Niven, Larry - The flight of the horse

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A Del Rey Book

Published by Ballantine Books

House, Inc., New York and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Parts of this book were previously published:

ISBN 0-345-33418-3

Printed in Canada

First Edition: September 1973

Ninth Printing: October 1985

Cover art by Boris Vallejo

DEDICATION

There was a time when I had to tell a story to someone, verbally, to know if it was worth writing.

I had to know where the story was confused, or what points to explain fully, or whether I had made

my point, or even whether I had a point to make. I bent a lot of ears in those days,

This book is dedicated to those who were willing to listen. Starting with my brother Mike.

Contents

The Flight of the Horse

Leviathan

Bird in the Hand

There's a Wolf in My Time Machine

Death in a Cage

Flash Crowd

What Good is a Glass Dagger?

Afterword

The Flight of the Horse

The year was 750 AA (Ante Atomic) or 1200 AD (Anno Domini), approximately. Hanville Svetz stepped

out of the extension cage and looked about him.

To Svetz the atomic bomb was eleven hundred years old and the horse was a thousand years dead. It

was his first trip into the past. His training didn't count; it had not included actual time-

travel, which cost several million commercials a shot. Svetz was groggy from the peculiar

gravitational side-effects of time-travel. He was high on pre-industrial-age air, and drunk on his

own sense of destiny; while at the same time he was not really convinced that he had gone

anywhere. Or anywhen. Trade joke.

He was not carrying the anesthetic rifle. He had come to get a horse; he had not expected to meet

one at the door. How big was a horse? Where were horses found? Consider what the institute had had

to go on: a few pictures in a salvaged children's book, and an old legend, not to be trusted, that

the horse had once been used as a kind of animated vehicle!

In an empty land beneath an overcast sky, Svetz braced himself with one hand on the curved flank

of the extension cage. His head was spinning. It took him several seconds to realize that he was

looking at a horse.

It stood fifteen yards away, regarding Svetz with large intelligent brown eyes. It was much larger

than he had expected. Further, the horse in the picture book had had a glossy brown pelt with a

short mane, while the beast now facing Svetz was pure white, with a mane that flowed like a

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woman's long hair. There were other differences . . . but no matter, the beast matched the book

too well to be anything but a horse.

To Svetz it seemed that the horse watched him, waited for him to realize what was happening. Then,

while Svetz wasted more time wondering why he wasn't holding a rifle, the horse laughed, turned

and departed. It disappeared with astonishing speed.

Svetz began to shiver. Nobody had warned him that the horse might have been sentient! Yet the

beast's mocking laugh had sounded far too human.

Now he knew. He was deep, deep in the past.

Not even the horse was as convincing as the emptiness the horse had left behind. No reaching

apartment towers clawed the horizon. No contrails scratched the sky. The world was trees and

flowers and rolling grassland, innocent of men.

The silence- It was as if Svetz had gone deaf. He had heard no sound since the laughter of the

horse. In the year 1100, Post Atomic, such silence could have been found nowhere on Earth.

Listening, Svetz knew at last that he had reached the British Isles before the coming of

civilization. He had traveled in time.

The extension cage was the part of the time machine that did the traveling. It had its own air

supply, and needed it while being pushed through time. But not here. Not before civilization's

dawn; not when the air had never been polluted by fission wastes and the combustion of coal,

hydrocarbons, tobaccos, wood, et al.

Now, retreating in panic from that world of the past to the world of the extension cage, Svetz

nonetheless left the door open behind him.

He felt better inside the cage. Outside was an unexplored planet, made dangerous by ignorance.

Inside the cage it was no different from a training mission. Svetz had spent hundreds of hours in

a detailed mock-up of this cage, with a computer running the dials. There had even been artificial

gravity to simulate the peculiar side-effects of motion in time.

By now the horse would have escaped. But he now knew its size, and he knew there were horses in

the area. To business, then.

Svetz took the anesthetic rifle from where it was clamped to the wall. He loaded it with what he

guessed was the right size of soluble crystalline anesthetic needle. The box held several

different sizes, the smallest of which would knock a shrew harmlessly unconscious, the largest of

which would do the same for an elephant. He slung the rifle and stood up.

The world turned grey. Svetz caught a wall clamp to stop himself from falling.

The cage had stopped moving twenty minutes ago. He shouldn't still be dizzy!-But it had been a

long trip. Never before had the Institute for Temporal Research pushed a cage beyond zero PA. A

long trip and a strange one, with gravity pulling Svetz's mass uniformly toward Svetz's navel .

When his head cleared, he turned to where other equipment was clamped to a wall.

