What Kept You?

by Geoff Nelder

conclusion

“Or too fast, even for them,” she said, frowning at the still incomplete translation. “There’s a picture of what looks like a Tibetan temple perched on a mountain. Looks old so it could be abandoned. I wonder if there are varying temporal shifts on this planet. Freaky time dilation can occur with proximity of black holes and strings. But I don’t know if we’d age faster up a mountain or slower. Give me time and I’ll work it out.”

“Oh funny,” said Travis.

“Team, we are on a mission...”

“Oh, cut out the loyalty crap, Cody. Let’s just find them. Back to the shuttle,” said Travis.

Megan put a hand on Cody’s arm. “You know, the tram seems to go to the mountain in the picture. The temple?”

“Hey, I’m not going in any alien bus!” shouted Travis.

Cody looked at Megan and smiled: “There seems a good possibility that that is where they went. We could search for too long looking at all the mountains in the shuttle. Travis, okay, you go back to our shuttle and stand by for us to call you. We’ll take our chances in local public transport.”

“The speed will kill you.”

“Travis, we are trained to take G forces. Go ready the shuttle and keep instruments on us as well as the communicator. Listen, Travis, suppose none of us return, what would happen in, say, another three hours our time?”

“Let’s see, that’d be thirty-two days again for here so Mission Control might send another rescue mission. No, hang on, this is a trick question isn’t it?”

Cody and Megan nodded in unison. Then Megan said: “However, if for some ghastly reason we can’t return, it would be a brilliant idea for them to know about the time anomaly here. Send off all the data so far even if we’re not sure they’d get it without distortion.”

“Also, Travis, make a copy with a message and leave it near our landing spot such that another mission would find it easily. Hopefully, locals will leave it alone.”

As Travis left, Megan realized that the speed at which the odors dissipate before their noses grab them explained the lack of scents and even of the noxious emissions from Travis.

She smiled just as the vehicle appeared. A quick check and they leapt in and dived for the nearest empty seats. Already accelerating, they had a struggle to stay seated. Three other passengers glanced at them and away. One of them smudged away at a jerked stop.

“Hey, Megan, suppose a conductor comes on for the fare?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll be there in seconds. If they try and throw us off, we’re bigger than they are; link arms to make handling us more difficult. Hey, look there’s the mountain with the temple on the horizon — er, about five seconds away. Hey, how do we tell this bullet to stop?”

“Hopefully it will stop at the mountain,” Cody said.

“Great, so we’ll have a fraction of a second to leap free or be amputated.”

“Hey, you sound like Travis. Anyway, no time to argue. Here we are and it’s stopping!”

Fighting the abrupt deceleration, they fell out, tumbling onto rough ground.

Megan sat up rubbing her bloodied left elbow showing through a jagged hole in her uniform. Cody stayed down. She staggered over to him, convinced he couldn’t be dead or he would be a mound by now with a helmet on the top. He stirred.

Checking her watch, Megan realised they’d lain there for a week local time. How weird must that be for the natives to encounter? She hoped it was still only twenty minutes for Travis. There’d be no end to his ragging them if he could argue it would have been quicker using the shuttle after all.

“You okay, Cody?”

“A bit groggy, must have hit my head on this harder bit of planet. How about you?”

“I cut my elbow but look at it.” A new pink scar showed, with patches of dried blackened blood. “Another thing, we’ve been doing it without noticing but we’ve drunk nearly all our water and gone through a hell of a lot of chewable rations.”

“Whatever it takes, as long as we are both relatively fit. What do you think about taking some boosters to get us up this hill before we become pensioners?”

“Okay. I’ll get some pro-Benzedrine out of my kit. Are you getting any of this, Travis? Maybe he’s out of range,” said Megan. “We travelled in the vehicle for about thirty seconds our time, which equates to two hours their time. It’s not possible to know how fast we went — sorry, out of breath, no, we mustn’t slow down — but suppose it averaged sixty miles per hour then Travis is a hundred and twenty miles away.”

“Catch up on your breathing,” Cody said, as they made good progress up the twisted, overgrown mountain track. All three had had to be superfit to qualify for rescue allocation, but the hike tested their stamina. “It’s not just the distance, Megan.”

They stopped talking for the next couple of hours, stopping only to deplete their water supply and rations. Plagued with false hope, they aimed for summit after summit, each one leading to a higher peak. At the penultimate peak they rested in an abandoned gatehouse.

Cody recovered first. “What do you notice, Megan?”

