“You slipped up there,” I said. “We’ve found no traces of that creature so late in the Age of Reptiles. It’s a very common mistake, every fantastic novelist makes it when he tries to write a time-traveling story. Tyrannosaurus eats brontosaurus and is then gored to death by Triceratops. The trouble with it is that it couldn’t happen.”
The boy ground his cigarette butt into the sand. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “It was there—I photographed it—and that’s all there was to it. Tyrannosaurus I didn’t see —and I’m not sorry. I’ve read those yarns you’re so supercilious about. Good stuff—they arouse your curiosity and make you think. Triceratops—if he’s the chunky devil with three horns sticking out of his head and snout—I got in profusion. You haven’t come to him yet. Go down about three more.
I humored him. Sure enough, there was a vast expanse of low rolling plains with some lumpy hills in the distance. The thing was planned very poorly—any student would have laid it out looking toward the typical Cretaceous forest, rather than away from it—but it had the same startling naturalness that the others had. And there were indeed Triceratops in plenty—a hundred or more, grazing stolidly in little family groups of three or four, on a rank prairie grass that grew in great tufts from the sandy soil.
I guffawed. “Who told you that was right?” I demanded. “Your stuff is good—the best I’ve ever seen—but it is careless slips like that that spoil everything for the real scientist. Reptiles never herd, and dinosaurs were nothing but overgrown reptiles. Go on—take your pictures to someone who has the time to be amused. I don’t find them funny or even interesting.”
I stuffed them into the folder and tossed it to him. He made no attempt to catch It. For a moment he sat staring down at me, then in a shower of sand he was beside me. One hobnailed boot gouged viciously across the femur of my dinosaur and the other crashed down among its brittle ribs. I felt the blood go out of my face with anger, then come rushing back. If I had been twenty years younger I would have knocked him off his feet and dared him to come back for more. But he was as red as I.
“Damn it,” he cried, “no bald-headed old fuzzy-wuzzy is going to call me a liar twice! You may know a lot about dead bones, but your education with regard to living things has been sadly neglected. So reptiles never herd? What about alligators? What about the Galapagos iguanas? What about snakes? Bah—you can’t see any farther than your own nose and never will! When I show you photographs of living dinosaurs, taken with this very camera twenty-four hours ago, not more than three or four miles from where we’re standing—well, it’s high time you scrap your hidebound, bone-dry theories and listen to a branch of science that’s real and living, and always will be. I photographed those dinosaurs! I can do it again—any tune I like. I will do it.”
He stopped for breath. I simply looked at him. It’s the best way, when some crank gets violent. He colored and grinned sheepishly, then picked up the wallet from where it had fallen at the base of the quarry cut. There was an inner compartment with a covering flap which I had not touched. He rummaged in it with a finger and thumb and brought out a scrap of leathery-looking stuff, porous and coated with a kind of shiny, dried mucous.
“Put a name to it,” he demanded.
I turned it over in my palm and examined it carefully. It was a bit of eggshell—undoubtedly a reptilian egg, and a rather large one—but I could tell nothing more.
“It might be an alligator or crocodile egg, or it might have been laid by one of the large oviparous snakes,” I told him. “That would depend on where you found it.
I suppose that you will claim that it is a dinosaur egg—a fresh egg.”
“I claim nothing,” he retorted. “That’s for you to say. You’re the expert on dinosaurs, not I. But if you don’t like that—what about this?”
He had on a hunting jacket and corduroy breeches like mine. From the big side pocket he drew two eggs about the length of my palm—misshapen and gray-white in color, with that leathery texture so characteristic of reptile eggs. He held them up between himself and the sun.
“This one’s fresh,” he said. “The sand was still moist around the nest. This other is from the place where I got the shell. There’s something in it. If you want to, you can open it.”
I took it. It was heavy and somewhat discolored at the larger end, where something had pierced the shell. As he had said, there was evidently something inside. I hesitated. I felt that I would be losing face if I took him at his word to open it. And yet—
I squatted down and laying the egg on a block of sandstone beside the weird, crested skull of the Corythosaur, I ripped its leathery shell from end to end.
The stench nearly felled me. The inside was a mass of greenish yellow matter such as only a very long-dead egg can create. The embryo was well advanced, and as I poked around in the noisome mess it began to take definite form. I dropped the knife and with my fingers wiped away the last of the putrid ooze from the twisted, jellylike thing that remained. I rose slowly to my feet and looked him squarely in the eye.
“Where did you get that egg?”
He smiled—that maddening, slow smile. “I told you,” he said. “I found it over there, a mile or so, beyond the belt of jungle that fringes the marshes. There were dozens of them—mounds like those that turtles make, in the warm sand. I opened two. One was fresh; the other was full of broken shells—and this.” He eyed me quizzically. “And what does the great Professor Belden make of it?”
What he said had given me an idea. “Turtles,” I mused aloud. “It could be a turtle—some rare species—maybe a mutation or freak that never developed far enough to really take shape. It must be!”