The flight stick was a lift-field generator and power source built into five feet of pole, with a

control ring at one end, a brush discharge at the other, and a bucket seat and seat belt in the

middle. Compact even for Svetz's age, the flight stick was spin-off from the spaceflight

industries.

But it still weighed thirty pounds with the motor off. Getting it out of the clamps took all his

strength. Svetz felt queasy, very queasy.

He bent to pick up the flight stick, and abruptly realized that he was about to faint.

He hit the door button and fainted.

"We don't know where on Earth you'll wind up," Ra Chen had told him. Ra Chen was the Director of

the Institute for Temporal Research, a large round man with gross, exaggerated features and a

permanent air of disapproval. "That's because we can't focus on a particular time of day-or on a

particular year, for that matter. You won't appear underground or inside anything because of

energy considerations. If you come out a thousand feet in the air, the cage won't fall; it'll

settle slowly, using up energy with a profligate disregard for our budget . . ."

And Svetz had dreamed that night, vividly. Over and over his extension cage appeared inside solid

rock, exploded with a roar and a blinding flash.

"Officially, the horse is for the Bureau of History," Ra Chen had said. "In practice it's for the

Secretary-General, for his twenty-eighth birthday. Mentally he's about six years old, you know.

The royal family's getting a bit inbred these days. We managed to send him a picture book we

picked up in 130 PA, and now the lad wants a horse . . ."

Svetz had seen himself being shot for treason, for the crime of listening to such talk.

". . . Otherwise we'd never have gotten the appropriation for this trip. It's in a good cause.

We'll do some cloning from the horse before we send the original to the UN. Then-well, genes are a

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code, and codes can be broken. Get us a male, and we'll make all the horses anyone could want."

But why would anyone want even one horse? Svetz had studied a computer duplicate of the child's

picture book that an agent had pulled from a ruined house a thousand years ago. The horse did not

impress him.

Ra Chen, however, terrified him.

"We've never sent anyone this far back," Ra Chen had told him the night before the mission, when

it was too late to back out with honor. "Keep that in mind. If something goes wrong, don't count

on the rule book. Don't count on your instruments. Use your head. Your head, Svetz. God knows it's

little enough to depend on . . ."

Svetz had not slept in the hours before departure.

"You're scared stiff," Ra Chen commented just before Svetz entered the extension cage. "And you

can hide it, Svetz. I think I'm the only one who's noticed. That's why I picked you, because you

can be terrified and go ahead anyway. Don't come back without a horse..."

The director's voice grew louder. "Not without a horse, Svetz. Your head, Svetz, your HEAD...

Svetz sat up convulsively. The air! Slow death if he didn't close the door! But the door was

closed, and Svetz was sitting on the floor holding his head, which hurt.

The air system had been transplanted, complete with dials, intact from a Martian sandboat. The

dials read normally, of course, since the cage was sealed.

Svetz nerved himself to open the door. As the sweet, rich air of twelfth-century Britain rushed

in, Svetz held his breath and watched the dials change. Presently he closed the door and waited,

sweating, while the air system replaced the heady poison with its own safe, breathable mixture.

When next he left the extension cage, carrying the flight stick, Svetz was wearing another spin-

off from the interstellar-exploration industries. It was a balloon, and he wore it over his head.

It was also a selectively permeable membrane, intended to pass certain gasses in and others out,

to make a breathing-air mixture inside.

It was nearly invisible except at the rim. There, where light was refracted most severely, the

balloon showed as a narrow golden circle enclosing Svetz's head. The effect was not unlike a halo

as shown in medieval paintings. But Svetz didn't know about medieval paintings.

He wore also a simple white robe, undecorated, constricted at the waist, otherwise falling in

loose folds. The institute thought that such a garment was least likely to violate taboos of sex

or custom. The trade kit dangled loose from his sash: a heat-and-pressure gadget, a pouch of

corundum, small phials of additives for color.

Lastly he wore a hurt and baffled look. How was it that he could not breath the clean air of his

own past?

The air of the cage was the air of Svetz's own time, and was nearly four percent carbon dioxide.

The air of 750 Ante Atomic held barely a tenth of that. Man was a rare animal here and now. He had

breathed little air, he had destroyed few forests, he had burnt scant fuel since the dawn of time.

But industrial civilization meant combustion. Combustion meant carbon dioxide thickening in the

atmosphere many times faster than the green plants could turn it back to oxygen. Svetz was at the

far end of two thousand years of adaptation to air rich in CO2.

It takes a concentration of carbon dioxide to trigger the autonomic nerves in the lymph glands in

a man's left armpit. Svetz had fainted because he wasn't breathing.

So now he wore a balloon, and felt rejected.

