins predicting a starry night, a little music will help us pass the time.”

  “Chic,” Jenny approved. “Coffee, music, old friends, we’ve got all we need for an impromptu party!”

  The accidental guests smiled thinking about their comical situation: stuck in a time-traveling ship because of the fog, they were about to change it into a nightclub for a few hours.

  “And the music, Kurt, what’s taking you so long?” Doniatchka teased.

  Surprised by the silence the physicist turned a knob, searching for a signal but the speaker produced nothing but a constant hiss. No radio station could be found.

  The video, after several tries, also stayed off. No wavering line crossed the screen even for a second. Everyone looked puzzled at each other while Harrington slowly stood up with a worried look.

  “First of all the fog and then the absence of the military and now this!”

  Streiler and he exchanged a look and without a word they both rushed to the cockpit. The others followed to find them leaning over the transmitter of the control panel, trying to get in contact with the Retrotimeship base in the USA.

  “RT1 calling Nevada Center… RT1 calling Nevada Center,” Streiler repeated into the round microphone on the chrome panel.

  The speaker did not make a sound. For ten minutes the physicist kept it up but with no success.

  “Try to get Washington, Kurt,” Harrington advised.

  Streiler changed frequencies and repeated his call to no avail.

  “Le Bourget or Orly Airports?” Kariven suggested anxiously.

  Neither Le Bourget nor Orly Airports responded.

  The latent and so far unexpressed fear quickly materialized in them, causing an unpleasant tightening in their guts.

  Sweat beaded on Streiler’s forehead. He laid his hands flat on the controls and stared blankly at the silent speaker. “I… I don’t know where we are,” his throat went dry, “but we’re not in the Present… since we can’t get anyone to answer our calls.”

  “Come on, that’s impossible!” Harrington got busy with the temporal retrograde device. All of a sudden he stopped and ran his fingers over the controls, remembering a apparently banal detail. “This knob that got stuck a little might have caused a… detour in Time!”

  Feverishly he unscrewed the top the control panel mounted on hinges. The insides of the delicate mechanism controlling the time travel appeared in their incredible complexity. One part was connected to the control panel but another more important part was in a separate base.

  Various colored connections, hundreds of them, linked countless electronic circuits together in an intricate tangle. Transistors were arranged, also by the hundreds, in criss-crossed layers. To the right bundles of multicolored wires came out of the electronic keyboard to get lost in the shiny cone that was fixed to the metal floor behind the panel.

  With infinite care and using a pen-tool that looked like what radiotechnicians used, Harrington slid the copper point of the instrument along the wires and connections.

  Some greasy waste on the pin of the guilty knob seemed to have caused the damage. A series of parallel ridges along the grease attracted the mathematician’s attention. He gave a more careful examination to the fragile, insulated filaments around the pin (when the panel was closed) and pondered:

  “I think I’ve found the… well, one of the causes of the problem. The technicians who check the Retrotimeship before we leave from the Nevada Center greased the controls, notably the axle pin of this knob. Nothing unusual on all this, but an abnormal variation in temperature at some time for even a short period must have made the grease more fluid. As it ran down the pin it spread over the filaments… which should never come in contact with this pin.

  “One or more of the filaments must have had a crack in their insulation, probably microscopic, and the grease got in. This could have caused a variation in the feed, some of the low voltage energy escaping. As a consequence the lower power altered the working of the keyboard controlling the time travel. This is, of course, only a hypothesis, a theoretical starting point for the tests we’ll have to perform.”

  “And how long will that take?” Dormoy asked.

  Harrington shrugged. “Maybe ten hours… or ten days if I’m right.”

  “Ten days?” Kariven was alarmed. “When we don’t even know in what Time we are!”

  “Knowing it wouldn’t change anything,” Streiler philosophized, putting on sky blue overalls to protect his suit during the repairs.

  Harrington also took out a pair of overalls from a compartment in the back of the cockpit and put them on, absorbed in thought.

  “Being no use to our friends,” Kariven observed, “we should leave them alone to work. Just standing around here might bother them.”

