by Chad Oliver
Charlie stepped inside and took off his hat. The thing reminded him of an elevator.
Onthal joined him and the door shut.
There was a lifting sensation.
Charlie smiled.
As has been stated, Charlie was a great deal smarter than he looked …
The ship was just a spaceship, no more and no less. Of course, Charlie Buckner had never actually seen one before, but he read the papers and he knew what to expect. As a matter of fact, he didn’t get to see this spaceship either; there were no windows in the box, and when the door opened again Charlie and Onthal were inside the ship.
“Quite a layout you got here,” he said.
Onthal smiled. “Come with me. I will take you to the others.”
Charlie followed him, keeping his eyes open. He was impressed, but hardly overwhelmed. The ship was on the plush side, just as he had anticipated.
When he saw the large room in which the other men were gathered, he relaxed. He was sure of himself now, on familiar ground. The room inside the spaceship had wooden panels with polished knotholes, a flashy bar—-tended by a robot, but what the hell—and a big log fire blazing in a useless fireplace.
I know these birds, Charlie thought. They’re all the same, no matter where they come from.
There was a sudden excited babble when Charlie made his entrance, all of it in an unfamiliar language.
Onthal held up his hand for silence. He cleared his throat, pleased with his own importance. “You know the rules, men,” he said. “We speak only English when a native is present.”
“What’s he doing here?” a big balding man demanded, his face flushed with too many drinks. “What did you bring him here for?”
“He says that he—um—wishes to offer us a deal.”
A slender blonde, whose function on a fishing trip was obviously other than piscatorial, giggled. “Isn’t he quaint?”
To add to the local color, Charlie took out his pipe, filled it carefully, and lit it. Calmly, he flipped the match into the fireplace.
Another man, seemingly a person of some importance, stepped forward. “Your name, sir?”
“Charlie Buckner. And yours?”
“That does not concern you. We are not savages, Mr. Buckner. I will not pretend to offer you hospitality here. You will not be permitted to leave this ship alive.”
“Glad to meet you, too.” Charlie puffed on his pipe. “You’re pretty jumpy, Clyde.”
The man frowned. “You do not understand our position. We are not men of your world—”
“You can skip all that. I know all about you.”
The man blinked. “You do?”
“Certainly. If you will be so good as to pour me a drink, I’ll explain.”
The man hesitated, then snapped his fingers. The robot rolled over with a tall glass on a tray. Charlie thanked him and sampled the drink. It was smooth. Definitely quality. Class.
Naturally.
“Well?” the man demanded.
Charlie sighed. “Back home, wherever that is, you people are successful businessmen. You work hard all the time, and the pressure builds up. When you take a vacation, you want to get away from it all. You like brief doses of unspoiled nature, and you like good fishing. Evidently, your own world is too citified for what you want, so you come to Elkhorn Valley. How am I doing?”
The man pursed his lips. “You’re seriously suggesting that we’d bring a spaceship all the way from—well, all that way just to go fishing?”
“I’m not suggesting it. I know it. Look, amigo, I’m in the tourist business myself. I know how much money is spent every year just to go fishing somewhere. Why else would you come to our planet? You’re way ahead of us in gadgets and machines, so we wouldn’t have much to offer except scenery and fishing and hunting. I figured that right off. But why do you have to sneak around like you do? What are you afraid of?”
The man looked at the others who were gathered around and smiled. “You seem to be an intelligent man, Mr. Buckner. What do you think would happen to our fishing if the news got out that the Earth had been contacted from outer space?”
Charlie chewed that one over for a minute. It made sense. “You’ve got a point there. But I can’t say much for the way you’ve conducted yourselves. You’ve got a lot to answer for.”
“The Earth,” the man said rather pompously, “is not yet ready for the galactic civilization. You would not be capable of accepting what we have even if it were offered to you—”
Charlie downed his drink, then gave the man explicit instructions as to how he could dispose of his galactic civilization. “I don’t give a hang about all that junk. I’m talking about me. You don’t pay taxes and you don’t spend any money in Elkhorn Valley. You throw a fog around the other tourists so they don’t get their share of fish. You burn buildings down—why, I don’t know. Next thing, the other tourists—the paying customers—will stop coming. You call that fair?”
The man spread his hands with a we’re-all-reasonable-men-here gesture. “Mr. Buckner, we have been visiting Elkhorn Valley for several of your years. It means a great deal to us. The problems of galactic administration and commerce—”
Charlie snorted.
“Well, never mind. You may find this hard to understand, Mr. Buckner, but we love Elkhorn Valley. We love it the way it is—primitive, unspoiled, rustic. You don’t appreciate your own values. When you start putting up fancy clubs and internal combustion stations, you ruin Elkhorn Valley. We come a long way every year to find what we want, and we simply cannot permit this commercialization. That’s what we’re trying to get away from, don’t you see?”
“So if we build something you don’t like, you burn it down?”
“Naturally. Upon occasion, we like to wander through the village. It is a tonic to us. We don’t want any changes here.”
“I’ve felt the same way myself, Clyde. But I’ve got a living to make.”
The man shrugged. “That is unfortunate.”
