Time Travel Omnibus, page 753
“Hello, there,” Sandburg said cheerily. She was wearing some sort of elaborate priestess-rig, white linen done up in curl upon stiff curl and a shimmering diadem in her black ringlets. “Ready for some fresh air?”
“So you’ve decided not to keep me here?” he said.
“What?”
“This is the day the jump field is coming back, isn’t it? And you’re letting me out.”
She blinked and peered at him as though he had spoken in some unknown language.
“What? What?”
“I’ve been keeping count. This is the day.”
“Oh, no,” she said, with an odd little laugh. “The field came yesterday. We found your alleyway, and we were there to see it. Oh, I’m so sorry, Edward. Your count must be off by a day.”
He was bewildered. “My count—off a day—”
“No doubt of it.”
He couldn’t believe it. He had ticked off the dawn of each new day so carefully, updating in his mind. The tally couldn’t be off. Couldn’t.
But it was. Why else would they be here? He saw Lehman standing behind her, now, looking fidgety and guilty. There were others there also. Eyaseyab, for one. A little party to celebrate his release. In the solitude of his cell he had lost track of the days somehow. He must have.
Sandburg took him by the hand. Numbly he let her lead him out into the hall.
“These are your slaves,” she said. “I’m giving Eyaseyab to you.”
“Thank you.” What else did you say, when they gave you a slave?
And a charioteer, and a cook, and some others.
Davis nodded. “Thank you very much,” he said stonily.
She leaned close to him. “Are you ever going to forgive us?” she asked in a soft, earnest tone. “You know we really had no choice. I wish you had never come looking for us. But once you did, we had to do what we did. If you could only believe how sorry I am, Edward—”
“Yes. Yes. Of course you are.”
He stepped past her, and into the hall, and on beyond, around a row of huge columns and into the open air. It was a hot, dry day, like all the other days. The sun was immense. It took up half the sky. I am an Egyptian now, he thought. I will never see my own era again. Fine. Fine. Whatever will be, will be. He took a deep breath. The air was like fire. It had a burning smell. Somewhere down at the far end of the colonnade, priests in splendid brocaded robes were carrying out some sort of rite, an incomprehensible passing back and forth of alabaster vessels, golden crowns, images of vultures and cobras. One priest wore the hawk-mask, one the crocodile-mask, one the ibis-mask. They no longer looked strange to him. They could have stepped right out of the reliefs on the wall of his cell.
Eyaseyab came up beside him and took his arm. She nestled close.
“You will not miss your old home,” she said. “I will see to that.”
So she knew the story too.
“You’re very kind,” he said.
“Believe me,” Eyaseyab said. “You will be happy here.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Perhaps I will.”
The masked priests were casting handfuls of some aromatic oil on a little fire in front of a small shrine. Flames rose from it, green and turquoise and crimson ones. Then one of them turned toward him and held out a tapering white vessel of the oil as if inviting him to throw some on too.
How different from Indiana all this is, Davis thought. And then he smiled. Indiana was 3500 years away. No: farther even than that. There was no Indiana. There never had been. Indiana was something out of a dream that had ended. This was a different dream now.
“It is the Nekhabet fire,” Eyaseyab said. “He wants you to make an offering. Go on. Do it, Edward-Davis. Do it!”
He looked back toward Sandburg and Lehman. They were nodding and pointing. They wanted him to do it too.
He had no idea what the Nekhabet fire was. But he shrugged and walked toward the shrine, and the priest handed him the vessel of oil. Hesitating only a moment, Davis upended it over the fire, and watched a sudden burst of colors come blazing up at him, for a moment as bright as the colors of the jump-field vortex itself. Then they died away and the fire was as it had been.
“What was that all about?” he asked Sandburg.
“The new citizen asks the protection of Isis,” she said. “And it is granted. Isis watches over you, now and forever. Come, now. We’ll take you to your new home.”
