by Steve Cook
“Benedict’s screaming,” Captain Legg told second lieutenant Patel, “is the worst thing about all this.” and Patel, a man born evidently without an optimism gene, nodded lugubrious agreement.
It had been three days now since Benedict had returned from his mission and he still screamed the place down every time anyone went near him. They had even tried sending a pretty nurse in with his food but that had not helped, in fact Legg was convinced it actually made things worse and he wrote as much in his daily reports.
“We could try upping his medication.” Lieutenant Patel, a small man with even smaller hope, suggested, his tone such that he might as well have been saying, “we could all kill ourselves.”
Captain Legg was not keen on the medication idea. They had Benedict on the smallest dose they could get away with, just enough to take the edge off and prevent the man from bursting a blood vessel. They needed Benedict lucid, in possession of all his marbles and the trouble with these psych medicines is they took the edge off all right but in the process they took the edge off everything, even parts of the psyche, such as the ability to think – or chew – where the edge was definitely best left on. You might as well be using a flamethrower to kill the greenfly.
Besides, medicating the poor blighter might make him less noisily deranged but he would still be deranged and they would be no closer to why he was deranged. And that they definitely needed to know. The trouble was, the only person who could enlighten them was Sergeant Benedict and Benedict was not talking – or at least not, at present, in a language spoken by anyone else on planet Earth
Try telling that to the “doctors” of the psych department, whose solution to everything that mystified them, apparently, was to clobber the old grey matter with some chemicals and blame the patient when he didn’t get well. Legg had no use for the psych mob, whom he considered quacks who were only useful if you wanted to drug your soldiers. And even then it didn’t work because you wound up with more soldiers killing themselves than the enemy managed to kill.
For three days then, Legg had managed to keep the psychs off Benedict, using his authority as appointed OIC of the Project, in much the same way one wards off vultures with an air rifle. He was not sure how much longer he could manage it because Upstairs was getting impatient – and by Upstairs, in the case of The Project, one was talking waaaay upstairs in her Britannic Majesty’s stratosphere. The Project was the most important that Brit science had undertaken since good the good old days of WW2: radar, sonar and the bouncing bomb and all that.
In fact, it was much more important than even those breakthroughs, on account of the fact that it involved time travel, and consequently a real opportunity, at last, to finally defeat the ancient enemy, the Americans.
Legg and lieutenant Patel were joined in the observation room then by Mike Drift, a civilian physicist, who was as irritatingly chirpy as Patel was depressingly lugubrious.
“How’s our boy doing?” Drift asked, with the same manner one might use to enquire when the women’s beach volleyball was due to start.
“Still three kilotons short of a full payload.” Legg told him, grimly.
The three of them were hunched over a CCTV screen, linked to a camera high up in a corner of Benedict’s padded cell. In the beginning they had tried using a room with a two-way mirror but Benedict had reacted in abject terror to his own reflection so they had had the sappers rig his current abode with padding and CCTV and put him in it. It was not really a cell of course, more a recovery room you could not unlock from the inside, except there was not much recovery going on.
Benedict was quiet at the moment though, which was something, and he would remain so as long as no-one went in the room. He sat hunched in the far corner, swathed in the comforting constraints of a straight jacket, banging his head futilely against the generous padding and grizzling in a way no Royal Marine should ever grizzle.
“One space-bar short of a full keyboard.” Patel, the psychologist, diagnosed.
“Doolally.” Drift translated, cheerfully.
Legg did not know what Drift had to be so phlegmatic about: if Benedict did not recover soon, he was going to be in as much hot water as the rest of them. For one thing they had succeeded in damaging one of Her Majesty’s Royal Marines, an expensive item when you factored in the cost of training and feeding the blighter, plus the cost of paying out invalidity pension for life to a man who was only twenty six.
For another thing, Drift was one of the inventors of the EMF, the Electromagnetic Flux machine – nicknamed “Tardis “– that had enabled them to send Benedict back in time and then retrieve him again, well most of him. And by “inventor” one meant one of the team of military researchers who had discovered it by accident while mucking around with scientific data stolen from their allies, the Israelis, who had stolen it from the yanks – something code-named “Philadelphia.” The Brits had re-codenamed it, “Basingstoke,” which was nowhere near as catchy. The Yanks always were good at code names.
“Basingstoke,” aka “The Project” aka “Tardis,” had cost a couple of billion quid, give or take, not an easy amount of expenditure to hide from the tax payer. Unless they could figure out not only how to send a soldier (funny how it never occurred to anyone to use this scientific marvel to send a Quaker to visit the past, or a poet) back in time but also have him return intact, several billion quid Her Majesty’s Government could have shelled out on something useful, such as a few missiles or invading somebody, might as well have been flushed down the toilet.
HMG wanted and expected results - i.e., a weapon that actually worked, as opposed to the other kind, of which she already had plenty – and if she did not get it, she was going to be seriously miffed. If she became seriously miffed, Legg, Drift, the hapless Patel and the rest of the Project team were going to find themselves re-assigned to Project Antarctica Weather Station.
HMG was already miffed, just not yet seriously so, what Drift airily referred to as MiffConTwo, at the delay occasioned by Legg’s dragging his feet vis a vis submitting a final report on the outcome of their use of a live guinea pig. Legg was hoping against hope that Benedict would snap out of...whatever it was that was wrong with him...and emerge from his foray into prehistory all smiles and thus give him a positive outcome to report.
The trouble was, he had not a clue how to hasten the process because there was nothing organically, neurologically wrong with their man that would explain his condition. Time travel had done him no detectable physical damage at all but once one exhausted all the organic possibilities, one was in terra incognita and right out of ideas.
It might have helped get an angle on what ailed sergeant Benedict if they could have used the services of a psychologist, of which there were three in the team and whom Legg distrusted slightly less than the brain butchers, but there was not much they could do with a man who screamed at them ninety percent of the time and ranted at them in an unknown language for the remainder.
Legg guessed they had a day or two at the most before Upstairs moved to MiffCon One and their research station, buried deep in the Scottish Highlands, got a visit from some serious M.O.D. brass looking for someone to blame or, worse, a politician.
Legg wished he had not made so many promises, gotten so many hopes up during the ritual touting for funds – building a time machine was an expensive business, compared to which a Trident missile system was just a few cheap baubles – but, to be fair, that was Drift’s fault. Drift with all his expansive enthusiasm, eloquently painting an appetising canvas of world domination that was bound to have the Brit establishment salivating.
In truth it was not all down to Drift. The scientist had been but one of a five-man research team that, at first accidentally, sent fruit back in time while researching some gizmo that was supposed to be invisible to radar, then graduated to a small robot, figuring out how to send-and-retrieve deliberately. Neither fruit nor robot, to be fair, had shown any signs of mental disturbance upon returning to the present.
Unhappily for Drift, he had been the one who had shot his mouth off, the one who had tried to steal the credit and the limelight and thus found himself IC of the technical team, under Legg’s overall administrative command, responsible for building them a “Tardis” and making it work, which he had done and done admirably. Legg guessed Drift probably saw himself going down in history as the “Father of Time Travel” but the liability of taking all the credit for something is you stood to take all the blame if it went pear-shaped. And Legg was going to make damn sure of it.
Drift however, showed no signs that he was worried. He had after all succeeded in co-designing and then building a technological marvel and was pleased with himself, the fact that it had deranged poor sergeant Benedict was a wrinkle he was confident they would iron out eventually.
“Any sign at all of an improvement in our chap’s condition?” Legg asked, hopefully.
“He’s quieter.” Patel told him, without enthusiasm. Patel was overall in charge of the “psych” team, which included the psychiatrists, psychologists, anthropologists, neurologists and so forth assigned to the Project. He was, however, no expert; what he knew about the human psyche you could write on a Tesco receipt with a marker pen, despite his degree in psychology – or perhaps because of it. He was more a sort of ringmaster charged with coordinating the work of the real “experts.” Patel had made the mistake of graduating from Loughborough with degrees in psychology and anthropology before he joined Army Intelligence and Psychological Warfare and that apparently was why he had gotten lumbered with his current assignment. Legg suspected that Army Intelligence and Psychological Warfare had found him too depressing to work with and had provided glowing references so as to get rid of him.
“I think mainly because he’s knackered.” Patel finished.
“And after three days he’s still refusing food.” Legg added.
“And that.” Patel agreed.
“That’s three days since he’s eaten?” Drift asked.
“Regular food makes him throw up.” said Patel. “But he will drink water. We’ll have to start force-feeding him if this goes on much longer.”
“He gets hungry enough, he’ll eat.” Legg said, with more confidence than he actually felt.
“We hope.” Patel added.
Drift shrugged. “Well, I’m no psychologist,” he said “But can’t you just give the bugger something to make him act normal? At least so he’ll sit quietly and not cringe or hide under the table, say ‘yes sir,’ ‘no sir’ when the Brass descend on us, maybe smile a bit?”
“And what do you propose we give him that will make him speak an intelligible language, Doctor Genius?” Legg asked sardonically.
Drift shrugged again; he did that a lot: “He’s a Marine Sergeant, can’t we just train him to grunt a bit? No-one would be any the wiser.”
“This is hardly a matter for levity. If we don’t figure out what’s wrong with Benedict and correct it, the whole Tardis project may well end up shelved – and us along with it.”
“I don’t see why, there are other applications for time travel other than military....”
“Such as?”
That threw Drift for a moment, then he said, “Research! Knowledge! Look at what we’ve already learned about the origins of our own species: the recordings that the good sergeant brought back!”
“And that’s worth two billion quid of the tax payer’s money is it? How many schools and hospitals didn’t get built to cover this project? We created a ruddy recession building your ruddy machine and then had to blame the yanks for it! Do you really think HMG gives a toss about mere knowledge?”
“I see your point. But quite frankly, I think we’ve given HMG its weapon. So what if we lose a few soldiers? When did HMG ever have second thoughts about sending soldiers over the top just because they didn’t all come back in one piece? There’s such a thing as suicide missions isn’t there?”
“The Army doesn’t do suicide missions, doctor. There’s no kamikaze regiment in HM forces.” Legg replied, stiffly.
“Not officially, no. We just don’t tell volunteers it’s a suicide mission. Been done before. So what’s wrong with sending soldiers back in time to kill Hitler or whoever and omitting to tell them that after they’ve completed their mission they’ll come back stark staring bonkers? What’s one or two soldiers compared with strangling the ol’ Third Reich at birth?”
Legg had to admit, privately, that Drift had a point. How much would the Brass really been discouraged by the trifling matter of losing a few soldiers, against the greater good? The “greater good” in this case being the rebirth of the Empire.
Actually, Legg knew that bumping off Hitler or any such nonsense was not on the cards. The target was the real enemy: the yanks. He had already been privy to discussions in high places about the best use to which a successful Tardis project could be put and knew that the powers that be had their sights on The Boston Tea Party, George Washington or even Ben Franklin, not to mention the arch dissident, Thomas Paine.
Send back a squad to bump some of those characters off – karate chop Thomas Paine while he was pamphleteering the streets of London and before he ever got on as boat to America, for instance -and you change history in a way that would strangle at birth an evil far greater than the Third Reich: you prevented the success of the American Revolution and the loss of the American colonies!
At least, that was Brass-think. Legg himself was not so sure. Why did the miracle of the century automatically wind up being used to kill someone? Why not send a doctor back in time to cure King George’s syphilis and then when he was well and lucid have the good doctor persuade the King to stop pissing off the colonists by taxing them into a state of revolt? Having been so miraculously cured, the King would be bound to pay attention to what their emissary from the future would have to say.
Legg had even made the mistake of suggesting it as an alternative to the military option but had received a very frosty reception. Evidently, the Brass were already looking forward to giving Franklin and Washington, not to mention the Boston hooligans, their comeuppance.
Be that as it may, the upshot was that things vis à vis the Tardis project were probably not as dicey as he first thought. As long as Britannia could send a trained psychopath back in time to do its bidding, that was good enough. It did not greatly matter whether the aforementioned psychopath came back in one piece.
Legg immediately felt relieved, although at the same time inordinately depressed.
He sighed, straightened up awkwardly and moved away from the CCTV screen: over the past few days he had developed a bad back from spending so much time hunched over the thing.
“We’ll give it one more day,” He told them, “before I really can’t stall any longer.” He turned to Patel: “Suggestions lieutenant?”
Patel sucked his teeth:”We’re going to try liquidizing his food. Good chance he’ll drink something other than water. And send someone in regularly to try and communicate with him. Maybe if we keep at it, he’ll get used to it and calm down. He shows all the signs of someone who is hallucinating heavily and one of my chaps has experience with that kind of thing – he was on that Project the Army did a few years ago with hallucinogens.”
“Is he still biting people?” Drift asked.
Patel blinked, not sure for a moment whether Drift was referring to the chap who had worked with hallucinogens or Benedict. “Benedict? Not if they keep their distance.”
“And this language he keeps jabbering?”
Patel said: “Appears to be of his own invention but my chaps are convinced it is not just gibberish. In fact it has some similarity to English apparently, at least in its structure, but....” he searched for a parallel “...imagine if you taught some obscure dialect of English to an ostrich –and taught it badly - then stuffed its beak full of loft insulation. It would be about as easy to understand as our friend in there. We’ve sent tapes for analysis. We are confident we can decode it.”
Legg thought Patel’s analogy was imaginative but not very helpful. Gibberish was gibberish.
“I would have thought,” Drift suggested, “that getting him to speak our language would be a higher priority.”
“Easier said than done. He doesn’t appear to know any.” Legg said.
“Well, could he have picked up this language on his travels?” Drift asked, a physicist crossing the line once again from his own discipline, in which – in his own estimation at least – he was a genius, into another, in which he was a dunce. For a man who had engineered a time machine, Drift knew precious little about history. “He was gone two years, subjectively.”
Patel sighed. Drift irritated him. How would he like it if Patel were to saunter over to his department and start sticking his nose in, making inane suggestions like “why don’t you stick the blue wire into that hole there?”
From their perspective only an hour or two had elapsed between Benedict entering the “Tardis” and then stumbling out of it again as the field generators wound down, looking like he had spent months camped out in the jungle. Indeed Benedict had spent months camped out in the wilds; he had been gone just under two years from his own perspective. He supposed two years was sufficient time for Benedict to have learned an entire language – but from whom would he have learned it?
He pointed out that obvious fact to Drift: “There weren’t any spoken languages in the Cretaceous era. Dinosaurs were not noted for their conversational skills.”
“So far as we know.” Drift retorted, mysteriously, “I’ve seen the recordings our boy brought back. Half a dozen species nobody even knew about, all those gaps filled in the puzzle of our own ancestry. In all those millions and millions of years, maybe one of th -.”
“Drift.” Legg said emphatically, to shut him up. He wished Drift would stick to what he was good at, running up HMG’s electricity bill, and not make such an idiot of himself. “Dinosaurs and all the other species roaming the Earth back then were animals pure and simple. Nothing in what Benedict brought back suggests otherwise. They very definitely did not used to sit and chew the ruddy fat....”
“Ah well, just a thought.” Drift said, unperturbed. “I just build machines, the live payload is your problem. Guess I better be getting back.....Things to do....”
“Speaking of which...?” Legg asked.
“We’ve replaced the burnt out coils so we’re almost ready for another run just as soon as you find another hero. And Upstairs okays it.”
“And the shielding?” Legg asked. They had decided to double the thickness of the lead shielding around the capsule in case some kind of radiation had been responsible for deranging Benedict’s neuro-wotsits – Legg did not really understand the science. There was no evidence that anything like that had been the problem, in fact the capsule was theoretically safer to sit in, even with the field generators at full tilt and bending time out of shape like boiling spaghetti, than an automobile in rush hour traffic. It was more a case of leaving no stone unturned and being seen to do something other than stare at the hapless sergeant on the monitor and liquidize his lunch in the blender.
“Done.” Then Drift added pointedly, for Patel’s benefit: “My department has its operations ship shape. My report will be on your desk by six.”
“Very good, doctor.” And then he gave Drift his very best officerial stare, until the man took the hint, and left.
Legg was glad to see him go; too full of himself by half, was Doctor Drift. He was not sure who irritated him the most: Drift or Patel or indeed anyone of a dozen of the senior staff of the Project. They had been cooped up in this network of dreary bunkers half a mile under the Cairngorms for far too long. Legg could not recall off hand how long it had been since he last saw the sky or got some fresh air and he was missing his wife, which was a measure of just how bad things had gotten.
Besides, the condition of sergeant Benedict bothered him: he too had a wife, a kid on the way, hopes, dreams, career and a long life ahead of him. The man was not just some lab rat and if they had destroyed him by treating him as one, Legg for one was going to be haunted by it for a very long time. It was no worse than sending men into battle or out on patrol on the streets of Kabul, he told himself, knowing that some of them would get hurt or not come back at all, yet somehow it was. At least he supposed it was, having never seen serious action himself.
Legg thought he could not spend all day in the cramped little observation room. Nothing was being achieved by it and he had an entire Project to run, with its various departments and laboratories, staff, maintenance, logistics issues, catering, security, communications, not to mention dealing with Upstairs. It was amazing just how big an operation was required for the simple matter of poking a wormhole in the space-time continuum and shoving a bloke through it. Doctor Who always made it look so simple.
“If there’s nothing else, lieutenant.....” Legg said to Patel, preparing to leave.
Just then, the door behind him opened and a couple of Patel’s staff arrived, as if responding to a cue. One of them was Doctor Carey, a psych contracted to the military, whom Patel had mentioned earlier as having done research for the Army on hallucinogens. By “research” was evidently meant giving some luckless “volunteer” an LSD derivative, then making notes when he acted like someone off his trolley on LSD, all in the name of producing the Ultimate Soldier, which –surprise, surprise – it never did. Why anyone thought a spaced-out acid-head would make a fine soldier was beyond Legg. Blighty, after all, had managed to carve out a global empire and then cock it all up without the aid of much more than bromide in the tea ration – and rum of course.
The real value of such research, Legg suspected, was so that the Frankensteins could fool around with some new psychotropics at HMG’s expense and with legal impunity before they made them available to the general population.
Needless to say, he did not like Carey very much. He did not bathe for one thing, looked like a praying mantis in a lab coat for another, and for a third seemed like the sort of nut who would slyly drop a pill in your tea just to see what it did. He was, however, reputed to be good at getting through to someone who was off his bonce, probably because he had had lots of practise.
