Free The Human Front by Ken MacLeod

nutritious than the fare to which most of the inmates, including myself, had become accustomed. This is not to say that our confinement was pleasant. The continuous cloud cover felt like a great shining lid pressing down on us, day after day. Every day it seemed to, or perhaps actually did, descend a little lower. The nightly lock-downs were hellish, even thoughthe huts did in fact cool down somewhat. The wire around the camp was almost equally suffocating, one we’d realised that it wasn’t so much there to keep us in as to keep the dinosaurs out. The same was true of the guards’ strange weapons, which could—if turned to a much higher setting than was ever used against prisoners—fire bolts of electricity or plasma sufficient to turn back even the biggest of the great blundering beasts which flocked to the river every couple of days, their feet making the plain shake. We called them dinosaurs, because they resembled the reconstructions of dinosaurs which most of us had seen in books, but I knew from my scientific education that they could not be dinosaurs—they were too vigorous, too obviously hot-blooded, to be the sluggish reptilian giants of the Triassic and Jurassic eras. Whatever they may have been, their presence certainly discouraged attempts to escape.
    The British contingent was in two Nissen huts: twenty men in one, twenty women in the other. They had a committee of three men, three women, and a chairman, and they spent a lot of time trying to regulate sexual relations. It was all very British and messy, uncomfortably between the strict puritanism of the Chinese comrades and the easygoing, if occasionally violent, mores of the Latin Americans and Africans. My unit decided to ignore all that and do what we considered the proper British thing.
    We set up an escape committee.

    “What the hell are you doing, Matheson?”
    I waved my free hand. “Just a minute—”
    It didn’t interrupt my counting. When I’d finished, I put the one-metre line and the 250-gramme tin of peas on the table and glanced over my calculations before looking up at Purdie. The young Englishman was on our hut committee and the camp committee, but not the escape committee, which he regarded as a diversion in both senses of the word.
    “We’re not on Venus,” I said.
    He glanced over his shoulder, as if to confirm that we were still alone in the hut, then sat on a corner of the table.
    “How d’you figure that out?”
    “Pendulum swing,” I said. “Galileo’s experiment. The gravity here is exactly the same as on Earth. Venus has about eighty percent of the mass of Earth.”
    “Hmm,” he said. “Well done. Most people begin by wondering why nothing feels lighter, and then put it down to our muscles adapting to the supposed lower gravity. Still, can’t say it’s a surprise, old chap. Some of us reckon they keep us in at night because if we went outside we could see the moon through the cloud cover, and even the least educated of us is aware that Venus doesn’t
have
a bloody moon.”
    “So where are we?” I waved a hand. “It seems a wee bit out of the way, if this is Earth.”
    He crooked one leg over the other and lit a cigarette.
    “Well, the camp committee has considered that. The usual explanation is that we’re in some unexplored region of a South American jungle, something like what’s-his-name’s
The Lost World.”
    ”Conan Doyle,” I said automatically. I screwed up my eyes against the smoke and the glaring light from the open door of the hut. “Doesn’t seem likely to me.”
    “Me neither,” said Purdie cheerfully. “For one thing, the midday sun isn’t high enough in the sky for this to be a tropical latitude, but it’s
bloody
hot. Any other ideas?”
    “What if instead we’re in somewhere out of
The Time Machine?
Well, you know …
dinosaurs?”
    Purdie frowned and probed in his ear with a finger.
    “That has come up. Our Russian comrades shot it down in flames. Time travel is ruled out by