What now? he wondered.
He found himself on an icy windswept plain, bleak and desolate. Leafless trees with dark crooked trunks rose here and there above the snowfields. The air was harsh and sharp, with howling gusts cutting deep. He touched his utility belt to give himself a little protection against the cold.
This was the minus-fifty-billion-minute level. Fifty billion-minutes! He was 95,129 years into the past nowthe Pleistocene period, the last Ice Age, the Fourth Glacial. Eric took his bearings. Latitude 41 degrees north. Longitude 6 degrees east. East? He was in Europe, then. Right in the middle of Spain. A whopping spatial displacement, clear across the whole United States and the Atlantic, too. Halfway around the world and smack into the teeth of an Ice-Age gale.
And there were tracks in the fresh snow in front of him.
Human tracks.
No question about it. The tracks had been made by someone with a wide foot, very wide. Probably a short person, because the prints were fairly close together.
But human, without a doubt. Because the feet that had left those tracks in the snow had been clad in sandals of some sort. The imprint was unmistakable: no sign of toes or claws, only the rounded front end of the sandal and the tapering heel.
Human? In Pleistocene Spain?
Neanderthals, Eric thought in sudden wonder. And he began to follow the trail.
It led up and over a hummock of rock that jutted from the snowfield, and down the other side through a region of loose and annoyingly deep snow that gave him much trouble, and then up the side of a steep hill. Climbing it was real work. For one bad moment he thought he had lost the trail altogether; but then he picked it up again, midway up the hill. Behind him, the winds grew wilder and snow began to fall. He scrambled upward.
A cave. A fire burning within.
He stared. Eight, ten people inside, close together by the campfire. Wearing shaggy fur robes, though some were bare to the waist. Short people, stocky and squat, with big heads and thick necks and barrel chests and broad, low-bridged noses. They werent pretty, no. But they werent apes, either. They were human beings. Different from us, but not by much. Cousins. Our Neanderthal cousins. Eric shivered, and not just from the cold.
One of them was singing, and the others were gathered around, nodding and clapping their hands in time. A slow, rhythmic chant, which suddenly speeded up, then slowed again, speeded again: an intricate rhythm, constantly changing. Almost like a poem. Almost? It was a poem! Those complex rhythms, the solemnity of the chanters voice, the rapt attention of the listeners. The Iliad of the Neanderthals, maybe, a tale of heroic battle deeds. Or the Odyssey, the story of a man who had gone to war across the sea and had had a hard time getting home. A tribal poet, telling the great old stories around the campfire. Stories that would fall into the deepest sort of oblivion when these rugged people of the Ice Age were swept away into extinction, thirty or forty thousand years from now.
Neanderthal poetry! The idea stunned and dazzled him.
He leaned forward as far as he dared, peering into the mouth of the cave, straining to hear the words, hoping with an impossible hope to understand the meaning.
Abruptly the chanting stopped. There was silence in the cave.
They knew he was there. How? He had crouched down behind a great rock partly blocking the entrance. But they were looking his way. Sniffing. Those big noses, those wide nostrils. They could smell him. They were murmuring to each other. Suddenly these people seemed less like ancient cousins, more like hairy ogres or trolls.
The storm was lashing the plain now: wild winds, flailing the falling snow into thick white curtains. Eric backed away from the mouth of the cave. He heard a shout from within, then another, another. Desperately now he began to run down the hill, slipping and stumbling in the loosely packed snow.
And they were coming after him.
Dont try to run, he thought. Slide for it! Slide!
He dropped down flat and gave himself a shove. And went wildly tobogganing away, moving at an ever accelerating speed with his knees drawn up tight against his chest and his arms pulled in over them. A couple of times he fetched up against some up-jutting snag of a tree, or some hunk of rock, and gave himself a nasty whack; but then he pushed on, down and down and down the hill.
After a time he looked back. The Neanderthals had stopped pursuing him. They were standing some distance above him on a snowy ridge, staring at him in what looked like open-mouthed astonishment.
