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  Carpenter saw the dark winged-shapes of the pteranocjons then. There were two of them, and they were homing in on the triceratank like a pair of prehistoric dive-bombers. Seizing Skip’s hand, he pulled the boy up on the snout, set him in the compartment beside his sister, and told them to get into the cabin fast. Then he jumped into the driver s seat and slammed down the nacelle.

  Just in time: the first pteranodon came so close that its right aileron scraped against Sam’s frilled head-shield, and the second came so close that its ventral fuselage brushed Sam’s back. Their twin tailjets left two double wakes of bluish smoke.

  II

  Carpenter sat up straight in the driver’s seat. Ailerons? Fuselage? Tailjets?

  Pteranodons?

  He activated Sam’s shield-field and extended it to a distance of two feet beyond the armor-plating, then he threw the reptivehicle into gear. The pteranodons were circling high overhead. “Marcy,” he called, “come forward a minute, will you?”

  Her buttercup-colored hair tickled his cheek as she leaned over his shoulder. “Yes, Mr. Carpenter?”

  “When you saw the pteranodons, you said, ‘They’ve found us already!’ What did you mean by that?”

  “They’re not pteranodons, Mr. Carpenter. Whatever pteranodons are. They’re kidnapers, piloting military-surplus fly-abouts that probably look like pteranodons. They abducted Skip and me from the preparatory school of the Greater Martian Technological Apotheosization Institute and are holding us for ransom. Earth is their hideout. There are three of them altogether—Roul and Fritad and Holmer. One of them is probably back in the spaceship.”

  Carpenter was silent for several moments. The Mars of A.D. 2156 was a desolate place of rubble, sand and wind inhabited by a few thousand diehard colonists from Earth and a few hundred thousand diehard Martians, the former living beneath atmosphere-domes and the latter, save for the few who had intermarried with the colonists, living in deep caves where oxygen could still be obtained. But twenty-second century excavations by the Extraterrestrial Archaeological Society had unearthed unquestionable evidence to the effect that an ultra-technological civilization similar to that of Earth Present had existed on the planet over 70,000,000 years ago. Surely it was no more than reasonable to assume that such a civilization had had space travel.

  That being the case, Earth, during her uppermost Mesozoic Era, must have presented an ideal hideout for Martian criminals, kidnapers included. Certainly such a theory threw considerable light on the anachronisms that kept cropping up in Cretaceous strata. There was of course another way to explain Marcy’s and Skip’s presence in the Age of Dinosaurs: they could be A.D. 2156 Earth children, and they could have come back via time machine the same as he had. Or they could have been abducted by twenty-second century kidnapers, for that matter, and have been brought back. But, that being so, why should they lie about it?

  “Tell me, Marcy,” Carpenter said, “do you believe I came from the future?”

  “Oh, of course, Mr. Carpenter. And I’m sure Skip does, too. It’s—it’s kind of hard, to believe, but I know that someone as nice as you wouldn’t tell a fib—especially such a big one.”

  “Thank you,” Carpenter said. “And I believe you came from Greater Mars, which, I imagine, is the planet’s largest and most powerful country. Tell me something about your civilization.”

  “It’s a magnificent civilization, Mr. Carpenter. Every day we progress by leaps and bounds, and now that we’ve licked the instability factor, we’ll progress even faster.”

  “ ‘The instability factor’?”

  “Human emotion. It held us back for years, but it can’t any more. Now, when a boy reaches his thirteenth birthday and a girl reaches her fifteenth, they are desentimentalized. And after that, they are able to make calm cool decisions strictly in keeping with pure logic. That way they can achieve maximum efficiency. At the Institute preparatory school, Skip and I are going through what is known as the ‘pre-desentimentalization process.’ After four more years we’ll begin receiving dosages of the desentimentalization drug. Then—”

  SKRRRREEEEEEEEEEK! went one of the pteranodons as it sideswiped the shield-field.

  Carpenter watched it as it wobbled wildly for a moment, and before it shot skyward he caught a glimpse of its occupant. All he saw was an expressionless face, but from its forward location he deduced that the man was lying in a prone position between the two twelve-foot wings.

