Time's Last Gift (3 page)

Two more men climbed over the edge of the hill. One, a huge man with the massive muscles and the pot-belly of a gorilla, was carrying part of a large male reindeer over his shoulders. The other, shorter and less stout, was carrying a smaller portion over his shoulders and a marmot tied by the neck to his belt.

The two stopped when they saw the strangers. The carcass dropped with a thump and a clash of antlers against a hearth, and the giant advanced toward them. The chief said something to him, and the giant stopped, scowling.

The first thing to do was to establish ‘identities.’ Gribardsun got them to pronounce - or try to pronounce - their names. They did better with John than with his surname.

The chief was Thammash. The brown-haired man was Shivkaet, the tribal artist. The painted man was Glamug, the witch doctor or shaman. The giant was Angrogrim. The sick boy was Abinal, son of Dubhab. Dubhab showed up during the name-learning. He was a short lean man with a wide friendly smile, and he seemed to be the most articulate of his people. He introduced others, including Laminak, his daughter, a pre-teenager, and Amaga, his wife.

Gribardsun told his colleagues it was time to go back to the vessel. They would not stay too long today. Despite their violence-free reception, they were putting the natives to a strain. They would retreat and let the tribe discuss the strangers. Tomorrow they would return and stay a little longer. And the day after they would increase the length of their visit even more. In time, the natives would get used to them.

Von Billmann said, ‘I can hardly wait to study their language. Did you catch that synchronic articulation of the nasal bilabial and the velar bilabial and the ejective consonants with simultaneous glottal stops?’

‘I caught them,’ Gribardsun said.

Rachel rolled her large blue eyes and said, ‘I think I’m going to have trouble speaking their language anywhere near correctly. The sounds sound impossible.’

Drummond said, ‘Robert, you look as excited as if you were about to make love.’

‘Which he is, in a way,’ Gribardsun said.

They left, while the tribe gathered on the edge of the hill to watch them. Some of the small boys started down after them but were called back by their parents. The people stood together and watched them until they were out of sight.

They were not very talkative on the way back. Von Billmann had stuck the speaker of his pocket recorder-player into his ear and was listening to the sound of the language over and over. Rachel and Drummond spoke infrequently and then softly to each other. Gribardsun seldom talked much unless the occasion demanded it.

However, when they returned to the H. G. Wells I, their spirits rose. Perhaps it was because they were home. Even the grim gray torpedo shape was a haven and reminder of the world they had left.

‘We’ll sleep here tonight,’ Gribardsun said. ‘We can put up our domes later on. Obviously we can’t walk back and forth to the village every day, and we can’t move the vessel, so we’ll have to establish camp close to our subjects.’

Rachel busied herself getting supper, though this took only two minutes to cook and open the prepared packages. She did pour out small glasses of wine to celebrate. Gribardsun ran the specimens through the analyzer while she was getting supper.

‘The boy, Abinal, has typhus,’ he said. ‘That can be caused by a rickettsia or body lice. I didn’t see anybody else sick, so I doubt that it was caused by body lice, though Abinal may just be the first. Whatever the cause, he can transmit it through his own body lice. I propose tomorrow to give Abinal an anti-typhus medicine and to give the others a preventative. Plus a medicine which will kill their body lice.’

‘How do you propose to get them to take the medicines?’ von Billmann said.

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘It might cause more trouble than it’s worth,’ Drummond said. ‘Not that I’m ignoring the human side of this,’ he added, seeing Rachel’s frown. ‘But, after all, we want to study them in their natural habitat and in their natural mode of life as much as possible. If we prevent diseases, how will we know how they react to them? I mean, what medicines and magical rituals they use, their burial ceremonies and so forth. You know they’re going to die anyway - in fact, they’ve been dead for a long time, actually. And what kind of resentments will you stir up if you interfere with the shaman’s profession or fail to cure a sick person? You might even get blamed for the death.’

‘That’s true,’ Gribardsun said. ‘But if the tribe is wiped out by typhus, or some other disease, then we have no tribe to study, no language to learn. And nobody to help us haul the vessel to the top of the hill. I’m taking what they used to call a calculated risk.’

