Time Travel Omnibus, page 600
The cage had arrived. Ra Chen waved an arm in signal. The door opened.
Something tremendous hovered within the big extension cage. It looked like a malevolent white mountain in there, peering back at its captors with a single tiny, angry eye. It was trying to get at Ra Chen, but it couldn’t swim in air.
Its other eye was only a torn socket. One of its flippers was ripped along the trailing edge. Rips and ridges and puckers of scar tissue, and a forest of broken wood and broken steel, marked its tremendous expanse of albino skin. Lines trailed from many of the broken harpoons. High up on one flank, bound to the beast by broken and tangled lines, was the corpse of a bearded man with one leg.
“Hardly in mint condition, is he?” Ra Chen observed.
“Be careful, sir. He’s a killer. I saw him ram a sailing ship and sink it clean before I could focus the stunners on him.”
“What amazes me is that you found him at all in the time you had left. Svetz, I do not understand your luck. Or am I missing something?”
“It wasn’t luck, sir. It was the most intelligent thing I did the entire trip.”
“You said that before. About killing Leviathan.”
Svetz hurried to explain. “The sea serpent was just leaving the vicinity. I wanted to kill him, but I knew I didn’t have the time. I was about to leave myself, when he turned back and bared his teeth.
“He was an obvious carnivore. Those teeth were built strictly for killing, sir. I should have noticed earlier. And I could think of only one animal big enough to feed a carnivore that size.”
“Ahhh. Brilliant, Svetz.”
“There was corroborative evidence. Our research never found any mention of giant sea serpents. The great geological surveys of the First Century Post-Atomic should have turned up something. Why didn’t they?”
“Because the sea serpent quietly died out two centuries earlier, after whalers killed off his food supply.”
Svetz colored. “Exactly. So I turned the stunners on Leviathan before he could swim away and I kept the stunners on him until the NAI said he was dead. I reasoned that if Leviathan was there, there must be whales in the vicinity.”
“And Leviathan’s nervous output was masking the signal.”
“Sure enough, it was. The moment he was dead, the NAI registered another signal. I followed it to—” Svetz jerked his head. They were floating the whale out of the extension cage—“to him.”
• • •
Days later, two men stood on one side of a thick glass wall.
“We took some clones from him, then passed him on to the secretary-general’s vivarium,” said Ra Chen. “Pity you had to settle for an albino.” He waved aside Svetz’s protest: “I know, I know, you were pressed for time.”
Beyond the glass, the one-eyed whale glared at Svetz through murky sea water. Surgeons had removed most of the harpoons, but scars remained along his flanks; and Svetz, awed, wondered how long the beast had been at war with man. Centuries? How long did sperm whales live?
Ra Chen lowered his voice. “We’d all be in trouble if the secretary-general found out that there was once a bigger animal than this. You understand that, don’t you, Svetz?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” Ra Chen’s gaze swept across another glass wall and a fire-breathing Gila monster. Farther down, a horse looked back at him along the dangerous spiral horn in its forehead.
“Always we find the unexpected,” said Ra Chen. “Sometimes I wonder.”
If you’d do your research better, Svetz thought.
“Did you know that time travel wasn’t even a concept until the First Century Ante-Atomic? A writer invented it. From then until the Fourth Century Post-Atomic, time travel was pure fantasy. It violates everything the scientists thought were natural laws. Logic. Conservation of matter and energy. Momentum, reaction, any law of motion that makes time a part of the statement. Relativity.
“It strikes me,” said Ra Chen, “that every time we push an extension cage past that particular five-century period, we shove it into a world that isn’t really natural. That’s why you keep finding giant sea serpents and fire-breathing.”
“That’s nonsense,” said Svetz. He was afraid of his boss, yes; but there were limits.
“You’re right,” Ra Chen said instantly. Almost with relief.
“Take a month’s vacation. Svetz, then back to work. The secretary general wants a bird.”
“A bird?” Svetz smiled. A bird sounded harmless enough. “I suppose he found it in another children’s book?”