“I hate questions like that, Captain. I had an aunt that would always say: ‘What d’you know?’ Even if I told her I knew more than her and she knew more than me, she’d come out with it again next time.”

“Okay, at the risk of sounding like your aunt, what do you notice? I’ve lost the power of long speech.” He gasped, his lungs still heaving.

“There’s a subtle change in the sky colour from lilac to pink and, hey, I can smell these maroon tiny flowering plants. Umm a cross between lavender and jasmine. Heavenly.”

“Appropriate for a temple area, Megan, but does that mean...” “Time has slowed up here? Besides aromas having time to reach our noses how else can we tell? There’s no wind to rustle the trees. Are we too high up to see birds and insects?” She knelt on the wooden floor at the portal of the gazebo-like gatehouse to examine the rough grass. A pink grasshopper looked back, then hopped away — but not so fast she couldn’t follow it.

“Yes.” She turned to look at Cody, grinning and tapping at his watch.

“Hey, we should get Travis up here,” she said. “The longer he stays down in fast time, the less likely he’ll find us in time. He’s probably hours ahead of us already. Damn, why didn’t I think of that earlier?”

“Megan...”

“No, sir, it’s serious. If he is hours ahead of us now, he can’t receive a signal from us. Even if we go back down we’d probably find he’s gone or see an earlier version of him. Oh, hell, we’re going to have temporal paradox problems and it’s all my fault.” Her eyes filled with the emotion of her error.

“While you were busy throwing stones in a pond and timing ripples, I told him to take off and land on any high mountain before we ran out of radio contact. Still can’t raise him yet, though.”

They hugged.

“On the way up,” said Megan, “I dwelt a little on the temporal shifts affecting this planet. Although the nearby presence of a double black-hole was suspected, Earth, being so keen to find a habitable planet, brushed aside speculation on their possible effects. Of course we are far from an event-horizon that could be dangerous, but maybe the twin black holes are close enough to create shifts in time, variable with altitude here and maybe with latitude too.”

“You might be right,” said Cody, “but let’s see if our climb will be rewarded.”

A rickety footbridge spanned a chasm separating them from the final pinnacle housing the temple. With painful lungs and legs, but not wanting to delay any further, they crossed one at a time.

Together they entered the derelict temple. Shafts of pink sunlight diagonally spotlighted cobwebbed statues and sparse furniture. With unnecessarily reverent silence Megan nudged Cody to look at dancing motes picked out in the light above their head.

“What kept you?”

The creaky old voice startled them. In a dark corner on a wicker bed lay an ancient woman.

Megan recovered first: “Are we glad to see you.”

“Not as glad as I am, my dear.”

Cody asked: “Are you Doctor Tanya Semper?”

“Give the man a medal,” she said. “Are you getting me out of here before I’m too old to fool around with my husband back home?”

“Er, yes, is there anyone else up here?” said Cody, taken aback at the thought of geriatric amour.

“Only Boyd, he’s out back picking some banana-type food. Yuck, but it’s kept us going. Leave him, he’s a cantankerous old fool.”

“I’ll be glad to be rid of that old witch,” said the oldest man Megan had ever seen as he shuffled in a rear door carrying a basket and gourd.

“Boyd Tinker, I am so pleased to see you, um, again,” said Cody, helping him with the food and water.

“Never mind all that,” croaked Boyd. “How are you going to signal your ship?”

“Don’t worry,” said a worried Cody.

Cody took Megan outside. “He has a point. Travis still hasn’t responded to me. Has he said anything to you?” “No, shall we signal him the old-fashioned way? He might see it if he’s looking out on one of these mountains?”

“Good idea, I’ll gather some firewood, get some green — or pink — plants to generate smoke.”

“We’ve got some flares,” said Boyd, who’d followed them outside. “Homemade but they work. You don’t think I’ve waited years just so I could listen to that old bag moaning on, do you?”

“I told you how to make them,” said Tanya. “And who looked after you when you kept getting sick on your stupid home brew...”

A few minutes later a green smoke trail curved through the sky.

“I see you. At least I assume it’s you guys,” said Travis, flying in from behind a nearby peak.

“I never thought I’d be so glad to hear your voice,” said Megan.

“Come in and land on level ground to the south of the temple,” said Cody. “And we have two passengers to bring home.”

“Hey, that’s great. I bet they’re looking forward to having some real grub at last,” said Travis.

“Umph,” said Boyd, “not as much as seeing the faces of our paymasters as they try to work out our overtime pay!”

[Author’s note] “What Kept You?” first appeared in the science-fiction and fantasy e-zine, Ultraverse.