No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 5) (11 page)

Pounding feet sounded in the corridor outside.

Clark’s hand shot out and scooped up the stones.

“Can’t let anyone find us with these on us,” he whispered huskily. “Let’s duck into the hangar.”

Swiftly the two leaped through the doorway into the darkened room. Crouched under the wing of one of the time-fliers, they saw figures come into the room they had just quitted. Figures in police uniforms.

The police stood stock-still in the center of the room, staring.

“What’s going on here?” shouted one of them.

Silence fell more heavily.

“What do you think that fellow meant, telling us he saw some funny looking birds coming out of here?” one of them asked the other two.

“Let’s look in the hangar,” one of the policemen said. He leveled a flash and a spear of light cut the deep gloom, just missing the two men crouched under the wing of the time-flier.

Clark felt Smith tugging at him.

“We got to get out of here,” Smith hissed in his ear.

Clark nodded in the darkness. And he knew there was only one way to get out of there.

Together they tumbled through the door of the time-flier.

“Here we go,” said Smith. “We’re criminals now, Steve.”

The machine lurched out through the suddenly opened lock.

The time mechanism hummed and two men, one with ten bongo stones in his pocket, fled through time.

CHAPTER III
Anachronic Treasure

Old One-Eye was fighting his last battle. His great stone-ax lay out of reach, its handle broken, swept from his hand by a blow aimed at him by the mighty cat. His body was mauled and across one shoulder was a deep wound from which a stream of crimson trickled down his hairy chest.

To flee was useless. One-Eye knew that he could not out-distance Saber-Tooth. There was only one thing to do—stand and fight. So with shoulders hunched, with his hands poised and ready for action, with his one eye gleaming balefully, the Neanderthal man faced the cat.

The animal snarled and spat, its tail twitching, crouched for a leap. Its long, curved fangs slashed angrily at the air.

One-Eye had no delusions about what was going to happen. He had killed many saber-tooths in his life. In company with others of his kind, he had faced the charge of the great cave-bear. He had trailed and brought down the mighty mammoth. In his day One-Eye had been a great hunter, an invincible warrior. But now he had reached the end of life. A man’s two hands were no weapon against the tooth and claw of a saber-toothed tiger. One-Eye knew he was going to be killed.

Dry brush crackled back of the cat and the saber-tooth pivoted swiftly at this threat of new danger from the rear. One-Eye straightened and froze in his tracks.

Conrad Yancey, standing at the edge of the brush, slowly raised his rifle.

“I reckon this has gone about far enough,” he said. “A man’s got to stick by his own kind.”

Startled, the great cat’s snarls rose into a siren of hate and fear.

Yancey lined the sights on the ugly head and squeezed the trigger. The saber-tooth leaped into the air, screaming in rage and terror. Again the rifle blazed and the cat straightened, reared on its hind legs, fell backward to the ground, coughing great streams of blood.

Across the body of the beast One-Eye and Yancey exchanged glances.

“You put up a swell battle,” Yancey told the Neanderthaler. “I watched you for quite a spell. Glad I was around to help.”

Petrified by terror, One-Eye stood stock-still, staring. His nostrils twitched as he sniffed the strange smells which had come with the stranger and his shining spear. The spear, when it spoke in a voice of thunder, had a smell all its own, a smell that stung One-Eye’s sensitive nostrils and his throat and made him want to cough.

Yancey took a slow, tentative step toward the Neanderthaler. But when the sub-man stirred as if to flee, he stopped short and stood almost breathless.

Yancey saw that the Neanderthaler’s left eye at some time had been scooped out of his head by the vicious blow of a cruelly taloned paw. Deep scratches and a tortuous malformation of the region above the cheek-bone told a story of some terrible battle of the wilderness.

Short of stature and slightly stooping of posture, the Neanderthaler was a model of awkward power. His head was thrust forward at an angle between his shoulders. His neck was thick as a tree boll. The long arms hung almost to the knees of the bowed legs and the body was completely covered with hair. The heavy bristle of hair on his enormously projecting eyebrows was snowy white and throughout the heavy coat of hair which covered the man were other streaks and sprinklings of gray and white.

“An old buck,” said Yancey, half to himself. “Slowing down. Someday he won’t move quite fast enough and a cat will have him.”

