Time Travel Omnibus, page 492
We’d finished off the bonehead, so the first thing was to shoot fresh meat. With an eye to trophies, too, of course. We got ready the morning of the third.
I told James: “See here, old boy, no more of your tricks. The Raja will tell you when to shoot.”
“Uh-huh, I get you,” he said, meek as Moses. Never could tell how the chap would act.
We marched off, the four of us, into the foothills. We were looking for bonehead, but we’d take an ornithomime. There was also a good chance of getting Holtzinger his ceratopsian. We’d seen a couple on the way up, but mere calves without decent horns.
It was hot and sticky and we were soon panting and sweating like horses. We’d hiked and scrambled all morning without seeing a thing except lizards, when I picked up the smell of carrion. I stopped the party and sniffed. We were in an open glade cut up by these little dry nullahs. The nullahs ran together into a couple of deeper gorges that cut through a slight depression choked with a denser growth, cycad and screw-pine. When I listened, I heard the thrum of carrion flies.
“This way,” I said. “Something ought to be dead—ah, here it is!”
And there it was: the remains of a huge ceratopsian lying in a little hollow on the edge of the copse. Must have weighed six or eight tons alive; a three-horned variety, perhaps the penultimate species of Triceratops. It was hard to tell because most of the hide on the upper surface had been ripped off and many bones had been pulled loose and lay scattered about.
HOLTZINGER said: “Oh, hell! Why couldn’t I have gotten to him before he died? That would have been a darn fine head.” Associating with us rough types had made little August profane, you’ll observe.
I said: “On your toes, chaps. A theropod’s been at this carcass and is probably nearby.”
“How d’you know?” James challenged, with the sweat running off his round red face. He spoke in what was for him a low voice, because a nearby theropod is a sobering thought even to the flightiest.
I sniffed again and thought I could detect the distinctive rank odor of theropod. But I couldn’t be sure because the stench of the carcass was so strong. My sahibs were turning green at the sight and smell of the cadaver.
I told James: “It’s seldom even the biggest theropod will attack a full-grown ceratopsian. Those horns are too much for them. But they love a dead or dying one. They’ll hang round a dead ceratopsian for weeks, gorging and then sleeping their meals off for days at a time. They usually take cover in the heat of the day anyhow, because they can’t stand much direct hot sunlight. You’ll find them lying in copses like this or in hollows, anywhere there’s shade.”
“What’ll we do?” asked Holtzinger.
“We’ll make our first cast through this copse, in two pairs as usual. Whatever you do, don’t get impulsive or panicky.” I looked at Courtney James, but he looked right back and then merely checked his gun.
“Should I still carry this broken?” he wanted to know.
“No; close it, but keep the safety on till you’re ready to shoot,” I said. It’s risky carrying a double closed like that, especially in brush, but with a theropod nearby, it would have been a greater risk to carry it open and perhaps catch a twig in it when one tried to close it.
“We’ll keep closer than usual, to be in sight of each other,” I said. “Start off at that angle, Raja. Go slowly and stop to listen between steps.”
We pushed through the edge of the copse, leaving the carcass but not its stink behind us. For a few feet, we couldn’t see a thing. It opened out as we got in under the trees, which shaded out some of the brush. The Sun slanted down through the trees. I could hear nothing but the hum of insects and the scuttle of lizards and the squawks of toothed birds in a treetop. I thought I could be sure of the theropod smell, but told myself that might be imagination. The theropod might be any of several species, large or small, and the beast itself might be anywhere within a half-mile radius.
“Go on,” I whispered to Holtzinger, for I could hear James and the Raja pushing ahead on my right and see the palm-fronds and ferns lashing about as they disturbed them. I suppose they were trying to move quietly, but to me they sounded like an earthquake in a crockery shop.
“A little closer,” I called, and presently they appeared slanting in toward me.
WE DROPPED into a gully filled with ferns and clambered up the other side, then found our way blocked by a big clump of palmetto.
“You go round that side: we’ll go round this,” I said, and we started off, stopping to listen and smell. Our positions were exactly the same as on that first day when James killed the bonehead.