“You might want to stay and watch this, sir.” Patel said.
Legg doubted it but lingered anyway, on the off chance that Benedict would brighten his day by biting out a chunk of Carey’s leg.
“Doctor Carey is going to attempt to establish communication with the patient.” Patel elaborated needlessly, making it sound as if they were attempting to contact an alien species. “With your permission?”
Legg sighed and gave him the nod. Patel in turn conveyed the nod down the chain of command. Carey nodded back, gave the kind of smile which Torquemada might have given when about to start an interview, and when all the nodding was done, unlocked the door of the treatment room.
They watched on the monitor as Carey entered the padded room; watched Benedict look up, stiffen and try to recoil in horror as the good Doctor cautiously approached him. Unfortunately, as the sergeant was already squeezed tight up against the padding in the far corner, there was not the room for much recoiling.
Carey had taken a plate of sandwiches in with him and was offering one of these to the sergeant as he edged closer, reminding Legg of someone trying to appease a rabid Doberman with a biscuit. It was all very scientific.
Carey was speaking in soft, kindly tones as he approached his victim, coaxing, trying to exude harmlessness, establish a rapport, to solicit some kind of response. He edged close enough to wave the sandwich under Benedict’s nose, albeit at arm’s length, hoping the smell would prompt the sergeant to take a bite.
Legg could not see that their “expert” was doing anything half a dozen people had not tried already, unless he thought to win Benedict over by sheer charisma. The Captain wondered how much they were paying Carey for this twaddle.
At first, to be fair, Benedict’s response did seem a little quieter than that with which he had greeted the dozens of previous attempts to get through to him, confining himself to heavy breathing through gritted teeth, the bug-eyed stare that suggested he was not seeing the man in front of him but some dreadful phantasmagoria conjured up by his own imagination, and trying to suffuse into the wall behind him.
But then Benedict became increasingly agitated and started yelling in that strange, nonsensical language of his own devising, his voice so full of fear and despair it gave one the heeby jeebies.
Carey persisted for several minutes, then withdrew and sat on the floor on the far side of the room, giving Benedict some space until he calmed down. Then he tried again, moving very slowly, showing his less-than-salubrious teeth in what was supposed to be a friendly smile. With much the same result.
After ten minutes, the doctor gave up and beat a tactical retreat. In the observation room, he paused to jot down some notes on his clipboard.
“I’ll try again in half an hour.” He reported. “The subject certainly acts as if he is suffering hallucinations that make us appear to him as some kind of monsters but the problem we have is that hallucinations induced by medication wear off. His don’t. Being as nothing showed up in the tests and scans I am at a loss to explain it.”
Well that was yet another waste of my time. Legg thought, glumly.
“One thing we could try.....” said Carey’s companion, a female no less, by the name of McGann, and not a bad looking one in an over-starched kind of way. “....is take him out of that straight jacket, so he feels less of a prisoner. He can’t hurt himself in there.”
“It’s not him we are worried about.” Legg told her. “You are aware he bit people? And that my chaps hurt him trying to hold him down? He’s a Marine. He takes a lot of subduing.”
“We can have a tranquiliser gun handy. Besides, three days without food and he’s getting weaker.” McGann suggested, pragmatically. “I’m thinking that we should try leaving him in there unrestrained, put some food in with him and a pad and pencil...”
“He could easily take his eye out with a pencil,” Patel objected. “Or someone else’s”
“A piece of chalk, then. A very short piece. Maybe, just maybe, if we leave him alone, he will draw or write something. His profile says he’s an amateur artist, likes to draw. It might be easier for him than spoken communication.”
The men all looked at one another. Legg thought it not a bad idea but he waited for Patel’s response.
“Worth a try.” Patel said. “But don’t get your hopes up.”
No danger of that. Legg thought, then said to Patel: “Go ahead and give it a bash. See Colour Sar’nt McAllister and have him send over some MPs in case our boy throws a wobbler when the restraints come off. I’ll swing by later.”
And with that he turned on his heel and left the room, glad to be out of there. For the next few hours, Legg was mercifully preoccupied with the manifold duties of running the base with some semblance of a military operation.
Towards tea time he even found time to escape for a breather and went “up top” to one of the observation posts from where he could look out upon the bleak majesty of the mountains and valleys purple with heather in the descending dusk. It was cold and raining, the stars hidden by cloud and on the ground the solitary forlorn light of a village glimmered in the distance. The desolate scene did nothing to lighten the Captain’s mood so he did not linger long.
Descending in the lift into the heart of the underground complex, he took a detour into Drift’s domain and went to have a look at the Tardis.
The machine had the look of something that had been disembowelled. It was a very smart-looking, shiny ovoid the size of a cabin cruiser that normally hung suspended in mid air between enormous electromagnetic gizmos in a well beneath a mezzanine that housed banks of computer screens and variously shaped ancillary machines. The Tardis had, however, been winched out of the well and placed in a net of gantries and scaffolding. It reminded Legg of the dome of a mosque undergoing roof repairs. Some of its outer shell had been removed and not yet welded back in place and from its open wounds trailed clusters of wires and fibre-optic cables.
The pinnacle of British engineering, Legg thought, not without some pride and, regardless of the teething troubles they had had, a scientific quantum leap forward from which the planet, probably, would never recover. Watching Drift working at a console before a bunch of screens showing schematics and wavy lines, he wondered if he was looking at another Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, destined to unleash upon the world technological capability far in advance of its collective wisdom.
Probably.
Striding down to the medical wing while the guards stationed throughout the complex were preparing to change shifts, Legg looked in on Patel’s team, to see if McGann’s idea had achieved anything.
They had gotten Benedict out of his restraints without mishap, left him some food and water and some paper and a piece of blue chalk and then retired to see what he did.
By the time Legg arrived, he was back in his favourite corner, arms wrapped around his knees and talking to himself. Occasionally he would look up at the camera and yell at it, all of which was disappointing to say the least because the scene looked much as Legg had left it, only minus the straight-jacket.
But according to Patel, their man had indeed been active for a while. They had everything on tape so Legg watched the re-runs.
Benedict had drunk the water they left for him and even tried to eat the food. The smell or taste of it made him gag but he did manage to swallow a few mouthfuls, which was encouraging.
He then started ranting at the camera again, but to Legg’s ear it sounded less like ranting and more like pleading: the problem was that the language he was using sounded so feral that even if he had been reciting poetry it would still have sounded like the raving of a lunatic.
After that, perhaps buoyed by the fact that he had at last managed to ingest some food, Benedict took an interest in the paper and chalk, seeming to get the idea of what they wanted him to do.
This man isn’t insane, Legg thought. He’s just terrified out of his wits!
For an hour or so then, Benedict began writing. He wrote so much they had to find him another piece of chalk, open the cell door and quickly toss it in.
Every time he had filled a piece of paper, the sergeant would hold it up to the camera so his watchers could read it. The problem was, the writing was unintelligible. Clearly a script, it corresponded to no script anyone had ever seen, and no script filed in their data base, nor any that could be found on the internet.
“So we’ve got an unknown language written in an unknown script.” Legg said. “Great!” but it seemed to him that these things were too elaborate to be mere inventions.
No man of Benedict’s education, surely, could invent out of thin air and in a couple of years an entire speech, alphabet, grammar and vocabulary. Benedict had to have gotten them from somewhere. But where? During his stay in prehistory, according to the tapes he had brought back, Benedict had encountered dinosaurs, insects and so forth – some species already known to science and some hitherto unsuspected – and all behaved much as you would expect any animal devoid of the higher intellect possessed by at least some of the people he knew.
“This is helpful.” McGann said, being of a somewhat more optimistic disposition than her boss, Patel. “A written language will be easier to analyse and de-code than spoken. We could send it off for analysis. We might in time be able to understand what the sergeant is trying to tell us.”
“You think he’s trying to tell us something?”
“Most definitely, Captain. A good portion of the rage he is manifesting is sheer frustration. The rest is terror of course, but he’s frustrated as well.....keep watching, look what he does next.”
Legg kept watching, by then quite interested, the faint hope stirring that they might yet be able to understand Benedict’s condition and help him.
Momentarily, Benedict proceeded to throw a fit and angrily tore up all the pages he had written, then he jumped up and down on their torn remnants. Then he calmed down, sat on the floor and had a good cry. It was pitiful to behold.
After a while though he seemed to get as grip on himself and, as if propelled by a new idea, picked up the chalk and a new piece of paper and began drawing.
At length, he held up the drawing to the camera. He was indeed quite a good artist and had even managed to inject some shading and shadow into his picture so that it had a degree of life and three dimensions.
“What the hell is that?” Patel asked.
It was clearly some kind of animal with spindly legs, tiny eyes and a very small head from which sprouted what appeared to be grass at the top and a fleshy protuberance in the middle of what was presumably a face.
“I’ve never seen anything like it.” Legg replied and next to him, McGann nodded her head in agreement.
“We can run it through the data base,” she suggested, “but I doubt we’ll find it, except maybe in a comic book.”
“I’ve seen it before.” Patel told them. “There are a couple of sketches similar to this among the sergeant’s effects that we retrieved from the capsule. Benedict did a lot of sketching. We assumed that it must be a rendition of some animal he had encountered in the Cretaceous but there is nothing on film even remotely like it. Looks like some kind of monster. A figment of his deranged imagination perhaps?”
“What the hell is he doing now? “ Legg asked, distracted by a flurry of movement from Benedict.
The sergeant was gesturing vigorously, repeatedly, pointing first at the picture and then at himself, over and over.
Patel shook his head slowly, pityingly. “I think he is trying to tell us that that is a self-portrait. The man is insane.”
Legg had to concur. Benedict was a handsome enough chap, if currently somewhat dog-eared, but the creature in the portrait was ugly enough to give children nightmares.
* * * * * *
Sergeant Thomas Benedict’s association with the quaintly nick-named “Tardis” Project had begun some three months earlier, by everyone’s else’s reckoning and two years and three months from his own perspective.
Of course, he did not know the name of it when he found himself “volunteered” for it, nor the nature of it, nor its location, nor the selection process by which he drew what turned out to be a very short straw.
All he knew the day the Army truck that had brought him all the way from Plymouth, where the chopper that had brought him from his barracks in Poole, Dorset had dropped him off at an RAF base, laboured up an unmade track high in the Cairngorms late one September afternoon, was that he was heading for a project so secret you had to have top security clearance just to stick the “top secret” label on the Project’s file.
He had no premonition of what was to come, that he was to be the world’s first time-traveller (not counting several pieces of fruit and a robot) and that he would endure for his heroics, the mother of all jet-lags.
He had figured out, of course, that whatever he had been assigned to was massively important to the nation and probably therefore massively dangerous but that did not bother him unduly. He was used to tricky assignments and honoured to have been picked for yet another because each time he found himself selected it was, so far as he was concerned, a vote of confidence from the powers-that-be (whoever they were) and as good as pinning a medal on his chest.
Benedict was an exemplary soldier and good at almost everything, unflappable, brave and, most importantly, he followed orders to the letter. He had one other quality that made him a natural choice when her majesty needed a star performer: he was a survivor. The veteran of a dozen capers that had put paid to many a good fellow soldier, he always came back in one piece – apart from the odd bullet hole. He imagined that somewhere in the bowels of the ministry of defence, his personnel file probably glowed in the dark.
The only thing that surprised him faintly was to discover that the truck, heading north, just kept going and went deeper and deeper into Scotland. Then deeper still, then started to climb the mountain foothills. He had expected to be heading for Afghanistan or somewhere interesting and was not aware that there was anything going on in Scotland that would require his services, unless the buggers were rustling cattle again.
At one point, bored with the endless hours of being bounced around in the back of the truck, he poked his head in the cab and asked one of the two men, a corporal and a private, who were taking it in turns to drive.
“Where exactly are we headed, corporal?”
“If I told you that, sarge, we’d have to kill you.” said the corporal airily and Benedict had as feeling he was not joking.
“Real hush-hush top secret then is it?”
“If I told you that sarge, we’d have to kill you.”
“No point in my pulling rank on you, then?”
“If you tried that, sarge, I’d have -“
“To kill me, yeah, I get it. Well, been nice chatting to you boys. I’m afraid to ask, but either of you got a cig? I’m out.”
The corporal fished a cigarette out of his tunic.
The truck did not stop except for fuel and the toilet. They ate rations on the move, drove through the night and most of the next day before, two fuel stops and three hundred cigs later, they were climbing the mountain road and Benedict sensed they were nearing the end of their journey
His destination was buried deep into the side of a mountain, its approaches heavily guarded – although only a trained eye would have noticed – and accessed via a tunnel with a heavily camouflaged entrance.
Once inside, Benedict noticed the liberal smattering of white lab-coats among the usual military drab and he thought: Oh bloody hell, bleedin’ research project. That can’t be good.
It wasn’t. When he was first briefed on exactly what he would be doing – and he had been there a week before that happened – he thought Captain Legg, the base OIC, was pulling his leg. Legg however did not look the type who was up for a laugh. He was a lanky, grey man in his forties who looked as if he was enduring rather than enjoying his duties. His complexion suggested he should get out more.
“Excuse me sir? Come again sir?”
“You heard me right the first time, sergeant. Nothing wrong with your ears is there?” But then Legg took pity on him. “Not exactly your regular assignment, I grant you. Needs a special kind of soldier...”
Yes, thought Benedict, a bleedin’ idiot.
“..and the MOD, in its wisdom, seemed to think you fit the bill. However, on this occasion, taking into the account the very unusual nature of your mission and despite the fact that you have been compulsorily volunteered, you will be permitted to decline this assignment.” And then he added, “If you feel it is too much for you.”
And that little addendum pretty much guaranteed Benedict would not back out whatever the misgivings he felt, and however much those misgivings would soon be justified a thousand-fold.
Soon thereafter Legg had a boff by the name of Drift show him around the time machine. And it slowly dawned on Benedict that these boys were not kidding; they really had built a time machine – or at least thought they had.
Strewth!
“We call it the ‘Tardis’.” Drift informed him as he showed him around the time machine, gave him a preliminary briefing on the controls, where he would sit and how it worked. Benedict did not understand the latter but sitting he could manage, opening and shutting the door, working the controls which comprised little more than the air conditioning and a big red button.
“Like in Doctor Who?” Benedict asked.
“Precisely, except we’ve dispensed with the Police Box motif and gone for the....er, eggy look.” Drift had a bland, flat face, white skin and bags under his eyes. Benedict was not fooled by the breezy manner, the man had a febrile gleam in his eyes that told a practised observer of squaddies that he was close to the edge. The edge of what exactly, the sergeant was not sure.
“Oh good.” Benedict said, walking around the capsule and admiring its smooth, shiny surface. It certainly looked like a big, polished, silver egg. An egg about the same size as a large London bus. “Very chic.”
“There are reasons for the shape and the mirrored surface, which I won’t bore you with.....” Drift told him. He patted the capsule’s flanks, affectionately. “Carbon-fibre shell under the mirrored surface, lead shielding under that, just in case....”
“Just in case of what, sir?”
“Nothing you need worry about.” Then Drift quickly moved on. “Once the door is closed, you seal it from the inside. The capsule is completely air and water tight, just in case we drop you in the ocean or deep space by mistake.”
“Is that very likely?”
“Not very.” Drift told him, airily. “We are sending you back in time sixty five million years, but go back sixty-five million years in time to this very spot in the universe and the Earth isn’t here yet and won’t be for another sixty-five million years. Everything’s in motion you see: the sun, the Earth, even the Earth’s tectonic plates and so forth. So we have to send you to where we are standing was, sixty-five million years ago, have to move the capsule in space as well as time, Fortunately space, motion and time are interrelated.....”
“Stroke of luck.” the sergeant concurred. Sixty five million years?
Drift paused, not sure whether the soldier was being sarcastic, then went on:
“Anyway it’s very technical and all you need to know is we’ve figured out how to move the capsule in space when we...how to open a hole in space as well as time....the upshot is we can put you where we want you on Earth sixty four million, eight hundred and thirty two thousand, nine hundred and eighty-six years, three months and eight days B.C. To the minute and to the inch. Give or take. Besides, it doesn’t much matter where we put you – as long as it’s not in the centre of the sun - because all you have to do is wait for the time field to collapse, which it will because the electromagnetic field can only hold it for so long before we have to put a coin in the meter – just joking - and you’ll be pulled back to the present automatically. All you have to do is make sure you’re in the capsule when that happens, otherwise...well, you’re screwed.”
“Ingenious sir.” Benedict said. He had not understood a word so he figured it must be. “So it’s safe, then, is it?”
“We like to think so.” Drift told him. “I can assure you I am not worried.”
“Oh good. I’d hate you to worry, sir.”
“Any questions so far, sergeant?”
Benedict had about ten million but when he tried to focus, most of them fled into the deep mists of his bewilderment.
He walked around the machine, poked his head in the door and had a look at the accomodation compartment, which in all was about as spacious as a small campsite trailer and the flight compartment which was as cramped as the cockpit of a light aircraft. He examined the controls, the internal climate panel, the internal power unit, the various racks that would house his water and rations, tools, cameras and recording equipment.
“Looks a bit like a space capsule.”
“We nicked a few design ideas off NASA.” Drift said.
It occurred to Benedict then that there was no room in the capsule for an engine. It was ninety percent stowage space for rations and such, which made sense being as he was going to be gone two and a bit years, but where was the engine? He asked the scientist about it.
For a moment Drift looked stricken. “Oh my God,” he said. “I knew we’d forgotten something!” Then he laughed. “Just kidding, sergeant. The Tardis doesn’t have an engine, just a power source for internal life support, microwave oven, lights and so forth. All the work is done at this end.”
He waved his hand expansively at the enormous electromagnetic coils that surrounded the well in which the capsule sat. “When we power up those coils, they open up what the sci fi buffs would call a temporary worm hole. When we shut off the field, the hole collapses and the capsule is pulled back into the present. It’s like it’s on a long piece of elastic, if you will. We can keep the coils running long enough to keep you in the past for a few hours our time, a few years from the perspective of whoever is at the end of the elastic.”
“Excuse me sir, did you just say a few years?”