Rachel looked curiously at him and said, ‘Every once in a while you use an old-fashioned phrase. Not self-consciously but as if - well, I don’t know. You roll them out as if you were to the phrase born, if you know what I mean.’

‘I read a lot,’ he said. ‘And I have a tendency to repeat some of the good old phrases.’

‘I’m not deprecating it,’ she said. ‘I like to hear them. It’s just that they startle me. Anyway, supper’s on. Let’s have a little toast first. John, you’re our chief; you propose it.’

He raised his glass and said, ‘Here’s to the world we love, whatever she may be.’

They drank down the wine. Rachel said, ‘That’s a strange toast, John.’

‘John’s a strange man,’ Drummond said, and he laughed.

Gribardsun smiled slightly. He knew that Silverstein resented his wife’s obvious admiration for him, but he did not think that the issue would be an irritating one, even if they were forced to be together for four years. The scientists in charge of the project had studied their compatibility charts and were well satisfied with them. Nobody on the expedition was psychologically unstable, as far as the tests could determine.

If Drummond got out of line, he would have to be straightened out. He was a reasonable man, except where his wife was concerned. And even there he could be reassured. Gribardsun was sure of that. It was only in the last few weeks before the launching of the H. G. Wells I that Drummond had started to show signs that he thought his wife admired Gribardsun more than she should. Even then he had expressed himself in only mild oblique remarks. Several mornings, he and Rachel had looked as if they had not slept well the night before. Gribardsun had thought of asking for their withdrawal before the day of launching got too close. But the two had not let whatever was bothering them interfere with their duties, and he knew how deeply they would be hurt if they were taken off the project. So he had said nothing to his superiors.

‘We’ll get up early,’ he said. ‘Seven o’clock, ship’s time. After breakfast we’ll tramp around and collect some more specimens. Then we’ll visit our natives. But I think we can establish even better relations if we take them some meat.’

After eating, they went outside. The sun was just touching the horizon. The air was very cold. A herd of about thirty reindeer, a couple of huge rhinoceroses, twelve adult mammoths and three babies, and a dozen bison were by the river. At this distance they looked like small animated toys.

The four were thrilled at their first sight of the rhinos and mammoths. There were still elephants in zoos and reservations in their world, but the mammoths with the hump of fat on their heads and shoulders and the curved tusks were quite different. And the rhinos were extinct in the twenty-first century.

‘There’re some wolves!’ Rachel said.

She pointed, and they saw a dozen of the gray shapes floating out of the shadows of a hill. The reindeer raised their heads, and the faint trumpeting of the mammoths reached the four. But the wolves ignored them and trotted to a spot about sixty yards down from the herbivores. There they drank, and the herbivores continued to drink, though watching the wolves nervously.

The sky above passed from pale blue to dark blue to sable. The stars came out. Drummond Silverstein made sightings, then set out his telescope and camera. Rachel stayed out with him. Von Billmann returned to the vessel to listen some more to the sounds of his new language. Gribardsun took his express rifle and walked back up the hill. By the time he reached the top, the half moon had appeared. It looked exactly like the moon he knew, except that he knew that no men were burrowed deep in its rock and no domes or spacecraft were on its surface.

He faced the wind, which was blowing at about six miles an hour from the northwest. It also brought sounds: from far off a lion’s roar; nearer, a small cat’s scream; the snorting of some large beast, rhino or bison; the clatter of hoofs on rocks to the west. The lion roared again and then was silent. He smiled. It had been a long time since he had heard a lion roaring. This one was deeper than any he had known; the cave lion was somewhat larger than the African. A mammoth trumpeted shrilly from near where the lion’s roar had come. Then there was silence. After a while he heard a fox bark. He lingered a few more moments, drinking in the rising moon and the pure air, and then he returned to the ship below. Drummond Silverstein was putting away his astronomical equipment. Rachel had gone.

‘I like this world already,’ Gribardsun said. ‘I knew I would. It’s simple and savage and uncrowded with humans.’

‘Next you’ll be saying you want to stay behind when we leave,’ Silverstein said.

He sounded as if he did not altogether disapprove of the idea.