“Isn’t it, though?” Charlie helped himself to another drink. The robot, he decided, was the most friendly person on the ship. “But I think we can make a deal.”
The man chuckled. “Really, Mr. Buckner. I don’t mean to be insulting, but you have nothing that we want.”
“That’s where you’re barking up the wrong tree.” Charlie sensed that he had lapsed into idiom again and corrected himself. “I mean, you are mistaken. I have what you want more than anything else. But you won’t get it without a promise that I will be returned safely to Elkhorn Valley.”
“That’s impossible. You know too much. I tell you, we absolutely refuse to get all tangled up with the local tribal governments. It would be the end of everything. We wouldn’t get a moment’s peace. Why, we might even have to go on television.” The man shuddered.
“I can keep my mouth shut. Give me some tests or something if you don’t believe it. I don’t care a used salmon egg about men from another world, and I never worried any about Earth either. I care about my business and Charlie Buckner. Can’t you understand that?”
“It sounds familiar,” the man admitted.
“Okay. Deal or no deal?”
“Give him a chance,” the blonde said, eying him speculatively.
“We’ll see. What is this thing you have that you think we want, Mr. Buckner?”
Charlie smiled. He had them now.
He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out the letter from Old Kermit Thompson. He handed it over. Then he hauled out the photographs and handed them over.
The man’s eyes widened. He read the juicy parts aloud:
The tourists over here in Carson Creek are catching so many trout that the game warden hasn’t been to bed for a week. The streams are so full of fish that the water has to work up a sweat to get over them. They ain’t no stock-pond babies, either….
He passed the photographs around.
There was a collective murmur of astonishment.
Ch
arlie stoked up his pipe again and moved closer to the fire. “I know you people,” he said. “A dude is just a dude, no matter where he comes from. You folks came down here in your fancy ship and found a spot you liked. Then you never looked no farther. You come back every year to the same place. You never bothered with the other side of the hill. You were too lazy to get off the beaten track. Well, just take a look at them fish. The tourists are catching ’em like that over in Carson Creek, and they don’t have the equipment that you people have got. Now, you take one of them there green-tailed Busters up to Carson Creek …”
Charlie let his voice trail off. He had been dealing with tourists for a long, long time. He figured he knew how to handle them. If there was one thing they couldn’t resist, it was news about better fishing somewhere else.
There was a mild pandemonium in the spaceship room.
There were piles of trout in those photographs—big trout.
Onthal pushed his way up to him, his violet eyes shining.
“Ah, Mr. Buckner?”
“Ummm?”
“How do we get to Carson Creek?”
Charlie hauled out the pencil and paper he always carried for just such occasions. He felt fine.
“Looky here. You just follow this road up Beaver Creek Canyon over the pass. Then, you go on due north about fifteen-sixteen miles. You’ll come to a little lake shaped like a heart—you can see it plain from the air. Then you angle off to the left here …”
Charlie was feeling pretty good.
A man seldom obliterates anyone who tips him off to better fishing.
A month or so later, things had quieted down considerably in Elkhorn Valley.
There hadn’t been any more local fires, and the Lazy T Dude Ranch had been repaired, The fishing was better than it had been in some years, and all of Charlie’s cabins were full.
Charlie felt a faint twinge of regret when he read in the paper about Kermit Thompson’s place over on Carson Creek burning to the ground, but that was the way the old ball bounced.
He waited until Mary was busy with her ironing, then loaded up his red jeep. He checked the tank. It was full—plenty for the run over the pass.
Charlie figured he’d just mosey on over to Carson Creek and sample the fishing.
Maybe he’d even run across Onthal again.
He filled his pipe and lit it with a sigh of satisfaction.
Onthal wasn’t a bad guy when you got to know him.
Besides, he wanted to get a good look at that green-tailed Buster.
TRANSFUSION
The machine stopped.
There was no sound at all now, and the green light on the control panel blinked like a mocking eye. With the easy precision born of long routine, Ben Hazard did what had to be done. He did it automatically, without real interest, for there was no longer any hope.
He punched a figure into the recorder: 377.
He computed the year, using the Gottwald-Hazard Correlation, and added that to the record: 254,000 B.C.
He completed the form with the name of the site: Choukoutien.
Then, with a lack of anticipation that eloquently reminded him that this was the three hundred seventy-seventh check instead of the first, Ben Hazard took a long preliminary look through the viewer. He saw nothing that interested him.
Careful as always before leaving the Bucket, he punched in the usual datum: Viewer Scan Negative.
He unlocked the hatch at the top of the Bucket and climbed out of the metallic gray sphere. It was not raining, for a change, and the sun was warm and golden in a clean blue sky.
Ben Hazard stretched his tired muscles and rested his eyes on the fresh green of the, tangled plants that grew along the banks of the lazy stream to his right. The grass in the little meadow looked cool and inviting, and there were birds singing in the trees. He was impressed as always by how little this corner of the world had changed in fifty years. It was very much as it had been a thousand years ago, or two thousand, or three …
It was just a small corner of nowhere, lost in the mists of time, waiting for the gray sheets of ice to come again.