He sounded weary. “Yes,” he said flatly, “it could be a turtle. It isn’t but that doesn’t matter to you. Those photographs could be fakes, and none-too-clever fakes at that. They show things that couldn’t happen—that your damned bone-dry science says are wrong. All right—you’ve got me. It’s your found. But I’m coming back, and I’m coming to bring proof that will convince you and every other stiff-necked old fuzz-buzz in the world that I, Terence Michael Aloysius Donovan, have stepped over the traces into the middle of the Cretaceous era and lived there, comfortably and happily, sixty million years before I was born!”
He walked away. I heard his footsteps receding up the draw, and the rattle of small stones as he climbed to the level of the prairie. I stood staring down at the greenish mess that was frying in the hot sun on the bright red sandstone. It could have been a turtle, malformed in the embryo so that its carapace formed a sort of rudimentary, flaring shield behind the beaked skull. Or it could be—something else.
If it was that something, all the sanity and logic had gone out of the world, and a boy’s mad, pseudoscientific dream became a reality that could not possibly be real. Paradox within paradox—contradiction upon contradiction. I gathered up my tools and started back for camp.
2
During the days that followed we worked out the skeleton of the Corythosaur and swathed it in plaster-soaked burlap for its long journey by wagon, truck, and train back to the museum. I had perhaps a week left to use as I saw fit. But somehow, try as I would, I could not forget the young, blond figure of Terry Donovan, and the two strange eggs that he had pulled out of his pocket.
About a mile up the draw from our camp I found the remains of what had been a beach in Cretaceous times. Where it had not weathered away, every ripple mark and worm burrow was intact. There were tracks—remarkable fine ones—of which any museum would be proud. Dinosaurs, big and little, had come this way, millions of years ago, and left the mark of their passing in the moist sand, to be buried and preserved to arouse the apish curiosity of a race whose tiny, hairy ancestors were still scrambling about on all fours.
Beyond the beach had been marshes and a q
uicksand. Crumbling white bones protruded from the stone in incalculable profusion, massed and jumbled into a tangle that would require years of careful study to unravel. I stood with a bit of crumbling bone in my hand, staring at the mottled rock. A step sounded on the talus below me. It was Donovan.
Some of the cocksure exuberance had gone out of him. He was thinner and his face was covered with a stubbly growth of beard. He wore shorts and a tattered shirt, and his left arm was strapped to his side with bands of some gleaming metallic cloth. Dangling from the fingers of his good hand was the strangest bird I have ever seen.
He flung it down at my feet. It was purplish black with a naked red head and wattled neck. Its tail was feathered as a sumac is leafed, with stubby feathers sprouting in pairs from a naked, ratty shaft. Its wings had little three-fingered hands at the joints. And its head was long and narrow, like a lizard’s snout, with great, round, lidless eyes and a mouthful of tiny yellow teeth.
I looked from the bird to him. There was no smile on his lips now. He was staring at the footprints of the rock.
“So you’ve found the beach.” His voice was a weary monotone. “It was a sort of sandy spit, between the marshes and the sea, where they came to feed and be fed on. Dog eat dog. Sometimes they would blunder into the quicksands and flounder and bleat until they drowned. You see—I was there. That bird was there—alive when those dead, crumbling bones were alive—not only in the same geological age but in the same year, the same month—the same day! You’ve got proof now—proof that you can’t talk away! Examine it Cut it up. Do anything you want with it. But by the powers, this time you’ve got to believe me! This time you’ve got to help!”
I stooped and picked the thing up by its long scaly legs. No bird like it had lived, or could have lived, on this planet for millions of years. I thought of those thirty photographs of the incredible—of the eggs he had had, one of them fresh, one with an embryo that might, conceivably, have been an unknown genus of turtle.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll come. What do you want?”
He lived three miles away across the open prairie. The house was a modernistic metal box set among towering cottonwoods at the edge of a small reservoir. A power house at the dam furnished light and electricity—all that he needed to bring civilized comfort out of the desert.
One wing of the house was windowless and sheer-walled with blower vents at intervals on the sloping roof. A laboratory, I guessed. Donovan unlocked a steel door in the wall and pushed it open. I stepped past him into the room.
It was bare. A flat-topped desk stood in the corner near the main house, with a shelf of books over it. A big switchboard covered the opposite wall, flanked by two huge DC generators. There were cupboards and a long worktable littered with small apparatus. But a good half of the room was empty save for the machine that squatted in the middle of the concrete floor.
It was like a round, lead egg, ten feet high and half as broad. It was set in a cradle of steel girders, raised on massive insulators. Part of it stood open like a door, revealing the inside—a chamber barely large enough to hold a man, with a host of dials and switches set in an insulated panel in the leaden wall, and a flat bakelite floor. Heavy cables came out of that floor to the instrument board, and two huge, copper bus bars were clamped to the steel base.
The laboratory was filled with the drone of the generators, charging some hidden battery, and there was a faint tang of ozone in the air.
Donovan shut and locked the door. “That’s the Egg,” he said, “I’ll show it to you later, after you’ve heard me out. Will you help me with this arm of mine, first?”
I cut the shirt away and unwrapped the metallic gauze that held the arm tight against his body. Both bones of the forearm were splintered and the flesh gashed as though by jagged knives. The wound had been cleaned, and treated with some bright green antiseptic whose odor I did not recognize. The bleeding had stopped, and there was none of the inflammation that I should have expected.