“Roughly, yes. Might be a bit more, might be a bit less – there are variables. For us, you’ll only be gone hours, for you the...er, time might seem to drag a bit. You might want to take something to read. We haven’t been able to think up enough tests to keep you busy for that long. Might get a bit boring, especially after the Comet collision and the global winter sets in. Probably not much to observe then but mud and ash....”
“Not much of a reader, sir.” Did he just say “Comet Collision” and “Global Winter”?
“Well, go over that with the Psych department. We can load the onboard computer up with video games or porn if you prefer. You can switch the field off any time you want from your end, using that big red button there, if there’s some emergency which forces you to abort your mission early.”
“Such as getting attacked by a Tyrannosaurus.” Benedict had only been half-listening, was thinking about how it would be if he punched the smug twerp in the face.
“That would be one example, although we are hoping you will be able to hang on in there long enough to do all the data gathering and tests we want you to do and let the machinery at this end run its course. It’s important we keep the portal open as long as we can, so we can test the limits of what we can do. But one of my colleagues will brief you on all that in due course. Questions?”
Benedict did not have any, was already suffering from information overload. Drift had lost him at roughly the point where he said, “We call it the ‘Tardis.’”
“There’s one other thing....” Drift said. “I don’t know if anyone has mentioned it to you, but there’s the matter of the exact point in time we are going to send you to. Do you know much about prehistory, sergeant?”
“Beyond watching ‘Jurassic Park’ sir, no.”
“Ah. Well, you may or may not know that there was a cataclysmic event that wiped out the Dinosaurs – well, most of them.”
“I’ve heard of it. Earth was hit by comet or something?”
Drift nodded. “That’s the current consensus. The cataclysm brought about such sudden and massive climate change that the vast majority of dinosaur species and a whole load of others could not survive it. That’s why now there are very few species around, apart from birds and a few lizards apparently, that are descended from them but a lot of mammals – including man – were able to fill the gap with the dinosaurs out of the picture. Or so I’m reliably informed. Who knows? If the dinosaurs had stuck around lording it over all creation, our own line might never have evolved....”
“Another stroke of luck.”
“Not for the dinosaurs it wasn’t. Anyway, the point I’m making is that the cataclysm – which was produced by the Earth getting hit by a comet - produced a massive energy surge on the time stream. At this moment in our research, that energy surge means that we are unable to drop you anywhere – anywhen – other than right on top of it. I’m confident that in time we’ll be able to overcome that and pick and choose much more broadly what time we send the capsule to.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“You needn’t worry. Geographically you’ll be sent to a point a fair distance from the epicentre, which was in Mexico, and days, perhaps weeks, before the event. The capsule has been designed to survive just about anything other than a nuclear warhead being dropped right on top of it. We’ve already sent robots through to that exact time and they have been able to take recordings of the event. We’ll be wanting you to make observations and readings our robots just don’t have the sophistication to carry out but we do know that apart from some buffeting, shock waves, tidal waves, lots of crap in the atmosphere and such and a sudden drop in global temperature, as long as you are inside the capsule at the time, you’ll be fine. And as a precaution, we’ve installed an alarm inside the capsule warning you to get back inside and you’ll have another strapped to your wrist. When the alarm goes off, you’ll have about ten minutes. You’ll be briefed later on how far you can wander from the capsule and I would advise you to follow your instructions to the letter.”
“I always do sir. But can’t we just pull the capsule out when the comet hits?”
Drift shook his head. ”We tried it. The energy surge of the event kind of sticks the wormhole open for a bit so there will be a period of a few months from your perspective when we can’t pull the capsule back to ‘now,’ until the surge dissipates. During that window, even your pressing your red button won’t do anything. From our perspective we’re talking just a few minutes, from the perspective of anyone at the other end, a few months, as I said. Once that comet hits, you’ll have no choice but to sit it out. But, as I said, we’ve designed the capsule to withstand the consequences and already tested it with the robots: it will be uncomfortable but not fatal. And it provides a wonderful opportunity for direct observation of such an event, gathering data and all that rot.....”
Despite himself and his dislike for Drift, Benedict was becoming impressed by the whole thing, the science and, most importantly, the fact that if he made it back, his name would go down in history like the yank Neil Armstrong who was the first to walk on the Moon. A hero. The first man to time travel!
He recalled Armstrong’s famous speech: “A small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind.” Immortal words.
What would he say when he stepped forth from his own capsule in the middle of Jurassic Park that might - if the cloak of secrecy over the Project was ever lifted – be remembered for all time?
“A small step for a man, a giant step backwards for mankind.” came to mind but he figured they would probably have a speech writer compose something for him.
Benedict walked around the capsule again, his confidence growing. It sure looked like a good, solid piece of British engineering, even if most of the parts were probably made in China. He patted the egg affectionately the way Drift had done earlier.
“Impressive, sir. If you don’t mind my asking, is it you who designed and built it?”
“I had some help.”Drift told him smugly.
That was Benedict’s preliminary introduction to the Egg, as he called it. More thorough briefings came later, a basic grounding in the science behind it, training, drills, a through acquaintance with various pieces of field equipment and recording devices, soil and air sampling and so on. Significantly, there was nothing in the routines they expected him to perform that involved taking specimens or even DNA samples off the more approachable animals, beyond dung-gathering. He was under strict instructions not to interact with the animals at all under any circumstances – aside from running away from the large, carnivorous ones – and to even avoid stepping on bugs.
The reason for that was made clear during one of his briefings from second lieutenant Patel.
Patel, Benedict thought, was okay, for an officer. He had his department well organized and treated with him with the respect due a man who had spent his career at the sharp end from a man who ran wars from a computer screen. Benedict did not blame Patel for that: any army needed its backroom staff and masterminds safely ensconced in bunkers: each to his own. But at least Patel didn’t look down his nose at mere grunts and he seemed like a man you could depend on, even if he was a bit morose. And he certainly was not full of himself like Drift.
Patel and his team did all the briefing and training revolving around Benedict’s activities and projects in the field, “at the Other End,” as they called it, as well as putting him through innumerable psych and physiological tests.
At one such briefing, as the “launch” date neared, Patel made a point of warning him in very emphatic terms:
“Sergeant, there is one thing I must impress upon you and that is that you must not under any circumstances interfere with the life forms you come upon. For that reason you will not be going in armed with any weaponry whatever.”
“No weapons sir?”
“No sergeant. You are not being sent back in time to do battle with anything or kill anything.” Then he added, enigmatically, “not at this stage.”
“Might I ask why, sir?”
“I’m surprised no-one has been over this with you before....”
Probably because they didn’t want to tell me I had to leave me bleedin’ weapons behind. Benedict thought.
“Everybody seems to have forgotten that minor detail, sir.”
“Well, I am very sorry about that. Truth is, as we expect you to avoid animals in general apart from observing them and filming them from a safe distance and seek the safety of the capsule when the need arises, the need for a weapon should not arise. In any case, you’d need a friggin’ bazooka to even make an impression on some of the beasts that will be around in that era – were around in that era.”
“And the reason for this no fraternizin’ with the natives, sir?”
“Simple. Any change, I mean any change, in the timeline can change the present. We’ve no way of knowing how the consequences of even a small event might ripple up the time line and affect us in the here and now.”
Patel paused, fished around for an example that would illustrate his point. “For example, you do something apparently innocuous like swatting some sort of little bug thingy that’s bothering you and that bug thingy just happens to be the very bug that’s carrying a gene that will cause its descendents to mutate and multiply and over the tens of millions of years mutate some more and then some more and become the first bird or species of bird. You could change the past so that birds never evolved, or the heron or starling never evolved or some such. And if some species never evolved, then creatures for which they are natural predators are free to multiply and mutate down the millennia so the present winds up with species that, in our current reality, don’t exist or species that would have existed, not existing. You see that?”
“I think so sir. But what are the odds of me killing the very creature out of all the millions that are alive back then that is the direct ancestor of any particular species in the present?”
“We don’t know. But every species, every genetic line began with some particular animal or animals way back in the past contributing their genes or combinations of genes to the gene pool. Change that precise combination in any way and you change the course of evolution from that point on - probably. The point is that there is a risk. We just do not know yet how big the risk is. We believe that the further back you go, the potential for disturbing the present increases commensurately, possible even exponentially. And you will be going pretty far back. An extreme example would be if we sent someone way, way back to the time when the first amoeba was splitting and he killed it. He would have killed the direct ancestor of everything on the planet and may well wipe out all life as we know it – or rather make it so that it never existed. More to the point, suppose you kill a creature that is the direct descendent of homo sapiens? Somewhere back then there may be a little lizard hopping around that mates with another little lizard and their line just happens to be the one that survives the big Extinction Event, goes on evolving up through time to become a mammal, then an ape, then Man. What if you killed it before it can procreate?”
“I’d ...er, wipe out the human race, sir.”
“More precisely, you would make it so that the human race never existed in the first place. Granted, the odds are astronomical but, so far as we understand, the possibility exists.”
“No pressure then, sir.” Benedict said, with a hollow laugh. But then he had a thought. “But, sir, if I kill the ancestor of the human race and make it so the human race never existed, none of us will have existed, so there would be no-one to build the Tardis so that I could go back and kill our ancestor. In fact I would not exist so I would not be able to kill the lizard that.....”
Patel threw up a hand: “Tricky one isn’t it? And more than a little depressing. Truth of the matter is no-one really knows what the consequences would be, time travel being a new thing. Maybe you would affect changes that are not quite so catastrophic, eliminating only certain races, or affecting little changes to the development of the DNA that blueprints human physiology so that women have four breasts or we all have tails. On the other hand, maybe you could go on safari and bag dinosaurs by the dozen, stamp on bugs to your heart’s content, collect eggs from nests and boil them for your breakfast and it would have no discernible effect - but we cannot be sure. All we know is what you do will have some effect, miniscule or enormous, no-one knows. So we are not about to take the chance. Is that clear, sergeant?
“Very, sir...” Benedict lied, thinking that even if he did do something to change the past, no-one in the present would be aware of it because to them the past would be their past, making a present that was, well, their present. Maybe someone in the future had already been to the past and changed it. Maybe he had. Who would know? Maybe it’s being changed every five minutes.......
This is giving me a bleedin’ headache.
Still clinging to the hope he’d be allowed to carry some sort of weapon, he said, “How about a tranquilizer gun...?”
Patel shook his head. “Many of the creatures back then are too large for it to have any effect, but as for the others, again we can’t take the risk. Suppose you tranquilized our direct ancestor just when it was about to bonk its mate and pass on its gene? The mate gets bored with its spouse just lying there snoring and goes off and bonks another mate who doesn’t have the gene that eventually becomes Man?”
“I must say this all sounds a bit far-fetched to me, sir.” Not to mention confusing.
“So does time travel, sergeant. But in a few days’ time you’ll be doing it.”
And, a few days hence, he was.
The day was marked by none of the fanfare or hullabaloo that had greeted the first expedition to land a man on the Moon. The masses were not going to be watching his Great Adventure on the telly and his whole send-off was pretty low key.
When the time came to climb into the capsule, the base staff came to see him off, everyone who was not engaged in vital duties assembling on the observation balcony to give him a cheer and wave the Union Jack.
A lot of people shook his hand and he felt like a celebrity but he guessed that, thanks to the secrecy surrounding the Project, there were probably only a few hundred people tops on the whole planet that knew anything about it, most of them were right here and all of them were British.
He thought it was a shame in a way that HMG had seen fit not to share, or at least show off a bit to impress the French, but he guessed that what they were doing was best kept under wraps, particularly to prevent the Americans finding out about it.
They gave him a slap-up breakfast on the morning of his departure, which made him feel like a condemned man and the day before, somewhat tactlessly he thought, they had provided him with a legal chappie to help him write his will. The same bloke also had him sign a waiver that meant if they managed to kill him, nobody would be responsible for it and God would get all the blame.
They let him ring Joanne, his wife, and spend as long as he liked on the phone. He had to pretend he was calling from Afghanistan.
Joanne informed him that she had missed her period and was about to go to Boots to buy one of those pregnancy testing things and he promised to call her back in a “few days” to find out the result. He could not tell her the “few days” would most likely be a few weeks by the time he got back, went through quarantine, debriefed and finally got clearance to make a call but she was used to him disappearing off the radar for long periods, such was the lot of a soldier’s wife.
It occurred to him then that for her he’d be gone weeks, but for him it would be years. Would he age much in two years? Would there be a discernible difference? He ended the call with a lump in his throat and his voice getting a little wavery and that was his worst moment thus far. He had no idea then that there would be a lot worse moments to come and just how much worse moments could get.
Speaking of which, he had to endure a final briefing from Captain Legg (a ‘chit chat’ as Legg called it, ominously) but fortunately they had let him have his breakfast first.
Legg had an adjutant bring him a cup of tea, dropped all the officerial formalities for the occasion and tried to do the chummy, man-to-man, fatherly thing for some reason. Presumably he figured the occasion warranted the effort. Benedict wished he hadn’t; it was squirmingly embarrassing and both men felt kind of naked without the usual panoply of form and manners to protect them from one another.
“So, any last questions, sergeant?” Legg asked, signalling their ten minute ordeal was about to be wound down. Mercifully, Legg had not been able to bring himself to extending the informality all the way to calling him “Tom.”
“No sir.” Benedict replied, quickly draining his tea cup. “Everybody has been pretty thorough these past weeks. I’ve even learned some quantum physics and what I don’t know about the Cretaceous you could write on the back of a postage stamp. Should make me interesting at parties.”
Legg sort of laughed at that. “Indeed.....Quantum physics is a hell of an ice-breaker....” but he peered at Benedict closely and Benedict realised the Captain was actually quite sharp. “But there’s something on your mind. Spit it out.”
“Nothing really sir. It’s just that, well, this stuff about needing to send a chap back in time to expand our knowledge of the past. It’s a load of bollocks isn’t it? Pardon my French.”
Legg raised an eyebrow. “Oh, you noticed that? Suppose you explain your reasoning.”
Benedict shifted in his seat said: “Well, when I was first briefed I was told they had to send a man back because the robots ain’t sophisticated enough to run all the tests, take samples and so on....”
“Go on.”
“Well, now that they’ve taught me all the things they want me to do, it’s become obvious that I won’t be doing anything one of the robots couldn’t do. I mean, the robots is every bit as sophisticated as those Rover things the yanks sent to Mars...”
“Probably because MI6 stole the blueprints from NASA. Then we made some improvements using technology stolen from the Japs.”
“Er....exactly. So I’m thinking: why send a man at all? And why is this a military operation run from this bunker and not something being left to the boffs at Cambridge or somewhere?”
“Or better still, Oxford.” Legg suggested, who fancied himself an Oxford man, not because he had actually been to Oxford but because for some reason he always supported Oxford in the annual Boat Race.
“Oxford, sir, yes. Anyway, I’m thinking this is a military project because there’s a military use for it and nobody really gives a toss about the science – especially to the point of spending billions of quid just so we can see what happened to some dinosaurs millions of years ago, which we know already. Don’t make no difference to our daily lives really – not several billion quids’ worth of difference - and just knowing a bit more about some big lizards don’t help us be Top Nation.”
Legg said. “Does this bother you?”
“Not at all sir. I’m a soldier after all. Anything gives us the edge, I’m all for it. Just wish people would be straight an’ knock off the ‘doin’ it all for science’ bull. Means more to me that I‘m doin’ it for me country than helping the BBC make an improved version of ‘Walking with Dinosaurs.’ Or doctor Drift win the Nobel Prize.”
Legg shuddered inwardly at the latter thought, said: “And how in your view do you think we can find a military application for the Tardis?”
“Well I’ve heard whispers that the idea is to be able to send a man back and bump off Osama Bin Laden when he was a kid so he never gets to be the kingpin and Al Qaida never gets to be such a pain in the proverbial. Or maybe Saddam or some such. Save us all a lot of trouble. That’s why we’re sending a live soldier back – yours truly - to see how he gets on, see if it can be done, iron the bugs out an’ stuff.”
“Very astute sergeant. You can see why this technology must remain British and must not under any circumstances fall into enemy hands. And by enemy hands I mean anybody other than HMG. Suppose the French got it? Bet your life they’d be sending one of their chaps back to make sure Napoleon won at Waterloo and we’ll all wake up speaking French and applying to Paris for our driving licenses – imagine the bureaucracy! Or what about the Italians? Sure as night follows day they’ll be buggering about with history to make sure there’s still a Roman Empire and we’ll be racing chariots in Hyde Park. Or the Spanish, what wouldn’t they give to have had their Armada defeat Drake? Only upside is, we’d probably be playing better football. And I don’t even want to think about what would happen if the Krauts got it. Probably the only ones who wouldn’t be wanting to bugger about with history too much is the yanks because they’re doing okay - probably only want to make sure a few dissidents like Noam Chomsky never learned to write or the CIA never put Saddam in power and sold him all those missiles. But what if everybody got hold of it and they’re all at it, changing history every five minutes? We’d have bloody chaos. So we have to do the responsible thing here and make sure we get there first.”
“I can see that, sir.”
“There’s a lot riding on how you get on, sergeant. Perform well and come back in one piece and you’ll have done a service for your country so great it would be difficult to quantify.”
Benedict jumped up then, so quickly the Captain blenched slightly, and gave a very snappy salute, his entire body almost coruscating with patriotic fervour.
“Yes, SIR! You can rely on me sir!”
After that, things moved swiftly and he was back in the Cretaceous quicker than popping down to the local for a pint.
The journey was uneventful and something of an anti-climax after his send-off, the elaborate strapping him into his padded seat, the final checks and cross-checks, a parting pat on the shoulder and thumbs up from the last technician to duck out of the capsule, the capsule door shutting with a thud like the falling of a guillotine blade and a dramatic count-down, relayed from the control tower into his headset.
Then there was a hum, a jolt, a ringing in his ears. A display panel blinked “execution complete,” signalling that he had – hopefully- arrived.
He waited while the capsule equalised pressures with the outside and until the “remove seatbelt” sign came on. The Egg, he had been assured, would not fall over or roll down a hill or any such inconvenience, once it was removed from the magnetic field that, back at the base, had held it upright and suspended off the ground. It had pneumatic legs than unfolded from its body and deftly compensated for any unevenness in the ground, along with some sort of gyro system that would enable it to right itself should it fall over, rather like one of those kid’s toys that always rolls into an upright position when you knock it over. All he felt was a slight lurch and then a rocking sensation as it settled on its pneumatic legs.
