Stranger Than You Think Page 5

  The Byzantine gave an eloquent shrug. “There is none,” he said. “It seems to be an inalienable part of your civilization.”

  I was annoyed. “You seem singularly carefree for a man who’s going to travel beyond Saturn without a space suit any day.”

  “I am,” the Byzantine said. “I don’t believe I’m tampering when I tell you that all is not lost.”

  “I shall light a candle for you,” my mad friend said.

  “When I was convinced that nothing short of destroying the human race could prevent it from annihilating itself I began sleeping in a foetal position. Then curiosity came to my rescue. Although he was no longer in style, I decided to find the Missing Link.” My mad friend began mumbling an exorcism.

  “Did you find him?” I asked. “No. The machine’s range is limited to thousand year jumps. By the 3rd jump Byzantium-New Rome-Constantinople-Istanbul—the polynomial city of my youth had shrunk to a trading depot inside a log stockade.”

  “1000 BC is a trifle late for missing links,” I ventured.

  The Byzantine nodded and made that nervous gesture which knocked his boina askew again. Before he could lower his hand the waiter thrust another cognac into it. “Some Phoenicians were pouring blazing pitch down onto a band of savages. The savages were howling antisemitic slogans as I flipped the switch.”

  “Never sell this one,” my mad friend muttered.

  The Byzantine turned on his chalice-poisoning smile and permitted the interruption. “¿Por qué?” he asked.

  “You’ve got a time machine. You go back and back and nothing happens. So what?”

  “So the next jump,” the Byzantine continued, “also nothing happened. The Golden Horn was still there but wider and shallower. A frigid wind made me suspect the ice cap lay not far N of the Caucasus. One look told me the Phoenician subdivision was yet to come. It also told me something I should have thought of in the first place: that, though excellent for viajes temporales, the time machine was useless for geographical voyaging.”

  “A plumber never brings the right wrench,” I sympathized.

  “Nor did I,” the Byzantine agreed, “I went back, wondering what changes I had inadvertently caused.”

  “The Bomb and the Ultimatum are still with us,” my mad friend groused. “You didn’t change that.”

  “My germicidal precautions were satisfactory and, remaining virtually invisible, I startled no one into flapping up a new religion.”

  ‘The Missing Link,” I pressed.

  “Still missing.”

  “Anyone,” my mad friend pontificated, “who would make such a statement is abysmally ignorant of contemporary politics.”

  “And religion,” I added.

  “I’ll get to that later,” my friend retorted.

  “How big is this time machine?” I asked.

  Again the Byzantine unveiled his skatophagous smile. “Too small for a Land Rover. Thanks,” he continued, “to my FBI connections, I acquired a nuclear powered, folding back pack copter—one of those new ones with silenced ramjets so as not to apprise the enemy of his impending vertical envelopment.”

  There had been hints of this gadget at the Saucer Works but the Byzantine had apparently anticipated even the Russian version of Popular Mechanics.

  “It was a tight fit but after dousing it with germicide I milleni-skipped five thousand years back past the previous stop.”

  “Which put you approximately 7000 BC,” my mad friend surmised.

  “Al grano,” the Mexican girl suggested, “let’s get to the point.” The Byzantine was unruffled. “If I did not find the Missing Link, I contented myself that I had discovered Eden.

  “The ice cap had shuffled half a hundred leagues backward in its agelong waltz across the northern hemisphere. My many-named homeland was wooded, but no longer frigid. There was a difference which I felt immediately. It was like that frisson which comes on first reading Homer—on finding oneself transported beyond the dawn where the air is still unbesmogged and the gods have, perhaps, created man but have not as yet gotten around to inventing sin.

  ‘The forest was shaggy, like your unmanicured American woods, but five thousand years newer than Troy. The Golden Horn was chocked with reeds and roofed with a milling mass of screeching waterfowl. There was a cry which repeated endlessly—some sort of crane, I suppose, but the spell of the moment made me expect something between man and goat to step tootling from the reeds. But if Pan was born, he was not present that day.”

