by Chad Oliver
As the black night wore on into morning, Mark grew drowsy and gradually relaxed. It was good not to be alone any more, and even though he could not talk to Tlaxcan he felt a genuine kinship with him. He looked across at his dark sleeping form, and the night seemed somehow less cold and fearful. How strange it was, he reflected, that they should have met. What were the odds on any two people meeting in the twisted destinies of the world? What were the odds on them, two who had lived their lives separated by a gulf of almost fifty-two thousand years?
Mark did not know the odds. There in the shadows of early morning, with the dying storm sighing around their small shelter, he knew only one thing. Man had met man, across the ages, and he was glad.
Mark slept, and his heart was lighter than he had thought it would ever be again. When he awoke, the sunlight was streaming into the lean-to and the storm was over. He rolled over, and the cold laughter of despair once more mocked him in his mind.
Tlaxcan was gone.
Chapter 10 The Cro-Magnons
Mark was up in an instant and out in the open air. Perhaps Tlaxcan had only awakened early and stepped outside to wait for him. He-looked around hopefully, but Tlaxcan was not in sight. Mark sat down on a rock, wondering. Where had he gone? Why?
Then he noticed Tlaxcan’s stone knife on the ground in front of the lean-to. He walked over and picked it up. Surely, Tlaxcan would not have wandered off and forgotten something that represented many hours of labor for him. He must have left the knife behind intentionally, as a sign that he would return. Where had he gone? Well, he had taken his bow and arrows with him, and that suggested that he had gone out after food.
Mark climbed to the top of a large rock and shaded his eyes with his hand. He judged that Tlaxcan would probably hunt on the open plains, which certainly seemed to be teeming with game, and so he looked for him there. He saw nothing at first. There was only the grassy expanse of open country, so deceptively peaceful under the morning sun. A faint, fresh breeze rustled among the flowers, a joking reminder of the bitter gale that had raged the night before.
Mark saw a herd of animals in the distance, grazing on the plains, and at first he thought they were bison. But as he looked more closely he changed his mind. It was difficult to tell so far away, but the herd looked for all the world like wild horses, with several small colts frisking happily about in the sunshine. Mark tried to remember whether or not there had been horses in the year 50,000 b.c., and then he smiled. There the horses were, and after all was he not the world’s greatest authority on this Ice Age? He was the only modern man who had actually been there.
Then Mark saw something else. To his left, over the spot where he had left the dead reindeer by the pool, a cloud of great black birds hovered on widespread wings, drifting in the breeze, landing, and gliding in endless circles. Mark shuddered. Vultures, the grim scavengers of the dead . . .
He became aware of still another cloud of the devil birds to his right, and it was a moment before the significance of the sight sunk in. Tlaxcan! The vultures would not venture near his kill if he was all right himself. Of course, he could have left a carcass behind him and started back for the shelter, but if that was the case, either he was moving very slowly or else the vultures had moved in with unusual speed. Something told Mark that there was no time to waste.
He grabbed up Tlaxcan’s stone knife and drew his .45. Taking a careful sight on the cloud of vultures so as not to miss his directions, he scrambled down from the rock and left their camp on the double. He did not try to sprint, knowing that he had too far to go for that, but kept to a steady trot that covered the ground with rapid speed. He loped out of the foothills and onto the grassy plain, and then cut eastward to where he could still see an occasional vulture flying higher than his fellows.
It took him over half an hour, and at his approach the great ugly birds rose higher into the air, their gruesome naked necks arched in dismay. Carefully, Mark picked his way through the shrubs until he saw that his fears had been only too well warranted. Tlaxcan had propped himself up against the dead body of his prey, a very large wolflike animal that looked something like an overgrown Arctic fox. The wolf-thing was dead, but it had given a good account of itself. Tlaxcan had driven two arrows completely through the beast, but Tlaxcan himself had been clawed badly on his left shoulder. The blood had run down his side and dried in a dark mat, although it was still thickly red at the wound. Somehow, Tlaxcan had retained his senses and had actually been using his bow to good effect with his shoulder clawed and bitten fearfully, as one dead buzzard with an arrow through its neck mutely testified.