  Marcy was trembling. “I—I think they’re out to kill us,

  Mr. Carpenter,” she said. “They threatened to if we tried to escape. Now that they’ve got our voices on the ransom tape, they probably figure they don’t need us any more.” He reached back and patted her hand where it lay lightly on his shoulder. “It’s all right, pumpkin. With old Sam here protecting you, you haven’t got a thing to worry about.”

  “Is—is that really his name?”

  “It sure is. Sam Triceratops, Esquire. Sam, this is Marcy. You take good care of her and her brother—do you hear me?” He turned his head and looked into the girl’s wide blue eyes. “He says he will. I’ll bet you haven’t got anybody like him on Mars, have you?”

  She shook her head—as standard a Martian gesture, apparently, as it was a terrestrial—and for a moment he thought that a tremulous smile was going to break upon her Ups. It didn’t, though—not quite. “Indeed we haven’t, Mr. Carpenter.”

  He squinted up through the nacelle at the circling pteranodons (he still thought of them as pteranodons, even though he knew they were not). “Where’s this spaceship of theirs, Marcy? Is it far from here?”

  She pointed to the left. “Over there. You come to a river, and then a swamp. Skip and I escaped this morning when Fritad, who was guarding the lock, fell asleep. They’re a bunch of sleepyheads, always falling asleep when it’s their turn to stand guard. Eventually the Greater Martian Space Police will track the ship here; we thought we could hide out until they got here. We crept through the swamp and floated across the river on a log. It—it was awful, with big snakes on legs chasing us, and—and—”

  His shoulder informed him that she was trembling again. “Look, I’ll tell you what, pumpkin,” he said. “You go back to the cabin and fix yourself and Skip something to eat. I don’t know what kind of food you’re accustomed to, but it can’t be too different from what Sam’s got in stock. You’ll find some square, vacuum-containers in the cupboard—they contain sandwiches. On the refrigerator-shelf just above, you’ll find some tall bottles with circlets of little stars—they contain pop. Open some of each, and dig in. Come to think of it, I’m hungry myself, so while you’re at it, fix me something, too.”

  Again, she almost smiled. “All right, Mr. Carpenter. I’ll fix you something special.”

  Alone in the driver’s compartment, he surveyed the Cretaceous landscape through the front, lateral and rear viewscopes. A range of young mountains showed far to the left. To the right was the distant line of cliffs. The rear viewscope framed scattered stands of willows, fan palms and dwarf magnolias, beyond which the forested uplands, wherein lay his entry area, began. Far ahead, volcanos smoked with Mesozoic abandon.

  79,061,889 years from now, this territory would be part of the state of Montana. 79,062,156 years from now, a group of paleontologists digging somewhere in the vastly changed terrain would unearth the fossil of a modem man who had died 79,062,156 years before his disinterment.

  Would the fossil turn out to be his own?

  Carpenter grinned, and looked up at the sky to where the two pteranodons still circled. It could have been the fossil of a Martian.

  He turned the triceratank around and started off in the opposite direction. “Come on, Sam,” he said. “Let’s see if we can’t find a good hiding place where we can lay over for the night. Maybe by morning I’ll be able to figure out what to do. Who’d ever have thought we’d wind up playing rescue-team to a couple of kids?”

  Sam grunted deep in his gear box and made tracks for the forested uplands
.

  The trouble with going back in time to investigate anachronisms was that frequently you found yourself the author of the anachronism in question. Take the classic instance of Professor Archibald Quigley.

  Whether the story was true or not, no one could say for certain, but, true or not, it pointed up the irony of time travel as nothing else could. A staunch Coleridge admirer, Professor Quigley had been curious for years—or so the story went—as to the identity of the visitor who had called at the farmhouse in Nether Stowey in the county of Somersetshire, England in the year 1797 and interrupted Coleridge while the poet was writing down a poem which he had just composed in his sleep. The visitor had hung around for an hour, and afterward Coleridge hadn’t been able to remember the rest of the poem. As a result, Kubla Khan was never finished. Eventually, Professor Quigley’s curiosity grew to such proportions that he could no longer endure it, and he applied at the Bureau of Time Travel for permission to return to the place-time in order that he might set his mind at ease. His request was granted, whereupon he handed over half his life-savings without a qualm in exchange for a trip back to the morning in question. Emerging near the farmhouse, he hid in a clump of bushes, watching the front door; then, growing impatient when no one showed up, he went to the door himself, and knocked. Coleridge answered the knock personally, and even though he asked the professor in, the dark look that he gave his visitor was something which the professor never forgot to the end of his days.

