It was raining again, hot and heavy out of a hidden sky, and the air stank with swamp. Herries could just see the tall derricks a mile away, under a floodlight glare, and hear their engines mutter. Further away, a bull brontosaur cried and thunder went through the night.
Herries’ boots resounded hollowly on the dock. Beneath the slicker, his clothes lay sweat-soggy, the rain spilled off his hat and down his collar. He swore in a tired voice and stepped onto his gangplank.
Light from the shack on the barge glimmered off drenched wood. He saw the snaky neck just in time, as it reared over the gangplank rail and struck at him. He sprang back, grabbing for the Magnum carbine slung over one shoulder. The plesiosaur hissed monstrously and flipper-slapped the water. It was like a cannon going off.
Herries threw the gun to his shoulder and fired. The long sleek form took the bullet—somewhere—and screamed. The raw noise hurt the man’s eardrums.
Feet thudded over the wharf. Two guards reached Herries and began to shoot into the dark water. The door of the shack opened and a figure stood back against its yellow oblong, a tommy gun stammering idiotically in his hands.
“Cut it out!” bawled Herries. “That’s enough! Hold your fire!”
Silence fell. For a moment, only the ponderous rainfall had voice. Then the brontosaur bellowed again, remotely, and there were seethings and croakings in the water.
“He got away,” said Herries. “Or more likely his pals are now stripping him clean. Blood smell.” A dull anger lifted in him, he turned and grabbed the lapel of the nearest guard. “How often do I have to tell you characters, every gangway has to have a man near it with grenades?”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” Herries was a large man, and the other face looked up at him, white and scared in the wan electric radiance. “I just went off to the head—”
“You’ll stay here,” said Herries. “I don’t care if you explode. Our presence draws these critters, and you ought to know that by now. They’ve already snatched two men off this dock. They nearly got a third tonight—me. At the first suspicion of anything out there, you’re to pull the pin on a grenade and drop it in the water, understand? One more dereliction like this, and you’re fired—No.” He stopped, grinning humorlessly. “That’s not much of a punishment, is it? A week in hack on bread.”
The other guard bristled. “Look here, Mr. Herries, we got our rights. The union—”
“Your precious union is a hundred million years in the future,” snapped the engineer. “It was understood that this is a dangerous job, that we’re subject to martial law, and that I can discipline anyone who steps out of line. Okay—remember it.”
He turned his back and tramped across the gangplank to the barge deck. It boomed underfoot. The shack had been closed again, with the excitement over. He opened the door and stepped through, peeling off his slicker.
Four men were playing poker beneath an unshaded bulb. The room was small and cluttered, hazy with tobacco smoke and the Jurassic mist. A fifth man lay on one of the bunks, reading. The walls were gaudy with pinups.
Olson riffled the cards and looked up. “Close call, boss,” he remarked, almost casually. “Want to sit in?”
“Not now,” said Herries. He felt his big square face sagging with weariness. ‘‘I’m bushed.” He nodded at Carver, who had just returned from a prospecting trip further north. “We lost one more derrick today.”
“Huh?” said Carver. “What happened this time?”
“It turns out this is the mating season.” Herries found a chair, sat down, and began to pull off his boots. “How they tell one season from another, I don’t know—length of day, maybe—but anyhow the brontosaurs aren’t shy of us any more—they’re going nuts. Now they go gallyhooting around and trample down charged fences or anything else that happens to be in the way. They’ve smashed three rigs to date, and one man.”
Carver raised an eyebrow in his chocolate-colored face. It was a rather sour standing joke here, how much better the Negroes looked than anyone else. A white man could be outdoors all his life in this clouded age and remain pasty. “Haven’t you tried shooting them?” he asked.
“Ever tried to kill a brontosaur with a rifle?” snorted Herries. “We can mess ’em up a little with .50-caliber machine guns or a bazooka—just enough so they decide to get out of the neighborhood—but being less intelligent than a chicken, they take off in any old direction. Makes as much havoc as the original rampage.” His left boot hit the floor with a sullen thud. “I’ve been begging for a couple of atomic howitzers but it has to go through channels…Channels!” Fury spurted in him. “Five hundred human beings stuck in this nightmare world and our requisitions have to go through channels!”
Olson began to deal the cards. Polansky gave the man in the bunk a chill glance. “You’re the wheel, Symonds,” he said. “Why the devil don’t you goose the great Transtemporal Oil Company?”
“Nuts,” said Carver. “The great benevolent all-wise United States Government is what counts. How about it, Symonds?”
You never got a rise out of Symonds, the human tape recorder; just a playback of the latest official line. Now he laid his book aside and sat up in his bunk. Herries noticed that the volume was Marcus Aurelius, in Latin yet.
Symonds looked at Carver through steel-rimmed glasses and said in a dusty tone: “I am only the comptroller and supply supervisor. In effect, a chief clerk. Mr. Herries is in charge of operations.”
He was a small shriveled man, with thin gray hair above a thin gray face. Even here, he wore stiff-collared shirt and sober tie. One of the hardest things to take about him was the way his long nose waggled when he talked.
“In charge!” Herries spat expertly into a gobboon. “Sure, I direct the prospectors and the drillers and everybody else on down through the bull cook. But who handles the paperwork—all our reports and receipts and requests? You.” He tossed his right boot on the floor. “I don’t want the name of boss if I can’t get the stuff to defend my own men.”
Something bumped against the supervisors’ barge; it quivered and the chips on the table rattled. Since there was no outcry from the dock guards, Herries ignored the matter. Some swimming giant. And except for the plesiosaurs and the non-malicious bumbling bronties, all the big dinosaurs encountered so far were fairly safe. They might step on you in an absent-minded way, but most of them were peaceful and you could outrun those which weren’t. It was the smaller carnivores, about the size of a man, leaping out of brush or muck with a skullful of teeth, which had taken most of the personnel lost. Their reptile life was too diffuse: even mortally wounded by elephant gun or grenade launcher, they could rave about for hours. They were the reason for sleeping on barges tied up by this sodden coast, along the gulf which would some day be Oklahoma.
Symonds spoke in his tight little voice: “I send your recommendations in, of course. The project office passes on them.”
“I’ll say it does,” muttered young Greenstein irreverently.
“Please do not blame me,” insisted Symonds.
I wonder. Herries glowered at him. Symonds had an in of some kind. That was obvious. A man who was simply a glorified clerk would not be called to Washington, for unspecified conferences with unspecified people, as often as this one was. But what was he, then?
A favorite relative? No…in spite of high pay, this operation was no political plum. FBI? Scarcely…the security checks were all run in the future. A hack in the bureaucracy? That was more probable. Symonds was here to see that oil was pumped and dinosaurs chased away and the hideously fecund jungle kept beyond the fence according to the least comma in the latest directive from headquarters.
The small man continued: “It has been explained to you officially that the heavier weapons are all needed at home. The international situation is critical. You ought to be thankful you are safely back in the past.”
“Heat, large economy-size alligators, and not a woman for a hundred million years,” grunted Olson. ‘‘I’d rather be blown up. Who dealt this mess?”
“You did,” said Polansky. “Gimme two, and make ’em good.”
Herries stripped the clothes off his thick hairy body, went to the rear of the cabin, and entered the shower cubby. He left the door open, to listen in. A boss was always lonely. Maybe he should have married when he had the chance. But then he wouldn’t be here. Except for Symonds, who was a widower and in any case more a government than company man, Thansoco had been hiring only young bachelors for operations in the field.
“It seems kinda funny to talk about the international situation,” remarked Carver. “Hell, there won’t be any international situation for several geological periods.”
