Time's Last Gift (18 page)

‘But he said you had only a knife to defend yourself against an unwounded lion.’

‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘And here I am, and the lion is dead.’

And that was all he would say about the incident.

That night, while his colleagues and the chief men of the two tribes sat around a large fire, he described his journey. He had traveled northwestward on as straight a line as he could maintain. He averaged about fifty miles a day, though there were a few days when he just walked along so that he could make a rapid study of the terrain and the fauna and flora. He had crossed the land that would be under the English Channel when the glaciers had sufficiently melted. He found the Thames and the site of what would be London, much of which was covered with marsh or shallow lakes.

The land was even more barren and tundra-like than in France. He had seen a few mammoths and rhinoceroses, but exceedingly few lions, bears, or hyenas. But there were many wolves, which hunted mostly the reindeer and horses.

He had seen not a single human being, though there should be a few in England along the southern coast.

He journeyed northward and found that the glacier did not cover the site of his ancestral hall between the sites of Chesterfield and Bakewell in Derbyshire-to-be. But it had only recently retreated, and nothing but moss and some azaleas and saxifrage were growing. Gribardsun’s other main ancestral holding, in Yorkshire, where his family’s twelfth-century castle would stand, was still covered with hundreds of feet of ice.

‘I made a number of observations along the glacial front, traveling a hundred miles along it,’ he said. ‘And then I turned back and headed toward home. But I was held up for two days in a cave in the land bridge by a pack of wolves who didn’t seem to know they should have an instinctive fear of man. There must have been over fifty in the pack; I’ve never seen such a large one.’

‘What happened to your rifle?’ von Billmann asked.

‘I lost it when I was climbing up the hill to get away from the wolves. I was stopping now and then to shoot one, but they were not discouraged by their losses. They just ate their dead and kept on after me. I think they were especially hungry, otherwise they wouldn’t have been so determined.

‘Anyway, I slipped and had to grab hold of indentations in the rocks to keep from falling into their mouths. And the rifle went down a fissure, and I could not reach it after I got rid of the wolves. So I went on.’

‘You should have taken a revolver,’ Rachel said.

‘I wanted as little weight as possible.’

‘But how did you get rid of the wolves if you had only your knife?’ Drummond asked him. Gribardsun had told them that the spear he had used on the lioness had been made after the wolf incident.

‘I killed a few as they came up the hill at me,’ Gribardsun said. ‘They could only squeeze through the opening into the cave one at a time. After a while, they gave up. I think they’d eaten so many of their own pack, the edge of their hunger was gone.’

When told that Drummond had regained his sanity, Gribardsun had made only one comment. He said that he hoped that Dummond had regained all of his mind. Rachel supposed that he meant by that that he hoped Drummond had gotten over his desire to kill her and Gribardsun.

Drummond assured them that he had accepted reality, and that, whatever they did, he would not try any violence. Not that he ever had, except for the time when he had shot at Rachel.

Gribardsun gave Drummond a series of psychological tests designed to uncover deeply hidden feelings of violence toward particular persons. The results seemed to satisfy him, since he gave Drummond firearms. But Rachel noticed that Gribardsun never allowed Drummond to get behind him when he was armed.

Something decisive had happened to that group. Though there was always a certain amount of reserve among the three - von Billmann alone being treated quite warmly by all the others - they got along with a minimum of friction. All worked harder than before. Moreover, there were long periods when they did not see each other. Their studies of the area around the campsite had exhausted everything of interest there except the tribespeople themselves. They went farther and farther afield on their own specialties.

Winter struck. Though the world temperature was slowly climbing, and the glaciers would melt a little more every year, the cold and the snow were brutal. And this year the tribes had to leave the overhang and follow the reindeer herds. The big game in this area had been cleaned out. Moreover, the herds seemed to have deserted this part of France.

To von Billmann’s joy, Gribardsun decided they should head for Czechoslovakia-to-be. They would progress slowly because of the heavy snows, but when they got to Czechoslovakia, they would settle down there for the winter, and also the next summer. Provided, of course, that game was not too scarce there.

They moved north of the Alps, which were covered with giant glaciers, and into Germany and along the Magdalenian Danube - which did not follow the course of the twenty-first century river - and then northward into Czechoslovakia. There they stayed in a semicave during the whiter. Thammash, the chief, developed arthritis, which Gribardsun alleviated with medicine. But the medicine had an unexpected and long-hidden side effect, and one day that summer, while Thammash was running after a wounded horse, he dropped dead. Gribardsun dissected him and found that his heart muscles were damaged. The damage was the result of an intricate series of imbalances, a sort of somatic Rube Goldberg Mechanism.

