“The problem won’t be the Van Allen belts,” Rhiow said. “We’re well away from them. Solar flare, possibly—”
Urruah gave Rhiow a look.You are an optimist,he said silently.
“I don’t think so,” Arhu said. “I need a better look. Come on—”
He started to walk upwards as if on a stairway: a good trick, Rhiow thought, if he was using the air trapped with them to do it. She got up and carefully went up after him, none too concerned about the actual instrumentality at the moment—and much more concerned that the bubble of air should follow them all up, as Urruah came stepping carefully up behind her. She also took some care with how she went in the low gravity. Falling off Arhu’s invisible stairway, and down and out of the spell, would be unfortunate.
The spell followed them with no problems: its diameter was at least ten meters, and Arhu had apparently designated himself as its center. They walked upward for perhaps a quarter mile before Arhu stopped, standing there in the middle of nothing and looking down on the desolate landscape. Rhiow looked down too, and drew in a long painful breath. The crater off to the northward, the one which had produced the brown ejecta, lay plain before them. It was at least five miles in diameter, and ran all the way to the far horizon northward. Great fissures ran from it, in all directions but mostly toward the north. The bottom of the crater was glazed as if with ice, but it was not ice: it shone with a bitter, brittle gleam under the slanting light of the sun.
“So what would you make it?” Urruah said after a moment’s silence. “A megaton or so? And there are a lot more of these. Some particularly big impacts up in the northern hemisphere …”
Rhiow’s tail lashed furiously. “The only good thing about this,” she said, “is that they did this up here and not on Earth. But still—what a message.”
“Yes indeed,” Urruah said. “For every other pride ofehhifin the world to see, every time the Moon comes up.“Look what we could do to you, if we wanted to.” The question is—whichehhif down there are doing it?” He glanced at the gibbous-waning Earth hanging above the horizon.
“When we come back,” Rhiow said, “we’re going to have to find out. The Lone One has seen to it somehow that these people have been given the most dangerous technology that they could possibly get their hands on. With the assumption, I’m sure, that they’ll certainly destroy themselves. What we’re going to have to do is fly in the face of that certainty and stop it.”
“If we can,” Urruah said. He sounded rather muted: even his supreme self-confidence was having trouble dealing with this.
“Space travel as well,” Arhu said. “They can come up here and see what’s here … and then they dothis.”He was bristling.
“If we’re very lucky, we may be able to keep them from doing worse,” Rhiow said. “But even here, I don’t want to linger. The longer we stay in this universe … the more we endanger our own.”
“Let’s get back down then,” Urruah said. The timeslide won’t have self-activated yet, but that doesn’t matter. It functioned: that part of our test is a success. We can come back when we need to. And as for this—” He too was fluffed up as he looked down around him.
“Arhu,” he said after a moment, “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have seen it this way, you first time out.”
“No, it’s all right,” Arhu said. “We needed to do it: you were right. But let’s go home.”
He paused, standing there on nothing, and narrowed his eyes. A second later they were standing on the old dock by the Thames again, and Rhiow’s ears were ringing with thebang!of displaced air which accompanied their appearance. There wereehhifwalking by the river, further eastward, but they paid no attention to the sound at all.
“They probably think it’s a car backfiring or something,” Urruah muttered.
“Maybe so,” Rhiow said, “and I’ll be glad to get back where that kind of perception is normal for its time. Come on!”
They made their way as quickly as they dared, sidled, back to Old Jewry, the street where the other end of the timeslide was sited. It was hard to avoid theehhif,sometimes, they were so crowded together, and Rhiow was bruised or kicked more than once as the team made its way toward the timeslide.
They were about to break into a run across the noise and muck of George Street again, making for Old Jewry, when to Rhiow’s complete astonishment, Arhu, ahead of her, suddenly darted through a thicket of walking legs and westward down George Street. “Arhu!’ she cried. “What are you—”
“Just two blinks—!’ he said, and dodged around a corner. Rhiow and Urruah crowded against a nearby building, staring after him. Not quite two blinks later—more like two blinks and a quick scrub—he reappeared, dodging among theehhif.He was unsidled, and had something large and white in his mouth: it flapped as he came.Ehhifpointed and laughed at Arhu as he ran.
He ran straight past Urruah and Rhiow, and straight across George Street, weaving expertly to avoid the traffic. Rhiow and Urruah threw each other a look and went after him at speed. All three made it to the far side together, as more horse carriages and a few more of the antique cars came splashing and rattling down through the mud at them.
Arhu was spattered but triumphant.“I saw anehhifdrop it,” he said, and dropped it himself, going sidled again.
“How could you see him around the corner?” Urruah said, while Rhiow peered curiously at the thing. It said, THE TIMES, AUGUST 18, 1875, and everywhere else it was covered with small fine print inehhifEnglish. It would hardly have passed for a newspaper in New York: it seemed to have only three pages, no pictures, and no ads.
Arhu wrinkled his nose up.“I mean, Iseehim,” he said. “I stillseehim now, even though he did it already.Au,Rhiow, the way we talk about time doesn’t work right for talking about vision. I need new words or something …”
“One last check,” Urruah said, and held his head up as if sniffing for something. Rhiow looked at him, bemused.
“What?” she said.
“I’ve been feeling around me with a detector spell ever since we got here,” Urruah said. “But to no effect. You remember Mr… Illingworth? Well, there’s no sign of him.”
“You mean, after all this,he’s not from here?”
“I don’t know what it means,” Urruah said, “and at the moment, I’m not going to hang around to find out. Come on!”
Arhu picked up the paper again, coming unsidled as he did so, and they headed down the little street together, keeping to one side, for there were someehhifpassing up and down it together. Urruah stopped at one point and felt around with his paw in the mud.“All right,” he said, “there’s the “tripwire”. Now if thesevhai’d ehhifwill just go away—”
It took some minutes: there were several false starts in which the street would look like it was going to be clear, and then anotherehhifor two or three would come along from one end or the other. This left Rhiow with nothing to do but watch her own tension increase, and try to reduce it.Oh, please let the world still be there when we get back, our own world, please—! Meanwhile, Arhu had to keep dropping the paper and picking it up, to avoid being seen by theehhif.“It’s all right, isn’t it?” he said suddenly. “Bringing things back?”
“Or forward in this case?” Rhiow said. “Yes. Things are all right. Anything alive, that’s where the complications start …”
“Quick,” said Urruah. The street was empty, and he had pulled the “tripwire’. The circle of the timeslide spell sprang into being around them. “Ready? Brace yourselves—”
Rhiow tried, but against that awful pressure there was no way you could brace, nothing you could do but endure as everything, light and breath and almost life, was squeezed out of you. Hang on, she thought, it can’t last much longer, hang on—
—and suddenly things were dark again, and Auhlae and Fhrio were looking at them, bemused, from outside the circle.