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
I said: "I hope my visit will be far enough removed in time from Doctor Malgaru's to provide a safety factor against an overlap."
"I'm sure it will," said Havens. There will be a gap in time of at least five thousand years."
You see, Mr. Saito, we must be careful not to put two sets of time travelers into the same past period, or the same party twice into the same time slot. This would create a paradox, and an orderly universe just doesn't allow such contradictions. The minute you tried to do that, the space-time forces would snap your travelers back to Present and kill them in the process.
At the dinner in Darwin's best hotel, the new Darwin Hilton on Mitchell Street, Prendergast showed himself a jolly dinner companion, joking and laughing at a great rate. Perhaps he was trying to forestall any embarrassing discussion of those nasty editorials in The Time Traveler.
I was seated next to the Native Australian, Algy Malgaru. He was a big bloke with a chocolate-brown skin, the snub nose and beetling brows of the Australoid race, and a bush of Oxford-brown beard beginning to gray. I asked how he came to be, of all things, a professor of anthropology. He chuckled, showing those big Australoid teeth in a wide mouth.
"Sir Reginald, if you're born an Abo—" (he used the old abbreviation for "aborigine," nowadays considered rude for a white Australian to use toward a Native Australian) "—if you're born an Abo but have a bent toward reading and writing, your best bet is the academic life. That's where you'll encounter the least ethnic prejudice. And if you've spent much of your youth in the outback among fellow tribesmen, you might as well capitalize on the experience by going into anthropology, since you've already got a bloody head start."
Since we did not expect to meet any large thick-skinned game like elephant or dinosaur, I had brought along my new Mannlicher-Schönauer seven-point-five, with an eight-round magazine. I figured it should pack enough punch to take care of anything we might encounter, up to the marsupial lion Thylacoleo. Bruce Cohen had borrowed from the Raja's and my armory a Bratislava with similar characteristics.
When Cohen, Brenda, and I approached the van to take us to the chamber, Prendergast and Malgaru already occupied the middle seats, behind those of the driver and his seat mate. Havens, who was driving, said:
"Mark, you and Algy will have to move back to make seats for Sir and Lady Rivers and Mr. Cohen."
"Okay," said Prendergast. "Why don't you blokes hand your guns back here? I'll take care of them."
"Be careful!" I said. "Mine's loaded, with the safety on." I don't usually load so early in the game. But when Havens and his van were over an hour late, I'm sorry to say I got restless and loaded up to give my hands something to do.
Brenda took the front seat next to Havens; Cohen and I took the two middle seats. Malgaru sat on a jump seat behind us, and Prendergast scrunched down in the rear with the guns. Craning my neck, I asked:
"What are you blokes armed with?"
Prendergast spoke up. "I'm relying on you two, since I shall be kept busy working the camera." He pointed to a big video recording apparatus.
Malgaru said: "I was never a good enough shot for guns, because of defective eyesight. That's one reason I never became a real bushie. So I brought along this." He picked up from the floor a boomerang over a meter long. "Whittled it myself. It's not one of those toys that'll spin round in a circle and come back to the thrower. This is a real killer. I practiced with one as a kid until I could knock over a roo at fifty paces."
I said: "If you're determined to use stone-age weapons, Algy, wouldn't a spear be more effective? I've heard you Native Australians can throw spears with such accuracy as to bring down a bird on the wing."
Malgaru shook his head. "Once upon a time, perhaps. But nowadays you won't find any Abos who know how to make a proper spear, let alone throw one accurately. I knew the last Abo flint knapper, before that art died out completely. Now most of them farm or work as stockmen, or as you Yanks call them, cowboys. Or they j*o into white-collar work, as I did."
"I'm no Yank,' I said. "Born and raised in Brisbane."
"Technically I suppose you're not; though you bloody well sound a bit like a Yank."
"It's those years in America, I suppose," I said. "Inside, I'm still a dinkum Aussie."
At last we lined up outside the Australian transition chamber, in the big concrete building they've put up on the outskirts of Darwin. Cohen was deep in conversation with the local chamber wallah, a bloke named Draga Radich.
To my considerable relief, Prendergast handed me back my gun. It had occurred to me during the drive that, if he really felt the way his editorials implied, he might have shot me in the back with it and then said, oh, sorry, that was an accident. But then he unfolded a sketch map, saying:
"This shows the lay of the land about 500,000 B.C., when Algy went back and checked it out. We can hope the topography won't have changed drastically in the interval."
Since we planned to spend only a few hours in the Pleistocene, we did not bring along camp equipment and helpers to set it up. Havens merely shooed us into the transition chamber and waved us off. Radich set his dials for 495,000 B.C. and pushed his buttons.
The vertigo and other symptoms of time travel had Brenda looking like a very dead fish by the time the dials stopped spinning. Radich set the chamber down with scarcely a bump, and out we piled.
The landscape looked pretty much like the present-day Australian bush, dusty green and brown. The timber was mostly eucalyptus and acacia, with some araucaria and pandanus. There was none of that pest, the Opuntia or prickly-pear cactus, which some idiot introduced a century or two ago and whose spread the Aussies have been battling ever since. A few birds flew up, but otherwise we saw no animal life, no sign of the marsupial Hon or other predators.
Prendergast spread out his map. "I figure, we're just about here," he said. "Now, if the terrain is anything like that of five thousand years ago, the ground drops off west of here into a little dingle or gill, with a billabong at the bottom, and then rises back up on the far side. If you want to see wild life, that's the place for it, since the animals have to come to the billabong for a drink. I'll show you the way."
We set out after Prendergast, with his video recorder on his shoulder. It must have weighed twenty kilos, but the little bloke didn't seem to mind.
After a half-hour scramble, we came to the edge of the depression Prendergast had mentioned. Sure enough, through the bush we could glimpse water at the bottom of the depression. There were also a couple of animals drinking at it. We couldn't tell much about them at that distance and with all the bush in the way, even through the glasses, save that looked to be of pretty good size and clad in brown fur.
"Diprotodons," said Prendergast. "Want to go closer for a look, eh?"
"Oh, yes!" breathed Brenda, stringing the cord of her little camera round her neck. She had stood up under the hike very well. "This is what I've dreamed of."
"You two go down, then," said Prendergast. "I'll stay up here to shoot pictures, if I can find a spot with a better view." To Cohen and Malgaru he said: "You stand by, please, since I need your fire power. As soon as I've shot a good strip, we'll go down and join them." Turning to Brenda and me, he added with a nasty little smirk: "That'll give you two some privacy—that is, if Sir Reg can still rise to the occasion."
As the implications of Prendergast's remark sank in, I felt myself getting as mad as a meat-ax. I started to make a fist to bash the blighter. It wouldn't have been sporting, with my being twice the fellow's size; but at that instant I didn't care.