Tales of Old Earth (28 page)

“It should be suppressed. The technology. If it's used, it'll just help bring about …”

He wasn't listening.

I'd worked for the government long enough to know when I was wasting my breath. So I shut up.

When the Captain left with the bippy, Shriver still remained, looking ironically after him. “People get the kind of future they deserve,” he observed.

“But that's what I'm saying. Gevorkian came back from the future in order to help bring it about. That means that time isn't deterministic.” Maybe I was getting a little weepy. I'd had a rough day. “The other guy said there was a lot riding on this operation. They didn't know how it was going to turn out. They didn't
know
.”

Shriver grunted, not at all interested.

I plowed ahead unheeding. “If it's not deterministic—if they're working so hard to bring it about—then all our effort isn't futile at all. This future can be prevented.”

Shriver looked up at last. There was a strangely triumphant gleam in his eye. He flashed that roguish ain't-this-fun grin of his, and said, “I don't know about you, but some of us are working like hell to
achieve
it.”

With a jaunty wink, he was gone.

14

Ice Age

It was early afternoon when Rob carried the last carton into their new apartment and was—finally, officially—moved in. He was setting it down atop a stack of crated books to be unpacked later when Gail said something from the kitchen. “What's that?” he shouted.

She poked her head into the hallway. “I
said
—Hey, the landlord left the old refrigerator in.”

Rob sauntered to the kitchen. The counters were cluttered with boxes of half-unpacked cooking utensils. “Probably too much trouble to remove it.”

The refrigerator, yellowed to a grimy antique ivory, was welded immovably into the corner of the kitchen by decades' worth of petrified crud. Its top, the motor housing, rose like an art deco pagoda, in three tiers of streamlined vents. This made the refrigerator look vaguely futuristic—the future of the 1930s, though, not of the present.

Rob patted the motor housing. “This is actually very good design,” he said. “In modern refrigerators the motor is set underneath and the waste heat from it rises up into the refrigerator. Then the heat has to be pumped out by the same motor that produced it, generating yet more waste heat. It's a vicious cycle. But with the modern machines they're after consumer gloss, so the motor is set down there anyway.”

Gail pulled a bottle of zinfandel out of a cardboard box and set the now-empty box under the kitchen sink. “Trash goes there,” she said. “You want some wine?”

The refrigerator hummed lightly, a friendly, reassuring sound. “Sure. The landlord left the refrigerator on; there's probably even some ice left.”

“That's what I like about you. You ain't got no couth at all.”

Rob shrugged. “I'm a barbarian.” He opened the freezer compartment and found it almost overgrown with old ice. It had already swallowed up two ice cube trays and an ancient package of frozen peas. One tray, though, was almost free, and by hammering on it with the heel of his hand he could get it loose. He cracked the tray and carried a handful of ice back to the table.

“Plenty extra,” he offered. Gail curled a lip. But she set out a goblet for him anyway, and poured wine in it.

Rob leaned back and swirled his drink, listening to the ice clink. He took a sip.

And stopped. Was that a
bug
in the one ice cube? He fished it out with two fingers and held it up to the light.

The cube was heavily frosted across one surface where condensate from the freezer had formed, though that was already beginning to melt from the wine. Within the cube were swirls of tiny bubbles, too small to notice if you didn't look closely. And beyond them, deep in the center, was a large black speck, a creature the size of a horsefly trapped in the ice's pellucid depths. He peered closer.

There was a wooly mammoth in his ice cube.

It was dark and shaggy, with a head that tapered down to a long, filament-sized trunk. Two all but invisible tusks twisted from its mouth. Its legs were folded in against the body. Its fur was a deep auburn red. A small and perfect wooly mammoth, no larger than a bread crumb.

Rob didn't move. The ice was cold and stung his hand, but he didn't shift it. All he could think of were the Saturday afternoon movies that began with someone finding an ancient animal frozen in ice. Though usually those ended with the animal eating Tokyo, he reminded himself.

“Hey,” Gail said. “What're you staring at so intently?”

