Time Travel Omnibus, page 277
Leeds spoke softly. “I don’t see anything,” he said. “I’m just trying to see what I can see.” It didn’t make sense, but I wasn’t blaming anyone for not making sense at this moment.
“Look.” I grabbed his arm sharply. “What do you make of this huge damned animal print?”
“Make of it?” Leeds blinked in surprise. “Make of it? Why, it’s a dinosaur print, of course.”
“A dinosaur?” I yelped, while the skin peeled icily down my spine. “A dinosaur?”
Leeds nodded. “That’s right. Sorry. I thought you’d recognize it. Don’t know why I expected you to do so. Sometimes I don’t think beyond myself.”
“What,” Rusty put in, “is a dinersour?”
Leeds explained briefly. “They were extinct centuries ago,” he concluded.
RUSTY nodded soberly. Then his face brightened. “But, hell, Leeds, this is easy. If them beasts were outta date hundreds of years back, then this couldn’t be the print of a dinersour!” He beamed brightly at the stunning impact of his own logic.
Leeds nodded sober agreement. “Under ordinary circumstances I’d say you’re right, Rusty,” he said. “But can you find anything ordinary in these circumstances?” He waved his hand generally, to indicate our situation. “We’re hit by a bolt of lightning while crossing a sparsely wooded section of farmland in Georgia,” he went on. “Our tank is knocked about twenty feet through the air and lands right side up with no one killed. And when we climb out, we find that somehow we’re god-knows-how-many miles from our location, surrounded by territory that couldn’t be found in any section of Georgia that I know anything about. It’s a cinch it’s nowhere within a four hundred mile radius of the county where our divisional headquarters are. In fact,” he said speculatively, “I’d be willing to bet there’s no wasteland or jungle sections similar to this anywhere in the United States!”
Rusty rubbed his solid jaw with a big knuckled paw. “Yeah,” he admitted. “The situation isn’t exactly everyday, is it?”
I cut in. “In relation to your last guess, Leeds, where in the hell do you think we are, if it isn’t in the U.S.?”
Leeds rubbed a hand across his forehead. “I have to try to figure this out a little, Burt,” he said. “Hell, I don’t know but what maybe we are still in the United States at that; maybe still in Georgia, even.”
“But how could we still be in Georgia,” I protested, waving a hand to indicate our surroundings, “when you say, and I agree also, that there isn’t territory similar to this in the whole U.S.?”
“It’s not easy to explain,” Leeds admitted soberly. “But, then, neither is the dinosaur print, or how in the hell we got here to begin with.”
“Yeah,” I agreed slowly, “I see what you mean.”
“Did you ever study geology or historic biology?” Leeds asked with what seemed to be almost casual irrelevance.
I shook my head. “No. Did you?”
“Messing around with odd angles of odd subjects has always been a sort of hobby of mine. Curious information about unimportant—so-called—angles to sciences has always fascinated me.”
“Yeah,” I nodded impatiently. “I’ve yet to see anything that hasn’t fascinated you. But what’s it add up to?”
This time Leeds seemed to reflect before answering immediately; as if he had information that would knock my hat off, but wanted to recheck it mentally for his own satisfaction before blurting it.
Rusty took this silence to shove himself back into the parley.
“All I wanta know,” the redhead demanded, “is where we are.”
“It’s like this,” Leeds suddenly said. “All this,” he waved his hand to indicate the jungle surrounding us, “plant life and undergrowth is of the most primitive biological type. As far as civilized man knows, this sort of vegetation died out eons back in time. It exists nowhere on the face of the earth as we know it today.”
My mind was starting to march around in narrowing little circles trying to follow this.
“Also, we’ve found the track of a species of evolutionary animal which hasn’t existed on the face of the earth in centuries.”
“Yeah,” Rusty broke in, “a dinersour.” He beamed, glad at the opportunity to air his newly found knowledge.
Leeds glanced wryly at him, then went on. “So what does all this point to more than anything else?”
“Huh?” I demanded. “Come again!”