Tlaxcan had heard him coming, and Mark once again found himself with one of Tlaxcan’s deadly arrows staring him in the face. But Tlaxcan recognized him at once and lowered his bow. He smiled feebly and tried to get up, but couldn’t make it. His tense face was white beneath its tan, and Mark could see that he had lost a lot of blood.
Mark came forward and knelt beside the fallen man. He was still oppressed by the fact that he could not speak and make himself understood, but Tlaxcan solved this problem for him neatly. He put his right hand on Mark’s shoulder and looked searchingly into his eyes, then lowered his hand and sank back. Mark understood—Tlaxcan was putting himself in Mark’s hands. Facing almost certain death if he were abandoned on the plains, he was trusting a stranger to save him.
Mark examined the wound in Tlaxcan’s shoulder. It was deep and undoubtedly painful, but not fatal if it could be properly taken care of. Mark was no doctor, but he could see that what he had to fear was the danger of infection, plus weakness that would result if the bleeding was not stopped in a hurry. He looked around and spotted the telltale line of dense vegetation that indicated one of the many postglacial streams flowing down out of the mountains and across the great plain. Tlaxcan’s wound should be cleaned, and for that he would need water, but the stream was at least half a mile away. Mark again looked closely at the wound, and saw that it had stopped bleeding for the present. He signed for Tlaxcan to keep still, and then built a quick fire that caught more easily than had his first such attempt.
Tlaxcan watched with avid interest, taking puzzled note of both Mark’s matches and his sharp metal knife that folded so miraculously in and out of itself. Mark cut a strip from the flank of Tlaxcan’s kill and broiled it on a stick. Acting on a hunch, he also collected some of the wolf-thing’s still-warm blood in a crude container he fashioned out of skin and gave it to Tlaxcan. Tlaxcan gulped it down with obvious relish, and then ate the meat that Mark had cooked for him.
Mark let him rest a few minutes and then judged that he was strong enough to make it to the stream. He put out the fire and got himself under Tlaxcan’s good right shoulder, lifting him up. Not a sound came from
Tlaxcan’s lips, not even the whisper of a moan, although the pain must have been terrific. Taking it easy, Mark supported him as they slowly walked the long half-mile and then lowered him to the ground again by the banks of the stream, which was large enough to qualify as a small river.
Tlaxcan’s shoulder was bleeding again, but that couldn’t be helped. A little bleeding wouldn’t hurt, probably, and would even assist in cleaning the wound. Mark carefully washed it out with the ice-cold water, which stopped the bleeding in short order, as the veins and muscles contracted with the cold, permitting the blood to coagulate. He took out his handkerchief, which was still clean, and folded it into a bandage which he placed over the wounded shoulder. Then he tore a long strip from his shirttail, and after some difficulty, tied the bandage in place.
It was now early afternoon, and Mark judged that it would be unwise to try to move farther that day. He spent the afternoon in rigging a lean-to shelter and building a fire, and then sat down by Tlaxcan’s side. Tlaxcan had not moved, but now his color was better and most of the tenseness had gone out of his face. He dug into his skin pouch with his good arm, took something out, and handed it to Mark.
For a moment, Mark did not understand what the thing w
as. It was one of those common, ordinary things that we become so used to seeing in one form that we do not recognize the same article when it is made out of something else. It was a length of some sort of organic material, about six feet long, with a curved bit of bone or ivory attached to the end.
Mark hesitated, puzzled. Tlaxcan pointed to the gurgling waters of the little river, and then Mark got it. The thing was a fishing line! He hadn’t thought of fish before, but the streams must be full of them. He smiled. Fishing was something that he was an expert in, and it was nice to know that there was at least one thing he could do as well as a savage who had had the ill luck to be born many thousands of years before the blessings of civilization.