So far, so good.
His radio had gone silent and he was on his own, which was to be expected. Once he had gone back in time, the comm link became broken, on account of the fact that the other end of it would not actually exist for another sixty-five million years, which was a long time to wait for a reply when you sent a “hello.”
The sense, however, of being on his own was more profound and more deeply disturbing than he had imagined possible. He was the only human being in existence and would be for six hundred and fifty thousand centuries.
Fortunately, he had plenty of things to do to keep his mind off it and one of the attributes that so fitted him for the mission was his ability to focus. Working methodically through the first few pages of the huge stack of checklists he had been given - a routine that he was destined to repeat daily for the next seven hundred and fifty days or so - he checked his instruments and the condition of the capsule, ticking off each item in turn. Everything was working just fine.
Then, still following the precise sequence of his checklists, he got the external cameras working and panning so as to give him a three-sixty surveillance of his surroundings.
He had half expected his view-screens to be swarming with scaly monsters with long necks and lots of teeth crashing through giant ferns with volcanoes spouting fire and brimstone in the background and was both relieved, and a tad disappointed, to discover they had dropped him on a barren, shingly slope as devoid of anything interesting to see as Brighton Beach on a December afternoon.
Doubtless they had picked his landing spot carefully. The scouting missions performed by the robots that had been sent back before him enabled Base to assess the terrain and find him a place to materialise out of the future where his forbidden interaction with the natives could be kept to a minimum but from which he would be able to take readings and observe.
There was not much going on out there at all, just a dun, gentle slope sprouting the odd cluster of flowering plants or ferns, which stretched for miles in any direction under a blue sky flecked with the odd white cloud and some distant birds, which he later realised were not birds at all but some kind of pterosaurs.
In the distance, there were low hills, for although in these last days of the Cretaceous, there were many active volcanoes and mountain ranges were forming, he had been dropped in a stable area relatively unaffected by the upheavals going on over much of the planet. Some miles away, there was forest carpeting the shallow valleys, too distant to be seen as anything but a green smudge.
He made notes, working through yet another checklist and answering each of its questions in turn, then noting down instrument readings one by one: external temperature, external air pressure, weather, humidity, seismic activity, wind speed and so on. It was a very long list and he knew that the computer was recording the exact same readings he was, except in a fraction of the time.The boffs, however, wanted both man and computer on the job, each providing a backup to the other in case one malfunctioned.
The telescopic lenses of the capsule’s cameras enabled him, once he had surveilled his immediate surroundings, to bring more distant views in close and he was able to make out the conifers and ferns that comprised the forest and a herd of long-necked animals, probably alamosaurus, lumbering along the shores of a shallow lake.
This was his first view of a real dinosaur - for at that point it had not yet dawned on him that the “birds” he had were not birds at all - and he quickly realised, with a sudden rush of emotion, that he was the first human being ever to have laid eyes on one.
He was kept thus busy for quite some hours and was still working through the routine when night fell. Darkness descended on the cretaceous world and a familiar Moon hung in the sky, like an old friend.
That night he turned the cameras heaven-wards so that they could film and map the stars and the turn of constellations through the heavens. The onboard computer, which he called “Mother,” still had the capsule hatch firmly locked as it was supposed to. In the morning, assuming all the readings were favourable, “she” would unlock it and let him take his giant leap for mankind.
When he did, he would do it without a speech, for he had prepared none, having lost interest in the whole “immortal words” idea once his briefings back at Base had impressed on him that he would have no comm link with his own time and no audience.
Sergeant Benedict dutifully and thoroughly completed the routines that had been set for him, giving them as much of his attention as he could muster, considering the enormous weight of distractions pressing in at the periphery of his consciousness.
Then he knocked off for the day, went into the accommodation compartment and took the foil off the first of over three thousand meals that had been tightly packed into the storage area. It was spaghetti Bolognese, followed by apple crumble. He did not like spaghetti Bolognese and – first night nerves - he was not particularly hungry but the label said: “Day 1: Meal 1” and a lot of trouble had been taken by the Project’s nutritionists to plan out an exact, balanced regimen for him, so he put the meal in the microwave and dutifully ate it down to the last crumb.
Then he spent a while watching the stars on his screens, listened to distant jungle sounds – various whoops and squawks and growls – on the capsule’s audio sensors, before watching a movie, swathed in an overriding sense of unreality.
His first half-day in the Cretaceous therefore had passed routinely and without adventure. It set the tone for much of what was to come, so much so that boredom became his worst enemy.
The Cretaceous world was not like the movies, at least not the part of it that the Project team had sent him to. The climate was hot and humid, his hillside sufficiently barren that few of the world’s inhabitants strayed onto it and he was not permitted to stray off of it.
He was restricted to a radius of two hundred yards in any direction, a tiny portion of the entire escarpment that stretched into the far distance north and south and a couple of miles east to west. He marked his boundary with tape, so that he could be sure that if he stayed within it, he could get back to the safety of the capsule swiftly in an emergency.
It was hard to imagine after a while what kind of emergency could happen. He could see for miles and have plenty of warning if anything large and full of teeth - or small and full of teeth - made an approach. Occasionally, a flying dinosaur, one or other of the pterosaurs, would pass overhead like a low-flying light aircraft, so whenever he was out and about he kept a weather eye on the sky. He had a soldier’s instinct for danger in any case.
He was confined for the most part to observing the world’s life forms through binoculars or filming them long-distance with one of the cameras. The nearest lake soon became the focus of his attention, for all manner of species came out of the forest of conifer and fern to drink at the water’s edge, or to eat animals that came to the water’s edge to drink. It was located at the bottom of the gentle hill, a mile and a half away and he did his David Attenborough bit, filming and recording its manifold visitors and residents with a voice-over commentary of his observations, which for some reason he always felt compelled to whisper.
Many of those creatures he was able to identify, either from his memory of the briefings he had had – his crash course in the Cretaceous - or from Mother’s data base. Of those, most looked and acted pretty much the way scientists imagined they would look and act from piecing together fossil evidence. Chalk one up for the boffs!
On the other hand, he was able to spot and record for posterity (a posterity that lay million of years in the future) at least two species that were supposed to have already become extinct and half a dozen species that nobody knew had existed. He figured that at least one of the latter should be named after him: the thomasuarus or benedictosaurus perhaps, and he would probably speak to someone about it when he got back.
He never did see a Tyrannosaurus, although at night something in the forest would now and then emit an unnerving roar that made one’s blood curdle and he guessed that at least he had heard one, probably, which was more than any other human being had ever done.
Closer to home, on the drab, sunlit hillside that reminded him of Crete, only without the mountains in the background, he was confined to endless routines of taking soil samples and trying not to tread on any insects.
His routine also included painstakingly filming the aforementioned insects, of which he identified twenty three species crawling around among the pebbles; whether or not they were previously known, he did not much care.
He also photographed and catalogued any plants he could find. Here and there the hillside had the odd clusters of cacti, ferns and little yellow flowers. There was no grass because grass had not yet evolved.
The hillside yielded little in the way of dung he could bag and take home for DNA analysis or whatever it is the boffs did with poo, simply because very few animals ever passed that way to take a dump. He did however manage to find and remove a few samples that looked as if they had been lying there in the sun for years and, one momentous day, a blue-green pterosaur (species unknown) flew screeching overhead and obligingly dropped a still-steaming sample from the heavens.
Further away, the lake and the forests that crowded down to its edge contained a rich spectrum of life but too much life for comfort and most of it hungry and he was not permitted to approach it. Quite frankly, unarmed as he was, he would not have approached it in any case. He was no coward but he was not an idiot either. Fortunately HMG had sent him in with the best long-range cameras Japanese technology could provide so he was able to film enough, even from a distance, to advance the field of palaeontology several centuries overnight.
On his twelfth day, he spotted something about three miles to the north west of him, on a neighbouring brush-covered and boulder-strewn slope, that immediately captured first his interest and then his fascination. The object glinted in the sun like a large jewel and he knew it had not been there the day before and had appeared overnight because he had the whole three-sixty mapped into grids and processed into computer schematics into which he had entered methodically each day’s observations, grid by grid.
He set up the most powerful optical instrument he had in his kit, a telescope that stood on a tripod, and got the mysterious object in its cross-hairs, adjusted the focus until it seemed to leap forward and become close enough to reach out and touch.
It was egg-shaped and stood on spindly, hydraulic legs. Its surface was like glass. Its hatch was open and close by it, a small machine which sprouted various jointed arms and antennae, was trundling on caterpillar tracks over the ground. On the side of the little robot there was a Union Jack.
It was several minutes before he fully grasped what he was looking at: it was the very capsule that was now his home. Not just another Tardis, but the same one. He was watching one of its earlier missions, when Base had sent it back in time with a robot to do preliminary tests. It had been sent six months to a year before he himself had been sent back in time and had arrived a few days later than he had, a variable or a margin of error that was miniscule on the scale of tens of millions of years but nevertheless significant enough to, “do me bleedin’ head in” as Benedict put it, for the benefit of anyone who might be listening.
For a few days, the little robot trundled around near to the Tardis, stopping to take photographs or extend one of its arms to sample the soil and then as its battery ran low, returned to the capsule and did not emerge again. For the whole of the rest of Benedict’s stay, the “other Tardis” sat on the distant hillside, inert. As it was not doing anything, Benedict’s interest in it waned.
He guessed it was waiting now for the Comet to hit the Earth, so that it could record the event. He knew it was destined to survive the cataclysm intact and return home, whereupon some weeks or months after its return he would arrive and be introduced to it for the first time by Doctor Drift. Then, a few weeks later, he would climb aboard it and be sent back in time to where he was now and watch it through his telescope.......
Benedict shook his head to clear it. “Jesus bleedin’ Christ.” he said, for he had taken to talking to himself – and repeating himself just in case he had not heard himself the first time - neither of which he had previously been inclined to do. “Talk about doin’ yer bleedin’ head in!”
After a few weeks, life had settled into a routine and the novelty had worn off.
Once he had gotten used to the funny-looking animals, he might as well have been in any one of a thousand boring places that littered the world he knew. The sun rose, the Moon rose, the winds blew, the world turned, the stars glittered in the heavens. What was that French expression?
“Plus ca ...something or other.” The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
Day after day he would sample, film, photograph and record observations, duck into the capsule when a pterosaur flew overhead. He would exercise, do his karate katas, sit in the shade under the capsule and read, jog around his taped perimeter, sunbathe, hang his washing out to dry in the sun and avoid stepping on insects.
Most days, he would walk around naked and got himself a deep all-over tan, because, well, what was the point of modesty when there would be no-one around to take offence for another sixty-five million years?
At night, he would eat his assigned meal: “Day 32, meal 3: macaroni cheese/strawberry cheesecake”; smoke another of the ten thousand cigarettes that were included in his supplies; sit in the hatchway and watch the stars; record night sounds; film night life using the infra-red, watch a movie, play a video game, brush dust off the capsule’s solar panels and re-re-re-check the onboard systems.
Occasionally it would rain and when it did, it would rain for days on end. The rain was warm. He began counting the days, which was a mistake because Mother gloated: “MET (mission elapsed time) 33 days,” reminding him sadistically that he still had over seven hundred to go.
Benedict was finding this assignment harder than anything else he had ever done and he had once hidden in the Columbian jungle on his own for fifty two days and nights with only a sniper’s rifle for company, sustaining himself by eating uncooked the bugs that crawled over him at night; and it had rained virtually the whole time.
It was not the fact of being alone that gnawed at him: it was the fact of being ALONE, a solitariness that was not comparable to being stranded on a desert island or even on another planet because in such a predicament one at least knew that somewhere other human beings existed.
The isolation Tom Benedict endured, however, was in a different league, as near absolute as isolation could be because, sitting under him like a black bottomless pit, was the knowledge that he was, at present, the only human being in existence and the only human being who would exist in all the broad universe for another six hundred and fifty thousand centuries.
Still, until the comet hit the Earth, he could press the red panic button on his console any time he wanted and be snapped back into the present. He was tempted to do so on many occasions when he was really bored or when he started longing for Joanne or that underlying blackness threatened to well up and consume him but the very fact that he could do so any time he wanted kept him going. He was not trapped here. He was bored but not trapped. That red button gave him a choice. Besides, there was a finite end to this “adventure.” Somewhere up ahead, it would be over and he would be back home.
He did not know and never would discover that the red button did not in fact work. The time field that kept him here in the prehistoric past could only be operated from the “Other End.” The sagacious minds of the Project had installed it for the sole purpose of making him believe he had a choice, having surmised with uncharacteristic insight the psychological factors that would weigh on him and that a convincing illusion that he had some control would help preserve his sanity.
Yet Benedict knew that a point of no return was coming. When that comet hit the Earth, there would be a period of months when he had no option but to stay, according to what Drift had told him. That was going to be hard but Tom Benedict had never backed off from anything in his life and he was not about to do so now.
On the night of MET 39 days, he saw a meteor storm in the night sky, then another, bigger one on day 40 and a new star had appeared in the heavens. As the nights went by, the new star got bigger and brighter and it had a tail: the comet was on its way.
On day 41, the capsule’s dish must have finally registered the comet’s presence and trajectory in the sky and a new message appeared on his screens:
“Warning: Comet detected. TTI (time to impact) estimated at 10 days and counting.”
He found himself wishing the ruddy comet would hurry up and get here, then returned to his studies.
By that time, fed up with movies and video games, he had started a home-study course in creative art and during the day had taken to practising by sketching rather than filming the various things he saw. Patel, bless him, or someone on his staff, having studied Benedict’s file thoroughly and taken it to heart, had made sure there were plenty of artist’s materials on board, as well as a series of appropriate books and courses loaded into the computer.
The sergeant had always had a liking for drawing and painting, something he acquired in childhood and which had never left him, although he tended to keep his hobby quiet because it was a kind of pansy thing for a soldier and he had no wish to let any of his comrades know he was “sensitive.” Sensitive was only a step away from being a poof. Now though, with more time and privacy than he could handle, he suddenly found he had the opportunity to get in all the practise he had never been able to do.
“And you ain’t half bad, Tom you ol’ bugger, even if I do say so meself.”
On Day 43, with the approaching comet becoming brighter in the night sky and beginning to be faintly visible in the heavens even in daylight, sergeant Benedict had visitors.
They wandered up from the lakeside at the bottom of the hill, drawn by God-knows-what to skitter and disport on the shingle close by his camp. There were six of the little creatures, perhaps some kind of family group, perhaps the young of some larger creatures or perhaps full-grown adults, he was not sure.
He did what he had been trained to do: saw them coming from a long way off and immediately retreated to the sanctuary of his capsule, from where he was able to observe and study them through the cameras.
They were no more than a foot tall: miniature dinosaurs that walked upright on nimble legs, with long necks and long tails, slender bodies, arms that were proportionally long compared, say, with a Tyrannosaurus and tiny, dextrous hands. They had faces that were flat by dinosaur standards, the forward-facing, large eyes of predators and fanlike membranes on the sides of their heads that might have been ears. Their scales were bluish and shimmered with colours in the sunlight, like oil and their heads boasted a bright green stripe that ran from the crown to the middle of their backs. They walked like bipeds, foraged in the shingle for insects like birds and were as agile and apparently playful as monkeys.
Watching them, Benedict thought they were charming and quite beautiful little creatures, although their tiny razor-sharp teeth suggested they were carnivores. What their exact taste in flesh might be, in addition to grubs and insects, he did not know and was not about to present himself and find out the hard way. Singly they were not much threat but six of them, if they hunted as a pack, could do larger prey such as a man a heck of a lot of mischief.
Besides, he was under orders to do no harm, so any tussle with them could have unwanted consequences. On both counts then, he kept away from them, remaining out of sight, an unsuspected watcher, in his capsule.
The only problem was his visitors appeared to be there to stay. Within hours of their arrival, they began building a nest, digging in the ground with their tiny clawed hands to form a crater and then running down to the lakeside and bringing back twigs, branches and ferns with which to line it. Benedict understood then that they had selected that barren slope simply because it was barren, a good vantage point that enabled them to see and hear other creatures approaching from a long way off. And when they ran they were quick, which meant they could easily make themselves scarce when a predator came too near.
In a way, Benedict was glad to have company, the proximity of other living things, albeit he was not sure at that stage whether said beings would, if he presented himself, have him for lunch.
However, he now had a problem. If these creatures were setting up home right on his doorstep, he was going to be stuck in the capsule for days on end – at least until the comet hit and the consequent tsunamis and global winter wiped them out, as they were destined to wipe out most of the life currently occupying the planet.
He guessed he would survive until that happy day dawned but it was going to be uncomfortable. He had no wish to add being cooped up in a confined space to his boredom and loneliness.
By sunset, the little creatures had built their nest and brought food in the form of small rodent-like animals and a fish up from the forest. Then, as a family group – which he suspected was behaviour atypical for most dinosaurs – they settled in for the night.
Watching them on the infra-red, Benedict noticed an interesting thing. While five of the creatures slept, one remained awake, perched alertly on the nest’s raised brim, its fanlike ears moving, its little head darting this way and that, monitoring the sights and sounds and possibly scents of the night hours. Every few hours one of the sleeping creatures would wake and hop up onto the brim, trading places with its brother or sister, who would then retire for the night.
“Well, I’ll be damned, you organized little buggers,” Benedict muttered, “if you ain’t postin’ bleedin’ sentries!” And he felt an immediate kinship with his new neighbours.
That night, before he himself retired, Benedict sat at the computer and searched its data base, trying to identify the species. There was nothing listed that resembled it and he knew had encountered and been able to film, this time very close up and personal, another species hitherto lost from the annals of time.
“Thomasaurus.” he said, unaware then as to how much, sixty five million years in the future, that name was going to stick. He felt a little sad then. His new friends were unaware both that their kind had acquired an epithet and that they had about eight days to live.
In the heavens, the comet outshone everything but the Moon. Benedict gave it a name too:”Amida,” the Japanese god of death.
The next morning, MET 44, the onboard computer had news for him:
“Comet data updated,” it said. “TTI re-calculated: 6 days, 3 hours, 2 minutes and counting.”
Benedict was faintly relieved. The initial calculations had evidently been about a day off. Amida was going to arrive a little sooner than expected.