“That’s right. Ever hear of a roc?”
THE EVER-BRANCHING TREE
Harry Harrison
The children had spread up and down the beach, and some of them had even ventured into the surf where the tall green waves crashed down upon them. Glaring from a deep blue sky, the sun burned on the yellow sand. A wave broke into foam, surging far up the shore with a soundless rush. The sharp clap-clap of Teacher’s hands could easily be heard in the sunlit silence.
“Playtime is over—put your clothes back on, Grosbit-9, all of them—and the class is about to begin.”
They straggled towards Teacher, as slowly as they could. The bathers emerged dry from the ocean, while not a grain of sand adhered to skin or garment of the others. They gathered about Teacher, their chatter gradually dying away, and he pointed dramatically at a tiny creature writhing across the sand.
“Uhggh a worm!” Mandi-2 said and shivered deliciously, shaking her red curls.
“A worm, correct. A first worm, an early worm, a protoworm. An important worm. Although it is not on the direct evolutionary track that we are studying we must pause to give it notice. A little more attention, Ched-3, your eyes are closing. For here, for the first time, we see segmentation, as important a step in the development of life as was the development of multicellular forms. See, look carefully, at those series of rings about the creature’s body. It looks as though it were made of little rings of tissue fused together—and it is.”
They bent close, a circle of lowered heads above the brown worm that writhed a track across the sand. It moved slowly towards Grosbit-9 who raised his foot and stamped down hard on the creature.
The other students tittered. The worm crawled out through the side of his shoe and kept on.
“Grosbit-9, you have the wrong attitude,” Teacher said sternly. “Much energy is being expended to send this class back through time, to view the wonders of evolution at work. We cannot feel or touch or hear or change the past, but we can move through it and see it about us. So we stand in awe of the power that permits us to do this, to visit our Earth as it was millions of years ago, to view the ocean from which all life sprung, to see one of the first life forms on the ever-branching tree of evolution. And what is your response to this awe-inspiring experience? You stamp on the annelid! For shame, Grosbit-9 for shame.”
Far from feeling shameful, Grosbit-9 chewed a hangnail on his thumb and looked about out of the corners of his eyes, the trace of a smirk upon his lips. Teacher wondered, not for the first time, how a 9
had gotten into this class. A father with important contacts, no doubt, high placed friends.
“Perhaps I had better recap for those of you who are paying less than full attention.” He stared hard at Grosbit-9 as he said this, with no apparent effect. “Evolution is how we reached the high estate we now inhabit. Evolution is the forward march of life, from the one-celled creatures to multicelled, thinking man. What will come after us we do not know, what came before us we are now seeing. Yesterday we watched the lightning strike the primordial chemical soup of the seas and saw the more complex chemicals being made that developed into the first life forms. We saw this single-celled life triumph over time and eternity by first developing the ability to divide into two cells, then to develop into composite, many-celled life forms. What do you remember about yesterday?”
“The melted lava poured into the ocean!”
“The land rose from the sea!”
“The lightning hit the water!”
“The squirmy things were so ugghhy!”
Teacher nodded and smiled and ignored the last comment. He had no idea why Mandi-2 was registered in this science course and had a strong feeling she would not stay long.
“Very good. So now we reach the annelids, like our worm here. Segmented, with each segment almost living a life of its own. Here are the first blood vessels to carry food to all the tissues most efficiently. Here is the first hemoglobin to carry oxygen to all the cells. Here is the first heart, a little pump to force the blood through those tubes. But one thing is missing yet. Do you know what it is?”
Their faces were empty of answers, their eyes wide with expectation.
“Think about it. What would have happened if Grosbit-9 had really stepped on this worm?”
“It would have squashed,” Agon-1 answered with eight-year-old practicality. Mandi-2 shivered.
“Correct. It would have been killed. It is soft, without a shell or a skeleton. Which brings us to the next branch on the evolutionary tree.”
