Time Travel Omnibus, page 278
Leeds sat up then, blinking and cursing softly under his breath.
“Can’t you guys hold your oratorical conventions some place other than the one spot where I’m trying to grab some sleep?” he demanded.
Rusty poked his head down from the tower to ask, “Did I wake yuh, Leeds?”
Leeds glared helplessly up at him.
“No,” he answered with acid calm. “No, Rusty. You didn’t wake me. I always wake up automatically at midnight just to see what time it is.”
Rusty frowned. “Really? What a hellofa silly thing to do.” His head disappeared. Then it poked back into the tank again. “Say, what time is it?” he demanded.
I sighed. “You’ve got my watch,” I told him. “When you get to your guard post figure it out on your toes.”
Rusty muttered something, and his red head disappeared from the tower opening. We heard him clambering down the tankside a moment later.
“Sorry, Leeds,” I muttered.
“S’all right,” he muttered. “Don’t know how I’d get along sleeping normally, anyway.”
There was a silence, and I closed my eyes in the darkness, feeling suddenly tired as hell. I pulled the blanket up over my shoulders and stretched as best I could in the cramped surroundings.
“Leeds,” I said after a moment.
“Yeah?” his voice answered sleepily through the darkness.
“How damned many species of animal life do you think there’ll be around this neck of time?”
There was another silence for a moment. “Hell,” Leeds answered. “I really don’t know, Burt. Plenty of ’em. You can be sure of that. I don’t think the scientists have ever made any accurate computations.”
“This would be a helluva swell spot for a scientist,” I thought aloud, “if he could ever get back.”
“Yeah,” said Leeds, “if he could ever get back.”
Another silence.
“That brings up something I haven’t wanted to talk about,” I said after a minute or so.
“You mean about getting back, of course,” Leeds answered.
“Yeah,” I admitted. “Think we’ve any chance, ever?”
This was the longest silence. And when Leeds’ voice finally came through the darkness, it was grimly soft. “What do you think, Burt?”
“I don’t see how—” I began.
Leeds cut me off. “Neither do I,” he agreed.
We didn’t say any more after that. Pretty soon I could hear Leeds’ breathing coming regularly in sleep, and I lay there in the darkness envying him, his composure, and wondering how in the hell all this came about and where in the hell it would end.
I must have dropped off to sleep on that track . . .
A HAND was shaking my shoulder roughly, and I said something nasty in my sleep, turning over, then sitting up, blinking and rubbing my eyes.
“Damnit to hell!” I muttered. “This is no time to jar me out of the only decent rest I’ve had since—”
And by then my eyes were focusing. My eyes were focusing to the extent where I was aware of several unpleasant circumstances all at once. The first being that the interior of the tank was weirdly illuminated. Illuminated by a torch held in a gigantic, hairy hand. The second was the animal stench, the unwashed, wild and woolly odor in the air. And the third was the fact that there were two alien human beings standing over me. One of them was the owner of the hairy hand that held the torch. The other, the owner of the equally hairy paw that grabbed my shoulder so roughly. This latter person having, rather than a torch, a huge, ominous, crude club!
“What the—” I started.
But my exclamation was never completed. One of those hairy paws clamped hard across my mouth, and an arm, massively muscled, coiled tightly around my chest, pinioning me helplessly.
I was lifted off my feet, then, and carried bodily from my improvised bunk. Up through the tower, while the torchlight carrier behind me grunted in the background.
Then we were out in the clearing, and I was dumped to the ground. Rusty was there. Flat on his back, hands and arms tied by crude thongs of leather. He was out cold, a lump the size of an egg already swelling on the side of his skull.
I got a better view of our captors, now, both of them.
They were even larger than I had supposed inside the tank.
Huge, massively boned and hairy creatures. Both wore animal skins, Johnny Weismuller fashion, to cover their tremendous bodies. Their skulls were the kind you see on stone-age creatures in museum reproduction cases.
