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
"That doesn't prove they don't exist in some other part of the world," said Zahn.
"Quite true, old sport," I said. "But what's been found is all we've got to go on."
"You have the word of God," he said. "But there, I oughtn't to preach to you."
"How about predators?" asked McMurtrie. "Seems to me that, wherever you have a lot of plant eaters, you ought to find some critters that have evolved to eat the plant eaters."
"Right-o!" I said. "But the carnivores here are pretty primitive, too. They belong to an order called Creodonta, which died out without descendants. The biggest locally is a fellow named Oxaena, about the size and shape of our modern sea otter, though it lives on dry land. There are also doglike and foxlike forms.
"And yes, I almost forgot. There's a big flightless bird of prey. Early in the Age of Mammals, such birds evolved to prey on the mammals, which were mostly small, nondescript creatures. They flourished most in South America, which was cut off from the rest of the world. When the more modern carnivores evolved among the mammals, these birds couldn't take the competition and disappeared.
"The one we have to watch out for here is Diatryma, which looks like the Aussie emu; except that instead of a long, thin neck with a small head, it has a stout neck and a head like an eagle's, only bigger."
"Shouldn't think a bird would be anything to worry about," said McMurtrie.
"Famous last words," I said. "The first law of survival is: Don't take chances with anything big enough to kill you. This bird is."
"Here's breakfast, gentlemen," said Ming.
After breakfast, I laid out a course for a two-hour morning's hike. I found this nature walk bloody frustrating, because it proved hard to keep my lambs moving. Zahn complained about bis sore feet. McMurtrie and Hubert wanted to stop and photograph everything, plant or animal. The fauna, as I warned them, proved such a monotonous lot of small, nondescript creatures that they complained about that.
When McMurtrie, pointing to a group of terrier-sized animals, asked: "How would you classify them?"
I replied: "I wouldn't. If we had a real paleontologist here, he could tell us which are the ancestors of the horse, and which of the rhino, and so on. Some are archaic mammals that died out without descendants."
The biggest beasts we flushed were a pair of coryphodonts, like enlarged pygmy hippopotami, about a meter high and two meters long. They were munching plants along the bank of a small stream. When we came up, the male evidentiy thought we threatened his female, for he faced us, flashed his four big tusks, and gave a loud grunt. McMurtrie and I got our guns ready; but when we advanced no closer, the coryphodonts went back to eating.
We were headed back to camp, when Hubert cried: "Hey, look at that!" In an instant he was kneeling and sighting with his camera.
The rest of us lined behind him to see. What he was photographing was a snake—a two-meter one— swallowing a small mammal. The snake had engulfed the head and was, millimeter by millimeter, working its jaws forward over the body.
"Kill it!" cried Zahn.
"No, you don't!" said Hubert. "I want this on film."
"The snake is the symbol of evil! The Lord God cursed the serpent above all cattle, and ordained that man should bruise its head! See Genesis eight."
"Medieval superstition," growled McMurtrie, struggling to untangle his camera from the sling holding his rifle across his back.
"So says an ignorant unbeliever!" cried Zahn. "Know you not—"
"Please!" I said. "We shall be late for tiffin. Come along, all of you, and let the arguments rest. Come on, Paul."
"I want to get the whole sequence," said Hubert, focusing on the snake, which proceeded with engulfing its prey as if we were not even there. "Go ahead. I'll catch up."
"Better come, Paul," I said. "This place may not be so harmless as it looks."
"Oh, leave me alone!" he snapped.
I struggled with my own temper, got it under control, and said: "I'm going back to camp, and I advise all you blokes to come along. Otherwise I shan't be responsible." I was bloody irritated with my clients.
I started off. McMurtrie, after one more camera shot, came after me; and then came Zahn. That left Hubert, still kneeling and filming. I faced determinedly away and marched up the slope leading to the camp.
We had got perhaps thirty meters from Hubert when McMurtrie looked back and cried: "Hey, Reggie! Turn around, quick!"
I turned. Zahn was a few meters behind McMurtrie and me. A big diatryma had come out of the nearest copse and advanced on Hubert, jerking its head back and forth with each stride. Hubert was so absorbed in his photography that he seemed oblivious to the bird's approach.
"Hey, Paul!" I yelled as loudly as I could, at the same time bringing up my own gun. McMurtrie was also trying to get his rifle into the shooting position, but he had got the gun sling tangled with one of his camera straps.
Hubert looked up just as the diatryma stooped, shot out that raptorial head, and snapped up both the snake and its prey. When it raised its head, the snake dangled, writhing, from its beak.
Hubert's obvious cue was to jump up and run like hell. But, as I said, he was an impulsive, hot-tempered bloke. What the silly galah did was to yelclass="underline" "Bastard!", grab his broad-brimmed canvas hat, and whack the diatryma in the face with it.
I couldn't shoot, because Hubert was directly between me and the diatryma. The bird dropped the snake, shot out that wicked beak, and gave Hubert a mighty peck. Hubert took one step back and fell into the grass.
The diatryma stooped and started looking around for its snake. I fired, and the bird toppled back into the grass.
We all rushed back, but too late to do anything for Paul Hubert. The bird's beak had laid open a gash in his neck as long as the span of your fingers and centimeters deep. Blood was still pouring out. Hubert made a bubbling moan and then lay still. A check of his pulse showed no heart action. I suppose an ambulance with a crew of paramedics could have done something to save him, but we didn't have that.
I took a quick look around for the snake, but there was no sign of it. I imagine that when the bird dropped it, it had beat a hasty retreat, perhaps thanking its reptilian gods for deliverance.
I needn't go into the dismal details of that hike back to camp, with two of us carrying Hubert's body, taking turns. There was no argument for continuing the safari further, although I had planned a stop in the Pliocene. We put the body in a body bag I had stored with our gear. I had packed it without telling anyone, just in case.
While the crew were stowing gear in the chamber, McMurtrie said: "Reggie, may I speak to you privately?"
"Okay," I said. "Let's go over this way, and keep your voice down."
He said: "I saw the whole thing, because I kept looking back when you didn't. The Reverend Zahn saw the bird come out of the woods and start towards Hubert. Instead of warning Hubert, who was so intent on his pictures that he wasn't aware of anything else, Zahn quietly, without a word, started after us. I think he wanted the bird to get Hubert."
"Maybe you've got something," I said, and told McMurtrie about the dispute I had overheard between the preachers the night before, when McMurtrie had been out on watch. "He must have regarded Hubert as a deserter from the army of righteousness."
"It sounds like murder!" said McMurtrie. "Though I don't know if you can indict a man for simply walking away from a disaster in the making. He saw that bird coming and never uttered a peep."
"I doubt if we could make any charge stick," I said. "We never know what's really going on in another bloke's mind, and you'd have a hell of a time proving anything to a jury. Even if we had the good oil on him, he'd claim a murder committed back in the Eocene didn't come under any contemporary laws."