Mark examined the fishhook and decided that it was made of ivory. It was excellently constructed, sharp and with a definite barb, and it was fastened to the line by tying the line through a hole punched in the ivory, in the fashion of modern fishhooks. Mark looked at the soft river earth and considered digging for worms, but changed his mind and caught a grasshopper instead. He put the grasshopper on the ivory hook and wandered down the riverbank until he came to a beautiful dark pool behind a large rock that blocked the current. The pool was clear and cold and deep, and it had fish written all over it in letters that fishermen of any age could read without difficulty.
He dropped the line in and got an instant, thrilling strike. He yanked the line, felt the lithe, tugging pull at the other end, and knew he had a fish. He could not help thinking of how much Doctor Nye would have enjoyed a chance to fish in this paradise—how hard it was, even now, to realize that his uncle was far, far away, cut off from him by the gulf of centuries, in another world that in a sense was yet to be born.
Mark landed the fish after a brief fight, and was faintly surprised to find that he recognized the fish at once. If he was expecting some strange marine monster of the type so dear to the hearts of writers of lurid prehistoric fiction, he was disappointed. The fish was a perfectly ordinary salmon, although a beauty that must have weighed close to four pounds. Mark broke the fish’s neck and cleaned it speedily with his knife. It was the work of but a moment, since salmon have no scales and are an easy fish to clean.
Mark started back to Tlaxcan, the fish held proudly in his hand. He realized that he was beginning to learn, in a way he would never forget, the first law of primitive life: you had to eat, and getting and preparing food took a lot more time than it did when all you had to do was to stroll into a restaurant and order a meal. It almost seemed to him that since he had stepped out of the space-time machine—and he had come out in the first place in search of food—it had taken every single minute of his time just to stay alive. If you weren’t hunting something, then something was hunting you. Mark shuddered, remembering the horrible Neanderthals who might even now be lurking behind every bush, every rock, hidden in every twisted shadow . . .
He cooked and they ate the delicious salmon, and then passed a peaceful night in the lean-to. With the coming of the dawn, Tlaxcan was on his feet again and amazingly ready to go. Mark watched his companion with envy. He must have a constitution like an ox. Mark remembered his steel-hardness when he had supported him the day before. With a wound such as he had received, he should have been helpless for days, but here he was almost as good as new.
Side by side now, the two struck out for what was, to Mark, an unknown destination. He took careful note of their direction, so that he would not hopelessly lose the space-time machine. He and Tlaxcan were still moving almost due east, skirting the mountain foothills, and going directly away from the valley of the Neanderthals.
The warm, sun-drenched days passed, and with them the bitter-cold, mysterious nights. Mark and Tlax-can walked on across the great plain, detouring twice to get around great green lakes carved out of solid rock by the retreating glaciers. Mark could still see an occasional glitter far to the north, and he was convinced that it was indeed the last of the glacial ice, an isolated section, probably, since vegetation had already come back on the plain, and pines dotted the mountain foothills. He made up his mind to get a good look at the ice if he ever saw an opportunity. It would be a real thrill to be able to look down on the vast ice sheet that so recently had covered most of Europe, and which even in 1953 had not completely disappeared. Few people realized, in 1953, that they were not yet altogether out of the Ice Age. Enormous sheets of ice, thousands of feet thick, the remnants of those which had licked out across the world, still crushed the earth of Greenland and Antarctica in modern times. The ice was not gone, and it was a safe bet that it would come again, as it had come before, reaching back into the lands where it had been foolishly forgotten.
