They did not hear “zero” because for that fraction of eternity even sound was suspended. Something happened to them, something undefinable and so far outside of the normal sensations of life that an instant later they could not remember what it had been or how it had felt. At that same moment the lights in the warehouse outside vanished, and the only illumination came from the dim glow of the instruments on the tiered panels. Behind the open end of the truck, where an instant before the brightly lit room had been, there was now only a formless, toneless gray nothing that hurt the eyes when you looked at it.
“Eureka!” the professor shouted.
“Anyone want a drink?” Dallas asked, producing a quart of rye from behind the crate he was sitting on, and accepting his own invitation to the marked detriment of the bottle’s liquid contents. It passed quickly from hand to hand—even Tex reached in from the cab for a slug—and all of them, with the exception of the professor, drew courage from it. He was too busy at his instruments, babbling happily to himself.
“Yes—definitely—definitely displacing toward the past… an easily measured rate… now physical displacement as well… wouldn’t do to end up in interstellar space or in the middle of the Pacific… oh dear no!” He glanced into a hooded screen and made more precise adjustments, “I suggest you hold securely to something, gentlemen. I have made as good an approximation as possible to the local ground level, but I am afraid to be too precise. I do not wish us to emerge underground, so there may be a drop of a few inches… Are you ready?” He pulled the master switch open.
The back wheels hit first and an instant later the front of the truck jarred to the ground with a mighty crash, knocking them about. Bright sunlight flooded in through the open rear making them blink, and a fresh breeze brought the sound of distant breakers.
“Well I’ll be double-god-damned!” Amory Blestead said.
The grayness was gone and in its place, framed by the canvas top of the truck like a giant picture window, was a view down a rocky beach to the ocean, where great waves were breaking. Gulls swooped low and screamed while two frightened seals snorted and splashed off into the water.
“This is no part of California I know,” Barney said.
“This is the Old World, not the New,” Professor Hewett said proudly. “To be precise, the Orkney Islands, where there were many settlements of the northmen in the eleventh century, in the year 1003. It undoubtedly surprises you that the vremeatron is capable of physical as well as temporal displacement, but this is a factor—”
“Nothing has surprised me since Hoover was elected,” Barney said, feeling more in control of himself and affairs now that they had actually arrived somewhere—or somewhen. “Let’s get the operation moving. Dallas, roll up the front of the tarp so we can see where we’re going.”
With the front end of the canvas cover out of the way, a rocky beach was disclosed, a narrow strand between water and rounded cliffs. About a half mile away a headland jutted out and cut off any further view.
“Start her up,” Barney called in through the rear of the cab, “and let’s see what there is further along the beach.”
“Right,” Tex said, pulling the starter. The engine ground over and burst into life. He kicked it into gear and they rumbled slowly down the rocky shingle.
“You want this?” Dallas asked, holding out a holstered revolver on a gunbelt. Barney looked at it distastefully.
“Keep it. I’d probably shoot myself if I tried to play around with one of those things. Give the other one to Tex and hold onto the rifle yourself.”
“Aren’t we going to be armed just in case, for our own protection?” Amory Blestead asked. “I can handle a rifle.”
“Not professionally, and we work to union rules around here. Your job is to help the professor, Amory, The vremeatron is the most important thing here. Tex and Dallas will take care of the armaments—that way we can be sure that there won’t be any accidents.”
“Alt for Satan! Look at that, so beautiful, that I should be seeing this with my own eyes!” Jens Lyn burbled and pointed ahead.
The truck had churned its way around the headland and a small bay opened up before them. A crude, blackened rowboat was pulled up onto the shore, and just above the beach was a miserable-looking building made of clumsily piled turf and stone and covered with a seaweed-thatched roof. There was no one in sight, though smoke was curling up from the chimney hole at one end.
“Where is everybody?” Barney asked.
“It is understandable that the sight and sound of this truck has frightened them and that they have taken refuge in the house,” Lyn said.
“Kill the engine, Tex. Maybe we should have brought some beads or something to trade with the natives?”