He straddled the flight stick and twisted the control knob on the fore end. The stick lifted under

him, and he wriggled into place on the bucket seat. He twisted the knob further.

He drifted upward like a toy balloon.

He floated over a lovely land, green and untenanted, beneath a pearl-grey sky empty of contrails.

Presently he found a crumbling wall. He turned to follow it.

He would follow the wall until he found a settlement. If the old legend was true-and, Svetz

reflected, the horse had certainly been big enough to drag a vehicle-then he would find horses

wherever he found men.

Presently it became obvious that a road ran along the wall. There the dirt was flat and bare and

consistently wide enough for a walking man; whereas elsewhere the land rose and dipped and tilted.

Hard dirt did not a freeway make; but Svetz got the point.

He followed the road, floating at a height of ten meters. There was a man in worn brown garments.

Hooded and barefoot, he walked the road with patient exhaustion, propping himself with a staff.

His back was to Svetz.

Svetz thought to dip toward him to ask concerning horses. He refrained. With no way to know where

the cage would alight, he had learned no ancient languages at all.

He thought of the trade kit he carried, intended not for communication, but instead of

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communication. It had never been field-tested. In any case it was not for casual encounters. The

pouch of corundum was too small.

Svetz heard a yell from below. He looked down in time to see the man in brown running like the

wind, his staff forgotten, his fatigue likewise.

"Something scared him," Svetz decided. But he could see nothing fearful. Something small but

deadly, then.

The institute estimated that man had exterminated more than a thousand species of mammal and bird

and insect-some casually, some with malice-between now and the distant present. In this time and

place there was no telling what might be a threat. Svetz shuddered. The brown man with the hairy

face might well have run from a stinging thing destined to kill Hanville Svetz.

Impatiently Svetz upped the speed of his flight stick. The mission was taking far too long. Who

would have guessed that centers of population would have been so far apart?

Half an hour later, shielded from the wind by a paraboloid force-field, Svetz was streaking down

the road at sixty miles per hour.

His luck had been incredibly bad. Wherever he had chanced across a human being, that person had

been just leaving the vicinity. And he had found no centers of population.

Once he had noticed an unnatural stone outcropping high on a hill. No law of geology known to

Svetz could have produced such an angular, flat-sided monstrosity. Curious, he had circled above

it-and had abruptly realized that the thing was hollow, riddled with rectangular holes.

A dwelling for men? He didn't want to believe it. Living within the hollows of such a thing would

be like living underground. But men tend to build at right angles, and this thing was all right

angles.

Below the hollowed stone structure were rounded, hairy-looking hummocks of dried grass, each with

a man-sized door. Obviously they must be nests for very large insects. Svetz had left that place

quickly.

The road rounded a swelling green hill ahead of him. Svetz followed, slowing.

A hilltop spring sent a stream bubbling down hill to break the road. Something large was drinking

at the stream.

Svetz jerked to a stop in midair. Open water: deadly poison. He would have been hard put to say

which had startled him more: the horse, or the fact that it had just committed suicide.

The horse looked up and saw him.

It was the same horse. White as milk, with a flowing abundance of snowy mane and tail, it almost

had to be the horse that had laughed at Svetz and run. Svetz recognized the malignance in its

eyes, in the moment before it turned its back.

But how could it have arrived so fast?

Svetz was reaching for the gun when the situation turned upside down.

The girl was young, surely no more than sixteen. Her hair was long and dark and plaited in complex

fashion. Her dress, of strangely stiff blue fabric, reached from her neck to her ankles. She was

seated in the shadow of a tree, on dark cloth spread over the dark earth. Svetz had not noticed

her, might never have noticed her.

But the horse walked up to her, folded its legs in alternate pairs, and laid its ferocious head in

her lap.

The girl had not yet seen Svetz.

"Xenophilia!" Svetz snarled the worst word he could think of. Svetz hated aliens.

The horse obviously belonged to the girl. He could not simply shoot it and take it. It would have

to be purchased . . . somehow.

He needed time to think! And there was no time, for the girl might look up at any moment. Baleful

brown eyes watched him as he dithered.

He dared waste no more time searching the countryside for a wild horse. There was an uncertainty,

a Finagle factor in the math of time-travel. It manifested itself as an uncertainty in the energy

of a returning extension cage, and it increased with time. Let Svetz linger too long, and he could

be roasted alive in the returning cage.

Moreover, the horse had drunk open water. It would die, and soon, unless Svetz could return it to

1100 Post Atomic. Thus the beast's removal from this time could not change the history of Svetz's

own world. It was a good choice . . . if he could conquer his fear of the beast.

The horse was tame. Young and slight as she was, the girl had no trouble controlling it. What was

there to fear?