They probably think Im crazy, Eric thought. Crazy skinny peculiar-looking guy with a strange outfit on, who cant find any better way to amuse himself than go sliding down a bumpy hill in the middle of a snowstorm. Obviously a low I.Q. type, a real moron.
Or maybe not. Maybe they think Im having a good time.
He stood up, waved, shouted to them.
Come on! he called. You try it, too! Its fun, guys! Its fun!
He saw them muttering to each other. Maybe they were considering it. Maybe they were seriously thinking about taking up body-sledding, now that Ive shown them the way.
I may have started something here, he thought. The Neanderthal Winter Olympics!
He brushed snow from his clothes and trudged on down the hillside, feeling a little creaky and battered. When he looked back next, the Neanderthal conference was still going on, and two of them were lying in the snow, trying to shove themselves downhill.
22. Sean + 5×1010minutes
The point of the spear just barely grazed Seans chest. The other man held it there. Sean froze, not even breathing. He looked down, eyes bugging, at the sharp stone tip against his breastbone. This is it, he thought. The end of Sean, nine thousand years ago in Arizona. The archaeologists will be real confused when they find the bones of a white man in the ancient strata here.
You have to do something, he told himself.
Go for the dart gun? Or even the laser? No. It took a little-time to get the anesthetic darts armed and primed. He didnt have that much time. As for the laser, he knew he was supposed to avoid using the weapon unless he had absolutely no other option. Besides, he suspected that the moment he made any movement toward his utility belt that spear would be sticking out his back.
Do something. Anything.
He began to sing.
He had no idea what good it would do. He just opened his mouth and let melody come flowing out.
Oh, say, can you see
By the dawns early light . . .
The hunter looked astounded. He stepped back, one pace, two, three, without taking his eyes off Sean.
Reprieve. Somehow.
. . . what so proudly we hailed
by the twilights last gleaming . . .
The hunter spoke: a single stream of words punctuated by explosive little bursts of breath.
Sorry, Sean said. I dont speak Prehistoric Hopi, or whatever youre talking. He managed a smile. It wasnt easy. It must have looked more like a tense grimace. Every culture understands smiling, he knew. Show your teeth. Its a sign of good will. You are a Hopi or something, right? An Indian, anyway. An early version. An ancestor. My name is Sean. I come here in peace from the year 2016. Do you want me to sing some more? God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay
The hunter spoke again, the same speech, faster this time. To Sean his words sounded blunt, cruel, harsh.
Sean responded with another smile, a little on the edgy side. And came out with:
California, here I come
Right back where I started from . . .
It was hard to tell what the other was planning to do. The hunters eyelids were fluttering now. His nostrils flared wide. He grasped his spear at both ends and pulled it back tightly against his chest. He spoke once more, slowly and in a deeper voice. As if he were sinking into some sort of trance.
Keep on singing, Sean thought.
I am the captain of the Pinafore
And a right good captain too.
De deedle deedle dee and deedle deedle dee
With chimpanzees for my crew.
They werent quite the right words, but he doubted that the hunter would know that. And at least the tune was there.
The other hunters were approaching now. Their faces were smeared with bison blood. One of them prodded Sean with the business end of his spear, pushing against the close-knit fabric of his jumpsuit. It was just the lightest of touches, but Sean shivered as he felt the keen tip of the stone point. He tried singing the Hallelujah chorus. It didnt sound so good solo. They came in closer now, pinching and poking him. He switched to Silent Night thinking it might calm them some. The first one, the one who seemed to have gone into a trance, made a low rumbling sound far back in his throat.
Id like to get out of here, Sean thought.
Somehow. Any way at all.
Just let it be right now.
