image [https://i.imgur.com/oYg9O7s.jpg]

Year 2149

ALMOST in an instant, the spaceship was no more than a dwindling dot in the sky, soon vanishing into a cloud. Jacqui had seen no sign of anything to provide thrust: it had just lifted out of the water as if it were a helium balloon. Ah well. There was so much of the Sous’ technology that she had never learned about—that she never would learn about.

She was home! A very different planet from the one she had left, one hundred and eighteen years earlier, but it was home. And this part of it, on the Antarctic Peninsula, seemed habitable enough. She threw down her bag and luxuriated in the soft warm yellow sand, lying prone, unwilling to stir for a long time. When she did finally try scrambling to her feet, she felt heavy and unsteady—she was not used to Earth’s greater gravity. She lay down again, on her back this time, and waited. Why hurry? It would pass.

The beach was fairly narrow, dotted in places with clumps of sea-kale, and beyond it was a strip of short grass. Yes! real grass, not the strange ‘moss’ that covered much of the dry land on the Sous’ world. Beyond the grass she could see a narrow, steep-sided valley heading up and inland. It was tempting to go exploring, but that could wait. For the moment Jacqui was content to lie on the beach, occasionally casting a glance at the Sun—yes, the real Sun! Too bright to look at—Earth’s Sun, no Red Dwarf. It was slowly sinking but it seemed that sunset was still some time off. She closed her eyes…

The Sun was higher in the sky, and she realised she must have slept all the night through. The tide was out, and there was a short stretch of wet sand between her and the sea. Feeling rather stiff, she sat up. She could see her ‘Dr Scholl’ sandals which she had kicked off while swimming, stranded some distance out. She wondered whether to go and retrieve them, but why bother? There would be no ‘nasties’ here: no spine-creatures buried in the soil waiting to ambush her. She might as well go barefoot—she was used to it.

A slight noise behind her made her start. She staggered to her feet and wheeled round. There were two men there, dressed in drab overalls, standing at the edge of the beach where the grassy strip began—not twenty yards from her. They were observing her calmly, without saying a word. What were they doing here? Why were they looking at her rather strangely? It took a few seconds before it dawned on Jacqui: she had forgotten that she was naked. Red-faced, and with a squeak of embarrassment, she grabbed her rucksack, rummaged in it, drew out the poncho and slipped it over her head. There! At least she was now decent.

The two men were walking towards her. There was something strange, something vaguely familiar about them, but she could not pin it down. One of the men was Black: short, muscular, fairly elderly, mostly bald but with some grey close-curled hair at the sides and back. He had a wispy light grey beard adorning his chin and looked quite handsome for his age. What was it about his face that made her uneasy? And the other man, white, much younger, tall, also with a much fuller, trimmed beard, and with long black hair tied in a pony-tail—that reminded her so much of Paul when she’d first met him…

Would there be language problems? There had been barely any inhabitants in Antarctica in her time—only scientific outposts. Quite likely any new migrants would be Spanish-speakers, coming from Chile or Argentina—the nearest inhabited (or once-inhabited) countries to where she was now. Well, that was all right, Jacqui knew a bit of Spanish. She summoned up what she could recall and began to frame a question in her mind: ‘¿Quiénes son ustedes?’ But before she could get the words out, the older man spoke. In English:

“Don’t you recognise me, Jacqui? Jacqui—my Eve…?”

No! It was impossible! It couldn’t be Adam! And the other man—could he possibly be Nathan? Nathan grown up! But surely they must both be long dead by now. This was clearly a dream she was in—she must pinch herself—try to wake herself up. But Jacqui’s thoughts advanced no further than that. She collapsed onto the sand in a dead faint.

*

Consciousness was gradually returning. Jacqui sensed that she was still lying on the beach, and the two men were stooping over her. The younger one was bathing her face with a little cold water.

Was she still in a dream? Had she just experienced a ‘false awak­ening’ and was she still dreaming? She struggled to sit up again but the younger man gently restrained her.

It didn’t feel like she was dreaming. Everything seemed so real, so solid, there were no ‘gaps’ in her perception of things as happens in dreams. Indeed, as she recovered from her faint, she felt more and more present in reality. But the confusion in her mind! This was the second time she had fainted on hearing news about Adam and Nathan. But this was very different…

Were these men who they purported to be, or were they impostors? But how could anyone but Adam have known the very words she spoke to him, just before they first made love?

