x
After that, it could not be discovered that anything else happened. Everything inside the ship looked and stayed exactly as it had at the beginning. Even the passengers remained in their seats, held there by their safety straps. The boy Barry watched with excited, shining eyes, but there was nothing happening to watch. The lights in the passenger cabin glowed quite normally. The young man with spectacles stared hypnotically at the circular area of blackness which was the viewport beside him. The girl with the sophisticated makeup sat rigidly still. She was trying to defy the cosmos to make her display fear. But her face had slipped a little. Inside, she was terrified. The man who'd been restless now sat frozen in his seat. His position wasn't natural. His muscles were rigid. His face was contorted. He seemed to be either paralyzed or catatonic from pure panic.
Nothing happened. Betty held herself in the chair back in the tiny compartment where there was a refrigerator and a hotplate, a cupboard for dishes and the material for refreshments. A coffeepot had been boiling. Water reached the pouring spout and began to come out of it, steaming. Betty automatically stopped the flask and turned off the heat switch. It looked like a perfectly commonplace action, but she held herself in her chair. Had she let go she would've found herself floating in midair.
In the pilots' compartment, also, nothing happened. Steve methodically did, one after another, all the things that should've made some difference of some sort in some fashion.
The Spindrift could have been falling, but she wasn't. She was rigidly oriented in the grip of something that could not be affected by the Spindrift's drive. It felt, inside the ship, as if the Spindrift were firmly between the jaws of some enormous vise, or else bolted with unbreakable bonds to something gigantic and irresistible and utterly inelastic. Steve turned off the drive and turned it on again. Nothing happened. He swung the ship's rudder-surfaces and swung them back again. Nothing happened. He threw in the inertial guidance system that should have made it possible to steer the ship even if the near vacuum outside it should freakishly become too thin to have its guiding effect. Again, nothing happened.
Dan licked his lips. "We're not falling. We'd have hit ground by now. We've been weightless long enough to have hit from two thousand feet."
“Dan—look at the chronometer!” Steve barked, his voice tight with urgency.
The primary flight clock, synchronized to Pacific time, was dead—frozen in place. But the backup chronometer, linked to their onboard systems, was going wild. Numbers flickered erratically, rolling forward, then backward, skipping entire seconds in a chaotic blur. Then, without warning, the display erupted into a frenzied cascade. The numbers raced ahead at an impossible speed—1983, 1997, 2010, 2028, 2042, 2065, 2103, 2140—flashing in neon green and electric blue against the darkened panel. The readout had become a window into a future accelerating uncontrollably, years vanishing in the blink of an eye.
“Do you see that?” Steve’s knuckles whitened against the controls. “We’re not just stuck in space----we’re being flung into the future!”
Dan frowned as he checked the altimeter, then the radar display. His expression darkened. “The radar beam’s going out, but… nothing’s bouncing back,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s like there’s nothing out there for it to reflect off of. That’s impossible!”
Steve’s grip tightened on the controls. His jaw set grimly. “Apparently, it’s not,” he said.
He went through all the motions again. Drive off. Drive on. Emergency power on. Emergency power off. Steering controls turned. Steering controls turned back. Inertial guidance on. And off. Drive on...
But nothing happened.
And nothing happened.
And still nothing happened.
Steve said with unnatural calm:
"I don't suppose this can keep up forever. We might as well relax and be ready to do something if it ever turns out that something can be done."
Dan said, "But this---this is impossible.
Steve shrugged. If one behaves with faked composure, some sort of real composure develops. Steve said evenly, "It's happening. So in case the situation changes," he left the drive on, useless as it was, "having the power on may gain us a second or two for action."
"What kind of action?"
Dan squirmed in his seat. There was silence for a moment. Then----
“We’re being thrust into the future—yet somehow, we’re not moving. Not falling. We should’ve hit the ground long ago. How far up can we still be? And how far into the future are we going to go?”