I judge we’d gone two-thirds of the way round our half of the palmetto when I heard a noise ahead on our left. Holtzinger heard it and pushed off his safety. I put my thumb on mine and stepped to one side to have a clear field.
The clatter grew louder. I raised my gun to aim at about the height a big theropod’s heart would be at the distance it would appear to us out of the greenery. There was a movement in the foliage—and a six-foot-high bone-head stepped into view, walking solemnly across our front from left to right, jerking its head with each step like a giant pigeon.
I heard Holtzinger let out a breath and had to keep myself from laughing. Holtzinger said: “Uh—”
“Quiet,” I whispered. “The theropod might still—”
That was as far as I got when that damned gun of James’s went off, bang! bang! I had a glimpse of the bonehead knocked arsy-varsy with its tail and hindlegs flying.
“Got him!” yelled James, and I heard him run forward.
“My God, if he hasn’t done it again!” I groaned. Then there was a great swishing, not made by the dying bonehead, and a wild yell from James. Something heaved up and out of the shrubbery and I saw the head of the biggest of the local flesh-eaters, tyrannosaurus trionyches himself.
The scientists can insist that rex is bigger than trionchyes, but I’ll swear this tyrannosaur was bigger than any rex ever hatched. It must have stood twenty feet high and been fifty feet long. I could see its big bright eye and six-inch teeth and the big dewlap that hangs down from its chin to its chest.
The second of the nullahs that cut through the copse ran athwart our path on the far side of the palmetto clump. Perhaps six feet deep. The tyrannosaur had been lying in this, sleeping off its last meal. Where its back stuck up above ground level, the ferns on the edge of the nullah masked it. James had fired both barrels over the theropod’s head and woke it up. Then James, to compound his folly, ran forward without reloading. Another twenty feet and he’d have stepped on the tyrannosaur’s back.
JAMES understandably stopped when this thing popped up in front of him. He remembered his gun was empty and he’d left the Raja too far behind to get a clear shot.
James kept his nerve at first. He broke open his gun, took two rounds from his belt and plugged them into the barrels. But in his haste to snap the gun shut, he caught his right hand between the barrels and the action—the fleshy part between his thumb and palm. It was a painful pinch and so startled James that he dropped his gun. That made him go to pieces and he bolted.
His timing couldn’t have been worse. The Raja was running up with his gun at high port, ready to snap it to his shoulder the instant he got a clear view of the tyrannosaur. When he saw James running headlong toward him, it made him hesitate, as he didn’t want to shoot James. The latter plunged ahead and, before the Raja could jump aside, blundered into him and sent them both sprawling among the ferns. The tyrannosaur collected what little wits it had and crashed after to snap them up.
And how about Holtzinger and me on the other side of the palmettos? Well, the instant James yelled and the tyrannosaur’s head appeared, Holtzinger darted forward like a rabbit. I’d brought my gun up for a shot at the tyrannosaur’s head, in hope of getting at least an eye, but before I could find it in my sights, the head was out of sight behind the palmettos. Perhaps I should have shot at where I thought it was, but all my experience is against wild shots.
When I looked back in front of me, Holtzinger had already disappeared round the curve of the palmetto clump. I’m pretty heavily built, as you can see, but I started after him with a good turn of speed, when I heard his rifle and the click of the bolt between shots: bang—click-click—bang—click-click, like that.
He’d come up on the tyrannosaur’s quarter as the brute started to stoop for James and the Raja. With his muzzle twenty feet from the tyrannosaur’s hide, he began pumping .375s into the beast’s body. He got off three shots when the tyrannosaur gave a tremendous booming grunt and wheeled round to see what was stinging it. The jaws came open and the head swung round and down again.
Holtzinger got off one more shot and tried to leap to one side. He was standing on a narrow place between the palmetto clump and the nullah. So he fell into the nullah. The tyrannosaur continued its lunge and caught him, either as he was falling or after he struck bottom. The jaws went chomp and up came the head with poor Holtzinger in them, screaming like a doomed soul.