  Recalling the story, Carpenter chuckled. It wasn’t really anything for him to be chuckling about, though, because what had happened to the professor could very well happen to him. Whether he liked it or not, there was a good chance that the fossil which the North American Paleontological Society had sent him back to the Mesozoic Era to investigate might turn out to be his own.

  Nevertheless, he refused to let the possibility bother him. For one thing, the minute he found himself in a jam, all he had to do was contact his two assistants, Miss Sands and Peter Detritus, and they would come flying to his aid in Edith the therapod or one of the other reptivehicles which NAPS kept on hand. For another, he had already learned that outside forces were at work in the Cretaceous Period. He wasn’t the only candidate for fossildom. Anyway, worrying about such matters was a waste of time: what was going to happen had already happened, and that was all there was to it.

  Skip crawled out of the cabin and leaned over the back of the driver’s seat. “Marcy sent you up a sandwich and a bottle of pop, Mr. Carpenter,” he said, handing over both items. And then, “Can I sit beside you, sir?”

  “Sure thing,” Carpenter said, moving over.

  The boy climbed over the backrest and slid down into the seat. No sooner had he done so than another buttercup-colored head appeared. “Would—would it be all right, Mr. Carpenter, if—if—”

  “Move over and make room for her in the middle, Skip.” Sam’s head was a good five feet wide, hence the driver’s compartment was by no means a small one. But the seat itself was only three feet wide, and accommodating two half-grown kids and a man the size of Carpenter was no small accomplishment, especially in view of the fact that all three of them were eating sandwiches and drinking pop. Carpenter felt like an indulgent parent taking his offspring on an excursion through a zoo.

  And such a zoo I They were in the forest now, and around them Cretaceous oaks and laurels stood; there were willows, too, and screw pines and ginkgos galore, and now and then they passed through incongruous stands of fan palms. Through the undergrowth they glimpsed a huge and lumbering creature that looked like a horse in front and a kangaroo in back. Carpenter identified it as an anatosaurus. In a clearing they came upon a struthiomimus and startled the ostrich-like creature half out of its wits. A spike-backed ankylosaurus glowered at them from behind a clump of sedges, but discreetly refrained from questioning Sams right of way. Glancing into a treetop, Carpenter saw his first archaeopteryx. Raising his eyes still higher, he saw the circling pteranodons.

  He had hoped to lose them after entering the forest, and to this end he held Sam on an erratic course. Obviously, however, they were equipped with matter detectors. A more sophisticated subterfuge would be necessary. There was a chance that he might bring them down with a barrage of stun-charges, but it was a slim one and he decided not to try it in any event. The kidnapers undoubtedly deserved to die for what they had done, but he was not their judge. He would kill them if he had to, but he refused to do it as long as he had an ace up his sleeve.

  Turning toward the two children, he saw that they had lost interest in their sandwiches and were looking apprehensively upward. Catching their eye, he winked. “I think it’s high time we gave them the slip, don’t you?”

  “But how, Mr. Carpenter?” Skip asked. “They’re locked right on us with their detector-beams. We’re just lucky ordinary Martians like them can’t buy super Martian weapons. They’ve got melters, which are a form of iridescers: but if they had real iridescers, we’d be goners.”

  “We can shake them easy, merely by jumping a little ways back in time. Come on, you two—finish your sandwiches and stop worrying.”

  Their apprehension vanished, and excitement took its place. “Let’s jump back six days,” Marcy said. “They’ll never find us then because we won’t be here yet.”

