Farmer, Philip Jose - Time' s Last Gift

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Philip Jose Farmer - Time's Last Gift (1972)
(Scanned by: Kislany)
---------------------------------------------
One
The explosion was as loud as a 75-millimeter cannon's.
At one second, there had been nothing but dead wet grass and limestone rocks on the edge
of the steep hill. A gray torpedo shape appeared as if precipitated by some invisible chemical in
the air. The displacement of air caused the boom that rattled down the hillside and the valley and
across the distant river and bounced back to the vehicle.
The H. G. Wells I, without moving a micron in space, had traveled from A.D. 2070, Spring,
to circa 12,000 B.C., Spring. Immediately after making the long leap in time, it moved in space.
The vehicle had appeared two feet in the air and on the lip of the hill. It fell with a crash to
the ground and began rolling.
Forty feet long, its hull of irradiated plastic, it did not suffer from the very steep
three-hundred-foot descent. It was not even scratched, though it broke off sharp projections of
lime-stone, and eventually stopped upright at the bottom of the hill after snapping off a score of
dwarf pines.
'That was better than the fun-house,' Rachel Silverstein said in a quivering voice. She
smiled, but her skin was almost as pale as her teeth.
Drummond Silverstein, her husband, grunted. His eyes were wide, and his skin was gray. But
the blood was returning swiftly.
Robert von Billmann spoke with a very slight trace of German accent.
'I presume it is safe to unstrap ourselves?'
John Gribardsun twisted some dials on the instrument board before him. A slight whirring
told of the projection of a TV camera. The view changed from a blue sky with some high white
clouds to dead wet grass ahead and, a mile away, the river at the bottom of the valley.
He turned another dial, and the view switched to the hill down which they had rolled.
Halfway up, a fox-like animal jumped out from behind a rock.
The camera swiveled. On the other side of the valley was another animal. Gribardsun turned
the closeup dial.
'A hyena,' Gribardsun said. His voice was deep and authoritative. 'A cave hyena. Looks
like a Kenyan hyena except it's much larger and all gray.'
Gribardsun had paled only slightly when they had rolled. He spoke with a British accent
with a very slight underlying suspicion of another. Von Billmann, the linguist, had never been
able to identify it. He had refused to question the Englishman about it because he wanted to label
it himself. He prided himself on his ability to recognize any of the major languages and at least
two hundred of the minor. But he had no idea of what tongue underlay the Englishman's speech.
The screen showed the view behind the vehicle. A tiny figure stepped out from the shadow
of a huge overhang of rock. It ran to a large rock and dropped behind it.
Rachel said, 'That was a man, wasn't it?'
'Has to be,' Gribardsun said.
He kept the camera upon the rock, and, after several minutes, a head appeared. He closed
up, and they were looking at a seeming distance of ten feet into the face of a man. His hair and
beard were light brown, tangled, and long. The face was broad and a prominent supraorbital ridge
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shaded eyes of some light color. The nose was large and aquiline.
'I'm so thrilled,' Rachel said. 'Our first man! The first human being. A Magdalenian!'
The man stood up. He was about six feet tall. He wore a fur vest, fur knee-length pants,
and calf-length fur boots. He carried a short flint-tipped spear and an atlatl, a stick with a
notch at one end, which enabled him to cast the spear with greater force. A skin belt held a skin
bag which looked as if it held a small animal or large bird. The belt also supported a skin sheath
from which protruded a wooden hilt.
Gribardsun looked at a dial. 'Outside temperature is fifty degrees Fahrenheit,' he said.
'And it's fifteen minutes past noon, late May - perhaps. Warmer than I had expected.'
'There's very little green as yet,' Drummond Silverstein said.
Nobody spoke for a moment. They were just beginning to feel the awe that they had expected
to feel. The transition and the rolling had numbed them, and the anesthesia of wonder and fright
was just beginning to dissolve.
Gribardsun checked that the equipment was operating at one hundred per cent efficiency. He
ran through the CAA (checkout-after-arrival), calling out each item to von Billmann, who sat on
his left. The German repeated each, and the words of both were taped. At the end of the checkout,
a green light flashed on the panel.
