The World Turned Upside Down (35 page)

"You fool, you'd never make it back to the camp alive!" I shouted.

"I'll take a chance—" began James, setting the butt of his .500 against his shoulder, with the barrels pointed at my face. Looked like a pair of bleeding vehicular tunnels.

He was watching me so closely that he lost track of the Raja for a second. My partner had been resting on one knee, and now his right arm came up in a quick bowling motion with a three-pound rock. The rock bounced of James's head. The .500 went off. The ball must have parted my hair, and the explosion jolly well near broke my eardrums. Down went James again.

"Good work, old chap!" I said, gathering up James's gun.

"Yes," said the Raja thoughtfully, as he picked up the rock he'd thrown and tossed it. "Doesn't quite have the balance of a cricket ball, but it is just as hard."

"What shall we do now?" I said. "I'm inclined to leave the beggar here unarmed and let him fend for himself."

The Raja gave a little sigh. "It's a tempting thought, Reggie, but we really cannot, you know. Not done."

"I suppose you're right," I said. "Well, let's tie him up and take him back to camp."

We agreed there was no safety for us unless we kept James under guard every minute until we got home. Once a man has tried to kill you, you're a fool if you give him another chance.

We marched James back to camp and told the crew what we were up against. James cursed everybody.

We spent three dismal days combing the country for that tyrannosaur, but no luck. We felt it wouldn't have been cricket not to make a good try at recovering Holtzinger's remains. Back at our main camp, when it wasn't raining, we collected small reptiles and things for our scientific friends. The Raja and I discussed the question of legal proceedings against Courtney James, but decided there was nothing we could do in that direction.

When the transition chamber materialized, we fell over one another getting into it. We dumped James, still tied, in a corner, and told the chamber operator to throw the switches.

While we were in transition, James said: "You two should have killed me back there."

"Why?" I said. "You don't have a particularly good head."

The Raja added: "Wouldn't look at all well over a mantel."

"You can laugh," said James, "but I'll get you some day. I'll find a way and get off scot-free."

"My dear chap!" I said. "If there were some way to do it, I'd have you charged with Holtzinger's death. Look, you'd best leave well enough alone."

When we came out in the present, we handed him his empty gun and his other gear, and off he went without a word. As he left, Holtzinger's girl, that Claire, rushed up crying:

"Where is he? Where's August?"

There was a bloody heartrending scene, despite the Raja's skill at handling such situations.

We took our men and beasts down to the old laboratory building that the university has fitted up as a serai for such expeditions. We paid everybody off and found we were broke. The advance payments from Holtzinger and James didn't cover our expenses, and we should have precious little chance of collecting the rest of our fees either from James or from Holtzinger's estate.

And speaking of James, d'you know what that blighter was doing? He went home, got more ammunition, and came back to the university. He hunted up Professor Prochaska and asked him:

"Professor, I'd like you to send me back to the Cretaceous for a quick trip. If you can work me into your schedule right now, you can just about name your own price. I'll offer five thousand to begin with. I want to go to April twenty-third, eight-five million B.C."

Prochaska answered: "Why do you wish to go back again so soon?"

"I lost my wallet in the Cretaceous," said James. "I figure if I go back to the day before I arrived in that era on my last trip, I'll watch myself when I arrived on that trip and follow myself around till I see myself lose the wallet."

"Five thousand is a lot for a wallet," said the professor.

"It's got some things in it I can't replace," said James.

"Well," said Prochaska, thinking. "The party that was supposed to go out this morning has telephoned that they would be late, so perhaps I can work you in. I have always wondered what would happen when the same man occupied the same stretch of time twice."

So James wrote out a check, and Prochaska took him to the chamber and saw him off. James's idea, it seems, was to sit behind a bush a few yards from where the transition chamber would appear and pot the Raja and me as we emerged.

Hours later, we'd changed into our street clothes and phoned our wives to come and get us. We were standing on Forsythe Boulevard waiting for them when there was a loud crack, like an explosion, and a flash of light not fifty feet from us. The shock wave staggered us and broke windows.