He answered my unspoken question. “She fixed it up— Lana. One of your little playmates—the kind I didn’t see the first time—wanted to eat me.” He was rummaging in the bottom drawer of the desk. “There’s no clean cloth here,” he said. “I haven’t time to look in the house. You’ll have to use that again.”
“Look here,” I protested, “you can’t let a wound like that go untreated. It’s serious. You must have a doctor.”
He shook his head. “No time. It would take a doctor two hours to get out here from town. He’d need another hour, or more, to fool around with me. In just forty minutes my accumulators will be charged to capacity, and in forty-one I’ll be gone—back there. Make a couple of splints out of that orange crate in the corner and tie me up again. It’ll do—for as long as I’ll be needing it.”
I split the thin boards and made splints, made sure that the bones were set properly and bound them tightly with the strange silvery cloth, then looped the loose ends in a sling around his neck. I went into the house to get him clean clothes. When I returned he was stripped, scrubbing himself at the laboratory sink. I helped him clamber into underwear, a shirt and breeches, pull on high-top shoes. I plugged in an electric razor and sat watching him as he ran it over his angular jaw.
He was grinning now. “You’re all right, professor,” he told me. “Not a question out of you, and I’ll bet you’ve been on edge all the while. Well—I’ll tell you everything. Then you can take it or leave it.
“Look there on the bench behind you—that coiled spring. It’s a helix—a spiral made up of two-dimensional cross sections twisted in a third dimension. If you make two marks on it, you can go from one to the other by traveling along the spring, round and round, for about six inches. Or you can cut across from one spiral to the next. Suppose your two marks come right together—so. They’re two inches apart, along the spring—and no distance at all if you cut across.
“So much for that. You know Einstein’s picture of the universe—space and time tied up together in some kind of four-dimensional continuum that’s warped and bent in all sorts of weird ways by the presence of matter. Maybe closed and maybe not. Maybe expanding like a balloon and maybe shrinking like a melting hailstone. Well—I know what that shape is. I’ve proved it. It’s spiraled like that spring—spiraled in time!
“See what that means? Look—I’ll show you. This first scratch here in the spring, is today—now. Here will be tomorrow, a little further along the wire. Here’s next year. And here is some later time, one full turn of the coil away, directly above the first mark.
“Now watch. I can go from today to tomorrow—to next year—like this by traveling with time along the spring. That’s what the world is doing. Only by the laws of physics —entropy and all that—there’s no going back. It’s one-way traffic. And you can’t get ahead any faster than time wants to take you. That’s if you follow the spring. But you can cut across!
“Look—here are the two marks I just made, now and two years from now. They’re two inches apart, along the coiled wire, but when you compress the spring they are together—nothing between them but the surface of the two coils. You can stretch a bridge across from one to the other, so to speak, and walk across—into a time two years from now. Or you can go the other way, two years into the past.
“That’s all there is to it. Time is coiled like a spring. Some other age in earth’s history lies next to ours, separated only by an intangible boundary, a focus of forces that keeps us from seeing into it and falling into it. Past time—present time—future time, side by side. Only it’s not two years, or three, or a hundred. It’s sixty million years from now to then the long way around!
“I said you could get from one coil of time to the next one if you build a bridge across. I built that bridge—the Egg. I set up a field of forces in it—
no matter how—that dissolve the invisible barrier between our time and the next. I give it an electromagnetic shove that sends it in the right direction, forward or back. And I land sixty million years in the past, in the age of dinosaurs.”
He paused, as if to give me a chance to challenge him. I didn’t try. I am no physicist, and if it was as he said—if time was really a spiral, with adjacent coils lying side by side, and if his leaden Egg could bridge the gap between— then the pictures and the eggs and the bird were possible things. And they were more than possible. I had seen them.
“You can see that the usual paradoxes don’t come in at all,” Donovan went on. “About killing your grandfather, and being two places at once—that kind of thing. The time screw has a sixty-million-year pitch. You can slide from coil to coil, sixty million years at a time, but you can’t cover any shorter distance without living it. If I go back or ahead sixty million years, and live there four days, I’ll get back here next Tuesday, four days from now. As for going ahead and learning all the scientific wonders of the future, then coming back to change the destiny of humanity, sixty million years is a long time. I doubt that there’ll be anything human living then. And if there is—if I do learn their secrets and come back—it will be because their future civilization was built on the fact that I did so. Screwy as it sounds, that’s how it is.”
He stopped and sat staring at the dull gray mass of the Egg. He was looking back sixty million years into an age when giant dinosaurs ruled the earth. He was watching herds of Triceratops grazing on the Cretaceous prairie— seeing unsuspected survivors of the genus that produced Brontosaurus and his kin, wallowing in some protected swamp—seeing rat-tailed, purple-black Archaeopteryx squawking in the tree ferns. And he was seeing more!
“I’ll tell you the whole story,” he said. “You can believe it or not, as you like. Then I’ll go back. After that—well, maybe you’ll write the end, and maybe not. Sixty million years is a long time!”
Adventures in Time and Space Page 17
