Somewhere

I know that it’s the slightest of proof and not enough to convince anyone that it really did happen but Fiona Curry says that, in the instant before I fell into a coma, I sort of flickered and Fiona is not one to imagine things. Fiona was my business partner at the time and she is a female bulldozer. Stand in her way and she’ll run right over you. Even though knowing her well, I have always been more than a little afraid of her. She is entirely without weaknesses and any kind of fancy is a weakness, at least to her. If she says that I flickered then I flickered. And on top of that is my extreme emaciation. My subsequent coma came to be blamed on that and everyone wondered how I could have got into such a state without it being noticed. After all, I seemed to have been eating normally. Tests were made—tests that I was naturally entirely unaware of—test that could find no cause for my wasting. I seemed to be otherwise quite healthy. It was a mystery and a mystery it is going to have to remain. It’s cause is just too unbelievable. We were in our office. It is on the third floor with large north-facing windows and a view. The sun was streaming in and we were having coffee while planning media-campaign strategy. We had been hired by local conservation groups to engineer public opposition to the proposed route for the city bypass. I was known to have conservation interests and this had been enough to swing the job our way. There is no doubt that a bypass is needed but the cheapest route passes through an area of wetland, the only known habitat of Ryker’s frog. The route is cheapest simply because the wetland is entirely unsuitable for building. A highway through it would need massive foundations and cost many millions but any other route would mean the acquisition of hundreds of houses and commercial premises and cost even more. Our problem was to convince the council and the ratepayers that a few frogs were worth millions of dollars and the disrupting of the lives of many hundreds. It was at this stage that I flickered, at least in the here. I suddenly found myself to be

somewhere else. Not on this planet anyway, that is certain. I was standing naked and knee-deep on a summer-browned grassy plain which had sparse groups of waist-high shrubs all of which appeared to belong to closely related species. The plain was a rippling sea and the horizon was as one sees it from a boat when far out at sea. There were no distant mountains. In fact, in my time there, I never found a height that was more than perhaps a metre nor a depth of more than the same. It seems that this planet–and planet it must be–does not have the moving tectonic plates that push up our mountains. The small undulations in the landscape appear to have been wind-formed, dunes that plants have retaken. But how can I describe the cold shock of my sudden transference to this place, of the fear that it engendered. Here I was taken from everything and everyone I knew with, I believed, never a way back. The sun was sinking. It was somewhat larger than our sun and, I would guess , older and cooler. It was faster moving too. I was to find shorter days and nights although I suspect that the seasons are longer than we know. With the sun’s disappearance there were new fears to be faced. The unknown denizens of this place! I waded hurriedly to the nearest clump of shrubs and, using the remaining light, broke off what branches I could and wove myself a covert. It would be no defence against a determined predator but it would be better than nothing. That first short night seemed infinitely long and, although it was probably as warm as subsequent nights, I shivered. I didn’t sleep. I dare not. Yet I was going to find that the fear was unnecessary. I should really have wondered at the lack of grazing animals but I was in shock and would be for some days to come. Morning found me hungry and thirsty and it quickly became clear that the bushes carried no berries of any sort. The grass was my salvation. The tops were dry and the seed had already fallen but below ground were fleshy rhizomes which although not particularly tasty

stored large amounts of water. Filling is all that one could say of them. And that was to be my entire diet during my time there. I was never to find a spring or a running stream. I came across a few shallow depressions that had clearly held water for a short time after a downpour but these were all dry at that time of the year. As I said, I was not thinking clearly. It seemed perfectly obvious to me that there had to be civilisation somewhere and that the first thing that I must do was to find it. Its nearest direction was unknowable but which ever way I walked I must come across someone eventually. I set of walking and again it was more like wading. I put the breeze at my back since it made walking a little bit easier. I didn’t stop to wonder how I was going to maintain a given direction on that featureless sea because breezes shift, often with the time of day. I kept going all that day and the next although there is a strong possibility that I never really went very far from my starting point. On the third day, I saw smoke way off in the distance which gave me a fixed heading. Smoke had to mean people. I never stopped to wonder what sort of people I would find. It meant hope. It took me another three days to find disappointment and reach a part of the plain that had been swept by the fire that was just as far off as ever. There were no people there. The fire had probably been started by a lightning strike. Here on earth, there are grasslands and forests that rely on lightning-set fires to bring about necessary regeneration: to allow lower-growing, less competitive species to have their day in the sun. I have since come to think that fire was the only way that nutrients could be recycled there. That might account for the poor quality of the soil. I had not realised even then that I was not going to find people. This even though I had grown gradually aware that there was something missing and it was not just grazing animals. After a few days, I gave up carrying a stick as my feeble defence against wild animals. I had