But there was its natural weaponry . . . of which Ra Chen's treacherous picture book had shown no

sign. Svetz surmised that later generations routinely removed it before the animals were old

enough to be dangerous. He should have come a few centuries later.

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And there was the look in its eye. The horse hated Svetz, and it knew Svetz was afraid.

Could he shoot it from ambush?

No. The girl would worry if her pet collapsed without reason. She would be unable to concentrate

on what Svetz was trying to tell her.

He would have to work with the animal watching him. If the girl couldn't control it-or if lie lost

her trust-Svetz had little doubt that the horse would kill him.

The horse looked up as Svetz approached, but made no other move. The girl watched too, her eyes

round with wonder. She called something that must have been a question.

Svetz smiled back and continued his approach. He was a foot above the ground, and gliding at dead

slow. Riding the world's only flying machine, he looked impressive as all hell, and knew it.

The girl did not smile back. She watched warily. Svetz was within yards of her when she scrambled

to her feet.

He stopped the flight stick at once and let it settle. Smiling placatorially, he removed the heat-

and-pressure device from his sash. He moved with care. The girl was on the verge of running.

The trade kit was a pouch of corundum, A1203, several phials of additives, and the heat-and-

pressure gadget. Svetz poured corundum into the chamber, added a dash of chromic oxide, and used

the plunger. The cylinder grew warm. Presently Svetz dropped a pigeon's-blood star ruby into his

hand, rolled it in his fingers, held it to the sun. It was red as dark blood, with a blazing white

six-pointed star.

It was almost too hot to hold.

Stupid! Svetz held his smile rigid. Ra Chen should have warned him! What would she think when she

felt the gem's unnatural heat? What trickery would she suspect?

But he had to chance it. The trade kit was all he had.

He bent and rolled the gem to her across the damp ground. She stooped to pick it up. One hand

remained on the horse's neck, calming it. Svetz noticed the rings of yellow metal around her

wrist, and he also noticed the dirt.

She held the gem high, looked into its deep red fire.

"Ooooh," she breathed. She smiled at Svetz in wonder and delight. Svetz smiled back, moved two

steps nearer, and rolled her a yellow sapphire.

How had he twice chanced on the same horse? Svetz never knew. But he soon knew how it had arrived

before him.

He had given the girl three gems. He held three more in his hand while he beckoned her onto the

flight stick. She shook her head; she would not go. Instead she mounted the animal.

She and the horse, they watched Svetz for his next move.

Svetz capitulated. He had expected the horse to follow the girl while the girl rode behind him on

the flight stick. But if they both followed Svetz, it would be the same.

The horse stayed to one side and a little behind Svetz's flight stick. It did not seem

inconvenienced by the girl's weight. Why should it be? It must have been bred for the task. Svetz

notched his speed higher, to find how fast he could conveniently move.

Faster he flew, and faster. The horse must have a limit.

He was up to eight before he quit. The girl lay flat along the animal's back, hugging its neck to

protect her face from the wind. But the horse ran on, daring Svetz with its eyes.

How to describe such motion? Svetz had never seen ballet. He knew how machinery moved, and this

wasn't it. All he could think of was a man and a woman making love. Slippery-smooth rhythmic

motion, absolute single-minded purpose, motion for the pleasure of motion. It was terrible in its

beauty, the flight of the horse.

The word for such running must have died with the horse itself.

The horse would never have tired, but the girl did. She tugged on the animal's mane, and it

stopped. Svetz gave her the jewels he held, made four more and gave her one.

She was crying from the wind, crying and smiling as she took the jewels. Was she smiling for the

jewels, or for the joy of the ride? Exhausted, panting, she lay with her back against the warm,

pulsing flank of the resting animal. Only her hand moved, as she ran her fingers repeatedly

through its silver mane. The horse watched Svetz with malevolent brown eyes.

The girl was homely. It wasn't just the jarring lack of makeup. There was evidence of vitamin

starvation. She was short, less than five feet in height, and thin. There were marks of childhood

disease. But happiness glowed behind her homely face, and it make her almost passable, as she

clutched the corundum stones.

When she seemed rested, Svetz remounted. They went on.

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He was almost out of corundum when they reached the extension cage. There it was that he ran into

trouble.

The girl had been awed by Svetz's jewels, and by Svetz himself, possibly because of his height or

his ability to fly. But the extension cage scared her. Svetz couldn't blame her. The side with the

door in it was no trouble: just a seamless spherical mirror. But the other side blurred away in a

direction men could not visualize. It had scared Svetz spitless the first time he saw the time

machine in action.

