The IF Reader of Science Fiction Page 4

  “It’s a possibility, pumpkin. But the odds have it overwhelmingly that they didn’t spot us. Otherwise they wouldn’t have gone on searching for us—right?”

  She gazed at him admiringly. “You know something, Mr. Carpenter? You’re pretty smart.”

  Coming from someone who could multiply 4,692,438,921 by 828,464,280 in her head, it was quite a compliment. However, Carpenter managed to take it in his stride. “I hope you kids can find the ship now,” he said.

  “We’re already on the right course,” Skip said. “I know, because I’ve got a perfect sense of direction. It’s camouflaged as a big tree.”

  For the second time that morning, the sun came up. As had been the case yesterday, Sam’s size and mien cowed the various Cretaceous creatures they met although whether tyrannosaurus would have been similarly cowed had they come upon him was a moot question at best. In any case, they didn’t come upon him. By eight o’clock they were moving over the same terrain that Carpenter had come to not long after leaving the forested uplands the day before. “Look!” Marcy exclaimed presently. “There’s the tree we climbed when the humpbacked monster chased us!”

  “It sure is,” Skip said. “Boy were we scared!”

  Carpenter grinned. “He probably thought you were some species of flora he hadn’t tried yet. Good thing for his digestive system that I happened along when I did.”

  They looked at him blankly for a moment, and at first he thought that the barriers of two different languages and two different thought worlds had been too high for his little joke to surmount. Such, however, did not prove to be the case. First Marcy burst out laughing, and then Skip.

  “Mr. Carpenter, if you aren’t the darndest!” Marcy cried.

  They went on. The landscape grew more and more open, with coppices of palmettos and clusters of fan palms constituting most of the major plant-life. Far to the right, smoking volcanos added their discolored breath to the hazy atmosphere. In the distances ahead, mountains showed, their heads lost in the Mesozoic smog. The humidity was so high that large globules of moisture kept condensing on Sam’s nacelle and rolling down like raindrops. Tortoises, lizards, and snakes abounded, and once a real pteranodon glided swiftly by overhead.

  At length they came to the river which Marcy had mentioned and which the increasing softness of the ground had been heralding for some time. Looking downstream, Carpenter saw his first brontosaurus.

  He pointed it out to the lads, and they stared at it bugeyed. It was wallowing in the middle of the sluggish stream. Only its small head, its long neck, and the upper part of its back were visible. The neck brought to mind a lofty rubbery tower, but the illusion was marred by the frequency with which the head kept dipping down to the ferns and horse tails that lined the river bank. The poor creature was so enormous that it virtually had to keep eating day and night in order to stay alive.

  Carpenter found a shallows and guided Sam across the stream to the opposite bank. The ground was somewhat firmer here, but the firmness was deceiving, for the reptivehicle’s terrainometer registered an even higher frequency of bogs. (Lord! Carpenter thought. Suppose the two kids had blundered into one!) Ferns grew in abundance, and there were thick carpets of sassafras and sedges. Palmettos and fan palms were still the rule, but there were occasional ginkgos scattered here and there. One of them was a veritable giant of a tree, towering to a height of over one hundred and fifty feet.

  Carpenter stared at it. Cretaceous Period ginkgos generally grew on highground, not low, but a ginkgo the size of this one had no business growing in the Cretaceous Period at all. Moreover, the huge tree was incongruous in other respects. Its trunk was far too thick, for one thing. For another, the lower part of it up to a height of about twenty feet consisted of three slender subtrunks, forming a sort of tripod on which the rest of the tree rested.

  At this point, Carpenter became aware that his two charges were pointing excitedly at the object of his curiosity. “That’s it!” Skip exclaimed. “That’s the ship!”

  “Well, no wonder it caught my eye,” Carpenter said. “They didn’t do a very good job of camouflaging it. I can even see one of the fly-about-bays.”

  Marcy said, “They weren’t particularly concerned about how it looks from the ground. It’s how it looks from above that counts. Of course, if the Space Police get here in time they’ll pick it up sooner or later on their detector-beams, but it will fool them for a while at least.”

  “You talk as though you don’t expect them to get here in time.”

