The Fury Out of Time

by Biggle Jr. , Lloyd

  The Hras said nothing, and he had no way of knowing what they were thinking.

  They moved back down the slope, where they might partially escape the searing desert wind, and sat down to rest. They had formed up again and were starting to move off when Karvel heard a distant, unending roll of thunder.

  He turned a questioning gaze on Hras Klaa. “Do you hear that?”

  Hras Klaa did not answer. The other Hras stood fussing nervously with their T poles.

  “I’ll see what it is,” Karvel said, and hurried toward the hilltop.

  Suddenly he realized that the thunder was crescendoing toward him. The ground began to shake underfoot, and a wave, a torrent of dinosaurs swept over the crest of the hill. A glance told him that there was no escape. They could outrun the terrified monsters for yards, but not for miles. He screamed, “Stand still!” and stood his ground, hoping that the stampede would pass around him.

  Long necks swayed over him and were gone. Armored monsters charged past with unbelievable speed, their lowered horns protruding like lances. It was an outpouring of all of the museum cases he could remember, their speculative restorations brought suddenly into the sharper focus of stomping, bellowing, snorting reality.

  On and on they came, quadrupeds and bipeds, weirdly shaped heads and grotesque bodies, the tailed and the tailless, giants and midgets, a churning, dust-choked deluge of horrors.

  Karvel made no attempt to unsling his rifle. He stood motionless and the dinosaurs flowed by harmlessly. The beasts kept their distance, wider gaps opened and closed between them, and there even seemed to be a certain jockeying for position, a drifting away from the vicious horns of the quadrupeds.

  Then the crest was empty, and as the last of the dinosaurs thundered past Karvel turned, and hurried down the slope after them. They vanished over the next rise, leaving four of the Hras standing in paroxysms of terror.

  Only four.

  Before Karvel could ask a question a shadow fell across him. Hras Klaa uttered a pathetic bleat, and jabbed weakly with a T pole. Karvel wheeled, snatching for his rifle, but the tyrannosaur was already upon them. The claws of its small forefeet slashed downward. Karvel leaped away and emptied his rifle into the horribly gaping mouth.

  Tyrannosaurus lunged forward, but one of the Hras moved in boldly with a T pole. Karvel reloaded and got off three carefully aimed shots at the head. Tyrannosaurus teetered for a moment, and crashed to the ground amidst a wild scattering of Hras. Its jaws continued a jerky, reflexive snapping, its forefeet continued to slash, its tail threshed twice and subsided to a spasmodic quivering.

  They all drew away from it, as though from a common fear that the miasma of evil exuded by such a horror must remain potent long after death.

  Karvel leaned weakly on his rifle. “That’s why they stampeded,” he said. “It’s some kind of migration across the desert, and Tyrannosaurus follows the herds to pick off the weaklings.”

  “This horrible world!” Hras Klaa wheezed.

  “Cheer up,” Karvel said bitterly. “All of them will be extinct in a few million years. Has this happened to you before?”

  “Yes.”

  Three more Hras had joined them while they were occupied with the tyrannosaur, and another staggered into view as Karvel turned to renew his count “Nine?” he asked.

  “Fourteen,” Hras Klaa said.

  Karvel looked about him bewilderedly.

  “Including you,” Hras Klaa added.

  “Then we lost six. But where are the other four?”

  “They ran. They are returning now. Hras Drawa says—”

  “Hras Drawa!” Karvel exclaimed.

  “Hras Drawa says we are to continue if you think there is hope.”

  “To the hills?”

  “If you think there is hope.”

  Another dust-covered Hras stumbled into view, one of its limbs dangling helplessly. “Ten,” Karvel breathed.

  “Three more are coming,” Hras Klaa said.

  They were telepaths, which should have been obvious to Karvel from the beginning. They never spoke audibly to each other, only to him. And yet Hras Drawa was nine days’ traveling time away from them, which meant…

  The tail of the fallen tyrannosaur threshed again, and the Hras cautiously retreated. “I’d better see if we have any more surprises coming our way,” Karvel said, and returned to the crest of the hill.