Steve shrugged again. He said suddenly, "Take over. I'm going to see how Betty's making out.
Steve’s fingers hesitated over the release of his safety straps as he glanced at the clock again. His breath caught. The numbers kept rolling forward, relentless and unfeeling—2083. A full century had passed in the blink of an eye. His grip tightened on the strap, knuckles white.
Where would they land? Would they land at all?
The cities they had once known—Los Angeles, New York, Chicago—had they endured, or had time reduced them to rubble? Would America even exist? A century was enough time for empires to rise and fall, for flags to change, for borders to dissolve into something unrecognizable.
And what of the great fear of their time—the nuclear sword hanging over humanity’s throat? Had it finally dropped? If the world had burned, what had replaced it? A wasteland, or something stranger—something new?
If civilization still stood, what marvels might they find? Was spaceflight now routine, with ships leaping between the planets like airliners once crossed oceans? Did computers, already advancing at an astonishing pace in their own time, now guide every aspect of human life?
And then, the most pressing question of all—the one that sent a chill through his gut.
Would the people they met possess the one thing that could undo this? A way back?
A time machine.
If only they were in London now, daybreak would be casting its gray morning light everywhere, mist rising from the ground as the golden sun gilded the city's roofs and chimneypots......
The viewports were black. The loudspeaker in the cabin was mute. The only sounds were the normally unheard-of ones of breathing. But Steve suddenly noticed that a familiar, unnoticed humming of the ship's hullplates had stopped, too. Even the thin air at a hundred thousand feet usually made small noises as the Spindrift split the near vacuum in its flight. It made no such noises now. The Spindrift wasn't flying.
Steve went back into the passenger cabin. The frightened man in a seat up forward had moved a little. One can be paralyzed by terror for only so long. His eyes turned affrightedly to Steve. Steve nodded and absorbedly experimented until he'd found how to travel between the double rows of seats in the complete absence of gravity. The girl with the sophisticated hairdo saw him and closed her eyes. She pretended to be asleep. Her image of herself fiercely denied that she could be frightened, so she feigned an impossible indifference. The spectacled man asked in an enforcedly calm tone, "Any idea what's up?"
"Not yet," said Steve.
He went on. The boy Barry looked up at him. At fourteen, nobody believes in death. To him, this was an adventure. One hand reached down beside the seat he occupied. There was a piece of hand luggage there.
Steve’s eyes narrowed as he caught sight of Barry’s hand slipping into his open handbag. His voice was firm, leaving no room for argument. "Barry, I need you to be straight with me. What exactly do you have in that bag?"
The boy instantly looked worried. He jerked his hand out of the handbag, moving to close it. A yelp came from inside.
The boy went pale. Steve reached down. He brought a small dog to light. The little animal squirmed and agitatedly prepared to lick anything and especially Steve's hand, to show his forgiveness for the pinching of his tail and to reestablish relations with a cosmos that was bewildering.
Steve put the little animal down in Barry's lap. Barry pressed it close to him, staring uneasily upward.
Steve's expression hardened as he looked Barry in the eye. "Listen to me, kid—you could be in a lot of trouble. Personal ownership of dogs is illegal now. I get that you're attached to your friend, but if the authorities in England find out you smuggled him in, they won’t hesitate to prosecute you."
Barry let out a quiet, trembling whimper, his lower lip quivering as he clutched the strap of his bag. For a moment, he looked almost five years old instead of nearly fourteen—small, vulnerable, and desperately afraid. Tears welled up in his eyes, glistening in the dim cabin light, but he didn’t say a word. He just sat there, frozen, as if any sound might make everything worse.
Steve exhaled, his tone gentler now but still firm. “Okay, okay. The dog gets by me. But listen—if they catch you, you’re on your own. I can’t help you, and I won’t lie for you. You understand me?”
The boy nodded, still silent.