Gribardsun said, 'The air outside is pure. It's air that we haven't known for a hundred
and fifty years.'
'Let's breathe it,' Drummond Silverstein said.
The Englishman unstrapped himself and stood up. He was six-foot-three, and the top of his
head missed the ceiling by only an inch. He looked as if he were thirty. He had long, straight,
very black hair, dark gray eyes, and a handsome, slightly hawkish face. The sheer single-piece
tunic revealed a body like Apollo's. He was the M.D. of the expedition, a physical anthropologist,
an archeologist, a botanist, and a linguist. If England had not abolished titles, he would have
been a duke.
Robert von Billmann stood up a minute later. He was six-foot-two, well-built, thirty-five,
titian-haired, and handsome in a pale Baltic way. He was the world's foremost linguist, a cultural
anthropologist, an art specialist, and had the equivalent of a master of arts in chemistry.
Rachel Silverstein followed him. She was short, petite, and dark but had light blue eyes.
She was long-nosed, but pretty. She had Ph.D.s in genetics and zoology and considerable training
in botany and meteorology.
Drummond Silverstein was about six feet tall, thin, and dark. He was a physicist and
astronomer and was well trained in geology. He was also a well-known virtuoso on the violin and
expert on musicology, preliterate and civilized.
Gribardsun turned the large wheel and pushed open the bank-vault-like port. He stood for a
moment in the exit while the others crowded behind him. He breathed deeply and then turned his
head to them and smiled slightly.
'I suppose I should say something as poetic as Armstrong's words when he first put foot
onto the Moon,' he said.
He stepped out onto a narrow strip, the top of a flight of twelve steps, which had slid
out when the port was opened. The air was bracing. He sniffed as if he were a great cat, and then
he went down the steps. The camera on top of the vehicle had bent over to take in the area of the
port because he had set it to track him when he emerged. Its audio was also on. His image and
words would be recorded for posterity - if the vehicle returned.
'This is Time's last gift,' he said loudly, looking up at the camera. 'Modern man will
never again be able to travel to this point in time. We, the crew of the H. G. Wells I, will do
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our best to thank Time and Mankind for this great gift.'
The others looked disappointed. Evidently they thought that, if they had been given the
chance, they could have uttered more notable words.
Gribardsun went back into the vessel and unlocked a box of weapons. Rachel followed him
and removed clothes of some light but very warm material which retained body heat very
effectively. Armed and weaponed, and two equipped with cameras the shape and size of American
footballs, they moved out. The port had been closed, but the camera on top of the vessel tracked
them. They began the steep climb with the Englishman at their head. They were in excellent
physical condition, but all except Gribardsun were puffing and red-faced by the time they reached
the top.
Gribardsun turned and looked back down. The vessel was small. But it weighed three hundred
tons, and it had to be moved back up to the physical point where it had emerged from Time.
Otherwise, when the time came to be pulled back to A.D. 2074, the vessel would remain in 12,000
B.C. And so would its crew. The mechanics of time-travel devices required that the vessel, and its
original mass within plus or minus ten ounces, be in the exact landing place.
Gribardsun drove a number of sharp plastic spikes into the ground to mark the outlines of
the depression formed where the vessel had fallen. Four years from now, the depression might be
smoothed out, and thus it would be impossible to locate.
Rachel and von Billmann took films of the spot, and then Gribardsun and Drummond
Silverstein took the coordinates of the depression from three large rocks sticking out of the soil
nearby.
The H. G. Wells I had been set on a wooden platform on top of a hill before being
chronologically launched. The edge of the hill in the Vezere River valley, France, A.D. 2070, was
forty feet away from the vessel. It had been expected that the edge of the hill in 12,000 B.C.
would be even more distant. The geologists had affirmed this to be a fact. Gribardsun wondered if
they had been correct but a slight displacement in space had occurred. The theoreticians said that
this would not occur, but the truth was that they did not know what would happen in practice.
The process of time travel required an enormous amount of energy. The further back into
time the machine went, the more the energy. This period was as far back as a machine could be
sent. There was a factor, which only a few mathematicians understood, which required that the most
expensive and most dangerous journey be made first. If the time travelers waited, say, eight years
more before attempting to go into the Magdalenian, they would find themselves in circa 8000 B.C.
