by Chad Oliver
It was not yet dark, and would not be for at least another hour, but the light was already uncertain.
The shadows that striped the plains were confusing; at a distance of a hundred yards, a bush and a crouching man looked too much alike to make for absolute comfort.
The two men and the dog did not slacken their pace, but Tlaxcan tossed a questioning look at Mark. Mark clenched his fists, unsure of what he ought to do. It would be rough indeed to turn back with his goal almost in sight, but on the other hand it would certainly not do to plunge on to their deaths on a wild-goose chase. Tlaxcan, of course, had no interest in the space-time machine, and indeed did not even know of its existence. He could not abandon Tlaxcan to his fate just to make good Ins own escape.
Then he saw it, actually saw the great sphere of the space-time machine bubbling up out of the grasses where he had left it. And at the same time he saw, right smack in front of him, the Neanderthals.
The two fugitives had doubled low and crept back through the fading light to wait for them. They were through running—they were ready to fight.
Tlaxcan skidded to a halt and whipped an arrow into his bow. Mark was unable to stop; he simply had to veer off to one side to avoid running right into a half-man’s waiting spear. Heart pounding wildly, he slipped and fell in the tall grass. He hit rolling, and snatched out his .45 as he rolled. He came up on all fours, the .45 ready in his hand, and instantly was confronted by a terrible problem. Tlaxcan had not succeeded in loosing an arrow in time, and the more powerful Neanderthal had him down flat on the ground, trying to slit his throat with a stone knife. Tlaxcan was obviously nearly unconscious and his strength was slipping. The other Neanderthal was crouching low for the kill, moving toward Mark through the tall grass.
Mark had one bullet left in his .45.
He did not hesitate; there was no time to think. Mark took careful aim, squeezed the trigger, and the half-man threatening Tlaxcan dropped as though he had been clubbed with a crowbar. Mark at once threw the empty gun with all his might into the bestial face of the advancing Mroxor. The weapon struck home, staggering the Neanderthal for a moment. Mark leaped to his feet and grabbed up his spear, and was dismayed to see that the point had broken off in his fall.
The half-man recovered himself and moved in again, a stone knife in his hand. Mark gave ground, using the shaft of his broken lance as a fencing weapon to keep the Mroxor at bay. He jabbed desperately, backing all the while, knowing that he was no match for the Neanderthal in brute strength. If the half-man could once get his viselike hands on him, he would tear him to pieces.
Mark thrust and clubbed, keeping on the move. He could smell the Neanderthal’s sweating nearness, see the red blood-lust in the thing’s eyes as he stalked him. Mark’s blood ran cold and he fought in a kind of daze, knowing that he was tired from his long run and that his strength was failing him.
He could not escape. He knew that now with icy certainty. He would have to stand and fight while some power was still left in his muscles. But he didn’t fool himself. The barrel-chested Neanderthal could break him in two as easily as snapping a twig!
Mark had no choice. He stopped and stood his ground, using the spear shaft alternately as a jabbing weapon and as a light club. It was too light, however; time and again, he connected with a solid blow on the side of the half-man’s hairy head, but the Mroxor just blinked his sunken eyes and kept on coming.
It was only a question of time. The Neanderthal had been waiting his chance, and when Mark’s swing was just a trifle off its target, the half-man caught the spear shaft in his long-nailed, dirty hand and wrested it from Mark’s grasp with one contemptuous wrench.
Mark felt the cold hand of death reach out for him once more. He stood facing the Neanderthal alone, without arms of any sort. He was too tired to run. His mind kept functioning somehow, telling him that at no cost must he allow the half-man to wrestle him, get him at too close quarters.
He would have to box him. The situation looked hopeless, but Mark was prepared to fight as long as life burned within him.
Smiling the grim smile of the hopeless, Mark suddenly stepped forward. With his left he feinted at the surprised half-man, and when the Neanderthal clumsily tried to catch his fist Mark came up from his toes with a sizzling right haymaker that caught the half-man on the point of his hair-matted jaw.