No babies or mothers died during birth that year, though there were several miscarriages.

Angrogrim, the strong man, slipped just as he was about to drive a spear into a baby mammoth that had been cut out from the herd. His head struck a rock, and he died even before the baby stepped on his chest and crushed it.

Amaga married Krnal, a Shluwg whose wife had choked on a fishbone.

The following summer, the tribes moved back to the overhang in the valley of La Vezere in France. Von Billmann was very disappointed, because he had not found a single language which seemed capable of developing into Indo-Hittite.

‘You really didn’t think you would, did you?’ John said. ‘Whoever the pre-Indo-Hittites are, they are probably in Asia or Russia somewhere. They won’t be migrating to Germany for several thousands of years yet - probably.

‘Of course,’ he added, smiling slightly, ‘it’s possible that they are only a few miles from us at this very moment.’

‘You have a small sadistic streak in you, John,’ von Billmann said.

‘Perhaps. However, if you are on the next expedition, which will go to 8000 B.C., you may find your long-lost speakers.’

‘But I want to find them now!’

‘Perhaps something entirely unforeseen will happen to enlighten you.’

Von Billmann remembered that remark much later.

NINE

Time went swiftly, and then suddenly the day of departure was close. Four years had passed. The vessel was crowded with specimens and only a few had yet to be collected. These were mainly spermatozoa and ova which would be taken from animals shot with the anesthetic-bearing missiles. When the vessel returned to the twenty-first century, the frozen sperm and eggs would be thawed out and appropriately united in tubes. The fetuses would be placed in the uteri of foster mothers - cows in the case of most of the larger animals but, in the zoo, elephants or whales in the case of the largest. The biological science of the twenty-first century permitted the young of one species to flourish in the womb of another. And so, the twenty-first century would soon have in their zoos and reservations beasts that had been extinct for many thousands of years.

Moreover, the sperm and eggs of humans were in the cryogenic tanks. These would be united and implanted in human females, and the children would be brought up by their foster parents. In everything except physical structure, they would be twenty-first centurians. But they would be studied by scientists. And their children, hybrids of Magdalenians and modern, would be studied.

To compensate for the mass of the specimens, parts of the vessel had to be removed. Everything was removed except the files and those devices needed to keep the specimens from decay. Everything had been carefully weighed before the vessel was launched, but everything was weighed again. The day before the vessel was to be retrieved, the weighing apparatus was removed, and its mass was replaced with artifacts from thirty tribes, each of which had been weighed. It was Gribardsun who suggested that each member of the four should also be reweighed.

‘If something should happen to one of us, and he wasn’t able to get aboard, his weight should be replaced by something valuable.’

‘For heaven’s sake, John!’ Rachel said. ‘What could happen? We’re not leaving the vicinity of the vessel except to go to the farewell feast tonight. And if somebody got sick or fell and broke his neck, we’d still take him along.’

‘True, but I feel that we should take no chances. You know how serious a deviation in weight can be when the tracers’ll be searching for us. Let’s take no chances whatsoever.’

The ‘reserves,’ as von Billmann called them, were artifacts reluctantly discarded because there just was not enough room for them. Four piles were carefully selected, each representing the weight of one of the four. Whatever additions or subtractions had to be made were done with mineral specimens.

The celebration that night was long and exhausting and often touching. The tribes, carrying pine torches, followed them to the vessel and then each member of the Wota’shaimg and the Shluwg kissed each of the explorers. And then, wailing and chanting, they retreated to a distance of a hundred yards. There they settled down to wait for the dawn, since the departure retrieval was set for shortly after sunrise.

The four made no attempt to sleep. They sat in their chairs and talked and now and then looked at the screen showing them the outside. The tribespeople were all awake too, except for the babies and small children.

The four talked animatedly and even gaily; for the first time in a long while the shadow of the past had lifted. Rachel found herself hoping that Gribardsun might forget his prejudices against coming between a man and his wife. She would file a divorce claim as soon as she was out of quarantine, and she would convince John that he did love her, that he had only suppressed his love because of his old-fashioned morality.

A few minutes before sunrise, John Gribardsun rose from the chair. He turned, pulled out a black recording ball, and placed it in a depression on the armrest of chair.