The era of 12,000 B.C. would be forever out of reach. And if they waited for ten years, they would
find that 4000 B.C. was as far back as they could go.
Moreover, there was a strange and unexplained limit at the other end. The first small
experimental manless model had been sent back one day into time. But it had never arrived, as they
knew it would not, having been present the day before. Where the model went was not known. Then
another model, at great expense of materials and energy, was sent back a week. This did not
appear, as the experimenters knew it would not. But they had to be sure.
At this time, the news media learned about Project Chronos, and it was suspended for a
while until the public, and Congress, were satisfied that it was safe. The old science-fiction
idea that tampering with time would change the course of events had to be dealt with. Stories by
various writers from Wells to Silverberg and Bradbury and Heinlein, illustrating the paradox and
danger of time travel, were reprinted and even dramatized. Millions of people were fearful that
time travel would result in one of their ancestors being killed, and so their descendants would
vanish from the face of Earth, as if the boojum were prowling it.
Jacob Moishe, leader of the project team that had invented the time-travel machines,
quieted this form of protest. He showed, in a series of articles, that if time travel was going to
make any changes, it had already done so, and therefore there was nothing to fear. By then the
original goal of circa 25,000 B.C. was lost forever. Too much time had elapsed. The expedition
would have to settle for the middle Magdalenian. The funds were restored, and a small model was
sent back to one hundred years, and a search was made for it. The theory was that it had appeared
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in A.D. 1973 and had been picked up by someone who did not, of course, recognize it. But, since it
was practically indestructible, it existed now and was probably in someone's possession. Or
perhaps buried some place. Worldwide advertising failed to turn up the model.
Meanwhile, another had been sent to A.D. 1875, and the advertising for this one went
around the world. None showed up. A third one was sent back at a cost that staggered Congress and
the public. This one was set to bob up about A.D. 1850 within fifty feet of where the project
buildings stood.
Dr. Moishe's researches had shown that, in 1850, this hilltop in Syracuse, New York, had
been the scene of a mysterious and exceedingly violent explosion. He reasoned that the explosion
had been caused when the model had appeared inside some solid matter, such as soil or a tree; the
result of two solid objects trying to occupy the same space had been the explosion. A complete
conversion of matter to energy had not occurred, of course. Otherwise, the hill and much of the
surrounding countryside would have disappeared.
The model contained radioactive particles, and so, after it was sent back to 1850, the
area for a mile around was scanned with geiger counters. A piece of the radioactive particle-
bearing model was located and identified. Accusations of fraud were, of course, made, but Dr.
Moishe had foreseen this and made foolproof arrangements. He had even gotten six congressmen and
the Secretary of Science to watch the entire procedure.
One of the theories about the failure of the first two models to be found was immediately
dismissed. This theory postulated that the structure of time was such that time travel was
impossible within any period in which contemporaries had been living. In other words, time, to
avoid a paradox, but not the pathetic fallacy, would not permit travel except in a time before
anybody living in A.D. 2070 had been born. The critics pointed out, none too gently, that this
would mean that somebody born before A.D. 1875 was still living and that his presence was keeping
the models from appearing in A.D. 1973 and 1890. If the hypothetical person was born in, say, A.D.
1870, then he would today be 200 years old. And that was impossible, for several reasons. For one
thing, a record existed of the birth date of everybody living, and the oldest person in the world
was 130. She had been bora in A.D. 1940.
The theory was admittedly farfetched, if not crackpotted. Its proponent, who later
committed suicide for unknown reasons, and so discredited any reputation he had for sanity,
replied that anyone that old might have some reason for not wanting to be known. And it was not
impossible to fake records.
John Gribardsun was thinking of this when Rachel Silverstein touched his arm. She seemed
to be touching him at least ten times a day, as if she were testing to make sure that he existed.
Or because she liked to touch him. He did not mind it, though he knew that Drummond disliked it.
But it was up to her husband to say something about it to her, and, so far as he knew, the man had
never opened his mouth about it.
'Do you think we can get the ship back up by ourselves?' she said. Her light blue eyes
were bright, as if she were burning with excitement.