It was like hitting the side of the Empire State Building. The Neanderthal just shook his head slowly and moved on in for the kill. Mark had hit him with everything he had, and it hadn’t been enough.
Frantically, he backed away, not taking his eyes off his foe. The half-man stalked him with a smothered fury, his hands opening and closing with unmistakable suggestiveness. Mark took a deep breath. He could go no further. He saw a jagged, heavy stone lying in the grass near him, but he knew that when he bent to pick it up the Mroxor would be on him like a flash and that would be that.
There was nothing else to do. Mark dived for the stone, and the Neanderthal snarled and leaped with him. Mark closed his eyes—and then opened them again in amazement.
The half-man never reached his prey. The wolf-dog, Fang, had launched himself through the air like a juggernaut, slamming into the thing and knocking it off balance. Fang had been with the fallen Tlaxcan, but now he had rejoined his master, rejoined him with a savage fury that had the Neanderthal fighting for his very life under an onslaught of powerful, snapping jaws that ripped and tore at his throat.
Mark jerked to his feet, swaying, the rock in his hand. The path to the space-time machine was now clear before him; he had only to run to it and get in, leaving Fang and Tlaxcan to their own devices. Mark did not even think about it, nor was it heroism on his part, or stupid bravery. It was just the way he was; he could no more have abandoned his friends than he could have sprouted wings and flown away into the heavens.
Mark charged at the snarling battle and took careful aim with his rock. The Neanderthal had Fang’s throat in his hands now, crushing it like a vise. Fang held on with a death-hold, but his eyes were bulging piteously, begging Mark for help.
He got it. Mark hit the Neanderthal’s skull with the jagged rock, pounding the rock down with all his might. The half-man still did not release the dog. Mark’s rock-filled fist came down again—and again and again.
Maddened now by a drive he had not known he possessed, Mark snatched up the Neanderthal’s stone knife where it had fallen in the grass and went in for the kill.
Exhausted, Mark sank down in the grass while Fang staggered to his feet and licked his face. Mark reached up and scratched the dog’s ears, fighting to get his breath. He felt himself drifting down the night shadows; it was so pleasant lying in the warm grass . . .
Tlaxcan.
His memory returning, Mark got wearily to his feet and hurried back to his friend. Tlaxcan was sitting up on the ground, holding his head in his hands; the Neanderthal Mark had shot still sprawled beside him. Mark helped him to his feet.
“How do you feel?” he asked. “Are you all right?”
“I feel. . . That is enough in itself,” Tlaxcan smiled. “Come, my friend, the night winds are almost upon us.”
“I’m not going with you, Tlaxcan,” Mark said slowly, his stomach hollow within him.
Tlaxcan looked at him, the smile vanishing from his face.
“I must go away,” Mark said, trying to make Tlaxcan understand. “It is not that I wish to leave my friend, but I must go away.”
Tlaxcan hesitated. “You will return, Mark?”
“Perhaps,” Mark said, knowing that he was lying. He would never see Tlaxcan again.
The blood-red sun was very low in the west, only its upper tip still showing above the mountains, holding the night shadows at bay. The long grasses began to ripple under the whisper of the cool night wind.
Tlaxcan did not argue. No doubt his friend had good reasons for what he did, and it was not good to question a friend’s action. Mark would go his way, and Tlaxcan would go his. Tlaxcan
smiled again and placed his right hand on Mark’s shoulder.
“Orn,” he said simply. “We shall be brothers always.”
“Orn,” Mark echoed him. “We shall be brothers always.”
With that, Tlaxcan turned without another word and walked eastward across the plains, starting the long journey back to his people and his home. He did not look back.
Fang sat quite still in the grass, looking up at Mark with questioning eyes. Mark scratched the wolf-dog’s ears and smoothed the soft hair on the back of his neck.
“You too, old fellow,” he told his dog. “This is your home. Go with Tlaxcan. Do you understand? Go with Tlaxcan!”
He pointed after his friend across the fields. Fang whined deep in his throat and wagged his bushy tail hopefully.
“No,” Mark said. “I must go alone. Go with Tlaxcan!”