We ran toward the place and got there just as a bobby and several citizens came up. On the boulevard, just off the kerb, lay a human body. At least, it had been that, but it looked as if every bone in it had been pulverized and every blood vessel burst, so it was hardly more than a slimy mass of pink protoplasm. The clothes it had been wearing were shredded, but I recognized an H. & H. .500 double-barreled express rifle. The wood was scorched and the metal pitted, but it was Courtney James's gun. No doubt whatever.

Skipping the investigation and the milling about that ensued, what had happened was this: nobody had shot at us as we emerged on the twenty-fourth, and that couldn't be changed. For that matter, the instant James started to do anything that would make a visible change in the world of eight-five million B.C., such as making a footprint in the earth, the space-time forces snapped him forward to the present to prevent a paradox. And the violence of the passage practically tore him to bits.

Now that this is better understood, the professor won't send anybody to a period less than five thousand years prior to the time that some time traveler has already explored, because it would be too easy to do some act, like chopping down a tree or losing some durable artifact, that would affect the later world. Over longer periods, he tells me, such changes average out and are lost in the stream of time.

We had a rough time after that, with the bad publicity and all, though we did collect a fee from James's estate. Luckily for us, a steel manufacturer turned up who wanted a mastodon's head for his den.

I understand these things better now, too. The disaster hadn't been wholly James's fault. I shouldn't have taken him when I knew what a spoiled, unstable sort of bloke he was. And if Holtzinger could have used a really heavy gun, he'd probably have knocked the tyrannosaur down, even if he didn't kill it, and so have given the rest of us a chance to finish it.

* * *

So, Mr. Seligman, that's why I won't take you to that period to hunt. There are plenty of other eras, and if you look them over I'm sure you'll find something to suit you. But not the Jurassic or the Cretaceous. You're just not big enough to handle a gun for dinosaur.

Afterword by Eric Flint:

I was glad we decided that Dave would write the preface to this story, because it meant I could write an afterword where I didn't have to worry about being undignified and putting the reader off. By now, the reader will have finished the story so it doesn't much matter what I say.
I first read this story when I was somewhere around thirteen or fourteen years old and I loved it for the good and simple reason that it was just so
cool.
There I was, a kid in the mountains—which means hunting country—and my father had recently taught me how to shoot his trusty .30-06. Just to make things perfect, my father had been a big game hunter in his time and I'd heard plenty of his stories about hunting moose and mountain goats and—especially!—grizzly bears. (That was in the fifties, folks. In those days, "endangered species" meant . . . not much of anything.)
Hunting dinosaurs! Oh, how cool! 
And, of course, the story had that other essential ingredient for coolness: a hero you really liked, a villain worth hissing, and the villain getting his Just Deserts in the end.
What's not to like? That was how I felt about it then. Now, some forty years later . . .
It's still how I feel about it. Some things are timeless.

Preface by Eric Flint

When we decided to put together this anthology, one of the authors I knew I wanted to include it in was James H. Schmitz. He was perhaps not quite as important to me as Heinlein and Clarke and Andre Norton, who formed the triad around which I assembled all other science fiction writers in my mind as a teenager. But awfully close.
Why? It's hard to say. (Well . . . more precisely, it's hard to say
briefly.
)
Part of it may be that I've always had a soft spot for hard luck cases. Schmitz had one of those reputations which was very high at the time, but not
quite
high enough to guarantee him the more or less perpetual status that Heinlein and Clarke have enjoyed. (Although I'm hoping the reissue of his complete works which I recently edited for Baen Books will turn that around. We'll see.)
Schmitz was a quirky writer, in some ways, as is exemplified by his insistence on using mainly female characters in an era when females appeared rarely enough as the central figures in SF stories—and almost never, except in Schmitz's own stories, as the heroines of action stories. But a lot of his "hard luck" was just that—bad luck.