'I suppose so,' he said. 'But I think we could do it far more swiftly and easily if we had
the strong backs of some cavemen helping us. So we won't worry about it now. After all, we have
four years.'
Robert yon Billmann said something sharply. He was looking through binoculars to the
northeast, across the valley. Gribardsun saw the figures that had attracted von Billmann. He
lifted his own binoculars. The heads and antlers of several brownish reindeer came into view. He
moved the glasses and within a minute had zeroed in on a big grayish shape. It was a wolf. Soon,
he caught about a dozen with a sweep of the glasses.
The deer were well aware of the wolves. They continued to crop at the moss between
liftings of the head, to sniff the air, and to eye the slinking beasts some fifty yards distant.
Presently some of the gray shapes floated behind a hill and soon appeared ahead of the
herd. They disappeared again, and then those that had remained moved in slowly toward the herd.
The deer waited for a minute to make sure that the wolves would not stop and suddenly, as if the
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leader had spoken, they bounded away. The wolves ran after them, and then, as the herd passed the
hill behind which the others were, they veered away. Six wolves had run out at them. One wolf
caught a doe that stumbled, and the others leaped upon it. The remaining deer got away, except for
a buck that slipped when he leaped across a brook. Before he could get up again, he found two
wolves tearing at his legs. These were joined by others, and the wolves quit running.
Gribardsun had been watching with keen interest. He put the binoculars down and said, 'And
to think that the only wolves in our time were in zoos or small reservations. These beasts have a
whole world to roam in. And there must be millions of them.'
'Sometimes I think you're the zoologist,' Rachel said.
'I am a naturalist.'
He turned and looked down the valley where they had seen the man. He had long ago hidden
behind a rock and, though Gribardsun had stopped on the way up the hill to search for him with his
binoculars, he had failed to find him. Now the man, having seen the four leave the vessel, was
approaching it.
'Curiosity kills more than a cat,' Gribardsun said.
The man's home might be a little way off or many miles. The expedition had quite a few
daylight hours left, so they might as well take advantage of it. There was much work to do.
He allowed the others to collect their samples of soil, plants, and rocks and to take some
more photographs. Then he said that they should return to the vessel, store their samples, pick up
food and trinkets, and set out up the valley to look for a human habitation.
They started back down the slope. The man was within a hundred yards of the great torpedo
shape. Seeing the four coming down the hill, he ducked behind a boulder. He remained there until
Gribardsun opened the port of the vessel. Then he rose and, bending over, ran to a more distant
rock. Drummond Silverstein took some more films of him.
They packed their bags and strapped them onto their backs. Gribardsun took the 500-caliber
express rifle. Von Billmann and Drummond carried the rifles which shot anesthetic darts. Rachel
carried a 30-caliber automatic rifle. Each had an automatic pistol in the holster at his belt, and
they had explosive and gas grenades in their sacks.
They started up the valley and presently came to a small stream which meandered down to
the river below. They followed along the stream for a time. The man kept ahead of them by a
quarter of a mile.
At the end of two miles, they decided to climb up through the base of the cliffs. There
were some overhangs that looked interesting. These turned out to have been inhabited by men,
judging from the rude hearths of stone, the bones, flint, and chert fragments, and pieces of wood
and fur. A half mile on, they found a narrow cave which stank as if hyenas had once lived there.
Rachel said that she would study it later and determine what hyenas ate and so forth. She threw
some rocks into the interior but got no result.
They walked five miles before they came to the man's home. The valley suddenly widened
here, and the overhang which housed human beings was at the top of a steep slope. They could not
see any women or children from this angle, but the twelve men would not have gathered in full
sight on the edge of the hill unless they had something to defend.
Gribardsun looked around before giving the order to ascend. It seemed likely that there
would be other men out hunting, and he did not want to be surprised by men attacking from behind.
The man they had first seen had scrambled up ahead of them to warn the others. Now he
stood with the others, brandishing his spear and yelling at the invaders.
Gribardsun activated the bullhorn device on his chest and then told the others to drop
about a hundred feet behind him. He looked for large rocks on the lip of the hill. He was ready to
jump if they rolled any down on them. But there did not seem to be any nor was there evidence at
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the foot of the hill that they had rolled any down in the past.