The wolf-dog seemed to understand, with that intuitive knowledge of the strange ways of their masters that good dogs always have. He looked sorrowfully at Mark with deep and liquid eyes and trotted slowly away into the gathering gloom, following Tlaxcan through the shadows.
They were gone. Mark was alone.
With a terrible loneliness buried deep within him, Mark set off northward toward the gray sphere of the space-time machine, invisible now in the darkness. The cold wind blew in his face, and he felt like an ant crawling across the earth, alone and unprotected.
He remembered the dream he had had, so long ago. He had been racing across this gray world, the half-men snarling behind him. The gray grass had shimmered beneath a gray-smoke wind that whipped and billowed before his very eyes. And ahead of him—a great gray sphere, waiting on a cold, gray plain. Even as now …
Except, of course, that there were no Neanderthals around now. Or were there? Had some of them doubled back? What could he do, without any weapon but the empty .45 he had picked up and the stone knife of the Mroxor?
Suddenly, the night seemed full of sounds. Ominous sounds. . .
Mark redoubled his pace, and the bulge of the spacetime machine loomed up out of the grayness before him. It was just as he had left it, a lifetime ago, silent and ghostlike under the first stars of the night.
A cold chill ran through him as he remembered the monster half-man who had waited inside the machine in his dream. He told himself that such thoughts were nonsense, but still it was all that he could do to throw the gray switch that activated the entry port. He held his breath. If the port failed to open—
With a mechanical hiss, a strange, foreign sound here on the plains of the darkening Ice Age, the circular door slid open. The interior glowed with soft white light, spilling out like cold, shining oil into the night. Mark stepped through the entry port, feeling nervous and unreal with the smooth metallic sphere all around him.
The space-time machine was empty. Mark threw the inside switch, his hands clumsy on the almost-forgotten machinery, and the circular entry port hissed shut behind him, sealing him in. All was as he had left it, except that the yellow caution light in the control panel, signifying that the machine was rebuilding its energy potential, was out.
The green light looked at him like an inviting eye from the panel. The space-time machine was ready to go.
Wiping his sweating hands on the fur of his clothing, Mark examined the timing dials before him. He had to be very careful now, he knew. He wanted to set the space-time machine to arrive back at his uncle’s lodge as shortly as possible after he had first left, in order to spare Doctor Nye unnecessary, frantic worry. His uncle was in good health, and was far from being an old man, but Mark well knew that he was the only thing that really counted in Doctor Nye’s life. He lived only for Mark and for his trip back to ancient Rome, a trip that Mark had unwittingly deprived him of. He had lost his dream, and if he lost his adopted son as well . . .
The small pointer, like the fine second hand of a watch, was exact almost to the second, and Mark decided that fifteen minutes would be an acceptable safety margin. That would not give his uncle time to worry unduly about him, and would give Mark enough of a margin to prevent a spine-chilling possibility of getting back too soon.
For example, he thought, what would happen if he got back to 1953 fifteen minutes before he had left? Would there be two Marks in the basement of Doctor Nye’s house, and two space-time machines? What would happen when the explosion occurred and there could only be one? Or would he simply somehow fade into that other Mark, waiting there with his uncle, and talk with him until that fatal phone call and the blowup —and then go back in space-time again, repeating his adventures in the Ice Age endlessly, forever? Would he be destined always to go back too soon, caught up in an eternal circle of his own devising?
These were unanswerable questions, and they were questions that Mark was fully content to leave unanswered. He took his time and set the dial with infinite precision. It had been nine o’clock when the space-time machine had left on its strange journey, and now he set it for the return at precisely nine-fifteen. He adjusted the other dials with equal care for the day and the month and the year and then he paused.
There was nothing else to do but throw the knife switch that would send him back. He was keenly aware that he was not an expert at the handling of the controls, and a nagging fear in his mind told him that he must have made a dreadful mistake somewhere. And the space-time machine itself was new, untested. It had gotten him back to the dawn of man, but could it get him safely home again?