  A solitary tryannosaur loomed hugely on the next rise. Spattered with gore from its last meal, it was seemingly intent on not being outdistanced by its next. Karvel fired from a prone position at five hundred yards, and it wheeled and snapped viciously. Six more carefully aimed shots brought it down, its powerful jaws still searching for an invisible attacker.

  The thirteen Hras were standing motionless in a circle, as though patiently awaiting another catastrophe. Karvel counted them twice. “We must search for the dead,” he said. “Will you want to bury them?”

  Hras Klaa answered, perhaps after a long-distance consultation with Hras Drawa. “Yes. Bury them.”

  No search was necessary. The Hras knew. So intimate and continuous was their thought-sharing that they could move directly to every dropped piece of equipment and each broken body, and tell Karvel precisely what had happened up to the moment when death broke the telepathic connection.

  Hras Krur had emulated Karvel and valiantly stood still, only leaping aside at the last instant when death seemed inevitable. Unfortunately, the dinosaur had swerved at the same time. Hras Maarl had run, and outdistanced the dinosaurs for more than a hundred yards before stumbling. Hras Hrul had been impaled by one of the lancelike horns.

  “Hras Hrul was carrying the uranium detector,” Karvel said. “What happened to it?”

  They did not know. It had been in Hras Hrul’s possession at the moment of death.

  “Let’s look for it now. If we can’t find it, we won’t have the problem of deciding whether to turn back. We’d be silly to go on without it”

  They soon located Hras Hrul, but not the detector. They formed a line and attempted to retrace Hras Hrul’s steps, searching carefully. It was Karvel who finally found it lying in a crushed nest of the brittle grass, looking like a glowing egg.

  Glowing.

  His shout brought the Hras crowding about him. Breathlessly he lifted it and held it cupped in his hands. It continued to glow.

  “How close are we?” Karvel asked.

  “Walk with it,” Hras Klaa suggested.

  Karvel paced a small circle. The glow neither brightened nor faded. He strode off in a straight line for a hundred yards, for five hundred, for more than a mile, with the Hras trailing after him. “Shouldn’t it get brighter as it comes closer, and dimmer as it moves away?” he asked finally.

  “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t change at all. I suppose that could mean that the uranium is straight down, but I certainly wouldn’t expect a deposit to be so large.”

  The Hras said nothing.

  “I’m sure I walked through this area with it the last time we stopped. It didn’t show anything then. And Hras Hrul carried it over this ground, and would have let us know if it glowed. So it didn’t glow before. Now it glows everywhere.”

  Still the Hras had nothing to say.

  “I think it’s broken,” Karvel said bluntly. “How much brighter should it get when it’s really close to uranium?”

  “Very bright,” Hras Klaa said. “Like the sun.”

  “What does Hras Drawa think about this?”

  “That the detector is broken.”

  “Tell Hras Drawa, please, that we’ll be starting back today. I doubt that we could reach the mountains safely, and with a faulty detector there wouldn’t be any point in trying.”

  The Hras scooped out a deep grave and buried their six dead comrades, and while they worked Karvel wandered off by himself. If the Hras wished to inter their dead with reverence, or even with ceremony, he would not be present to inhibit them, and he wanted to be alone with his con
science.

  Seven of the Hras were dead because he’d neglected to study their limitations and to find out what they’d already learned about this environment. That was inexcusable, but so was the expedition. He asked himself how many important uranium deposits were known to the twentieth century. Fewer than a dozen, he was sure. That averaged out at less than two to a continent; and even if this Mesozoic Earth had ten times or even a hundred times as many, which he doubted, a haphazard search on foot, from a random starting point, could not have one chance in a hundred thousand of succeeding.

  The expedition had cost seven lives, and the only thing he had learned for certain was that if one traveled far enough one would eventually encounter terrain that was hilly or mountainous. A moron would have taken as much for granted, and stayed home.

  The interment was completed when he returned, and the Hras were waiting for him. He handed the softly glowing detector to Hras Klaa and wearily gave the signal. The Hras formed up behind him for the long walk back.