He could buy the horse from her, shoot it here and pull it inside, using the flight stick to float

it. But it would be so much easier if...

It was worth a try. Svetz used the rest of his corundum. Then he walked into the extension cage,

leaving a trail of colored corundum beads behind him.

He had worried because the heat-and-pressure device would not produce facets. The stones all came

out shaped like miniature hen's eggs. But he was able to vary the color, using chromic oxide for

red and ferric oxide for yellow and titanium for blue; and he could vary the pressure planes, to

produce cat's eyes or star gems at will. He left a trail of small stones, red and yellow and blue.

And the girl followed, frightened, but unable to resist the bait. By now she had nearly filled a

handkerchief with the stones. The horse followed her into the extension cage.

Inside, she looked at the four stones in Svetz's hand: one of each color, red and yellow and light

blue and black, the largest he could make. He pointed to the horse, then to the stones.

The girl agonized. Svetz perspired. She didn't want to give up the horse . . . and Svetz was out

of corundum.

She nodded, one swift jerk of her chin. Quickly, before she could change her mind, Svetz poured

the stones into her hand. She clutched the hoard to her bosom and ran out of the cage, sobbing.

The horse stood up to follow.

Svetz swung the rifle and shot it. A bead of blood appeared on the animal's neck. It shied back,

then sighted on Svetz along its natural bayonet.

Poor kid, Svetz thought as he turned to the door. But she'd have lost the horse anyway. It had

sucked polluted water from an open stream. Now he need only load the flight stick aboard.

Motion caught his eye.

A false assumption can be deadly. Svetz had not waited for the horse to fall. It was with

something of a shock that he realized the truth. The beast wasn't about to fall. It was about to

spear him like a cocktail shrimp.

He hit the door button and dodged.

Exquisitely graceful, exquisitely sharp, the spiral horn slammed into the closing door. The animal

turned like white lightning in the confines of the cage, and again Svetz leapt for his life.

The point missed him by half an inch. It plunged past him and into the control board, through the

plastic panel and into the wiring beneath.

Something sparkled and something sputtered.

The horse was taking careful aim, sighting along the spear in its forehead. Svetz did the only

thing he could think of. He pulled the home-again lever.

The horse screamed as it went into free fall. The horn, intended for Svetz's navel, ripped past

his ear and tore his breathing-balloon wide open.

Then gravity returned; but it was the peculiar gravity of an extension cage moving forward through

time. Svetz and the horse were pulled against the padded walls. Svetz sighed in relief.

He sniffed again in disbelief. The smell was strong and strange, like nothing Svetz had ever

smelled before. The animal's terrible horn must have damaged the air plant. Very likely he was

breathing poison. If the cage didn't return in time...

But would it return at all? It might be going anywhere, any-when, the way that ivory horn had

smashed through anonymous wiring. They might come out at the end of time, when even the black

infrasuns gave not enough heat to sustain life.

There might not even be a future to return to. He had left the flight stick. How would it be used?

What would they make of it, with its control handle at one end and the brush-style static

discharge at the other and the saddle in the middle? Perhaps the girl would try to use it. He

could visualize her against the night sky, in the light of a full moon . . . and how would that

change history?

The horse seemed on the verge of apoplexy. Its sides heaved, its eyes rolled wildly. Probably it

was the cabin air, thick with carbon dioxide. Again, it might be the poison the horse had sucked

from an open stream.

Gravity died. Svetz and the horse tumbled in free fall, and the horse queasily tried to gore him.

Gravity returned, and Svetz, who was ready for it, landed on top. Someone was already opening the

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door.

Svetz took the distance in one bound. The horse followed, screaming with rage, intent on murder.

Two men went flying as it charged out into the institute control center.

"It doesn't take anesthetics!" Svetz shouted over his shoulder. The animal's agility was hampered

here among the desks and lighted screens, and it was probably drunk on hyperventilation. It kept

stumbling into desks and men. Svetz easily stayed ahead of the slashing horn.

A full panic was developing.

"We couldn't have done it without Zeera," Ra Chen told him much later. "Your idiot tanj horse had

the whole center terrorized.

All of a sudden it went completely tame, walked up to that frigid bitch Zeera and let her lead it

away."

"Did you get it to the hospital in time?"

Ra Chen nodded gloomily. Gloom was his favorite expression and was no indication of his true

feelings. "We found over fifty unknown varieties of bacteria in the beast's bloodstream. Yet it

hardly looked sick! It looked healthy as a, healthy as a . . . it must have tremendous stamina. We

managed to save not only the horse, but most of the bacteria too, for the Zoo."

