opened the door as he was speaking. The car’s internal light came on. I saw that the cuts and bruises had almost healed, and that his features were almost exactly like those I see in a mirror when I shave—except, of course, that they were the wrong way round. I’m not the most symmetrical person in the world, alas.
Automatically, I took the hand in my own and shook it.
“You couldn’t give me a few tips, I suppose,” I said. “Tactics for avoiding the worst effects of the world’s impending end—that sort of thing.”
“Study Stone Age survival techniques and move to Antarctica,” he said. “That’s if you want to drag it out. Otherwise, don’t wait too long before buying that antique revolver and blowing your brains out.”
“I really would like to come with you,” I said. “I might not like your world, but.…”
“No can do, Jim,” he said. “Very sorry. Thanks for the lift. Just turn around and go back the way we came. You’ll be home in no time at all.” Then he shut the door, and walked back to the other car with the shaggy crocodile in the plastic bag. They seemed to be arguing about something as they went, but they certainly weren’t doing it in English.
The time-traveler got into the other Volkswagen’s passenger seat. The vehicle moved off a minute or so later, swerving past me and continuing along the road in the direction of the unknown.
For a couple of minutes I thought about following it, but I knew that time travel couldn’t possibly be as simple as that, and that I’d probably get lost in limbo. Doomed or not, the familiar world seemed the more attractive option. I put the car into gear, did another three-point turn, and headed back the way I’d come.
I had a lot to think about, and whatever the time traveler had said about “no time at all” I’d had a very long day. I was so used to the fake road being empty that I wasn’t really paying attention. I didn’t notice the road become real again, and I didn’t see the deer until it was far too late.
It wasn’t a big deer—a roe deer, I think, and not fully grown at that. I braked hard, but I knew it wouldn’t be hard enough, because the damn thing just stood stock still until I hit it. In the last split second before the impact, I stopped wondering whether it might be the same deer as before, realizing that it had to be exactly the same deer. This time, though, it wasn’t going to leap aside. This time, the time traveler’s history would be conserved.
The luckless deer slammed into the windscreen, and the windscreen broke. A deer—even one that’s hardly more than a fawn—can really make a mess of your face when it’s traveling along with the shards of a windscreen at God-only-knows-how-many miles per hour, but it didn’t knock me unconscious. To tell the truth, I think most of the blood must have been the deer’s, not mine. I was able to bring the car to a halt, unbuckle my seat belt and step out on to the road.
“The bastard,” I said. “I wonder whether he and his mate fixed things so that it never bloody happened, or whether the dent in history was just snapping back into shape.” I was glad, though, that I still remembered every moment of what had happened, even if it hadn’t happened any longer. Neither he nor history had been able to take that away from me.
I couldn’t be absolutely sure, of course. How could I begin to guess what the temporal AA, or the natural resilience of the time-stream, might be able to achieve?
I stuck the deer in the boot, although rumor has it that collecting road kill still counts as poaching in the eyes of the law. I got a friend in the business to butcher it for me, and split the legs and rump with him. Unfortunately, every time I eat a bit I remember the way the damn thing looked at me that first time, immediately after it had caused the time machine to crash. I don’t know for sure, but it still seems to me that the deer had known what it was doing. Perhaps, in some parallel universe, it still does—but in ours, it seems, intelligent designers seem to be content to work in less ambitious and more mysterious ways.
CHAPTER THREE
TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY
In most of the places that Steve had hung out in the course of his life, a story like Jim’s would have got a round of deeply ironic but sincerely admiring applause, assuming that the audience could have tolerated its enormous length—which was unlikely, given the shortage of modern attention spans. Even respectful applause, however, was evidently not de rigueur at AlAbAn meetings. When Jim finished he was greeted with a polite murmur of approval and an assortment of sage nods.
Steve hadn’t been planning to tell his story anyway, even if there had been time left for a second one, but he realized immediately that he was going to have to remember a great deal more, and organize it far more comprehensively, before he could even begin to think about taking the floor in Amelia Rockham’s front room. Even if Jim’s performance wasn’t typical, it had certainly set a standard. Steve wasn’t the kind of person to obsess about the possibility of falling below an established standard, but he felt obliged to make some effort to uphold the honor of the teaching profession, science, and youth.
The group was not only scrupulously polite, Steve observed, but exceedingly stubborn in maintaining its supportive appearances. When Walter Wainwright invited questions and comments, the gist of the opening remarks was that Jim’s experience must have been unusually disturbing, and that he was obviously coping with it extremely well, not only emotionally but intellectually and imaginatively.
Jim, who had obviously been slightly worried about the kind of reception he might get, even though he had scouted out the group before diving in head-first, blossomed in the warmth of the praise. He admitted that he was, indeed, coping very well, not only emotionally but intellectually and imaginatively, and that he was a fortunate man to be able to pass on the legacy of his experience to such understanding people.
Steve was mildly surprised that nobody even ventured to hint, let alone to suggest forthrightly, that Jim might have fallen asleep at the wheel and hallucinated the whole experience—or the ideative seed that he had since nurtured and brought to maturity by careful confabulation—in the split second before or after he hit the deer. Nor did anyone imply, by the merest word or gesture, that he might simply be telling a tall tale. Indeed, it seemed to Steve that some of the private glances exchanged between the group members were signaling that Jim’s story had made even more sense to them than it had to its teller, not just because it dovetailed with their own experiences but because their own experiences cast some light on its murkier elements. Steve was tempted, just for a moment, to throw a spanner into the works by making some slyly snide remark, but he didn’t have to make an effort to suppress the temptation; it withered and died of its own accord.
“That wasn’t quite what I expected,” he whispered in Janine’s ear.
“Nor me,” she replied. She was looking across the room at Milly, who was nodding sagely and making murmurous approving noises along with everyone else, and who seemed to have identified as forcefully with the narrator as anyone else had. Neither of the women who sat to either side of Milly, one of whom looked to be in her thirties and the other in her forties, could match her robust figure, but they didn’t seem at all frail: there was color in their cheeks and a marked liveliness in their manner a they fed on one another’s fascination and good will.
None of which signifies, Steve thought, that they’re anything but completely crazy, intoxicated by the chance to pool their craziness. Such was the atmosphere of the meeting, however, that Steve felt ashamed of the judgment as soon as he’d formulated it. He decided, on due reflection, that it didn’t matter whether he believed Jim’s story or not, or whether anyone else really believed it, or even whether Jim believed it himself. It was the kind of story
