Journey Into Space (18 page)

“Yeah,” said Mitch, just as enthusiastically. “Let’s get out there, all of us. We’re probably going to be here the rest of our lives anyway--we might as well get used to it Come on.”

“All right,” said Jet. “Open up the hatch, Doc, and let’s go.”

“Do we take the suits?” I asked him.

“Suits? What do we need suits for? There’s life on this planet, life very much as we know it, so let’s go out and say hello to it, just as we are.”

It is now nearly a week since we landed on this planet and Lemmy left the ship and found the atmosphere breathable. Since then we have discovered many other things; that the water is drinkable, the temperature mild, and the rain unceasing. In many respects this planet is very much like Earth and the days are very nearly the same length, almost to the second. The cultivated area along the river banks contains a variety of crops, principally a kind of wheat or barley. But, whatever it is, it is in the early stages of its growth, which leads us to believe that we have arrived here during the late spring or early summer. Who or what it is that has cultivated the soil we have no idea, for, with the exception of flights of birds across the dark, cloudy sky, we have seen no living thing since -we arrived here. At night the forest resounds with weird cries of some creature or other; the voices come echoing across the clearing and, carried by the wind, sound as though they are just outside the ship. Perhaps there is food to be had in the forest but, until we can be sure what kind of creatures live there, we dare not risk entering it.

With our rations almost used up, we had to find food from somewhere. We found it in the river. On the fifth day after landing, Jet and Mitch, armed with home-made nets and hooks, tried their luck at fishing. Much to the surprise and relief of us all, they were successful. They caught a fish that was not unlike salmon trout. It made a good meal, particularly as we had not consumed any hot food since leaving home. We have no galley on our ship so we had no opportunity of cooking anything fancy. We built a fire on the ground underneath the ship’s belly to shelter it from the rain, and boiled our fish, after cutting it up into small pieces, in one of the metal ration boxes. We ate it, without the luxury of bread, potatoes or any kind of vegetable, with our fingers.

We spent the nights within the ship and, for our own safety, always closed the hatch before sleeping. We would have closed the main door, too, except that it used up so much power, and we were conserving all we could to keep at least one light burning at night.

“What do we do when the juice gives out?” said Mitch one day. “Go out and buy some candles?” There were many problems we’d have to solve before long, a great many.

While three of us slept, one always kept watch. He went into the pilot’s cabin where, seated in its chair, he had a fairly good view of the surrounding countryside through the transparent canopy. Most nights, with the clouds so low and the rain so heavy, there was very little for him to see.

Right now it was Jet’s turn to take watch while the remainder of us turned in. “Who follows me?” Jet asked.

“I do,” I told him.

“All right, Doc,” he said, “I’ll wake you in a couple of hours.”

Mitch and Lemmy climbed on to their bunks. I sat on mine until I had finished filling in my journal, then I, too settled down to sleep.

I was awakened by Jet calling Mitch. “Hey, wake up,” he was saying; but Mitch, who was always a heavy sleeper, wasn’t to be roused so easily.

“What is it, Jet?” I asked, sitting up in my bunk.

“The rain--it’s stopped.”

“You didn’t wake us up just to tell us that, did you?” grumbled Lemmy.

“No, I didn’t,” said Jet. “But the sky has cleared and can see the stars.”

“Well, what else did you expect?” asked Mitch, sleepily.

“But the constellations . . .”

“What about them, Jet?” I asked.

“They’re the same as we would see from Earth.”

“What?” Mitch sat up in his bunk, wide awake now. “They can’t be.”

“They are, I tell you. Come and look for yourselves.”

“You bet we will,” said Mitch.

We followed Jet to the pilot’s cabin. But for a few scudding clouds, the sky was completely clear and out of its deep blue shone the familiar groups of stars we would normally recognise from the northern hemisphere of the Earth.

“They are the same,” I said.

“Not quite the same,” said Jet.

“How do you mean?” I asked him.

“Look at Lyra,” he said.

I did, but the constellation looked exactly the same as the last time I had seen it. Vega, the arc lamp of the sky, shone in all its brilliance. Sulafat, Sheleak and Epsilon, the famous double double, all stood out clearly.