Svetz was sitting up in a hospital bed, with his arm up to the elbow in a diagnostician. There was

always the chance that he too had located some long-extinct bacterium. He shifted uncomfortably,

being careful not to move the wrong arm, and asked, "Did you ever find an anesthetic that worked?"

"Nope. Sorry about that, Svetz. We still don't know why your needles didn't work. The tanj horse

is simply immune to tranks of any kind.

"Incidentally, there was nothing wrong with your air plant. You were smelling the horse."

"I wish I'd known that. I thought I was dying."

"It's driving the internes crazy, that smell. And we can't seem to get it out of the center." Ra

Chen sat down on the edge of the bed. "What bothers me is the horn on its forehead. The horse in

the picture book had no horns."

"No, sir."

"Then it must be a different species. It's not really a horse, Svetz. We'll have to send you back.

It'll break our budget, Svetz."

"I disagree, sir-"

"Don't be so tanj polite."

"Then don't be so tanj stupid, sir." Svetz was not going back for another horse. "People who kept

tame horses must have developed the habit of cutting off the horn when the animal was a pup. Why

not? We all saw how dangerous that horn is. Much too dangerous for a domestic animal."

"Then why does our horse have a horn?"

"That's why I thought it was wild, the first time I saw it. I suppose they didn't start cutting

off horns until later in history."

Ra Chen nodded in gloomy satisfaction. "I thought so too. Our problem is that the Secretary-

General is just barely bright enough to notice that his horse has a horn, and the picture book

horse doesn't. He's bound to blame me."

"Mmm." Svetz wasn't sure what was expected of him.

"I'll have to have the horn amputated."

"Somebody's bound to notice the scar," said Svetz.

"Tanj it, you're right. I've got enemies at court. They'd be only too happy to claim I'd mutilated

the Secretary-General's pet." Ra Chen glared at Svetz. "All right, let's hear your idea."

Svetz was busy regretting. Why had he spoken? His vicious, beautiful horse, tamely docked of its

killer horn . . . he had found the thought repulsive. His impulse had betrayed him. What could

they do but remove the horn?

He had it, "Change the picture book, not the horse. A computer could duplicate the book in detail,

but with a horn on every horse. Use the center computer, then wipe the tape afterward."

Morosely thoughtful, Ra Chen said, "That might work. I know someone who could switch the books."

He looked up from under bushy black brows. "Of course, you'd have to keep quiet."

"Yes, sir."

"Don't forget." Ra Chen got up. "When you get out of the diagnostician, you start a four weeks

vacation."

"I'm sending you back for one of these," Ra Chen told him four weeks later. He opened the

bestiary. "We picked up the book in a public park around ten Post Atomic; left the kid who was

holding it playing with a carborundum egg."

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Svetz examined the picture. "That's ugly. That's really ugly. You're trying to balance the horse,

right? The horse was so beautiful, you've got to have one of these or the universe goes off

balance."

Ra Chen closed his eyes in pain. "Just go get us the Gila monster, Svetz. The Secretary-General

wants a Gila monster."

"How big is it?"

They both looked at the illustration. There was no way to tell.

"From the looks of it, we'd better use the big extension cage."

Svetz barely made it back that time. He was suffering from total exhaustion and extensive second-

degree burns. The thing he brought back was thirty feet long, had vestigial bat-like wings,

breathed fire, and didn't look very much like the illustration; but it was as close as anything

he'd found.

The Secretary-General loved it.

Leviathon

TWO MEN STOOD on one side of a thick glass wall. "You'll be airborne." Svetz's beefy red-faced

boss was saying. "We made some improvements in the small extension cage while you were in the

hospital. You can hover it or fly it at up to fifty miles per hour or let it fly itself: there's a

constant-altitude setting. Your field of vision is total. We've made the shell of the extension

cage completely transparent."

On the other side of the thick glass, something was trying to kill them. It was 40 feet long from

nose to tail and was equipped with vestigial batlike wings. Otherwise, it was built something like

a slender lizard. It screamed and scratched at the glass with murderous claws.

The sign on the glass read:

GILA MONSTER

RETRIEVED FROM THE YEAR 230 ANTE ATOMIC, APPROXIMATELY, FROM THE REGION OF CHINA, EARTH. EXTINCT.

"You'll be well out of his reach," said Ra Chen.

"Yes, sir." Svetz stood with his arms folded about him, as if he had a chill. He was being sent

after the biggest animal that had ever lived; and Svetz was afraid of animals.

"For science' sake! What are you worried about Svetz? It's only a big fish!"

"Yes, sir. You said that about the Gila monster. It's just an extinct lizard, you said."

"We had only a drawing in a children's book to go by. How could we know it would be so big?"

