"So what happened here?" Natty asked. "And where did everybody go?"
The moment the walls of the Forbidden Cave had materialized around us we had known that something was wrong. Or perhaps not wrong, only different.
Most notably, the Forbidden Cave was deserted. No heavily armed females were defending the mouth of the cave against would-be intruders. For that matter, the small besieging army appeared to have left as well.
Somewhat ominously, the grid-iron gate to the cave was gone, too. There remained no trace of the fact that the Forbidden Cave had ever been locked and secured. There was no trace of Jake, either, or of his blue limousine.
As we stepped outside, we found no skid marks on the ground, which was puzzling considering the number of jeeps and military vehicles that had been positioned here at the time we had left.
"Do you think the autarchy's cleanup crew did that?" I wondered. "Perhaps they won the fight and then made it look like nothing ever happened here."
"Could be. But I think that's pretty unlikely," Natty said. "Judging from what we have seen of their performance, I rather doubt they'd be able to do such a professional job. Is it possible that Brianna sent us back to the wrong time?"
I shrugged. "I don't know. But I doubt it. I mean, she did have the exact coordinates of our previous transit. I can't imagine that anything as basic as that could have gone wrong."
"Well, somebody must have gone to great lengths to make it look like nothing out of the ordinary happened here," Natty concluded. "Also, now that our ride is gone, we have to figure out how to proceed from here."
"I suggest we walk to the nearest village and take the bus to the next town," I told her. "Basically, we need to reach a train station and then take a train to London."
Natty shook her head. "That's fine with me, except for the London part. See, I don't think I want to go to London anymore."
I frowned. "Where else do you want to go, then?"
Natty sighed. "Back to school, Cathy. I have had some time to think about this, and I have decided that I am done with running away, at least for the time being. Besides, I have got a feeling that the cleanup crew may be out of the game now."
"Are you sure? I mean, what if you're wrong and they show up again to kidnap you or worse?"
"If so, we shall deal with that when it happens," she replied. "As I've said, I'm done with running away."
"Alright then." I felt a lot less optimistic than her, but I respected her choice. I figured we would just have to be extra careful from now on. "So, back to school it is."
It took us less than half an hour to walk to the nearest village, but we had to wait for the bus for more than an hour there. Eventually we reached Cardiff and from there took a train to London where we changed onto another train that took us to Arlesten. We arrived at St. Albert's late in the afternoon.
Contrary to what we had feared, the initial reaction of teachers and staff alike appeared to be a profound sense of relief at our safe return. The school secretary, Sandra Bale, sent us to our room to get some rest before she went to pass on the good news to Headmistress Stuart and to our class teacher Ms Jefferson.
In the corridor we met Dorothy Barnett who did not appear surprised to see us.
"Carmichael said not to worry, the two of you would be back in no time at all," she commented.
By comparison, Nancy had been more concerned about what had happened with us.
"You might have told me about your plans, Nat," she complained, when she came to visit us in our dorm room later that day. "I mean, I understand that you panicked after what happened when those two men showed up in in our classroom. Everybody understands that. But you could have told me good-bye or something, at the very least."
"I am truly sorry about that, Nancy." My roommate offered her a rueful smile. "And you are right, I panicked."
"I know." The two girls hugged briefly.
"So, what happened after we left?" I asked.
As it turned out, a lot had happened. When Ms Jefferson had returned to our classroom, accompanied by the head, to find that Natty and I had left, and after they had established that we were not in our dorm room either, they had called the police. It was quickly determined that Mr Anderson and Mr Banks – if those were their real names – were not in the employ of the Security Service and certainly did not work there as special agents.
Not surprisingly, those two gentlemen were nowhere to be found. The black sedan they had abandoned in our school's parking lot had turned out be a rented car. It was assumed that the two men had left the school premises by bus.
When Natty and I had failed to show up by the evening of that day, the police had set up a country-wide search for the two of us. My parents had been informed – that is to say, Mr Taylor of Taylor, Hampden and Clark, the man who had been commissioned to play the role of my father here in the 1960s, had been informed. Natty's legal guardian – an Arlesten city clerk who had not once deigned to show up at our school nor otherwise taken any interest in her well-being although he was being paid good money by the state to act as her legal guardian – had also been made aware of Natty's disappearance.
As a consequence, St. Albert's security policies had become the subject of inquiries by concerned parents who desired to know how it had been possible for two alleged agents of the Security Service to enter a classroom and demand that one of the students be placed into their custody – a demand that might actually have been granted if the two perpetrators had encountered a teacher less determined than the formidable Ms Jefferson.
Later that night I contacted Sara and Mira via the ansible to report on what had happened since the last time I had talked to them. I had postponed that for as long as I dared, telling myself that I needed more time in order to decide what to do.
Clearly, I needed to make a choice here: to tell Sara and Mira about our transit to the deep future or not.
To understand that, consider Rule 3.7, listed in chapter III of 'The Temporal Explorer's Guidelines and Best Practice', which states that 'A Temporal Explorer must refrain from a course of action if the most probable outcome of said action would appear to lead to contradictions with one or more known historical facts'.
In its simplest interpretation, Rule 3.7 discourages well-intended but useless attempts to 'change history' by e.g., attempting to assassinate Hitler or to save JFK from being assassinated.
Of course, the motivation behind Rule 3.7 is not a desire to protect the course of history against the occurrence of paradoxes or other kinds of contradictions. According to our current understanding, there exists one single globally coherent space-time history of the universe, which implies that there is no room for contradictions. However, at any given time our local knowledge of events both of the past and the future is limited and incomplete, which implies that we have no way to know all the consequences of our actions.
To be specific, I knew for certain that a lot the incidents of the past days – in particular, our transit to the early 31st century and the role Natty had played in the fight against an alien invasion in that temporal era – obviously had not made it into those versions of the Alliance's history books that would be accessible to people in the 31st century. That was what Rule 3.7 would refer to as a known historical fact.
If I included a description of those incidents in my official report, they would almost certainly become part of an update of my people's history records in the 23rd century, which in turn would suggest that they would be part of the Alliance's history books in the 31st century as well.
Unless something unexpected happened to prevent that. Something drastic and possibly rather unpleasant, as it would involve the destruction of safely stored distributed historical records.
I am certain that you can see already where this is going. Rule 3.7 of 'The Temporal Explorer's Guidelines and Best Practice' would strongly suggest that all incidents related to our transit to the future had better not be mentioned in my official report.
A simple and straightforward way for me to insure that would be to not tell my Temporal Instructor and her grad student anything about our little excursion to the year 3014 AD.
But what if part of the information I would be withholding turned out to be crucial to avoid another future disaster? Who was I to decide which part of my observations was to be kept from the scientists that were going to evaluate the historical data I had collected? I was just a sixteen-year-old girl on my First Temporal Assignment, for crying out loud.
In the end, I decided to come clean and leave it to the wisdom of my Temporal Instructor to determine how to proceed. That is to say, I told Sara and Mira everything that had transpired, not without emphasizing the apparent lack of any related records in the history books of the 31st century.
Sara's and Mira's reaction to my report did not disappoint me: they were fascinated, shocked, intrigued. My Temporal Instructor agreed that part of my observations would most probably be classified. There were in fact guidelines on how to proceed in such cases.
You can imagine that I was greatly relieved to learn that.
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A / N : As usual, I would ask you to consider adding your comments or voting for this chapter, as I am always keen on getting your feedback.