“Good.” Benedict said, cheered slightly by the fact that the Earth was going to get thoroughly obliterated ahead of schedule. “The sooner we get this crap over with the better.”
He went through his usual routines, or those that he could given that he was now stuck in the capsule and then settled down to watch “Neighbours” on his screens.
The little thomasaurs were up and about, disporting on the shingle, rummaging for grubs and ferrying food and nest-building materials up from the forest, blissfully unaware that in just over six days’ time, their world was going to end. At one point two of them began climbing on the legs of the capsule, doubtless mistaking it for a big shiny tree. They were quite agile: not as acrobatic as monkeys but pretty nimble.
Benedict noticed that no matter they were doing, always one of the thomasaurs was on sentry-go, perched further up the hill like a vigilant little gopher, the membranes on the side of its head moving alertly like the ears of a long-eared bat.
The creatures struck Benedict as being pretty smart, as animals went, perhaps as smart as monkeys. Indeed, there was much about their behaviour that reminded him of small monkeys, even though their physical appearance bore no semblance. They were well organized and he guessed he was looking at some kind of extended family or small clan. He could not tell which were male and which female, although there was one individual, slightly larger and maybe older than the rest who had the look of an alpha male. Unfortunately his crash-course in the Cretaceous had of necessity been pretty narrow and aside from dim memories of a few TV documentaries, the sergeant did not have the education to evaluate what he was seeing. A GCSE in woodwork and a swimming certificate hardly cut it.
However, his affinity for the thomasaurs grew, the more he watched and “studied” them. From a distance at any rate, they were cute and charming little creatures in a reptilian kind of way. He began to be able to distinguish one animal from another and gave them names, reserving Jon for his favourite – Jon being the name he had already decided to give his son, should Joanne’s pregnancy test turn out to be positive – and girls’ names for the three he was beginning to suspect might be female.
He even started sketching them because - well, why not? – and filling in the colours with his acrylic pencils: the bluish scaly hide, the green stripe on the head, neck and back, the black almost feline eyes that were doubled-lidded like a camel’s.
By the time night fell and he had been cooped up all day, he was thinking seriously about the possibility of leaving the capsule in the morning and making their acquaintance. From everything he had seen thus far, though they were undoubtedly carnivores they seemed no more aggressive than other carnivorous creatures such as, say, a Labrador, except they were much smarter. Of course, in his ignorance Benedict failed to take into account that the Labrador is a carnivore selectively bred for domestication.
They showed no sign that they hunted as a pack, which animals do when their instinct is to target prey larger than themselves, and indeed always seemed to go off singly to retrieve food for their group, returning with nothing larger thus far than animals the size of small rodents.
Benedict, secure in his ignorance, decided that if he presented himself they were unlikely to descend upon him en masse.
He would have to go softly, softly though, because creatures that did not as a rule hunt in packs might well have different responses towards a perceived threat to their nest. They might well freak out and he would have a hard time defending himself against six sets of little razor-sharp teeth – and there was always the possibility that they injected their foe with a venom.
He had to remember too that in defending himself he might injure one of them – in fact, if it came to defending himself he would make damn sure of it – and he had been warned innumerable times against killing or wounding any creature he encountered.
On balance, he decided it was worth having a go. He was not aware of how much his sense and judgement had been eroded and how much his customary self-discipline had gone with it.
The next morning, MET 45, five days before the cataclysmic arrival of Amida, just after sunrise, he opened the hatch.
He did not venture out but sat in the hatchway, the ladder withdrawn and let the thomasaurs have a good look at him.
Alerted by the sudden sound of the hatch opening and by Benedict’s movement in the capsule’s shadowed doorway, the thomasaurs were immediately curious. Scattered here and there in ones and twos across the hillside, they all stopped, stood very still and stared at him, their fan-ears pricked, their bodies quivering on the cusp of attack or flight.
They did not seem particularly afraid, perhaps because Benedict stayed put and made no movement towards them or perhaps because his scent did not fit the profile of known hostiles – or known anything for that matter.
He guessed that if he had made a move towards them, they would have scattered to the four winds rather than stand and fight. He was a lot bigger than them after all, in a world where many animals were a lot, lot, lot bigger and being able to make themselves scarce rather than stand and slug it out, would surely be a survival thing.
After half an hour the thomasaurs had not moved and had barely blinked. They would surely win any staring contest. Benedict got a little bored but he decided not to venture out just yet but to stay put and let them get used to him. He ducked back inside the capsule and went and fetched his sketch pad and pencils, thinking that if his friends were going to stand still as portrait models he might as well take advantage.
Two hours later, the thomasaurs themselves had had enough. Satisfied that the big ugly thing in the big shiny tree was not going to do anything interesting, as if by hidden signal they suddenly broke off the engagement and went about their business.
So after a while, Benedict gave them the whistle that back home he reserved for his bulldog, Winston.
That got their attention again and another half hour of staring ensued, at the end of which the one he had identified as the “alpha male” and nicknamed “Dennis” edged closer, peering up into the shadowed hatchway to get a closer look at the big whistling bird in the big shiny nest.
When Benedict made no hostile move, Dennis got braver and edged closer and the rest of his little clan took his cue and gathered a few pace behind him,
“Morning chaps!” Benedict called down to them cheerily. “How’s things?”
The little group fidgeted at the sound of his voice, their fan-ears twitching and one or two of them started making soft little clicking noises. Benedict was not sure what the clicking signified It might be some sort of warning, like a dog’s growl, or for all he knew they might be talking to one another.
“What’s it saying Dennis?” Benedict translated in his imagination.
“Dunno Doris, I thought it was talking to you.”
“Well, what is it?”
“Some kind of big ugly bird, I think.”
The thomasaurs stayed thus for a while, craning their necks to get a better look at him, periodically emitting bursts of their soft clicking. Then, moving as one, they cautiously turned away, as if remembering they had things to do, most of which involved home improvements and shopping for food. It was amazing how little was going to change over the next sixty five million of years.
Though they went about their business, Benedict noticed that from then on they would occasionally stop what they were doing and stare at the capsule for a few moments, as if aware that somebody strange was living in the neighbourhood.
By the next day, MET 46 (TTI 4), the thomasaurs were so used to him that they were ignoring him completely. They did not even respond to his whistle or when he tried calling to them, which in the end he had done several times the previous day. He supposed the novelty had worn off: he was neither a threat nor food and therefore not particularly interesting.
He wondered how next to gain their attention; he was damned if he was going to spend the next four days, after which all of his neighbours would be dead in any case, being ignored. He was not yet ready to venture out of the capsule and hit upon an idea, a pretty obvious one for any pet owner to arrive at.
He ducked inside the capsule and descended the aluminium ladder into the stores that lay, like a high-tech cellar, beneath the accommodation deck. Here his daily food rations were tightly packed into row upon row of refrigerated racks, three packs per day, each package bearing its day label and mouth-watering contents. He searched along the racks looking for a meal that contained pure meat, until he found what he was looking for, then extracted the pack for “Day 50/Meal 3: beef steak, chips and peas/apple tart with cream.”
He took it up to his tiny galley and put it in the microwave to defrost it and once that was done, broke open the aluminium wrapper and took out the steak. He returned the “chips and peas/apple tart with cream” to the stores, thinking that when day 50 came around, he was going to go a little hungry but that did not much bother a man who had lived on creepy crawlies for over a month in the Columbian jungle. In any case, that was coincidentally the day Amida was due to strike and he thought he probably would not have much of an appetite.
He went back to the galley and chopped the raw steak into little pieces, then gathered up the pieces and took them to the hatchway.
The raw meat got the attention of the thomasaurs readily enough, when he threw a piece in Dennis’ general direction. It landed a few feet from where Dennis was scratching in the ground for insects. Doris was on sentry-go at the top of the hill, a quarter of a mile away. Two of the group were nowhere to be seen – presumably off to hunt at the lakeside – Agatha and Archibald were chasing one another’s tails just inside Benedict’s taped perimeter. When the tiny piece of steak that Benedict had thrown landed in the shingle, Dennis, Agatha and Archibald were on it like a shot, apparently having identified it as a comestible while it was in mid air.
Good sense of smell, Benedict thought and decided that probably came from an adaptation to hunting food that was small and moved quickly.
Dennis got to it first. There was a brief squabble over it when the other two tried to muscle in on his spoils but Dennis saw off the competition and quickly devoured the steak, holding it in his tiny hands and tearing at it with his little razor teeth.
While Dennis was thus occupied, Benedict threw a piece for the other two and when Agatha got it, he tossed a piece for Archibald.
The gift made Benedict very popular. Soon, the three thomasaurs had gathered at the foot of the hatchway ladder and a game of “fetch” ensued whereby he would toss a piece of meat as far as he could throw it and they would race after it, although it was not so much a game of “fetch” as a game of “eat. “ They were hunters by instinct, not retrievers and thus un-inclined to bring the food back. Nevertheless the interlude reminded him of his dog, Winston, and by association home. The memory brought him close to tears.
After a couple of goes the thomasaurs figured out that they did not all need to race after the food, that if they waited another piece of flesh would come sailing out of the big shiny tree. Soon they were taking it in turns, an economy of effort and quickness of uptake that was quite impressive.
The game went on for a while, until Benedict ran out of steak and told them, sunnily:
“Sorry chaps, that’s yer lot!”
The thomasaurs evidently did not believe him, for they waited an hour, clustered at the foot of the ladder in the hope of more morsels, during which time they were joined by the remaining two of their number, Jon and Edith, who must somehow have learned from their fellows what was afoot because the food-tossing had already stopped before they came up from the lake.
Finally the little group seemed to realise that there would be no more freebies and after a spate of soft clicking they dispersed and returned to gathering food the way nature had intended.
Watching them from the hatchway for much of the rest of the day, Benedict reflected that he was watching a species that no-one had known existed, yet they had probably been around for millions of years, on and on and on through countless hundreds of thousands of generations of thomasaurs, living, breeding, hunting and dying according to their genetic programming just as his new friends were doing.
He had learned that different dinosaur species had already come and gone by the Cretaceous period: they tended to endure for millions of years, many thousands of times as long as Man had existed, before becoming extinct – or, as was to be the case next week, before all of them became extinct.
Had not Amida wiped them out, would the thomasaurs still have been around in his own time? Or evolved into something else? But all that was academic: survival was not the destiny of their species. Dennis, Agatha, Archibald, Edith, Doris and Jon were the last of their line. And they had four days to live.
Depressed by the thought, Benedict reflected that night that all living things had but two things in common: that they were alive...and that the condition was only temporary.
That night there were meteor showers, lots of them: thousands of pieces of debris, by the looks of it, peppered the earth like a mortar barrage presaging the main attack. Amida was so bright its light penetrated the gathering overcast and cast shadows. It looked as if the world had gained a second, bigger and brighter moon. But this moon was not in orbit. It was on an intercept vector.
Shortly after midnight there was a thunderstorm, water falling from the heavens in a deluge that roared against the hull of the wind-buffeted capsule like a waterfall, while lightening crackled and coruscated like an army of angry gods marching across the horizon. Benedict did not know if such weather was natural or the bow-wave of the approaching comet was beginning to disturb the atmosphere but the storm was louder and more ferocious than any he had seen.
The following day, MET 47/TTI 3, he broke open Meal 62, retrieved the turkey pieces, washed off the gravy and cut them into tiny pieces, then opened the hatch, bid the thomasaurs “good morning” and repeated the game of the day before. He was not sure why he did it, why he was bothering to bond with creatures that had but three days and a bit to live. More importantly he was wasting rations on them.
The storm had abated by then, the winds had died to mere gale force but it was still raining steadily as if the world had begun weeping for its imminent fate and overhead the clouds were broiling, coalescing into new dark masses and he knew another storm was on its way.
The thomasaurs themselves seemed skittish and on edge, as if they sensed somehow that something bad was striding towards them. It did not however stop them chasing the free food the way that had the previous day.
Growing impatient, Benedict decided to leave the capsule and continue the game from the ground. He stayed close by the ladder so that he could get back into the capsule if his friends got bored of snacks and decided to make him the main meal. However, it soon became obvious they did not consider him food. Maybe he just smelled wrong or by tossing titbits for them was firmly established in their minds as an ally in the business of survival. After all, it worked with most dogs, so why not these little lizards?
They were slightly wary of him at first but as the food-tossing game continued and he made no hostile move, they finally relaxed and ventured closer. By the end of the day he could walk among them without their seeming to mind too much and he began to feel like a master among his hounds.
That evening there were more meteor showers and some of the chunks finding their way to Earth must have been pretty big because here and there across the landscape there were explosions that briefly lit the night with florid fire.
On Day 48/TTI 2, the meteors were still coming to Earth, their detonations echoing across the landscape like shell fire. Another violent storm broke around noon but in the morning before the violence of the elements forced him to retreat to the capsule, he was able to pet Jon, his favourite, without getting bitten. Jon liked to have the green stripe that ran from his head to the small of his back stroked against the grain of his soft, dry scales. To the touch, his skin felt like a snake’s. Soon, Dennis was shoving Jon aside and virtually insisting that Benedict stroke his own scales. Then all of them wanted a go.
By the time Benedict discovered that the thomasaurs liked to have their chins scratched, he was the most popular guy at the party and one of the clan.
The acceptance and growing rapport make the sergeant inordinately happy and he had developed an affinity for the little creatures as powerful as any he had felt for any pet – and more than he had felt for a large number of human beings.
The warnings he had been given about interacting with the species of the cretaceous world in any way had been temporarily forgotten.
The afternoon he spent in the capsule. Outside, the world was turning into bedlam. An unrelenting delude roared against the hull, thunder cracked in counterpoint to the regular “crump, crump” of detonating meteors. At one point less than a mile away a mighty explosion erupted, its shockwave threatening to turn the capsule over. It set light to the forest, which blazed for an hour before the rain extinguished the flames and debris pitter-pattered against the hull. The lake nearly doubled in size within an afternoon and the entire hillside became awash with running water. It was getting very ugly, yet it was nothing compared with what was to come.
Dutifully, Benedict recorded everything, for future posterity.
When day broke, on Day 49/TTI 1, the rain stopped for a while and the world calmed down, as if exhausted by its excesses. He went outside, half expecting the thomasaurs to have been washed away but, no, they were still there. Their nest had been turned into a water-filled crater and so they were busy building a new one without running water. Loose branches and what-have-you were easy to find, considering the pounding the forest had taken, but he could see they were already having trouble finding food. Even the insects that crawled in the shingle were becoming scarce – probably washed away by the rain.
Taking pity on them, Benedict cracked open another of his future meals and treated them to a lunch of raw veal cutlets.
Just after they had finished eating, Benedict discovered the reason his friends had selected his neighbourhood to set up home. A large pterosaur – another unknown species - came swooping in from the heavens. The pterosaurs had not come their way often, not with a jungle and lake full of tasty morsels a few miles hence, but it too was probably starting to have trouble finding food and so, the pterosaur equivalent of rummaging in skips, it had decided to check out their barren hillside on the off-chance it might spot a snack. It probably could not believe its luck when its sharp eyes spotted six thomasaurs running around in the open and so with a triumphant screech it came zooming in low like an Apache helicopter on a strafing run.
The thomasaurs, however, were no mugs at the survival game. Their sentry gave the alarm, a series of loud whoops and clicks, and they all made a run for it.
They headed for the capsule and took shelter under it, where the pterosaur could not reach them; it was too big and gawky to get past the capsule’s landing legs and reach into the narrow space between the main body of the capsule and the ground, although it did try. Benedict felt its huge leathery wings and large bony head thumping against the hull until it gave up and, with an angry squawk, flew off.
Benedict realised then that the thomasaurs had picked this very spot because while the bare hill itself enabled them to foresee approaching danger, the capsule gave them a place to run to when bothered by anything they could not outrun, such as nature’s airborne divisions.
He was impressed, could think of plenty of officers who could have done with their tactical acumen.
Not long after that, another storm broke. The sky blackened, lightening cracked like a relentless military barrage and howling tornadoes stampeded across the landscape, kicking brutal furrows of destruction through the forests and one passed but a few miles from where the capsule stood.
Benedict remained in the safety of the capsule, remembering that Drift had told him it was designed to survive everything short of as direct hit from a nuclear warhead. When another meteor shower began peppering the land with missiles, and some of the detonations came perilously close, he thought: I bloody well hope the loony bastard wasn’t kidding.
By sunset the bedlam had not diminished, the satanic overture intensified if anything and went on with cacaphonic relentlessness into the night.
He guessed that it was not going to let up now until the comet itself arrived. Amida was by then so bright its light penetrated even the black overcast that obscured everything else in the heavens. Though bright, it still did not look that big, just an impossibly brilliant star. Benedict had expected it to look huge by now but guessed it was probably only a few miles across: it was not its size that was going to give the planet such immense problems, it was the speed at which it was going to hit.
By then Mother was counting time to impact not in days but hours. Amida would hit around lunchtime the next day. Even the battle-hardened sergeant began to feel growing trepidation, knowing that he was about to witness an event as violent as a thousand Hiroshima bombs. But he was battle-hardened, not brain dead.
He reflected on what Drift had told him; that the Comet had struck in Mexico and that he was safely far removed from Ground Zero. Mexico sure sounded a long way off but sixty five million years BC, it was a lot nearer to the spot they had dumped him in, which would later become the British Isles, because the continents were still separating - at a rate of about an inch a year or something. He distrusted both Drift’s cavalier attitude and the great minds that had run the Empire to ruin generally and were presently doing their best to wreck the sorry rump that was all that remained of it. He would not be the first soldier to die because someone else’s head was up his ass.
Mother was warning him to “batten down and prepare for impact” and he went meticulously through the numerous preparatory routines and checks that he had rehearsed so thoroughly at Base.
One of the final actions on his list was to close and seal the hatchway, sealing himself into the capsule for what might be many months, depending on what shape the planet was in by the time Amida had finished with it. Soon he was going to find out what it felt like to be an Astronaut, one of those guys on the International Space Station sealed in their tin-can for weeks and months on end.
When it came to sealing the hatch, though, he hesitated.
He thought of the thomasaurs out there in the howling wind and the rain where detonating meteors were lighting the night with fire. Their last few hours of life were going to be pretty terrifying and miserable and he had not even said goodbye. In his mind now they were somewhere between pets and comrades in the field and it went against Benedict’s grain to abandon either, at least not without a pat or a kind word.