I CAME up just then and aimed at the brute’s face. Then I realized its jaws were full of my friend and I’d be shooting him. As the head went up, like the business end of a big power shovel, I fired a shot at the heart. But the tyrannosaur was already turning away and I suspect the ball just glanced along the ribs.
The beast took a couple of steps away when I gave it the other barrel in the back. It staggered on its next step but kept on. Another step and it was nearly out of sight among the trees, when the Raja fired twice. The stout fellow had untangled himself from James, got up, picked up his gun and let the tyrannosaur have it.
The double wallop knocked the brute over with a tremendous smash. It fell into a dwarf magnolia and I saw one of its hindlegs waving in the midst of a shower of incongruously pretty pink-and-white petals.
Can you imagine the leg of a bird of prey enlarged and thickened until it’s as big round as the leg of an elephant?
But the tyrannosaur got up again and blundered off without even dropping its victim. The last I saw of it was Holtzinger’s legs dangling out one side of its jaws (by now he’d stopped screaming) and its big tail banging against the tree-trunks as it swung from side to side.
The Raja and I reloaded and ran after the brute for all we were worth. I tripped and fell once, but jumped up again and didn’t notice my skinned elbow till later. When we burst out of the copse, the tyrannosaur was already at the far end of the glade. I took a quick shot, but probably missed, and it was out of sight before I could fire another.
We ran on, following the tracks and spatters of blood, until we had to stop from exhaustion. Their movements look slow and ponderous, but with those tremendous legs, they don’t have to step very fast to work up considerable speed.
When we’d finished gasping and mopping our foreheads, we tried to track the tyrannosaur, on the theory that it might be dying and we should come up to it. But the spoor faded out and left us at a loss. We circled round hoping to pick it up, but no luck.
Hour later, we gave up and went back to the glade, feeling very dismal.
COURTNEY JAMES was sitting with his back against a tree, holding his rifle and Holtzinger’s. His right hand was swollen and blue where he’d pinched it, but still usable.
His first words were: “Where the hell have you been? You shouldn’t have gone off and left me; another of those things might have come along. Isn’t it bad enough to lose one hunter through your stupidity without risking another one?”
I’d been preparing a pretty warm wigging for James, but his attack so astonished me, I could only bleat: “We lost—?”
“Sure,” he said. “You put us in front of you, so if anybody gets eaten, it’s us. You send a guy up against these animals undergunned. You—”
“You stinking little swine,” I began and went on from there. I learned later he’d spent his his time working out an elaborate theory according to which this disaster was all our fault—Holtzinger’s, the Raja’s and mine. Nothing about James’s firing out of turn or panicking or Holtzinger’s saving his worthless life. Oh, dear, no. It was the Raja’s fault for not jumping out of his way, etcetera.
Well, I’ve led a rough life and can express myself quite eloquently. The Raja tried to keep up with me, but ran out of English and was reduced to cursing James in Hindustani.
I could see by the purple color on James’s face that I was getting home. If I’d stopped to think, I should have known better than to revile a man with a gun. Presently James put down Holtzinger’s rifle and raised his own, saying: “Nobody calls me things like that and gets away with it. I’ll just say the tyrannosaur ate you, too.”
The Raja and I were standing with our guns broken open, under our arms, so it would take a good part of a second to snap them shut and bring them up to fire. Moreover, you don’t shoot a .600 holding it loosely in your hands, not if you know what’s good for you. Next thing, James was setting the butt of his .500 against his shoulder, with the barrels pointed at my face. Looked like a pair of blooming vehicular tunnels.
The Raja saw what was happening before I did. As the beggar brought his gun up, he stepped forward with a tremendous kick. Used to play football as a young chap, you see. He knocked the .500 up and it went off so the bullet missed my head by an inch and the explosion jolly well near broke my eardrums.
The butt had been punted away from James’s shoulder when the gun went off, so it came back like the kick of a horse. It spun him half round.