Teacher pressed the activating button on the control unit at his waist, and the programmed computer seized them and hurled them through time to their next appointment. There was a swift, all-encompassing grayness, with no feeling of motion at all, which vanished suddenly to be replaced by a green dimness.
Twenty feet above their heads the sun sparkled on the surface of the ocean while all about them silent fish moved in swift patterns. A great monster, all plates and shining teeth, hurried at and through them and Mandi-2 gave a little squeal of surprise.
“Your attention down here, if you please. The fish will come later. First we must study these, the first echinoderms. Phill-4, will you point out an echinoderm and tell us what the term means?”
“ ‘Echinoderm.’ ” the boy said, keying his memory. The training techniques that all the children learned in their first years of schooling brought the words to his lips. Like the others he had a perfect memory. “Is Greek for spiny skin. That must be one there, the big hairy starfish.”
“Correct. An important evolutionary step. Before this, animals were either unprotected, like our annelid worm, or had skeletons outside, like snails or lobsters or insects. This is very limiting and inefficient. But an internal skeleton can give flexible support and is light in weight. An important evolutionary step has been made. We are almost there, children, almost there! This simple internal skeleton evolved into a more practical notochord, a single bone the length of the body protecting a main nerve fiber. And the chordates, the creatures with this notochord were only a single evolutionary step away from this—all this!”
Teacher threw his arms wide just as the sea about them burst into darting life. A school of silvery, yard-long fishes flashed around and through the students, while sharp-toothed sharklike predators struck through their midst. Teacher’s speech had been nicely timed to end at this precise and dramatic moment.
Some of the smaller children shied away from the flurry of life and death while Grosbit-9 swung his fist at one of the giants as it glided by.
“We have arrived,” Teacher said, vibrantly, carried away by his own enthusiasm. “The chordate give way to the vertebrate, life as we know it. A strong, flexible internal skeleton that shields the soft inner organs and supports at the same time. Soft cartilage in these sharks—the same sort of tissue that stiffens your ears—changes to hard bone in these fishes. Mankind, so to speak, is just around the corner! What is it, Ched-3?” He was aware of a tugging on his toga.
“I have to go to the—”
“Well press the return button on your belt and don’t be too long about it.”
Ched-3 pressed the button and vanished, whisked back to their classroom with its superior functional plumbing. Teacher smacked his lips annoyedly while the teeming life whirled and dived about them.
Children could be difficult at times.
“How did these animals know to get a notochord and bones?” Agon-1 asked. “How did they know the right way to go to end up with the vertebrate—and us?”
Teacher almost patted him on the head, but smiled instead.
“A good question, a very good question. Someone has been listening and thinking. The answer is they didn’t know, it wasn’t planned. The ever-branching tree of evolution has no goals. Its changes are random, mutations caused by alterations in the germ plasm caused by natural radiation. The successful changes live, the unsuccessful ones die. The notochord creatures could move about easier, were more successful than the other creatures. They lived to evolve further. Which brings us to a new word I want you to remember. The word is ‘ecology’ and we are talking about ecological niches. Ecology is the whole world, everything in it, how all the plants and animals live together and how they relate one to the other.
An ecological niche is where a creature lives in this world, the special place where it can thrive and survive and reproduce. All creatures that find an ecological niche that they can survive in are successful.”
“The survival of the fittest?” Agon-1 asked.
“You have been reading some of the old books. That is what evolution was once called, but it was called wrong. All living organisms are fit, because they are alive. One can be no more fit than the other.
Can we say that we, mankind, are more fit than an oyster?”
“Yes,” Phill-4 said, with absolute surety. His attention on Ched-3 who had just returned, apparently emerging from the side of one of the sharks.
“Really? Come over here, Ched-3, and try to pay attention. We live and the oysters live. But what would happen if the world were to suddenly be covered by shallow water?”
“How could that happen?”
“The how is not important,” Teacher snapped, then took a deep breath. “Let us just say it happened.
What would happen to all the people?”