He wondered what the natives were thinking. There were twelve warriors there, defending
their home territory, and there were only three men and a woman boldly approaching them. Their
appearance, of course, would be impressive. There would be something very alien about the
invaders; the clothes, the weird-looking weapons, the clean-shaven faces. Most mystifying, and
terrifying, would be the confidence with which the greatly outnumbered party approached.
Gribardsun had had long experience with savages. He was much older than he looked and
remembered when Africa and Asia still hid genuine preliterates with very little knowledge of
civilization. It was this experience which gave him confidence, because he knew that these people
did not really want to engage in combat with an unknown enemy. The others of his party had had
little to do with genuine primitives; they had been born too late; the savages had died out or
been citified; the few left on reservations were too well-educated to be 'real' primitives.
Nevertheless, the natives were dangerous. They must have fought enemy humans and they must
have hunted the dangerous mammoth, rhinoceros, cave bear, and cave lion.
Gribardsun got well within range of the spears before he held up his hand for the others
to stop. He advanced slowly then, speaking through the bullhorn. His voice, like a thunder god's,
bellowed at them. They stopped yelling and waving their weapons when the first words struck them.
Even at this distance he could see their flushed skins turn pale.
He stopped, too, and pulled out a Very gun and fired it straight up into the air. The
parachute expanded from the stick, at two hundred feet, and as it fell it burned a bright green
and then a bright scarlet and then exploded loudly at a fifty-foot altitude.
The warriors became rigid and silent.
They must have wanted to run, but that would have meant abandoning the women and children.
And that they would not do.
Gribardsun approved of this. Though they must have fell a terrible awe of this evil
magician, yet they stood their ground.
The Englishman held out both hands - his express rifle was still supported by a strap over
his shoulder - and he advanced smiling.
A tall heavily built man with dark red hair mingled with gray stepped out of the line and
approached Gribardsun slowly. The brown-haired man whom the party had followed also came down the
slope though he stayed a few feet behind the red-haired man. The chief held a big stone axe in his
right hand and a thick-shafted spear in his left. He was about as tall as Gribardsun.
The Englishman spoke through the bullhorn again. At the thundering speech, the chief and
his companion stopped. But Gribardsun continued to smile, and then he turned the amplifier off,
lowering his hand slowly so he would not alarm the two. After that, he raised his hand and spoke
with his normal voice. The eyes of the two widened at this. However, they seemed to understand
that the change in loudness was meant to signify friendliness.
Gribardsun walked slowly upward until he was about ten feet from them. At this range, he
could see that both were quivering. But it was the alienness of the intruders that was making them
shake, not the prospect of combat.
Gribardsun talked and at the same time made signs to reinforce the words. He used the sign
language of the Kalahari bushmen, not because he expected the sign language of these people - if
they had any - to coincide but because the signs would be additional reassurances of his peaceful
intentions.
He told them that the four came from a far place and that they brought gifts and that they
were friends.
The chief finally smiled and lowered his weapons, though he still kept his distance. The
other man also smiled. The chief turned, still watching Gribardsun out of the corner of his eyes,
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and shouted at the warriors above. Then he beckoned Gribardsun to follow him, and he and the brown-
haired man preceded the four. At the top they found themselves ringed by the warriors but these
made no threatening gestures.
The four could now see that there was a large camp under the immense limestone overhang.
The north end was blocked by stones piled on top of each other and part of the eastern end was
also blocked. There were about thirty 'wigwams,' tents of skin supported by wooden poles, near the
rear of the overhang. Gribardsun counted thirty adult women, ten juvenile girls, six juvenile
males, and thirty-eight children. Later, when hunters returned, the total adult male population
would be twenty-four.
There were small fires in every hearth and wooden spits over many, some of which held
skinned and gutted rabbits, marmots, birds, and parts of a bear. In one corner was a wooden cage
in which was a bear cub. Before one of the tents was a pole held up by a pile of rocks and dirt.
Stuck on its end was a bear skull easily as large as the largest of the Kodiak bears of
Gribardsun's time. Gribardsun wondered if the skull and the cub meant that the tribe had a bear
cult.