  “Another theory shot to hell,” I grunted.

  The Byzantine shot me an inquiring look.

  “According to his theory,” my mad friend said, “Europe was overrun by Bushmen or, as we of the Hibernian persuasion call them, Firbolgs.”

  “Ah, sí.” Leprejón was the nearest the Byzantine could approximate to the trumpeted Gaelic vowels.

  “A relict of paganism,” my mad friend said disapprovingly.

  “Also extinct, save in the Kalahari.”

  “We don’t live in South Africa,” the Mexican girl said.

  The Byzantine lurched abruptly to his feet and made for the pissorr. More unsteadily than last time, I noted.

  “This Speedtrap, Ariz., jazz,” I prodded. “If you’re so newly incorporated, how come the extradition?”

  “We couldn’t afford a large municipal payroll so the offices of auditor and treasurer were combined.”

  “Oh gad!” I muttered. “Say an Ave Maria for the traditional checks and balances.”

  “R.I.P. would be better,” my friend conceded. “It was all checks and no balance.”

  “You’re here to recover the municipal funds?”

  “If she hasn’t spent them.”

  “She?”

  “If I hear it again I’ll shout soprano but, in Algonquin, Polynesian, or Baluchistani, I cherche for the woman.”

  The Byzantine returned. His roundabout progress brushed him against the table where Cataldn revolutionaries still conversed. They glanced up and lapsed into silence. A moment later one got up and left hurriedly without paying the check.

  “Where was I?” the Byzantine asked, sitting down and giving us a fuzzy look.

  “You had just discovered that the Golden Horn was populated neither by Bushmen nor Pan.”

  Ah si pues, I left the time machine beneath an oak, perhaps a hundred meters from the water’s edge, and turned on its radio beacon. Then I unfolded the copter. It went together like an erector set, all with wing nuts. Guaranteed to assemble without wrenches in less than ten minutes. Two hours later I was finally heading NW.”

  “Exactly opposite from where I’d have gone,” my mad friend observed.

  The Byzantine gave a faintly superior smile. “I was familiar with the parking problem in Babylon,” he said. “I was looking for a country boy.”

  “NW of Istanbul,” the Mexican girl mused, “would be somewhere in Germany.”

  “The Neander Valley, to be exact.”

  “The plot agglutinates,” my mad friend said unenthusiastically.

  “Why not take the time machine along and save a trip back?” I wondered.

  “The power comes from a connection in a basement workshop in a New Rome suburb which will never exist. Moving it might pull out the plug.”

  My mad friend sipped coffee and stared morosely at the table vacated by the Catalán.

  “The trip was uneventful. The climate was slightly balmier than nowadays. Europe had not been logged off but the Carpathian Alps were still mountains and the Schwarzwald was still the Black Forest.”

  “Full of elves making Volkswagens?” my friend baited, but the Byzantine did not rise.

  “Stilt houses in a few lakes were inhabited by brown-skinned burrheads whom I took for Cro-Magnons. I pushed on in my search for a real country boy.”

  “To Neanderthal?”

  “Empty.”

  My mad friend looked up incredulously.

  “He had been there but a raid, a plague, a bad winter, had come. Ash
es in the caves were several years old.”

  Someone collapsed in the table’s single empty chair. I glanced up and recognized one of my mad friend’s wives. “I thought you didn’t bring any,” I exclaimed.

  Ignoring me, he whipped the warrant from his pocket and proclaimed, “I arrest you in the name of the people of Speedtrap, Arizona.”

  “Does that mean we have to go home?” his wife asked.

  “Probably take another couple of weeks to arrange passage,” my mad friend answered.

  “Is she the embezzling treasurer?” But the Byzantine was talking again.

  “Being at loose ends, I decided to go up to Schleswig-Holstein and see if it was true about the amber traders having a marine railway across the isthmus so they wouldn’t have to sail around Denmark.”

  “Did they?” I asked absently. I wanted to question the newly arrived wife but she was deep in a discussion of the other wife’s new botch look.