It was just a little stream, bubbling along and minding its own business, and a lonely limestone hill scarred with the dark staring eyes of rock shelters and cave entrances.
There was nothing different about it.
It took Man to change things in a hurry, and Man wasn’t home.
That was the problem.
Ben took the six wide-angle photographs of the terrain that he always took. There were no animals within camera range this trip. He clambered through the thick brown brush at the base of the limestone hill and climbed up the rough rocks to the cave entrance. It was still open, and he knew its location by heart.
He well remembered the thrill he had felt the first time he had entered this cave. His heart had hammered in his chest and his throat had been so dry that he couldn’t swallow. His mind had been ablaze with memories and hopes and fears, and it had been the most exciting moment of his life.
Now, only the fear remained—and it was a new kind of fear, the fear of what he wouldn’t find.
His light blazed ahead of him as he picked his way along the winding passage of the cave. He disturbed a cloud of indignant bats, but there was no other sign of life. He reached the central cavern, dark and hushed and hidden under the earth, and flashed his light around carefully.
There was nothing new.
He recognized the familiar bones of wolf, bear, tiger, and camel. He photographed them again, and did manage to find the remains of an ostrich that he had not seen before. He took two pictures of that.
He spent half an hour poking around in the cavern, checking all of the meticulously recorded sites, and then made his way back to the sunlit entrance.
The despair welled up in him, greater than before, Bad news, even when it is expected, is hard to take when it is confirmed. And there was no longer any real doubt.
Man wasn’t home.
Ben Hazard wasn’t puzzled any longer. He was scared and worried. He couldn’t pass the buck to anyone else this time. He had come back to see for himself, and he had seen.
Imagine a man who built a superb computer, a computer that could finally answer the toughest problems in his field. Suppose the ultimate in computers, and the ultimate in coded tapes; a machine—however hypothetical—that was never wrong. Just for kicks, suppose that the man feeds in an easy one: What is two plus three?
If the computer answers six, then the man is in trouble. Of course, the machine might be multiplying rather than adding—
But if the computer answers zero or insufficient data, what then?
Ben Hazard slowly walked back to the Bucket, climbed inside, and locked the hatch.
He filed his films under the proper code number.
He pushed in the familiar datum: Field Reconnaissance Negative. He sat down before the control board and got ready.
He was completely alone in the small metallic sphere; he could see every inch of it. He knew that he was alone. And yet, as he had before, he had the odd impression that there was someone with him, someone looking over his shoulder …
Ben Hazard had never been one to vault into the saddle and gallop off in all directions. He was a trained scientist, schooled to patience, He did not understand the soundless voice that kept whispering in his mind: Hurry, hurry, hurry—
“Boy,” he said aloud, “you’ve been in solitary too long.”
He pulled himself together and reached for the controls. He was determined to run out the string—twenty-three checks to go now—but he already knew the answer.
Man wasn’t home.
When Ben Hazard returned to his original year of departure, which was 1982, he stepped out of the Bucket at New Mexico Station—for the machine, of necessity, moved in space as well as time, As a matter of fact, the spatial movement of the Bucket was one of the things that made it tough to do an intensive periodic survey of any single spot on the Earth’s surface; it was
hard to hold the Bucket on target.
According to his own reckoning, and in terms of physiological time, he had spent some forty days in his check of Choukoutien in the Middle Pleistocene. Viewed from the other end at New Mexico Station, he had been gone only five days.
The first man he saw was the big M.P. corporal.
“I’ll need your prints and papers, sir,” the M.P. said.
“Dammit, Ames.” Ben handed over the papers and stuck his thumbs in the scanner. “Don’t you know me by now?”
“Orders, sir.”
Ben managed a tired smile. After all, the military implications of time travel were staggering, and care was essential. If you could move back in time only a few years and see what the other side had done, then you could counter their plans in the present. Since the old tribal squabbles were still going full blast, Gottwald had had to pull a million strings in order to get his hands on some of the available Buckets.
“Sorry, Ames. You look pretty good to me after a month or so of old camel bones.”
“Nice to have you back, Dr. Hazard,” the M.P. said neutrally.
After he had been duly identified as Benjamin Wright Hazard, Professor of Anthropology at Harvard and Senior Scientist on the Joint Smithsonian-Harvard-Berkeley Temporal Research Project, he was allowed to proceed. Ben crossed the crowded floor of the room they called Grand Central Station and paused a moment to see how the chimps were getting along.
There were two of them, Charles Darwin and Cleopatra, in separate cages. The apes had been the first time travelers, and were still used occasionally in testing new Buckets. Cleopatra scratched herself and hooted what might have been a greeting, but Charles Darwin was busy with a problem. He was trying to fit two sticks together so he could knock down a banana that was hanging just out of reach. He was obviously irritated, but he was no quitter.
“I know just how you feel, Charles,” Ben said.
Charles Darwin pursed his mobile lips and redoubled his efforts. What they won’t do for one lousy banana.
Ben looked around for Nate York, who was working with the chimps, and spotted him talking to a technician and keeping track of his experiment out of the corner of his eye. Ben waved and went on to the elevator.
