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'But,' John Glenn said slowly, reluctantly, 'you're not Deke Slayton. Are you, Deke? I mean '
Schirra sighed. 'No, John, you Presbyterian pooch. I admit it. I'm Walter M. Schirra, Jr, of the USN.'
Schirra was beginning to work out what had happened. Glenn, though, was still in the dark. He plodded
through the logic like a schoolkid. 'This is John Glenn,' he said. 'And I'm capcom for your mission for
Deke Slayton's mission, in the Pilgrim 7.'
Christ, Schirra thought. You'd think they'd take this klutz off the air. 'Not any more,' he said. 'This is
Wally Schirra in the Sigma 7. And Deke is was my Cape capcom.'
Glenn sighed audibly. 'Then where's Deke?'
Slayton hadn't been able to fly at all, in Schirra's world. Heart fibrillations, discovered after he'd joined
the programme.
'I don't know,' Schirra said simply. 'Maybe he's okay, somewhere.' A thought struck him. 'Where's Jo?'
Glenn paused, evidently checking with somebody. 'At home. With Wally Schirra,' he added heavily.
Insulated by the surroundings of the capsule, familiar from a hundred simulator rides, Schirra had felt
bemused by all that had happened the war, then no war, the sliding continents... Now, though,
something touched him.
Not that he couldn't see the funny side. The final gotcha. I'll never top this one.
'John,' he snapped. 'I've some more questions. How's your geology?'
Continental drifting was a respectable theory, but not universally accepted by geologists or so Glenn
relayed to Schirra. Schirra imagined telephone lines buzzing with strange conversations ('He's asking
what?'). There might be currents in the mantle; the continents might float this way and that like rafts,
bumping and jostling. Maybe their single supercontinent hadn't always been this way; maybe once it had
consisted of different pieces which had drifted together.
Yeah.
Schirra stared down at the changed, seamless world. Maybe if you dug down deep enough, he
wondered, there would be a fine layer of ash, some of it still radioactive-hot...
As he passed over 'America' on his next orbit, his sixth, Schirra described the position of the continents in
his world: Africa and South America and Antarctica split apart and scattered around the southern
hemisphere... He asked Glenn if there had been a time when the world had looked like that.
It took Glenn another orbit to get answers from his telephone panel of specialists. Yes, such an era was
possible. The guesses ranged from two to three hundred million years... into Glenn's future.
They'd all been moved into the past. The whole population of the Earth, to somewhere close to the
Permian-Triassic boundary, from what Schirra remembered of his high school geology. Moved by little
green men from beyond the sky doors, Schirra supposed, to get them away from the devastation of the
war. To save the species. They'd been watching, since Korea and perhaps before, maybe drawn by the
light of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Waiting for the spark.
Everything had been reconstructed, as near as it could be to the world that had been destroyed. Of
course there must have been changes. Schirra wondered what had happened to the Chinese to the
Californians, for Christ's sake. And, somewhere, Israelis and Arabs must be fighting over some other
portion of land, just as sacred and eternal as Palestine had been. But no-one seemed to know about it,
except him... and, presumably, the unfortunate copy of Deke Slayton who should have been up here
instead of him. Maybe by being in space, he'd been missed out, somehow.
Schirra thought it over. For some reason, being moved hundreds of millions of years into the past was
more disturbing, philosophically, than moving into the future. Why should that be?
He laughed at himself. What the hell difference would it make? It would surely cause him a hell of a lot
less trouble than the fact that, here, there was another Walter M. Schirra, as large as life, married to his
wife.
He sighed, and told Glenn he was ready to come down.
The retrorocket package shoved him into his moulded seat, hard, with a few seconds' worth of six g.
The atmosphere bit at the capsule. The retros were strapped over the heatshield; Schirra watched the hull
glow red, the package straps break and fly past his window. He remembered when they thought Glenn's
heatshield had come loose, that he might burn up. (Maybe that hadn't happened, here.) He watched the
dial creep up six, seven, eight g. He tensed his calf and stomach muscles to counteract the g-forces. He
counted out: 'Oh... kay... Oh... kay...'
He was kicked in the back again. The main chute blossomed against blue sky.
He splashed down ten miles from the Kearsage from a Kearsage, anyway in the new Pacific, off the
coast of 'America'. Not bad, for the first landing on an alien planet. 'Good enough for Government work,'
he muttered.
He'd got through most of his checklist, in spite of everything. He wondered if the other Deke Slayton had
had the same checklist. According to procedure, he marked the positions of the dials and switches on his
control panel with his grease-pencil.
Now he should lie here and wait for the copters to lift the capsule to the Kearsage.
He looked at his cine-camera, and thought about the images it contained. He imagined spending the rest
of his life explaining away a world which didn't exist any more, a war which had been negated.
On impulse, he pulled the safety pin from the capsule's escape hatch, punched the three-inch detonator
button. The explosion as the hatch blew out was too damn loud in the enclosed cabin.
The sea air was fresh, salty, full of sunlight; it banished the greenish gloom of the cabin. He could hear the
blades of a copter, only minutes away.
He undid his chest strap, lap belt, shoulder harness and knee straps. He disconnected the sensor wires
trailing from his suit, took off his helmet, and rolled the suit's inner rubber neck up around his throat,
sealing the suit.
He clambered out of his form-fitting chair and struggled through the hatch. He brought his cine-camera
with him. The capsule looked like a misshapen bell, lolling in the water. Yellow marker dye stained the
water for ten feet around the Mercury. The lower half of the capsule was scorched black by the reentry,
but you could still see the Sigma 7 design, and the US flag.
On the horizon was the Kearsage. It was still recognizably a carrier but its profile, flattened by distance,
was subtly changed.
Schirra used his weight to haul at the capsule, made it rock until the sea lapped into the cabin.
It sank fast. 'Too fast,' Schirra said to himself as he struggled in the water in his heavy spacesuit. 'Bad
design by those McDonnell assholes.'
The copter dropped him a horse collar. He let himself be hauled up, returning the curious stares of the
airmen with a grin. 'Turned out fine,' he told them.
The airmen couldn't take their eyes off the US flag sewn to his suit. Maybe he should have ripped it off
before he got picked up.
But that wasn't the worst, he reflected. By losing his capsule, they'd think he'd screwed the pooch, just
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