When it came to the major science fiction awards, for instance, Schmitz always seemed to have the misfortune to get nominated for the finals in the same year that the competition was ferocious.
This story, "Goblin Night,"
was nominated for the Nebula best novelette award in 1967—along with another story by Schmitz, "Planet of Forgetting." They both lost to Roger Zelazny's "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth."
That very same year, he had a third story in the running for the Nebula—"Balanced Ecology,"
in the short story category. It lost to Harlan Ellison's "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman."

It gets better. Schmitz actually had
four
stories in the running for the Nebula that year. "Research Alpha," co-authored with A.E. Van Vogt, was up for the novella. It lost to Zelazny's "He Who Shapes."
Four stories nominated for three different categories in the Nebula award in one year. That's got to be some kind of record, or close to it. And still . . . nothing.
"Lion Loose"
was a Hugo finalist for best short fiction in 1962—during the stretch of a few years when the Hugo didn't separate "short fiction" into specific categories. It lost to Brian Aldiss' collection,
The Long Afternoon of Earth.
A few years earlier or a few years later, it might very well have won the award for best novella.
Just to top it all off, his best known novel,
The Witches of Karres,
made it to the short final list of the Hugo nominees for best novel in 1967. And . . . so did Robert Heinlein's
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
 
So it goes. In the long run, these things rarely matter very much. And for the purposes of this anthology, they didn't matter at all. Over forty years have gone by since I first began reading James H. Schmitz, and I've never grown tired of him. For me as for anyone willing to be honest about it, that's the only definition of "good writing" that counts.

There was a quivering of psi force. Then a sudden, vivid sense of running and hiding, in horrible fear of a pursuer from whom there was no escape—

Telzey's breath caught in her throat. A psi screen had flicked into instant existence about her mind, blocking out incoming impulses. The mental picture, the feeling of pursuit, already was gone, had touched her only a moment; but she stayed motionless seconds longer, eyes shut, pulses hammering out a roll of primitive alarms. She'd been dozing uneasily for the past hour, aware in a vague way of the mind-traces of a multitude of wildlife activities in the miles of parkland around. And perhaps she'd simply fallen asleep, begun to dream. . . .

Perhaps, she thought—but it wasn't very likely. She hadn't been relaxed enough to be touching the fringes of sleep and dream-stuff. The probability was that, for an instant, she'd picked up the reflection of a real event, that somebody not very far from here had encountered death in some grisly form at that moment.

She hesitated, then thinned the blocking screen to let her awareness spread again through the area, simultaneously extended a quick, probing thread of thought with a memory-replica of the pattern she'd caught. If it touched the mind that had produced the pattern originally, it might bring a momentary flash of echoing details and further information. . . . assuming the mind was still alive, still capable of responding.

She didn't really believe it would still be alive. The impression she'd had in that instant was that death was only seconds away.

The general murmur of mind-noise began to grow up about her again, a varying pulse of life and psi energies, diminishing gradually with distance, arising from her companions, from animals on plain and mountain, with an undernote of the dimmer emanations of plants. But no suggestion came now of the vividly disturbing sensations of a moment ago.

* * *

Telzey opened her eyes, glanced around at the others sitting about the campfire in the mouth of Cil Chasm. There were eleven of them, a group of third and fourth year students of Pehanron College who had decided to spend the fall holidays in Melna Park. The oldest was twenty-two; she herself was the youngest—Telzey Amberdon, age fifteen. There was also a huge white dog named Chomir, not in view at the moment, the property of one of her friends who had preferred to go on a spacecruise with a very special date over the holidays. Chomir would have been a little in the way in an IP cruiser, so Telzey had brought him along to the park instead.

In the early part of the evening, they had built their fire where the great Cil canyon opened on the rolling plain below. The canyon walls rose to either side of the camp, smothered with evergreen growth; and the Cil River, a quick, nervous stream, spilled over a series of rocky ledges a hundred feet away. The boys had set up a translucent green tent canopy, and sleeping bags were arranged beneath it. But Gikkes and two of the other girls already had announced that when they got ready to sleep, they were going to take up one of the aircars and settle down in it for the night a good thirty feet above the ground.