So he flung open the hatch and let the capsule’s inner lighting spear the encompassing dark like a sword blade. He poked his head out and had a look around. They were nowhere in sight. There was a water-filled hole where their nest, so recently re-built after the flooding of the first one, had been. Maybe they had finally abandoned their exposed hillside, or been washed away by the water that was running down it in torrents, or were hiding under a rock somewhere to escape the terrifying cacophony all around them. He climbed down the ladder and looked under the capsule to see if they were hiding there but could not see them in the pitch dark shadows.
He went back into the capsule and dug another meal for them out of the stores, Day 103’s beef burgers, and defrosted it in the microwave. When he returned with a bowl full of meaty titbits to the hatchway, the thomasaurs were waiting for him, as if responding to some inner radar.
At least, four of them were. Of Dennis and Doris there was no sign and he never saw them again, though he kept the hatch open as long as he dared, with Mother all the while registering her stern disapproval of the oversight, in case they showed up.
The remaining four were clustered at the foot of the ladder, looking as skittish and cowed by fear as household pets on a night of fireworks. Yet they waited for him to toss them food as he had done before. They reminded him of miniature gladiators gathered under the Royal Box to give their parting salutation: “We who are about to die, salute you!”
“Alright you guys,” Benedict yelled at them above the background din. “For old time’s sake!” And he made to toss the first piece of meat out into the hostile night.
But then he stopped as the thought struck him that he did not have to let his friends die, did not have to abandon them to their fate, did not want to any more than he had stood by and let Winston drown the day his dog fell off the boat into the river on the Norfolk Broads.
There was room in his capsule for four creatures no bigger than ferrets and rations enough to keep all of them alive, if he was very careful. He himself was used to eking out meagre rations and could survive well enough on half of what had been packed for him if he had to. He had survived on less before.
All the warnings he had been given about not interacting with the life forms came to mind, but they were all about not killing anything. He was not planning on killing anything, so he guessed it would do no harm to let something live.
So he used the food to entice the thomasaurs into the capsule. They came readily enough, negotiated the ladder without difficulty. They were probably hungry and the smell of food drew them in, while – if they had needed any more incentive - the terrifying din of the night gave them a helpful shove from behind.
Later, after his guests had dined on beef burgers, explored their new home and found it to their liking, climbed all over everything, chewed up some of his pile of checklists, defecated in his shower, then curled up together in the nest he made for them from blankets in a corner of the main accommodation area and fallen asleep, Benedict began to realise that he had could have made a very big mistake.
He did not know these creatures well enough to be able to predict how they would react to being cooped up in the confined space with him for weeks or months on end, perhaps years. Once he had sealed the hatch, once Amida laid waste to the Earth, the seas rose and the global winter that finished off ninety percent of its species set in, the hatch would remained sealed until Mother deemed it safe to open it again.
He and his guests would be trapped here together until that day arrived and he did not know when that would be They would all have to go on strict rations until then, eking out the food against a worst-case scenario of a long confinement. The thomasaurs only ate raw meat: how many of the pre-packed meals contained raw meat and how long then would he be able to feed them? How would they behave when they got hungry as well as claustrophobic? Would they turn nasty and try to eat him?
They were only small but four of them turned ferocious or mad in a confined space would be hard to deal with. It was easy to be cute and chummy when your belly was full but God alone knew what deeper survival protocols would kick in when hunger made itself felt. One had only to look at how bad tempered and irritable a man could get when his dinner was not on the table to extrapolate what might drive creatures without the ameliorating influence of higher rationality.
He knew that he had acted irrationally, a moment of madness in which sergeant Benedict had done something he rarely did, at least not while on mission and under orders: he had let his heart rule his head.
“Dear God!“ he chided himself. “Tommie boy you’ve gone soft in the bleedin’ ‘ead. “
He had seen men lose it in the field; the individual human reaction to the unnatural stresses of war and the suppression of the normal survival instinct to run away or skip the whole stupid thing entirely was a huge variable, but Benedict had never imagined “losing it” would happen to him.
But this was not war. He was not sitting in a fox-hole listening to the thud of mortars, or lying camouflaged in a jungle curled up with his sniper’s rifle, nor running the gamut of booby traps in the backstreets of Kabul or Basra.
Those things he could deal with, if by “deal with” one meant keeping one’s inner terrors compartmented off, not thinking too much – or preferably not at all – keeping a clear head and following orders as much like an automaton as one could manage. This was something else entirely: he was sixty five million years in the past, walking the Earth so many thousands of centuries before Man, that his ancestors were probably not yet even evolved into mammals or if they were, they were probably still being eaten by the likes of the thomasaurs.
His situation was so thoroughly “something else,” so utterly adrift from the solace of human presence that humans were not even around to be shot at. It was so infinitely far removed from experience that there were no defences or protocols, either evolved or trained-in, to guide one through it. One could forgive oneself then for becoming slightly unhinged.
Yet the unforgiving universe was disinclined to let you off because you had a good excuse and Benedict knew in his heart that this was a “cock-up” for which he was destined to pay eventually, one always did.
“Karma,” he told himself, with the wisdom of a man who had watched “My Name is Earl,” is a bitch.”
He had not the remotest idea then of just how much of a bitch karma was or how horribly she was going to make him pay.
He did not sleep that night but went below to the stores and began running an inventory of what he had, of how much raw meat there was among the frozen meals and how long he could use it to feed his guests based on a very rough estimate of the size of their appetites.
He worked out too, the consequences for himself of roughly one meal in three having no meat in it: a diet of vegetables and jam rolly poly. It was not so bad: going vegetarian a couple of days a week was not going to kill him and, besides, he had a tub of protein powder among his supplies that he could use to supplement his diet if the need arose.
He would be all right, would last the maximum stay of two and a bit years that had been allowed for by the Project’s planners and it was entirely possible the time portal would close and snap him back to the present well within that time.
He thought, though, that whatever happened when the capsule returned to the future, the thomasaurs had better not be still in it because he would be in very hot water if they were. If he was going to break the habit of a lifetime and “improvise” on his orders, he sure as hell was not going to advertise the fact.
As for the thomasaurs, he figured out that he had enough food to keep them fed for maybe six months at a pinch, although how well fed and how accurate his calculations were, only time would tell – and time was not the dependable constant it had been cracked up to be.
He had finished his work by the time the sun rose on the morning of the Earth’s execution, a watery ember behind a thick blanket of turbulent cloud and airborne ash. The thomasaurs were up and about and agitating for food and using his little shower cubicle as a toilet. As he fed them as sparingly as he dared, he reflected that this was going to be his life for the foreseeable future: playing mother hen to his little charges; cleaning up their poo and trying not to gag at the stench that quickly filled the confined space, the air recycler notwithstanding; trying perhaps to house train the little blighters; stopping them chewing the wiring or his sketch pads...ah well, at least it would give him something to do.
He realised as he was feeding them that morning that when they had slept that night, they had not done their usual thing of posting a sentry, a survival habit he assumed would have been thoroughly laid into their genetic programming. He thought this odd until the penny dropped: he had been their sentry! In their minds he was one of the clan and quite probably had taken on the mantle of the “alpha male,” now that Dennis was AWOL.
Thinking of Dennis, he went and opened the hatch, ignored Mother’s nagging that that was not a very clever idea and that the hatch should instead have been locked and sealed. He poked his head out into the lashing rain and had a look around.
He had hoped Denis and Doris would have turned up, but there was no sign of them out there in a landscape that already looked like the surface of Venus, with tornadoes everywhere waltzing like giants that had made the Earth their ballroom, the forest in the valley on fire from a meteor strike, the air thick with mist and smoke and rain and the incoming Amida close enough now that it looked like a small moon. In fact there was no living thing in sight at all, no pterosaurs in the sky, no dinosaurs by the swollen lake. It was as if the Earth, sensing the inexorability of its fate, had already given up the will to live. It was an overwhelmingly depressing scene to behold and no man should have been forced to behold it.
A stab of resentment at the powers-that-be went through him then, that they were putting any man through this, but he reminded himself that he was doing it for England and her chance to re-establish herself as Top Nation. Yet somehow the whole stupid Top Nation game seemed a paltry and futile thing, a petty folly that Man should be so busy fighting himself when the real foe was a cruel and uncaring universe that demanded all his resource lest it step on him like a bug.
He tried whistling, a signal the thomasaurs had come to recognise as meaning there was food available at the big shiny tree but his whistle was snatched away and stifled by the din of a world in its death throes.
By then Mother was telling him that impact was three and a half hours away.
He kept the hatch open as long as he dared. His guests did not try to venture out, for the outside world had become manifestly too dangerous, and Dennis and Doris did not turn up.
Even when a klaxon started sounding and a screen began flashing, “Emergency. Retract ladder and seal hatch. Emergency. Retract ladder and seal hatch.” over and over, he kept it open. He was reluctant to give up on them until he had to, even though he knew that he had done all his food calculations on the basis of feeding four thomasaurs, not six, and if they did show up they would present two more mouths he could scarcely afford to feed and he would have to re-work his calculations over again.
The klaxon blared relentlessly and got on his nerves. “All right, all right! I got the bleedin’ message!” he yelled at the computer but there was no way he was able to shut the thing off so it went right on blaring, scaring the thomasaurs who hid under his cot like frightened puppies.
The main screen on his console began counting down time to impact in minutes. The second “moon” that was Amida began to move across the sky towards the west, glowing red now that it had hit the atmosphere.
Its arrival in the stratosphere sent shock waves through the air, thunder cracked and rolled, louder than the loudest howitzer he had ever heard and wind smashed across the landscape at hundreds of miles an hour, flattening what was left of the forest and batting the capsule angrily. It would surely have toppled it over and sent it tumbling like wind-blown litter had it not been for the steel grappling cables firmly anchored into the bedrock. Benedict was grateful for that. He had ignored Mother’s exhortations to strap himself in and had the capsule been torn loose from its anchor, he would surely have been tossed around like a pea in a can and gotten his head smashed in or his neck broken.
He was treated then to the surreal sight of various large creatures picked up and tossed like toys, flying past his capsule. He would never forget the sight of several enormous Corythosaurus, a Pteranodon and a rather forlorn looking Monoclonius tumbling end over end as if they were plastic models from a Cornflake packet discarded by a petulant child.
He still did not see a Tyrannosaurus.
Amida had become a huge fiery ball, arcing across the sky and falling towards the western horizon. It was too brilliant to look at directly. Its heat boiled the oceans and lakes and rivers it passed over and sent further shockwaves through the air, which reached where the capsule stood, many hundreds of miles distant from its passing with the force of hurricanes. As it passed, red hot pieces broke off it and fell to Earth as further meteor showers.
It passed over the horizon leaving utter devastation in a wake that was hundreds of miles wide. Benedict waited.
The computer was counting down time to impact in seconds: “eight, seven, six.....”
Then it said, simply “Impact.” Then added for good measure, as its charge did not seem to have taken the hint: “Danger, danger, danger. Secure hatch and strap in. Secure hatch and strap in. Stand by for shock waves. Stand by for shock waves.” It just kept repeating the message, as if there was nothing more, really, to be said.
Morbid fascination kept Benedict at the hatch as long as he dared, wanting to see with his own eyes events unfold that no man had ever witnessed.
For a couple of seconds, at least it seemed that long as he held his breath, nothing seemed to happen. But then, as thousands of miles hence what would one day be Mexico was vapourized, the western horizon was suddenly lit by a bright, whitish glare. He knew that the shockwaves were already rippling outwards through the air and the ocean and that they were travelling at such speeds they would reach him within minutes and still be travelling at hundreds of miles an hour when they did so. The hurricane to end all hurricanes was coming and in its wake the tsunami to end all tsunamis, a wall of water a mile high that would consume everything for hundreds of miles inland, including, most likely, the spot where the capsule stood, even though it was a long way from the ocean.
He decided to retract the ladder and close the hatch before Mother had a nervous breakdown, sealed it, went to the cockpit and strapped in. He felt a twinge of sadness for Dennis and Doris. In his mind he counted eighteen fallen comrades throughout his army career, the two little thomasaurs he included in that number.
Mother said. “All stations secure,” and he imagined a sigh of relief. “Stand by.”
When the wind came it banged against the hull with the solid force of a fleet of speeding trucks. The external temperature readings soared, for the wind was scorching hot, hot enough to fry an egg or kill almost everything that was not below ground or in the water – or in a capsule – at the time.
The capsule lurched and juddered violently. Numerous warning lights came on on his console. He reminded himself, desperately, that the capsule had been through all this before several times and survived each time intact but it was like going out on patrol: you could do so a hundred times and return to base okay, but it was no guarantee that on the hundred and first you would not step on a land mine or cop a sniper’s bullet.
Benedict sat and endured. There was nothing to do but endure, like a mouse caught in a washing machine, hanging on until the spin cycle came to an end.
The wind ripped away the two external cameras he had left, as instructed, un-retracted so as to record as much of the event as they could before they expired. Fortunately the capsule’s legs and the steel anchoring cables held, although he could hear something groaning and protesting under the strain, the sound of steel in pain.
Then the tsunami came. It sounded and felt like a direct hit from a Jumbo jet. The entire capsule seemed to scream but again the legs and the grapples held.
The computer readouts announced that they were now under water, as if they were suddenly on the bottom of the ocean, in a current travelling at a hundred miles an hour. Unknown things banged and clattered against the hull: rocks, trees, dead dinosaurs or all three, he did not know which.
The ensuing turbulence lasted for over twenty four hours: the capsule rocked and buffeted and hit relentlessly. Then there was a lull of several hours, followed by another couple of days of violent turbulence as the ocean waters reversed direction and began to recede, bringing with them trees, rocks and the corpses of now extinct giants with them for a second pass.
Benedict spent most of his time strapped into his flight couch just waiting for the noise and motion to stop. He did not sleep and came as close as he had ever come to that psychological condition known as shell shock.
Dutifully, he did his best to do as he had been instructed and recorded his experience, noting as best he could its psychological impact, his thoughts and impressions and working through the psychological tests for concentration, memory and coordination presented by the computer.
He wondered if the whole line Drift had spun him about not being able to close the portal due to the energy surge wotsit had just been typical Brass bull and they were making him go through this with malice aforethought, using him as a lab rat so they could take the opportunity to test a man’s wits under conditions that were not far off those of ground zero of a nuclear strike. He would not put it past the bastards.
A couple of times he took a risk, unstrapped and fought his way to the accommodation area, to see how the thomasaurs were faring.
They were still alive, still huddled together under his cot and not coming out. He made reassuring noises at them and they blinked at him: four pairs of doubled-lidded cat-like eyes that were glazed with shock.
He even went and prepared food for them but they were, for once, not interested, so he put the chunks of meat in a bowl and left it on the floor where they could reach it, in case they changed their minds. Then he fought his way back to the cockpit as the capsule rocked like a coracle in rapids and strapped himself in again.
Two days later, things seemed to have calmed down at last. The winds gradually died to a gale-force bluster, the ocean had gone back to where it belonged and they were once more on dry land. According to the capsule’s sensor readings, the outside temperature was dropping steadily. Vast clouds of ash and smoke were engulfing much of the Earth, blocking out the sun, plunging the world into a long night and bringing the onset of global winter.
According to data supplied by the earlier robot forays into time, the global winter was only going to last a couple of months, which was much less than scientists had previously thought: the Earth’s powers of recovery were greater than anyone had believed. But it was going to be long enough to kill off most of the world’s existing species and come perilously close to wiping the slate clean altogether.
The dinosaurs in particular had no chance: they were cold-blooded creatures, adapted to a range of temperatures that, over almost the whole planet, had not sunk below the sub-tropical for hundreds of millions of years. If they had survived the initial apocalypse, then the searing heat, then the tsunami, the sudden cold was going to kill them stone dead in a few hours at the most.
Warm-blooded creatures such as burrowing mammals, some of the birds that had already evolved by the end of the Cretaceous and creatures that could could avail themselves of the shelter of the water would get through it; provided they had not been vapourized at ground zero or drowned or burnt alive by the scorching winds and could still find enough food to keep going, because the weather did not turn all that cold by the standards Benedict was used to. It went below freezing, it snowed, the lakes and rivers froze temporarily, an arctic wind blew and then it settled at just above freezing for a long while, as the sun struggled to fight its way through the gauze of dust that swathed the world.
The capsule remained sealed for several weeks. It probably was an over-precaution because none of the sensor reading suggested the climate was fouled enough to have killed him if he ventured out. If one could imagine London in January overlaid by a Los Angeles smog, one had a good analogy of the climate outside the capsule. You might not want to live there, given a choice, but you could walk around in it. At least, Benedict thought, there would be little danger out there from wild animals. There now weren’t that many left.
The time passed agonizingly slowly, the confinement and boredom ameliorated and kept tolerable only by his responsibilities for his new pets, an endless routine of feeding them and cleaning up their excrement, house-training them and teaching them tricks as if they were dogs – although they were if anything quicker to learn than dogs – and generally being the group’s alpha male.
Generally, the thomasaurs were good pets. They responded well to house-training and had the distinction of being the first creatures in all of creation to have that honour thrust upon them. They soon learned to confine their toilet activities to the plastic box Benedict provided and it was Jon who became the first living thing in history to use a toilet.
On one occasion, while cleaning out the aforementioned dirt box, Benedict realised that in all that time he had never once collected a thomasaur stool sample that could be taken back for analysis. By then he already had stool samples from a pterosaur and probably another six or so species of unknown donor who had left souvenirs on the hillside around his capsule. Yet he had no souvenir of his friends, which was stupid of him considering they had generously provided so many to choose from. So he put on a plastic glove and selected a few choice samples, bagged them, labelled them “Specimin 8: thomasaur (previously unknown species. See photographs 166-402)”and put them in the “samples” freezer.
Once recovered from the shock of their ordeal, the aforementioned sample donors proved to be playful creatures with a temperament that was not particularly pugnacious. Benedict did however get nipped a few times, the thomasaurs’ sharp teeth drawing blood and requiring first aid, but he had had worse and he found that a clout around the head with a sheaf of rolled up checklists soon impressed upon them the error of their ways and the biting stopped. In some respects then, they were like dogs, in others they were a little like cats, in others like small monkeys.