He went on. The incident was absurd. Everything was absurd. The situation of the Spindrift had no precedent. No, there were the two missing ships, the Anne and the Marintha. Unquestionably they'd vanished as the Spindrift was engaged in doing. They hadn't come back. If her present situation was a freak of nature, of natural forces on the loose, it couldn't be imagined that they'd reverse themselves and restore the Spindrift to a normal state of things.
Betty stirred when he reached the back of the passenger cabin. She carefully put the coffeepot away.
She pressed her lips together, her voice tense. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep this under wraps. I know what’s happening—we’re caught in a space warp.”
Steve’s expression was grim. “It’s worse than that, Betty—this airless void isn’t just holding us, it’s pushing us forward. We’re not just trapped in space… we’re being thrown into the future.”
She said evenly, "We're air-conditioned, but we've no reserve of air. We'll need some fresh air soon."
He nodded.
"And there's no way to get it," she pointed out. "And if there were, there's food. We've got refreshments, caviar and such things. Not much. Maybe it's best we haven't breathing air except for only so long."
"But we're all right for the moment,' said Steve. "Don't think about that stuff."
"Why not?"
He hesitated and then said crisply, "We don't have data to justify despair. After what's happened, anything could follow. Even a favorable event. We're quite as likely to find ourselves suddenly flying over the British Isles with day just breaking as we are to suffocate or starve. Neither one is exactly probable but breaking out of this---stasis and finding everything perfectly normal again is just as plausible as anything else."
It wasn't true, but it was wise to make her believe it. She surprised him a moment later, though. She said, “If we're going ahead in time, then…”
He stared. Then he shrugged.
"Then we'll have to come to terms with it—if we're hurtling into the future, we either adapt or find a way back."
"The way things happened," protested Betty, "it was like something---planned."
"If that's the case," said Steve drily, "the plan would doubtless include a supply of air for us to breathe and food to eat. Otherwise snatching us would be pretty pointless, and anybody smart enough to do it would be smart enough to think of it."
He nodded reassuringly and partly floated and partly walked back up the aisle. The small boy held the little dog close. He'd been left at the airport to board the ship alone. He'd probably been alone for a while before he was taken to the airport and had dumped his clothing to make room for the dog. Then, on the ship, he'd opened the bag so the dog would have air, and his hand had been inside to reassure the little animal. It was quaintly pathetic.
Steve swung into the pilot's cabin and hauled himself into his seat. He buckled his straps and tried the controls again. No response.
"I think," he said grimly, "that I just played the fool. Betty was tense and hopeless. I tried to encourage her. I don't think I did. In fact, I arrived almost at hopelessness myself!"
His expression was acutely wry. More or less unconsciously, he'd kept his thoughts from estimating the probabilities of this situation. What if the future isn't the promised utopia of advanced science and orderly progress? he thought. What if instead it's a dystopia built on the ruins of a once-great civilization—a world where human values have crumbled, and survival is all that remains? The notion had never occurred to him before; he had always assumed that the future would be better, brighter. He'd been busy trying to find out the facts of the state of things in being. He'd ignored the possibility that the future might be nothing more than a desolate wasteland of lost hope. But Betty had made him realize how deadly a fix the Spindrift was in. He'd tried to persuade Betty that it was as likely the Spindrift would be returned to normality as to deadliness. But that couldn't be the case. There were thousands of unfavorable developments that the ship and its people could encounter. There were at most a dozen lucky breaks that could happen. The odds for the ship and the people in it---they were quite bad enough to justify despair.
There was nothing to do but wait and see what happened.
....2197.... 2210....2223....2235....
Nothing happened.
....4123....4124....4125....
An hour passed, and still nothing happened.
....5320....5321....5322....