I wondered then, where in the hell Leeds McAndrews had gone. Foggily, I tried to recall whether or not he’d been in the tank when I was jarred out of my sleep by the ungentle gents who now grunted unintelligibly to one another over my prostrate form. I couldn’t remember. But it seemed safe to assume that had he been so, he’d be out here in the clearing, captive with Rusty and me.
Starting to rise to my feet, I saw the slight movement made by the club carrying behemoth to my right. I changed my mind hastily, thinking of the lump on Rusty’s skull, and went back to my former position.
Bitterly, I remembered the fears I’d held for the animal life around us. It seems I’d never given a thought to cave men.
The Neanderthalish chap with the club made a grunting noise that might have been some communication to his other chum. For the torch-bearing chappie nodded his assent and stepped around behind me.
Warily, I turned, looking back over my shoulder. Turned, to see the torch-bearer’s extremely ugly pan split in what was undoubtedly meant to be a grin.
And then I got it.
Hard against the side of my skull, while a million flames exploded in my brain and the stars came out shooting like Roman candles to a pinwheel background of wheeling planets.
The club-bearing brute had used the weapon the moment I’d turned. And as I fell through a million miles of flame splashed darkness, I was fuzzily aware of this fact. And fuzzily aware, too, that I couldn’t hang onto my last straws of consciousness any longer . . .
CHAPTER V
A Prehistoric Greeting
FOR Lord knows how long, I was certain that I’d been taken to hell. Taken to hell and placed upon a huge spit—like a barbecued chicken—which was driven through the top of my skull and straight through the rest of my body.
The spit was turning me back and forth across a huge furnace of white hot coals, toasting and crisping my body to a delicious golden brown, while savages, all of them looking like cave men, stood happily around the pit on which I was being fried, spittle drooling eagerly from the sides of their huge mouths.
And then I opened my eyes. Opened my eyes to find immediately the physical causes for the nightmare in which I’d been living.
I was stretched out, tied hand and foot, before a huge, roaring bonfire in front of the mouth of a great cave. Close enough to the fire, in fact, to dangerously approximate being spitted over white hot coals.
My back, legs, and forehead were drenched with sweat from the heat of the great blaze. And the aching in my head from the smashing blow I’d received from the primitive war club was undoubtedly the reason for my imagining that a spit had been driven through my skull.
And as for the cave savages, my nightmare had batted one thousand. They were everywhere around the big blaze, and streamed back and forth before the mouth of the huge cave.
None of them seemed to be paying the slightest attention to the trussed form of yours truly; so I squirmed this way and that, until I was able to get a better view of the primitive panorama around me.
My eyes must have been bug-wide, and it’s a cinch that my heart was hammering sledge-like in my chest as I lay there on my side, taking a long visual gulp of it all.
There were crudely fashioned ladders running along the walls on either side of the big cave entrance, and by craning my neck until it almost snapped, I was able to see smaller cave openings, perhaps a double dozen of them, at the end of each of those crude ladders.
It was evident that this location was the primeval equivalent of a Park Avenue apartment sector. I got the impression that it was close to a cliff edge, and the additional feeling that there was probably quite a drop down from said cliff edge. It seemed reasonable to assume that for protection’s sake this community was built on a mountainside.
And as much as I hated to admit it—for my own peace of mind—the citizenry of this community seemed far cruder than the dwellings they’d fashioned for their ape-like bodies.
The two chaps who’d captured Rusty and me had evidently been just average specimens of this pre-civilized humanity. For there were guys, and gals, moving around the place who were considerably more gargantuan than our original captors.
And the female of the species was repulsive beyond my wildest dreams. I thought I’d seen ugly wenches, but these walked away with last prize for all time as far as I was concerned.
They were all almost as large as their menfolk, and aside from being lumpier generally, if you know what I mean, they were hard to tell from the males.
I had a sudden, wild, foolish nostalgia for the beautiful gals of Georgia. And then I remembered that these, ironically enough, might very well be Georgia peaches of the ummmm-thousand B. C. variety.