“They would all drown!” Mandi-2 said, unhappily.
“Correct. Our ecological niche would be gone. The oysters would thrivaand cover the world. If we survive we are all equally fit in the eyes or nature. Now let us see how our animals with skeletons are faring in a new niche. Dry land.”
A press, a motionless movement, and they were on a muddy shore by a brackish swamp. Teacher pointed to the trace of a feathery fin cutting through the floating algae.
“The subclass Crossoptergii, which means fringed fins. Sturdy little fish who have managed to survive in this stagnant water by adopting thsir swim bladders to breathe air directly and to get their oxygen in this Jnanner. Many fish have these bladders that enable them to hover at any given depth, but now they have been adapted to a different use. Watch!”
The water became shallower until the fish’s back was above the water, then its bulging eyes. Staring about, round and wide, as though terrified by this new environment. The sturdy fins, reinforced by bone, thrashed at the mud, driving it forward, further and further from its home, the sea. Then it was out of the water, struggling across the drying mud. A dragonfly hovered low, landed—and was engulfed by the fish’s open mouth.
“The land is being conquered,” Teacher said, pointing to the humped back of the fish now vanishing among the reeds. “First by plants, then insects—and now the animals. In a few million years, still over 255 million years before our own time, we have this . . .”
Through time again, rushing away on the cue word, to another swampy scene, a feathery marsh of ferns as big as trees and a hot sun burning through low-lying clouds.
And life. Roaring, thrashing, eating, killing life. The time researchers must have searched diligently for this place, this instant in the history of the world. No words were needed to describe or explain.
The age of reptiles. Small ones scampered by quickly to avoid the carnage falling on them.
Scolosaurus, armored and knobbed like a tiny tank pushed through the reeds, his spiked tail dragging a rut in the mud. Great Brontosaurus stood high against the sky, his tiny, foolish head, with its teacup of brains, waving at the end of his lengthy neck, turned back to see what was bothering him as some message crept through his indifferent nervous system. His back humped-up, a mountain of gristle and bone and flesh and hooked to it was the demon form of Tyrannosaurus. His tiny forepaws scratched feebly against the other’s leathery skin while his yards-long razor-toothed jaws tore at the heaving wall of flesh. Brontosaurus, still not sure what was happening, dredged up a quarter ton of mud and water and plants and chewed it, wondering. While high above, heaving and flapping its leathery wings, Pteranodon wheeled by, long jaws agape.
“That one’s hurting the other one,” Mandi-2 said. “Can’t you make them stop?”
“We are only observers, child. What you see happened so very long ago and is unalterable in any way.”
“Kill!” Grosbit-9 muttered, his attention captured for the very first time. They all watched, mouths dropping open at the silent fury.
“These are reptiles, the first successful animals to conquer the land. Before them were the amphibia, like our modem frogs, tied un-breakably to the water where their eggs are laid and the young grow up.
But the reptiles lay eggs that can hatch on land. The link with the sea has been cut. Land has been conquered at last. They lack but a single characteristic that will permit them to survive in all the parts of the globe. You have all been preparing for this trip. Can anyone tell me what is still missing?”
The answer was only silence. Brontosaurus fell and large pieces of flesh were torn from his body.
Pteranodon flapped away. A rain squall blotted out the sun.
“I am talking about temperature. These reptiles get a good deal of their body heat from the sun. They must live in a warm environment because as their surroundings get cooler their bodies get cooler . . .”
“Warm blooded!” Agon-1 said with shrill excitement.
“Correct! Someone, at least, has been doing the required studying. I see you sticking your tongue out, Ched-3. How would you like it if you couldn’t draw it back and it stayed that way? Controlled body temperature, the last major branch on the ever-branching tree. The first class of what might be called centrally heated animals is the mammalia. The mammals. If we all go a little bit deeper into this forest you will see what I mean. Don’t straggle, keep up there. In this clearing, everyone. On this side. Watch those shrubs there. Any moment now . . .”