  They wasted almost a full day at the river, Karvel resting and catching fish, and the Hras soaking up water and eating again, though they insisted that neither was necessary. The idea, Karvel told them, was to learn to take food and water when they were available.

  They moved well away from the river for what Karvel hoped would be their last night in the open. The rolling plains, so empty of large life forms when they crossed them before, were now the stage for a grim battle of survival. The great herbivores were seeking edible vegetation; the carnivores were pursuing them. Tyrannosaurus did not stalk its prey; it attacked in a raging, bloodthirsty frenzy until the intended victim was felled or hopelessly beyond reach. The dinosaurs scattered widely, but sometimes pressure from the relentless carnivores forced them into compact groups—and into a panicky stampede.

  They had been six days reaching the river on the trip out; the return trip took them ten. They held tenaciously to the fringe of the forests, they crossed open spaces with caution and only after careful reconnaissance, and they moved much more slowly. The Hras were very frightened, and they were also ill. Their brown skin faded slowly to a sickly gray. Perhaps because of their weakened condition they were much more susceptible to the heat. They collapsed with such regularity that Karvel became obsessed with the fear that all thirteen might faint at once—in the open, in the face of a stampede.

  In contrast, his own physical condition was improving. The slower pace and the frequent stops enabled him to have the rest he needed for his nightly vigils. He was eating much better, feasting each evening on dinosaur steak. Its toughness was unsurpassed by that of any steak he had ever eaten, but he had never enjoyed steak more.

  The entire Hras company met them at the edge of the swamp, took firm charge of the weary Hras travelers, and, when Karvel declined the hospitality of the spaceship, furnished a small escort led by Hras Drawa to accompany him across the swamp to his cabin. The dinosaur migration had preceded them, and the swamp wore a strange auditory veneer of deep grunts, bellows, eerie cries. As they hurried over the bridges, fantastically-shaped heads arched up out of the slow-moving waters to regard them curiously.

  The abatis was intact, though dinosaurs grazed the plain about it. Karvel inspected the cabin and the U.O., and then he wearily dropped his knapsack and sat with Hras Drawa on the log by the cabin door. The other Hras collected in the shade of the cabin and watched the dinosaurs.

  Hras Drawa wheezed meditatively. “We should talk about this expedition. Why not talk now?”

  Karvel glanced at the setting sun. “You might not be able to get back to the ship before dark. We can talk tomorrow or the next day—I’m not going anywhere.”

  “We could remain here for The Sleep,” Hras Drawa said, “though the swamp may now be crossed with much less risk. The crocodiles have other than Hras to occupy them.”

  “Let’s talk, then,” Karvel said resignedly. If the Hras remained it meant another sleepless night for himself; but their unexpected willingness to spend a night away from the ship indicated a degree of impatience he would not have thought possible. “The expedition was a complete bust, of course. I learned a few things, but I could have learned most of them here, with less effort and at far less cost.”

  “We learned many things,” Hras Drawa said. “I fear that I caused the failure by not thinking to provide more than one uranium detector.”

  “No. We couldn’t have gone farther. We weren’t equipped to cross a desert—which seems silly, because I half expected that we’d come to one. We should have talked our problems over ahead of time. Your worst mistake was in not giving me a better idea of what your needs would be. Mine was in not making an effort to find out.”

  “We are unaccustomed to this need for telling things,” Hras Drawa said frankly. “Among ourselves we do not bother to tell things, because we know.”

  Karvel nodded glumly. “Whatever was learned, the cost wasn’t worth it. All the way back I was kicking myself for not thinking of a perfectly obvious solution to your problem. You haven’t enough fuel to get you away from Earth. Do you have enough to take you somewhere else on Earth?”

  “Yes. There is enough for that.”

  “That’s what I thought. I spent three weeks, and cost you seven lives, and accomplished nothing. And you could have reached those mountains easily with the ship.”

  “Why should we take the ship to the mountains?” Hras Drawa asked.

  “To look for uranium!”