  The Byzantine spread his hands. “I never got there,” he explained. “The booklet clearly stated that the copter could be assembled without wrenches but hand-tight was not tight enough. I fluttered along, tightening first one wing nut, then another. Somewhere between the Elbe and the Oder, a dozen loosened simultaneously. I decided to land and bang them all tight with a rock. I had nearly reached the ground when one flew off and I found myself holding things together with one hand.

  “Miraculously, the glide flattened. I progressed nearly a half kilometer into a box canyon before the second nut dropped off. I was moving slowly now, only a meter above ground, but I was frantic for fear the rotor would be damaged unless I could stop its windmilling. After another hundred meters of hoppity-skipping through a bramble patch I made it. The jet pods were less scratched than I.

  “It turned visibly darker as I merthiolated the worst of my scratches. It was late summer from the looks of the berries, so I wouldn’t freeze. I couldn’t hunt for the wing nuts after dark so I decided to build a fire to keep away whatever carnivores lurked nearby.

  “I realized next morning that those last hundred meters had taken more out of me than was apparent at first glance. But the Trinity of my youth still looked after its own for, though I had built no fire, I was alive and, despite numerous aches, could walk.

  “After breakfasting on a Hershey bar, I started back-tracking for my missing wing nuts.”

  “Talk about needles in haystacks,” I grunted.

  The Byzantine smiled. “I had a pocket radar which would make a solid pip whenever I got close to that much metal.” He stuck out his hand and the waiter immediately filled it. “It wasn’t until I had retraced my glide through the briar patch that I saw the tracks and thought to load my Mendoza-McGirr.

  “Oh, you don’t have them yet,” he remembered. “.25, with a triangular plastic cartridge. The slug is a gob of contact explosive.”

  “Nice thing to carry around in your pocket,” my mad friend observed sardonically.

  “The explosive is inactive until the propelling charge compresses it through a choke bore,” he explained. “But even with a Menmac I was not eager to round a bush and face a bear large enough to leave these tracks.

  “I proceeded slowly out of the canyon with one eye on the scope and the other carefully peeled for the berry-eating bear. Crossing a mud creek-bank, I learned my bear walked on two feet and was accompanied by several smaller bipeds. I came very carefully out of the brambles, through low scrub timber to a meadow where I caught a flicker of motion in the distance.

  “They were big, tangle-haired, and naked. The meadow was a half kilometer across and perhaps twice as long. I was torn between a desire to see these things up close and to continue searching for my missing wing nuts. I was distinctly worried by now for the radars metal readings hinted that any natives who settled here would exist in a permanent stone age. Resignedly, I started around the meadow.

  “Dodging from tree to tree, I came within fifty meters of them and squatted behind a log. They were big, heavier than a Russian wrestler, and, stretched out, would have been as tall as a Texan s story. But they crouched like apes and this made their arms seem longer than a man’s.

  “Sparse reddish hair covered the males’ shoulders and chests. It ran down in a bristling line to a tuft which nearly concealed their masculinity. Both sexes had long yellow hair which streamed in a tangled mass from their skulls. This convinced me, even more than the flints they carried, that they were not apes. Uglier than usual they might be, but these things were men.

  “They poked along, moving toward me. The big male grunted mightily as he strained at a rotten log. Two females joined him and they turned it over. Females and cubs made eager clucking sounds as they scrabbled for beetles. The boss male sucked a snail from its shell while half-grown bucks watched from a safe distance and perhaps dreamed of a day when they’d be bigger and the boss older. But his stiff beard betrayed no grey and it would take a long fang to reach that throat.

  “Minutes passed while I lay behind the log watching them, wondering what sort of necklace the boss was wearing. It didn’t look like the shell and acorn strings the others had.

  “Suddenly there was a ’whuff as he stood, little eyes glaring suspiciously toward me. I could see now what the necklace was. He was wearing my wing nuts!