The Gila monster drew back from the glass. It inhaled hugely and took aim. Yellow-and-orange flame

spewed from its nostrils and played across the glass. Svetz squeaked and jumped for cover.

"He can't get through," said Ra Chen.

Svetz picked himself up. He was a slender, small-boned man with pale skin, light-blue eyes and

very fine ash-blond hair. "How could we know it would breathe fire?" he mimicked. "That lizard

almost cremated me. I spent four months in the hospital, as it was. And what really burns me is,

he looks less like the drawing every time I see him. Sometimes I wonder if I didn't get the wrong

animal."

"What's the difference, Svetz? The secretary-general loved him. That's what counts."

"Yes, sir. Speaking of the secretary-general, what does he want with a sperm whale? He's got a

horse, he's got a Gila monster-"

"That's a little complicated." Ra Chen grimaced. "Palace politics! It's always complicated. Right

now, Svetz, somewhere in the United Nations palace, a hundred different scientists are trying to

get support, each for his own project. And every last one of them involves getting the attention

of the secretary-general and holding it. Keeping his attention isn't easy."

Svetz nodded. Everybody knew about the secretary-general.

The family that had ruled the United Nations for 700 years was somewhat inbred.

The secretary-general was 44 years old. He was a happy person; he loved animals and flowers and

pictures and people. Pictures of planets and multiple star systems made him clap his hands and coo

with delight; so the Institute for Space Research shared amply in the United Nations budget. But

he liked extinct animals, too.

"Someone managed to convince the secretary-general that he wants the largest animal on earth. The

idea may have been to take us down a peg or two," said Ra Chen. "Someone may think we're getting

too big a share of the budget.

"By the time I got onto it, the secretary-general wanted a Brontosaurus. We'd never have gotten

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him that. No extension cage will reach that far."

"Was it your idea to get him a whale, sir?"

"Yeah. It wasn't easy to persuade him. Whales have been extinct for so long that we don't even

have pictures. All I had to show him was a crystal sculpture from Archaeology-dug out of the

Steuben Glass building-and a Bible and a dictionary. I managed to convince him that Leviathan and

the sperm whale were one and the same."

"That's not strictly true." Svetz had read a computer-produced condensation of the Bible. The

condensation had ruined the plot, in Svetz's opinion. "Leviathan could be anything big and

destructive, even a horde of locusts."

"Thank science you weren't there to help, Svetz! The issue was confused enough. Anyway. I promised

the secretary-general the largest animal that ever lived on earth. All the literature says that

that animal was a whale. And there were sperm-whale herds all over the oceans as recently as the

First Century Ante-Atomic. You shouldn't have any trouble finding one."

"In twenty minutes?"

Ra Chen looked startled. "What?"

"If I try to keep the big extension cage in the past for more than twenty minutes. I'll never be

able to bring it home. The-"

"I know that."

"-uncertainty factor in the energy constants-"

"Svetz-"

"-will blow the institute right off the map."

"We thought of that, Svetz. You'll go back in the small extension cage. When you find a whale,

you'll signal the big extension cage."

"Signal it how?"

"We've found a way to send a simple on-off pulse through time. Let's go back to the institute and

I'll show you."

Malevolent golden eyes watched them through the glass as they walked away.

The small extension cage was the part of the time machine that did the moving. Within its

transparent shell, Svetz seemed to ride a flying armchair equipped with an airplane passenger's

lunch tray; except that the lunch tray was covered with lights and buttons and knobs and crawling

green lines. He was somewhere off the East Coast of North America, in or around the year 100

AnteAtomic or 1845 Anno Domini. The temporal-precession gauge was not particularly accurate.

Svetz skimmed low over water the color of lead, beneath a sky the color of slate. But for the rise

and fall of the sea, he might almost have been suspended in an enormous sphere painted half light,

half dark. He let the extension cage fly itself, 60 feet above the water, while he watched the

needle on the NAI, the Nervous Activities Indicator.

Hunting Leviathan.

His stomach was uneasy. Svetz had thought he was adjusting to the peculiar gravitational side

effects of time travel. But apparently not.

At least he would not be here long.

On this trip, he was not looking for a mere 40-foot Gila monster. Now he hunted the largest animal

that had ever lived. A most conspicuous beast. And now he had a life-seeking instrument, the NAI.

The needle twitched violently.

Was it a whale? But the needle was trembling in apparent indecision. A cluster of sources, then.

Svetz looked in the direction indicated.

A clipper ship, winged with white sail, long and slender and graceful as hell. Crowded, too, Svetz

guessed. Many humans, closely packed, would affect the NAI in just that manner. A sperm whale-a

single center of complex nervous activity-would attract the needle as violently, without making it

jerk about like that.