Water would have to be brought up from the river. A number of skin bags on the dirt floor
seemed to hold water.
There were bones all over the place, and a strong odor from the north indicated that human
excrement was dropped over the edge of the hill on the other side of the rude wall. The odor of
the natives, and their matted hair and beards and dirty skins, showed that they cared little for
personal cleanliness.
Gribardsun walked over to the nearest tent and looked inside without objection from
anybody. There were very low beds with wooden frames and furs piled on top. On one lay a boy of
about ten. He stank of sickness.
Gribardsun crawled into the tent after telling Rachel to hold the skin flap open for him.
The boy looked at him with glazed eyes. He was too sick to be frightened by the stranger.
A woman shouted something outside and then crawled in to watch the stranger. She was
making sure that the mysterious man with the voice like thunder did not intend to harm her child.
Gribardsun smiled at her but also made a gesture for her not to interfere.
He put a reflector on his head and shone a light into the boy's eyes and down his throat
and into his ears. The boy submitted though he trembled with fear.
Gribardsun had to decide whether or not to take samples of skin tissue, blood, saliva, and
urine. So many of the preliterate societies he had known had objected to giving specimens. They
feared that these would be used against them by evil magic. If this tribe had the same
superstitions, it might react violently, no matter how awed they were at this moment.
He considered. The flat instrument he had applied to the boy's skin indicated a fever of
104° Fahrenheit. The skin was flushed and dry. The breath was foul. The heartbeat was eighty-five
per minute. The breathing was rapid and shallow. These symptoms could mean a dozen different
diseases. He needed specimens for a diagnosis.
He could just back off and let nature, or whatever the local witch doctor might have in
the way of efficacious medicine, do its work. He had been warned that he should not get involved
with medical matters if he thought that his interference might backfire. After all, everybody he
would meet was doomed to die, would have been dead for almost fourteen thousand years when he was
born. But procedure was left to his discretion. If he thought he could cure a sick native, and
thereby aid the goal of the project, he could proceed. But if he did not wish to endanger the
project, he could just let the natives die.
There was no question of concern about his interference changing the course of events.
Whatever he was to do had been done, and events and lives had been determined before he was born
even if he had helped determine them.
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Gribardsun's back kept the mother from seeing what he was doing. She said something in a
protesting tone, but he paid no attention. He stuck the tip of the instrument against the arm,
twisted a little knob on its side, the syringe filled with blood. He drew off some saliva from lie
boy's open mouth. Getting urine would be difficult only if the mother objected. He secured another
instrument at the proper place, and pressed a button plunger on the end of a flexible metal tube.
If there was any urine available, it would come out without delay, and it did. He removed the
instrument and packed it away. When he returned to the vessel, he would make his analyses. Rather,
the small medical computer in the ship would. And tomorrow, if things went right here today, he
would transport the computer-analyzer to this site.
The mother protested some more, but she crawled out of the tent a moment later. Perhaps
she was going to the chief and the medicine man. He took advantage of her absence to drop a pill
into the boy's mouth, raise his head, and pour ill-smelling water into his mouth from a skin bag.
The pill was a general panacea - a redundancy in terms - which could slow down the
development of a dozen diseases. It might not contain anything to help whatever was making the boy
sick, but there was nothing in it to hurt him.
Outside, the woman was talking rapidly and loudly and gesticulating to the chief and a
short muscular man with a forehead covered with symbols painted with ocher. The symbols matched
those on the skin of the tent. This man had just come in from the hunt. His woman was carrying off
two rabbits and a large badger.
Two more men climbed over the edge of the hill. One, a huge man with the massive muscles
and the pot-belly of a gorilla, was carrying part of a large male reindeer over his shoulders. The
other, shorter and less stout, was carrying a smaller portion over his shoulders and a marmot tied
by the neck to his belt.
The two stopped when they saw the strangers. The carcass dropped with a thump and a clash
of antlers against a hearth, and the giant advanced toward them. The chief said something to him,
and the giant stopped, scowling.
The first thing to do was to establish 'identities.' Gribardsun got them to pronounce - or
try to pronounce - their names. They did better with John than with his surname.
