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
Dunbar subsided, belched, and mumbled: "Sorry, guys. Guess I let my feelings run away with me. Anyways, I gotta go. Put my drinks on your bill, Jason. See y'all." He rose and staggered off.
The first job in our mastodon hunt was to adapt Prochaska's transition chamber. A full-grown American mastodon would stand about two and a quarter meters high at the shoulder and be perhaps five and three-quarters long. That's not so tall as a big modern bull elephant, but it is longer in the body and about as heavy.
Prochaska was dubious about our taking liberties with his precious transition chamber; but he became enthusiastic at the prospect of hauling an endless series of extinct organisms beck to Present. That is how it has worked out. He hovered over us while our workmen took out the chairs that the passengers normally sat in during the transition. Then we put a row of stout steel bars round the chamber wallah's corner, so that none of our animal cargo could lay a claw or a fang on Bruce Cohen while he handled his controls.
As usual, these modifications took twice as long and cost twice as much as estimated. For one thing, we needed a pen to hold the animal back in Present until the Redintegration people could come and take it away. Since the local zoo didn't have any vacant pens we could borrow or rent, I rounded up some carpenters and bought some lumber: good, stout ten-by-ten centimeter timbers. The carpenters assembled these on the university grounds and bolted them together, with the sides cross-braced in case the animal tried to push one of his walls over.
As an example of the unforeseen delays that bedevil such a project, we were talking with Joseph Hockersmith, a specialist in catching wild animals uninjured for zoos and scientific institutions. When he saw Cohen's cage being assembled, he cried: "Hey! You've got to put padding on those bars!"
"Eh?" said I. "What for?"
"You want to catch a member of the elephant tribe, don't you?"
"Yes," I said, "though there's a question about calling a mastodon a member of the elephant tribe, since elephants are descended from mastodons."
"But he'll have tusks, won't he?"
"If he's a two-thirds grown one, he will."
"And you'd like to deliver him with tusks undamaged, wouldn't you?"
"Righto!"
"Well, if you put the beast in a cage with iron bars before he's had a chance to get used to you, he'll be so angry and frightened that he'll bang his tusks against the bars hard enough to break them. He'll arrive in the present with only the stumps. I've handled elephants."
So we had to hold up proceedings to pad the bars and also to hang sheets of that quilting that moving men use in their vans to keep the furniture from damage.
At last we assembled in the chamber building: the Raja and I, Norman Blackelk, the cook Ming, and our crew. These were Beauregard Black, the crew boss, and his helpers Pancho, Bruno, and Rodrigo. Then there were Hockersmith and his three assistants, and one more man: A young cove, Wilmer Delarue, whom the University of Minnesota had sent us. A graduate student and assistant instructor, Delarue was bucking for his doctorate in paleontology. We were always glad to have a real scientist on these safaris, because it gives certain tax advantages.
There had been a number of such young blokes on our safariin, some easy to get along with and some not. Delarue seemed a harmless chap except for a know-it-all tendency to set everybody right on details, such as the pronunciation of words like Apatosaurus. When Norman Blackelk pronounced it with the accent on "pat," Delarue picked him up and said the word should be stressed on the "ap."
"Wilmer," said Blackelk, "the most successful lawyer I've known, when a client came in to hire him, if the client mispronounced a word, this lawyer in later conversation used the same mispronunciation, even though he knew better."
"That's why the language goes all to hell," said Delarue.
We hoped to scare up mastodons near enough to the chamber site so as not to need to shift camp. Therefore we did not bring a train of asses to haul our stuff around the outback. We thought that, if we had to move camp, we could send the chamber back to Present with Black and his crew to fetch them.
As a last-minute addition, Hockersmith's boys brought a barrel of apples, which they manhandled into the chamber. Hockersmith explained:
"This is my bait. Don't let any of your people swipe them. With elephant, I never found anything that brings 'em round so fast as ripe yellow apples. They love 'em. The only thing that would fetch them quicker would be the fruit of the umganu tree of Southern Africa. It ferments as it ripens, and the elephants there got drunk on 'em. I didn't have any umganu fruit, and perhaps it's just as well. A sober elephant is problem enough to handle, so you can imagine what it would be like with a drunken one!"
"Bloody good idea," I said. We filed into the chamber, and off we went.
By then, departure was pretty much routine. The dizziness of transition through time caused one of Hockersmith's men to lose his breakfast. He managed to keep it in until the Raja passed an airsickness bag back to him. Cohen had taped envelopes of these bags to the backs of the seats; but then the chairs were taken out, and nobody gave the bags a thought. Bruce Cohen's as fussy about keeping his chamber clean and shipshape as anybody's maiden aunt, so he had laid in his own supply.
I had told Cohen to set his dials for one million years before Present. That was the closest Prochaska's scientists would let users of the chamber come to Present. They didn't want to have time travelers meet Blackelk's ancestors coming over from Siberia. Such a meeting would affect later history and cause a paradox. To prevent that, we should all be thrown back to Present, boom!, and killed in the process.
Actually, I am sure that a setting of half a million b.p. would not impose any risk, since all the evidence is that the first Red Indians arrived in North America well after 100,000 b.p. But Prochaska's committee of experts insisted on an extra-wide safety factor.
Cohen found us a nice, soft landing place. He can't move the chamber horizontally, but by hunting back and forth in time he can find a period when the site is flat and hard enough to provide a safe alighting. The landscape of 1,000,000 b.p. looks hardly different from today in those national forests, all named after Mark Twain, across southern Missouri. This state is pretty bloody flat, with a little roll but nothing an American from a western state would call a mountain. The highest place is a hill in Iron County called Taum Sauk Mountain, less than 500 meters. In Colorado they wouldn't bother to name it.
For millions of years, this area has been part of the big temperate-zone forest, which covered the eastern third of the continent until the white men moved in and cut down most of the trees for farmland. It's pretty well out towards the western edge of this forest, and the edge moves back and forth with the weather. In a series of dry centuries, the forest retreats eastward, leaving most of Missouri as grassland; then a sequence of wet centuries brings the forest back again.
We had evidently hit one of the drier periods. There was still plenty of timber around us, mostiy maple, hickory, and several kinds of oaks; but it was broken into clumps and copses. In our business, we prefer this to a solid, dense forest. Not only are the animals thicker, since the grass provides them with food down where they can reach it, but also we can better see them. In a real jungle you're bloody lucky to see fifty meters. You never know how many beasts of the kinds you're looking for are just outside that limited radius of vision.
In any case, there were no animals but a couple of squirrels in sight when the Raja and I hopped out with guns ready. After a trip by the chamber back to Present to fetch our equipment, setting up the camp kept us all busy for the first couple of hours.