  “I don’t. Oh, they’ll get here eventually, Mr. Carpenter, but not for weeks, and maybe even months. It takes a long time for their radar-intelligence department to track a ship, besides which it’s a sure bet that they don’t even know we’ve been kidnaped yet. In all previous cases where Institute children have been abducted, the government has paid the ransom first and then notified the Space Police. Of course, even after the ransom has been paid and the children have been returned, the Space Police still launch a search for the kidnapers, and eventually they find their hideout; but naturally the kidnapers are long gone by then.”

  “I think,” Carpenter said, “that it’s high time a precedent was established, don’t you?”

  After parking Sam out of sight in a nearby coppice of palmettos and deactivating the shield-field, he reached in under the driver’s seat and pulled out the only hand weapon the triceratank contained—a lightweight but powerful stun-rifle specially designed by NAPS for the protection of time-travel personnel. Slinging it on his shoulder, he threw open the nacelle, stepped out onto Sam’s snout and helped the two children down to the ground. The trio approached the ship.

  Skip shinned up one of the landing jacks, climbed some distance up the trunk and had the locks open in a matter of seconds. He lowered an aluminum ladder. “Everything’s all set, Mr. Carpenter.”

  Marcy glanced over her shoulder at the palmetto coppice. “Will—will Sam be all right do you think?”

  “Of course he will, pumpkin,” Carpenter said. “Up with you now.”

  The ship’s air-conditioned interior had a temperature that paralleled Sam’s, the lighting was cool, subdued. Beyond the inner lock, a brief corridor led to a spiral steel stairway that gave access to the decks above and to the engine rooms below. Glancing at his watch, which he had set four hours back, Carpenter saw that the time was 8:24. In a few minutes, the pteranodons would be closing in on the Sam and Carpenter and Marcy and Skip of the “previous” timephase. Even assuming that the three kidnapers headed straight for the ship afterward, there was still time to spare—time enough, certainly, to send a certain message before laying the trap he had in mind. True, he could send the message after Roul and Fritad and Holmer were safely locked in their cabins, but in the event that something went wrong he might not be able to send it at all, so it was better to send it right now. “Okay, you kids,” he said, “close the locks and then lead the way to the communications-room.” They obeyed the first order with alacrity, but hedged on the second. Marcy lingered in the corridor, Slap just behind her.

  “Why do you want to go to the communications-room, Mr. Carpenter?” she asked.

  “So you kids can radio our position to the Space Police and tell them to get here in a hurry. You do know how, I hope.”

  Skip looked at Marcy. Marcy looked at Skip. After a moment, both of them shook their heads. “Now see here,” Carpenter said, annoyed, “you know perfectly well you know how. Why are you pretending you don’t?”

  Skip looked at the deck. “We—we don’t want to go home, Mr. Carpenter.”

  Carpenter regarded first one solemn face and then the other. “But you’ve got to be home! Where else can you go?” Neither of them answered. Neither of them looked at him. “It boils down to this,” he proceeded presently. “If we succeed in capturing Roul and Fritad and Holmer, fine and dandy. We’ll sit tight, and when the Space Police get here well turn them over. But if something goes wrong and we don’t capture them, we’ll at least
have an ace up our sleeve in the form of the message you’re going to send. Now I’m familiar with the length of time it takes to get from Mars to Earth in the spaceships of my day, but I don’t of course know how long your spaceships take. So maybe you two can give me some idea of the length of time that will elapse between the Space Police’s receipt of our message and their arrival here on Earth,” he asked.

  “With the two planets in their present position, just over four days,” Marcy said. “If you like, Mr. Carpenter, I can figure it out for you right down to a fraction of a—”

  “That’s close enough, pumpkin. Now, up the stairs with you and you too, Skip. Time’s a-wasting!”

  They complied glumly. The communications-room was on the second deck. Some of the equipment was vaguely familiar to Carpenter, but most of it was Greek. A wide, deck-to-ceiling viewport looked out over the Cretaceous plain, and, glancing down through the ersatz foliage, he found that he could see the palmetto coppice in which Sam was hidden. He scanned the sky for signs of the returning pteranodons. The sky was empty. Turning away from the viewport, he noticed that a fourth party had entered the room. He unslung his stun-rifle and managed to get it halfway to his shoulder; then, ZZZZZZTTT! a metal tube in the fourth party’s hand went, and the stun-rifle was no more.