The chief was Thammash. The brown-haired man was Shivkaet, the tribal artist. The painted
man was Glamug, the witch doctor or shaman. The giant was Angrogrim. The sick boy was Abinal, son
of Dubhab. Dubhab showed up during the name-learning. He was a short lean man with a wide friendly
smile, and he seemed to be the most articulate of his people. He introduced others, including
Laminak, his daughter, a pre-teenager, and Amaga, his wife.
Gribardsun told his colleagues it was time to go back to the vessel. They would not stay
too long today. Despite their violence-free reception, they were putting the natives to a strain.
They would retreat and let the tribe discuss the strangers. Tomorrow they would return and stay a
little longer. And the day after they would increase the length of their visit even more. In time,
the natives would get used to them.
Von Billmann said, 'I can hardly wait to study their language. Did you catch that
synchronic articulation of the nasal bilabial and the velar bilabial and the ejective consonants
with simultaneous glottal stops?'
'I caught them,' Gribardsun said.
Rachel rolled her large blue eyes and said, 'I think I'm going to have trouble speaking
their language anywhere near correctly. The sounds sound impossible.'
Drummond said, 'Robert, you look as excited as if you were about to make love.'
'Which he is, in a way,' Gribardsun said.
They left, while the tribe gathered on the edge of the hill to watch them. Some of the
small boys started down after them but were called back by their parents. The people stood
together and watched them until they were out of sight.
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They were not very talkative on the way back. Von Billmann had stuck the speaker of his
pocket recorder-player into his ear and was listening to the sound of the language over and over.
Rachel and Drummond spoke infrequently and then softly to each other. Gribardsun seldom talked
much unless the occasion demanded it.
However, when they returned to the H. G. Wells I, their spirits rose. Perhaps it was
because they were home. Even the grim gray torpedo shape was a haven and reminder of the world
they had left.
'We'll sleep here tonight,' Gribardsun said. 'We can put up our domes later on. Obviously
we can't walk back and forth to the village every day, and we can't move the vessel, so we'll have
to establish camp close to our subjects.'
Rachel busied herself getting supper, though this took only two minutes to cook and open
the prepared packages. She did pour out small glasses of wine to celebrate. Gribardsun ran the
specimens through the analyzer while she was getting supper.
'The boy, Abinal, has typhus,' he said. 'That can be caused by a rickettsia or body lice.
I didn't see anybody else sick, so I doubt that it was caused by body lice, though Abinal may just
be the first. Whatever the cause, he can transmit it through his own body lice. I propose tomorrow
to give Abinal an anti-typhus medicine and to give the others a preventative. Plus a medicine
which will kill their body lice.'
'How do you propose to get them to take the medicines?' von Billmann said.
'I don't know yet.'
'It might cause more trouble than it's worth,' Drummond said. 'Not that I'm ignoring the
human side of this,' he added, seeing Rachel's frown. 'But, after all, we want to study them in
their natural habitat and in their natural mode of life as much as possible. If we prevent
diseases, how will we know how they react to them? I mean, what medicines and magical rituals they
use, their burial ceremonies and so forth. You know they're going to die anyway - in fact, they've
been dead for a long time, actually. And what kind of resentments will you stir up if you
interfere with the shaman's profession or fail to cure a sick person? You might even get blamed
for the death.'
'That's true,' Gribardsun said. 'But if the tribe is wiped out by typhus, or some other
disease, then we have no tribe to study, no language to learn. And nobody to help us haul the
vessel to the top of the hill. I'm taking what they used to call a calculated risk.'
Rachel looked curiously at him and said, 'Every once in a while you use an old-fashioned
phrase. Not self-consciously but as if - well, I don't know. You roll them out as if you were to
the phrase born, if you know what I mean.'
'I read a lot,' he said. 'And I have a tendency to repeat some of the good old phrases.'
'I'm not deprecating it,' she said. 'I like to hear them. It's just that they startle me.
Anyway, supper's on. Let's have a little toast first. John, you're our chief; you propose it.'
He raised his glass and said, 'Here's to the world we love, whatever she may be.'