Rob opened his mouth, shut it again. Gently he lowered the ice cube to the tabletop. Drops of water appeared on its side, oozed down to the Formica, and began to form a micropuddle.

“Gail,” he said carefully, “I want you to look inside this ice cube and tell me what you see.”

Following his example, Gail placed her hands flat on the table and leaned forward. “Wow,” she whispered. “That's—Rob, that's
beautiful
.”

The creature was fractionally easier to see now. Its tusks, long for its size—was that an indicator of age?—were yellowed and one was broken at its tip. Its eyes, frozen open and almost too small to be seen, were blue. The fur was badly matted, and there were a couple of tiny bare patches.

Gail jumped up and began running water in the sink. She returned with a bowl that steamed gently. “Here,” she said, “let's thaw it out.” With infinite care she eased the ice cube into the water.

After a while Rob said, “Ice melts slowly doesn't it?” and then, reluctantly, “Maybe we should call the Smithsonian or something.”

“If you could convince them to look at this,” Gail pointed out, “which I doubt, they'd only take it away from us.”

“There is that,” Rob agreed, relieved that Gail too felt no obligation to give the mammoth away.

At last the ice melted. Rob fished out the wee mammoth with a spoon. It was still and tiny in his hand. Suddenly, he felt very close to tears. Against all logic, he had hoped it would thaw out alive. “Here,” he said, and let the beast fall from his hand to Gail's.

By dumping the contents of every carton in the house onto the floor, Gail had managed to find a magnifying glass. Now she squinted through it. “That's a wooly mammoth all right,” she said. “Would you look at those eyes! And—guess what—the toe leathers are pink!” Her voice fell to a mutter then rose again: “Hey, are those
spear points
in its side?”

Rob's momentary
tristesse
melted in the heat of Gail's excitement. He leaned over her shoulder, trying to see. “I wonder how you'd go about getting something like this preserved in Lucite,” Gail mused. Then she straightened and turned to face him. “Maybe there's more of these in the freezer!”

Gail took the lead. She opened the refrigerator and peered into the freezer. Nudging the ice cube tray with a finger, she squinted at the ice around it. Then, gingerly, she pulled out the tray and, after examining it briefly, stared through the small space that was not yet swallowed up by the slow, devouring ice. She whistled softly.

“What?” Rob said.

She shook her head, still staring into the freezer.

“What?
Tell
me.”

“I think you'd better look for yourself.”

Rob put an arm around her waist and laid his head beside hers so they could both peer within. The light inside was dim but serviceable, the land beyond the ice half-lit by some unseen source. He stared past the rime into a tiny, mountainous country. Off to one side, a small glacier was partially visible. To the foreground, a trickle of water—a river in miniature—meandered through a dark, Nordic pine forest.

Huddled by the river was a town, stone and wood buildings all in a jumble and surrounded by high stone walls.

“My God,” Rob breathed. “
There's a lost civilization in my refrigerator
.”

They stared at each other for a moment, eyes wide, then returned, wonderingly, to the freezer.

It was dark in the back reaches. Silently cursing the gloom, Rob strained to see. The town was laid out on a semicircular plan against the water, though the streets were a hopeless maze. Clearly they had been built haphazardly, at random.

Atop a hill near the center of town stood a cathedral, squat and heavy, but still recognizable as such. It dominated the town. By the river's edge stood a castle. All the other buildings radiated from these two loci. The town walls were clearly anachronistic remnants, though, for slum buildings—hovels, actually—had been built up against them. In places the walls were actually breached, the stones carted away for building materials. Several roads ran from the town through the pine forest, and one—a major one—ran along the river.

Finally Gail stepped back and said, “You know, this doesn't make any sense at all.”

“That so?” Rob did not look up from the freezer.

“I mean, this is clearly an early medieval city. Wooly mammoths died out sometime in the neolithic.”

Rob looked at her. Cold air seeped from the refrigerator. Placing a hand on his arm, Gail tugged him away from the freezer and softly closed the door. “Let's have some coffee,” she suggested.