“What one fact in all this big mess stands out most clearly?” Leeds demanded.
“That we don’t know where we are,” Rusty blurted before I could supply the answer.
Leeds shook his head. “No. The most outstanding thing about this incredibly strange situation and our surroundings is the fact that they couldn’t exist—according to absolutely solid, modern scientific fact—in any place other than a world centuries and centuries back in time itself!”
I squinted hard at Leeds. “Sure you didn’t hit your head when the lightning knocked the tank through the air?”
“When the lightning, through the presence of a most peculiar radio device, knocked our tank through time, you mean,” Leeds corrected me soberly. “I’m not out of my head, Burt, and I’m not kidding. I’m no mental marvel, but what I do know about what we’ve seen all around us here adds up only to the conclusions I’ve just handed out.”
“You mean,” I demanded indignantly, “to stand there and tell me we’re centuries back in the past?”
“I mean,” Leeds said angrily, “that two and two makes four.”
RUSTY, who had been following our interchange frowningly, brightened up when it came inside his mental sights. “That’s right,” he blurted happily. “Leeds is right, Burt. Two and two’s four!”
We both fixed him with an impatient glare, and his effervescence subsided.
I turned back to face Leeds.
“Look,” I said, “I have a man-on-the-street knowledge of so-called time theories and all that malarkey. I know that a few zany scientists subscribe to them and claim that some day time travel will be feasible. But as far as I’m concerned, that’s a lot of junk. Please don’t hand me any more of that back-in-the-past reasoning, Leeds. You’re too smart for that sort of noise.”
Leeds shrugged. “All right, Burt,” he said with softly worded surrender, “you explain all this, then.”
“Why, it’s simple,” I said. “This is just, ah, weelll, I mean, that is. Hell, Leeds, dammit all. This is, ahhh . . .”
But he had me. As coldly and as simply as that. One sentence was all Leeds had to use in the clinch. And it had punctured any balloons of doubt I might have clung to.
Leeds smiled humorlessly.
“But, Leeds,” I began weakly.
And the shot blasted out at that moment, loudly, startlingly, less than two feet from us. We both wheeled to see Rusty, the huge automatic pistol he carried at his belt as a side arm, smoking in his big, red knuckled mitt.
We looked toward the spot where the barrel of the gun still pointed. A spot near a heavy fringe of thick jungle brush.
An incredible, miniature monster lay stretched out there kicking it’s nine legs in last dying spasms!
“Damned thing looked dangerous,” Rusty commented briefly to us over his shoulder. “Noticed it moving creepy-like through the brush toward us.”
Neither Leeds nor I said a word. We moved cautiously over toward the dying creature as Rusty followed, nonchalantly smug over his marksmanship, at our heels.
Leeds held out an arm to halt us as we drew within five feet of the thing kicking there on the soft, black soiled grass near the fringe of the underbrush.
It was about seven feet long, about two feet thick, and maybe three wide. It most closely resembled a gigantic, mis-shapen, horned toad. Except that it seemed protected by a thick coat of shell-like armor, and had, as I said before, nine legs.
It was flat on its back, now, and those legs were making their last feeble kicks as we watched it wordlessly. Blood was pouring from the huge right eye where Rusty had plugged it.
AND then Leeds pointed his finger at a pair of sharp, thin tendrils that ran bug-like from its skull.
“Damned good thing Rusty plugged it,” he said softly. “Those waspish tendrils are venomous stingers. Deadly poisonous, no doubt. We might easily have been attacked by it.”
Rusty’s chest puffed out.
“I seen that turtle armor around it and figgered I’d better not waste a shot on it, so I let ’em have it in the blinker,” he declared.
I looked at the ugly creature and shuddered. The legs had stopped kicking, now, and I started in closer toward it. Leed’s hand shot out and grabbed my arm.
“Let it be,” he said. “Maybe it’s dead, but maybe it isn’t quite dead yet. Don’t take chances.”
I was glad to take his advice. We turned away and went back toward the tank in the middle of the narrow clearing.