“The inertial effect makes simultaneity a valid approximational concept,” declared Symonds pedantically. His habit of lecturing scientists and engineers on their professions had not endeared him to them. “If we spend a year in the past, we must necessarily return to our own era to find a year gone, since the main projector operates only at the point of its own existence which—”
“Oh, stow it,” said Greenstein. “I read the orientation manual too.” He waited until everyone had cards, then shoved a few chips forward and added: “druther spend my time a little nearer home. Say with Cleopatra.”
“Impossible,” Symonds told him. “Inertial effect again. In order to send a body into the past at all, the projector must energize it so much that the minimal time-distance we can cover becomes precisely the one we have covered to arrive here, one hundred and one million, three hundred twenty-seven thousand, et cetera, years.”
“But why not time-hop into the future? You don’t buck entropy in that direction. I mean, I suppose there is an inertial effect there, too, but it would be much smaller, so you could go into the future—”
“—about a hundred years at a hop, according to the handbook,” supplied Polansky.
“So why don’t they look at the twenty-first century?” asked Greenstein.
“I understand that that is classified information,” Symonds said. His tone implied that Greenstein had skirted some unimaginably gross obscenity.
Herries put his head out of the shower. “Sure it’s classified,” he said. “They’d classify the wheel if they could. But use your reason and you’ll see why travel into the future isn’t practical. Suppose you jump a hundred years ahead. How do you get home to report what you’ve seen? The projector will yank you a hundred million years back, less the distance you went forward.”
Symonds dove back into his book. Somehow, he gave an impression of lying there rigid with shock that men dared think after he had spoken the phrase of taboo.
“Uh…yes. I get it.” Greenstein nodded. He had only been recruited a month ago, to replace a man drowned in a grass-veiled bog. Before then, like nearly all the world, he had had no idea time travel existed. So far he had been too busy to examine its implications.
To Herries it was an old, worn-thin story.
“I daresay they did send an expedition a hundred million years up, so it could come back to the same week as it left,” he said. “Don’t ask me what was found. Classified: Tip-top Secret, Burn Before Reading.”
“You know, though,” said Polansky in a thoughtful tone, “I been thinking some myself. Why are we here at all? I mean, oil is necessary to defense and all that, but it seems to me it’d make more sense for the U.S. Army to come through, cross the ocean, and establish itself where all the enemy nations are going to be. Then we’d have a gun pointed at their heads!”
“Nice theory,” said Herries. ‘‘I’ve daydreamed myself. But there’s only one main projector, to energize all the subsidiary ones. Building it took almost the whole world supply of certain rare earths. Its capacity is limited. If we started sending military units into the past, it’d be a slow and cumbersome operation—and not being a Security officer, I’m not required to kid myself that Moscow doesn’t know we’ve got time travel. They’ve probably even given Washington a secret ultimatum: ‘Start sending back war material in any quantity, and we’ll hit you with everything we’ve got.’ But evidently they don’t feel strongly enough about our pumping oil on our own territory—or what will one day be our own territory—to make it a, uh, casus belli.”
“Just as we don’t feel their satellite base in the twentieth century is dangerous enough for us to fight about,” said Greenstein, “but I suspect we’re the reason they agreed to make the Moon a neutral zone. Same old standoff.”
“I wonder how long it can last?” murmured Polansky.
“Not much longer,” said Olson. “Read your history. I’ll see you, Greenstein, boy, and raise you two.”
Herries let the shower run about him. At least there was no shortage of hot water. Transoco had sent back a complete atomic pile. But civilization and war still ran on oil, he thought, and oil was desperately short up there.
Time, he reflected, was a paradoxical thing. The scientists had told him it was utterly rigid. Perhaps, though of course it would be a graveyard secret, the cloak-and-dagger boys had tested that theory the hard way, going back into the historical past (it could be done after all, Herries suspected, though by a roundabout route which consumed fabulous amounts of energy) in an attempt to head off the Bolshevik Revolution. It would have failed. Neither past nor future could be changed—-they could only be discovered. Some of Transoco’s men had discovered death, an eon before they were born…But there would not be such a shortage of oil up in the future if Transoco had not gone back and drained it in the past. A self-causing future—
Primordial stuff, petroleum. Hoyle’s idea seemed to be right, it had not been formed by rotting dinosaurs but was present from the beginning. It was the stuff which had stuck the planets together.
And, Herries thought, was sticking to him now. He reached for the soap.
* * *
Earth spun gloomily through hours, and morning crept over wide brown waters. There was no real day as men understood day—the heavens were a leaden sheet with dirty black rainclouds scudding below the permanent fog layers.
Herries was up early, for there was a shipment scheduled. He came out of the bosses’ messhall and stood for a moment looking over the mud beach and the few square miles of cleared land, sleazy buildings and gaunt derricks inside an electric mesh fence. Automation replaced thousands of workers, so that five hundred men were enough to handle everything, but still the compound was the merest scratch and the jungle remained a terrifying black wall. Not that the trees were so utterly alien—besides the archaic grotesqueries, like ferns and mosses of gruesome size, there were cycad, redwood, and gingko, scattered prototypes of oak and willow and birch. But Herries missed wild flowers.
A working party with its machines was repairing the fence the brontosaur had smashed through yesterday, the well it had wrecked, the viciously persistent inroads of grass and vine. A caterpillar tractor hauled a string of loaded wagons across raw red earth. A helicopter buzzed overhead, on watch for dinosaurs. It was the only flying thing. There had been a nearby pterodactyl rookery, but the men had cleaned that out months ago. When you got right down to facts, the most sinister animal of all was man.
Greenstein joined Herries. The new assistant was tall, slender, with curly brown hair and the defenseless face of youth. Above boots and dungarees he wore a blue sports shirt; it offered a kind of defiance to this sullen world. “Smoke?” he invited.
“Thanks.” Herries accepted the cigarette. His eyes still dwelt on the derricks. Their walking beams went up and down, up and down, like a joyless copulation. Perhaps a man could get used to the Jurassic rain forest and eventually see some dark beauty there, for it was at least life; but this field would always remain hideous, being dead and pumping up the death of men.
“How’s it going, Sam?” he asked when the tobacco had soothed his palate.
“All right,” said Greenstein. “I’m shaking down. But God, It’s good to know today is mail call!”
They stepped off the porch and walked toward the transceiving station. Mud squelched under their feet. A tuft of something, too pale and fleshy to be grass, stood near Herries’ path. The yard crew had better uproot that soon, or in a week it might claim the entire compound.
“Girl friend, I suppose,” said the chief. “That does make a month into a hell of a long drought between letters.”
Greenstein flushed and nodded earnestly. “We’re going to get married when my two years here are up,” he said.
“That’s what most of ’em plan on. A lot of saved-up pay and valuable experience—sure, you’re fixed for life.” It was on Herries’ tongue to add that the life might be a short one, but he suppressed the impulse.
Loneliness dragged at his nerves. There was no one waiting in the future for him. It was just as well, he told himself during the endless nights. Hard enough to sleep without worrying about some woman in the same age as the cobalt bomb.
‘‘I’ve got her picture here, if you’d like to see it,” offered Greenstein shyly.
His hand was already on his wallet. A tired grin slid up Herries’ mouth. “Right next to your…er…heart, eh?” he murmured.
Greenstein blinked, threw back his head, and laughed. The field had not heard so merry a laugh in a long while. Nevertheless, he showed the other man a pleasant-faced, unspectacular girl.
Out in the swamp, something hooted and threshed about.
