The IF Reader of Science Fiction Page 3

  He had never talked so much in all his life. He wondered what had come over him, why he felt so carefree and gay all of a sudden and why nothing seemed to matter except the haze-ridden Cretaceous afternoon and the two round-eyed children sitting beside him. But he did not waste much time wondering. He went on to tell them about the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, and about what a wonderful dream the founding fathers had had and about how much better it would have turned out if opportunistic men had not used it to further their own selfish end and about how relatively wonderful it had turned out anyway, despite the many crimes that had been committed in its name. By the time he finished, evening was on hand. The white cliffs rose up before them, shouldering the darkening sky.

  At the base of the cliffs they found a jim-dandy of an untenanted cave, large enough to accommodate both Sam and themselves and with enough room left over to build a campfire. Carpenter drove the reptivehicle inside and parked it in the rear; then he extended the shield-field till it included the cave, the side of the cliff and a large semicircular area at the base of the cliff. After checking the “front yard” and finding that it contained no reptiles except several small and harmless lizards, he put the two children to work gathering firewood. Meanwhile, he generated a one-way illusion-field just within the mouth of the cave. By this time Skip, at least, had shed his reserve. “Can I help build the fire, Mr. Carpenter?” he cried, jumping up and down. “Can I—can I—can I?”

  “Skip!” Marcy said.

  “It’s all right, pumpkin,” Carpenter told her. “You can help, too, if you like.”

  The walls of the cave turned red, then rosy, as young flames grew into full-fledged ones.

  Carpenter opened three packages of frankfurters and three packages of rolls and showed his charges how to spear the frankfurters on the end of pointed sticks and roast them over the fire. Afterward he demonstrated how to place a frankfurter in a roll and smother it with mustard, pickle relish, and chopped onions. It was as though he had flung wide magic casements opening on enchanted lands that the two children had not dreamed existed. The last vestiges of solemnity departed from their faces, and during the next half hour they created and consumed six hot dogs apiece. Skip got so excited that he nearly fell into the fire, and the smile that had been trying all afternoon to break upon Marcy’s lips at last came through, teaching the flames to bum bright.

  Carpenter had made a pot of cocoa in Sam’s kitchenette, and nothing more was needed to round out the cookout except marshmallows. Was it remotely possible, he wondered, that his efficient chief assistant had included such nostalgic delicacies among the various supplies in Sam’s tail-compartment? It was doubtful at best, but he took a look anyway. To his delight, he found a whole box of them.

  Again, he performed a demonstration, while the two children looked on in open-mouthed awe. When the two marshmallows which he had speared on his stick turned golden brown he thought for a moment that Skip’s eyes were going to fall out of his head. As for Marcy, she just stood there and stared as though Carpenter had said, “Let there be light!” and the first day had come into being.

  Laughing, he removed the marshmallows and handed one to each of them. “Skip I” Marcy said when the boy popped his into his mouth and dispatched it with a single gulp. “Where are your manners?” She ate hers daintily.

  After the marshmallow roast, he went outside and cut enough laurel and dogwood branches for three mattresses. He showed the children how to arrange the branches on the cavern floor and how to cover them with the blankets which he took out of Sam’s tail-compartment. Skip needed no further invitation to turn in: exhausted from his enthusiastic activities and becalmed by his full stomach, he collapsed upon his blanket as soon as he had it in place. Carpenter got three more blankets, covered him with one of them and turned to Marcy. “You look tired, too, pumpkin.”

  “Oh, but I’m not, Mr. Carpenter. Not in the least bit. I’m two years older than Skip, you know. He’s just a kid.”

  He folded the remaining two blankets into impromptu pillows and placed them a few feet from the fire. He sat down on one of them; she sat down on the other. All evening, grunts and growls and groans had been coming sporadically from beyond the shield-field; now they were supplanted by an awesome noise that brought to mind a gigantic road-repair machine breaking up old pavement. The cavern floor trembled, and the firelight flickered wildly on the wall. “Sounds like old tyrannosaurus,” Carpenter said. “Probably out looking for a midnight snack in the form of a struthiomimus or two.”