  “Can’t do it, pumpkin—it would take too much starch out of Sam. Time-jumping require a tremendous amount of power. In order for a part-time time-machine like Sam to jump any great distance, its power has to be supplemented by the power of a regular time station. The station propels the reptivehicle back to a pre-established entry area, and the time-traveler drives out of the area and goes about his business. The only way he can get back to the present is by driving back into the area, contacting the station and tapping its power-supply again, or by sending back a distress signal and having someone come to get him in another reptivehicle. At the most, Sam could make about a four-day round trip under his own power but it would bum him out. Once that happened, even the station couldn’t pull him back. I think we’d better settle for an hour.”

  Ironically, the smaller the temporal distance you had to deal with, the more figuring you had to do. After directing the triceratank via the liaison-ring on his right index finger to continue on its present erratic course, Carpenter got busy with pad and pencil, and presently he began punching out arithmetical brain-twisters on the compact computer that was built into the control panel.

  Marcy leaned forward, watching him intently. “If it will expedite matters, Mr. Carpenter,” she said, “I can do simple sums, such as those you’re writing down, in my head. For instance, 828,464,280 times 4,692,438,921 equals 3,887,518-032,130,241,880.”

  “It may very well at that, pumpkin, but I think we’d better check and make sure, don’t you?” He punched out the first two sets of numerals on the calculator, and depressed the multiplication button. 3,887,518,032,130,241,880, the answer panel said. He nearly dropped the pencil.

  “She’s a mathematical genius,” Skip said. “I’m a mechanical genius myself. That’s how come we were kidnaped. Our government values geniuses highly. They’ll pay a lot of money to get us back.”

  “Your government? I thought kidnapers preyed on parents, not governments.”

  “Oh, but our parents aren’t responsible for us any more,” Marcy explained. “In fact, they’ve probably forgotten all about us. After the age of six, children become the property of the state. Modem Martian parents are desentimentalized, you see, and don’t in the least mind getting rid of—giving up their children.”

  Carpenter regarded the two solemn faces for some time. “Yes,” he said, “I do see at that.”

  With Marcy’s help, he completed the rest of his calculations; then he fed the final set of figures into Sam’s frontal ganglion. “Here we go, you two!” he said, and threw the jumpback switch. There was a brief shimmering effect and an almost imperceptible jar. So smoothly did the transition take place that Sam did not even pause in his lumbering
walk.

  Carpenter turned his wristwatch back from 4:16 P.M. to 3:16 P.M. “Take a look at the sky now, kids. See any more pteranodons?”

  They peered up through the foliage. “Not a one, Mr. Carpenter,” Marcy said, her eyes warm with admiration. “Not a single one!”

  “Say, you’ve got our scientists beat forty different ways from Sunday!” Skip said. “They think they’re pretty smart, but I’ll bet they’ve never even thought of trying to travel in time . . . How far can you jump into the future, Mr. Carpenter—in a regular time-machine, I mean?”

  “Given sufficient power, to the end of time—if time does have an end. But traveling beyond one’s own present is forbidden by law. The powers-that-be in 2156 consider it bad for a race of people to find out what’s going to happen to them before it actually happens, and for once I’m inclined to think that the powers-that-be are right.”

  He discontinued liaison control, took over manually and set Sam on a course at right angles to their present direction. At length they broke free from the forest onto the plain. In the distance the line of cliffs that he had noticed earlier showed whitely against the blue and hazy sky. “How’d you kids like to camp out for the night?” he asked.

  Skip’s eyes went round. “Camp out, Mr. Carpenter?”

  “Sure. Well build a fire, cook our food over it, spread our blankets on the ground—regular American Indian style. Maybe we can even find a cave in the cliffs. Think you’d like that?”

  Both pairs of eyes were round now. “What’s ‘American Indian style,’ Mr. Carpenter?” Marcy asked.

  He told them about the Arapahoes and the Cheyennes and the Crows and the Apaches, and about the buffalo and the great plains and Custer’s last stand, and the Conestogas and the frontiersmen (the old ones, not the “new”), and about Geronimo and Sitting Bull and Cochise, and all the while he talked their eyes remained fastened on his face as though it were the sun and they had never before seen day. When he finished telling them about the settling of the west, he told them about the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln and Generals Grant and Lee and the Gettysburg Address and the Battle of Bull Run and the surrender at Appomattox.