They drank down the wine. Rachel said, 'That's a strange toast, John.'
'John's a strange man,' Drummond said, and he laughed.
Gribardsun smiled slightly. He knew that Silverstein resented his wife's obvious
admiration for him, but he did not think that the issue would be an irritating one, even if they
were forced to be together for four years. The scientists in charge of the project had studied
their compatibility charts and were well satisfied with them. Nobody on the expedition was
psychologically unstable, as far as the tests could determine.
If Drummond got out of line, he would have to be straightened out. He was a reasonable
man, except where his wife was concerned. And even there he could be reassured. Gribardsun was
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sure of that. It was only in the last few weeks before the launching of the H. G. Wells I that
Drummond had started to show signs that he thought his wife admired Gribardsun more than she
should. Even then he had expressed himself in only mild oblique remarks. Several mornings, he and
Rachel had looked as if they had not slept well the night before. Gribardsun had thought of asking
for their withdrawal before the day of launching got too close. But the two had not let whatever
was bothering them interfere with their duties, and he knew how deeply they would be hurt if they
were taken off the project. So he had said nothing to his superiors.
'We'll get up early,' he said. 'Seven o'clock, ship's time. After breakfast we'll tramp
around and collect some more specimens. Then we'll visit our natives. But I think we can establish
even better relations if we take them some meat.'
After eating, they went outside. The sun was just touching the horizon. The air was very
cold. A herd of about thirty reindeer, a couple of huge rhinoceroses, twelve adult mammoths and
three babies, and a dozen bison were by the river. At this distance they looked like small
animated toys.
The four were thrilled at their first sight of the rhinos and mammoths. There were still
elephants in zoos and reservations in their world, but the mammoths with the hump of fat on their
heads and shoulders and the curved tusks were quite different. And the rhinos were extinct in the
twenty-first century.
'There're some wolves!' Rachel said.
She pointed, and they saw a dozen of the gray shapes floating out of the shadows of a
hill. The reindeer raised their heads, and the faint trumpeting of the mammoths reached the four.
But the wolves ignored them and trotted to a spot about sixty yards down from the herbivores.
There they drank, and the herbivores continued to drink, though watching the wolves nervously.
The sky above passed from pale blue to dark blue to sable. The stars came out. Drummond
Silverstein made sightings, then set out his telescope and camera. Rachel stayed out with him. Von
Billmann returned to the vessel to listen some more to the sounds of his new language. Gribardsun
took his express rifle and walked back up the hill. By the time he reached the top, the half moon
had appeared. It looked exactly like the moon he knew, except that he knew that no men were
burrowed deep in its rock and no domes or spacecraft were on its surface.
He faced the wind, which was blowing at about six miles an hour from the northwest. It
also brought sounds: from far off a lion's roar; nearer, a small cat's scream; the snorting of
some large beast, rhino or bison; the clatter of hoofs on rocks to the west. The lion roared again
and then was silent. He smiled. It had been a long time since he had heard a lion roaring. This
one was deeper than any he had known; the cave lion was somewhat larger than the African. A
mammoth trumpeted shrilly from near where the lion's roar had come. Then there was silence. After
a while he heard a fox bark. He lingered a few more moments, drinking in the rising moon and the
pure air, and then he returned to the ship below. Drummond Silverstein was putting away his
astronomical equipment. Rachel had gone.
'I like this world already,' Gribardsun said. 'I knew I would. It's simple and savage and
uncrowded with humans.'
'Next you'll be saying you want to stay behind when we leave,' Silverstein said.
He sounded as if he did not altogether disapprove of the idea.
'Well, if a man wants to know this time thoroughly, hell have to stay here the rest of his
life,' Gribardsun said. 'He could explore Europe and then cross the land bridge to Africa. As I
understand it, the Sahara is a green and wet land with rivers full of hippos. And the sub-Sahara,
my old stamping ground, is a paradise of animal life. And there might even be a few subhumans
left, roaming the savannahs or the forests.'
'That would be self-indulgent and suicidal,' Drummond said. 'Who would gain anything from
it? All that data and no one to leave it to.'
'I could leave a record of some sort at an agreed-upon place, and you could pick it up
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