“I’ve been watching it for an hour or more,” said Jet, “and in all that time Vega hasn’t moved from that position, well, hardly; but the other stars have moved quite a distance. They’re circling round her.”

“You mean,” I asked incredulously, “that Vega is the Pole Star?”

“That’s just what I mean.”

As everybody knows, the Pole Star is the one ‘fixed’ star in the heavens and marks the point where the north pole of the Earth points towards the sky. But Vega is not the Pole Star, at least, it wasn’t the last time I saw it.

“I don’t understand it,” I told Jet.

“Well, I do,” he replied, “at least, I think I do. Vega has been the Pole Star before and it will be again. Every 26,000 years or so it occupies the place we normally see occupied by Polaris.”

“But,” said Mitch, “apart from the displacement of Vega, the shapes of the constellations are exactly as we know them.”

“Yes,” conceded Jet, “but don’t you see, only from the Earth, or maybe from some other part of the solar system, would the constellations assume the shapes they do.”

“You mean we must be somewhere within the solar system?” queried Mitch.

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s a comfort,” broke in Lemmy.

“And that’s not all,” said Jet slowly. “We know that within the solar system there is only one planet with air, trees, water, rain and clouds--the Earth. In other words, this can only be the Earth--it
is
the Earth.”

“What?” I exclaimed.

“And I went through all that performance
testing
the air,” said Lemmy in disgust.

“But if we are on the Earth,” reasoned Mitch, “how do you account for the constellations being out of position? Why is Vega the Pole Star?”

“There is only one possible explanation,” Jet considered his words carefully. “We’ve landed on the Earth all right, but at a different time from when we left it.”

What Jet told us was so fantastic, so incomprehensible, that for a full minute none of us spoke. I was the first to break the silence. “How different?”

“Heaven knows,” said Jet, “but my guess is at least 13,000 years.”

“Which way?” said Lemmy. “Forward or back?”

“I don’t know--I just don’t know.”

Lemmy looked at Jet blankly. “You see,” Jet went on, “the stars are constantly shifting and the pole of the heavens is continually moving, tracing a circle in the sky. We hardly notice any difference in a lifetime because the movement is so slow, but over a thousand years the change is quite considerable. Five thousand years ago, back from 1965, that is, the Pole Star was Thuban in Draco, as it was when the Egyptians built their Pyramids. Five thousand years on the Pole Star will be a star in the constellation Cepheus.”

“And how many thousands of years from 1965 before it would be Vega?”

“I’ve already told you.”

“You mean we’ve landed back on Earth either 13,000 years before or after we left it?”

“Not necessarily,” said Jet. “It takes 26,000 years for the star that marks the Pole to make its complete circuit--26,000 years between the time it is the Pole Star and the time it returns to that position.”

“I don’t see what you’re driving at.”

“Just this. How do we know how many
times
Vega has been the Pole Star since we left Earth?”

Lemmy paused while the full sense of what Jet had said sank in. Then he said, rather weakly, “You mean we might have to add another 26,000 years to the 13,000 we’ve already got?”

“Yes, Lemmy. Perhaps even more--it depends on how often the cycle has been completed.”

“Don’t, Jet. It sends me dizzy just thinking about it.”

“All this is assuming we are on the Earth,” said Mitch.

“Where else could we be?” asked Jet.

“I don’t know, but if this is the Earth it should have a moon, a very large one, revolving round it.”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“Then where is it?” demanded Mitch.

“Probably hasn’t risen yet,” said Jet, “or else it’s already set. But since we’ve been here the Moon must have southed six times. We just haven’t seen it, that’s all.”

“If we did,” said Mitch, “it would make all the difference. It would be the final proof that we
are
back on Earth.”

“We’ll keep a watch for it,” said Jet. “It may rise before dawn. If it doesn’t, then we are bound to see it one evening soon, just after sunset.”

We all decided to stay up with Jet. None of us could have slept anyway, we were too excited. An hour before sunrise our patience and vigilance were rewarded. The slim crescent of the old Moon rose above the horizon. We turned the telescope on it. Mitch took first look, then each of us in turn.