It occurred to me, then, that I’d better squint around a bit to see what had happened to Rusty.
Some more squirming around on the earth brought me into the desired position for additional look-see of the territory.
It took me several minutes to scan the territory thoroughly enough to establish the fact that Rusty Harrigan wasn’t in evidence.
And then it took an additional two minutes for me to comprehend fully what a hell of a spot I was in.
LEEDS had been the first to disappear. I hadn’t thought about that since I’d been banged over the bean by the knotty club. But now I gave it some more very serious consideration.
I wondered, among other things, if our cavemen captors had beaten his brains out while he slept. I hadn’t thought to see if he, or the remains of him, had been in the tank at the time that the massively muscled brethren had dragged me from the interior of the tank. There hadn’t been time for that.
But, too, there had been no sign of him around the clearing when I’d discovered Rusty, out cold and tied like a hog for market, immediately before I’d been sandbagged with an ancient shillallah.
I remembered that Leeds had always been a light sleeper.
Perhaps, on hearing the sound of the scuffle that must have occurred between Rusty and the cave dweller, Leeds had piled out of the tank to see what was going on.
Perhaps he’d even engaged in the scrap alongside Rusty, maybe getting his brains beaten out in the fringes of the jungle.
I shuddered, giving up the mental debate.
But Rusty, where was he now? Had he been more than out cold there in the clearing when I’d spied him with the knot on his knob? It didn’t seem likely and I quite frankly hoped to God their club belts hadn’t killed him.
Remembering the thickness of that Mick’s skull, however, I heaved a sigh of relief and dismissed the thought. It would be utterly impossible for anyone to kill Rusty Harrigan by beating his brains out.
And then it suddenly occurred to me that the redhead must have been stealthily ambushed. For had he seen the two aboriginals advancing on our camp clearing, they’d never have survived two quick bursts from his tommy gun. Rusty Harrigan had the sharpest eye in the service, and the fastest trigger finger. An eye like an eagle—I remembered someone having commented. Then I grinned, recalling Leeds’ additional bird-like description of Rusty. And a brain like a wren—Leeds had added.
But eagle eye and wren brain notwithstanding, Rusty was nowhere around at present. And the most disconcerting factor I faced in an entire hodge-podge of impossible trouble was the fact that I now didn’t know whether Rusty or Leeds were alive any longer.
So I lay there near the roaring blaze, baking and broiling until my clothes were sticking fast to my body and my face must have been blood red. Lay there and went through a special sort of indescribable torment. Torment which brought into play all my emotions of dread, horrible suspense, futile remorse, and sick fear regarding the fate of the two best guys I’d ever known.
And finally, I don’t know how much later it was, I caught sight of thick legs and huge feet moving over toward me. I closed my eyes instinctively as I heard the guttural grunts passed between my approaching captors.
Hands were grabbing me up, then, like a limp sack of flour, and I found myself tossed up onto a broad, unpleasantly odorous, bare shoulder.
Then my insides were getting an unpleasant jolting, while I caught bobbing glimpses of the ground over which I was being carried. Suddenly the ground became stone, and I realized we were entering the large cave which I’d first seen on opening my eyes.
The place seemed illuminated flickeringly in some sort, and I decided it was probably lighted by torches placed along the walls.
We—my carrier and I—must have covered about fifty or sixty yards of caveway before we came to a halt.
I was just wondering what next, when I was dumped jarringly to the stone flooring, narrowly missing landing on my skull.
I was twisting around wildly on the floor, trying to get my snoot off the cold stone, a most difficult maneuver when bound hand and foot, when hands were once again laid most ungently on my carcass and a stone knife cut the thongs binding my aching ankles.
THIS, to date, came as the greatest surprise of my captivity. I lay there motionless, face downward, feeling that my legs were now free, but dreading to take advantage of the new freedom for fear of some unsubtle trickery.