“I am afraid that these are not the kind of natives that you are thinking of…”
The rough door of the house crashed open as if to emphasize his words and a man leaped out, howling terribly and waving a broad-bladed ax over his head. He jumped into the air, clashed the ax against a large shield he carried on his left arm, then thundered down the slope toward them. As he approached them with immense bounds they could see the black, horned helmet on his head, and his flowing blond beard and wide moustache. Still roaring indistinctly he began to chew the edge of the shield: foam formed on his lips.
“You can see that he’s obviously afraid, but a Viking hero cannot reveal his fear before the thralls and housecarls, who are undoubtedly watching from concealment in the building. So he works up a berserk rage—”
“Save the lecture, will you, Doc. Dallas, can you and Tex take this guy on, maybe slow him down before he breaks something?”
“Putting a bullet through him will slow him down a lot.”
“No! Positively not. This studio does not indulge in murder, even for self-defense.”
“All right, if that’s the way you want it—but this goes under the personal jeopardy bonus in the contract.”
“I know! I know! Now get out there before—”
Barney was interrupted by a thud, then a tinkling crash followed by even louder howls of victory.
“I can understand what he is saying!” Jens Lyn chortled happily. “He is bragging that he has taken out the monster’s eye…”
“The big slob has chopped off one of the headlights!” Dallas shouted. “Keep him busy, Tex, I’ll be right with you. Draw him away from here.”
Tex Antonelli slid out of the cab and ran down the beach away from the truck, where he was seen by the berserk axman, who instantly began to pursue him. At about fifty yards distance Tex stopped and picked up two fist-sized stones, well rounded by the sea, and bounced one of them in his palm like a baseball, waiting calmly until his raging attacker was closer. At five yards he let fly at the man’s head and, as soon as the shield had been swung up to intercept the stone, he hurled the other at the Viking’s middle. Both stones were in the air at the same time and even as the first one was bounding away from the shield the second caught the man in the pit of the stomach: he sat down with a loud woosh. Tex moved a few feet away and picked up two more stones.
“Bleyoa!” [1] the downed man gasped, shaking his ax.
“Yeah, and you’re one too. C’mon buddy, the bigger they are, the harder they splat.”
“Let’s wrap him up,” Dallas said, coming out from behind the truck and spinning a loop of rope around his head. “The Prof is getting jittery about his gadgets and wants to go back.”
“Okay, I’ll set him up for you.”
Tex shouted some Marine Corps insults, but they did not penetrate the linguistic barrier. He then resorted to the Latin language of gesture that he had learned as a youth and with rapid movement of fingers and hands called the Viking a cuckold, a gelding, ascribed some filthy personal habits to him and ended up with the Ultimate Insult, left hand slapped to right bicep causing the right fist to be jerked up into the air. One—or more—of these obviously had antecedents that predated the eleventh century, because the Viking roared wit
h rage and staggered to his feet. Tex calmly stood his ground, though he looked like a pygmy before the charging giant. The ax swung up and Dallas’s spinning lasso shot out and caught it, while at the same moment Tex put out his foot and tripped him. As the Viking hit the ground with a crash both men were on him, Tex paralyzing him with an armlock while Dallas hogtied him with rapid bights of rope. In a few instants he was helpless, with his arms tied to his legs behind his back and roaring with frustration as they dragged him through the pebbles back to the truck. Tex had the ax and Dallas the shield.
“I have to talk to him,” Jens Lyn insisted. “It is a rare opportunity.”
“We must leave instantly,” the professor urged, making a delicate adjustment on the verniers.
“We’re being attacked!” Amory Blestead squealed, pointing with palsied ringer at the house. A ragged horde of shock-haired men armed with a variety of swords, spears and axes were rushing down the hill toward them.
“We’re getting out of here,” Barney ordered. “Throw that prehistoric lumberjack in the back and let’s get going. You can have plenty of time to talk to him after we get back, Doc.”
