So long, fellows. Onward to—what?
This was serious future now, a truly heavy distance. He was 95,129 years down the line, an enormous jump. His last forward swing had taken him a mere 951 years ahead. Even that world, Quintu-Leela’s world of A.D. 2967, was utterly unlike anything he knew or could understand. That was how vast the changes had been between his own time and Quintu-Leela’s.
Now he was a hundred times as far from Time Zero. 95,129 years! The transformations in human life during such an immense span must have been incredible. It had taken only five thousand years to go from the first civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia to the age of travel through time and space. Now he had covered twenty times as many years. Did the human race even exist any more? Or had it evolved into something unimaginably strange?
Where was he? What was this globe of green light? What was going to happen to him?
Many questions, no answers.
Then a deep gentle voice said, “Hey, it’s good to see you again, Sean. Been a long time, boy.”
A very familiar voice. His grandfather’s voice, rich and warm. Grandpa Gabrielson who lived in San Diego.
Sean blinked into the greenness. “Is that you, Grandpa?”
“Who else, boy?”
Unmistakable, that voice. The voice of the wise, loving old man who had spent so many holiday weekends with them, who liked to tell all those stories of the first television sets, the first jet planes, the first trip to the moon, the first flights of the space shuttle. Grandpa Gabrielson had worked as an engineer for the Apollo space program when he was a young man, and later he had been involved in the shuttle project. He had seen the whole modern world take shape in his lifetime.
But Grandpa Gabrielson had no business being here in the 932nd century. Grandpa Gabrielson had lived to a good old age, well past eighty. But he had died last year, just before Sean and Eric had been chosen for Project Pendulum.
“I’m here too, son. It really has been a long time!”
His grandmother’s voice. She had died when he was ten. And then his father was in the green globe with him, clapping him on the back, laughing, asking him if he was managing to keep up with the baseball scores while he was shunting around. And his mother, glowing with pride. And his mother’s parents, Grandfather and Grandmother Weiss. He hardly knew them, because they lived in Belgium.
And Eric was there also.
It was Thanksgiving Day, and there was a huge turkey on the table, and mounds of cranberry sauce, and mountains of candied yams and turkey stuffing and everything else, and the whole family was there. His father was busy carving, as he always did. And he and Eric were side by side for the first time in 95,129 years.
Sean looked at his brother. He could feel the strange force, the brother-force, that had bound him to his twin all his life. The force which he had not felt since the moment they had gone their separate ways at Time Zero on the shunt platform.
“Are you really here?” he asked.
Eric grinned. “What do you think? That I’m just some sleazy illusion?”
“But this can’t be happening,” Sean said. “Thanksgiving Day in the year 95,129? Grandpa and Grandma here? Mom and Dad? No. I’m in some kind of green globe and this is just some hallucination that who knows what kind of creatures are pulling out of the memories they find in my brain. Right? Right?”
Eric gave him a pitying look. “You must have lost your mind. Or misplaced it, at the very least. I’m as real as you are, and probably a lot hungrier. Shut up and pass the turkey, turkey!”
23. Eric + 5×1011minutes
Scrambling down an icy hillside through a blinding snowstorm was bad enough. But every breath was agony. Breathing this fierce Fourth Ice Age atmosphere was like inhaling icicles. And to have a pack of angry Neanderthals coming after him, besides—
Eric felt the shunt take him and sweep him mercifully into some far-off warmer place. He landed on all fours, gasping and coughing, and crouched there a moment until he had recovered. At last he looked up.
A Neanderthal face was looking back at him. Sloping forehead, rounded chin, broad nose, mouth like a jutting muzzle. Shrewd dark eyes studying him intently.
“Huh? Did I bring you along with me somehow?”
The Neanderthal knelt beside him and said something in an unknown language. His voice was deep and the way he spoke seemed oddly musical, though very strange. He didn’t seem hostile. Behind him, Eric saw softly rounded green hills, a wide valley broken by a chain of lakes, a forest in the distance.
There were prehistoric hominids wandering about wherever he looked.
He had landed in a group of ten or fifteen Neanderthals. Off to his left a hundred yards away were some slender little creatures looking a bit like apes but walking confidently upright. Eric recognized them as australopithecines from the early Pleistocene, creatures that occupied a place somewhere midway on the evolutionary path that had led to Homo sapiens. And over there, that awesome monster of an ape, as massive as a grizzly bear? Wasn’t that Gigantopithecus, from a million years B.C.? And those, in the middle distance? Sturdy-looking people who seemed almost human but for their strangely apelike faces: could those be Homo erectus, the ancestors of mankind whose fossil remains had been found in Java and China?
And those—
And those—
And those—
Wherever he looked, some not-quite-human creatures could be seen in the valley. The whole history of the evolution of humanity seemed to be here, all the extinct forms that he had studied in school and a good many that he was unable to identify at all.
What was this place? Unless he had lost count of the shunts, he was at the plus-500-billion-minute level now. 951,000 years in the future. What were all these creatures doing here, all wandering around at random like this?
“You have just arrived, I suppose?” a pleasant voice said behind him. Eric whirled. The speaker was a bearded man of about fifty, elegant and amiable-looking, wearing what looked like riding clothes of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. He might have been some English gentleman out for a stroll in the woods. “Bathurst,” he said. “Benjamin Bathurst. Former Minister Plenipotentiary of His Britannic Majesty George III to the court of Franz I, Emperor of Austria. Of course, I’m nothing very much any more.”
“Eric Gabrielson,” Eric said shakily. “From Los Angeles, California, the—the United States.”
“Very pleased to make your acquaintance,” Bathurst said. “Always charming to see another human face. There are forty of us now, I think. Of course, we’re greatly outnumbered by the apes, but everyone’s friendly enough. You’re a million years in the future, you know. The United States, you say? Of America? The former Colonies? California was never one of the Colonies, as I recall. But I suppose—”
“We got it from Mexico,” Eric said. “Somewhere around 1849. And yes, I know we’re a million years in the future. Approximately. But you—George III—”
He was having trouble speaking clearly. An overdose of confusion was making his voice husky. The Neanderthal, muttering to himself, began to fondle Bathurst’s intricately carved walking stick. The Englishman smiled and gently drew it away.
“What year are you from?” he asked Eric.