  He looked incredulously down at his hand.

  IV

  The fourth party was a tall, muscular man clad in clothing similar to Marcy’s and Skip’s, but of a much richer material. The expression on his narrow face contained about as much feeling as a dried fig, and the metal tube in his hand was now directed at the center of Carpenter’s forehead. Carpenter didn’t need to be told that if he moved so much as one iota he would suffer a fate similar to that suffered by his rifle, but the man vouchsafed the information anyway. “If you move, you melt,” he said.

  “No, Holmer!” Marcy cried. “Don’t you dare harm him. He only helped us because he felt sorry for us.”

  “I thought you said there were only three of them, pumpkin,” Carpenter said, not taking his eyes from Holmer’s face.

  “That is all there are, Mr. Carpenter. Honest! The third pteranodon must have been a drone. They tricked us!”

  Holmer should have grinned, but he didn’t. There should have been triumph in his tone of voice when he addressed Carpenter, but there wasn’t.

  “You had to be from the future, friend,” he said. “Me and my buddies cased this place some time ago, and we knew you couldn’t be from now. That being so, it wasn’t hard for us to figure out that when that tank of yours disappeared yesterday you either jumped ahead in time or jumped back in it, and the odds were two to one that you jumped back. So we gambled on it, figured you’d try the same thing again if you were forced into it, and rigged up a little trap for you, which we figured you’d be smart enough to fall for. You were. The only reason I don’t melt you right now is because Roul and Fritad aren’t back yet. I want them to get a look at you first. I’ll melt you then but good. And the brats, too. We don’t need them any more.”

  Carpenter recoiled. The diptates of pure logic had much in common with the dictates of pure vindictiveness. Probably the pteranodons had been trying to “melt” Marcy, Skip, Sam, and himself almost from the beginning, and if it hadn’t been for Sam’s shield-field, they undoubtedly would have succeeded. Oh well, Carpenter thought, logic was a two-edged blade, and two could wield it as well as one. “How soon will your buddies be back, Holmer?”

  The Martian regarded him blankly. Carpenter tumbled to the fact that the man wasn’t wearing hearrings then.

  He said to Marcy: “Tell me, pumpkin, if this ship were to fall on its side, would either the change in its position or its impact with the ground be liable to set off an explosion? Answer me with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ so that our friend here won’t know what we’re talking about.”

  “No, Mr. Carpenter.”

  “And is the structure of the ship sturdy enough to prevent the bulkheads from caving in on us?”

  “Yes, Mr. Carpenter.”

  “How about the equipment in this room? Is it bolted down securely enough to prevent its being tom loose?”

  “Yes, Mr. Carpenter.”

  “Good. Now, as surreptitiously as you can, you and Skip start sidling over to that steel supporting pillar in the center of the deck. When the ship starts to topple, you hold on for dear life.”

  “What’s he saying to you, kid?” Holmer demanded.

  Marcy stuck her tongue out at him. “Wouldn’t you like to know!” she retorted.

  Obviously, the ability to make calm, cool decisions strictly in keeping with pure logic did not demand a concomitant ability to think fast, for it was not until that moment that the desentimentalized Martian realized that he alone of the four persons present was not wearing hearrings.

  Reaching into the small pouch that hung at his side, he withdrew a pair. Then, keeping his melter directed at Carpenter’s forehead with one hand, he began attaching them to his ears with the other. Meanwhile, Carpenter ran his right thumb over the tiny, graduated nodules of the liaison-ring on his right index finger, and when he found the ones he wanted, he pressed them in their proper sequence. On the plain below, Sam stuck his snout out of the palmetto coppice.

  Carpenter concentrated, his thoughts riding the tele-circuit that now connected his mind with Sam’s sacral ganglion: Retract your horn-howitzers and raise your nacelle-shield, Sam. Sam did so. Now, back off, and get a good run, charge the landing-jack on your right, and knock it out. Then get the hell out of the way!

