He laughed. “Nice try. No, you press it, I’ll be waiting over here, keeping an eye on you.” He retreated into the corner and kept the pistol pointed in their direction.
After a brief discussion, Gail agreed to be lifted up on Ben’s and Patterson’s shoulders. With the added height, she easily reached where the Xynutian was holding the staff, and fumbled around for the switch. She felt it move under her fingers, and pressed it fully until it was flush with the shaft.
She had barely been returned to the floor when the lights went out.
A faint glow emanated from the stone ball on the end of the staff, and the walls, ceiling and floor of the room dissolved into nothingness.
She was in the depths of space; the spirals and warm glows of distant galaxies and nebulae beckoned. She soon found herself shooting up through wispy gaseous clouds. Leaving the plane of the Universe behind, she soared upwards: below her was everything that ever was.
The experience had taken her by surprise, but the visual effect was so intense that Gail felt herself lift from her physical self, her extremities numb. This was a voyage of the mind, like a dream, yet at the same time very real and tangible. She would have asked the others how they felt, what they could see, but she was on her own. They were still in the same room, yet at the same time millions of light years apart.
The galaxies swam beneath her, like small whirlpools, swells and ripples in a turbulent river. Gail had seen the Nile behave like that. She found herself inexorably drawn towards one galaxy, its tentacles wrapping round each other like an octopus in a spin. She recognised it as the Milky Way. As the galaxy enveloped her, she saw a single star ahead. She entered the solar system, and the gas giants flew past at breakneck speed as if their mere existence was inconsequential. Asteroids and debris from ancient collisions during the system’s formative years littered her trajectory, but somehow she made it through and before long Mars appeared and expanded from a small red dot until it filled her field of vision. It was beautiful, the outline of continents and dead rivers on the planet’s surface top and tailed by the frozen poles; memories of a more active past.
She hovered briefly by the shore of a vast empty ocean; a jetty thrust out towards a strange ship, hovering in mid-air.
But before she had time to focus in on the details of what was happening, she shot back up into space again, towards Earth.
Her heart filled with warmth as she saw the blue planet and its moon, dancing in the dawn like illicit lovers, their faces lit up by the familiar Sun as they whirled round and round to their own private rhythm.
Gail passed the Moon, and skimmed the atmosphere of the Earth. But something below her was different. She couldn’t see the familiar continents and oceans. Instead, there was one massive continent in the centre of one hemisphere, while the rest of the planet was a vast expanse of ocean.
Pangaea; she could remember this from history at school. All present day continents had emerged from a single landmass many millions of years ago.
Somehow, in this immersive simulation that was playing out around her, she could sense from different perspectives at the same time. It was as if she was in two or three, or maybe a dozen different places at once, and could see, hear and smell all of them seamlessly. She continued to orbit the Earth, but the black space around her turned to forests and she found herself deep inside an ancient jungle. Rain was falling in drops the size of her thumbnails, beating the blades of fan-like leaves into submission and creating rivers in the mud.
The rains ended, and below her the landmass on Earth started to change shape; at the same time, small dinosaurs started to move around the forest, eating foliage. The continents became more distinct, and she could easily recognise North and South America drifting away from Africa and Eurasia.
All around her the dinosaurs grew to monstrous proportions, the familiar long-necked herbivores and ferocious meat-eaters only a tiny fraction of the thousands of species she was now looking at.
Most of the landmass remained on one hemisphere, the Atlantic and Indian oceans far smaller than she was used to on modern maps. With the exception of Europe and Asia, the continents looked correct. Central America still didn’t exist, and though on each orbit she searched for them, Britain and Ireland also refused to emerge.
She was completing another orbit when an object hurtled past her and landed next to where Mexico would be. The debris thrown skywards hit the top of the atmosphere and flattened against the roof of the world like an umbrella, covering the continents below. Gail tried desperately to see through the haze, but it was impossible.
She knew without a doubt that she was looking at an event 65 million years ago: the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.
The air remained murky as she orbited several more times, slowly clearing to reveal the ravaged earth beneath. Notably, Central America had risen from the sea.
To her surprise, dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, though in lesser numbers and variety than before, and the great giants of the Jurassic had gone.
Somewhere in a small forest, a small rodent emerged from a hole in a riverbank and shot up a tree. It started dangling from branches to reach nuts and fruit in the forest canopy and as it did so its limbs stretched. The tail, at first a long, straight point, started to curl round and balance the animal as it grew larger, reaching bigger fruits and insects, and eventually other small animals.
Suddenly it dropped from the trees and emerged from the forest into a grassy plain. It balanced on its hind legs to see above the long grass. Seeing it was safe to do so, it walked into the grass and away from the forest. As it did, its limbs elongated, giving it higher standing and allowing it to stride with greater comfort and speed through the fields.
It picked up a branch, and within one step it had become a spear. A step later the creature was wearing rough clothes, and within a few more Gail was looking at a fully developed human, only much stronger; a Xynutian.
Had she been able to feel her arms, she would have pinched herself. It was the Xynutian version of her first biology class on evolution at school.
The long grass turned to farmland and holes in the earth on the banks of the river turned into elaborate dwellings rising into the sky. Industry became apparent, smoke churning out of small round buildings away from the river, and in a matter of minutes the first vehicles emerged. Roads connected the rapidly growing city to its neighbours up and down the river, and the first lights came on.
She looked down at the planet beneath her and saw that all the continents were now in place, although they appeared somehow bloated, fatter versions of their modern selves, due to lower sea-levels. Europe still touched Africa along parts of the Mediterranean, Britain and Ireland, while now recognisable for the first time, were still part of the continental landmass, and Scandinavia was simply a blob near the Arctic circle.
In the Atlantic, connected to Spain and Morocco, she noticed part of Europe that didn’t seem familiar. It only took a few seconds for her to realise that she may be looking at the mythical Atlantis. The Xynutians had obviously lived with Atlantis, so to them it probably had little or no significance, but thousands of years later it still sparked the imagination of humans who had never known it and had no proof it had ever existed.
And then she noticed the rivers.
Not just the ancient forebears of the Nile and Amazon and Mississippi, but in the bloated landmass that had since sunk into the sea there were complex deltas and marshlands, while upriver water seemed to find its way into every crease of the world.