The ship would interfere with reception. Svetz turned east and away, but not without regret. The

ship was beautiful.

The uneasiness in Svetz's belly was getting worse, not better.

Endless gray-green water, rising and falling beneath his flying armchair.

Enlightenment came like something clicking in his head. Seasick. On automatic, the extension cage

matched its motion to that of the surface over which it flew; and that surface was heaving in

great dark swells.

No wonder his stomach was uneasy! Svetz grinned and reached for the manual controls.

The NAI needle suddenly jerked hard over. A bite! thought Svetz, and he looked off to the right.

No sign of a ship. And submarines hadn't been invented yet. Had they? No, of course they hadn't.

The needle was rock-steady.

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Svetz flipped the call button.

The source of the tremendous NAI signal was off to his right and moving. Svetz turned to follow

it. It would be minutes before the call signal reached the Institute for Temporal Research and

brought the big extension cage with its weaponry for hooking Leviathan.

Many years ago, Ra Chen had dreamed of rescuing the library at Alexandria from Caesar's fire. For

this purpose, he had built the big extension cage. Its door was a gaping iris, big enough to be

loaded while the library was actually burning. Its hold, at a guess, was at least twice large

enough to hold all the scrolls in that ancient library.

The big cage had cost a fortune in government money. It had failed to go back beyond 400 A.A., or

1545 A.D. The books burned at Alexandria were still lost to history, or at least to historians.

Such a boondoggle would have broken other men. Somehow, Ra Chen had survived the blow to his

reputation.

He had pointed out the changes to Svetz after they returned from the zoo. "We've fitted the cage

out with heavy-duty stunners and anti-gravity beams. You'll operate them by remote control. Be

careful not to let the stun beam touch you. It would kill even a sperm whale if you held it on him

for more than a few seconds and it'd kill a man instantly. Other than that, you should have no

problems."

It was at that moment that Svetz's stomach began to hurt.

"Our major change is the call button. It will actually send us a signal through time, so that we

can send the big extension cage back to you. We can land it right beside you, no more than a few

minutes off. That took considerable research. Svetz. The treasury raised our budget for this year,

so that we could get that whale."

Svetz nodded.

"Just be sure you've got a whale before you call for the big extension cage."

Now, 1200 years earlier, Svetz followed an underwater source of nervous impulse. The signal was

intensely powerful. It could not be anything smaller than an adult bull sperm whale.

A shadow formed in the air to his right. Svetz watched it take shape: a great gray-blue sphere

floating beside him. Around the rim of the door were anti-gravity beamers and heavy-duty stun

guns. The opposite side of the sphere wasn't there; it simply faded away.

To Svetz, that was the most frightening thing about any time machine: the way it seemed to turn a

corner that wasn't there.

Svetz was almost over the signal. Now he used the remote controls to swing the anti-gravity

beamers around and down.

He had them locked on the source. He switched them on and dials surged.

Leviathan was heavy. More massive than Svetz had expected. He upped the power and watched the NAI

needle swing as Leviathan rose invisibly through the water.

Where the surface of the water bulged upward under the attack of the antigravity beams, a shadow

formed. Leviathan rising...

Was there something wrong with the shape?

Then a trembling spherical bubble of water rose, shivering, from the ocean, and Leviathan was

within it.

Partly within it. He was too big to fit, though he should not have been.

He was four times as massive as a sperm whale should have been and a dozen times as long. He

looked nothing like the crystal Steuben sculpture. Leviathan was a kind of serpent, armored with

red-bronze scales as big as a viking's shield, armed with teeth like ivory spears. His triangular

jaws gaped wide. As he floated toward Svetz, he writhed, seeking with his bulging yellow eyes for

whatever strange enemy had subjected him to this indignity.

Svetz was paralyzed with fear and indecision. Neither then nor later did he doubt that what he saw

was the Biblical Leviathan. This had to be the largest beast that had ever roamed the sea; a beast

large enough and fierce enough to be synonymous with anything big and destructive. Yet-if the

crystal sculpture was anything like representational, this was not a sperm whale at all.

In any case, he was far too big for the extension cage.

Indecision stayed his hand-and then Svetz stopped thinking entirely, as the great slitted irises

found him.

The beast was floating past him. Around its waist was a sphere of weightless water that shrank

steadily as gobbets dripped away and rained back to the sea. The beast's nostrils flared-it was

obviously an air breather, though not a cetacean.

It stretched, reaching for Svetz with gaping jaws.

Teeth like scores of elephant's tusks all in a row. Polished and needle-sharp. Svetz saw them

close about him from above and below, while he sat frozen in fear.

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Niven, Larry - The flight of the horse

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