None of us said a word. I felt certain we were all thinking pretty much the same thoughts, however. But I didn’t count on Rusty’s typically unorthodox reaction.
“Well,” Rusty said brightly, “maybe we better get rolling again. I missed one date with a southern peach, and I got one lined up for tomorrow that I don’t wanta miss.”
I looked at Leeds, and he returned the glance with equal amazement, shaking his head unbelievingly.
I touched Rusty’s arm.
“Look, chum,” I said, “don’t you get it?”
Rusty frowned. “Get what?”
“The spot we’re in,” I said. “Weren’t you listening when Leeds and I threshed out an explanation of where we really are?”
“Not carefully,” Rusty admitted. “I just got the gist of it, and understood that you’d figgered out where we were. Why, are we a long ways from where we wanna be?”
We were patient, then. Oh, so very patient. We told it to Rusty slowly. We didn’t use big words. We made it as simple as we could. We repeated it three times, each of us, into his none too shell-like ear. And then we stood back and waited for the great light to break out of his pan.
“Ohhhhhh,” Rusty said soberly. “Then we’re really in a jam, eh? We’re really lost, huh? How long do you think it’ll be before we can find our way out of this joint?”
Leeds and I sighed and exchanged glances of frustration. The swift trigger touch in Rusty Harrigan was limited to his finger. His mind didn’t have any.
“We’ll try again later and it’ll seep in over a gradual period of time,” I told Leeds.
He nodded agreement. “That’s the best way.” Then: “What do we do now?”
I looked at the sun lowering fast on the horizon. “It’ll be dark pretty soon,” I judged. “We have no idea of the territory around us, and scouting it by night, with such pretty denizens of the jungle as we just saw at large, would be a risky proposition. We’d better hole in here in this clearing around the tank. We can keep a brush fire going all night, stand watch tricks in turn, and keep any danger off that way.”
Leeds nodded agreement. “That’s the best program.”
“You mean we gotta camp here?” Rusty demanded.
I nodded. “Exactly.”
Rusty groaned. “Whatta dump, and whatta spot to be in!”
I thought of the night gathering over the primeval jungle, and of the huge, incredibly monstrous creatures stalking the darkness in search of food. I thought of the fact that we were thousands of years in the past, utterly lost and at the mercy of a million unknown elements. Something inside me grew cold and shuddered violently. But I managed a grin for Rusty and Leeds.
“That’s the height of understatement,” I said.
And as if in answer, the blood-hungry bird screech ripped shrilly, half-humanly, out of the jungle depths once more. This time I shuddered outwardly . . .
CHAPTER IV
The Neanderthals
WE BROKE out our emergency rations and started a small fire just about the time the sun went down. And as the three of us hunched around the blaze to cheat the growing dampish cold, the jungle began really to come alive with sound.
And the sounds weren’t pretty, believe me.
They were the sounds of strange and hungry beasts waking from the slumber of a warm afternoon, stretching themselves in the growing cold and darkness before they began their forays for food.
Leeds felt the danger crackling increasingly loud through the atmosphere, and so did I. But the two of us could only envy the calm placidity with which Rusty accepted the situation. The fact that his almost bovine acceptance was due in a large part to an overwhelming ignorance of the real danger of our plight did little to alter the situation.
After that, pulling out cigarettes, we had a council of war and policy around the fire. Leeds and I, of course, carried on most of the war and shaped the policy.
Rations were the first thing slated for conservation. And an estimate of our supplies was immediately made. After that we figured them out, ounce for ounce, so that we’d get through the next six days on them. Even at that, however, they were stretched pretty thin.
Matches, clothing, medical aid and ammunition rounds were all in order, of course, for we knew our allotments in those items beforehand. However, they, too, were put on a strict rationing basis.
“We’ll need ’em for hunting when we run out of food,” said Leeds, speaking of bullets.
In his voice and his eyes, however, there was the unmistakable conclusion that we might damned well need our ammunition for sheer self-defense.