The rest of Benedict’s time was taken up with running through his never-ending daily checklists, carrying out minor repairs, inventorying and re-inventorying the food supplies, running through the psychological tests and spending time on his hobby.
The capsule provided limited subjects for drawing and after a few weeks and a hundred or so portraits of the thomasaurs, he had grown bored with drawing them. So he took up self-portraiture, standing in front of his shaving mirror and trying to render his own ugly mug in coloured acrylic pencil. In the end, he was not bad at it, albeit he could not resist tweaking his likeness a bit so that he ended up looking like Tom Cruise.
He decided that if he ever left the Army, he might try for a career as an artist, wondered what it would be like to be sensitive and poof-like for a living. It would be quieter at any rate.
The weeks dragged by. Benedict grew a beard just for the hell of it, decided it made him look like Tom Hanks in Cast Away and shaved it off. Then he grew and groomed a Van Dyke, decided it made him look like a Spanish pimp and shaved off the beard part, leaving him with a drooping Pancho Villa style moustache. He decided that that made him look too much like....well, Pancho Villa, and shaved that off too. It passed the time.
The day arrived when he could not stand to be cooped up any longer so he asked Mother’s permission to go out and play. Outside, environmental conditions suggested it was safe enough, for him at least. It was too cold for the thomasaurs and they would have to stay in, although he doubted they would venture out in any case. One brush with the cold air would be enough to convince them to stay in the warm.
Mother relented and told him, in so many words, that he could go out as long as he wrapped up warm and wore his boots. Then there was a pneumatic hiss as the computer unsealed the hatch and a faint rumbling as the small airlock cubicle, whose mechanism he had not yet had occasion to use but was now necessary to prevent dust-laden air entering the capsule and gumming up the works, filled with air.
Benedict shucked into a hooded survival suit that made him look like an Eskimo and put on a face mask to filter the air so that the whole ensemble turned him into a cross between Michael Jackson and Scott of the Antarctic. It was faintly ridiculous, as the outside temperature was actually a couple of degrees above zero that morning, but Mother insisted.
Benedict went through the airlock and climbed down the ladder, found himself in a landscape that was totally unrecognizable.
It was bleak. The wind howled across it mournfully. The forests were gone, displaced by a sea of mud from which protruded the limbs of dead, uprooted trees, displaced rocks and the rotting carcasses of large and very dead animals.
The lake was still there but three times as big as it had been previously. His own hillside he recognized from its general shape but the sparse vegetation it had supported was gone. Even the shingle was gone, for it was now covered in cold, slowly drying mud several feet thick, overlaid with a few inches of fine dust, in which were imprisoned dead vegetation, tree branches and more animal corpses.
It was dark as twilight, even though it was mid morning by then and the sun was up. Its faint, desultory glow could be seen like lamplight through a curtain behind grey and black clouds that covered the sky in varying thicknesses from horizon to horizon. They were not clouds, he realised: what he was looking at was simply an air thick with so much dust and debris the sunlight could barely get through it.
It was snowing too but after a while it became obvious that it was not mere snow. What was falling from the sky was one part snow and three parts fine ash as the billions of tons of fine particles that had hung suspended in the air for weeks began to settle back to Earth.
“Jesus Christ almighty!” Benedict said, which given the circumstances was just about all a man could say. There was not a sign of a living thing moving anywhere on the land or in the sky. Apart from the keening of the wind, there was no sound. The entire world was a graveyard, a graveyard sunken to decay and neglect because anyone or anything that might have cared for it was under the ground too.
He doubted whether even the surface of the Moon could have looked any more desolate. It was overwhelming. It was Hell. It was beyond death. It reached in and gripped his soul in the icy clutch of utter futility and despair.
Sergeant Benedict sank to his knees and cried.
After that he lost the urge to go out for a couple of weeks, but the feeling wore off as feelings do and boredom and claustrophobia were back, like old friends that had just returned from their vacation and had set up the slide projector in the lounge.
So he went out again, as if swapping one torture for another occasionally would ameliorate the agony of both.
The second time it was not so bad. The ash was still falling but the gauze that covered the sky was thinning. More light was getting through, the temperature was up a notch. Incredibly, here and there the green shoots of plants were already beginning to grow and he imagined that thanks to the dust, the soil was going to be very mineral rich and that what might have been a terminal catastrophe for many was going to be a boon for some. It was almost as if death was necessary so that life could wipe clean the slate and come back smarter for another go at pervading the cold and hostile universe
The third time he went out, it was warmer and brighter still, the sky had more colour, even though it was predominantly various shades of rust, and the “snow” was sparser. Now and again, he thought he saw small animals scurrying or hopping through the piles of mud and rock and reckoned that with the dinosaurs out of the way, some species of mammal were going to flourish now that there was no-one around to eat them, if they could only hang on in there a few more months,.
That thought made him think of the thomasaurs. It was still too cold for them to leave the warmth of the capsule and survive for more than an hour or two but there was still food out here for them, if only he could catch it. He went back to the capsule and began designing and building traps fashioned from bits and pieces from his equipment and stores.
A week later, he ventured out again and laid the traps he had built as close to the lakeshore as he dared go for fear of the mud, which grew thicker and more treacherous the further down the hillside one went, and what manner of aqueous carnivore might still be alive in the water. He nudged one trap that he had designed for catching small fish into the shallows using a long tree branch and then quickly retreated when he saw a shadow moving ominously under the water.
By that time he had dispensed with his face mask, for the air was no worse – he hoped – than any he had breathed in an inner city in a traffic jam. It stank though, of sulphurous compounds and burned remains and of rotting flesh. He passed innumerable carcases on his short journey, half buried in the mud like shipwrecks and so mangled and in such advanced states of decay he could not identify what they had been, except that most of them had been very large.
After that, he went out daily to inspect his traps. They caught nothing for two weeks. He knew they would work – he knew how to build traps and in the past had usually eaten the proceeds himself – and figured that there were not a lot of animals around to catch at present.
He persisted in any case, thinking that if he could bring home fresh food, it would do the thomasaurs some good and alleviate the burden on his stocks. He was still smarting from his previous night’s meal of cod, chips and peas being reduced to chips and peas and a spoonful of protein powder: the thomasaurs liked cod – but so did he.
Again, the warnings about not killing anything nagged at him but he rationalized that he was not killing anything the thomasaurs would not have taken as prey in any case, so that was hardly likely to send catastrophic ripples of cause and effect up the time stream. Maybe, at worst, he would return to the present and find there was no such thing as a halibut, which would put the kybosh on at least one Monty Python sketch, but he doubted it.
After two weeks, some small animals that looked variously like rodents with shells or sometimes rodents without shells, and even some sort of crab, began to appear now and then in his traps. The thomasaurs ate everything he brought them and had fresh meat then, perhaps one day in five. It was not much but it did enable Benedict to provide himself with more of his own food.
As time went on, over the ensuing months, the sky cleared and the sunshine came back. The weather remained stormy and unsettled but the average temperatures gradually inched upwards.
One morning during that time a mood of devilishness took him. Chuckling to himself, he brought a small, empty tin of Heinz baked beans from the trash that was waiting to go in the recycler – he had until then followed his strict instructions not to leave anything outside the capsule – and took it to the lakeshore.
Here there lay the skeleton of a lambeosaurus, a plant-eating dinosaur with a tall, hollow, bony crest on its head, that had long since been picked clean by scavengers. He placed the tin of beans inside the skeleton’s jaws and then trudged back to the capsule, highly amused at his own jest. He imagined, sixty five millions years from now, some palaeontologists finding the fossilised remains of the lambeosaurus and trying to figure out how the sixty-five-million-year-old remains of a tin of Heinz beans managed to wind up in its mouth.
Funny. At least he thought so – although he imagined the palaeontologists would not be quite so amused.
The day arrived when it was warm enough for the thomasaurs to venture out from the safety of the capsule. It cooled off rapidly towards evening though and became cold enough to have killed them if they had tried to stay out in it but his little companions would scurry back as soon as they felt the cold and return to the warmth of their home inside the big shiny tree. That was just over a year since he first arrived.
As the next year progressed, the climate grew milder and the weather settled somewhat, temperatures became such that the thomasaurs could stay out all night, huddled together in the new nest they had built for themselves.
Primitive plants and ferns began to reappear, in fact the hillside was no longer the barren, shingly escarpment it had once been; it was now covered with a layer of mud and ash that enabled plants to grow in greater profusion and towards the end of the second year, it was alive with growing things and flying insects, which the thomasaurs could jump and catch in their snapping jaws.
Small mammals became evident more and more, the only blight on their new landscape, perhaps – and he was not educated enough to be sure - the only natural predators left alive to bother them anywhere on the whole planet, were the four thomasaurs that Benedict had saved from the grizzly fate met by billions of their fellow reptiles. The thomasaurs were once again going off to the lakeside to hunt.
Benedict watched their lives return gradually to normal and felt pleased with himself. Their natural food supply was burgeoning and at the same time the animals for which they might have been natural prey, such as the pterosaurs and many a larger dinosaur, were gone. They would do all right.
To underscore that assessment, he noticed a few days later that one of the thomasaurs was pregnant. Archibald, evidently had been mis-named but it did not much matter. There would soon, at the end of whatever happened to be the normal thomasaur pregnancy, be one or more additions to the family.
The aforementioned pregnancy turned out to be three months in duration, at the end of which Benedict sauntered over to their nest one day and discovered there were five bluish eggs in it.
He hunkered down on the edge of the nest. Only Archibald, the proud mum, was home; two were out a-hunting, while Jon was perched at the top of the hill doing his sentry-go. Benedict gave her the treat he had brought her, juicy chunks of next Tuesday’s steak.
“Congratulations, Archie old girl.” he said to her as he watched her eat. “I hope you’re going to name one of the little blighters Benedict.....”
It was at that very moment that the capsule’s warning klaxon starting sounding.
For an instant he froze, not recognising the sound that echoed across the landscape and rendered the thomasaurs, and probably every living thing within miles, edgy and alert. It had been two years since he last heard it, the day Amida hit the Earth, and he thought at first it must be an animal, perhaps an Ichthyornis or another of the species of large birds that had begun to flourish in the region.
But then he recognized it. It was the warning signal urging him back to the capsule because the time portal was about to close.
There was no time to think, to hesitate, to say a final goodbye to the thomasaurs that had been his friends and family for two long years. All he could do was run or be trapped here forever. It all happened so fast.
From his vantage point on the hill, Jon watched him run through large, perspicacious eyes, with vertical, slitted irises like a cat’s. He watched him disappear into the big shiny tree and never saw him again.
Jon watched the big shiny tree for a while but then turned his head, his attention drawn momentarily by the distant cry of some animal, the fan-like membranes that were his ears picking up and distinguishing minute sounds from miles away. Having established the sound signified no danger, he turned his head back towards the big shiny tree.
But the big shiny tree was gone.
Within half an hour it had faded from his memory as had the strange bird inside it that distributed food and represented survival.
Life went on. And on.
Inside the capsule, Benedict rushed to the cockpit and threw himself into his seat. The computer screen said:
“Warning. Time portal will close in twelve minutes, thirty five seconds and counting. Seal hatch. Process irreversible. Do not leave capsule. Warning. Time capsule will close in twelve minutes, thirty seconds and counting..........”
Benedict sat there dumbstruck for a minute, thinking of the thomasaurs, the sadness of parting, the vast chasm of nothingness under all existence that was the word “never.” After all they had been through together, he had simply run off, without a parting word, a last titbit from his rations, a last affectionate stroke of the green scales that ran in a stripe from the crown of their heads to the small of their backs. Sad.
He wondered if the thomasaurs would remember him.
But then a new emotion welled up inside him, pushing all maudlin sentimentality aside. He was going home!
He strapped in, sat and waited with a pounding heart for the little judder and bump that would tell him he had been snapped back to his own time as the elastic umbilical of the quantum-electro-something-or-other thingy contracted, reeling him instantaneously up the time-stream.
But then, with the countdown at nine minutes, he realised he had forgotten something, said: “Oh bloody hell!” and quickly unbuckled. The thomasaurs had not lived in the capsule for a year but the accommodation deck was still a mess, still contained plenty of evidence that they had been there, even the nest he had made for them from blankets was still in a corner of the cramped space. He had let things go a bit.
Sergeant Benedict did the quickest spring-clean in history. He gathered up the blankets, the papers and other items that had been chewed up, wiped down everything and swept the floor, for the thomasaurs had a habit of liberally shedding scales, sprayed all the compartments with the very last of his pine-scented air freshener and bundled up all the rubbish and took it to the hatch.
He opened the hatch and Mother flashed a warning message that said, in so many words: “Look, I specifically told you not to do that.” By then the countdown was into its final few seconds. He did not even want to think of what might happen to him if the hatch was open while the capsule was making its jump through time.
He threw all the rubbish out into prehistory and slammed the hatch shut. With two seconds to go, he rushed back to the cockpit. He was in mid-rush when the transit started. The capsule shuddered and jumped, its deck lurched once, like a braking elevator, turning his stomach and throwing him to the floor, then was still.
Benedict struggled to his feet. For a moment his head swam and his vision blurred and he felt very peculiar. Something inside him felt as if it had turned inside out. He assumed this was some by-product of the time jump, although he could not recall any such adverse reaction two years or so earlier.
Close by where he had fallen, his shaving mirror was still fixed to the bulkhead where he had placed it for the benefit of his efforts at self-portraiture. He glanced at it as he got up. Did a double-take. Blinked. The reflection blinking back at him was not his own.
Sergeant Benedict recoiled in horror. The reflection in the mirror recoiled in horror. He put his right hand to his face, the...thing....in the mirror put its left hand to its face. Then he screamed.
So did the thing in the mirror.
He was still doing his horrified-recoil-screaming-thing when the hatch behind him flew open and a couple of technicians in coveralls and a doctor in a white coat came in, all smiles. Encountering a somewhat ragged and gaunt version of the sergeant Benedict they saw enter the capsule just two hours earlier and one that was screaming at his own reflection in the mirror, their welcoming smiles faded.
Benedict turned towards them. And screamed some more. He knew he must be hallucinating but the phantasmagoria he saw looked very, very real.
* * * * * * * * *
Sergeant Tomas Benedict did in fact recover from what the flippant doctor Drift referred to as the “mother of all jet lags” but it took a while.
Captain Legg finally relented and let Patel’s people sedate the poor devil. They could not do anything with him and he thought perhaps they could at least help him sleep. Besides, Upstairs were on the way and he had a choice of presenting them with the Hero of the hour behaving like a complete loony or sleeping like a baby and he decided that sleeping-baby mode would make the least adverse impression.
Upstairs arrived by way of a government limo in the form of one Bertie Scott and a small entourage. Scott was an imperious, Oxford-and-Sandhurst chap in very snappy Saville Row civvies who nevertheless carried the rank of Brigadier and was clearly well acclimatized to operating in rarefied atmospheres close to the administrative summit of the Empire.
Legg knew the Brigadier from previous visits because Scott ran some hush-hush department or other that oversaw various top secret projects of which this was evidently but one. They were all, of course, devoted to pushing back the frontiers of science and furthering the cause of human freedom, a task that, naturally, could only be entrusted to the Very Best People and kept out of the hands of the hoi poloi and various other nefarious elements, such as the French.
Legg liked Brigadier Scott, if by “liked” one meant “was terrified of him” and “desperately wanted to be like him.”
The Brigadier strutted through the Base and carried out a snap inspection, spent quite some time at the business end of the operation, Drift’s department, admiring the Tardis as if it were some masterpiece hanging in the Louvre, asking a lot of awkward questions and receiving Legg’s report on the state of play.
He looked in on the medical department and stood over the bed where the sedated Sergeant Benedict was sleeping peacefully with a tube sticking out of his arm. He asked more awkward questions about Benedict’s condition and the prognosis for his recovery.
It actually all went quite well and the Brigadier seemed pleased in so far as he did not tear anybody off a strip or re-assign anyone to the Front or Antarctica.
Later he and Legg retired to Legg’s office for a Sherry and (Legg blenched inwardly at the prospect) an “informal chat.”
The Brigadier occupied Legg’s desk and his comfortable leather chair, which obliged the Captain to sit in the less comfortable straight-backed chair opposite, which did not seem all that “informal” to Legg.
“So far so good.” Scott said, after sipping the sherry and raising an eyebrow in approval of Legg’s taste in tipple. He seemed pleased and Legg hid his relief. “Our first go at sending a chap back in time went pretty much without a hitch – apart from the minor matter of Sergeant Benedict’s Jet Lag.” he said, having already picked up the confounded Drift’s somewhat trivialising epithet for the poor Sergeant’s condition. “Every chance that Upstairs will smile benignly on your humble efforts, Captain, and will be looking to extend funding and resources for the next phase of the operation.”
Legg did not dare ask what the “next phase” was going to be. He said: “You’ve not yet had a chance to view the recordings Benedict brought back but my own science chappies are saying the data has provided a quantum leap in our understanding of prehistory. We’ve identified at least ten previously unknown species – including a tremendous amount of data on one small lizard that apparently throws light on the evolution of our own species.....”
“That’s all very wonderful I am sure,” Scott replied. “But all that will have to be kept under wraps for quite some time. If we start releasing the data to the scientific community or the ruddy BBC documentary makers, we’ll have to tell them where and how we got it.”
So much for advancing the cause of science. Legg thought, but he understood the logic. He could imagine the furore should it get out that HMG had a working time machine. He said:
“We are still hopeful that Sergeant Benedict will make a full recovery.”
“Well, that would be a boon. I’m going to recommend our hero for promotion to Warrant Officer and word is Her Majesty is keen to pin a medal on him – private ceremony of course. He’s earned it - services rendered and all that. But we can’t have him drooling or speaking in tongues when the day comes. That wouldn’t do at all, put a damper on the whole thing.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Make sure the chap gets everything he needs, the very best drugs and so forth. If he doesn’t snap out of it, we’ll assign him a pretty nurse and make sure he can see out his days in comfort. There’s a nice hush-hush facility in the Falklands for that kind of thing. We look after our own. His family will be told he’s MIA presumed dead, naturally. But his wife will receive the customary pension.”
“I’m sure she’ll be very pleased.” Legg replied, unable to resist the muted sarcasm. It seemed an ignominious fate for a man who had just pulled off a mission of greater importance than the first Moon landing.