Impulsively, Herries asked: “How do you feel about this operation, Sam?”
“Huh? Why, it’s…interesting work. And a good bunch of guys.”
“Even Symonds?”
“Oh, he means well.”
“We could have more fun if he didn’t bunk with us.”
“He can’t help being…old,” said Greenstein.
Herries glanced at the boy. “You know,” he said, “you’re the first man in the Jurassic Period who’s had a good word for Ephraim Symonds. I appreciate that. I’d better not say whether or not I share the sentiment, but I appreciate it.”
His boots sludged ahead, growing heavier with each step. “You still haven’t answered my first question,” he resumed after a while. “I didn’t ask if you enjoyed the work, I asked how you feel about it. Its purpose. We have the answers here to questions which science has been asking—will be asking—for centuries. And yet, except for a couple of under-equipped paleobiologists, who aren’t allowed to publish their findings, we’re doing nothing but rape the earth in an age before it has even conceived us.”
Greenstein hesitated. Then, with a surprising dryness: “You’re getting too psychoanalytic for me, I’m afreud.”
Herries chuckled. The day seemed a little more alive, all at once. “Touché! Well, I’ll rephrase Joe Polansky’s question of last night. Do you think the atomic standoff in our home era—to which this operation is potentially rather important—is stable?”
Greenstein considered for a moment. “No,” he admitted. “Deterrence is a stopgap till something better can be worked out.”
“They’ve said as much since it first began. Nothing has been done. It’s improbable that anything will be. Ole Olson describes the international situation as a case of the irresistibly evil force colliding with the immovably stupid object.”
“Ole likes to use extreme language,” said Greenstein. “So tell me, what else could our side do?”
“I wish to God I had an answer.” Herries sighed. “Pardon me. We avoid politics here, as much as possible; we’re escapists in several senses of the word. But frankly, I sound out new men. I was doing it to you. Because in spite of what Washington thinks, a Q clearance isn’t all that a man needs to work here.”
“Did I pass?” asked Greenstein, a bit too lightly.
“Sure. So far. You may wish you hadn’t. The burning issue today is not whether to tolerate ‘privileged neutralism,’ or whatever the latest catchword is up there. It’s: Did I get the armament I’ve been asking for?”
The transceiving station bulked ahead. It was a long corrugated-iron shed, but dwarfed by the tanks which gleamed behind it. Every one of those was filled, Herries knew. Today they would pump their crude oil into the future. Or rather, if you wanted to be exact, their small temporal unit would establish a contact and the gigantic main projector in the twentieth century would then “suck” the liquid toward itself. And in return the compound would get—food, tools, weapons, supplies, and mail. Herries prayed there would be at least one howitzer…and no VIP’s. That Senator a few months ago!
For a moment, contemplating the naked ugliness of tanks and pumps and shed, Herries had a vision of this one place stretching through time. It would be abandoned some day, when the wells were exhausted, and rain and jungle would rapidly eat the last thin traces of man. Later would come the sea, and then it would be dry land again, a cold prairie scoured by glacial winds, and then it would grow warm and…on and on, a waste of years until the time projector was invented and the great machine stood on this spot. And afterward? Herries didn’t like to think what might be here after that.
Symonds was already present. He popped rabbit-like out of the building, a coded manifest in one hand a pencil behind his ear: “Good morning, Mr. Herries,” he said. His tone gave its usual impression of stiff self-importance.
“ ’Morning. All set in there?” Herries went in to see for himself. A spatter of rain began to fall, noisy on the metal roof. The technicians were at their posts and reported clear. Outside, one by one, the rest of the men were drifting up. This was mail day, and little work would be done for the remainder of it.
Herries laid the sack of letters to the future inside the shed in its proper spot. His chronometer said one minute to go. “Stand by!” At the precise time, there was a dim whistle in the air and an obscure pulsing glow. Meters came to life. The pumps began to throb, driving crude oil through a pipe which faced open-ended into the shed. Nothing emerged that Herries could see. Good. Everything in order. The other end of the pipe was a hundred million years in the future. The mail sack vanished with a small puff, as air rushed in where it had waited. Herries went back outside.
“Ah…excuse me.”
He turned around, with a jerkiness that told him his nerves were half unraveled. “Yes?” he snapped.
“May I see you a moment?” asked Symonds. “Alone?” And the pale eyes behind the glasses said it was not a request but an order.
Herries nodded curtly, swore at the men for hanging around idle when the return shipment wasn’t due for hours, and led the way to a porch tacked onto one side of the transceiving station. There were some camp stools beneath it. Symonds hitched up his khakis as if they were a business suit and sat primly down, his thin hands flat on his knees.
“A special shipment is due today,” Symonds said. “I was not permitted to discuss it until the last moment.”
Herries curled his mouth. “Go tell Security that the Kremlin won’t be built for a hundred million years. Maybe they haven’t heard.”
“What no one knew, no one could put into a letter home.”
“The mail is censored anyway. Our friends and relatives think we’re working somewhere in Asia.” Herries spat into the mud and said: “And in another year the first lot of recruits are due home. Plan to shoot them as they emerge, so they can’t possibly talk in their sleep?”
Symonds seemed too humorless even to recognize sarcasm. He pursed his lips and declared: “Some secrets need be kept for a few months only; but within that period, they must be kept.”
“Okay, okay. Let’s hear what’s coming today.”
“I am not allowed to tell you that. But about half the total tonnage will be crates marked Top Secret. These are to remain in the shed, guarded night and day by armed men.” Symonds pulled a slip of paper from his jacket. “These men will be assigned to that duty, each one taking eight hours a week.”
Herries glanced at the names. He did not know everyone here by sight, though he came close, but he recognized several of these. “Brave, discreet, and charter subscribers to National Review,” he murmured. “Teacher’s pets. All right. Though I’ll have to curtail exploration correspondingly—either that, or else cut down on their guards and sacrifice a few extra lives.”
“I think not. Let me continue. You will get these orders in the mail today, but I will prepare you for them now. A special house must be built for the crates, as rapidly as possible, and they must be moved there immediately upon its completion. I have the specifications in my office safe: essentially, it must be air-conditioned, burglar-proof, and strong enough to withstand all natural hazards.”
“Whoa, there!” Herries stepped forward. “That’s going to take reinforced concrete and—”
“Materials will be made available,” said Symonds. He did not look at the other man but stared straight ahead of him, across the rain-smoky compound to the jungle. He had no expression on his pinched face, and the reflection of light off his glasses gave him a strangely blind look.
“But—Judas priest!” Herries threw his cigarette to the ground; it was swallowed in mud and running water. He felt the heat enfold him like a blanket. “There’s the labor too, the machinery, and—How the devil am I expected to expand this operation if—”
“Expansion will be temporarily halted,” cut in Symonds. “You will simply maintain current operations with skeleton crews. The majority of the labor force is to be reassigned to construction.”
“What?”
“The compound fence must be extended and reinforced. A number of new storehouses are to be erected, to hold certain supplies which will presently be sent to us. Bunkhouse barges for an additional five hundred are required. This, of course, entails more sickbay, recreational, mess, laundry, and other facilities.”
Herries stood dumbly, staring at him. Pale lightning flickered in the sky.
The worst of it was, Symond’s didn’t even bother to be arrogant. He spoke like a schoolmaster.
“Oh no!” whispered Herries after a long while. “They’re not going to try to establish that Jurassic military base after all!”
“The purpose is classified.”
