Land Beyond the Map

“No soap, Polly. For two reasons. One is the boastful one that like a number of people I have map-sense, natural orientation. Lead me around the maze and I know — but how I know I don’t know, if you follow — just which way is the right way to get out.”

“Lucky you.”

“Don’t mention it. The other reason is hanging up there in the sky. We might just have become twisted about enough to be traveling west instead of east, and I might be wrong in imagining my map-sense has stuck with me into the Map Country. But the sun shows we’re traveling east. The norm magnetic pole is now down deep south.”

The look on Polly’s face surprised Crane. He had expected incredulity, perhaps, after that first remonstrance, or a girlish indifference to odd scientific facts. Instead she nodded with certainty, and said: “Wasn’t the north magnetic pole in the Antarctic about a million years ago, last time?”

“Last time?”

“Well, even I know it has changed poles from time to time in the course of Earth’s development. I believe the last time compasses would have pointed south was a million years ago. Wasn’t that one of the results from I.G.Y.?”

“So you’re suggesting that the Map Country exists a million years ago, that we’ve gone through into the past?”

“Could be.”

She was damned matter-of-fact about it, Crane grumbled to himself. Far too contained and perky — or was it merely that he was the old woman of the party, the chicken-hearted, the frightened?

The tank had now dropped behind them, lost along the road beyond the gentle undulations that appeared so slight and yet were enough to hide the clanking monster’s metallic vermilion body. The flat plain was in reality like a petrified ocean, ridged with long rollers athwart their line of passage.

“And still only one damned road.”

“We can’t go back,” Crane agreed. “That’s certain. Not, that is, unless we knock out that second tank.” He was stubbornly determined to think of the clanking monsters not as that but as mere tanks. They were probably robotic or remote-controlled; he didn’t care to dwell on who or what might be driving them otherwise.

The car slid gently across the crown of the road, skimmed the offside verge and then, as Polly turned the wheel, surged back onto the left-hand lane again. Crane looked at her. “I don’t suppose they obey the Highway Code here,” he said. “And you needn’t bother about driving on the left; but what was that swerve for?”

He hadn’t yet sorted out an acceptable formula to enable him to suggest he take over the driving without upsetting her or running the risk of a blazing barrage of scorn.

Polly bit her lip. “I don’t know, Rolley. The car just went by itself — whoops — here we go again.”

The car snaked up the road. Crane gripped the door strap and held on anxiously. “I know we’ve had a hectic day, followed by a bizarre night and I should feel tired. But I don’t. Perhaps it’s the air here; but I feel more alive than I have in ages.”

“Me too.”

Polly wrested with the wheel, spinning this way and then, as the car skittered across the road, spinning that. The frown of concentration on her face, the grim set to her jaw, all added to Crane’s fear.

“Maybe the steering’s gone haywire…. Slow down!”

He was looking hard at her; yet a movement beyond her profile attracted his attention. Out there on the plain the trees thrashed in wild motion. He saw a clump with their strange towering trunks and feathery clumped heads bending and bowing, lashing down until they brushed the ground and then whipping back the other way like giant stockmen’s whips so rapidity he felt sure their trunks must snap.

“Slow down!” he shouted again, stricken with unreasoning panic.

Out there the whole plain was moving: the long rollers of grass were rolling in reality, were surging forward and up and down like the monstrous waves of a blasphemous sea. His mouth open in horror and his eyes staring, Crane saw that maelstrom of solid earth, and he cowered down on the seat of the car.

“Good God!” Polly screamed. She stamped on the brake.

The Austin slid to a halt. Now they could clearly see the sinuous writhings of the road; like a rippling length of white rope it gyrated away before them.

“What’s happening?”

“I don’t know. But anything can happen here — and it evidently does!”

“I feel sick, Rolley.”