Tex jumped into the cab and grabbed up his revolver from the seat. He fired it out to sea until all the chambers were empty, raced the engine, flashed the remaining headlight and blew the horn. The shouts of the attackers turned to wails of fear as they dropped their weapons and fled back into the house. The truck made a U-turn and started back down the beach. When they came to the sharp curve around the headland a horn blasted from the other side of the rocks and Tex just had time to jerk the wheel to the right—until the tires were in the rush of breaking waves—as another olive-drab truck tore around the headland and roared by them.
“Sunday driver!” Tex shouted out the window and kicked the truck forward again.
Barney Hendrickson glanced up as the other truck went by, swinging into their wheel tracks, and was almost petrified as he looked into the open rear. He saw himself standing there, swaying as the truck lurched over the rocks and grinning wickedly. At the last moment, before the second truck vanished from sight, the other Barney Hendrickson raised his thumb to his nose and wiggled his fingers at his duplicate. Barney dropped back onto a box as the rock wall intervened.
“Did you see that?” he gasped. “What happened?”
“Most interesting,” Professor Hewett said, pressing the starter on the motor-generator. “Time is more plastic than I bad ever imagined. It allows for the doubling of world lines, perhaps even for trebling, or even an infinite number of coils. The possibilities are incredible…”
“Will you stop babbling and tell me what I saw,” Barney snapped, lowering the almost empty whiskey bottle.
“You saw yourself, or we saw us who will be—I’m afraid English grammar is not capable of accurately describing a situation like this. Perhaps it would be better to say you saw this same truck with yourself in it as it will be at a later date. That is simple enough to understand.”
Barney groaned and emptied the bottle, then shouted with pain as the Viking managed to wriggle around on the floor and bite him in the leg.
“Better keep your feet up on the boxes,” Dallas warned. “He’s still frothing.”
The truck slowed and Tex called back to them. “We’re coming to the spot where we landed, I can see where the tire tracks begin just ahead. What’s next?”
“Stop as close to the original position of arrival as you can. It makes the adjustments simpler. Prepare yourselves, gentlemen—we begin our return journey through time.”
“Tröll taki yor öll!” [2] the Viking roared.
3
“What went wrong?” L.M. asked suspiciously as they trooped tiredly into his office, dropping into the same chairs they had left eighteen centuries before. “What happened—you walk out of the office ten minutes ago and now ten minutes later you walk in?”
“Ten minutes to you, L.M.,” Barney said, “but it’s been hours for us. The machine is okay, so we’re over the first and biggest hurdle. We know now that Professor Hewett’s vremeatron works even better than we had hoped. The way is open to take a company back in time and film an accurate, full-length, wide-screen, realistic, low-budget high-quality historical. Our next problem is a simple one.”
“A story.”
“Right as always, L.M. And it so happens we have a story, a true-to-life story, and, what is more, a patriotic story. If I was to ask you who discovered America, what would you say?”
“Christopher Columbus, 1492.”
“That’s what most people think, but it was the Vikings who did the job first.”
“Was Columbus a Viking—I thought he was Jewish?”
“Let us please drop Columbus. Five hundred years before Columbus was born Viking ships had sailed from Greenland and discovered what they called Vinland which has since been proven to be part of North America, The first expedition was led by Eric the Red—”
“Kill that idea! You want to get us blacklisted with a commie picture?”
“Just hold on for a bit please, L.M. After Eric found the place it was colonized, Vikings came and lived there and built houses and fanned, and this was all organized by the legendary hero, Thorfinn Karlsefni…”
“These names! He’s got to go too. I can already hear the big romance scene… kiss me my dearest Thorfinn Karlsefni she whispers. Out. You’re not so hot, Barney.”
“You can’t rewrite history, L.M.”
“What else have we ever done? This is no time to go soft on me, Barney Hendrickson, you who were at one time my best producer and director before the lousy moron-box ruined us all. Get a grip on yourself. The motion pictures are not primarily an educational medium. We are selling entertainment, and if it doesn’t entertain it doesn’t sell. I see it this way. We got this Viking, you call him Benny or Carlo or some other good Viking name, and you do a saga of his adventures…”
“That’s just the word for it, L.M.”