“Yeah. Sure. Classified. Arise, ye duly cleared citizens of democracy and cast your ballot on issues whose nature is classified, that your leaders whose names and duties are classified may—Great. Hopping. Balls. Of. Muck.” Herries swallowed: Vaguely, through his pulse, he felt his fingers tighten into fists.”
‘‘I’m going up,” he said. “I’m going to protest personally in Washington.”
“That is not permitted, Symonds said in a dry, clipped tone. “Read your contract. You are under martial law. Of course,” and his tone was neither softer nor harder, “you may file a written recommendation.”
Herries stood for a while. Out beyond the fence stood a bulldozer wrecked and abandoned. The vines had almost buried it and a few scuttering little marsupials lived there. Perhaps they were his own remote ancestors. He could take a .22 and go potshooting at them some day.
“I’m not permitted to know anything,” he said at last. “But is curiosity allowed? An extra five hundred men aren’t much. I suppose given a few airplanes and so on, a thousand of us could plant atomic bombs where enemy cities will be. Or could we? Can’t locate them without astronomical studies first, and it’s always clouded here. So it would be practical to booby trap only with mass-action weapons. A few husky cobalt bombs, say. But there are missiles available to deliver those in the twentieth century. So…what is the purpose?”
“You will learn the facts in due course,” answered Symonds. “At present, the government has certain military necessities.”
“Haw!” said Herries. He folded his arms and leaned against the roofpost. It sagged a bit…shoddy work, shoddy world, shoddy destiny. “Military horses’ necks! I’d like to get one of those prawn-eyed brass hats down here, just for a week, to run his precious security check on a lovesick brontosaur. But I’ll probably get another visit from Senator Lardhead, the one who took up two days of my time walking around asking about the possibilities of farming. Farming!”
“Senator Wien is from an agricultural state. Naturally he would be interested—”
“—in making sure that nobody here starts raising food and shipping it back home to bring grocery prices down to where people can afford an occasional steak. Sure. I’ll bet it cost us a thousand man-hours to make his soil tests and tell him, yes, given the proper machinery this land could be farmed. Of course, maybe I do him an injustice. Senator Wien is also on the Military Affairs Committee, isn’t he? He may have visited us in that capacity, and soon we’ll all get a directive to start our own little Victory gardens.”
“Your language is close to being subversive,” declared Symonds out of prune-wrinkled lips. “Senator Wien is a famous statesman.”
For a moment the legislator’s face rose in Herries’ memory; and it had been the oldest and most weary face he had ever known. Something had burned out in the man who had fought a decade for honorable peace; the knowledge that there was no peace and could be none became a kind of death, and Senator Wien dropped out of his Free World Union organization to arm his land for Ragnarok. Briefly, his anger fading, Herries pitied Senator Wien. And the President, and the Chief of Staff, and the Secretary of State, for their work must be like a nightmare where you strangled your mother and could not stop your hands. It was easier to fight dinosaurs.
He even pitied Symonds, until he asked if his request for an atomic weapon had finally been okayed, and Symonds replied, “Certainly not.” Then he spat at the clerk’s feet and walked out into the rain.
* * *
After the shipment and guards were seen to, Herries dismissed his men. There was an uneasy buzz among them at the abnormality of what had arrived; but today was mail day, after all, and they did not ponder it long. He would not make the announcement about the new orders until tomorrow. He got the magazines and newspapers to which he subscribed (no one up there “now” cared enough to write to him, though his parents had existed in a section of spacetime which ended only a year before he took this job) and wandered off to the boss barge to read a little.
The twentieth century looked still uglier than it had last month. The nations felt their pride and saw no way of retreat. The Middle Eastern war was taking a decisive turn which none of the great powers could afford. Herries wondered if he might not be cut off in the Jurassic. A single explosion could destroy the main projector. Five hundred womanless men in a world of reptiles—he’d take the future, cobalt bomb and all.
After lunch there was a quiet, Sunday kind of atmosphere, men lay on their bunks reading their letters over and over. Herries made his rounds, machines and kitchen and sickbay, inspecting.
“I guess we’ll discharge O’Connor tomorrow,” said Dr. Yamaguchi. “He can do light work with that Stader on his arm. Next time tell him to duck when a power shovel comes down.”
“What kind of sick calls have you been getting?” asked the chief.
Yamaguchi shrugged. “Usual things, very minor. I’d never have thought this swamp country would be so healthful. I guess disease germs which can live on placental mammals haven’t evolved yet.”
Father Gonzales, one of the camp’s three chaplains, buttonholed Herries as he came out. “Can you spare me a minute?” he said.
“Sure, padre. What is it?”
“About organizing some baseball teams. We need more recreation. This is not a good place for men to live.”
“Sawbones was just telling me—”
“I know. No flu, no malaria, oh, yes. But man is more than a body.”
“Sometimes I wonder,” said Herries. ‘‘I’ve seen the latest headlines. The dinosaurs have more sense than we do.”
“We have the capacity to do nearly all things,” said Father Gonzales. “At present, I mean in the twentieth century, we seem to do evil very well. We can do as much good, given the chance.”
“Who’s denying us the chance?” asked Herries. “Just ourselves, H. Sapiens. Therefore I wonder if we really are able to do good.”
“Don’t confuse sinfulness with damnation,” said the priest. “We have perhaps been unfortunate in our successes. And yet even our most menacing accomplishments have a kind of sublimity. The time projector, for example. If the minds able to shape such a thing in metal were only turned toward human problems, what could we not hope to do?”
“But that’s my point,” said Herries. “We don’t do the high things. We do what’s trivial and evil so consistently that I wonder if it isn’t in our nature. Even this time travel business…more and more I’m coming to think there’s something fundamentally unhealthy about it. As if it’s an invention which only an ingrown mind would have made first.”
“First?”
Herries looked up into the steaming sky. A foul wind met his face. “There are stars above those clouds,” he said, “and most stars must have planets. I’ve not been told how the time projector works, but elementary differential calculus will show that travel into the past is equivalent to attaining, momentarily, an infinite velocity. In other words, the basic natural law which the projector uses is one which somehow goes beyond relativity theory. If a time projector is possible, so is a spaceship which can reach the stars in a matter of days, maybe of minutes or seconds. If we were sane, padre, we wouldn’t have been so anxious for a little organic grease and the little military advantage involved, that the first thing we did was go back into the dead past after it. No, we’d have invented that spaceship first, and gone out to the stars where there’s room to be free and to grow. The time projector would have come afterward, as a scientific research tool.”
He stopped, embarrassed at himself and trying awkwardly to grin. “Excuse me. Sermons are more your province than mine.”
“It was interesting,” said Father Gonzales. “But you brood too much. So do a number of the men. Even if they have no close ties at home—it was wise to pick them for that—they are all of above-average intelligence, and aware of what the future is becoming. I’d like to shake them out of their oppression. If we could get some more sports equipment—”
“Sure. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Of course,” said the priest, “the problem is basically philosophical. Don’t laugh. You too were indulging in philosophy, and doubtless you think of yourself as an ordinary, unimaginative man. Your wildcatters may not have heard of Aristotle, but they are also thinking men in their way. My personal belief is that this heresy of a fixed, rigid time line lies at the root of their growing sorrowfulness, whether they know it or not.”
“Heresy?” The engineer lifted thick sandy brows. “It’s been proved. It’s the basis of the theory which showed how to build a projector: that much I do know. How could we be here at all, if the Mesozoic were not just as real as the Cenozoic? But if all time is coexistent, then all time must be fixed—unalterable—because every instant is the unchanging past of some other instant.”