  Sam came out of the coppice, turned and trotted a hundred yards out on the plain. There he turned again, aligning himself for the forthcoming encounter. He started out slowly, geared himself into second. The sound of his hoofbeats climbed into a thunderous crescendo and penetrated the bulkhead of the communications-room, and Holmer, who had finally gotten his hearrings into place, gave a start and stepped over to the viewport.

  By this time Sam was streaking toward the ship like an omithischian battering-ram. No one with an IQ in excess of 75 could have failed to foresee what was shortly going to happen.

  Holmer had an IQ considerably in excess of 75, but sometimes having a few brains is just as dangerous as having a little knowledge. It was so now. Forgetting Carpenter completely, the Martian threw a small lever to the right of the viewscope, causing the thick, unbreakable glass to retract into the bulkhead; then he leaned out through the resultant aperture and directed his melter toward the ground. Simultaneously, Sam made contact with the landing-jack, and Holmer went flying through the aperture like a jet-propelled Darius Green.

  The two kids were already clinging to the supporting pillar. With a leap, Carpenter joined them. “Hang on, you two!” he shouted, and proceeded to practice what he preached. The downward journey was slow at first, but it rapidly picked up momentum. Somebody should have yelled, “TIMBER!” Nobody did, but that didn’t dissuade the ginkgo from fulfilling its destiny. Lizards scampered, tortoises scrabbled and sauropods gaped for miles around. KRRR-RRRUUUUUUMMMP! The impact tore both Carpenter and the children from the pillar, but he managed to grab them and cushion their fall with his body. His back struck the bulkhead, and his breath blasted from his lungs. Somebody turned out the lights.

  At length, somebody turned them back on again. He saw Marcy’s face hovering like a small pale moon above his own. Her eyes were like autumn asters after the first frost.

  She had loosened his collar and she was patting his cheeks and she was crying. He grinned up at her, got gingerly to his feet and looked around. The communications-room hadn’t changed any, but it looked different. That was because he was standing on the bulkhead instead of the deck. It was also because he was still dazed.

  Marcy, tears running down her cheeks, wailed, “I was afraid you were dead, Mr. Carpenter!”

  He rumpled her buttercup-colored hair. “Fooled you, didn’t it?”

  At this point, Skip entered the room through the now horizontal doorway, a smal
l container clutched in his hand. His face lit up when he saw Carpenter. “I went after some recuperative gas, but I guess you don’t need it after all. Gee, I’m glad you’re all right, Mr. Carpenter!”

  “I take it you kids are, too,” Carpenter said.

  He was relieved when both of them said they were. Still somewhat dazed, he clambered up the concave bulkhead to the viewport and looked out. Sam was nowhere to be seen. Remembering that he was still in tele-circuit contact, lie ordered the triceratank to home in, after which he climbed through the viewport, lowered himself to the ground and began looking for Holmer’s body. When he failed lo find it he thought at first that the man had survived the lull and had made off into the surrounding scenery.

  Then he came to one of the bogs with which the area was infested, and saw its roiled surface. He shuddered. Well, anyway, he knew who the fossil was.

  Or rather, who the fossil had been.

  Sam came trotting up, circumventing the bog in response Id the Terrainometer’s stimuli. Carpenter patted the reptivehides head, which was not in the least damaged from its recent collision with the landing-jack; then he broke off liaison and returned to the ship. Marcy and Skip were standing in the viewport, staring at the sky. Turning, Carpenter stared at the sky, too. There were three specks in it.

  His mind cleared completely then, and he lifted the two children down to the ground. “Run for Sami” he said. “Hurry!”

  He set out after them. They easily outmatched his longer but far-slower strides, gaining the reptivehicle and clambering into the driver’s compartment before he had covered half the distance. The pteranodons were close now, and he could see their shadows rushing toward him across the ground. Unfortunately, however, he failed to see the small tortoise that was trying frantically to get out of his way. He tripped over it and went sprawling on his face.

  Glancing up, he saw that Marcy and Skip had closed Sam’s nacelle. A moment later, to his consternation the triceratank disappeared.