by Chad Oliver
Momentarily overcome with emotion, Doctor Nye stopped, running his hands through his white hair as if to get his mind under control by sheer physical force. Mark put his arm around his uncle’s shoulder, ignoring a strong impulse simply to put his right hand on his shoulder, Danequa fashion. He understood that it had all happened so fast for his uncle that he was unnerved by it all. He had, after all, only discovered his nephew’s absence a few minutes ago, and here Mark was back again, to all intents and appearances a grown man. It was characteristic of Doctor Nye that he obviously had not even thought of the loss of his space-time machine, or of his vanished dream to go back to the Rome of legend. His every thought had been of his boy.
“Upstairs,” Doctor Nye said finally, shaking himself. “Let’s go upstairs.”
Together, they walked out of the lead-lined room that housed the space-time machine and through the basement laboratory. Mark noticed that the machine was approximately two feet nearer the door than it had been before; an error of two feet and a few seconds in a fifty-thousand-plus years’ journey through space-time was nothing to be ashamed of. They climbed the stairs, went through the kitchen where the roast was still warming in the oven and die pot of coffee Mark had started a half-hour or so ago was bubbling merrily, and entered the sitting room. There was the bust of Caesar by the lamp on the table, the long shelves full of books, the Navajo rugs on the floor, the walls of lightly varnished pine. It was all just as he had left it a few short minutes ago, and it was all strange and unreal to the Mark who had traveled across the ages, as though something remembered from a dream.
Fang, who had been awakened earlier by the explosion, stood bolt upright in the best armchair in the house and growled curiously at Mark. Who was this intruder with the fur clothes and the long hair tied with rawhide? Fang bristled, and barked shrilly. Then he eyed Mark more closely, and the stump of his tail began to wag. Uncertainly, he leaped off the chair and the golden-brown cocker spaniel puppy trotted across the room and sniffed Mark suspiciously. Satisfied then, as Mark scratched his ears, Fang wagged the stump of his tail again and returned to his armchair. He couldn’t quite figure it out, but he trusted his sense of smell more than he did his eyes. He was not excessively glad to see Mark, of course—after all, his master had just gone downstairs a few minutes before.
Doctor Nye sank into a chair, and Mark did likewise. The soft cushions felt curiously unpleasant; he felt as though he were sinking through to the floor.
Nervously, Mark clenched and unclenched his fists, trying to get used to his own home again.
“How long were you gone, Mark?” Doctor Nye asked finally.
“I’m not sure,” Mark said. “A few months, I think.” The English felt awkward in his mouth, like a foreign tongue.
“Fifty thousand years before Christ,” mused Doctor Nye, who had set the dials himself. And then, oddly: “Are you hungry?”
Mark smiled. “No. What happened—was it the rocket?”
Doctor Nye nodded. “The test rocket went off-course and blew up in the hills near here,” he said. “It was a miracle no one was hurt.”
Mark shifted uncomfortably in the silence. The very concept of such things as “rockets” was strange to him now; his whole mental set had changed, his mind was oriented to a different set of conditions, and he felt like an intruder in his own home.
“I would never have forgiven myself, Mark, if—”
Mark shook his head. “It wasn’t your fault, Uncle Bob,” he said. “And I’m grateful, really. I can’t talk about it now, but it was the most wonderful experience I’ve ever known.”
Doctor Nye nodded, understanding. “There’ll be plenty of time to talk later,” he said quietly.
“Uncle Bob — I’m so sorry — the space-time machine . . .”
“Forget it, son,” Doctor Nye said, rising and placing his hand on Mark’s shoulder in a gesture strangely like that of the Danequa. “Perhaps, one day, I can rebuild it again. What man has done once, man can do again.
You are all that counts, Mark. I do not think that the space-time machine was wasted. When you left here fifteen minutes ago, you were a boy. Now you are a man. Your eyes are open, son, and that is something beyond any price.”
Mark sat silently for a moment, trying to get himself adjusted to things. He looked at little Fang dozing in the armchair. How different the cocker spaniel was from the wolf-dog he had left in the shadows of the Ice Age!
“It’s stopped raining, hasn’t it?” he asked after a short time. “Yes.”
“Let’s go outside, Uncle Bob. Let’s just go out and walk around for a while.”
“Good idea, son,” Doctor Nye smiled. “But first I think you better change your clothes, before someone takes a pot shot at you for looking like a man from Mars or something.”
Mark grinned back, beginning to relax a little, and hurried up to change. His own clothes were too small for him, but he made them do. His feet, however, flatly refused to suffer through a pair of shoes, so he kept his Danequa sandals on. He glanced at the man who looked back at him out of his mirror, hardly recognizing him. He felt like a spy, an alien, in his own room and he left rapidly and rejoined his uncle in the sitting room.
“That’s better,” Doctor Nye approved, puffing on his pipe. “Come on. We’ll walk up to the Point.”
They went outside, into the cool night air and the silence, and Mark Nye instantly relaxed. There was the smell of the familiar pines in the air, and the freshly washed earth was heavy with clean scent. The black clouds had broken above them, and the frosted stars twinkled coldly in the black sky. A full moon raced along behind the scudding clouds, turning them into a silver sea and itself into a circular ship of frozen ice that sailed in and out among them. Mark breathed deeply, glad to be alive.
Neither man spoke. They walked along the path through the moonlit night until they came to the Point, and there they stopped. The Point was an outcropping of rock that looked down into the light-pointed valley below. It was free of trees, and the soft night wind whispered around it eerily. A transport plane, high in the sky, winged along above them, its engines muted by distance, its red and green running lights blinking in the stars.
The full moon sailed clear of the silver-flecked clouds, and Mark watched it with a heavy heart. His friends were dead, dead and ashes in the mists of time. Tlaxcan smiled no more, and little Tlax had lived and dreamed and died and was gone forever. Nranquar, and Roqan, and the proud Qualxen—where were they now?
Gone. Lost in the dust of ages . . . Mark looked at his uncle, puffing his pipe in silence beneath the moon. He was glad to be back with him again. This, after all, was where he belonged. He had no choice. This was his world, with all its problems, and it was here that his life must be lived. And yet-There was the full moon. How long ago had it been that he sang the song of die Danequa beneath that same full moon, with the excitement of the quaro hunt racing in his blood? Had it been a few days, a few months—or almost fifty-two thousand years ago? The moon smiled down on him, and Mark closed his eyes. Clear and strong across the ages, clean as silver bells, he heard again the chant of the Danequa . . .
House of the night
House of the moon
Darkness walks with us
On the hunt
In life, in death
In the moon-rays it is finished
In the moon-rays it is ended.
O he o-yo o-yo he o-he
O he o-yo o-yo he o-he o—
Mark opened his eyes, smiling now. Dead? The Danequa were not dead. Tlaxcan and Tlaxcal and Roqan and Tloron—they were all a part of him, friends that he could never see again and yet friends that would live forever in his heart. Here he belonged, and here he would stay. But always a part of him, wild and free, would be with the friends he had made in the dawn of time.
“All right, Uncle Bob,” he said. “I’m ready now.”
Doctor Nye smiled. “Let’s go, son,” he said.
Together, side by side, they walk
ed back down the moonlit path that led to home.
