"COMMON SENSE TELLS me I'd better alert the crew," said Commander Adamavich.

"Alert them that we're all going to die, you mean. I dissent, Commander.  After all, what can they do about it?  You'll only start a panic."

"Feofil's right," said Ila.

"But I told them the time-jump would be quasi-instantaneous---so why haven't I announced that we've emerged?  They're probably sick already.  Do you think they didn't notice the ship buckling like a horse when Tasha fired the turbos?"

"Then tell them we've been busy!  Tell them that we're trying to dodge space debris at the other end.  T minus 43 years."  Feofil added more calmly with a glance at his retardograph.  "I'm sorry, but there is no time to launch our escape pods, even if they could break out of the flux-field, which I doubt they can."

"I'm sure everyone should be told.  It's an awful thing to go to your death ignorantly."

"Thanks, but I'd rather be taken by surprise---right out of the blue."

"Oh, it's out of the blue we'll be coming in a few more minutes and no mistake!  I wonder if any Siberians have looked up and the sky and seen a redstar flying down from space?  A kind of vision of a future time.  Maybe some of the reindeer people saw it, the Evenki.  Then all the trees were knocked flat, just the way Czarist society was knocked flat in 1917.  Frak, this is absurd talk.  I'm going to tell them.  How's the reprogramming coming?"

"Slowly," said Tasha Ringkels.

"You spoke up, more to delay Milan than for any other reason.  You do realize, don't you, Commander, that the flux-field will have to hold steady until almost the very end?  Otherwise, given our shape, we'd be ripped to pieces by the atmosphere and scattered across half of Asia. But we weren't.  I mean we won't be."

"Yes, that figures.  We've got to return to the Earth, our home.   I wonder if it's actually impossible to get away from our world by using the time-flux?  Have you thought of that, Feofil?"

"How do you mean?"

"Oh, we can send as much dead matter to the stars as we like, or as far back in time as we wish.  But as soon as we tried to send conscious, living human beings, it doesn't work.  What is time? Nobody really knows."

Feofil pretended to be interested.  "Surely the main point is that all equations for physical processes work just as well in reverse as forwards.  That means processes can occur in either time direction, theoretically.  Well, we've proved that in practice, yes?" He indicated his console. "T minus 47, see?"  Immediately he regretted his gesture; he should be keeping the commander's mind off their impending doomsday.

"But your equations don't tell us what time is, unfortunately."

"Surely it has to do with the entropy total," Feofil said cautiously.

"Perhaps not.  It could be that the 'passage' of time is a construct of consciousness, of evolving consciousness, in fact.  That would explain why time seems to flow from past to future.  Maybe it's because of the dynamics of human evolution.  And where, pray tell, did we evolve?" Milan stabbed a finger towards the main viewscreen, filled with the wild, solid fog which was part of the Earth. "Right down there, where else?"  Maybe 'time' as we know it doesn't exist elsewhere in the universe.  Because time hasn't been built out there.  Bottom line:  we cannot escape the Earth merely by traveling through time."

"Surely not!  What happened to the test probes we sent through the Flux?  They surely didn't turn up on an earlier Earth or people would have found them years ago.  They were rigged to transmit for a hundred years.'

"Unless they just----ceased to exist suddenly."

"Things do not cease to exist suddenly," said Ila sharply.  "That is forbidden by the Law of Conservation."

"We'll soon cease to exist, Astrogator."

"No, we will not!  We'll turn into heat and light and particles and droplets of germanium and copper and everything else.  But the sum total of mass and energy won't stop existing!"

"Have you ever looked at a table of geological eras, Ringkels?"

"Of course. Hasn't everybody?"

"Yes, they looked.  But they didn't notice one small detail.  Each successive era is shorter than the last one. Why, a child could plot the shrinking on a graph."

"Shrinking?!"

"That's what I said.  Look, the Carboniferous era lasts for 350 million years.  The Permian lasts for 280.  Next comes the Triassic and that lasts for 230. Then there's the Jurassic at 190.  And so forth.  Getting shorter all the time."

"But that's just a convenient way of dividing prehistory."

"Is it?!  I'll tell you what it is.  As life and brain structures evolve, so does time speed up. First of all, it's very slow and stately, but lately it's been zipping along."

"Felgerkarb!"

"I knew you would say that.  Meanwhile, tempus fugit for us too."  Milan switched on his chin-mike.  "Commander Adamavich to all hands:  hear this!"

"No!" Feofil urgently whispered. "You could be right about the geological eras.  Maybe nobody else put two and two together."

"Shut up, Feofil!"

"We have met unexpected difficulties, Comrades.  We have failed to leave Earthspace.  We're currently hurtling backwards through time at a rate of approximately three years per ship minute.  But we are also closing in on the planet Earth at considerable speed.  You shall have noticed our evasive maneuvers.  These proved unsuccessful.  Chief Engineer Chaddrac is reprogramming our flight pattern to bring us out of flux prematurely, before we impact with the atmosphere.  I shall keep you informed.  Be brave, fellow Russians!"

The Galactica continued plummeting through time, back towards its planet of origin, it's Mother Earth.