Conrad Yancey took another slow step forward and this time the Neanderthaler, bristling with terror, wheeled about with a strange, strangled cry of fear and ran, shuffling awkwardly, down the hill to plunge straight into a dense thicket.

Back at the time-tractor camp Yancey told the story of the battle between the caveman and the cat, of how he watched and had finally stepped in to save the man’s life.

But the others had stories, too. Cabot and Cameron, hunting together a few miles to the east, had been charged by an angry mammoth bull, had stopped him only after they had placed four well aimed heavy-caliber bullets into him. Pascal, remaining at the tractor, had scared off a cave bear and reported that a pack of five vicious, slinking wolves had patrolled the camp throughout the afternoon. He had shot two of them and then the rest had scattered.

For here was a land that was teeming with game; a land where the law of claw and fang ruled and was the only law; where big animals preyed on smaller animals and in turn were preyed upon by still bigger ones. Here was a land without human habitation, with the few Neanderthalers who did live here hiding in dark, dank caves. Here was a land that had no human tenets, no softening hand of civilization.

But here, in this primeval wilderness of what later was to become the British Isles, was the greatest hunting ground Cabot and Yancey had ever seen. They shot in self-defense as often as they shot to bring down marked game. They found that a cave bear would carry more lead than an elephant, that the saber-tooth was not so hard to kill as might be thought, that only superb marksmanship and the heaviest bullets would bring the mammoth to his knees.

The flickering campfire, lighting up the gray, shadowy bulk of the time-tractor, was the only evidence of civilized life upon the darkening world as a blood-red moon climbed over the eastern horizon and lighted a land that growled and snarled, shivered and whimpered, hunted and was hunted.

Yancey saw Old One-Eye lurking on the edge of the camp when he arose in the morning. He had just a glimpse of the old fellow, squatting in a clump of bushes, looking over the camp with his one good eye. He disappeared so quickly, so soundlessly that Yancey blinked and rubbed his eyes, hardly believing he had left.

In the field that day Yancey and Cabot caught sight of him several times, lurking in their wake, spying upon them.

“Maybe,” Cabot suggested, “he is trying to get up enough courage to thank you for saving his life.”

Yancey grunted.

“Hell, I had to do that, Jack,” he said. “He isn’t more than an animal, but he’s still a man. We got to play along with our own kind in a place like this. He was such a brave old cuss. Standing there, ready to go to bat with that cat with his bare hands.”

Back at the camp, Pascal looked at it in a scientific light.

“Just natural curiosity,” he said. “The first glimmering of intelligence. Trying to figure things out. With what limited brain power he has that old fellow is doing some heavy thinking right now.”

“Maybe he recognizes you as one of his descendants. Great-grandson to the hundredth generation, maybe,” Cameron jibed at Yancey.

“The Neanderthal race is not the ancestor of man,” Pascal protested. “They died out or were killed off by the Cro-Magnons, who’ll be moving in within another ten or twenty thousand years. The Neanderthaloids were just a sort of blind alley. An experiment that didn’t go quite right.”

“Seems damn human, though,” protested Yancey.

One-Eye became a camp fixture. He lurked around the tractor, trailed Yancey when he went afield. Degree by degree he became bolder. Meat was left where he could find it and he carried it off into the brush. Later he didn’t bother to drag it off. In plain view of the hunters he squatted on his haunches, ripping and rending it, snarling softly, gulping great, bloody mouthfuls of raw flesh.

He haunted the campfire like a dog, apparently pleased with the easy living he had found. He came farther away from the encircling brush, squatted and jabbered just outside the circle of firelight, waiting for the bits of food tossed to him.

At last, seemingly convinced he had nothing to fear from these strange creatures, he joined the campfire circle, sat with the men, blinking at the campfire, jabbering away excitedly.

“Maybe he has a language,” said Pascal, “but if he has it’s very primitive. Not more than a dozen words at most.”

He liked to have his back scratched, grunting like a contented hog. He begged for cubes of sugar.

“Makes a nice pet,” Cameron declared.

But Yancey shook his head.

“Something more than a pet, Hugh,” he said.

