Where am I, he wondered?
He looked around. There was a wide beach in front of him, crowded with sunbathers. It didn’t have the exotic look of a tropical beach—crystalline water, white powdery sand. It looked very much like a California beach. Turning, he could see a town or small city a little way inland, and, behind the town, a steeply rising wall of rugged, heavily forested mountains.
It all seemed very familiar.
It definitely had the look of the California coast—up by Santa Barbara, say, where the mountains come down close to the shore. Though these mountains seemed a little closer to the shore than he remembered from his last visit to Santa Barbara.
But what about this sweltering tropical heat? You almost never got temperatures like this along the California coast. And this stifling humidity? Never. Where were the cooling sea breezes? Puzzled, he walked up toward the promenade separating the beach from the town. Here the vegetation seemed wrong. The slim, graceful palm trees that were growing everywhere didn’t look like the ones he had known all his life. They were some kind of more tropical species, most likely—coconut palms or royal palms or something else, something too tender to grow in California’s mild but sometimes chilly climate. And these vines, these creepers, these odd ferns, these riotously blossoming shrubs with glistening leaves—no, no, Eric thought, none of this is California stuff. California is dry all summer long. These plants must come from some moist jungle.
He paused to catch his breath. Moving around was a real struggle in this greenhouse environment.
Where am I? he wondered again.
He had to be fifty million minutes in the future—a little more than ninety-five years. So this was the summer of the year 2111. If he was still alive in this year, he’d be 118 years old. Stretching his luck a little, maybe.
So he knew when he was. But where—where—?
And suddenly he knew.This greenhouse environment. That was what he had called it a moment ago. He trembled with fear and shock as full understanding hit him. He was in California, all right. But a California that had been utterly transformed—in a world that had undergone what must have been a colossal calamity—
“You savah, mister?” asked someone at his elbow.
A girl, about thirteen, fourteen. She was wearing only the tiniest of bathing suits and she had a small metallic pack strapped to her back. A flexible tube ran from the backpack to her mouth. A tall boy stood behind her. He had a similar backpack on.
“Savah?” Eric repeated. “I don’t understand.”
“Are you savah?” she said again. “Are you all right? Are you okay?” She said “okay” as if it were a word from some foreign language. “You don’t have your breather on.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t have one.”
“You lose it? You look bad mal, savvy? Tray mal.”
She was speaking a sort of French, he realized. French and English, mixed. He leaned on the railing of the promenade. She was telling him that he looked sick. And he felt sick.
“The air,” he said. “So thick—so humid here, so hot—”
“Not the heat,” said the girl. “It’s the see-oh. It’ll plonk you in a quick.”
See-oh. C-O, he thought. CO2. Carbon dioxide.
“Lend him your breather, Slowjoe,” the girl said impatiently, gesturing at her companion. “Can’t you see he’s going to plonk?”
Eric was feeling dizzier and dizzier. Vaguely he was aware of the boy unstrapping the device from his back and handing it to him. The girl put the tube in his mouth and told him to breathe deeply. Almost at once his head began to clear. Oxygen? They were watching him worriedly. Nice kids, he thought. Lucky for me.
“Savah?” she asked. “Better now?”
“Much,” he said.
“Bien. Go on. Put it on your back.”
“But I can’t let him give me his breather.”
“He’ll go and get another one. Five minutes without won’t mort him. We’re used to this stuff, you know.”
Eric nodded.This stuff. So it had really happened, he thought. The greenhouse effect that the environmental scientists had worried about all those years. The buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through the centuries of industrial development, until a thick mantle of heat-retaining gas surrounded the Earth and temperatures everywhere started to climb. And the polar ice caps melted, and the seas rose, and the air turned into chemical soup, and the temperate lands turned into steaming tropics, and God only knew what had become of the places that had been tropical before.
Now Sean understood why the mountains here seemed closer to the shore than he thought they ought to be. The mountains hadn’t moved. The rising seas had come up onto the land. If sea levels have risen twenty-five or fifty feet, he thought, what has become of Santa Monica? Of New York? The hills of San Francisco must be islands now.
“What’s the name of this town?” he asked the girl.
“Santa Barbara,” she said.
“Santa Barbara, California?”
“No, Santa Barbara on the moon.” And she laughed. “Where do you think you are?”
“I thought it might be Santa Barbara,” he said. “But everything’s so different from what I—” He paused.
“Go on,” she said. “Different from what you remember, right?”
“You know who I am?”
“You’re a voyageur, yes? A time traveler? You come from the cool years, right?”
“The cool years, yes. From the year 2016, matter of fact.”
The girl smiled. She didn’t seem notably startled by what he had just said. Time-travelers must be commonplace items by now, he thought. People dropping in from the past all the time. “I knew it toot sweet, right away. You talk like the vieux-time people. You must have been one of the first, no?”
“The first,” he said. “The very first.”
“No blague!” she said admiringly. “Imagine that!” But she still didn’t sound enormously impressed. “Well, enjoy yourself here. If you can. Don’t forget to use your breather. You’ll plonk real fast without it, you know.Real fast.”
16. Sean -5×107minutes
Well, here comes the parade, finally,” said the short red-faced man just to Sean’s left.
What, again? The parade was over. Was time backing up on him? Had the pendulum slipped a cog? Yes, he could hear the sounds of parade music all over again. Had he somehow been taken a shunt within a shunt, going back to the start of his stay in 2025 to live through an experience he had already had?
“Yes, sir, that’s what I call a parade!” the red-faced man said.
Sean stared. It was a parade, all right, but not the one he had just been in. He could see the prancing drum major now, far down the street. The half-built, dinky-looking, antiquated street. And he could hear the music. Not electronic sounds, no, but an old-fashioned brass band making a joyous blaring uproar. A real bass drum sending out vast booming sounds.
This wasn’t Glendora in the year 2025. And this wasn’t any parade in honor of Sean Gabrielson, the visitor from out of time. Not at all.
He was in a small town, but it was a much older one. There weren’t any futuristic high-rise buildings with horns and eyes on them. There weren’t any high-rises at all, just little wooden or stucco one- and two-story buildings with scrawny young palm trees standing in front of them. And the sign on the street corner—an old-fashioned sign, white letters on blue metal, no infoglow, no shimmerglass—said that this was Wilshire Boulevard.