  “Is there uranium in the mountains?”

  “We know that there isn’t any around here. You’d certainly be no worse off than you are now.”

  “We might be worst off. You do not know if there is water in the mountains.”

  “That could be determined before you land, couldn’t it? If there weren’t, you could land at the nearest river or lake.”

  “What we have thought,” Hras Drawa said, speaking with a deeper rumble and great deliberation, “what we have thought is that we can make only one such journey. There is not enough fuel for two. There is not enough fuel to permit the search for alternate landing places. It would be best to wait until we know for certain where we wish to go. It would be best to find the uranium, and then take the ship there. Do you agree?”

  “You have a point,” Karvel admitted. “If you took the ship to the mountains and then found the uranium five hundred miles further on, it would be a long haul to get the ore back to the ship.”

  “Exactly.”

  “On the other hand, if you don’t take the ship to the mountains, you may never get five hundred miles beyond.”

  “That is true, also.”

  “Then there isn’t any easy solution. If you’re to find the uranium before you move the ship, you must find it on foot. You must search as far as you can, in all directions. You must develop new travel techniques and new equipment. It may take you years just to reach your ultimate limits, because as you gain skill and experience you’ll keep pushing those limits back. If you ever do reach them, then you can move the ship elsewhere and start over. You’ll be resigning yourselves to an ordeal that will quite likely last all of your lifetimes, and cost you many casualties along the way.”

  “We agree. As you pointed out, the worst that can happen is that we’ll die far from home. We can die waiting, or we can die searching, and we prefer to search. You will help us?”

  “As much as I can,” Karvel said.

  “You have thoughts as to this equipment we would need?”

  “A few thoughts. There must be a portable shelter for The Sleep. Perhaps the shelter could also serve as tubs for drinking. You must be able to carry a reserve of food and water, and you won’t feel really safe until we’ve found a sure way to turn a stampede—which won’t be easy. We’ll work on it. We’ll start tomorrow.”

  As the sun went down the Hras filed into the cabin, and Hras Drawa followed them. They formed a circle and quickly slipped into their deathlike slumber. Karvel made a slow circuit of the abatis, checking e
very post carefully, and then he went back to sit by the cabin door.

  A small, ugly-looking lizard popped out of the ground nearby, glowered suspiciously at Karvel, and retreated. As the light faded it became bolder. Karvel stretched out his right foot and scratched its back, at the same time relieving the itch in his nonexistent toe. The lizard scurried into its hole, returned again, finally submitted to the scratching.

  The Hras plan seemed wholly futile to Karvel. It amounted to nothing less than a lifetime of searching and not finding. Hras Drawa’s grim optimism surprised him. Karvel’s thoughts were an open book to the telepathic Hras. Surely they were aware of the tremendous odds against them.

  But they were obviously an ethical race, and probably they were equally idealistic. They would fight the Good Fight, and damn the odds. He admired them, but he also pitied them.

  The moon rose, full and splendid. Karvel had hardly noticed it in recent nights, confined as he had been to the forest barricades. He gazed at it nostalgically. A short time ago he had been there—a short time ago that was a couple of hundred million years into the future. The future was behind him, the past was the present, and Bowden Karvel was a derelict without purpose or destination.

  He leaped up suddenly, wrenched open the dilating door, and dove through.

  “Hras Drawa!” he shouted.

  The sleeping Hras did not stir.

  Karvel shook Hras Drawa impatiently, shouted again, and finally delivered a parting kick before he turned away disgustedly. His dash into the cabin had frightened the lizard. He sat down on the log and scratched his right foot on the edge of his left shoe while he contemplated the moon.

  Chapter 5

  Dawn came at last, and with it the first tentative stirrings of the Hras. The shallow shafts of light from the firing slots had not yet chased the darkness from corners and from behind the thick braces when Karvel returned to the cabin. Hras Drawa, grasping drunkenly for complete consciousness, received Karvel’s question with astonishment “The moon? You wish to go to the moon?” The other Hras halted their efforts to shake themselves awake, and sounded a wheezing chorus. “The moon?”