THE SYNTHETIC BARBARIAN
L. Sprague de Camp
How’s that, Miss Bergstrom? My strangest client? Let’s see . . . There was . . . come to think, I’m sure the balmiest was young Standish, Clifton Standish. Of course you’ll be careful of using people’s true names in your story, because of the chance of lawsuits.
I first heard about Standish when I got back from taking a party of paleontologists to the Permian, so they could settle arguments over which kind of Permian lizard was the ancestor of the dinosaurs, and which of the mammals, and all the rest. They explained that most of these creatures weren’t really lizards but belonged to other orders. But they looked like lizards and scuttled like lizards, so I’m willing to call them “lizards,” just as we call all members of two quite distinct later reptilian orders “dinosaurs.”
The Raja—that is, my partner, Chandra Aiyar—had been holding down the office in my absence. One day this bloke Standish came in with his friend Hofmann, saying they wanted a time safari to cave-man days, to shoot dinosaurs the way our ancestors used to do.
The Raja told me: “I explained that this was jolly well impossible, since dinosaurs disappeared from the Earth sixty-odd million years ago, and the first organisms one could rightly call ‘men’ didn’t appear till about four or five million years ago, when they were still pretty apeish. Also it took them another couple of million years to learn to hunt large, dangerous game. I cited the authorities, but I’m afraid they didn’t believe me; they wanted to speak to you. I think I detected a touch of ethnic prejudice.”
“You know I won’t stand for that sort of thing,” I said. “Did you throw them out of the office?”
“No, Reggie. Knowing you were due back shortly, I made another appointment for them. In fact, I think that buzzer means they’re here now.”
Standish and Hofmann came in and were introduced. Both were in their early thirties, but different in looks. Frank Hofmann was a good-sized bloke with the build of a former football player, now beginning to show a bit of fat. Dark hair, receding, and a little dark mustache.
What you noticed first of all about Standish was his height; he must have topped two hundred centimeters. I’m a good-sized bod, but he stared down at me. He had a decided stoop, probably from ducking door lintels. He was a skinny fellow with blond hair and blue eyes, clean-shaven, wearing gold-rimmed glasses. He thrust out a hand and bawled at me:
“Jambo, bwana!”
It had been some years since I was last in East Africa, but I managed to recall enough Kiswahili to answer:
“Hujambo, rafiki yangu! Unataka nini?”
That bloody well shut Standish up. Hofmann spoke next: “Mr. Rivers, we want a safari to the days of the dinosaurs, so we can hunt them the way our cave-man ancestors did. Mr. Aiyar says we can’t. Is it true they lived at entirely different times?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “If the Raja tells you something like that, you can take it as fair dinkum; he knows the field as well as I do. I’ve seen enough Mesozoic landscapes to have a good idea, and there was never any sign of human beings.”
Hofmann looked around uneasily. “Mind if I smoke?” he said.
“No. Hand him that ashtray, Raja, will you?”
Hofmann lit a cigarette. “Sorry; I’m a genuine addict. I once tried to stop it; but after a year without smoking, the craving was just as strong as ever. So I said what the hell? and gave up.” He blew rings.
“But,” said Standish, in a strained, high-pitched voice, “how about all those movies and comic strips that show men chasing dinosaurs and vice versa?”
“If you believe that Alice fell down a rabbit hole, or crawled through a mirror into Looking-Glass Land—you’ve read Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’ books, of course?”
Those two looked blankly at each other. No offense, Miss Bergstrom, but I can’t say I’m overwhelmed by your American educational system, if upper-class blokes grow up in such ignorance of the classics.
I explained, as patiently as I could, that something in fiction proves nothing about the real world. I went into the geological eras, but the argument ground on and on without getting anywhere. Standish was one of those coves a little loose in the top paddock, who won’t give up an idea no matter how wrong you prove it. He was still muttering about cave men and dinosaurs when I said:
“Now look here, sport! Would you, today, buy a ticket to France on the theory that you’d meet Napoleon?”