  “ ‘Tyrannosaurus,’ Mr. Carpenter?”

  He described the ferocious theropod for her. She nodded after he had finished, and a shudder shook her. “Yes,” she said, “Skip and I saw one. It was a little while after we crossed the river. We—we hid in a clump of bushes till he passed. What terrible creatures you have here on Earth, Mr. Carpenter!”

  “They no longer exist in my day and age,” Carpenter said. “We have terrible ‘creatures’ of another order—‘creatures’ that would send old tyrannosaurus high-tailing it for the hills like a flushed rabbit. I shouldn’t be complaining, though. Our technological debauchery left us with a cold-war hangover-sure; but it paid off in quite a number of things. Time travel, for one. Interplanetary travel, for another.” At this point, the road-repair machine struck a bad stretch of pavement, and, judging from the ungodly series of sounds that ensued, blew a rod to boot. The girl moved closer to him. “Take it easy, pumpkin. There’s nothing to worry about. An army of theropods couldn’t break through that shield-field.”

  “Why do you call me ‘pumpkin,’ Mr. Carpenter? On Mars, a pumpkin is an unpleasant squashy vegetable that grows in swamps and midden-marshes.”

  He laughed. The sounds from beyond the shield-field diminished, then faded away, as the theropod thundered off in another direction. “On Earth, a pumpkin is quite a nice vegetable—or maybe it’s a fruit. Whichever, it’s quite respectable. But that’s beside the point. ‘Pumpkin’ is what a man calls a girl when he likes her.”

  There was a silence. Then, “Do you have a real girl, Mr. Carpenter?”

  “Not actually, Marcy. You might say that figuratively speaking I worship one from afar.”

  “That doesn’t sound like very much fun. Who is she?”

  “She’s my chief assistant at the North American Paleontological Society where I work—Miss Sands. Her first name is ‘Elaine,’ but I never call her by it. She sees to it that I don’t forget anything when I retro-travel, and she cases the placetimes over a time-scope before I start out. Then she and my other assistant, Peter Detritus, stand by, ready to come to the rescue if I should send back a can of chicken soup. You see, a can of chicken soup is our distress signal. It’s about as big an object as a paleontologivehicle can handle in most cases, and the word ‘chicken’ in our language connotes fear.”

  “But why do you worship her from afar, Mr. Carpenter?”

  “Well you see,” Carpenter said, “Miss Sands isn’t just an ordinary run-of-the-mill girl. She’s the cool, aloof type—a goddess, if you know what I mean. Although I don’t see how you possibly could. Anyway, you simply don’t treat goddesses the way you treat mere girls—you keep your distance and worship them from afar and humbly wait for them to bestow favors upon you. I—I worship her so much, in fact, that every time I’m near her I get so frustrated that I can hardly say anything. Maybe after I get to know her better it’ll be different. So far, I’ve known her three months.”

  He fell silent. Marcy’s hearrings twinkled in the firelight as she turned and looked gently up into his face. “What’s the matter, Mr. Carpenter—cat got your tongue?”

  “I was just thinking,” Carpenter said. “Three months is quite a long time at that—long enough for a man to tell whether a girl is ever going to like him or not. And Miss Sands isn’t ever going to like me—I can see that now. Why, she doesn’t even l
ook at me unless she absolutely has to, and she won’t say two words to me if she can possibly avoid it. So you see, even if I did stop worshipping her from afar and got up enough nerve to tell her that I love her, she would probably only be annoyed and tell me to get lost.” Marcy was indignant. “She must be out of her mind, Mr. Carpenter—just plain out of her mind. She should be ashamed of herself!”

  “No, Marcy—you’ve got her all wrong. You can’t expect a girl as beautiful as she is to go for a good-for-nothing time-bum like me.”

  “A good-for-nothing time-bum indeed! You know, Mr. Carpenter, I don’t think you understand women very well. Why, I’ll bet if you told her you love her, she’d throw herself into your arms!”

