He took out his little box and fiddled again with it. There was a sort of blowing noise from the sides of the room, from what would be the wainscoting in a normal house. A white strip started at one side. It moved slowly across to the other side, where it finally disappeared. In its wake there was nothing but clean carpet. The whole process took about thirty seconds. John was like a small boy with a toy. ‘Not much trouble about housekeeping, is there?’
He stopped clowning and we went on to the balcony. He produced what looked rather like two deck chairs. Thank god for a touch of normality, I thought.
‘You were talking about the Plain of Glass. Why does it belong so obviously to the future?’
‘Because it’s been melted, everywhere, smoothly. You know the Sun is going to get hotter and hotter as time goes on. There’ll be a stage when the whole surface of the Earth melts. After that the Sun will cool. Everywhere over the Earth there’ll be smooth glass. You remember what I said about its not being etched by blown grit or sand. There couldn’t be any sand with everything fused. Besides at that stage there would be no atmosphere, no wind. The Plain of Glass is the ultimate fate of the Earth.’
I sat for some time sipping my orange juice, letting all this sink in.
John went on. ‘You see, it was a fair bet that if the distant future were represented here, there ought to be something in between, between 1966 and the far-off future. That’s why I was so convinced it was worth going on searching.’
‘Didn’t you expect these people of the future would show themselves?’
‘Not necessarily. Remember your own point of view about the Greeks. You were worried at the mere idea of mobs of our own people streaming into Greece. You wanted to leave it as much the way it was as you could. The future could be quite shy of appearing amongst us for exactly the same reason. They couldn’t simply declare themselves as strangers, in the way you could when you arrived at Athens. The same thing in London would be impossible.’
‘Yet they must have appeared in Greece.’
‘For exactly the reason I’ve just given you. One thing I don’t quite understand is how they’ve managed to keep Europeans out of Greece. You must have been lucky enough to get through their barrier before they closed it.’
‘You think that’s why our own people never arrived?’
‘Fairly obvious, isn’t it? Somehow the communication lines must have been cut. I can’t quite see how, but we must realize these people are at least as far ahead of us technologically as we are ahead of the Greeks. I don’t think there’s much profit in worrying too much about practical details. If the Britain of 1966 could put an instant stop to the war in Europe, with only a technological lead of fifty years, a society with a lead of thousands of years wouldn’t have too much trouble in hiving off a bit of the Earth. In any case that’s exactly what they’ve done with their own country.’
I looked away towards the mountains. ‘Where are we? I was trying to puzzle it out before you came. The nearest I could get was Hawaii, but that didn’t seem right.’
John looked at his watch. ‘It’s not very far from midday. If you were to sit here for several hours you’d see the Sun move from left to right. Now work it out for yourself.’
The Sun moved from left to right, did it? I thought for a few minutes. This must mean we were in the northern hemisphere, because the Sun had to be south of the zenith. As far as I could judge, there was an angle of about twenty degrees between the direction of the Sun and the vertical. So far so good. Then it was early spring, at least it had been only the beginning of April in Greece. If it was the same here it meant the angle between the Sun and the vertical was pretty well the geographical latitude, evidently twenty degrees north or thereabouts. My next thought was of the Himalayas. Could these mountains be the Himalayas? Then I remembered the Himalayan range is much further north than one usually supposes. In fact the equator goes south of the whole of India, the mountains come at thirty degrees north. I looked up again towards the Sun, the angle couldn’t be as much as thirty degrees. Mentally I ran along a parallel of latitude, first into Burma. Obviously Burma wasn’t right either, unless the vegetation was completely changed. Then I thought about Arabia and Africa. None of it fitted. The solution came to me last of all. The twentieth parallel must cut through America somewhere about Mexico City. The clarity of the air, the feeling I had of altitude, the mountains, were right.
‘Mexico, of course.’
‘Very good.’
‘How did you get here yourself?’
‘A good question, considering the way you got here. Damn it, I know what I’m looking for and I have to comb the whole Earth before I find it. All you have to do is to walk up a hill to a temple and what happens, you run slap bang into these people of the future.’
I had a clear memory of the priestess standing on the steps looking down at me in the little garden. So that was the explanation of why she seemed so different, why she was so tall. Melea, she had told me her name was last night, if it was last night.
‘You know, John, my manuscripts. When I came up to the temple I didn’t bring them with me. I left them back at the place where I was working. Somehow they must have been retrieved.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you’re definitely persona grata. After your musical performance. You see it’s very likely they’ve lost all of our music. It must have come as quite a shock to them to hear it. I’m all right myself now, but it wasn’t easy in the beginning. We got here during a storm. Otherwise I’m sure they would have misled us through the radio. We found a place to land and came down.’
‘What happened to the rest of the crew?’
‘I’ll tell you about them in a moment. Of course the people here wanted to know who we were, all manner of detail.’
‘How about language difficulties?’
‘You’ll see how they cope with that, all in good time.’
‘So you got to the place where you wanted to be?’
‘I was agog to find out what they knew. I was curious about a lot of technical problems in physics, obviously. It was like doing a puzzle in a newspaper. You’re told the solution is on page eight, column four. If you find you can’t do the puzzle, the natural thing is to look at the answer, which was the way I felt about a lot of things. I asked a lot of questions in return, which was lucky for me, otherwise they’d have dealt with me the same way they did with the rest of the crew.
‘We had to go back in their textbooks quite a fair way before we reached the things I know about. One of my own discoveries I found under somebody else’s name. Naturally I didn’t take at all kindly to this. When I pointed it out, they instantly changed their tune and became very friendly. All doors were opened to me as it were. Well, two or three days after our landing, I learnt the plane was being sent away. I didn’t want to go myself for obvious reasons but I did want to send a message. So I sought out the crew.’
John stopped at this point, his usual habit, just when he had reached the decisive point.
‘Well,’ I grunted.
‘They didn’t know me, they damned well didn’t know me from Adam. There was nothing wrong with them physically. Of course when they made no move to recognize me it was clear the people here didn’t want any message sent. I saw it wasn’t a good idea to press the point. So I simply let the plane go.’
‘Why didn’t they recognize you?’
‘Well, it’s perhaps not really so surprising. What we can do with drugs, anaesthetics and so on, would seem astonishing to the Greeks, wouldn’t it? I don’t think they had been harmed in any way, except they would lose their memory of the whole incident. It would be a kind of artificially induced amnesia.’