He smiled again, the widest smile he could manage. I know you cant understand a thing that Im saying, but Im saying it calmly and reasonably. Im not here to cause any trouble. Im simply a visitor. My name is Sean Gabrielson and Im twenty-three years old and I have a degree in physics from Cal Tech, and I mean to keep right on speaking quietly and reasonably to you until you decide that Im no threat. Im also willing to sing anything you request. I can do some nice old rock numbers, I know a couple of hymns, I can do patriotic songs. And I can keep it up until the next shunt comes and gets me, if I have to. Just stand there and listen peacefully, okay? He started in on Rock of Ages. They all looked almost hypnotized now. Eyes wide, staring. They didnt know what to make of him. I can tell you all sorts of useful things, too. For example, I can advise you to start thinking about migrating north, because these animals here that you hunt are going to clear out of this territory in another few hundred years, once things start getting really warm and dry, and
They were looking at him in what looked like awe. Maybe theyre beginning to think Im a god, he thought. Or maybe they just love the sound of my voice.
You see, this is the late Pleistocene, but eventually this is going to be known as the state of Arizona, and I can prophesy that theres going to be a freeway right down the middle of this valley, running from Flagstaff down to Phoenix or Tucson
They were down on their knees. Yes. Worshipping me, Sean thought. He grinned. They do think Im a god. Unless theyre just begging me to stop talking and start singing again.
Old Man River, that Old Man River . . .
This is going to be fun, he told himself.
Then he felt the displacement force tugging at him.
Not now, he thought in annoyance. Not just when its getting good! But there was nothing he could do about it. The force had pulled him away from Quintu-Leela and now it was yanking him away from his first good shot at being a god, or at least being a star singer. One moment he was staring at a bunch of awed prehistoric bison hunters, and the next he was floating in a globe of green light, somewhere very far away.
So long, fellows. Onward towhat?
This was serious future now, a truly heavy distance. He was 95,129 years down the line, an enormous jump. His last forward swing had taken him a mere 951 years ahead. Even that world, Quintu-Leelas world of A.D. 2967, was utterly unlike anything he knew or could understand. That was how vast the changes had been between his own time and Quintu-Leelas.
Now he was a hundred times as far from Time Zero. 95,129 years! The transformations in human life during such an immense span must have been incredible. It had taken only five thousand years to go from the first civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia to the age of travel through time and space. Now he had covered twenty times as many years. Did the human race even exist any more? Or had it evolved into something unimaginably strange?
Where was he? What was this globe of green light? What was going to happen to him?
Many questions, no answers.
Then a deep gentle voice said, Hey, its good to see you again, Sean. Been a long time, boy.
A very familiar voice. His grandfathers voice, rich and warm. Grandpa Gabrielson who lived in San Diego.
Sean blinked into the greenness. Is that you, Grandpa?
Who else, boy?
Unmistakable, that voice. The voice of the wise, loving old man who had spent so many holiday weekends with them, who liked to tell all those stories of the first television sets, the first jet planes, the first trip to the moon, the first flights of the space shuttle. Grandpa Gabrielson had worked as an engineer for the Apollo space program when he was a young man, and later he had been involved in the shuttle project. He had seen the whole modern world take shape in his lifetime.
But Grandpa Gabrielson had no business being here in the 932nd century. Grandpa Gabrielson had lived to a good old age, well past eighty. But he had died last year, just before Sean and Eric had been chosen for Project Pendulum.
Im here too, son. It really has been a long time!
His grandmothers voice. She had died when he was ten. And then his father was in the green globe with him, clapping him on the back, laughing, asking him if he was managing to keep up with the baseball scores while he was shunting around. And his mother, glowing with pride. And his mothers parents, Grandfather and Grandmother Weiss. He hardly knew them, because they lived in Belgium.
And Eric was there also.
It was Thanksgiving Day, and there was a huge turkey on the table, and mounds of cranberry sauce, and mountains of candied yams and turkey stuffing and everything else, and the whole family was there. His father was busy carving, as he always did. And he and Eric were side by side for the first time in 95,129 years.