A huge hand slapped me on the back—an unmistakable signal for me to rise to my feet.
But I didn’t move. I didn’t turn my face for a gander at the backslapper. I’d turned my noggin once, and gotten a club in the side of the skull for my curiosity.
I could hear grunt-sounds. They sounded slightly annoyed and a little bit disgusted. Probably because I wasn’t rising so I could be kicked in the stomach and knocked down again, I figured.
All of a sudden, for no particular reason that hadn’t been present all along, I got boiling mad.
I pulled my knees up under me—my arms were still bound by thongs behind my back—and tried the grimly precarious balancing feat of rising. Try to get up without support sometime when your arms are securely tied behind your back.
The first effort wasn’t successful, and wasn’t funny. I got but several feet from the floor before I spilled over on my face.
There were grunt-noises around me this time that sounded like good, hearty, primeval horselaughs.
I was beginning to turn my slow burn into a boiling rage. And the next try I spread my legs as wide as I could, one in front of me, the other behind. It did the trick.
And as I was on my feet, a hearty paw slammed me hard in the back, while a most familiar voice boomed out jovially.
“Hy-yah, Sarge!”
The voice belonged to Rusty Harrigan!
CHAPTER VI
Enter, a Queen
I WHIRLED around to face him like a dervish showing off, half my brain digesting the sound of that voice, and the other half refusing to believe it.
But it was Rusty, all right. Rusty still with a lump on his skull, and blood caked in those crimson locks of his. But Rusty in spite of hell and high tide.
I was too stunned to say anything immediately. I could only stare at him like a blasted idiot, trying to shift my mental gears to a combination that would handle this impossibility.
For Rusty looked completely unperturbed, utterly at ease, and very much amused with the antics through which I’d been putting myself in the past two or three minutes.
“What,” I croaked at last, “what in the hell is this all about?”
Rusty’s grin didn’t leave. He continued to stare smugly at me. And his self-satisfaction oozed from the tenor of his voice.
“Don’t worry about a thing, Burt old boy. Rusty Harrigan of the U.S. Armored Forces is in complete control.”
And then I noticed for the first time what sort of a place this cave we were in was; and what sort of companions stood all around us.
The cave was an extraordinarily high vaulted affair, and was some twenty or twenty-five yards wide. Looking back over Rusty’s shoulder, I could see the entrance through which I’d been taken into the place. I could see the big, roaring fire still crackling down there at the mouth of it. As I’d originally suspected, huge, crude torches were placed all along the walls to provide the illumination for the cavern.
And gathered around us, all standing a few respectful yards back from Rusty, were at least two dozen aboriginals of the type I now am getting heartily sick of.
Rusty saw my glance, and waved a genial hand at our crude chums and cavern surroundings. He spoke with the air of a greeter presenting the keys to a city.
“Some joint, eh?” he said.
I nodded. “Yeah, and some playmates.” I paused to get mad all over again in exactly half a second. “Listen,” I thundered, “I want to know what in the hell this is all about! I want you to start at the beginning and bring me right up to this minute, chum. I want a blow by blow accounting!”
Rusty grinned more broadly. “Sure, sure, if you’ll wait a minute while I have your wrist thongs cut.” He turned, making a cutting gesture with one hand over his right wrist. One of the aboriginals grunted, nodded, and stepped over to me with a stone knife in his hand.
I turned my back and the thongs were sawed through speedily by the razor-sharp edge of the stone.
The aboriginal stepped quickly back to a respectful distance behind Rusty.
“Now,” I demanded, rubbing my very sore wrists, “get on with it.”
“Very simple,” Rusty said. “These babies, musta been a good dozen of ’em, crept up on me while I was standing my watch trick. I never knew what hit me. Guess they beaned me with one of them clubs they carry.”
I interrupted him. “For your information there wasn’t a dozen of them, Rusty. There were only two. And you must have been plenty alert to let them ‘creep’ up on you.”