“No, of course not—oh, I see what you’re driving at. All right. Then let’s go back to the dinosaur age, the one you call the Missi—Mesa—”
“Mesozoic,” I said.
“Okay, Mesozoic. We’ll still go hunting dinosaurs, even if there aren’t any Neanderthal men around to watch us do it.”
“Very well,” I said. “The next thing is armament. Have you your own guns, or will you rent them from Rivers and Aiyar?”
“Thought I’d take my Bratislava 11-millimeter,” said Hofmann.
“That’s a good gun,” I said. It actually has a higher muzzle energy than my old Continental 600, and is also a magazine rifle. With four in the magazine and one in the chamber, you’re better off if a dinosaur or whatever comes after you than you would be with a double-barrel like mine. On the other hand, it’s a heavy bastard—must weigh over ten kilos—to lug round rough Mesozoic country, where the ground is bloody uneven. The grasses had not yet begun to take over the bare ground in the Cretaceous, so erosion was faster than in similar wild country today.
I next asked:
“How about you, Mr. Standish?”
“Oh,” he said, “I don’t plan to take a gun at all.”
“Mean you’re a camera fan? That’s okay.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. I’m going to kill a dinosaur all right, but the way our ancestors would have done it—with a bow and arrow.”
“What on earth—”
“I’ll explain. You see, I’m really a barbarian at heart. A psychic once told me I’d been a barbarian in a previous life, and I knew right away what she meant. It all fitted together.”
“You mean you think you’re a reincarnation of Attila the Hun or one of those types?”
“Exactly, though I can’t say whether it was Attila or somebody else. I don’t think I could have been a Hun, since they were Mongolians and I’m a Nordic type. Maybe a Goth or a Viking.”
“Never heard that souls were given a choice of bodies in their next lives,” I said. “But I can tell you right now, I bloody well won’t lead any jaunt into the Mesozoic for bow hunting.”
“Why not?”
“Look, sport. Have you ever killed a large reptile of any kind?”
“N-no.”
“Well, I can tell you they’re damned hard to kill—much harder than mammals or birds. That is, they can absorb fatal damage that would instantly lay out a mammal or bird of that size and still remain active long enough to kill you dead. The fact that such a reptile later lay down and died of its wounds wouldn’t be much consolation.”
“I’ll take my chances—”
“You can take all the chances with your life you bloody well wish, but not with our business. Losing a client is one of the worst things that can happen to us. . .”
That argument ground on for another half-hour, till I wondered whether taking on these clients was worth the money they’d pay us. At last Standish said:
“All right then, suppose we don’t go clear back to the Age of Dinosaurs. Why can’t we go back to this Plasticene” (He meant Pleistocene) “when men lived with mammoths and saber-toothed tigers?”
“Sorry, but we’re not allowed to send parties into that period.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because they’re afraid we might interact with those human beings and alter subsequent history. Can’t have that sort of thing in a logical universe. The instant you start to do that, the space-time forces snap you back to Present. The effect is like being dropped from an aircraft a kilometer up. Nobody survives it.”
Standish took off his glasses, wiped them, and put them back on. He said: “I read somewhere that the ancestors of the Native Americans only arrived in the Americas ten or twenty thousand years ago. Why couldn’t we go back to a little before they arrived? Plenty of big game, like those mastodons and things that got caught in the tar in California.”
“Sorry; still off-limits. They’re afraid we might meet the first immigrants from Siberia, especially since there’s a wide disagreement about their date of arrival. Some think they came over much sooner than others do.”
Standish furrowed his brow. “But couldn’t we go back to a time earlier in the Age of Mammals, but still later than the dinosaurs?”
“Right-o. We’ve taken groups to every epoch from the Paleocene to the Pliocene.” (Actually, we are allowed the earliest Pleistocene in North America; but I thought that too dangerous for this rather eccentric pair.)
“What sort of trophies do those different periods have?”
I got down one of our reference books, which had pages of drawings to scale of contemporary mammals from the epochs and continents of the Cenozoic. For instance, there’s a page that shows the principal forms from the lower Miocene of South America; another illustrating the Eocene of eastern Asia; and so on.