“Perhaps so, from God’s viewpoint,” said Father Gonzales. “But we are mortal men. And we have free will. The fixed-time concept need not, logically, produce fatalism; after all, Herries, man’s will is itself one of the links in the causal chain. I suspect that this irrational fatalism is an important reason why twentieth-century civilization is approaching suicide. If we think we know our future is unchangeable, if our every action is foreordained, if we are doomed already, what’s the use of trying? Why go through all the pain of thought, of seeking an answer and struggling to make others accept it? But if we really believed in ourselves, we would look for a solution, and find one.”
“Maybe,” said Herries uncomfortably. “Well, give me a list of the equipment you want, and I’ll put in an order for it the next time the mail goes out.”
As he walked off, he wondered if the mail would ever go out again.
* * *
Passing the rec hall, he noticed a small crowd before it and veered to see what was going on. He could not let men gather to trade doubts and terrors, or the entire operation was threatened. In plain English, he told himself with a growing bitter honesty, I can’t permit them to think.
But the sounds which met him, under the subtly alien rustle of forest leaves and the distant bawl of a thunder lizard, was only a guitar. Chords danced forth beneath expert fingers, and a young voice lilted:
Looking over shoulders, Herries made out Greenstein, sprawled on a bench and singing. There were chuckles from the listeners, Well-deserved: the kid was good; Herries wished he could relax and simply enjoy the performance. Instead, he must note that they were finding it pleasant, and that swamp and war were alike forgotten for a valuable few minutes.
The song ended. Greenstein stood up and stretched. “Hi, boss,” he said.
Hard, wind-beaten faces turned to Herries and a mumble of greeting went around the circle. He was well enough liked, he knew, insofar as a chief can be liked. But that is not much. A leader can inspire trust, loyalty, what have you, but he cannot be humanly liked, or he is no leader.
“That was good,” said Herries. “I didn’t know you played.”
“I didn’t bring this whangbox with me, since I had no idea where I was going till I got here,” answered Greenstein. “Wrote home for it and it arrived today.”
A heavy-muscled crewcut man said, “You ought to be on the entertainment committee.” Herries recognized Worth, one of the professional patriots who would be standing guard on Symonds’ crates; but not a bad sort, really, after you learned to ignore his rather tedious opinions.
Greenstein said an indelicate word. ‘‘I’m sick of committees,” he went on. “We’ve gotten so much into the habit of being herded around—everybody in the twentieth century has—that we can’t even have a little fun without first setting up a committee.”
Worth looked offended but made no answer. It began to rain again, just a little.
“Go on now, anyway,” said Joe Eagle Wing. “Let’s not take ourselves so goddam serious. How about another song?”
“Not in the wet.” Greenstein returned his guitar to its case. The group began to break up, some to the hall and some back toward their barges.
Herries lingered, unwilling to be left alone with himself. “About that committee,” he said. “You might reconsider. It’s probably true what you claim, but we’re stuck with a situation. We’ve simply got to tell most of the boys, ‘Now it is time to be happy,’ or they never will be.”
Greenstein frowned. “Maybe so. But hasn’t anyone ever thought of making a fresh start? Of unlearning all those bad habits?”
“You can’t do that within the context of an entire society’s vices,” said Herries. “And how’re you going to get away?”
Greenstein gave him a long look. “How the devil did you ever get this job?” he asked. “You don’t sound like a man who’d be cleared for a dishwashing assistantship.”
Herries shrugged. “All my life, I’ve liked totalitarianism even less than what passes for democracy. I served in a couple of the minor wars and—No matter. Possibly I might not be given the post if I applied now. I’ve been here more than a year, and it’s changed me some.”
“It must,” said Greenstein, flickering a glance at the jungle.
“How’s things at home?” asked Herries, anxious for another subject.
The boy kindled. “Oh, terrific!” he said eagerly. “Miriam, my girl, you know, she’s an artist, and she’s gotten a commission to—”
The loudspeaker coughed and blared across the compound, into the strengthening rain: “Attention! Copter to ground, attention! Large biped dinosaur, about two miles away north-northeast, coming fast.”
Herries cursed and broke into a run.
Greenstein paced him. Water sheeted where their boots struck. “What is it?” he called.
“I don’t know…yet…but it might be…a really big…carnivore.” Herries reached the headquarters shack and flung the door open. A panel of levers was set near his personal desk. He slapped one down and the “combat stations” siren skirted above the field. Herries went on, “I don’t know why anything biped should make a beeline for us unless the smell of blood from the critter we drove off yesterday attracts it. The smaller carnivores are sure as hell drawn. The charged fence keeps them away—but I doubt if it would do much more than enrage a dinosaur—Follow me!”
Jeeps were already leaving their garage when Herries and Greenstein came out. Mud leaped up from their wheels and dripped back off the fenders. The rain fell harder, until the forest beyond the fence blurred; and the earth smoked with vapors. The helicopter hung above the derricks, like a skeleton vulture watching a skeleton army, and the alarm sirens filled the brown air with screaming.
“Can you drive one of these buggies?” asked Herries.
“I did in the Army,” said Greenstein.
“Okay, we’ll take the lead one. The main thing is to stop that beast before it gets in among the wells.” Herries vaulted the right-hand door and planted himself on sopping plastic cushions. There was a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on the hood before him, and the microphone of a police car radio hung at the dash. Five jeeps followed as Greenstein swung into motion. The rest of the crew, ludicrous ants across those wide wet distances, went scurrying with their arms to defend the most vital installations.
The north gate opened and the cars splashed out beyond the fence. There was a strip several yards across, also kept cleared; then the jungle wall rose, black, brown, dull red and green and yellow. Here and there along the fence an occasional bone gleamed up out of the muck, some animal shot by a guard or killed by the voltage. Oddly enough, Herries irrelevantly remembered, such a corpse drew enough scavenging insects to clean it in a day, but it was usually ignored by the nasty man-sized hunter dinosaurs which still slunk and hopped and slithered in this neighborhood. Reptiles just did not go in for carrion. However, they followed the odor of blood…
“Further east,” said the helicopter pilot’s radio voice. “There. Stop. Face the woods. He’s coming out in a minute. Good luck, boss. Next time gimme some bombs and I’ll handle the bugger myself.”
“We haven’t been granted any heavy weapons.” Herries licked lips which seemed rough. His pulse was thick. No one had ever faced a tyrannosaur before.
The jeeps drew into line, and for a moment only their windshield wipers had motion. Then undergrowth crashed, and the monster was upon them.
It was indeed a tyrannosaur, thought Herries in a blurred way. A close relative, at least. It blundered ahead with the overweighted, underwitted stiffness which paleontologists had predicted, and which had led some of them to believe that it must have been a gigantic, carrion-eating hyena! They forgot that, like the Cenozoic snake or crocodile, it was too dull to recognize dead meat as food; that the brontosaurs it preyed on were even more clumsy; and that sheer length of stride would carry it over the scarred earth at a respectable rate.
Herries saw a blunt head three man-heights above ground, and a tail ending fifteen yards away. Scales of an unfairly beautiful steel gray shimmered in the rain, which made small waterfalls off flanks and wrinkled neck and tiny useless forepaws. Teeth clashed in a mindless reflex, the ponderous belly wagged with each step, and Herries felt the vibration of tons coming down claw-footed. The beast paid no attention to the jeeps, but moved jerkily toward the fence. Sheer weight would drive it through the mesh.
“Get in front of him, Sam!” yelled the engineer.
He gripped the machine gun. It snarled on his behalf, and he saw how a sleet of bullets stitched a bloody seam across the white stomach. The tyrannosaur halted, weaving its head about. It made a hollow, coughing roar. Greenstein edged the jeep closer.