  All agreed and they decided to take a short rest in the cabins on the upper deck. Before lying on the foldout bunks of the narrow cabin, Yuln and Kariven looked out the single window stuck in the reinforced wall. The lateral spotlights were turned off. They could see nothing but a pale halo to the right coming from the cockpit. The fog, still as thick, kept them from seeing anything beyond the window.

  “Freed from the Past, now we’re stuck between Scylla and Charybdis,” Yuln sighed.

  As the fog dissipated the sunlight, already high on the horizon, flooded into the cabins of the Retrotimeship. The time travelers got ready and met in the inner passageway.

  When Streiler and Harrington could not be fund in any cabin they headed for the forecastle. The two of them were there, covered in grease, hair a tangle, hunched over the guts of the Retrotimeship. They looked exhausted. They were struggling to keep their eyelids from closing over their weary eyes. They straightened up, rubbing their backs.

  “I don’t want to sound like a pessimist,” Harrington sighed, “but we’re not going to be leaving this morning.”

  “We haven’t been able to analyze the exact nature of the problem yet,” Streiler added. “Moreover, the problem created some nasty results in the Time Counter so that we don’t know what era we’re stranded in.”

  “The wise thing to do would be to get a few hours of rest,” Kariven advised. “The work you’ve done has worn you out and you won’t get anything useful done if you force yourselves to continue.”

  “Kariven’s right, Red,” Dormoy agreed. “Since we can’t do the work ourselves, we’ll watch over the ship in the meantime.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Streiler accepted, covering a yawn with his hand.

  “At this point, losing two or three hours won’t matter. Let’s go get some sleep. Wake us up in three hours, Kariven.”

  When they were in their cabins the others went down to the lower deck to leave the ship. The warm air outside caressed their faces as the sun made them blink their eyes.

  The land around them was very different from what they had the night before. Shrubs and brambles and all kinds of plants were growing on the land. In every direction they could see it was wild country, luscious vegetation, dense forest and to the south an unknown landscape without roads or buildings.

  They walked around the ship, trying to spot the smoke from the capital to the west, but in vain.

  “Either the radar misguided us and we’re not in Guyancourt,” Leconte reckoned, “or if we’re there it’s at a time before Guyancourt… or Paris even existed.”

  Dormoy, the geophysicist, was leaning toward the second possibility. “I think that we’re in a period before Paris was built. Judging by the geological markers I’d say we’re in the quaternary period, well after the ice age as you can see by the vegetation which belongs to a humid, mo
derately warm climate. So, we are in our geological period and not in some distant epoch like the tertiary or even secondary period.”

  “Well, I like that better,” Yuln joked. “I’m feeling closer and closer to home.”

  This joke made them all laugh.

  Then Kariven said, “I’d like to get a more precise chronological details. Shall we explore a little? A very short exploration, of course, that for safety reasons shouldn’t go much more than a mile beyond the Retrotimeship.”

  “Excellent idea,” Doniatchka, Yuln and Jenny were ready to go.

  “Sorry,” Kariven informed them, “but it’s us who are going and not you, lovely creatures.”

  “Be reasonable and think a little,” Angelvin tried to persuade them while Kariven and Dormoy went to get some weapons from the Retrotimeship. “If we all go, who will watch over Kurt and Red during our absence? You three will be much more useful on board, keeping watch, than with us.”

  This argument seemed convincing enough and satisfied with their role the three young women climbed the metal stairs after kissing their men.

  The four men, each armed with a paralyzing rifle, discussed for a moment to decide which direction to take. They quickly agreed to climb a small, green hill around half a mile to the north.

  They started walking through the high grass that rose up to their thighs, talking along the way. Behind them, beyond the metal rocket shining in the sunlight, the grass waved at several points and multiple groves cut through it, converging on the ship.

  CHAPTER VI

  The scouts, with Kariven at the head, climbed the slope of the tree-covered hill, disturbing the hares and rabbits. They even saw a herd of frightened deer bounding off to the east over some rocks. A great number of partridges flew out of the grasslands surrounding the hill.

  “This would be paradise for any 20th century Nimrod,” Dormoy smiled.

  “No kidding. This area is full of game and would be great for hunting.”