“Come on!” I said. “I could have just driven off. I stayed to help you. I’m trying to get you to hospital. Believe me, you’re not fit to drive. You don’t even know what year it is.”
He seemed to have second thoughts, and lowered the gun, which now looked like something you might see in a cowboy film. Then he brought it up again, and said: “You drive.”
It was my turn to curse, but I got back into the car, and didn’t even try to drive off while he was going round to the passenger side. He couldn’t get the door open. I had to do it for him. I got my first clear sight of him as he got in. He was my height and build, and his shoes were brown suede, just like mine. If his face hadn’t been so badly cut and bruised, he might well have looked exactly like me. The gun was, indeed, an antique Colt revolver.
“Well,” I said, all the more desperate to make light of things, “either you’re some alternative version of me displaced from a parallel world, or you’re some kind of alien chameleon who’s automatically taken on my appearance and is plundering my fondness for old movies in deciding what a gun ought to look like.”
He still looked terrified, but now he looked amazed too. “You know that?” he said. “You understand?”
“Sure,” I said, although I felt anything but sure. “I even know how to put a seat belt on—which apparently you don’t.”
If he really had been me he wouldn’t have been able to look any more frightened than he already did, but alien chameleons obviously have an advantage in that regard. He did put his seat-belt on, though.
“Drive,” he said.
“Where to?” I wanted to know.
“Turn around,” he said. “Go back the other way.”
I made a three-point turn, and headed back towards Nomansland.
“You really do need X-rays,” I told him. “It’s a miracle that you survived, and I’m really grateful that the cuts on your head aren’t bleeding nearly as much as I’d have expected, but you could have broken something. You really should have had your headlights on, you know, even if that thing you were driving was only pretending to be a car. It’s way too late for making crop circles, you know—the harvest came in three months ago.”
He didn’t say anything, but the hand that was pointing the gun at me was trembling. I should have been terrified myself, but I wasn’t. However absurd it might be, I thought that I was in control of the situation.
We should have reached Nomansland—the village called Nomansland, that is—within three minutes, or five at the most. We didn’t. The road just kept on, silent, dark and deserted. It didn’t take a genius to work out that we weren’t in Wiltshire or Dorset any more—and I don’t mean that we’d somehow skipped into Hampshire.
I was shaken up, I guess. At any rate, I wasn’t myself. In any normal frame of mind I’d never have done what I did, which was to slam on the brakes without warning and grab the gun out of his shaking hand when he lurched forward. I turned it on him. It felt strangely comfortable in my hand.
“Ordinarily,” I said, “I’d just tell you to get the hell out, and then drive off. Unfortunately, I realize that it might just be a bit too late for that, and that I might not be able to find my way back to any place my SatNav can recognize. So tell me—where are we?”
He cursed softly in his alien language. “Not 2006,” he said, eventually. “Too dangerous.”
“2006 is too dangerous for you?” I said. “What year do you come from, then?”
“Too dangerous for everyone,” the alien chameleon said, resentfully. “We no longer keep count with clocks and calendars. We know when it is, internally.” He was watching me very carefully as he said it. I’d already managed to give him the impression that I knew and understood far more than I did, and I wanted to hold on to the intellectual high ground
“Do time travelers often crash into trees while avoiding stray twenty-first-century deer,” I asked him, “or are you feeling like a bit of a chump just now?”
He muttered something that might have included the words “your fault” and “stupid asshole”, but he’d obviously inherited my habit of strangling undiplomatic remarks as well as my physical appearance. He pulled himself together and said: “What now? Do you want me to drive?”
I looked out at the bare patch of road illuminated by the headlights. It didn’t seem unreal, but I knew that it was only pretending to be a bit of English B-road. It was actually a very different highway.
“Where or when were we driving to?” I asked him. “Surely not all the way home? Converting second-hand Volkswagen Polos into time machines can’t be that easy.”
“A…lay-by,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “Presumably, you could get a signal on your unwristwatch, even though I couldn’t get one on my mobile, so you were able to call the temporal AA. One up to future technology. Are you thirty-first century or forty-first? If you were still counting by means of calendars, that is.”
His eyes were fixed on the barrel of the gun, and he was literally quaking with fear, but he forced himself to reply, seemingly trying to humor me and make sure that I didn’t do anything violent. “It’s not a matter of centuries,” he said. “My era is a billion years from yours.”
“A billion years,” I repeated. “You just crashed a time machine from a billion years in the future into a twenty-first-century oak tree?”
“It wasn’t an oak,” the time-traveler said. “It was an ash.”
“You picked up the language very cleverly,” I observed. “Almost as cleverly as you picked up my appearance. What do you really look like, inside your plastic bag?”
“Would you like me to drive?” he asked, again—in a manner suggestive of some urgency.
“All you had to do was say,” I told him. “All you had to do was say: Please don’t take me to A-and-E in Ringwood, because I need medical help from my own kind. All you had to do was say: There’s this little interdimensional lay-by not a million miles from Nomansland, and if you could drop me there I’d be ever so grateful. And I’d have said: Sure—always assuming that I can get back again. Can I get back again? I mean, you wouldn’t want to rip me out of the time-stream permanently, would you? That would be tantamount to changing history, and I know how sensitive you time-travelers are about that sort of thing. Even if we humans are no more to you than a Mesozoic butterfly might be to us, you never know what changes might unfold over a billion years if you were to take me out…not to mention my poor little Volkswagen.”
“There were no butterflies in the Mesozoic era,” the pedant couldn’t help saying—but he knew what I meant. “Yes, you can get back. I’m sorry I didn’t ask politely. It just seemed…such a very dangerous time.”
“Is it really that bad?” I asked, curiously. “So the ecocatastrophe’s scheduled to unfold quickly enough to cause a major economic collapse before the century’s end?”
“Worse,” the time-traveler replied tersely.
“How much worse? Extinction of the species?”
“Yes.”
“Before the end of the century?”
“Yes.”
“So, when I say Can I get back? I really ought to be asking Do I have to go back?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” I said, after a few moments thought. “Do I?”
“Yes. I’m sorry about that—but you wouldn’t like my world.”
“Why? It must be a lot better