seen no wild animals. I had not seen a single bird either. It took a little longer to realise that I had also seen no insect life, no bees, no butterflies, no worms. No animal life of any kind. It was a plants only world. Which explained the lack of nectared flowers and berries on the shrubs or of any conspicuously flowering herbs. There were no pollinators to be attracted and no digestive tracts to carry seeds to distant places. Like the grasses, the shrubs were pollinated by the wind which also carried away their winged seed. But even coming to realise this, I was still expecting to meet people who were reasonably like myself. Even if there were no animals, there had to be people. I was not being very rational. My trek was to last for many days before I could come to accept that there was no-one to find: that I was entirely alone and always would be. My situation was hopeless. How can I describe the desolation that such a realisation brings? Even Adam had more than I had during his time alone. He had the animals although the animals were not enough. He needed human contact, a wife. Prisoners are put in solitary confinement as a punishment and it is not the confining walls but the lack of social contact that is the punishment. I was in solitary confinement. There were no walls but the very lack of feature in the landscape meant that, no matter how far I travelled, I was always in the same place. And the prisoner has at least some contact even if only with his gaoler. A prisoner will sometimes cultivate a rat as a pet or encourage a bird if he has an outside window. Had I had a rat, it would have been lavished with affection. Bread and water is also considered a punishment. I would have relished the driest crust. Anything different from those tasteless roots. When it became clear that I was alone in this world and that one place was every bit as good as another, I built myself a shelter and it was something that came to be needed. There

is no natural shelter in that flat world and the wind has free passage. From a gentle breeze to a vicious gale that stripped the dry soil, it was always present wearing one down. As the summer advanced the air increasingly carried the dust pall that one sees in photographs taken in the American mid-west in the nineteen twenties and early thirties. My shelter was a dugout, little more than a grave, excavated with a stick into one of the metre-high knolls. It was roofed with woven branches and bunches of dried grass, floored with more dried grass, and with a bundled grass door. But nothing could keep the dust out so that I feel myself lucky now not to have miner’s lung. I should have! The shelter was built into the knoll to provide at least a little run-off in the case of rain although there was no rain in all of my time in that place. The dust build -up on top though had to be removed frequently to prevent cave-in. A cave would have been a luxury apartment in comparison with that hole but there could be no possibility of ever finding a cave. Then, just as suddenly as I had gone there, and again with no warning, I found myself back in this world. I had been months in that world but away from here just a fraction of second, a mere flicker. And fortunately so too, my clothes, even my watch band, had not had time to move before I reappeared in them. I was not to reappear naked although Fiona would have been more amused at my embarrassment than shocked. She would have laughed to see my clothes apparently fall off while I would have just about died. And then, as I said before, I fell into a coma which lasted for weeks. It must have been that I was debilitated by the privation of that place that this further shock was just too much.

Fiona and I are no longer business partners. While I was in hospital, she handled the by- pass job on her own and with some success. People are going to come second to frogs. She must have begun to think that she didn’t really need me. And I have been very clingy since

my time away and hardly like to be out of the sight of other people. I was even clingy to Fiona and that was something that she couldn’t stand. I hear that she is not doing so well on her own. I tended to be the ideas man while she had the push to make things happen. Her city-bypass success probably came from ploys we had already decided on. Her push is futile without some measure of inspired lateral thinking behind it. And me? I have become re-established in my own public-relations company with hired pushers and fixers this time. I continue to have an interest in conservation and for this reason I often wonder what effect I have had on that somewhere place. I arrived there naked, true, but even naked we carry a baggage with us. Early travellers to the Americas carried a range of unfamiliar diseases with them. What did I carry with me? My symbionts. The myriad bacteria on my skin and in my nasal passages for one thing and the flora of my gut which I distributed freely without thought. So what, if any, long-range effect am I to have on this antithesis of Eden? Is it to be for better? Or for worse? Or is worse even possible? And then again—does it really matter?