15
The Sands of Time
"I think we may have a bit of a problem," Joachim said, as he stepped out of the machine and saw himself sitting on a rock, whittling a piece of blackthorn root into the shape of a plesiosaur.
"I think you're right," agreed Joachim, cutting off a flipper in his surprise.
"How about if I get back in the machine and go back when I came from?"
"You could try it . . . ."
Several minutes earlier . . .
"Er...? Should we have two of these things?" Joachim said, scratching his long, grey straggly beard.
"We have now," replied Joachim, scratching his long, grey straggly beard in unconscious mimicry of himself. "What's more, I think there's another one due in about five minutes.
The first Joachim thought for a few moments and then said, "Surely this can't be right. I ... we ... don't know where the machine came from in the first place ... presumably from sometime in the future, after it had been invented ... but only one machine came back through time originally. Now we seem to have a matching pair. Two Joachims seems a bit odd, as well."
"I know," agreed the second Joachim, "it seems no more than ten minutes since I was unique."
"Same here." chimed in a third Joachim who had materialised in yet a third identical time machine just in time to hear the previous remark.
"So, what shall we do?" asked the fourth arrival.
"I think," the first Joachim said, "that we all ought to go forwards into the future and investigate the matter."
Several minutes later . . .
"I call this Convention of Joachims to order!" shouted Chairman Joachim, banging his gavel down sonorously on the desk in front of him. The thirty seven thousand, four hundred and fifty seven other Joachims in the football stadium dutifully subsided into silence. Outside the stadium, the cacophony continued unabated as nineteen thousand, one hundred and twenty two car horns, sounded their impatience against the gridlock caused by the thoughtless on-street parking of rather too many time machines.
"This is hopeless!" a Joachim shouted. "We can't conduct business in the midst of all this noise." Thirty seven thousand, four hundred and fifty seven other Joachims murmured in a roar of agreement, whereupon five thousand, six hundred and two good citizens wandering around outside the stadium threw themselves to the ground, believing in the imminent crash landing of a Jumbo Jet.
The proposal by Chairman Joachim, that the convention adjourn and meet one year hence in the middle of the Gobi desert, was carried unanimously.
Several minutes later . . .
Five hundred and fifteen million, nine hundred and seventeen thousand, six hundred and sixty six Joachims materialised within the space of a single microsecond exactly one year later in the Gobi desert. The excessive quantities of heat generated by the sudden appearance of half a billion Joachims, not to mention that added to it by half a billion time machines, each of which was powered by a small fusion motor, resulted in the rapid formation of massive air pressure differentials across the Northern hemisphere. Within minutes, the tidal effects of these atmospheric disturbances caused the rate of continental drift to increase by two orders of magnitude. Naturally, this resulted in a series of large earthquakes across every crustal plate on the globe, most of which exceeeded any number envisaged as possible on the Richter Scale. It goes without saying that such unaccustomed seismicity could not but fracture the crusts over the several excessively large magma chambers, each about as big as Yellowstone Park, which had been slowly forming over hundreds of thousands of years. And so it was that within half an hour of the super-convention arriving in the Gobi desert, the Earth and all life upon it was destroyed by the eruption of twelve super-volcanoes.
Several minutes earlier . . .
"Dash!" cursed Joachim, to himself, "I've got here too early. These time controls are difficult to get the hang of. Still, seeing as I'm here, I might as well get out and potter around while waiting for the others to turn up."
While this particular temporally wayward Joachim was unearthing a seventy million year old dinosaur nest complete with unhatched but fully formed dinosaur chicks, a mere one hundred metres from his untimely transport and a little less than five minutes before half a billion other Joachims materialised to trigger armageddon, a solitary Bactrian camel wandered over a small dusty hill and made straight for the time machine. In a long but understandably boring life spent wandering about the Gobi crushing dinosaur eggs, the camel had never before seen such a contrivance and so, being blessed with the amount of curiosity usually ascribed to proverbial dead cats - usually before they become proverbial dead cats - naturally stuck its head inside the wondrous contraption in order to investigate . . . .
Several minutes earlier . . .
"Yikes!" shouted Joachim, jumping a foot higher than his beard, as he suddenly found himself looking straight into the astonished eyes of a disembodied camel. A large machine, curiously reminiscent of a nineteen fifties 'B' movie science fiction set, was apparently materialising in front of him. Since Joachim was perched right on the edge of a rock ledge which just happened to overhang a bottomless lake, the machine - which Joachim always fondly but erroneously remembered ever afterward as a Bionic Bactrian - succeeded in its attempt at temporal stability whilst failing substantially to maintain a similar attitude in one of the corresponding three spatial dimensions.
"I wonder what caused that?" said Joachim, brushing sand from his perfect carving of a plesiosaur as he and the lamb watched the astonished camel eyes, their associated head and surrounding gadgetry disappear down the maw of the afanc reputed to dwell in the lake.
The lamb looked round at the splendour of the snow-capped mountains, and the silvery streams which plashed and tumbled joyously down their slopes; it gazed at the magnificence of the blue heavens, dotted here and there with fluffy white clouds, in which raven and rook, skylark and linnet, eagle and kite, rose and swooped and thermalled; it harkened to the incessant buzzing of bees among the heather and the intermittent chirr of the grasshoppers hidden in the grass. Several minutes later, although Joachim didn't hear the words, it said: "Survival instinct."
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This is the last of the Tales of Joachim |
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Ink Amera |
(C) David 1/9/2007 |
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