The Raja dropped his own gun, grabbed the barrels and twisted it out of James’s hands, nearly breaking the bloke’s trigger finger. He meant to hit James with the butt, but I rapped James across the head with my own barrels, then bowled him over and began punching the stuffing out of him. He was a good-sized lad, but with my sixteen stone, he had no chance.
WHEN HIS face was properly discolored, I stopped. We turned him over, took a strap out of his knapsack and tied his wrists behind him. We agreed there was no safety for us unless we kept him under guard every minute until we got him back to our time. Once a man has tried to kill you, don’t give him another opportunity. Of course he might never try again, but why risk it?
We marched James back to camp and told the crew what we were up against. James cursed everybody and dared us to kill him.
“You’d better, you sons of bitches, or I’ll kill you some day,” he said. “Why don’t you? Because you know somebody’d give you away, don’t you? Ha-ha!”
The rest of that safari was dismal. We spent three days combing the country for that tyrannosaur. No luck. It might have been lying in any of those nullahs, dead or convalescing, and we should never see it unless we blundered on top of it. But we felt it wouldn’t have been cricket not to make a good try at recovering Holtzinger’s remains, if any.
After we got back to our main camp, it rained. When it wasn’t raining, we collected small reptiles and things for our scientific friends. When the transition chamber materialized, we fell over one another getting into it.
The Raja and I had discussed the question of legal proceedings by or against Courtney James. We decided there was no precedent for punishing crimes committed eighty-five million years before, which would presumably be outlawed by the statute of limitations. We therefore untied him and pushed him into the chamber after all the others but us had gone through.
When we came out in the present, we handed him his gun—empty—and his other effects. As we expected, he walked off without. a word, his arms full of gear. At that point, Holtzinger’s girl, Claire Roche, rushed up crying: “Where is he? Where’s August?”
I WON’T go over the painful scene except to say it was distressing in spite of the Raja’s skill at that sort of thing.
We took our men and beasts down to the old laboratory building that Washington University has fitted up as a serai for expeditions to the past. We paid everybody off and found we were nearly broke. The advance payments from Holtzinger and James didn’t cover our expenses and we should have damned little chance of collecting the rest of our fees from James or from Holtzinger’s estate.
And speaking of James, d’you know what that blighter was doing all this time? He went home, got more ammunition and came back to the university. He hunted up Professor Prochaska and asked him:
“Professor, I’d like you to send me back to the Cretaceous for a quick trip. If you can work me into your schedule right now, you can just about name your own price. I’ll offer five thousand to begin with. I want to go to April twenty-third, eighty-five million B.C.”
Prochaska answered: “Vot do you vant to go back again so soon so badly for?”
“I lost my wallet in the Cretaceous,” said James. “I figure if I go back to the day before I arrived in that era on my last trip, I’ll watch myself when I arrived on that trip and follow myself till I see myself lose the wallet.”
“Five thousand is a lot for a vallet.”
“It’s got some things in it I can’t replace. Suppose you let me worry about whether it’s worth my while.”
“Veil,” said Prochaska, thinking, “the party that vas supposed to go out this morning has phoned that they vould be late, so maybe I can vork you in. I have alvays vondered vot vould happen vhen the same man occupied the same time tvice.”
So James wrote out a check and Prochaska took him to the chamber and saw him off. James’s idea, it seems, was to sit behind a bush a few yards from where the transition chamber would appear and pot the Raja and me as we emerged.
HOURS later, we’d changed into our street-clothes and phoned our wives to come get us. We were standing on Forsythe Boulevard waiting for them when there was a loud crack, like an explosion or a close-by clap of thunder, and a flash of light not fifty feet from us. The shock-wave staggered us and broke windows in quite a number of buildings.
We ran toward the place and got there just as a policeman and several citizens came up. On the boulevard, just off the curb, lay a human body. At least it had been that, but it looked as if every bone in it had been pulverized and every blood vessel burst. The clothes it had been wearing were shredded, but I recognized an H. & H. .500 double-barreled express rifle. The wood was scorched and the metal pitted, but it was Courtney James’s gun. No doubt whatever.