“Don’t worry about me using more than my share,” Rusty put in. “One shot to a target is plenty for old Rusty.” Which, thank God, was a fact.
We decided, then, to match off the watch tricks in four hour shifts. I drew the first, from eight to midnight. Rusty was next, from twelve to four, and Leeds was then to take over until eight.
We checked over our equipment on the M-3, getting gear and guns in shape, and then, on my instructions, Rusty and Leeds bedded down inside the tank for some shut-eye.
I took my watch near the fire, a tommy gun nestling in my lap as insurance against any disturbance, and a blanket wrapped around my shoulders for warmth against the dampness of the night.
THE stars were out in all their glory, thousands of them, jamming the sky like I’d never seen them before. I speculated for a while about those twinkling dots, wondering how much changing they’d done from this moment in the past up until the twentieth century.
And after a while I began to catch glimpses of the tiny, bright beacons flashing at me from the fringes of the jungle surrounding our clearing. Animals, of course. Of what species I didn’t dare imagine. I thought about the dinosaur track a lot, too. Don’t think I was forgetting that. I made a mental prayer that the clearing in which we were spending the night wouldn’t happen to be the ancient monster’s boudoir.
The jungle sounds continued. The queerest, chillingest bunch of noises you’ve ever heard. Now and then my feathered chum back there in the tangled undergrowth would give out one of those shrill, bloodthirsty, half-humble screeches and set my spine tingling again. I wished to God that he’d go off in some tree and take a snooze.
I thought of a line from somebody’s epic poem. You know the one.
“This is the forest primeval.”
It didn’t help much, thinking that way. But somehow I couldn’t get it out of my head. For, if ever there was a forest primeval, this was it.
Of course there was a little bit of mental argument going on in my mind against what Leeds had said. Now that I was alone some of my skepticism returned. But every time it did, the clincher he’d given me, “Go ahead, Burt. You explain it,” came back to reaffirm my faith in his theory. And what the hell, wasn’t there that track, that print of the dinosaur? And I wasn’t forgetting the miniature monster with nine legs, the thing that looked like a nightmarish toad grown a hundred times in size.
Centuries back in the past. An unknown jungle, peopled by unknown monsters, stretching God knows how many thousand miles to every side of us.
It wasn’t too pleasant to think about, so I turned my thoughts to nostalgic remembrances of the things we’d left thousands of years away from us. That wasn’t any too helpful to personal morale either, and finally I went back to concentrating on the shadows and sounds and flickering eyes around the clearing where we were camped.
The time passed this way until at last it was close to midnight, and I was climbing to my feet, shedding the blanket, and preparing to rouse Rusty for relief.
He groaned a little, grumbling sleepily, but woke at last from my none too gentle tweaking of his ear.
“Huh,” Rusty muttered. “Time for my trick?”
“You said it, child,” I told him. I shoved the tommy gun into his big and very capable paws.
He stood there, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with the big red knuckles of his right mitt, while he held the tommy gun carelessly with his left.
“When do I wake Leeds?” Rusty demanded foggily.
I WAS already bedding myself down in the bunk Rusty had occupied. Leeds lay sound asleep a few feet away in a makeshift bunk of his own fashioning.
“Four hours,” I told him, “and no sooner.”
“Gimme your timepiece,” Rusty demanded.
I removed my wristwatch and handed it to him. “Don’t know how in the hell the band will fit that wrist of yours,” I said. “Don’t snap the thing.”
Rusty held it to his ear, then grinned.
“Good to have this, huh?” he said. “I mean, out in the middle of nowhere, it’s good to have something you can depend on.”
“You sound like a magazine advertisement,” I told him. “Get out there before the wolves eat our tank up.”
“See any wolves?” Rusty said eagerly.
I made a face. “Go out and look. But don’t stray from the fire, Red Hoodingride.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Rusty advised, starting up and out the tower. “You guys’ll never have a more peaceful sleep than you’ll get now, with ole Rusty standing guard.”
“That makes me feel better already,” I said sarcastically.