Standish, who seemed the dominant one of the pair even though the goofier, thumbed through the book. He and Hofmann muttered over the pictures. Finally Standish said:
“Mr. Rivers, the handsomest trophies shown in here are from the Old World, like that Baluchitherium and those dinotheres. The weirdest are some of those from South America. Could we get to one of those?”
“Afraid not,” I said. “Professor Prochaska’s transition chamber travels back in time but keeps the same latitude and longitude. It must, to make bloody sure it materializes back in the present in the exact place it departed from. If it didn’t, we might have a monster explosion.”
“Then,” said Hofmann, “let’s go over the North American faunas again, Cliff.”
There was another wait for them to make up their minds, if that is the word I want. The Raja and I spent the time totting up the accounts of my Permian safari. Then Standish spoke:
“Mr. Rivers, I think we want to go to the Oily—the Oligocene, to get ourselves a brontothere head or two. The critters from the later North American periods seem to be mostly smaller; until we get to the Plasticene, they all look pretty much alike, like hornless sheep and goats, without the wool.”
A brontothere, Miss Bergstrom? They were the largest of the titanotheres, dominant in the early Oligocene and related to modern horses and rhinos. The big ones looked like elephant-sized rhinos, except that instead of one or two horns on the centerline of the skull, they had a pair of blunt horns side by side on the nose. My scientific friends say those bumps are not technically horns, but mere bony outgrowths of the skull, covered in life by hard skin. But for practical purposes we call them “horns.”
Anyway, we agreed to make this trip to the Oligocene, about the time of the White River formation in Wyoming and Colorado. We don’t have a formation of that date in this part of the States, but it must have held a similar fauna, with local differences.
We set the date of departure for a fortnight ahead, to give our clients time to get ready. Then we got a call from a Professor Huang Xijing of the University of Nanjing, asking if he could go on this safari, too. He said he didn’t intend to hunt; instead he hoped to settle some scientific questions. Since his university was putting up the money, we were glad to have him; every additional client helps to pay the time-chamber fees, which are bloody steep. The thing uses fantastic amounts of electric power.
Before the date of departure, I went to my friends on your newspaper staff and got them to look up the good oil on these two. Seems they were boyhood chums. Nothing remarkable in Hofmann’s record; as I guessed, he had played football in college, but flunked out. Standish had never gone at all. He’d been sent to that fancy school where there was a big scandal around twenty years ago, with a lot of—ah—
Thank you, Miss Bergstrom. Since you say so, it was half the boys buggering one another and the teacher. I wouldn’t have put it quite so—ah—baldly to a lady, but . . . I don’t think your editor will let you get away with it; but that’s your problem.
Since then, Clifton Standish had held a few jobs, none of which lasted long; and he’d done a spot of traveling. Frank Hofmann’s adult record was similar. Since both were filthy rich, they didn’t have to worry about their tucker. Standish hadn’t been one of the homosexual gang at the school; but he felt tainted by having gone there and was determined to prove his masculinity. This, I suspected, accounted for his itch to play cave man.
I learned one thing more that gave me pause. Seems Hofmann had married the girl that Standish had been courting for several years.
One other preliminary was to check out the clients on the range, to judge how far they were to be trusted with guns. I met the pair there, Hofmann with his Bratislava and Standish with his bow. The gun was straightforward, and Hofmann proved himself a reasonably good shot.
Standish’s bow looked like no bow I’d ever seen. The bow proper was an arc of some metal-and-plastic combination, with offsets so the arrow went through the centerline. Instead of a plain cord, the string was led through pulleys. The bow had a sight, adjustable for range and windage. Robin Hood would never have recognized the thing. Standish said:
“You don’t think I can kill things with this, Reggie? Set me up a board, two centimeters thick, and I’ll show you!”
The board was set up, and Standish sent an arrow clear through it, so that the head stuck out on the further side.