Two hours. Three. The eventlessness became horrible. This could stretch across centuries. Perhaps it already had. It felt as though it would never end. The Spindrift was not merely fighting its way through space—it was struggling against time itself, caught in a relentless tide that refused to let go.52Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡIHEgLAVxrg
52Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡow6du78z5D
In the two side-by-side seats for pilot and co-pilot, Steve and Dan watched as the stars reappeared, utterly without warning. Steve tried the controls again, with no result at all. Then there were millions of stars. Steve jerked about. His start of surprise threw on the ship's full emergency power. The sky seemed ablaze with variously colored light specks of different degrees of brightness. The Spindrift leaped ahead on three-gravity thrust. It was a shock. It was intolerable. It was remarkably fortunate.52Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ2piS9imTqM
Then the stars reappeared, utterly without warning. Steve was trying the controls again, with no result at all. Then there were millions of stars. Steve jerked about. His start of surprise threw on the ship's full emergency power. The sky seemed ablaze with variously colored light specks of different degrees of brightness. The Spindrift leaped ahead on three-gravity thrust. It was a shock. It was intolerable. It was remarkably fortunate.
....5507....5508...5509.....
Betty, back in the passenger cabin, was flung sideways. The passenger with spectacles had his head jerked backward, and his spectacles came off and scratched his nose and temples. The girl with the sophisticated makeup gasped. She was held immovable against her seatback. The man who'd been restless cried out hoarsely. He struggled.
Steve had to twist himself with three times his normal weight to where he could put out his hand and cut off the emergency power. Instantly he was up and staring fiercely out the pilots' viewports, while he fumbled for the steering controls.
Yes. The stars were back. Because of the previous darkness they seemed vastly brighter than usual. But Steve didn't waste time looking at them.
There was the brilliant, unmistakable radiance of Earth's day side before them as the Spindrift hurtled toward it. In the far reaches of the horizon, a mysterious second sun—an anomalous, curving reddish streak of light—glimmered, casting an eerie glow over the planet's edge. It was as if dawn and dusk had merged into one surreal vision, a testament to the cosmic shifts of this far-flung future. Steve’s eyes widened in recognition and awe. “That’s Earth,” he murmured, his voice thick with disbelief, “and that extra light… it’s like a second sun—a relic of a time we never imagined.”
Dan nodded slowly, keeping his gaze fixed on the celestial display. “Yes, it’s unmistakably Earth—only changed, reshaped by the relentless march of time." Dan leaned forward, disbelief mingling with awe. "That's our final destination--- whether we like it or not!”
Steve changed the ship's plunge into a dive. It answered to the controls now. When he looked astern, he saw that the familiar constellations had shifted into unfamiliar patterns, as if the very tapestry of the cosmos had been redrawn by the inexorable passage of time.
"Watch the altitude, Dan," he commanded, "and check the air density with it."
He swerved the ship again. Under a canopy of innumerable stars, he adjusted the Spindrift's drive to the curving edge of the Earth that hid the second sun from them. Automatically, without reasoning it, he assumed that the Spindrift had been incredibly fortunate, and that this far-future Earth was home to a civilization whose cultural and scientific achievements had advanced so profoundly that his own time would seem primitive in comparison—a truly better world.
Dan said shakily; "A hundred fifty thousand feet, Steve. Density checks more or less. What're you doing?"
"Getting the ship into air," Steve told him curtly. "We were on top of the air when we were taken. No low-flying planes have been missing, only suborbital ships like this one. Whatever worked on us might not work through air, but only where we were--and where we are now."
He kept the Spindrift in a planetward dive. Again and again, he twisted to look behind—and each time, his eyes widened in disbelief. The Moon, once a familiar orb, now appeared fractured and altered, its smooth face shattered into a mosaic of jagged fragments that glowed with an eerie, pale luminescence, as if it had been scarred by forces beyond comprehension.
"We have to work on guesses," he said with some grimness. "We don't know anything certainly, but we went missing in thin air, and no other ship's been reported missing from low altitudes. So if we can get down to a low flight level, we may be better off."
"A hundred twenty thousand feet," said Dan shakily.
