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
"He doesn't believe we were fifty million years back. Four or five thousand, maybe, to squeeze geological time into the 6,000-year frame of Genesis."
"Four or five thousand would be quite far enough back to antedate the laws of the state of Missouri. No, we'd better leave bad enough alone. This will raise hell with the finances of Rivers and Aiyar; the other time we lost a client we almost went out of business."
That wasn't quite the end of the story. We got back to Present without incident. Zahn took over the disposal of Hubert's body and gear, for which I was grateful. When we parted, he gave me that big, bland smile, waved a farewell, and said:
"Very interesting, Reggie. Very interesting indeed! But I fear you have not converted me to your irreligious views." And off he went.
A few days later, this picket line of marchers from Zahn's church showed up with their signs, some of which not only accused me of being old man Antichrist himself but also implied that I had caused Hubert's death. The story Zahn had told from his pulpit was that I had deliberately exposed Hubert to danger by walking away from him when he wouldn't stop his photographing and come along. As for Gilmore Zahn's part, he said he knew nothing of the diatryma's approach until McMurtrie and I looked around and began shooting. McMurtrie remembered otherwise, so it would have been his word against Zahn's.
In another sermon he made a different claim, that the whole experience was a satanie illusion. They had not gone back in time at all, but I and my assistant devils had cast an illusion on him and Hubert, like the nonsense people think they experience on certain drugs. I couldn't very well disprove this statement, except that it didn't explain why poor young Hubert arrived back in Present dead. But such people don't worry about consistency.
After a few days of picketing, I went to Zahn's sumptuous big church, an ornate structure with lots of gold leaf. I sent word that I wished to speak with Zahn and was led in at once. When we were seated, I told Zahn to call his pickets off, saying:
"McMurtrie and I have sat on the true story of Hubert's death, although Spence has published everything else about the trip in his paper. If you don't call off your dogs, I'll see to it that his unvarnished account is published."
"He could never prove a thing," said Zahn with that damned smile. "Questions of who first saw the bird would be his word against mine, and mine carries a lot of weight."
"I don't doubt that," I said. "But it wouldn't do you and your church any good, now would it?"
"I would sue them for libel!"
"And the paper would counter-sue, and the case would end up enriching the lawyers and impoverishing everyone else."
"I will not be dictated to by a scoffing infidel!"
"I haven't scoffed at you or your beliefs or your church. I daresay it does much good, even if I don't agree with your theology. But I have now told you what I shall do if your people don't leave my partner and me alone. Good-day, sir!"
That was that. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but the next day there were fewer pickets, and the next still fewer. On the third day there was only one sign carrier, and he was the last. I still occasionally saw in the papers where Zahn and his new assistant pastor denounced me as a threat to Christian civilization.
This went on for a year, but then a big scandal blew up. Seems Gilmore Zahn had been siphoning off the church's revenue and spending the money in ways not authorized by his governing board. Officially, it was on certain charitable enterprises he was personally interested in. He did undoubtedly spend some of it thus; whether he also spent some on a dollybird or put it in his own bank account, it was impossible to tell for lack of records. It was plainly illegal, but ostensibly done for such good purposes that they let him off with a slap on the wrist. But a hostile faction in the church used the incident as a pretext for getting him booted out. I don't know where he is now.
Anyway, Mr. Proctor, you can see why I'm averse to leading time safaris to settle theological arguments. Time travel is mysterious enough without dragging in God!
VII
The Big Splash
What was my closest call, Mr. Burgess? Let's see. There was the time that drongo Courtney James woke up a sleeping tyrannosaur by shooting a gun over its head ... But if you really want to know, on these time safaris we haven't had so much trouble from the animals as from the people, and we haven't had so much grief from the people as we have from natural forces. Like that time we ran into Enyo. No, not Ohio, Enyo. That's what those scientific blokes call the K-T Event. Somebody named it Enyo after some Greek goddess of destruction.
Ta, don't mind if I have another.
The K-T Event? That's what killed off all the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, etcetera at the end of the Cretaceous. So Rivers and Aiyar, Time Safaris, took a couple of scientists to the edge of the Event, hoping it would not kill us off along with the ornithopods. And it nearly bloody well did. If Bruce Cohen, the chamber wallah, had been a second sooner or later with the doors, Aljira only knows what—
Who's Aljira? That's the head god of one of the tribes of Abos—excuse me, Native Australians—in the outback. You see, down-under we have lots of wowsers, worse than your Puritans here in America. If they hear you say "By God!" they raise a stink. So I long ago got into the habit of swearing by Aljira to avoid arguments.
But to get back. The scientists had been arguing for half a century over the nature of the K-T Event. Some said a comet or a planetoid hit the Earth; others, that one or more of those big super-volcanoes, like the one that made your Yellowstone Park, cut loose with an eruption that blanketed the Earth with ash and smoke.
When Professor Prochaska, here in St. Louis, got his time chamber working right, and the Raja and I made a going thing of Rivers and Aiyar, a couple of big universities thought to settle the question by sending a pair of their biggest brains back in time for a first-hand look at the Event. One came from Harvard and one from Yale, since no other unis could have afforded the rates.
The man from Harvard was a paleontologist, George Romero of the Museum of Comparative Zoology; a short, plump, middle-aged fellow with sparse gray hair. The other was a geologist, Sterling Feather-stone of Yale, a bit younger; a tall, angular, black-haired bloke of the kind they call "raw-boned." Imagine a younger Abraham Lincoln without his whiskers and you've got the idea.
This pair came into the office together and broke the news. I had a pretty full schedule lined up, but in one slot I had only two cash customers ticketed: Clarence Todd, a trophy hunter, and Jon O'Connor, an artist. If you wonder why an artist should be keen to go back to the Mesozoic, or how an artist could afford the fare, he had a contract with that museum in San Francisco to paint Cretaceous scenes from life. They paid his way.
"You understand," said Romero, "that we shall also have to have an astronomer. We need him to keep watching the sky, in hope of calculating when Enyo will hit.'
"Who's Enyo?" I said.
"That's our name for the planetoid whose fall caused the K-T Event—"
"He means," said Featherstone, "if, as he believes, the Event was the impact of an extraterrestrial body. I'm a supercaldera man myself."
"Has anybody seen this body circling the sun?" I said. "They keep track of a lot of asteroids with their telescopes."
"Of course not!" said Romero. "The impact vaporized it."
"Silly of me. Have you picked your astronomer?"
"Yes," said Romero. "If it's okay with you, it'll be Einar Haupt of CalTech."