Time leaving now,’ he said. ‘You’ll want to stow my pile of artifacts aboard as quickly as possible to replace my mass. Anything you want to know is in the ball. Please don’t ask me anything now or try to hold me back. You can’t do that; all three of you together aren’t strong enough and you know it.

‘I’m sorry to be so abrupt. You’re very shocked. But I don’t like long goodbyes or arguments, and I knew that that was what I’d get if I told you ahead of time.’

He paused, looked at their pale faces, and said, Tm staying here. I prefer this world to the one we left. That’s all.’

He turned and pressed the button that opened the vault-like door and stepped outside. As he did so, the tribespeople cried out and some raced toward him. They must have guessed that he had decided to stay with them, and they were happy. At least, most of them were. No man ever lived that was one hundred per cent popular.

Rachel cried out, ‘Stop him! Stop him!’

‘With what?’ Drummond said. He had recovered swiftly from his shock and seemed almost as joyous as the tribesmen. “We don’t have any guns, and he wouldn’t pay any attention to them if we did. And, as he said, he could take all three of us on and not even get up a sweat.’

He ran to the pile that was to be Gribardsun’s substitute and picked up a bag of artifacts. ‘You two had better help me, and quick!’ he said. ‘We haven’t got much time!’

Rachel was weeping by now and she looked as if she would like to run after Gribardsun. But she picked up a bag, too, and walked to the vessel after Drummond. Von Billmann followed her with two sacks. He lowered them to the floor by the entrance and blocked her as she tried to get out again. Drummond pressed the button, and all three were quickly shut in again. They got into their chairs and strapped themselves in and waited.

On the screen they could see Gribardsun standing before the tribe. He lifted a hand in farewell.

Sixty-three seconds passed. And they were back in the twenty-first century. The vessel was forty yards from the edge of the hill, and the walls around the buildings of the project towered over them. Then figures clad in white helmets and suits, carrying tanks on their backs and hoses in their hands, stepped out of a small building on their right. The first phase of the quarantine had started.

Von Billmann answered the chief administrator. The eyes of the entire world were on them; everyone of the nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine channels were devoted to the time vessel. But Rachel was paying no attention to the outside. She had dropped the recording ball, no larger than a child’s marble, into the machine, and she was listening to John Gribardsun’s voice.

Seven days later, the three were allowed to leave. The first thing they did was to go to the valley below, where the overhang still existed. Here they saw the hole in the back wall, broken open by the archeologists and project scientists. Behind six feet of rock was the chamber Gribardsun had promised they would find. And they also found the great stacks of artifacts and records that he said he planned to leave there, if he lived long enough.

Most of the records were in the form of John’s handwriting on vellum and then on paper. But his last message, made in 1872, was recorded in a ball in one of the machines he had taken from the vessel.

‘To you three, Robert, Drummond, and Rachel, it’s only been a week, but to me, almost 14,000 years have passed. I have lived for more than that; I have lived far longer than seems right.’

‘I did not think, the day I said goodbye forever to you, that I would live nearly this long. I am completely unafraid of death - which makes me somewhat nonhuman. I’m not afraid - but I also have a very strong will to live. Yet the mathematical probabilities of my living this long were very low. So many accidents can happen in 14,000 years; so many people and beasts would try to kill me. But they failed, and though I came near dying a number of times, I still live.’

‘I still live. But for how long? Today is January 31, a Wednesday. Tomorrow, or sometime in the next few days, I’ll be conceived.’

‘Will Time tolerate two John Gribardsuns?

‘Is there something in the structure of Time which win kill me? Or will I be erased from the fabric of Space-Time?

‘I’ll know only if I am spared. If I am killed or erased, I will be conscious one second and unconscious, because dead or obliterated, the next.

‘Whatever happens, I can’t explain. I have lived as no other man has lived, and for longer than any other man has lived.

‘As you know now, I was fortunate enough to be given an elixir by a witch doctor who was the last man of his tribe. He belonged to a family the original head of which, some generations before, had discovered how to make the elixir, a vile-tasting devil’s brew, from certain African herbs, blood, and several other constituents I will not even hint at. He had a high regard for me because I saved his life and also because he thought I was some sort of a demigod. He knew of my rather peculiar upbringing.

‘But all that was explained on the ball I gave Rachel.

‘How are you, Rachel? And you, Drummond? And you, Robert?

‘Strange to speak to the unborn. I have gotten accustomed to speaking with the long dead. But the unborn - Well, I won’t take up the valuable recording space in the ball to talk about the paradoxes of Time. That could go on and on.