Think, now. One hundred and eighteen years had elapsed on Earth, since she last saw Adam and Nathan, but she knew she looked no more than two years older. So something similar must have happened to Adam and Nathan—if it really was Adam and Nathan. Not quite the same, because they had clearly aged more than she had.

“So you really are Adam? My Adam!”

“Yes, I am. Really and truly I am Adam Nkomo, your sometime lover.”

“And I am your son Nathan, mother,” put in the younger man.

“So it must have happened to you two.” It now occurred to Jacqui what the possible rational explanation could be. “Like what happened to me. You must have been taken on an interstellar voyage; that’s why you have aged so much less. Relativity.”

“Close, but not quite right,” said Adam. “We didn’t actually travel anywhere—we remained on Earth the whole time. But I had better explain from the start.

“When your friend Helen—Major Helen Moon I should say, now I know she was an Army officer—turned up with the sensational news that you had been ‘abducted by aliens’, so to speak, I was of course horrified and totally devastated. Not merely at the shock of losing you, but at the anguish of having to explain to Nathan—when he was well enough to receive the news—that he had lost both his parents within the space of a few days. For a while I was in a blind panic and raving: ‘Call the RAF!’; ‘Call NASA!’; ‘Do whatever’s possible to get that spaceship to turn around!’ Of course Helen had to explain to me that no aircraft—nor any Earth-launched spacecraft—could possibly catch up with the fast-receding Sou spaceship, which was evidently powered by a technology far beyond anything mankind had achieved. The best we could do was try to send a message to it, in the hope that it might be understood.

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“When I had calmed down a bit, Helen filled me in on the whole ‘Sous’ business that you were involved with, Jacqui. I don’t blame you for not telling me about it—I recognise that it was all Official Secrets stuff and all that, and you were right to obey orders. So then we set about trying to get some sort of message sent to the spaceship. That was not as easy as you might think—and it was lucky that I had Helen to pull strings for me and get access. It took time for a trans­mitter powerful enough to reach the spaceship to be set up. Then we had to contact the ‘Active SETI’ people for the design of a self-inter­preting message that the crew of the alien ship might understand. The ship had already been tracked, luckily, and appeared to be headed for the star Arcturus. So we knew in which direction to beam our transmission, when it finally went out after several months of work.”

“You didn’t do all this yourself, surely, Adam,” interposed Jacqui.

“No of course not. We were lucky in that the Active SETI team got really intrigued: at last they had a target, not too far away, that really existed and could be messaged. They provided all the scientific know-how that got the project moving. I insisted that the message should include the information that Nathan and I were both OK, and we demanded that the ship turn about and return you to Earth. But it was then a frustrating time, waiting and waiting for a reply from the ship—should they ever see fit to send one. I think it was nearly two years before the answer came in.”

“I know,” put in Jacqui.

“You know? So the Sous told you all about our efforts?”

“Yes they did. But carry on with your account.”

“Well, the answer was a disappointment. We were told that the ship could not turn around and return to Earth: it did not have enough fuel for the manoeuvre. The NASA scientists told us that this was entirely reasonable. We also learnt that the ship was bound for a star thirty-six light-years away. We wondered whether the destin­ation actually was Arcturus—it’s about that distance from Earth—but the NASA guys said the star was not thought to have habitable planets orbiting it. Was Arcturus the Sous’ star?”

“No,” replied Jacqui. “The planet I was on was in orbit around a Red Dwarf star, some distance from Arcturus—but Arcturus did appear brilliant in the night sky. Much brighter than Sirius.”

“So you did actually reach the Sous’ home planet. We guessed as much. The message from the ship also told us that you were being kept in suspended animation during the voyage, so you would not age over its forty-three year duration. The same would be done if you were immediately sent back to Earth. But we were warned that your arrival would be at least 116 years in the future! I was bitterly disappointed at that—the one thing I longed for was the chance to see you again. And Nathan too—he was now just over ten years old. He fully understood the situation by now—” Nathan nodded; “—and he was beginning to overcome the shock and grief of losing both his parents. I was looking after him as my own son—with some help from Thelma. Until she got married and had children of her own, that is.”