Steve continued the dive. The altimeter read a hundred thousand feet, then eighty, then sixty. With a sharp twist of the controls, he wrenched the ship out of its plunge, sending the Spindrift scuttling across a vast, barren expanse below. Thousands of feet beneath them, the land stretched out in desolation—a cracked, arid wasteland with nothing but scattered rocks and dust for miles around.
But then, emerging like a mirage from the endless void, they spotted a city. The buildings were large, symmetrical, and constructed in a style reminiscent of early 20th-century human cities, complete with wide streets, structured districts, and even a central civic area. Some of the structures had domed roofs, while others bore the rigid, angular design of an authoritarian regime. There were clear roadways, though few vehicles were visible, and from this altitude, the city lacked the towering skyscrapers of a truly modern metropolis.
"Is that... could that be London?" Steve asked, his voice tinged with hope.
Dan frowned as he studied the layout. "London? Not a chance," he muttered. "It’s not big enough, not modern enough. It looks more like... something out of the '40s. What the hell kind of future did we land in?"
Steve was silent for a moment. Then he said quietly, "Is the communicator working? I don't hear anything on the air."
As automatically as Steve had assumed there would be an enlightened, ultramodern society on this future Earth, he registered the quiet unease in Dan’s expression—the furrowed brow, the tightened jaw—signs of a growing dread that this world was not the future they had hoped for, but a nightmare where progress had frozen or even reversed. He noted the silence of the loudspeaker. Dan turned up the gain. There was faint, faraway static. But there were no voices. No dah-dit-dah code. No whinings which would be satellites relaying messages and heterodyning on each other. There was no traffic in the air. None.
"Make an emergency call," ordered Steve. "I'd call our fix an emergency. Try different wavebands."
Dan spoke sharply into the microphone, "Mayday! Mayday! This is the Spindrift, Flight 703 out of Los Angeles! Mayday! Mayday!"
The word "Mayday" is the international signal of distress on all wavebands and for all craft on the sea, in the air, and in space. All traffic stops when a Mayday call is heard. There is nothing more important. No one who hears it attends to anything else until the emergency is well in hand.
Dan tried another wavelength. Another. He ran through every radio frequency used in communication, from microwaves to mile-long oscillations. On each and every frequency he heard faint static. But there was no reply to the call that any operating station would have answered.
"What's going on?" demanded Dan, incredulous. "Anywhere on Earth—even in this blasted future—someone would have answered our radio calls and sent help!"
"Look at the compass," said Steve.
Dan did, and his brow furrowed. The needle spun erratically, refusing to settle. A sick feeling twisted in his gut.
Through the cockpit window, the world below was one of desolation—silent, ruined, and lifeless. Once-proud skyscrapers stood in jagged ruin, their skeletal remains jutting up like broken teeth from the cracked earth. Concrete and steel lay in heaps of dust-covered wreckage, roads split apart as if wrenched by some ancient cataclysm. Here and there, rivers of sand had swallowed whole neighborhoods, burying what remained of the past. Beyond the ruins, the land stretched out in eerie silence, a dead place where time itself had crumbled. The sky, heavy with dust, cast an unnatural pall over the world—a world that had once been their own.
“The Gobi Desert?” Dan muttered, his brow furrowing as he studied the barren wasteland below.
Steve gave a dry chuckle, eyes fixed on the terrain ahead. “The Gobi is a vast, low-lying expanse of barren plains barely a few thousand feet above sea level. You figure it.”
Dan exhaled sharply, shaking his head. “I don’t know, Steve. This just—this doesn’t look right. If I had to guess, I’d say we were over the Mojave, or maybe the Great Basin. But nothing matches up.” His fingers tightened on the armrest as he glanced out the window again. “I don’t like this.”
