As they watched the planet they'd named Retha recede from sight as the moon drifted out of range of the Eagle fleet, which meant Operation Exodus couldn't go through once more as they discovered a planet that had a hazard they could not cope with, Dr Helena Russel tried to comprehend just how much humanity had changed over the millennia, as she struggled to remember her time as a cavewoman. She could recall a few bits and pieces, vague memories of how she and John had become cave people after passing through that time warp on the planet's surface.
When Moonbase Alpha was torn away during the launch date of the Ultra Probe mission, Helena had never imagined nor contemplated that she would would be regressed mentally and even physically into a cavewoman.
And she had felt…. Helena wasn't sure, but she had felt truly free as she and the others who'd also passed through the time warp had transformed, and that scared her. Helena had also spoken with the others and found that, despite everything like losing their memories and personal identity, they had enjoyed being cavepeople - even John, despite being whacked on the head with that rock.
"Penny for them?"
Helena turned and smiled when she saw Victor. "Oh, I was just thinking about the time warp. Do you think if we had gone through Operation Exodus and walled that place off, we could have settled there?"
Victor puffed out his cheeks in thought. "No," he replied.
"Why not?" Helena was not surprised by the response she'd gotten but she wanted to hear it from the scientist's point of view.
The decision not to colonise Retha because of the single-time warp was a controversial one. Many had already questioned John about the decision but he had said it was possible there could be other forms of temporal phenomena on the planet they did not know about. The recon parties had only found the one time warp in one area, and they had been turned into cavemen. There was the chance there were time warps that accelerated time, and if that was the case the Alphans could find themselves evolving into something different. And there could be warps that froze time, or there could be something that made time unstable on the planet. They just didn't know. In any case, while some would love to become temporal pioneers, too many people had been spooked by the thought of a trap that would regress them into cave people and quite a few had lost their nerve after encountering retro-evolved versions of their friends and colleagues.
"Aside from the fact we didn't know enough about the planet to know if there were no more time warps and we didn't have the time to properly explore other regions, we just don't know enough about time travel to not be sure of what could happen."
"Do you think we would have travelled in time?"
"Hard to be sure, Helena. But since we left Earth, I think the word 'impossible' should have a line drawn through it since the universe has thrown so many things we've considered to be impossible and unexplained in the past only around the corner. In this case, what worried me the most was how we have no way of knowing if there is a time warp on our doorstep. Our technology and scientific comprehension have not given us the means to make the kind of leaps needed to make such scans possible. We found a mist, but how do we know there won't be time warps that turn out to be invisible to the naked eye?" Victor played with his hands which meant he was giving it a lot of thought.
Helena shuddered as she conjured in her head someone wandering through a time warp only they weren't lucky enough to become a cave person, but vanished into thin air, never to return.
But Victor was not finished. "Who's to say that on Retha, there aren't wormholes that bridge through space as well as through time, maybe to parallel worlds? How would they be formed? Would they be invisible? Would they be seen? Would anyone going through such a wormhole get to the other side safely? Would they even be able to come back? Would they travel to a parallel world and find their molecules coming apart because they are in a place where the Laws of physics are flipped over? John did the right thing, Helena."
Helena followed his gaze, where he was staring at the increasingly small glowing blue jewel of Retha. But she noticed something else on Victor's face.
Regret they could never explore the planet and answer those questions.