The others attacked from the sides. Tracer streams hosed across alligator tail and bird legs. A launched grenade burst with a little puff on the right thigh. It opened a red ulcer-like crater. The tyrannosaur swung slowly about toward one of the cars.
That jeep dodged aside. “Get in on him!” shouted Herries. Greenstein shifted gears and darted through a fountain of mud. Herries stole a glance. The boy was grinning. Well, it would be something to tell the grandchildren, all right!
His jeep fled past the tyrannosaur, whipped about on two wheels, and crouched under a hammer of rain. The reptile halted. Herries cut loose with his machine gun. The monster standing there, swaying a little, roaring and bleeding, was not entirely real. This had happened a hundred million years ago. Rain struck the hot gun barrel and sizzled off.
“From the sides again,” rapped Herries into his microphone. “Two and Three on his right, Four and Five on his left. Six, go behind him and lob a grenade at the base of his tail.”
The tyrannosaur began another awkward about face. The water in which it stood was tinged red.
“Aim for his eyes!” yelled Greenstein, and dashed recklessly toward the profile now presented him.
The grenade from behind exploded. With a sudden incredible speed, the tyrannosaur turned clear around. Herries had an instant’s glimpse of the tail like a snake before him, then it struck.
He threw up an arm and felt glass bounce off it as the windshield shattered. The noise when metal gave way did not seem loud, but it went through his entire body. The jeep reeled on ahead. Instinct sent Herries to the floorboards. He felt a brutal impact as his car struck the dinosaur’s left leg. It hooted far above him. He looked up and saw a foot with talons, raised and filling the sky. It came down. The hood crumpled at his back and the engine was ripped from the frame.
Then the tyrannosaur had gone on. Herries crawled up into the bucket seat. It was canted at a lunatic angle. “Sam,” he croaked. “Sam, Sam.”
Greenstein’s head was brains and splinters, with half the lower jaw on his lap and a burst-out eyeball staring up from the seat beside him.
Herries climbed erect. He saw his torn-off machine gun lying in the mud. A hundred yards off, at the jungle edge, the tyrannosaur fought the jeeps. It made clumsy rushes, which they side-swerved, and they spat at it and gnawed at it. Herries thought in a dull, remote fashion: This can go on forever. A man is easy to kill, one swipe of a tail and all his songs are a red smear in the rain. But a reptile dies hard, being less alive to start with. I can’t see an end to this fight.
The Number Four jeep rushed in. A man sprang from it and it darted back in reverse from the monster’s charge. The man—“Stop that, you idiot,” whispered Herries into a dead microphone, “stop it, you fool”—plunged between the huge legs. He moved sluggishly enough with clay on his boots, but he was impossibly fleet and beautiful under that jerking bulk. Herries recognized Worth. He carried a grenade in his hand. He pulled the pin and dodged claws for a moment. The flabby, bleeding stomach made a roof over his head. Jaws searched blindly above him. He hurled the grenade and ran. It exploded against the tyrannosaur’s belly. The monster screamed. One foot rose and came down. The talons merely clipped Worth, but he went spinning, fell in the gumbo ten feet away and tried weakly to rise but couldn’t.
The tyrannosaur staggered in the other direction, spilling its entrails. Its screams took on a ghastly human note. Somebody stopped and picked up Worth. Somebody else came to Herries and gabbled at him. The tyrannosaur stumbled in yards of gut, fell slowly, and struggled, entangling itself.
Even so, it was hard to kill. The cars battered it for half an hour as it lay there, and it hissed at them and beat the ground with its tail. Herries was not sure it had died when he and his men finally left. But the insects had long been busy, and a few of the bones already stood forth clean white.
* * *
The phone jangled on Herries’ desk. He picked it up. “Yeh?”
“Yamaguchi in sick bay,” said the voice. “Thought you’d want to know about Worth.”
“Well?”
“Broken lumbar vertebra. He’ll live, possibly without permanent paralysis, but he’ll have to go back for treatment.”
“And be held incommunicado a year, till his contract’s up. I wonder how much of a patriot he’ll be by that time.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Can it wait till tomorrow? Everything’s so disorganized right now, I’d hate to activate the projector.”
“Oh yes. He’s under sedation anyway.” Yamaguchi paused. “And the man who died—”
“Sure. We’ll ship him back too. The government will even supply a nice coffin. I’m sure his girl friend will appreciate that.”
“Do you feel well?” asked Yamaguchi sharply.
“They were going to be married,” said Herries. He took another pull from the fifth of bourbon on his desk. It was getting almost too dark to see the bottle. “Since patriotism nowadays…in the future, I mean…in our own home, sweet home…since patriotism is necessarily equated with necrophilia, in that the loyal citizen is expected to rejoice every time his government comes up with a newer gadget for mass-producing corpses…I am sure the young lady will just love to have a pretty coffin. So much nicer than a mere husband. I’m sure the coffin will be chrome plated.”
“Wait a minute—”
“With tail fins.”
“Look here,” said the doctor, “you’re acting like a case of combat fatigue. I know you’ve had a shock today. Come see me and I’ll give you a tranquilizer.”
“Thanks,” said Herries. ‘‘I’ve got one.” He took another swig and forced briskness into his tone. “We’ll send ’em back tomorrow morning, then. Now don’t bother me. I’m composing a letter to explain to the great white father that this wouldn’t have happened if we’d been allowed one stinking little atomic howitzer. Not that I expect to get any results. It’s policy that we aren’t allowed heavy weapons down here, and who ever heard of facts affecting a policy? Why, facts might be un-American.”
He hung up, put the bottle on his lap and his feet on the desk, lit a cigarette and stared out the window. Darkness came sneaking across the compound like smoke. The rain had stopped for a while, and lamps and windows threw broken yellow gleams off puddles, but somehow the gathering night so thick that each light seemed quite alone. There was no else in the headquarters shack this hour. Herries had not turned on his own lights.
To hell with it, he thought. To hell with it.
His cigarette tip waxed and waned as he puffed, like a small dying star. But the smoke didn’t taste right when invisible. Or had he put away so many toasts to dead men that his tongue was numbed? He wasn’t sure. It hardly mattered.
The phone shrilled again. He picked it up, fumble-handed in the murk. “Chief of operations,” he said pleasantly. “To hell with you.”
“What?” Symonds’ voice rattled a bare bit. Then: “I have been trying to find you. What are you doing there this late?”
“I’ll give you three guesses. Playing pinochle? No. Carrying on a sordid affair with a lady iguanodon? No. None of your business? Right! Give that gentleman a box of see-gars.”
“Look here, Mr. Herries,” wasped Symonds, “this is no time for levity. I understand that Matthew Worth was seriously injured today. He was supposed to be on guard duty tonight—the secret shipment. This has disarranged all my plans.”
“Tsk-tsk-tsk. My nose bleeds for you.”
“The schedule of duties must be revised. According to my notes, Worth would have been on guard from midnight until 4 A.M. Since I do not know precisely what other jobs his fellows are assigned to, I cannot single any one of them out to replace him. Will you do so? Select a man who can then sleep later tomorrow morning?”
“Why?” asked Herries.
“Why? Because—because—”
“I know. Because Washington said so. Washington is afraid some nasty dinosaur from what is going to be Russia will sneak in and look at an unguarded crate and hurry home with the information. Sure, I’ll do it. I just wanted to hear you sputter.”
