In Which the World Takes a Turn for the Weird

Gordon Seiferts looked out the window of the operations module of Skybase Alpha. He blinked and looked again because he saw something that should not have been there: the moon.

Captain Seiferts was undertaking his daily background radiation reading and thermal image of Earth, but the blue planet was nowhere to be seen in his field of vision. He swivelled the camera 230 degrees and was able to bring Earth into view, but the metrics were all skewed. Fearing that the space station had somehow drifted out of orbit, he hurried down to the command module, where the mystery was compounded.

Instead of his colleagues and fellow scientists—men who had been working and sharing living space for the last three months—he found a crew of extremely astonished Russian cosmonauts. Seiferts did not speak Russian, and the cosmonauts did not speak English, so it took some time to work out that Seiferts was not aboard Skybase Alpha as he supposed, but on Mir 2, which was on a survey expedition to map the moon. Following this revelation, Seiferts grew so agitated and incoherent he had to be sedated and bound to a hammock for the duration of the mission.

* * *

Near Tacoma, Washington, fourteen vehicles plunged into Puget Sound when the highway bridge on which they were travelling disappeared beneath them. In all, thirty-two people were killed. However, local fishermen passing through the sound on their way out to sea were able to pull three extremely confused survivors from the water—none of whom could give a credible account of what had happened.

Able Seaman Mike Taylor of the Orca IV expressed utter incomprehension of the event. He was quoted in the Tacoma Times: "It was the craziest thing I've ever seen. I mean, those cars came from nowhere—it was like they just fell out of the sky. I still can't figure what happened. Those poor people ..." The accident occurred in the area of the newly proposed Tacoma Narrows Bridge—a fact that was not lost on the Puget Port Authority, whose public relations office commented, "Obviously, a disaster like this is tragic for those involved. But whatever the explanation turns out to be, it does raise serious questions about whether that is the best place for a bridge at all."

The incident was put down to a severe weather inversion resulting in a freak tornado. Such extreme weather conditions, although rare, are not unknown. In the Midwest, tornados have been known to pluck objects from the ground and transport them over many miles before depositing them in unlikely places.

* * *

Howard Smith went to sleep in his bed in Carol Stream, Illinois, and woke up on a floating agricultural island on the edge of Lake Texacoco in Mexico.

After kissing Julie—his wife of thirty-five years—good night, he closed his eyes in the bedroom of his suburban Chicago home, slept soundly, and awoke the next morning to find himself surrounded by wary Aztec farmers discussing the baffling presence of this pale-skinned alien who had appeared in their midst. They decided he was a sky god and, despite his strong protests—uttered in a language they could not understand—the farmers took him to the priest, who gave him a collar of gold and established him in the temple at Tenochtitlan.

* * *

In the Laxmi Nagar district of Mumbai, India, Sireena Shah prepared breakfast for her three children who were getting ready for school. She fed them and sent them out the door with their lunch pails—only to return to the kitchen to find them still dawdling over their food. She assumed they were playing a trick on her and was giving them a good scolding when her husband appeared on the scene, wanting his breakfast. She would have gladly given him something to eat, except for the fact that he had eaten and departed for the office forty minutes previously; his dirty dishes were still in the sink.

* * *

The entire R&D team of Arcosoft Games of Cupertino, California, disappeared while on a conference call with executives at Gyrotek, a marketing firm in San Francisco. When repeated attempts to reestablish contact failed, a secretary sent to the boardroom reported that the team had apparently staged a walkout as some kind of protest and left the building.

From the team members' point of view, however, the boardroom simply vanished—to be instantly replaced by a battlefield occupied by two opposing forces during what would later be called the Battle of Balaclava in the second month of the Crimean War. All eight men and five women of the Arcosoft team were slaughtered during a cavalry charge when British troops failed to identify them as noncombatants.

* * *

In Damascus, Rosemary Peelstick stood in front of a greengrocer with a sack of oranges in her hand. What am I doing here? she wondered. She looked down at the net bag, but had no memory of purchasing the oranges. The grocer smiled and offered his familiar greeting; she gave him an embarrassed wave, then walked home. It was, she decided, a sign of age, what was called a senior moment. She had another such moment later that day when, on the way to the genizah to join the discussion there, she turned into the hallway and found herself in the front room, again wondering why she was there.

Later, when talking to Tess Tildy, she suddenly heard herself saying the same words in the same conversation they had exchanged not an hour before. When she mentioned this to Tess, the elder woman confessed to having similar memory lapses. "It happens when you get older, dear," she said. "I don't think there's anything worth worrying about."

But when Mrs. Peelstick saw Gianni Becarria in the courtyard talking to Brendan Hanno and then, not three seconds later, turned around and saw him sitting in the front room reading a book, she knew there was something very much worth worrying about. The sight of the Italian priest nonchalantly thumbing the pages of the History of the Ottoman Empire sent her running back to the courtyard to find another Gianni and Brendan still immersed in conversation. She grabbed Cassandra Clarke, who happened to be passing by, and instructed her to look in the courtyard. "What did you see?"

"Well, Gianni and Brendan are talking physics, from what I can gather. Why?"

"That's what I thought. Now," said Mrs. Peelstick, "go and look in the front room and meet me in the kitchen. But don't say anything to anyone before you speak to me."

Cass regarded her curiously. "You're white as a sheet, Mrs. P. What's up?"

"Just do as I ask, please. There's a good girl."

Cass moved through the hallway and put her head through the door into the front reception room. There she saw Gianni reading his book; she did a double take and ran back to where Mrs. Peelstick was waiting in the kitchen. "Okay, what's going on?" she demanded.

"Shh! Keep your voice down," warned Mrs. Peelstick. "You saw them too?"

"I saw two Giannis, yes," Cass confirmed in a harsh whisper. "Why? What's happening?"

"I think we have a problem," she said.

"I'll say. This is deeply weird." Cass turned her wide-eyed stare toward the hallway as if...