*

Jacqui was sitting bolt upright by now, and she quickly got to her feet, feeling quite herself again. “Thelma! Helen!” she cried, excitedly. “Are they still alive? Are they here, too?”

“No, I’m afraid not. Let me explain. As I said, we got that answer from the spaceship, with its disappointing news. So we immediately set about sending another message to the ship.”

“The ship never received your second message,” put in Jacqui. “That’s what the Sous told me.”

“Oh yes they did! Receive it, I mean,” replied Adam. “That was partly down to me, I’m afraid. A bit of deception. I instructed the crew not to pass this information on to you, should you ever be in a position to hear it—so as not to raise your hopes in case my scheme failed.”

“The crew consisted of robots,” said Jacqui. “Hyper-intelligent robots—I have met some of them. They would certainly have obeyed your orders.”

“I see. Well, the delay was much longer now, because the ship had receded further from Earth in the meantime. The answer took nearly six years to come in. What we had sent was this: if the ship could not turn round, could Nathan and I wait for your return? Wait one hundred and sixteen years from the time of your disappearance, in other words. So could they please pass on details as to how to implement the suspended-animation—?”

Jacqui interrupted Adam with a cry of surprise. But it was no longer a matter of disbelief—all was clear now. As her hero Sherlock Holmes would have said, ‘when you have eliminated the impossible—Adam could not be nearly 160 years old!—whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’.

“So they put you and Nathan into suspended animation—” she blurted out, “—and that’s how you come to be alive now!”

“Not just Nathan and me—but yes, that’s how we came ‘here’. As I said, we had to wait about six years for the answer this time. To our surprise, the message included full technical specifications for the suspended-animation device. It was all Double-Dutch to Helen and me, of course—but we passed the information over to NASA. They were thrilled to bits: at last they could see their way to making crewed interplanetary, even interstellar, space flight feasible. Astro­nauts could ‘sleep’ through their voyage to a distant star system. Their scientists got busy at once.

“Well, it took a long time before they were satisfied with the device. They had to test it on rats first, of course—then on larger animals like dogs and monkeys. There were several failures before they got it working right. It must have been twenty years before they felt confident enough to to use it on humans.”

Adam paused. “You said ‘not just Nathan and you’. So someone else I know is here? Thelma? Helen?”

“Not either of them, sorry. As I already told you, Thelma had married by now and had her own children. She preferred to stay put in the twenty-first century. And so did Helen. She’d been disciplined for her part in allowing you to stow away—although honestly I don’t think it was her fault—and she’d resigned from the Army. And—wonder of wonders—she’d found herself a girlfriend. They got married and were still living together when we left, although both were well into late middle-age by then.”

“I didn’t know Helen was gay,” remarked Jacqui. “She never mentioned it to me, at least. Though she did say something in passing about not wanting to get married—to a man as I supposed. She said the Army came first.”

“Perhaps she thought that side of her lifestyle was irrelevant to her dealings with you. Anyway, they both stayed behind. But, Jacqui dear, you must be getting tired of me prattling on so much!—and you’re still feeling disorientated, what with all I’ve told you, and after your faint. Why don’t we go back to Nathan’s house, give you proper clothes, a shower, and a meal? And then some rest.”

*

Still feeling rather wobbly, and supported by Nathan, Jacqui stumbled along with them onto a path leading into the woods behind the beach. It was not a long walk—which was just as well since Jacqui’s legs were still rather stiff. After about a hundred yards the path opened out into a wide grassy clearing, with a strip of gravel across it, where stood what Jacqui at first took for a small helicopter. But it appeared strange: it had a rear-facing propeller at the back, and the large rotor above the aircraft was noticeably tilted towards the rear.

“It’s an autogyro,” remarked Nathan, sensing Jacqui’s puzzlement. “They existed right back in the early twentieth century—in fact they pre-dated the helicopter—but you probably never saw one yourself. However it’s a convenient means of getting around SanMartinland—I mean the Antarctic peninsula, we now call it SanMartinland. There aren’t many roads here—yet.”

Jacqui recalled the Sous’ ‘Transporter’ in which she’d been carried some distance—rather uncomfortably, as a ‘cocoon’. This autogyro was something she could cope with, she thought.

It was a tight fit, but the three of them just managed to cram into the cockpit; Nathan started the engine and the autogyro ran forward along the gravel strip for a short distance before it took off.