Herries thought he made out an indignant breath sucked past an upper plate. “Very good,” said the clerk. “Make the necessary arrangements for tonight, and we will work out a new rotation of watches tomorrow.”
Herries put the receiver back.
The list of tight-lipped, tight-minded types was somewhere in his desk, he knew vaguely. A copy, rather. Symonds had a copy, and no doubt there would be copies going to the Pentagon and the FBI and the Transoco personnel office and—Well, look at the list, compare it with the work schedule, see who wouldn’t be doing anything of critical importance tomorrow forenoon, and put him on a bit of sentry-go. Simple.
Herries took another swig. He could resign, he thought. He could back out of the whole fantastically stupid, fantastically meaningless operation. He wasn’t compelled to work. Of course, they could hold him for the rest of his contract. It would be a lonesome year. Or maybe not; maybe a few others would trickle in to keep him company. To be sure, he’d then be under surveillance the rest of his life. But who wasn’t, in a century divided between two garrisons?
The trouble was, he thought, there was nothing a man could do about the situation. You could become a peace-at-any-cost pacifist and thereby, effectively, league yourself with the enemy; and the enemy had carried out too many cold massacres for any halfway sane man to stomach. Or you could fight back (thus becoming more and more like what you fought) and hazard planetary incineration against the possibility of a tolerable outcome. It only took one to make a quarrel, and the enemy had long ago elected himself that one. Now, it was probably too late to patch up the quarrel. Even if important men on both sides wished for a disengagement, what could they do against their own fanatics, vested interests, terrified common people…against the whole momentum of history?
Hell take it, thought Herries, we may be damned but why must we be fools in the bargain?
Somewhere a brontosaur hooted, witlessly plowing through a night swamp.
Well, I’d better—No!
Herries stared at the end of his cigarette. It was almost scorching his fingers. At least, he thought, at least he could find out what he was supposed to condone. A look into those crates, which should have held the guns he had begged for, and perhaps some orchestral and scientific instruments…and instead held God knew what piece of Pentagonal-brained idiocy…a look would be more than a blow in Symonds’ smug eye. It would be an assertion that he was Herries, a free man, whose existence had not yet been pointlessly spilled from a splintered skull. He, the individual, would know what the Team planned; and if it turned out to be a crime against reason, he could at the very least resign and sit out whatever followed.
Yes. By the dubious existence of divine mercy, yes.
* * *
Again a little rain, just a small warm touch on his face, like tears. Herries splashed to the transceiver building and stood quietly in the sudden flashlight glare. At last, out of blackness, the sentry’s voice came: “Oh, it’s you, sir.”
“Uh-huh. You know Worth got hurt today? I’m taking his watch.”
“What? But I thought—”
“Policy,” said Herries.
The incantation seemed to suffice. The other man shuffled forth and laid his rifle in the engineer’s hands. “And here’s the glim,” he added. “Nobody came by while I was on duty.”
“What would you have done if somebody’d tried to get in?”
“Why, stopped them, of course.”
“And if they didn’t stop?”
The dim face under the dripping hat turned puzzledly toward Herries. The engineer sighed. ‘‘I’m sorry, Thornton. It’s too late to raise philosophical questions. Run along to bed.”
He stood in front of the door, smoking a damp cigarette, and watched the man trudge away. All the lights were out now, except overhead lamps here and there. They were brilliant, but remote; he stood in a pit of shadow and wondered what the phase of the Moon was and what kind of constellations the stars made nowadays.
He waited. There was time enough for his rebellion. Too much time, really. A man stood in rain, fog about his feet and a reptile smell in his nose, and he remembered anemones in springtime, strewn under trees still cold and leafless, with here and there a little snow between the roots. Or he remembered drinking beer in a New England country inn one fall day when the door stood open to red sumac and yellow beech and a far blue wandering sky. Or he remembered a man snatched under black Jurassic quagmires, a man stepped into red ruin, a man sitting in a jeep and bleeding brains down onto the picture of the girl he had planned to marry. And then he started wondering what the point of it all was, and decided that it was either without any point whatsoever or else had the purpose of obliterating anemones and quiet country inns, and he was forced to dissent somehow.
When Thornton’s wet footsteps were lost in the dark, Herries unlocked the shed door and went through. It was smotheringly hot inside. Sweat sprang forth under his raincoat as he closed the door again and turned on his flashlight. Rain tapped loudly on the roof. The crates loomed over him, box upon box, many of them large enough to hold a dinosaur. It had taken a lot of power to ship all that tonnage into the past. No wonder taxes were high. And what might the stuff be? A herd of tanks, possibly…some knocked-down bombers…Lord knew what concept the men who lived in offices, insulated from the sky, would come up with. And Symonds had implied it was just a beginning; there would be more shipments when this had been stored out of the way, and more, and more.
Herries found a workbench and helped himself to tools. He would have to be careful; no sense in going to jail. He laid the flashlight on a handy barrel and stooped down by one of the crates. It was of strong wood, securely screwed together. But while that would make it harder to dismantle, it could be reassembled without leaving a trace. Maybe. Of course, it might be booby trapped. No telling how far the religion of secrecy could lead the office men.
Oh, well, if I’m blown up I haven’t lost much. Herries peeled off his slicker. His shirt clung to his body. He squatted and began to work.
It went slowly. After taking off several boards, he saw a regular manufacturer’s crate, open-slatted. Something within was wrapped in burlap. A single curved metal surface projected slightly. What the devil? Herries got a crowbar and pried one slat loose. The nails shrieked. He stooped rigid for a while, listening, but there was only the rain, grown more noisy. He reached in and fumbled with the padding… God, it was hot!
Only when he had freed the entire blade did he recognize what it was. And then his mind would not quite function; he gaped a long while before the word registered.
A plowshare.
“But they don’t know what to do with the farm surpluses at home,” he said aloud, inanely.
Like a stranger’s, his hands began to repair what he had torn apart. He couldn’t understand it. Nothing seemed altogether real any more. Of course, he thought in a dim way, theoretically anything might be in the other boxes, but he suspected more plows, tractors, discs, combines…why not bags of seeds…? What were they planning to do?
“Ah.”
Herries whirled. The flashlight beam caught him like a spear.
He grabbed blindly for his rifle. A dry little voice behind the blaze said: “I would not recommend violence.” Herries let the rifle fall. It thudded.
Symonds closed the shed door behind him and stepped forward in his mincing fashion, another shadow among bobbing misshapen shadows. He had simply flung on shirt and pants, but bands of night across them suggested necktie, vest, and coat.
“You see,” he explained without passion, “all the guards were instructed sub rosa to notify me if there was anything unusual, even when it did not seem to warrant action on their part.” He gestured at the crate. “Please continue reassembling it.”
Herries crouched down again. There was a hollowness in him, his only wonder was how best to die. For if he were sent back to the twentieth century, surely, surely they would lock him up and lose the key, and the sunlessness of death was better than that. It was strange, he thought, how his fingers used the tools with untrembling skill.
Symonds stood behind him and held his light on the work. After a long while he asked primly, “Why did you break in like this?”
I could kill him, thought Herries. He’s unarmed. I could wring his scrawny neck between these two hands, and take a gun, and go into the swamp to live a few days…But it might be easier all around just to turn the rifle on myself.
He sought words with care, for he must decide what to do, even though it seemed remote and scarcely important. “That’s not an easy question to answer,” he said.
“The significant ones never are.”
Astonished, Herries jerked a glance upward and back. (And was the more surprised that he could still know surprise.) But the little man’s face was in darkness. Herries saw only a wan blank glitter off the glasses.