‘Well, if a man wants to know this time thoroughly, hell have to stay here the rest of his life,’ Gribardsun said. ‘He could explore Europe and then cross the land bridge to Africa. As I understand it, the Sahara is a green and wet land with rivers full of hippos. And the sub-Sahara, my old stamping ground, is a paradise of animal life. And there might even be a few subhumans left, roaming the savannahs or the forests.’

‘That would be self-indulgent and suicidal,’ Drummond said. ‘Who would gain anything from it? All that data and no one to leave it to.’

‘I could leave a record of some sort at an agreed-upon place, and you could pick it up immediately on returning,’ Gribardsun said. He laughed, then picked up a large plastic box containing recording equipment and followed Silverstein into the vessel.

‘You talk like von Billmann,’ Silverstein said. ‘He’s grumbling already because he won’t get a chance to locate and record pre-Indo-Hittite speech. He’s talking of making a trip by himself to Germany.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with dreaming,’ Gribardsun said. ‘But we’re all scientists and thoroughly disciplined. We’ll do our job and then go home.’

‘I hope so,’ Drummond said as he stowed away his equipment in the middle cabin. ‘But don’t you feel something in the air? Something …?’

‘Wild and free?’ Rachel said. She was looking at Gribardsun with a peculiarly intent expression. ‘The soul of the primitive is floating on the air.’

‘Very poetic,’ von Billmann said. ‘Yes, I feel it too. I think it’s because we’ve been living in a cramped and regulated world, and suddenly we’re released with a whole unspoiled world to ourselves, and we feel like exploding. It’s a psychological reaction that our psychologists didn’t foresee.’

Gribardsun did not comment. He was thinking that if this were true, then those who originally were the wildest and had repressed the most, would react the most violently.

The Silversteins let down their wall bunks in the middle room and closed the port after saying good night. The other two went to bed. The vessel was not spacious, but it was designed to be lived in for four years if the explorers found it necessary.

Gribardsun’s ear alarm went off at five A.M., ship’s time. He rolled out and did a few sitting-up exercises, ate breakfast, put on clothes, and left. He carried an express rifle in one gloved hand and a short-range rifle which shot anesthetic missiles in a sheath over one shoulder. He also carried a big hunting knife and an automatic pistol.

The air was cold and pale. The sun had not risen, but it was bright enough to see everything clearly. His breath steamed. He climbed briskly despite the weight of sack and weapons. His clothing was thin and light but very warm. After a while he had to unzip the front of the one-piece suit to cool off.

At the top he stopped to look back. He had left a message for them in the recorder-player. He might be back before they awakened.

He turned and trotted away down the gentle slope. He was exuberant. This was a wild land, not nearly as vegetation-grown as he would have liked it, but the open stretches had an appeal.

He had gone perhaps a mile, still trotting, when he flushed out grouse from a stand of dwarf pines. A minute later he saw a brownish fox scud from a ravine and across a field to a hiding place behind a boulder. Half a mile farther on, he had to swing northward because of six woolly rhinoceroses, one of which made short savage charges toward him.

He kept on trotting. The sun rose, but not for long. Clouds appeared and covered the sky quickly. And half an hour later, rain fell heavily.

His clothing was waterproof. But the water was cold and chilled his face. He passed a herd of vast shapes with humped heads and necks and great curving tusks. They were plucking up moss and the large flat cushions of a plant with white flowers (Dryos octopetda probably), saxifrage, and the dwarf azaleas, willows, and birch. He could hear the rumbling of their stomachs above the downpour. It was an old sound and a soothing one. He felt at home despite the freezing rain.

A little later he came to stands of dwarf pines again. As the glaciers retreated northward, the pines would appear in growing numbers. South, in lower Iberia, taller pines would be spreading over the land.

Gribardsun had been following the edge of the top of the valley. When he was above where he estimated the natives were, he looked over the edge. He had stopped almost exactly above them. The overhang, of course, hid their dwelling place, but he recognized the hill and the land below it. There was no sign of life. Either the hunters were staying home because of the rain, which did not seem likely since they had not been overstocked with meat, or they had already left. He resumed his trot but turned northward again, intending to make a circle and return to the vessel. He would be late, but that did not matter. They had their work to do first, and they could still start out for the site on schedule. He wasn’t worried about the boy, Abinal. The panacea he had given him worked against typhus. Its effect would last for several more hours.