“…like one day fighting, and winning of course, restless, he’s that land. He goes off and finds America then comes back and says I have found America! so they make him the king. Then there is this girl, with long, blond wig hair, who keeps waving to him every time he sails away and promises to return. Only now he is older with a little gray above the ears and some scars, he has suffered, and this time instead of going away he takes the girl with him and together they sail into the sunset to a new life as the first pioneers at Plymouth Rock. Well?”
“Great, as always, L.M. You haven’t lost the touch.” Barney sighed tiredly. Dr. Jens Lyn—whose eyes had been getting wider—made a strangling noise.
“B-but—it is not that way, it is in the records. Even Mr. Hendrickson is not completely correct. It was Leif Ericsson, the son of Eric the Red, who is generally credited with the discovery of Vinland. There are two versions of the chronicle, one in the Hauksbók and the other in the Flateyjarbók—”
“Enough!” L.M. grumbled. “You see what I mean, Barney? Even the history books can’t agree, so with a little bringing together here and there and some touching up we got a story. Who were you thinking of for the leads?”
“If we can get him, Ruf Hawk would be perfect for the Viking. And someone who is really stacked for a girl.”
“Slithey Tove. She’s available and between pictures and for two weeks her crumb of an agent has been in and out of here with deals, so I know she is broke and we can get her cheap. Next you will need a writer, and for that use Charley Chang, we have him on contract. He’s a specialist.”
“On Bible stories, maybe, not historicals,” Barney said doubtfully, “and frankly I didn’t think much of Down from the Cross or the other thing, Walking the Red Sea Waters.”
“Ruined by censorship, that’s all. I okayed the scripts myself and they were great—” He broke off suddenly as a bellowing cry sounded through the wall. “Did you hear that?”
“It’s the Viking,” Tex said. “He was still aching for a fight so we slugged him and
chained him to the shower in the executives’ head.”
“What’s this?” L.M. scowled.
“An informant,” Barney told him. “One of the locals. He attacked the truck so we brought him along so that Dr. Lyn could talk to him.”
“Get him in here. He’s just the man we need, someone with local knowledge to answer some questions on production problems. You got to have a local who knows his way around when you are shooting on location.”
Tex and Dallas went out and, after a few minutes of chain rattling and two loud thuds, returned with the slightly glassy-eyed Viking. He stopped in the door when he saw the men waiting in the room, and they had their first clear look at him.
He was big, even without the homed helmet he was almost seven feet tall, and hairy as a bear. Matted blond hair hung below his shoulders, and his flowing moustache vanished into the waves of beard that fell to his chest. His clothing consisted of coarsely woven blouse and breeks held in place by a varied assortment of thick leather straps, and they exuded a rich odor of fish, stale sweat and tar, yet the heavy gold bracelet around his arm did not seem out of place. His eyes were a light, almost transparent, blue, and glared at them from under beetling brows. He was battered and chained, but obviously uncowed and unbeaten, with his chin held high and his shoulders back.
“Welcome to Hollywood,” L.M. said. “Sit down—give him a drink, Barney—and make yourself comfortable. What did you say your name was… ?”
“He doesn’t speak English, L.M.”
L.M. Greenspan’s face fell. “I can’t say I approve of that, Barney. I don’t like working through interpreters, too slow, not reliable.… All right Lyn, do your stuff, ask him his name.”
Jens Lyn mumbled to himself for a moment, going through the Old Norse verb forms, then spoke aloud. “Hvat heitir maðrinn?”[3]
The Viking only rumbled deep in his throat and ignored the question.
“What’s the trouble?” L.M. asked impatiently. “I thought you talked his lingo? Can’t he understand you?”
“You must be patient, sir. Old Norse has been a dead language for almost a thousand years and we know of it only through the written word. Icelandic is the modem language that most closely resembles it so I am using the Icelandic intonation and pronunciation—”
The Technicolor Time Machine Page 2