For between Yancey and the old Neanderthaler something akin to comradeship had developed. It was by Yancey that the old one-eyed savage sat when he came into the ring of firelight. It was at Yancey that he directed his chatter. During the day he haunted Yancey’s footsteps like a shadow, at times coming out openly to join him, ambling along with his awkward gait.

One night Yancey gave him a knife, half wondering if One-Eye would know what it was. But One-Eye recognized in this wondrous piece of polished metal something akin to the fist ax that he and his people used to flay the pelts from the animals they killed.

Turning the knife over and over, One-Eye slobbered in delirious glee. He jabbered excitedly at Yancey, clawed at the man’s shoulder with caressing paw. Then he leaped from his place by the campfire and slithered away into the darkness. Not so much as a breaking twig heralded his plunge into the night.

Yancey rubbed his eyes.

“I wonder what the damn old fool is up to now?” he asked.

“Went off to try his new knife,” suggested Cabot. “Something like that calls for a little throat-slitting.”

Yancey listened to the moaning of a saber-tooth in the brush only a short distance away, heard the bellow of a mammoth down by the river.

He shook his head dolefully.

“I sure hope he watches his step,” he said. “He’s slowing up. Getting old. That saber-tooth out there might get him.”

But in fifteen minutes One-Eye was back again. He waddled into the circle of firelight so silently that the men did not hear his approach.

Looking over his shoulder, Yancey saw him standing back of him. One-Eye was holding out a clenched fist, but within the fist was something that glinted in the flare of the campfire.

Pascal caught his breath.

“He’s brought you something,” he told Yancey. “Something in exchange for the knife. I would never have believed it. The barter principle.”

Yancey rose and held out his hand. One-Eye dropped the shiny thing into it. Living flame lanced from it, striking Yancey’s eyeballs.

It was a stone. Yancey rotated it slowly with his fingers and saw that within its center dwelt a heart of icy blue flame, while from its many facets swarmed arcing colors of breath-taking beauty.

Cabot was at his elbow, staring.

“What is it, Yancey?” he gasped.

Yancey almost sobbed.

“It’s a diamond,” he said. “A diamond as big as my fist!”

“But it’s cut,” protested Cabot. “That’s not a stone out of the rough. A master jeweler cut that stone!”

Yancey nodded.

“Just what would a cut diamond be doing in the old Stone Age?” he asked.

CHAPTER IV
The Broadcast in Time

One-Eye pointed down into the throat of a cave and jabbered violently at Yancey. The hunter patted the hoary shoulders and One-Eye danced with glee.

“This must be it,” Yancey said.

“I hope so,” said Cameron. “It’s taken plenty of time to make him understand what we wanted. I still can’t understand how we did it.”

Cabot wagged his head.

“I can’t understand any of it,” he confessed. “A Neanderthaler lugging around cut diamonds. Diamonds as big as a man’s fist.”

“Well, let’s go down and see for ourselves,” suggested Yancey.

One-Eye led the way down the steep, slippery mouth of the cave and into a dimly lit cavern, filled with a sort of half-light that filtered in from the mouth of the cave on the ground above.

Cabot switched on a flashlight and cried out excitedly.

In cascading piles upon the floor of the cavern, stacked high against its rocky sides, were piles of jewels that flashed and glittered, scintillating in the beams of the torch.

“This is it!” yelled Cameron.

Pascal, down on his knees in front of a pile of jewels, dipped his hands into them, lifted a fistful and let them trickle back. They filled the cavern with little murmurings as they fell.

Cabot swept the cave with the light. They saw piles of jewels; neat stacks of gold ingots, apparently freshly smelted; bars of silver-white iridium; of argent platinum; chests of hammered bronze and copper; buckskin bags spilling native golden nuggets.

Yancey reached out a hand and leaned weakly against the wall.

“My God,” he stammered. “The price of empires!”

“But,” said Pascal, slowly, calmly, although his face, as Cabot’s torch suddenly lighted it, was twisted in an agony of disbelief, “how did this all come here? This is a primitive world. The art of the goldsmith and the jewel-cutter is unknown here.”

Cameron’s voice cut coolly out of the darkness.

“There must be an explanation. Some reason. Some previous civilization. A treasure cache of that civilization.”

“No,” Pascal told him, “not that. Look at those gold bars. New. Freshly smelted. No sign of age. And platinum—that’s a comparatively recent discovery. Iridium even more recent.”