‘Robert, I know that the expedition of 8000 B.C. located your pre-Indo-Hittite speakers. I was one of the informants, None of the expedition suspected that I had already recorded the pre-I-H dialects in far more detail than they would ever be able to do with their limited time. And they were looking for me, too. I suppose they were looking for me because of this message. But they failed. I won’t tell you why, of course, because then the expedition would be able to identify me. Ever if, in a sense, the expedition has already occurred. Well, I said I’d not get into the paradoxes.

‘You’ll find, Robert, that your pre-Indo-Hittite speech of 8000 B.C. arose from the very last place you would have, suspected.

‘Our two tribes, the Wota’shaimg and the Shluwg, eventually abandoned their original tongues and adopted the pidgin. The result was a simple analytical system. But over the course of six millennia, it became a polysyllabled synthetic speech which eventually developed into the pre-Indo-Hittite the second expedition studied. And this, of course, became the Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic, Celtic, and a dozen other language families which were not recorded or even heard of by civilized peoples. Until now.’

Gribardsun chuckled and said, ‘So if it hadn’t been for time travel, Robert, Indo-Hittite, and hence, German, Yiddish, English, French, and all those other related tongues would never have existed.

‘Yes, I know you’re going to say that our tribes had different blood groups than the Indo-Hittite speakers. But many invasions - migrations, rather - occurred from the East, and our tribe, which had become rather large between 12,000 B.C. and 8000 B.C., absorbed so many of the newcomers, and imposed their language on so many, that the original blood group was largely lost.’

Von Billmann had turned pale shortly after Gribardsun started talking. He sat down. He seemed to be having trouble getting his breath. Rachel brought him a drink of water, and he sat up and looked around as if he hoped someone had strength to give him.

‘Do you realize what he’s saying? I won’t be on the 8000 B.C. expedition! But why? Was I dead before it could be launched? Or - why?’

Anderson, the project head, turned on the recorder again, since no one could give an answer and they did not want to dwell on the subject.

‘There was one other expedition, that which was sent in 3500 B.C. to the Mesopotamian area. The others that had been planned were not realized. I waited for them, but they did not show. I wonder why. Something catastrophic prevented them? I don’t know, and you, of course, won’t know why until it happens.

‘Be that as it may, here are the collections I made. The expedition would never have been made if it had not been for me, as you now know. But I still feel a sense of obligation to the people who gave me this chance to live when the world was fresh. And I have had so much scientific training that I do appreciate what this collection will mean. So, throughout the millennia, I have cached artifacts and specimens and made notes. There are at least a hundred thousand photographs here, since I kept back some of the balls for this purpose. You will find photographs, surreptitiously taken, of course, of the original historical Hercules - myself - Nebuchadnezzar, the historical Moses - not myself - Julius Caesar, Shakespeare, Eric the Red, whom I took from behind a bush, having been waiting for six months for him to land, the historical Odysseus, the real city of Troy, the first Pharaoh, several of the first emperors of China and Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. There are also photos of the historical Jesus, Gautama, and Mohammed, Charlemagne, Saladin, the historical Beowulf, a group photograph of the actual founders of the city of Rome. No Romulus and Remus existed, I am sorry to say. ‘I could go on, but you’ll find everything catalogued. ‘I was a merchant-ship captain supplying the Achaean army, and I am mentioned in Homer, though not exactly in the role of a merchant. But I stayed away from the fighting there, as I stayed away from most fighting. As I stayed away from most centers of civilization. I decided that if I was going to survive for a long time, I would have to live a backwoods, backcountry life. I spent altogether a thousand years in the wilds of Africa and another in Asia and the pre-Columbian Americas, though not in a continuous stretch, of course.

‘Still, I got hungry for city life now and then, and I did want to keep watch on the rise of civilizations. So I spent time in Egypt and Mesopotamia and along the Indus and the Yellow River and in ancient Crete and Greece. And I was once Quetzalcoatl, the details of whose story you will find here. ‘I have been everywhere a dozen times and seen everything. I was the first human to set foot on the island of Tahiti; the second time I went there, I beat the first raftload of Polynesians by a week.

‘But all this is in the records.

‘I have been married many times and fathered many children. Each of you is my descendant. I would say that almost every human being that has lived since 5000 B.C. is my descendant. I am my own ancestor many times over.

‘I could talk forever. I could reveal what lay behind many of the great mysteries of history and I could solve many of the lesser, but just as intriguing, mysteries. For example, I was on the Marie Celeste.