Sean looked at his brother. He could feel the strange force, the brother-force, that had bound him to his twin all his life. The force which he had not felt since the moment they had gone their separate ways at Time Zero on the shunt platform.
Are you really here? he asked.
Eric grinned. What do you think? That Im just some sleazy illusion?
But this cant be happening, Sean said. Thanksgiving Day in the year 95,129? Grandpa and Grandma here? Mom and Dad? No. Im in some kind of green globe and this is just some hallucination that who knows what kind of creatures are pulling out of the memories they find in my brain. Right? Right?
Eric gave him a pitying look. You must have lost your mind. Or misplaced it, at the very least. Im as real as you are, and probably a lot hungrier. Shut up and pass the turkey, turkey!
23. Eric + 5×1011minutes
Scrambling down an icy hillside through a blinding snowstorm was bad enough. But every breath was agony. Breathing this fierce Fourth Ice Age atmosphere was like inhaling icicles. And to have a pack of angry Neanderthals coming after him, besides
Eric felt the shunt take him and sweep him mercifully into some far-off warmer place. He landed on all fours, gasping and coughing, and crouched there a moment until he had recovered. At last he looked up.
A Neanderthal face was looking back at him. Sloping forehead, rounded chin, broad nose, mouth like a jutting muzzle. Shrewd dark eyes studying him intently.
Huh? Did I bring you along with me somehow?
The Neanderthal knelt beside him and said something in an unknown language. His voice was deep and the way he spoke seemed oddly musical, though very strange. He didnt seem hostile. Behind him, Eric saw softly rounded green hills, a wide valley broken by a chain of lakes, a forest in the distance.
There were prehistoric hominids wandering about wherever he looked.
He had landed in a group of ten or fifteen Neanderthals. Off to his left a hundred yards away were some slender little creatures looking a bit like apes but walking confidently upright. Eric recognized them as australopithecines from the early Pleistocene, creatures that occupied a place somewhere midway on the evolutionary path that had led to Homo sapiens. And over there, that awesome monster of an ape, as massive as a grizzly bear? Wasnt that Gigantopithecus, from a million years B.C.? And those, in the middle distance? Sturdy-looking people who seemed almost human but for their strangely apelike faces: could those be Homo erectus, the ancestors of mankind whose fossil remains had been found in Java and China?
And those
And those
And those
Wherever he looked, some not-quite-human creatures could be seen in the valley. The whole history of the evolution of humanity seemed to be here, all the extinct forms that he had studied in school and a good many that he was unable to identify at all.
What was this place? Unless he had lost count of the shunts, he was at the plus-500-billion-minute level now. 951,000 years in the future. What were all these creatures doing here, all wandering around at random like this?
You have just arrived, I suppose? a pleasant voice said behind him. Eric whirled. The speaker was a bearded man of about fifty, elegant and amiable-looking, wearing what looked like riding clothes of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. He might have been some English gentleman out for a stroll in the woods. Bathurst, he said. Benjamin Bathurst. Former Minister Plenipotentiary of His Britannic Majesty George III to the court of Franz I, Emperor of Austria. Of course, Im nothing very much any more.
Eric Gabrielson, Eric said shakily. From Los Angeles, California, thethe United States.
Very pleased to make your acquaintance, Bathurst said. Always charming to see another human face. There are forty of us now, I think. Of course, were greatly outnumbered by the apes, but everyones friendly enough. Youre a million years in the future, you know. The United States, you say? Of America? The former Colonies? California was never one of the Colonies, as I recall. But I suppose
We got it from Mexico, Eric said. Somewhere around 1849. And yes, I know were a million years in the future. Approximately. But youGeorge III
He was having trouble speaking clearly. An overdose of confusion was making his voice husky. The Neanderthal, muttering to himself, began to fondle Bathursts intricately carved walking stick. The Englishman smiled and gently drew it away.
What year are you from? he asked Eric.
2016 is when I set out from.