  “You’re a romantic, Marcy. In real life, such things don’t happen.” He stood up. “Well, young lady, I don’t know about you, but I’m tired. Shall we call it a day?”

  “If you wish to, Mr. Carpenter.”

  She was asleep by the time he pulled her blanket up to her chin. As he stood there looking down at her, she turned on her side, and the firelight caught the buttercup-hue fuzz on the back of her neck, where her hair had been cut too short, and tinted it red-gold. All he could think of were buttercup-clad meadows in spring, and the warm clean sun rising and ushering in the dew-jeweled day . . .

  After checking to see if Slap was all right, he went over and stood in the cave mouth and stared out into the darkness. With tyrannosaurus’ departure, the lesser Cretaceous creatures had come out of their hiding places and were making their presence known again. He glimpsed the grotesque shapes of several omithopods; he saw an ankylosaurus standing immobile by a coppice of fan palms; he heard lizards scurrying both inside and outside the shield-field. A moon subtly different from the one he was most accustomed to was climbing into the prehistoric heavens. The difference lay in the number of meteorite craters. There were far fewer of them now than there would be 79,062,156 years in the future.

  He realized presently that although he was still looking at the moon he was no longer seeing it. He was seeing the campfire instead, and the girl and the boy enthusiastically roasting marshmallows. Why hadn’t he gotten married and had children? he wondered suddenly. Why had he passed up all the pretty girls he had ever known, only to fall hopelessly in love at the age of thirty-two with a beautiful goddess who preferred not to know he was alive? What had given him the notion that the thrill derived from adventure was somehow superior to the contentment derived from loving and being loved?—that getting the bugs out of historical and pre-historical times was more important than getting the bugs out of his own life? That a lonely room in a boarding house was a man’s castle and that drinks drunk in dim-lit bars with fun-girls he could no longer remember the next day spelled “freedom”?

  What treasure had he expected to find in the past that could equal the treasures he had passed up in the future?

  The night had grown chill. Before lying down to sleep he added more wood to the fire. He listened to the flames crackle and watched their pale flickerings on the cavern walls. A lizard regarded him with golden eyes out of prehistoric shadows. In the distance, an omithopod went Wa-roompf! Beside him in the Mesozoic night the two children breathed softly in their green-bough beds. Presently he slept.

  III

  The next morning, Carpenter wasted no time in getting the show on the road.

  Marcy and Skip were all for remaining in the cave indefinitely, but he explained to them that, were they to stay in one place, the kidnapers would find them that much sooner, and that therefore it would be better if they kept on the move. Thus far, everything he had told them had rung a bell in their language just as everything they had told him had rung a bell in his, but this time, for some reason, he had a hard time getting through to them. Either that, or they just plain didn’t want to leave the cave. Leave it they did however—after ablutions performed in Sam’s compact lavatory and a breakfast of bacon and eggs cooked in Sam’s kitchenette—when he made it clear to them that he was still the boss.

  He hadn’t as yet decided on a definite plan of action. While trying to make up his mind, he let the triceratank pick its own course over the plain—a feat for which its hypersensitive terrainometer more than qualified.

  Actually, he had only two choices: (1)—continue to play big brother to the two children and elude the kidnapers until they gave up or until the cavalry, in the form of the Greater Martian Space Police, arrived on the scene, or (2)—return to the entry-area and signal Miss Sands and Peter Detritus to bring the triceratank back to the present. The second choice was by far the safer course of action. He would have settled for it without hesitation if it had not been for two things: (a) Marcy and Skip, while they undoubtedly would be able to adapt to a civilization as similar to their own as twenty-second century terrestrial civilization was, might never feel completely at home in it, and (b) sooner or later, they would come face to face with the demoralizing information that their own civilization of 79, 062, 156 years ago had long since turned to dust and that the technological dreams which they had been taught to regard as gospel had come to nothing. A possible third choice lay in taking them back to Earth Present, keeping them there until such time as the kidnapers gave up and left or until the Space Police showed up, and then returning them to Earth Past; but such a procedure would involve several round trips to the Cretaceous Period. Carpenter knew without having to ask that, owing to the fantastic expense involved, NAPS’ budget couldn’t support even one such non-paleontological round trip, to say nothing of several.