He said, “Let’s put it this way. There are limits even to the right of self-defense. If a killer attacks me, I can fight back with anything I’ve got. But I wouldn’t be justified in grabbing some passing child for a shield.”
“So you wished to make sure that nothing you would consider illegitimate was in those boxes?” asked Symonds academically.
“I don’t know. What is illegitimate, these days? I was…I was disgusted. I liked Greenstein, and he died because Washington had decided we couldn’t have bombs or atomic shells. I just didn’t know how much more I could consent to. I had to find out.”
“I see.” The clerk nodded. “For your information, it is all agricultural equipment. Later shipments will include industrial and scientific material, a large reserve of canned food, and as much of the world’s culture as it proves possible to microfilm.”
Herries stopped working, turned around and rose. His knees would not hold him. He leaned against the crate and it was a minute before he could get out: “Why?”
Symonds did not respond at once. He reached forth a precise hand and took up the flashlight Herries had left on the barrel. Then he sat down there himself, with the two glowing tubes in his lap. The light from below ridged his face in shadows, and his glasses made blind circles. He said, as if ticking off the points of an agenda:
“You would have been informed of the facts in due course, when the next five hundred people arrive. Now you have brought on yourself the burden of knowing what you would otherwise have been ignorant of for months yet. I think it may safely be assumed that you will keep the secret and not be broken by it. At least, the assumption is necessary.”
Herries heard his own breath harsh in his throat. “Who are these people?”
The papery half-seen countenance did not look at him, but into the pit-like reaches of the shed. “You have committed a common error,” said Symonds, as if to a student. “You have assumed that because men are constrained by circumstances to act in certain ways, they must be evil or stupid. I assure you, Senator Wien and the few others responsible for this are neither. They must keep the truth even from those officials within the project whose reaction would be rage or panic instead of a sober attempt at salvage. Nor do they have unlimited powers. Therefore, rather than indulge in tantrums about the existing situation, they use it. The very compartmentalization of effort and knowledge enforced by Security helps conceal their purposes and mislead those who must be given some information.”
Symonds paused. A little frown crossed his forehead, and he tapped an impatient fingernail on a flashlight casing. “Do not misunderstand,” he went on. “Senator Wien and his associates have not forgotten their oaths of office, nor are they trying to play God. Their primary effort goes, as it must, to a straightforward dealing with the problems of the twentieth century. It is not they who are withholding the one significant datum—a datum which, incidentally, any informed person could reason out for himself if he cared to. It is properly constituted authority, using powers legally granted to stamp certain reports Top Secret. Of course, the Senator has used his considerable influence to bring about the present eventuality, but that is normal politics.”
Herries growled: “Get to the point, damn you! What are you talking about?”
Symonds shook his thin gray head. “You are afraid to know, are you not?” he asked quietly.
“I—” Herries turned about, faced the crate and beat it with his fist. The parched voice in the night continued to punish him:
“You know that a time-projector can go into the future about a hundred years at a jump, but can only go pastward in jumps of approximately one hundred megayears. You have spoken of a simple way to explore certain sections of the historical past, in spite of this handicap, by making enough century hops forward before the one long hop backward. But can you tell me how to predict the historical future? Say, a century hence? Come, come, you are an intelligent man. Answer me.”
“Yeah,” said Herries. “I get the idea. Leave me alone.”
“Team A, a group of well-equipped volunteers, went into the twenty-first century,” pursued Symonds. “They recorded what they observed and placed the data in a chemically inert box within a large block of reinforced concrete erected at an agreed-on location: one which a previous expedition to circa 100,000,000 A.D. had confirmed would remain stable. I presume they also mixed radioactive materials of long half-life into the concrete, to aid in finding the site. Of course, the bracketing of time jumps is such that they cannot now get back to the twentieth century. But Team B went a full hundred-megayear jump into the future, excavated the data, and returned home.”
Herries squared his body and faced back to the small man. He was drained, so weary that it was. all he could do to keep on his feet. “What did they find?” he asked. There was no tone in his voice or in him.
“There have actually been several expeditions to 100,000,000,” said Symonds. “Energy requirements for a visit to 200,000,000—A.D. or B.C.—were considered prohibitive. But in 100,000,000 life is re-evolving on Earth. However, as yet the plants have not liberated enough oxygen for the atmosphere to be breathable. You see, oxygen reacts with exposed rock, so that if no biological processes exist to replace it continuously—But you have a better technical education than I.”
“Okay,” said Herries, flat and hard. “Earth was sterile for a long time in the future. Including the twenty-first century?”
“Yes. The radioactivity had died down enough so that Team A reported no danger to itself, but some of the longer-lived isotopes were still measurably present. By making differential measurements of abundance, Team A was able to estimate rather closely when the bombs had gone off.”
“And?”
“Approximately one year from the twentieth-century base date we are presently using.”
“One year…from now.” Herries stared upward. Blackness met him. He heard the Jurassic rain on the iron roof, like drums.
“Possibly less,” Symonds told him. “There is a factor of uncertainty. This project must be completed well within the safety margin before the war comes.”
“The war comes,” Herries repeated…“Does it have to come? Fixed time line or not, does it have to come? Couldn’t the enemy leaders be shown the facts—couldn’t our side, even, capitulate—”
“Every effort is being made,” said Symonds like a machine. “Quite apart from the theory of rigid time, it seems unlikely that they will succeed. The situation is too unstable. One man, losing his head and pressing the wrong button, can write the end; and there are so many buttons. The very revelation of the truth, to a few chosen leaders or to the world public, would make some of them panicky. Who can tell what a man in panic will do? That is what I meant when I said that Senator Wien and his coworkers have not forgotten their oaths of office. They have no thought of taking refuge, they know they are old men. To the end, they will try to save the twentieth century. But they do not expect it; so they are also trying to save the human race.”
Herries pushed up from the crate he had been leaning against. “Those five hundred who’re coming,” he whispered. “Women?”
“Yes. If there is still time to rescue a few more, after the ones you are preparing for have gone through, it will be done. But there will be at least a thousand young, healthy adults here, in the Jurassic. You face a difficult time, when the truth must be told them; you can see why the secret must be kept until then. It is quite possible that someone here will lose his head. That is why no heavy weapons have been sent: a single deranged person must not be able to destroy everyone. But you will recover. You must.”
Herries jerked the door open and stared out into the roaring darkness. “But there are no traces of us…in the future,” he said, hearing his voice high and hurt like a child’s.
“How much trace do you expect would remain after geological eras?” answered Symonds. He was still the reproving schoolmaster; but he sat on the barrel and faced the great moving shadows in a corner. “It is assumed that you will remain here for several generations, until your numbers and resources have been expanded sufficiently. The Team A I spoke of will join you a century hence. It is also, I might add, composed of young men and women in equal numbers. But this planet in this age is not a good home. We trust that your descendants will perfect the spaceships we know to be possible, and take possession of the stars instead.”
Herries leaned in the doorway, sagging with tiredness and the monstrous duty to survive. A gust of wind threw rain into his eyes. He heard dragons calling in the night.
“And you?” he said, for no good reason.
“I shall convey any final messages you may wish to send home,” said the dried-out voice.
Neat little footsteps clicked across the floor until the clerk paused beside the engineer. There was silence, except for the rain.
“Surely I will deserve to go home,” said Symonds.
And suddenly the breath whistled inward between teeth which had snapped together. He raised his hands, claw-fingered and screamed aloud: “You can let me go home then!”
He began running toward the supervisors’ barge. The sound of him was soon lost. Herries stood for a time yet in the door.