Ah. 2016. The fabulous future, indeed. Well, well, we will have much to talk about, then. No one else here comes from any year later than 1853, I believe. Most are much earlier. We have a Roman couple, do you know, and several Greeks, and an Egyptian or two. And some who speak no language any of us can fathom. They must be quite ancient. I myself was seized in 1809.
Seized?
Oh, yes, of course, boy! How did you think we all got here?
Eric moistened his lips. Im here as a result of an experiment in travel through time carried out at the California Institute of Technology, he said. But you
Bathurst shrugged. A victim of kidnapping. Forced transport. Seized unawares. The same fate that has befallen all the creatures here, both human and otherwise. Except you, it would seem, if you indeed have come voluntarily. The rest of us are captives. It is a very comfortable captivity, I must say, but it is captivity all the same. And it is imprisonment for life, I grieve to say. Yet it is a very comfortable imprisonment, for all that.
Kidnapped from 1809? Romans? Greeks? Neanderthals? Australopithecines?
But whowho
Who is responsible for bringing us here, you mean to ask? Why, the demigods who inhabit this distant eon, boy! Our own remote descendants! Perhaps youll meet them someday. I myself have seen them on three occasions thus far. Quite remarkable, youll find. True demigods, as far beyond us as we are beyond these shaggy apelike fellows here. Weve been collected, do you see? All manner of historical specimens, and prehistorical specimens too, I dare say. Its a kind of zoological garden here. An exhibit, do you see, of the people of ages gone by, collected by mysterious magical means from every era of antiquity. Im one of the items on display, boy, for the amusement and edification of our remote descendants. And now so are you, do you see? So are you.
24. Sean -5×1011minutes
He was almost coming to believe that it was real. The tender succulent turkey meat, the sweet rich cranberry sauce, the hot steaming rollsit was all so much like the family feasts of his boyhood that after a while he simply accepted it and let it engulf him like a warm bath. Mom, Dad, his grandparents, Eric
But then it all turned misty and insubstantial. He had a final glimpse of the sphere of green light once again, and he thought he saw a row of faces behind the light, faces that might have been human and might have been something else. Then everything went black and the shunt took him and swept him away.
He was in heavy jungle terrain now. The air was thick and close, the trees were tall and slender and set close together with their crowns meeting overhead to form a canopy. Here and there, through a break in the foliage, he saw pale sugarloaf-shaped mountains on the horizon. This, he knew, was the world of 951,293 years before Time Zero.
And there was the biggest gorilla anyone had ever seen, standing twenty feet in front of him.
Actually he doubted that it was a gorilla. Perhaps it was more like an orangutan, with that deep chest and short neck. Or something midway between the two. But it was colossal. It was supporting itself on all fours, but he suspected that when it stood upright it would be close to nine feet tall.
It was watching him with a who-the-devil-are-you?look in its beady yellow eyes, and it was making a low growling sound, very ominous. Gorillas and orangutans, Sean told himself, eat fruits and vegetables. This guy doesnt look like a hunter to me. But hes big. Very big. And not friendly looking. Absolutely not friendly. And Im on his personal turf, and he doesnt like it.
Listen, Sean said, I dont want you to get annoyed about anything, okay? Just as I was telling those Indians a little while ago, its not my plan to bother you in the slightest. Im only a visitor here. Im simply passing through, and Im not going to be here very long, let me assure you of that.
The giant ape appeared to frown. It seemed to consider what Sean was telling it.
It didnt seem to like what it had heard, though.
It began to snort and growl. It raised itself to its full unbelievable height and pounded itself on its chest like King Kong in a feisty mood. It made unmistakably angry sounds. Sean wondered if it was going to charge him. He wasnt sure. The ape didnt seem quite sure, either. For a long moment it rocked back and forth in place, growling, beating its chest, glaring at the intruder.
Then it leaned forward on its knuckles and made a different sound, deep and ominous.
Yes, Sean thought. It is going to charge. It very definitely is going to charge.
And Im going to die, back here in the umptieth century B.C.