“The main thing is, the Brigadier went on, “Is we have proven we can send a chap back and have him carry out an assignment. Not only that, we have proven that, with the right chap, it can be done safely without his clod-hopping around, changing the past and affecting he present. Nothing has changed here in our own time. If it had, I’m sure we would have noticed....”
“Indeed, sir.” the Captain replied, sure that the Brigadier was right.
“So I can confidently predict that we’ll get the thumbs up for the next stage. It’s a shame we can’t use Benedict for the mission, being as he now has experience of time travel but a man has already been selected and will be with you shortly.”
“The next stage, sir?”
“Yes.” The Brigadier leaned forward, conspiratorially. “Ever heard of a blighter by the name of Benjamin Franklin....?”
It was at that moment that there was a commotion in the outer office, a knock on the door and Legg’s adjutant put his head in:
“Excuse me sirs, but lieutenant Patel is here asking to see you. Say’s it’s urgent.”
Legg glanced at the Brigadier, who shrugged, waved a hand.
“Send him in, staff sergeant!”
Patel stepped into the office and saluted briskly. He looked flushed and excited, which for the lugubrious Patel was quite something, and Legg guessed that something monumental must have happened.
“Excuse me for the interruption,” he said, “but I thought you both would want to know that there’s been a development.”
“A development, lieutenant?” Legg asked and braced himself for the answer.
“Yes sir. Our patient just woke up....I think you might want to come and see for yourselves.”
Five minutes later the brigadier and the captain arrived in the sick bay. Everybody snapped to attention.
And that included Sergeant Benedict who was sitting up in bed but nevertheless managed a very snappy salute. Legg’s heart leaped to see the man saluting and not recoiling or screaming. Or indeed drooling. He appeared at first glance very much in command of himself.
“Sergeant?” Legg asked.
“Yes sir!”
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine sir. A bit woozy sir from the medication. Excuse me for not getting up sir!”
Legg waved that aside. “Don’t want you keeling over sergeant.”
“He seems to have all his marbles.” The Brigadier said, tactlessly. “I thought you said he was raving?”
Legg looked at Patel, seeking an explanation.
“He was sir, very much sir.” Patel said and then, thinking on his feet, and for the Brigadier’s benefit: “It was our judgement that he was suffering from some as yet unknown psychological disturbance occasioned by the time travel and that if we put him into a deep sleep his, er, brain disturbances would right themselves. Which they appear to have done. He just woke up and appears lucid...”
“Are you lucid, sergeant?” the Brigadier asked.
“Yes sir, I think so sir. Memory’s a bit dodgy though sir. I seem to remember I went off the deep end for a bit. Imagining stuff. Acting crazy. But I feel fine now. Sorry if I caused any bother sir.”
“Don’t worry about all that, sergeant.” the Brigadier told him, generously. “We are just glad to have you back. We never like to lose a sound chap.”
He turned to Captain Legg. “My compliments to you and your medical team for a job well done. Make sure you send all the medical and psych reports to my office for analysis. And as soon as the sergeant feels up to it, get the full personal debrief done.”
They kept Benedict at the Base for months after that, running test after test on him, giving him brain scans, taking so many blood samples that he was sure they had extracted nearly a entire armful, keeping him under observation, making reports that went Upstairs and of course very thoroughly debriefing him on his exploits in the Cretaceous.
His memory was pretty much intact and the more he was questioned, the more of it came back and he was able to accurately answer any question that was thrown at him, clarify various entries in his daily log and so on.
There were however various things he could not help them with.
The first was the matter of the thomasaurs. During his mission he had taken a great deal of photo and film of his little friends, as well as numerous drawings and was able to provide a great deal of detail as to their habits and so forth. All this he explained by telling them a family of the creatures just happened to set up home next to his capsule, which was true, affording him a fantastic opportunity to study them at close hand – discreetly of course and without interfering. He left out certain details, naturally, such as how close his friendship with them became, how they had actually lived with him in the capsule for months on end, how he fed them and even went and caught food for them.
He was very much the Golden Boy and had no wish to blot an otherwise untarnished copy book by admitting he had actually disobeyed his mission orders. Besides, his indiscretions seemed to have done no harm and the present was normal enough and, so far as he could tell, as it had always been, so to speak. No names, no pack drill and all that.
Evidently, the boffs seemed to attach a great deal of importance to the thomasaurs. The word was that DNA analysis of their poo samples had answered some riddles about the origins of their own species, although exactly what, Benedict did not know and did not particularly care. Yet, by answering one riddle it posed another, with which he was “unable” to help them: how the hell did the thomasaurs – and everyone was calling them that by then, so Benedict’s epithet had stuck – manage to survive the Extinction Event?
Benedict pretended he was as mystified as everyone else about that and simply told them that after the Event, when he finally emerged from the capsule, there they were running around as large as life. The mystery spawned countless theories and speculations, none of which were correct, but which doubtless would keep the boffs amused for decades or centuries to come.
The sergeant decided that he would probably take pity on them and leave HMG a confession to be delivered after his death, an eventuality that he fully intended would be a long time in the future.
He was unable to help them too with the language he was speaking when he returned to the present, which he had also used in all the voice-commentaries he made on all the films he took of the local fauna and which he wrote in peculiar script on all his reports and checklists.
Apparently it turned out to be English, pretty much, except English kind of distorted and bent out of shape and pronounced with sounds almost impossible for a chap’s vocal cords to manage. He was at a loss to explain it and was quite incredulous when shown what he had written and permitted to listen to his own recordings. It sounded like someone else, an alien or something. His memory of events was by then quite lucid and so far as his own recall was concerned he had been speaking and writing normally.
The remaining oddity was the matter of the drawings he had made of a strange animal of which he had brought back no other evidence. He remembered doing several self portraits – the drawings having since vanished from his personal effects – but could not recall drawing the strange creature, which he assumed must have been drawn from his own imagination.
He and the Project were left then with mysteries that were never solved so far as he knew. The first was the matter of how the thomasaurs survived the Extinction Event and the second was the nature and cause of the strange hallucinatory mental disturbance that Benedict had suffered from pretty much for the duration of his adventure without even realising it.
The final mystery was related to the second: what had caused him to crack up entirely upon his return? That he did remember in a vague, dreamlike way, the way a man might recall an unpleasant acid trip in which normal people appeared, quite convincingly, to be some sort of hideous demons, spitting and snarling in satanic tongues.
They put it down to some effect, as yet not understood, of time travel upon electrical activity in the brain – a condition which fortunately righted itself as long as the returning time traveller was given some peace and quiet and put to sleep for a few days.
The sergeant decided that answering the riddle was not his problem. He was just glad he was back to normal with only a few hideous flashbacks to bother him occasionally, especially when he looked in a mirror.
He did not mention the odd flashbacks for fear they would keep him there even longer with their interminable tests and questions and he wanted to get out of there. From his point of view he had not seen his wife for nearly three years when you added together his time at the Base and his time in the Cretaceous and he was having trouble remembering what she looked like.
They did allow him to ring Joanne every now and then but he had to keep to the cover story and pretend he was calling from a base in Afghanistan. That was a month after his return; well over two years for him, a few weeks for her.
She had been to Boots and taken the pregnancy test, then to the doctor. Benedict was going to be a dad in about seven months’ time. She sounded very happy, bless her little cotton socks, and suddenly Benedict was very happy. Life goes on despite every effort of a cruel universe to prevent it.
“Do you think you can get an LOA and be here for the birth Tommie?” she asked him.
He told her he would do his best but could not promise it because he knew that the needs of the Project overrode everything and Upstairs would only let him go when they were good and ready.
“It’s pretty hot and heavy over here.” he said. “But I’ll put in a request.”
“Well please look after yourself and don’t go being a hero.”
“Trust me.” He said.
He was true to his word and put in a request for an LOA, which was denied for the time being, as he knew it would be.
Life at the Base went on, the tests and observations went on and became a mind-numbing drudge. Benedict longed for relief, to go home and see Joanne and his parents and siblings. He was allowed to call home regularly and was relieved that Joanne’s pregnancy was proceeding without a hitch.
The estimated date of the birth grew nearer and nearer and Benedict became increasingly fidgety, put in several requests for leave, all of which were denied. Then one day he called home and a friend of Joanne’s picked up. Joanne was in the hospital, giving birth.
Benedict was none too happy at not being there and put in another request for leave on compassionate grounds.
Captain Legg called him into his office.
“I seems someone Upstairs has finally taken pity on you.” He told Benedict. “Your LOA has been approved. We’re just processing the paperwork now and my adjutant is arranging transport for you as far as Aviemore and train tickets from there. It seems congratulations are in order....”
“Thank you sir. My wife was in labour last night when I called, so I assume by now that I’m a dad.”
“I can imagine you very much want to be off then.”
“Not that it hasn’t been fun here sir......”
Legg permitted himself a smile at that. “Indeed.” He was in a good mood that day. Upstairs was very happy with the whole project, so happy in fact that extra funding had been approved, as had more staff and promotions for himself to Major and Patel to First Lieutenant. He was therefore very kindly disposed towards Benedict, whose sterling work at the sharp end had contributed significantly to their good fortune – not to mention his convenient return to sanity at a timely moment.
“I’m only sorry we couldn’t get clearance earlier. There are security issues, which I don’t need to remind you of. The psych boys had to be absolutely sure your recovery is permanent and stable. Our appreciation however of your contribution to your country was never in question however.”
“Understood sir. Can I ask how long I’ve got, sir?”
“You may. You’re being given a month in consideration of the fact that, for you, you’ve been nearly three years on this assignment. You can imagine the trouble we had getting the bureaucracy to compute with that one!”
Benedict permitted himself a brief smile. “I can sir.”
“You will receive your written orders in due course but I can tell you that after your LOA you will not be returning here but to your Marine unit, wherever it happens to be at the moment.”
Benedict was relieved but did not show it. Legg went on, “This is no reflection on you but it is not considered safe at the moment to put a man through the time portal thing twice – in consideration of the adverse reaction you suffered the first time. We wouldn’t want you permanently blowing a gasket in the old noggin’.”
“I’d prefer to avoid it too, sir. Can’t say I’m unhappy about it.”
“I doubt very much whether we will meet again, Sergeant. I hardly need remind you that as far as you are concerned this Project does not exist and your foray into time never happened. You are to speak of it to no-one. And I mean not a living soul.”
“Understood sir.”
And Benedict was as good as his word. He never uttered it to a soul, not even Joanne, not even his children, of which he was destined to have four. It was not easy keeping his adventures to himself, being the world’s first time traveller and not being able to tell a soul about it – a bit like Columbus having to keep quiet about having discovered America. In fact, at times it nearly made him scream.
But he kept his word.
“With your permission sir, I’ll go and pack me kit...”
Legg nodded. “There’ll be a TUL ready for you in Bay Two within the hour.” He said, meaning a “Truck Utility Light” or Land Rover. See my adjutant to sign for your train tickets and travel money....Oh, and there’s one other thing....You won’t receive the warrant for a few days yet but I am authorized to tell you that you have been promoted...”
“Sir?”
“Measure of HMG’s appreciation. You’re been kicked up three rungs and will return to your unit as a W.O. First Class.” Legg told him. “Quite probably as Sergeant Major Benedict.”
Benedict was dumbfounded. He had expected a promotion, figured with his record it was long overdue, but he had assumed it would be to Colour Sergeant, which was the next rank up. A three-tier jump was beyond his wildest dreams. Joanne was going to be over the Moon about the corresponding rise in his pay.
Legg stood up and reached across the desk to shake his hand. “Your unit has been notified and your new insignia will be waiting for you when you return to it. Allow me to be the first to congratulate you Mr. Benedict.” He said, “mister” being the correct address to one of Benedict’s new rank.
Warrant Officer First Class Thomas Benedict was still floating half an inch off the ground when the Army Land Rover collected him in Bay Two and whisked him off through the mountains to Aviemore Station.
A long, frustratingly slow train journey ensued in which the time and the miles seemed to crawl by. He rang Joanne on his mobile when he got to Edinburgh and was waiting to change trains for the long, overnight haul south. The home phone did not answer so he tried her mobile.
Joanne answered after it had rung for a while. She sounded tired but happy.
“I snuck outside for a cig.” She told him. “But I’m fine. They’ll keep me here for a few days like they always do with your first. But you’re a daddy, Tom!”
Benedict thought that if he got any happier he would drop dead where he stood.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” he asked, thinking if it was a boy it was going to be called Dennis, a girl Doris, in honour of the two thomasaurs that never made it through the Extinction thing. He might have a job selling Joanne on the names though.
“Too soon to tell yet. Doctor says they’ll do the scan some time tomorrow, then we’ll know!”
“I’ll be home by tomorrow afternoon. I got my LOA and I’m at – on my way now.”
“Fantastic, Tommie! I can’t wait to see you!”
“Me too. Look I gotta go now, my train’s in.....love you!”
“Love you, too.”
The following afternoon he arrived at Poole in Dorset, alighted from the train a little stiff from the journey and hailed a cab.
“Where too, sarge? “ the cabbie asked, recognising the insignia on Benedict’s uniform. “The barracks?”
“Hospital.” Benedict said.
The cab wound its way through the afternoon traffic. Benedict thought the town had not changed much in the three years since the chopper had collected him from his barracks but then remembered it was only nine months so far as anybody else was concerned.
Anyway, whatever the time that had passed, it had passed as it should, nothing had changed. Everything was reassuringly normal. The newspapers he had read on the train were still carrying the same old same old: war, tax, debt, football and celebrity scandal. He was relieved that nothing he had done in the prehistoric past had in any way affected the present. He, and perhaps only he, would know it if he had.
He was tempted though to ask the cabbie if he had ever heard of a halibut but decided against it as it would sound too weird.
After a while, as the cab sat at traffic lights, he asked the cabbie, “You’re ex-marine, right?” It always showed.
The cabbie nodded proudly. “RMC Logistics. Moved here from Chivenor after I was invalided out. Corporal Sam Green, sarge.” And the cabbie took a hand off the wheel to shake Benedict’s hand
“WIA?” Benedict asked, meaning Wounded in Action.
The cabbie laughed. “At RMC Logistics? Nah...I wish though....Got hit by a truck on manoeuvres on Salisbury bloody plain. Bleedin’ truck belonged to First Para too, just to add insult to injury.”
“I’m sorry to hear that Corporal.”
“One of those things, sarge. Nice pension and the cabbing job, can’t complain. My son’s in the services too.”
“Oh? Where’s he stationed?”
“Nebraska garrison. Lucky swine. Ever been to the colonies?”
“No such luck. Always fancied it. Might retire there though. California maybe. They’re still giving our chaps land over there, I think.”
The cabbie nodded. “Was tempted meslef but in the end I figured the colonies is alright but ya can’t beat dear old Blighty – except for the bleedin’ weather of course.
“The weather ain’t so bad.” Benedict said, thinking that after what he had been through, he would never sneer at the British climate again.
“You just back from a tour?” corporal Green asked, chattily. “Anywhere interestin’?”
“Afghanistan.”
“Ah. I hear we kicked some serious ass over there, as the colonials would say. Newspapers are saying Ptolemy XIIth mob are on the run, retreated all the way to the Persian border.”
“Yeah...” Benedict said. He had not heard but he had been out of the loop three y- nine months.
“Anyway,” the cabbie went on. “Word on the grapevine is the Marines have a tour in Canada coming up.”
“I hadn’t heard. Mind you, we’re always the last to know.”
“Napoleon IX is trying to take Canada again. Bloody French should learn to be happy with Quebec and Europe and leave it at that. “Ah..... here we go!”
Benedict got out of the cab and paid his fare, gave Corporal Green a handsome tip, then went into the hospital and presented himself at reception and was directed to the post-natal wing.
He walked with a spring in his step. Everything was right with the world. He never did know what happened with the Project. Had they sent other men back in time? Had they meddled with history? Would other nations get hold of the time travel and affect changes of their own liking? If they ever did, in the future, they would have already been in the past by now and done some tinkering.
But there was no sign that anything like that had happened and thus, logically, would happen. Perhaps the whole thing was destined to be abandoned as too bleedin’ dangerous. Certainly history seemed to be as it had always been, the present as it should be, unchanged and complete, warts and all, so Benedict guessed that that must have happened – will have happened.
Dear God, it sure does your bleedin’ head in all right. Give me a simple soldier’s life any day. Point me at a Froggie or a Russkie and let me pull the friggin’ trigger. Simple.
On the maternity wing he was told he would have to sit and wait for half an hour as his wife was having a routine examination. By then he was hungry and so nipped down to the hospital cafeteria and bought himself a raw beef sandwich and a cup of lamb’s blood.
Then he returned to Maternity and was allowed to go in and see his wife.
Joanne was polishing her talons when entered her private room, grooming herself for his arrival. She looked bright as a button, utterly beautiful and gratifyingly overjoyed to see her husband. They embraced and held one another for a long while. She felt so good in his arms, smelled so good.
“Down boy!” Joanne said with a laugh, feeling his physical reaction. She disentangled herself from his embrace, not without some reluctance herself. “Plenty of time for that when you take me home.”
“I could brace a chair against the door...” Benedict suggested, only half joking.
She pouted. “Don’t you want to see your new son first?”
“It’s a boy?”
She nodded. “They just did the scan.”
“Where is he?”
“In the incubation ward. We can go take a look if you like!”
“Damn right I like.”
The incubation ward was just up the corridor: rows of little cots in a controlled environment that felt as warm as a greenhouse.
Benedict’s son, little Dennis, was in cot 12, at the end of a row and Joanne led him by the hand to it.
Then they both stood by the cot and gazed lovingly at the fruit of their loins.
“Beautiful!” Benedict said, close to tears. He reached out, conscious of how big and rough his hands were against something so tiny and fragile.
The bluish egg was warm to his touch.
“He’ll hatch in a couple of days. “ Joanne told him. “I’ll get them to show you the scan if you like...”
“Beautiful.” Benedict said again, knowing his son would be perfect.
Then he turned to Joanne and put his arm around her, his hand gently stroking the green stripe that ran from the crown of her head to the small of her back.
He turned his head and kissed her exquisite ear. The tiny fan-like membrane quivered with pleasure against his lips.
THE END