  Pondering the problem, he became aware that someone was tugging on his sleeve. It was Slap, who had come forward and climbed into the driver’s seat. “Can I steer him, Mr. Carpenter? Can I?”

  Carpenter surveyed the plain through the front, lateral, and rear viewscopes; then he raised Sam’s head and took a long look at the sky through the nacelle. A dark speck hovered high above the line of cliffs they had left less than an hour ago. As he watched, it was joined by two others. “Later on, Skip. Right now, I think we’ve got company.”

  Skip’s eyes had found the specks, too. “The pteranodons again, Mr. Carpenter?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  The specks grew rapidly larger, resolved into winged shapes with narrow, pointed heads. Marcy had come forward, and her gaze, too, was directed at the sky. This time, she didn’t seem to be in the least bit frightened, and neither did Slap. “Are we going to jump back in time again, Mr. Carpenter?” she asked.

  “We’ll see, pumpkin,” he said.

  The pteranodons were clearly visible now. There was no question but what they were interested in Sam. Whether they would try attacking him again was another matter. In any event, Carpenter decided that, even though the triceratank’s shield-field was in operation, his best bet would be to head for the nearest stand of trees. It was a stand of palmettos, and about half a mile distant. He threw Sam into high, and took over the controls again. “Come on, Sam,” he said. “to keep the kids’ morale from faltering, “show Marcy and Skip what you can do!”

  Sam took off like a twentieth-century locomotive, his flexible steel legs moving rhythmically, his alloy-hoofs pounding the ground in a thunderous cadence. Nevertheless, he was no match for the pteranodons, and they overtook him easily. The foremost one swooped down a hundred yards ahead, released what looked like a big metal egg and soared skyward.

  The metal egg turned out to be a bomb. The crater that it created was so wide that it took all of Carpenter’s skill to guide Sam around it without rolling the reptivehicle over. Instantly he revved up the engine and shifted into second. “They’re not going to get us that way, are they, old timer?” he said.

  “URRRRRRRR!” Sam grunted.

  Carpenter glanced at the sky. All of the pteranodons were directly overhead now. Circling. One, two, three, he counted. Three . . . yesterday there had been only two. “Marcy,” he said, suddenly excited, “how many kidnapers did you say there were?”

  “Three, Mr. Carp
enter. Roul and Fritad and Holmer.”

  “Then they’re all up there. That means the ship is unguarded—unless there’s a crew.”

  “No, Mr. Carpenter—there’s no crew. They did the piloting themselves.”

  He lowered his gaze from the circling pteranodons. “Do you kids think you could get inside?”

  “Easy,” Skip said. “It’s a military-surplus flyabout-carrier with standard locks, and standard locks are simple for someone with a little mechanical ability to disengage. That’s how come Marcy and I were able to escape in the first place. You just leave everything to me, Mr. Carpenter.”

  “Good,” Carpenter said. “We’ll be there waiting for them when they come back.”

  With Marcy doing the figuring, retro co-ordinate calculus was a breeze. Sam was ready for jump-back in a matter of seconds.

  Carpenter waited till they were in the stand of palmettos, then he threw the switch. Again, there was a shimmering effect and a slight jar, and daylight gave way to predawn darkness. Behind them in a cave at the base of the cliffs, another triceratank stood, and another Carpenter and another Marcy and Skip still slept soundly in their green-bough beds.

  “How far did we jump back this time, Mr. Carpenter?” Skip asked.

  Carpenter turned on Sam’s headlights and began guiding him out of the stand of palmettos. “Four hours. That should give us plenty of time to reach the ship and get set before our friends return. We may even reach it before they start out—assuming of course that they haven’t been searching for us round the clock.”

  “But suppose they spot us in this time-phase?” Marcy objected. “Won’t we be in the same pickle we just got out of?”