Or else Ill get shunted out of here in the nick of time and its Eric wholl die when he shows up right in front of a crazed charging ape. Its just as bad either way.
Damn! Damn! Damn!
25. Eric -5×1012minutes
The shunts were coming too fast, too close together. Eric was drowning in a torrent of wonders. To be given a glimpse of Neanderthals in their own time, chanting by their own campfire, and then to be swept far onward to a magical place where pithecanthropi and australopithecines and Romans and Greeks and nineteenth century Englishmen lived all jumbled together in some kind of far-future zoo, and to be pulled away from that much too soon, before he had even begun to learn the things he wanted to know
And now this. Nine and a half million years in the past. Paradise for the sort of dreamer who once built fossil dinosaurs out of papier-mâché. Not that there were any dinosaurs here, of course. Not in the Pliocene period, no. Dinosaurs were much earlier than that: this was mammal time, here. But, dinosaurs or no, he had been let loose in a garden of zoological wonders and he would gladly have spent a year here, five years, ten. There was so much to see. Paleozoology wasnt even his fieldhe barely knew the names of half the creatures who were parading before his astounded eyesand even so he would have given anything to be allowed to remain.
Another monthanother week
But he knew that the irresistible force of the shunt soon would surround him and tear him free of this place and sweep him onward.
That giant piglike thing with the fantastic bristly face and the terrifying teeth, a creature bigger than any rhinoceros, snorting and snuffling in the underbrush
That hairy elephant with the short trunk and the long outthrust jaw, and the second pair of tusks jutting down over the other ones
That skittish yellow animal with a camels silly face and a gazelles agile body, running in frantic herds across the plains
That one that had a camels body and a camels head, but a neck like a giraffes, reaching up easily to graze on treetops close to twenty-five feet high
The deer with its horns on its nose, and the one with fangs like a tigers, and the one whose head was all knobs and crests and other strangenesses
The giant ground sloth with the long weird drooping snout, almost like a little trunk
The armadillo as big as a tank, angrily lashing its spiked tail against the ground
Dream-animals. Nightmare-animals. They were everywhere on this wondrous plain, grazing, creeping, crawling, climbing, hunting, sleeping. He wanted to see every one, to commit them all to memory, to come home with mind-pictures of this Pliocene wonderland that would keep paleozoologists busy for decades. Unique discoveries, animals unknown to science. But already he felt the force tugging at him.
Nowait
Another day, he begged. Half a day. Another three hours.
No chance. The equations were inexorable. Forces had to balance.
Nownowonward
26. Sean + 5×1012minutes
He was five trillion minutes from home and the giant ape was no longer his immediate problem. Because the pendulum had swung and the iron fist of the displacement force had grabbed him and converted him into a shower of tachyons and sent him rocketing off toward the other end of time. So it was Eric who was destined to show up right in the path of the apes charge, when they started down the homeward slope of the voyage.
I have to do something to warn him, Sean thought. But what?
He looked around. He was standing in a fragrant bower of blossoming plants that sprouted on shining crystalline stalks three feet high, plants that looked like nothing he had ever seen before. And a great blue world was shining overhead like a dazzling beacon, filling half the sky.
It looked a little like the Earth, that huge world floating up there. There was one great bulging land mass that was very much like Africa, though it seemed too far to the south, and he couldnt find Europe where it ought to be, only abroad ocean occupying what might have been the place of the Mediterranean Sea. To the west Sean could make out something similar to the curve of North Americas eastern seaboard, though the shape wasnt a perfect match with what he remembered, and the West Indies werent there. Far down to the side was an enormous round hump of an island, vaguely in the position that South America once had had.
If that was Earth, then, that loomed above him in the sky, it was an Earth vastly transformed.
Earth? Up there in the sky? Then where was he? On the moon?
A garden of fragrant green and gold flowers rising on stalks of crystalon the moon?
Flowers on the moon? Sweet fresh air on the moon?