Rob brewed the coffee while Gail dumped the already-poured wine down the sink. They brooded over mugs of Kenyan in silence. Gail touched the tiny mammoth with the tip of her fingernail. It was not in good shape; putrefaction was setting in, as if time were catching up with the long ages it had lain frozen in the ice. She crooked an eyebrow at Rob, and he nodded agreement.

While Rob unhooked the spider plant from its new position over the kitchen window, Gail wrapped the mammoth in a corner of white tissue paper.

They dug a small hole in the soil under the plant with an old fork, and buried the creature with full military honors.

Rob solemnly placed the plant back on its hook.

Without saying a word, they both turned to the refrigerator.

They opened the freezer compartment together. Rob took one look, and his mouth fell open.

The town was still there. But it had changed and grown while they were away. It had evolved. The stone walls were down, and the cathedral had been rebuilt in the soaring, Gothic style. It no longer dominated the town, though; now it was one large building among many. The streets were wider, too, and the town had expanded out of sight behind the left-hand ice. It was a city now.

The details were harder to make out than before, though, for it seemed that the industrial revolution was in full swing. Bristling forests of smokestacks belched thick black smoke into the wintry sky. The riverside was choked with hundreds of tiny docks, the castle torn down to make room for them, and impossibly thin railroad tracks crawled through the depleted pine forests, past the glacier's edge, and over the snow-capped mountains to some unseen destination.

The town had evolved into a city in a matter of minutes. Even as they watched, buildings appeared and disappeared. Roads shifted position instantaneously. Entire sections of the city were rebuilt in the twinkling of an eye. “The time rate in there must be fantastic,” Rob said. “I'll bet that years—decades—are going by as we stand here.”

The city pulsed with movement. Its people were invisible, as were their vehicles and beasts of burden, for they all moved too quickly to be seen, but traffic patterns were shimmering gray uncertainties in the streets, dark where traffic was heavy, and pale where light.

The buildings were growing larger and taller. They exploded into the air as steel-beam construction was discovered. The sky to the far side of the city began flickering darkly, and it took an instant to realize that they were seeing the airlanes from an exurban airport hidden behind the ice.

“I think we've reached the present,” Gail said.

Rob leaned forward to get a better look, and was caught in the wash of the first thermonuclear blast.

There was an instantaneous
flash
and pure white light flooded his skull. Needles of pain lanced through his eyes, and he staggered backwards from the freezer, a hand over his face.

“
Rob
!” Gail cried in a panicky voice, and from her tone he could tell that she had blinked or glanced away at the crucial instant. She was okay then, and knowing that gave him the presence of mind to slam the refrigerator door shut as he fell over backwards.

Afterimages burned in his mind: A quadrant of the city disappearing into sudden crater, a transcendentally bright mushroom cloud that was gone before it was there, subliminal traces of fire and smoke, and blast zones where all traffic and life abruptly ceased. The pictures jumbled one on top of another.

“Rob, are you okay? Say something!”

He was lying on his back, his head in Gail's lap. “I'm … I'm okay,” he managed to say. And even as he said it, it began to come true. Through the bright wash of nothingness, the kitchen started to seep through. The details were vague and tentative at first, then stronger. It was like being blinded by a flashbulb, except that the afterimage was a small mushroom cloud.

“Gail,” he croaked. “They're fighting a nuclear war in there.”

“There now, don't get excited,” she said soothingly.

He struggled to sit up. “They're using tac-nukes in my refrigerator and you're telling me to
calm down
?”

“It's good advice anyway,” she insisted. Then she giggled. “Boy, you should see your face!”

“Why? What's the matter with it?” But she simply shook her head, too full of laughter to respond. He stalked off to the bathroom and numbly stared into the mirror. His face was bright red from the primary radiation. “Oboy,” he said. “That's going to be a bad sunburn in the morning.”

Back in the kitchen, he eyed the refrigerator with trepidation. “Let me,” Gail said. Gingerly, being careful to keep her head averted, she opened the door the tiniest possible crack.