Steve’s jaw tightened. “Wherever we are, we’d better find a place to set down soon. I kept the power on longer than I should have, waiting for something to change. We don’t have much left.” He leaned forward, scanning the horizon. “But it looks like the mountains might be getting lower. If we’re lucky, we’ll find a flat spot.”
The door of the pilots' cabin slid aside. There was gravity now. The Spindrift flew in air, above the unknown futuristic Earth. But there was air and there was gravity. So much was clear gain. Betty Hamilton came in. She looked relieved.
"We seem to be back to normal,' she said. "Shall I tell the passengers we're about to land? That everything's all right, and we'll land in so many minutes?"
Dan was staring at the compass. Steve didn't turn his head.
"Not yet," he said very quietly. "Not yet," he said very quietly. Then, he glanced at the chronometer and saw the year 6567 displayed in cold, digital clarity—a stark confirmation that they had been thrust into the far future—but he said nothing. "Uh, we haven't, uh, really located ourselves yet. Tell them that things look better. No more than that. Then he glanced at the outside-air thermometer dial. "No....just tell them that there are some precautions we still have to take, and when we've taken them, we'll land. But don't promise them London."
Betty went back into the passenger cabin. Steve's eyes went over the instrument board again.
"The power looks bad," he observed. "We'll have to land soon. If it has to be an emergency landing---and I think it will---we'd better find a place pretty damn quick to make it in."
Dan threw up his hands in exasperation, his voice edged with disbelief. “What is this desert, Steve? It just goes on forever—why doesn’t it ever end?”
Steve moved abruptly.
"Look over there—vegetation, some bushes, even a few trees—and I think I see a flowing river!" he said without elation. "It's coming up fast, and it might be our only chance. Trim our speed now and hook on the inertial guidance— we're going down!"
He dived the Spindrift once more. "Activate the Emergency Reentry Dampers!" he barked, his hand slamming down on the console. This subsystem—unused since liftoff—immediately surged to life, unleashing a burst of controlled reverse thrust that sent the Spindrift shuddering. Its engines roared in protest as they executed a sharp descent, skimming perilously close to rugged cliffs and rocky outcrops. The tension in the cockpit was palpable, every second stretching as they neared the ground.
"Cover the ports, Dan!" Steve bellowed, his voice cutting through the chaos as he glanced at the rapidly falling altimeter—it was at 20,000 feet, then 15,000, and now barely 10,000 as they hurtled toward the ground. The shutters to protect the ports against hail shut and covered them.
It had to be a blind landing. It was.
As the Spindrift descended, it carved a stark white vapor trail across the azure sky of the strange, future Earth—a fleeting scar against the vastness. The ship careened past towering mesas and jagged mountain peaks, the alien terrain rushing up with alarming speed. Inside the cockpit, with the viewports shuttered, Steve and Dan’s eyes were locked on the external sensor displays that relayed every detail of the rapidly approaching landscape. The controls vibrated under their grip as they fought to steady the ship amidst the turbulence, relying on the digital readouts to navigate through the chaos.
As the Spindrift approached the crystalline stream, the ground loomed ever closer. The ship's thrusters fired in a desperate bid to slow their descent, the alien landscape a blur beneath them. With a final, bone-rattling impact, the Spindrift made contact, skidding across the terrain before coming to a shuddering halt at the water's edge. Silence enveloped the cabin, the only sound the labored breathing of its occupants as they processed their abrupt arrival in this unknown and hostile world.
Beyond the grounded Spindrift, small flames flickered amidst scorched earth, casting wavering shadows across the desolate landscape. The once-pristine riverbanks of the nearby stream were now marred by the crash, with charred patches interrupting the natural tapestry. Clusters of hardy cacti stood sentinel, their thick, spiny arms reaching skyward, while sagebrush dotted the terrain, their silvery-green leaves rustling softly in the faint breeze. The air was thick with the acrid scent of burnt vegetation, and an eerie silence enveloped the scene, broken only by the occasional crackle of dying embers.
ns3.15.145.73da2