Only a small area was illuminated by the Sun but, so far as we could tell, that was identical with the Moon with which we were familiar, which we had so recently left and last saw directly behind us, filling our televiewer screen. Grimaldi and other features of the eastern limb were clearly recognisable.

“Here,” said Lemmy, as he removed his eye from the telescope, “I suppose there’s no way the Moon could help us find out exactly what period of time we’re in?”

“No, Lemmy,” I told him. “I doubt if the features of the Moon have appreciably changed in 10,000 years.”

“But there must be something we can do to find out. Or do we just sit here, worse off, for all our scientific knowledge, than those animals or whatever they are out there in the forest? At least they don’t know that they don’t know what age they’re in.”

“We have one clue,” I suggested.

“What’s that?” asked Mitch.

“The ice cap, it’s large. We must have arrived here either at the beginning or the end of a glacial epoch.”

“Oh, you mean the Ice Age,” ventured Lemmy.

“Not
the
Ice Age, Lemmy,” said Jet, “there were more than one of them. There are supposed to have been four. The first is estimated to have reached its peak 500,000 years ago.”

“Seems like only yesterday.”

“The second was 400,000 years ago, the third 150,000.”

“And the fourth?” “Assumed to have reached its maximum 50,000 years ago.”

“So we could be somewhere in that period,” I suggested. “Could be,” agreed Jet.

“Look,” said Lemmy, “why bother about the thousands? A hundred years either way is enough to cut us off from life as we know it.”

“Well, my guess is that we are somewhere between the fourth and fifth Ice Ages,” said Jet, “always assuming there was to have been a fifth. I’d say 39,000 years or so before or after our own time.”

“Only it isn’t our time anymore,” I said.

“Well, I know one thing,” put in Lemmy, “it must be back. If we had gone forward in time, the world wouldn’t look like this.”

“Why not?”

“Because over thousands of years man would have progressed. This would be a scientific world with great cities, controlled weather, roads, aeroplanes, space ships--but there’s not a sign of anything, not even any living creature--except for the row we hear coming from the forest at night. We must be in the past.”

“I wish I could be as sure of Man’s future on Earth as you are, Lemmy,” I told him, “but the way he was carrying on when we left, he could easily have destroyed himself by now, or the climatic conditions could have changed so much that his species died out altogether and another has taken its place.”

“You mean we might be the only creatures of our kind on Earth, just the four of us?”

“We have now been on this planet, which can only be the Earth, for 2 weeks. By now, we have got used to the idea. Our life is a peculiar mixture of the primitive and the scientific. Mitch spends most of his time within the ship, observing the heavens with the aid of the telescope and the navigational tables. He hopes, before long, to deduce our position. Finding our latitude was easy: it is approximately 35°, so we might be anywhere along a line drawn from North Africa eastwards through Asia Minor, North India, China or North America. Meanwhile Jet, Lemmy and I attend to the more immediate necessities of life. We catch fish; in fact, we live on fish. So far we have found no fruit or vegetable that we recognise or would risk eating. Perhaps, later, there will be plenty of fruit to be had; certainly the crops along the river bank must ripen within a few weeks. At night we still take turns at keeping watch, listening to the breathing of our companions and the cries of the nocturnal creatures that inhabit the forest.

One evening we were seated in the ship’s cabin after supper, discussing methods of preserving food should winter come. Mitch had been rather silent throughout the meal.

“Something on your mind, Mitch?” Jet asked him.

“Yes,” the engineer replied. “I think I’ve arrived at something.”

“About our position, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Good for you,” said Jet. “Where are we?” “Well, I just can’t believe we can be where my calculations say we are.”

“And where’s that?”

“In the Mediterranean, right smack in the middle of it.” “Do you mean the sea?” asked Lemmy, his eyes opening wide at the thought. “That’s how it looks.”

“Two weeks ago, with all that rain, I might have believed you. But that country out there looks solid enough to me.” “You quite positive, Mitch?” I asked him. “Well, I’ll go through it all again if you like.”

“No, wait,” said Jet. “You could be right. It doesn’t follow that what was water, or will be water, in 1965 is water now.”

“Of course it doesn’t,” I said.