Rivers of Time
- Автор: Де Камп Лайон Спрэг
- Год: 1993
- Язык: английский
- Год: Baen Books
- ISBN: 9781555940232
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Rivers of Time». Краткое содержание книги:
Includes:
• Faunas (1968)
• A Gun for Dinosaur (1956)
• The Cayuse
• Crocamander Quest
• Miocene Romance
• The Synthetic Barbarian
• The Satanic Illusion
• The Big Splash
• The Mislaid Mastodon
• The Honeymoon Dragon
On the personal side his record was spottier. The wife I had met was his fifth; he was one of those rich men who collect trophy wives. As fast as one began to look a little shelf-worn, he'd dump her and go after a younger one. One would think the girls would learn of his track record and catch on. Perhaps they figured they could shake him down in the divorce settlement for enough to live on forever. Not my idea of family life; but that wasn't our business.
The Raja got back with his Pliocene party on schedule. He hadn't lost any clients, and they brought back a couple of mastodon heads and heads of several kinds of buck. These were relatives of the present American pronghorn, with weird horn arrangements. One had four horns; one, two long, straight horns with a spiral twist; and one, a forked horn on the nose as well as a pair in the usual place.
While we tidied up from the Pliocene safari, I told the Raja about our next expedition, with Redmond and Ligonier to the Cretaceous. He was enthusiastic over the Cayuse; but then, Chandra Aiyar is enthusiastic over every new idea, whether good, bad, or indifferent.
The original plan had been for him to hold down the office while I nursemaided Redmond and Ligonier; but the prospect of driving the Cayuse around the Mesozoic outback so excited him that he begged to come along, too, leaving Miss Minakuchi in charge. I gave in, largely because our calendar for the rest of the year was already pretty full. There were bloody few time slots left in Prochaska's schedule that we could have fitted a safari into, between those already reserved for the scientists.
So on a fine spring morning we gathered in Professor Prochaska's building, outside the transition chamber. Besides the Raja and me there were Charles Redmond, Rex Ligonier, and Joseph Voth, Redmond's mechanic. Voth was a short, hairy bloke who looked like something left over from the Pleistocene; but he was quiet and respectful enough, seldom saying anything but "Yes, Mr. Redmond" and "No, Mr. Redmond." And of course there were Beauregard Black and his crew, together with the camp equipment and the dozen asses to haul the stuff when we shifted camp.
We had chosen a time a millennium after one of our first safaris (or safariin, if you prefer), the one on which we lost a client to a tyrannosaur because the other client of the pair wouldn't follow orders. At this period, the chamber materializes on top of a rocky rise, from which you can see the Kansas Sea to the west, the big sauropod swamp around the bayhead, and to the north the low range that the Raja named the Janpur Hills after his ancestors' kingdom. Sixty or seventy million years earlier, there had been an active volcano to northward in sight of the place, but in the later Cretaceous that had long since been extinct and eroded away. A geologist tells me that in the Janpur Hills he'd found remnants of lava flows from that volcano.
The Raja and I and the sahibs crowded into the chamber with our packs and guns, and the Cayuse was wheeled in. It was a tight fit, which we managed only by having two of us—Richmond and the Raja—sit on the tandem bucket seats. I gave Bruce Cohen, the chamber wallah, the all-clear signal, and he spun his dials and pushed his buttons.
The transition through time is bloody upsetting the first time you experience it. You get vibration, nausea, and vertigo, to the point where Cohen has equipped the chamber with airsickness bags for those who feel crook. He's fussy about keeping his transition chamber neat.
As usual, the Raja and I got out first with our guns ready, just in case. Then the others; we had to manhandle the Cayuse out because the slope of the ground put the floor of the chamber half a meter above the ground on the door side. Then Cohen closed the door. The chamber gave a shiver and disappeared with a whoosh on its way back to the twenty-first century, to fetch Black and his crew and the asses. This took three more trips.
The first day, the Raja and I took Redmond and Ligonier on the usual hunt for fresh meat. Voth wasn't interested in hunting. He preferred to stay in camp and check out the Cayuse, to make sure every nut was tight and no tubes leaked.
I tossed a coin to see who should get the first shot, and Ligonier won. When we came upon a pair of man-sized thescelosaurs eating leaves, I whispered to Ligonier:
"There you are, Rex. Have a go!"
Ligonier raised his rifle and squinted. He held it steady enough—I had checked him out on the target range and found him competent—but he didn't fire.
After a while he lowered the rifle, took a few deep breaths, and tried again. Again he didn't fire.
At last he lowered the gun and turned a pale, strained face to me. "I'm sorry, Reggie. I just can't."
"Huh? What's the matter, sport?"
"I just can't make myself shoot anything alive. If I had to kill all my own meat, I'd be a vegetarian."
"You poor guy!" murmured Redmond. "Want me to shoot it for you, Rex?"
"I'd consider it a favor," croaked Ligonier in a strangled voice. "Go ahead!"
All this cross-talk had aroused the thescelosaurs, which started to trot away. Redmond coolly brought up his rifle and cut loose with a bang. One thescelosaur dropped instantly, kicking and writhing as reptiles will even if you cut off their heads. The other ran. Redmond, we found, had made an excellent shot, drilling the thescelosaur through the small brain in its skull, even though the animal was moving, with its head jerking back and forth like a chook's.
"Good-o!" I said. "Anyone want to butcher it?"
"Let me," said the Raja, and went to work on the twitching carcass with that bloody great knife he carries. In record time he had the guts out and the remains ready to lash its legs to the carrying pole.
While he was doing this, I kept an eye on Ligonier, in case he should faint. Rex didn't pass out, but his skin got paler and more greenish, and his eyes got bigger. At last he muttered "Excuse me!" and bolted off to some nearby bushes. There I could hear him chundering his guts out.
By the time he came back, we had the pole and the carcass hanging from it ready to hoist to our shoulders. Ligonier insisted on taking one end of the pole, as if to make up for his downfall as a hunter. As he plodded on, with Redmond taking his turn on the other end of the pole, I asked Ligonier:
"Do you usually have this sort of trouble?"
"Y-yes; 'fraid I do," he said. "Not that I've ever done enough hunting to matter. Can't stand the sight of blood."
"Then why in Aljira's name did you come on this safari, if you knew you weren't fitted for it?"
He gave a helpless sort of wave with his free hand. "My wife insisted ..."
"Think you're up to trying again?"
"I'm determined to do so, Reggie! I won't have people thinking I'm—that I'm not ..." He let it trail off.
Then the Raja took the front end of the pole, and Redmond came aft. I must say that Charles Redmond was decent about the whole thing. Some men would have made nasty digs at Ligonier, casting doubts on his courage or his manhood. But not Charles Redmond; his approach was:
"Sure, Rex, you just had a bad day. Next time it'll be different. Get in there and fight! When you drive the Cayuse, it'll give you the feeling of power you need!" (Trust Redmond to work in a sales plug for his vehicle!)
When we got back to the first camp, there was Joe Voth going over the Cayuse with a rag, shining up its brightwork. He looked up and said:
' Mr. Redmond! I think it's ready to go; but I gotta tell you about something."
"Eh?" said Redmond.
"While I was working on the machine, one of them big dinosaurs come out of the trees and kind of wanders over this way."
"What land?" I asked.
"Jeez, Mr. Rivers, I wouldn't know about them things. All I know is, it scared the shit out of me, and me without no gun—"