  “He made sounds which might have been language and his subjects scurried away while he bared teeth and made threatening gestures at me. One young female carried a baby which couldn’t be more than a month old but, instead of disappearing like the others, she put the baby down some distance back and returned to join the male. I wondered if she was curious or had decided I’d be an easy kill.

  “I faced several possibilities—all unpleasant. Either I got the wing nuts from around his neck or I would have to walk across Europe. Something in his attitude told me now was not the moment to dicker. Even if his mind had been capable of entertaining notions of trade, what had I to offer?

  “A neat problem in morality: Had I the right to kill a man merely to save myself a long walk home?”

  “There was,” my mad friend suggested, “the moot point of whether you could survive the walk. It might have been as simple as your life or his.”

  “That occurred to me,” the Byzantine said soberly, “but I did not consider it valid for, as long as I had my weapon it seemed possible that I might eventually return to New Rome with little more than blistered heels.”

  “You considered these problems in a calm, detached manner while this ogre glared at you?” the Mexican girl asked.

  The Byzantine smiled. “One can consider an amazing number of things in an instant. However, an instant was all I had, for the ‘ogre’ carried a crude flint blade and was stalking me like the Sicilian Avenger in some third rate melodrama. I made a threatening motion with my pistol. He and the female who advanced with him ignored it. I suspect threats would have been useless, even had he known what a pistol was.

  “By now they were too close for the obvious tactic of blowing a house-sized hole between us. Also, if I frightened them I’d never see those wing nuts again. I retreated, walking slowly backward while they continued their inexorable advance. Soon it became obvious that I could not backpedal as fast as they could aggress.

  “A moment later I also learned I could not run forward as swiftly as their shambling lope could close between us. They were scarcely four meters behind when I cast moral scruples to the wind and turned.”

  “Oh gawd!” my mad friend groaned.

  The Byzantine looked knowingly at him. “Quite,” he said. “Those bullets were not meant to detonate that close to their user.

  “From the sun I should guess it was well past midday when I came to and picked myself from the meadow’s sawlike sedge. I ached in every joint and my ears rang like a carillon. I had lost considerable blood through the nose.

  ‘There was nothing of the male, save bits of bone and hair. The female had been blown clear but something—it looked like the males mandible—had gone through he
r chest.

  “Of my wing nuts, there was not a sign. I fumbled through my pockets and found the radar which, thanks to potted circuitry, still worked. Hours passed before I had recovered the nuts. I pried one from the bark of a Norway pine over 100 meters away. Then I came back to complete the more gruesome part of my task. The indicator had shown metal embedded somewhere inside the female.

  “By this time my ears had stopped ringing and it appeared that I would someday hear again. I removed the final nut from a corpse now advanced in rigor mortis and was about to go reassemble the copter when I heard a faint wail.

  “I had subconsciously supposed the rest of them had taken the baby. They hadn’t. It had lain wailing and starving in the grass all this time and only now was I beginning to hear it.”

  My mad friend smiled approvingly. “As Arthur Miller once observed, a play always tells how the birds came home to roost.”

  “Exactly,” the Byzantine agreed. “Having murdered his parents, what were my duties to the offspring? For in spite of all extenuating circumstances, I could not help thinking of it as murder.

  “My rations contained neither milk nor pablum. I tried making baby food as primitive mothers do, chewing a mouthful thoroughly, then feeding it to the child. But he was too young to swallow semi-solids. I carried him back, listening to his gradually weakening wails while I struggled to reassemble the copter. Several nuts had been damaged and it was only with a great deal of hammering that I got things back together.

  “Nevertheless, two hours later I was back at the time machine and a microsecond after that I had returned to an era where bottles and formula were available.”

  “And now the real problem,” I suggested.

  “Did you baptize him or give him to a zoo?” my mad friend asked.

  “After a week it became obvious to both of us that I was not a fit mother. He seemed perfectly normal but he most assuredly would not be when he grew up. Could I wish him onto some childless couple and break two innocent hearts?”

  “Wouldn’t he die anyhow when he got a whiff of modern, antibiotic-hardened germs?” I asked.