Mark did not waste this precious interlude of time, but rather employed it to learn Tlaxcan’s language as best he could. It was out of the question, as well as impractical, to try to teach Tlaxcan English—not because Tlaxcan was stupid, but because English was an impossibly difficult tongue to learn in a hurry, as well as being quite useless in 50,000 B.c. Tlaxcan s language was simpler, although by no means easy. There were not many words, but each one had a different meaning according to the way in which it was said. Mark was handicapped by not having any books to learn from, nor any organized rules to help him, but he made slow progress and began to make himself understood in simple sentences. For one thing, he learned what Tlaxcan had been doing out on the plain when he had been attracted by the strange sound of Mark’s shots. Tlaxcan had been scouting for the quaro herds, on which his people placed their primary dependence, when they could get them. Tlaxcan said that he had failed to find the quaro herds, so they couldn’t have been bison, reindeer, or horses, all of which they had seen in profusion. From his description, Mark got an impression of a mighty elephant of some kind, and, putting two and two together, Mark thought he knew what Tlaxcan had been after. Mammoths!
As they went on, Mark at last had some time to think. Given a little chance to rest, his imagination went busily to work. Where, exactly, was he? What, in modern times, had become of the great plain on which they were walking? As nearly as he could figure it, they were somewhere near the modern line between France and Germany. It was a little frightening to think, as they walked along under the sunny skies, that all the teeming millions of France and Germany were as yet unborn, dust and less than dust. No man in the world had yet heard the name of Napoleon, or of Hitler. Mark looked about him, wondering. What history would be written, how many men would die on this grassy plain before the end of time? In his mind’s eye, as he walked through the grass in the dawn of man, he could almost see the great plains twisted with ugly slit trenches, the mighty guns, yet uninvented, belching flame and death from black muzzles.
Mark could not help thinking, there in the sun with Tlaxcan at his side, of the relativity of it all. Here he was, in 50,000 B.c., and the beautiful plain was, as he knew all too well, deceptively deadly. Wild animals roamed through its grasses in dense herds, and the hideous Neanderthals prowled its surface in wicked packs. It was no place to be alone; it was hard and tough and demanding. But would almost fifty-two thousand years of civilization make it any safer? He doubted it. No matter what frightful danger waited for him beyond the smoke-blue horizons, he knew that there were at least no atom bombs to vaporize his body into nothingness.
Mark walked along beside Tlaxcan and reflected upon what a vast difference a companion made. When he had been alone, this savage world had been an impossible one. He had been lonely and afraid. But now he had a friend, for that was how he thought of Tlaxcan now. Tlaxcan was no longer a mysterious being from the dawn of time, nor was he an illiterate savage. He was Tlaxcan. A man who laughed a lot in a world that was no laughing matter, a man whom Mark was proud to have at his side. He had a friend, Tlaxcan, and he could depend on him. That made all the difference, he knew, the difference between living and dying. That was the secret behind the survival of the fittest. The fittest did indeed survive, but he was fittest because he had the one secret that made him a man—the secret of fri
endship. It was co-operation, one man helping another man, that had enabled man to survive in a harsh world. Alone, man was little more than an animal. But together, united, he was king. They seemed to know that much in 50,000 B.C. Had they forgotten, Mark wondered, in 1953?
On the fifth day, just as the blood-red sun was gently sinking to the far horizon, Mark and Tlaxcan left the whispering plains and walked up through the foothills and into a secluded mountain valley. The valley narrowed as they continued along it, until it was barely wide enough to hold the foaming mountain stream that rushed through it, and in the distance they could hear a roaring thunder as of a mighty storm.
After a short time, the valley turned sharply and they rounded the corner on a well-worn path that ran to one side and slightly above the swiftly flowing water. They rounded the corner—and there it was. Mark stopped in his tracks. He had never seen this place before, but he knew instantly, without question, that they had come to the end of their journey.
Mark Nye had known beauty before. He was no calf-eyed weakling who was forever gasping about the beauty of it all, nor did he often speak of beauty in any form. But beauty he had known nonetheless—the beauty of sunrise in the New Mexico mountains, the beauty of old Rome at night when the ghost legions marched, the lonely beauty of frosted city lights in the early morning when the city slept. He was no stranger to beauty, but he had never seen the equal of the sight which now confronted him.