Mark figured that he had a good fifty-fifty chance at least. He smiled grimly at the green eye and threw the switch.
Chapter 22 Home
An all-inclusive humming filled the hollow sphere. It seemed to start in Mark’s brain and push its buzzing way down along his spinal cord, out along his branching nerves, through the pores of his hands and feet, and out into the space-time machine where it saturated the dry air.
The green light winked out and the red light took its place. It glowed pinkly through the graying atmosphere, and seemed to shake in vibrating waves as he watched. There was the familiar taut feel of electricity in the air, as though lightning were sizzling silently above his head.
Feeling somewhat dizzy—the tensions generated within the space-time machine evidently had some effect upon even a healthy human organism—Mark stretched out on the floor of the sphere and closed his eyes. There was nothing he could do until the machine stopped; he was a passenger and simply had to wait out his ride, letting his mechanical engineer take him where he wished to go. These cybernetic control systems, or “mechanical brains,” were wonderful things, he reflected tiredly. They could perform the intricate adjustments needed to travel through space-time in the twinkling of an eye; it would have taken a human being a lifetime to figure them out. His uncle had once told him that space-time travel would have been an impossibility without the robot computers of cybernetics . . .
Even with his eyes closed, Mark could feel the red eye staring at him through the gray fog. The humming vibrations buzzed through his brain, and he found it hard to relax. How strange it was, he thought, that this most fascinating adventure of man was in a very real sense monotonous while you were going through it. There was absolutely nothing to see in the space-time machine, and very little to do.
It was ironic, too, that he had no idea what time it was. Here in the midst of the most finely adjusted timing mechanisms ever devised by man, he had no way of measuring the time interval within the space-time machine itself. Subjective time, the mind’s own reckoning of passing time, was apt to be a tricky and unreliable business. Mark could not tell how long he lay on the floor of the sphere; it might have been long minutes, or short hours, or even speeding days.
Many times, he opened his eyes, only to see nothing. There was only the gray mist and the red eye and the humming of the vibrations. There was only an electric nothingness, and within it, lost and invisible, the colossal span of history marching by on ghost-feet into the shadows that never were.
Time passed, inside and out, a
nd Mark dozed fitfully. As it had been the first time, the first impression he had that the space-time machine had stopped came when he suddenly noticed a complete absence of sound. There was nothing. It was the dead hush of a tomb.
Mark opened his eyes. The red light in the control panel had gone off, and the yellow light had replaced it. Mark jumped to his feet, his heart hammering against his chest. His palms were wet with sweat as he threw the small switch that governed the exit. The circular entry port hissed back.
Holding his breath, Mark stepped outside.
“Stop right there,” a voice said coldly. “Just stop right there.”
Mark crouched back against the space-time machine, his powerful fists clenching for action. His unaccustomed eyes blinked in the bright light that streamed into his face. What had happened? Where was he?
What could have gone wrong?
His vision cleared. Mark stared around him, and laughed almost hysterically with relief. He was back in his uncle’s lead-lined room where he had started, and through the open door in the wall beyond he could see the equipment-strewn basement of Doctor Nye’s lodge. And the white-haired man before him, a wicked-looking wrench in his hand, was Doctor Nye.
“Uncle Bob,” Mark said softly. “Don’t you know me?”
Doctor Nye stared and stared, unable to believe his eyes. For the first time, Mark realized what a strange spectacle he must present, and how different he was from the boy who had left this room an infinity ago. He was bronzed and powerful, and his blue jeans and wool shirt had been replaced by a covering of furs. Hide sandals protected his feet, and a stone knife was stuck in the belt around his waist. His long hair was tied in place with a rawhide thong, and his eyes were no longer the eyes of a boy. Doctor Nye dropped the wrench.
“Mark!” he gasped. “Mark—”
Doctor Nye embraced his adopted son with a trembling gladness and then stepped back again to stare at him. “I just can’t believe it, Mark,” he whispered. He looked at his watch. “It’s nine-fifteen—you’ve only been gone fifteen minutes in this time. I was hoping against hope . . .”
