by Larry Niven
Three of them. They formed a ring around Svetz and Wrona. One of them carried a length of white bone. They all walked upright on two legs, but they walked as if their feet hurt them. They were as hairless as men. Apes’ heads mounted on men’s bodies.
Homo habilis, the killer plains ape. Man’s ancestor.
“Pay them no attention,” Wrona said offhandedly. “They won’t hurt us.” She started down the hill. Svetz followed closely.
“He really shouldn’t have that bone,” she called back.
“We try to keep bones away from them. They use them as weapons. Sometimes they hurt each other. Once one of them got hold of the iron handle for the lawn sprinkler and killed a gardener with it.”
“I’m not going to take it away from him.”
“That glaring light, is that your extension cage?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure about this, Svetz.” She stopped suddenly. “Uncle Wrocky’s right. You’ll only get more lost. Here you’ll at least be taken care of.”
“No. Uncle Wrocky was wrong. See the dark side of the extension cage, how it fades away to nothing? It’s still attached to the rest of the time machine. It’ll just reel me in.”
“Oh.”
“No telling how long it’s been veering across the time lines. Maybe ever since that futzy horse poked his futzy horn through the controls. Nobody ever noticed before. Why should they? Nobody ever stopped a time machine halfway before.”
“Svetz, horses don’t have horns.”
“Mine does.”
There was noise behind them. Wrona looked back into a darkness Svetz’s eyes could not pierce. “Somebody must have noticed us! Come on, Svetz!”
She pulled him toward the lighted cage. They stopped just outside.
“My head feels thick,” Svetz mumbled. “My tongue too.”
“What are we going to do about the monster? I can’t hear anything—”
“No monster. Just a man with amnesia, now. He was only dangerous in the transition stage.”
She looked in. “Why, you’re right! Sir, would you mind—Svetz, he doesn’t seem to understand me.”
“Sure not. Why should he? He thinks he’s a white arctic wolf.” Svetz stepped inside. The white-haired wolf man was backed into a corner, warily watching. He looked a lot like Wrona.
Svetz became aware that he had picked up a tree branch. His hand must have done it without telling his brain. He circled, holding the weapon ready. An unreasoning rage built up and up in him. Invader! The man had no business here in Svetz’s territory.
The wolf man backed away, his slant eyes mad and frightened. Suddenly he was out the door and running, the trolls close behind.
“Your father can teach him, maybe,” said Svetz.
Wrona was studying the controls. “How do you work it?”
“Let me see. I’m not sure I remember.” Svetz rubbed at his drastically sloping forehead. “That one closes the door—”
Wrona pushed it. The door closed.
“Shouldn’t you be outside?”
“I want to come with you,” said Wrona.
“Oh.” It was getting terribly difficult to think. Svetz looked over the control panel. Eeny, meeny—that one? Svetz pulled it.
Free fall. Wrona yipped. Gravity came, vectored radially outward from the center of the extension cage. It pulled them against the walls.
“When my lungs go back to normal, I’ll probably go to sleep,” said Svetz. “Don’t worry about it.” Was there something else he ought to tell Wrona? He tried to remember.
Oh, yes. “You can’t go home again,” said Svetz. “We’d never find this line of history again.”
“I want to stay with you,” said Wrona.
“All right.”
* * *
Within a deep recess in the bulk of the time machine, a fog formed. It congealed abruptly—and Svetz’s extension cage was back, hours late. The door popped open automatically. But Svetz didn’t come out.
They had to pull him out by the shoulders, out of air that smelled of beast and honeysuckle.
“He’ll be all right in a minute. Get a filter tent over that other thing,” Ra Chen ordered. He stood over Svetz with his arms folded, waiting.
Svetz began breathing.
He opened his eyes.
“All right,” said Ra Chen. “What happened?”
Svetz sat up. “Let me think. I went back to pre-Industrial America. It was all snowed in. I … shot a wolf.”
“We’ve got it in a tent. Then what?”
“No. The wolf left. We chased him out.” Svetz’s eyes went wide. “Wrona!”
Wrona lay on her side in the filter tent. Her fur was thick and rich, white with black markings. She was built something like a wolf, but more compactly, with a big head and a short muzzle and a tightly curled tail. Her eyes were closed. She did not seem to be breathing.
Svetz knelt. “Help me get her out of there! Can’t you tell the difference between a wolf and a dog?”
“No. Why would you bring back a dog, Svetz? We’ve got dozens of dogs.”
Svetz wasn’t listening. He pulled away the filter tent and bent over Wrona. “I think she’s a dog. More dog than wolf, anyway. People tend to domesticate each other. She’s adapted to our line of history. And our brand of air.” Svetz looked up at his boss. “Sir, we’ll have to junk the old extension cage. It’s been veering sideways in time.”
“Have you been eating gunchy pills on the job?”
“I’ll tell you all about it—”
Wrona opened her eyes. She looked about her in rising panic until she found Svetz. She looked up at him, her golden eyes questioning.
“I’ll take care of you. Don’t worry,” Svetz told her. He scratched her behind the ear, his fingertips deep in soft fur. To Ra Chen he said, “The Vivarium doesn’t need any more dogs. She can stay with me.”
“Are you crazy, Svetz? You, live with an animal? You hate animals!”
“She saved my life. I won’t let anyone put her in a cage.”
“Sure, keep it! Live with it! I don’t suppose you plan to pay back the two million commercials she cost us? I thought not.” Ra Chen made a disgusted sound. “All right, let’s have your report. And keep that thing under control, will you?”
Wrona raised her nose and sniffed at the air. Then she howled. The sound echoed within the Institute, and heads turned in questioning and fear.
Puzzled, Svetz imitated the gesture, and understood.
The air was rich with petrochemicals and oxides of carbon and nitrogen and sulfur. Industrial air, the air Svetz had breathed all his life.
And Svetz hated it.
DEATH IN A CAGE
Svetz was coming home.
His narrow arms were folded on his chest. His back curved like a bow, to fit him into the curvature of the extension cage. He lay motionless, in stoic endurance, watching the inertial calendar.
Gravity behaved oddly in an extension cage. The pull was outward now as the cage moved into the future. –41, –40 … Svetz could not have reached the controls without considerable effort. They were overhead, at the center of the spherical shell. He did not need to reach them. The bulk of the time machine was fixed in timespace at the Institute for Temporal Research in 1102 Post Atomic. It would simply reel him in.
The small armored thing he’d captured was strapped to an opposite wall. It had not moved since Svetz shot it with an anaesthetic crystal.
The numbers on the inertial calendar rolled upward. + 16, + 17, + 18 … Gravity jumped and shivered like a car on a bumpy road. Svetz lay on his back and tried to ignore what his belly and his inner ear were telling him. In a couple of hours, internal time, he’d be home.
Something smoky began to obscure the control panel.
Svetz sniffed. The air was thick with oxides of nitrogen and sulfur, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide and carbon tetrachloride, a mixture of industrial wastes that Svetz had been breathing since the day he was born. He snif
fed and found nothing unusual.
But the haze was thickening.
It was not fanning out. It hung before the control panel, taking shape.
Svetz rubbed his eyes. It was still there, a shape like a cloaked and hooded man, distorting colors and outlines where they showed through. A vague stick-figure hand moulded itself around a lever, and pulled.
The interrupter circuit!
Svetz sat up. His head swam. He tried to stand, and overbalanced, and fell rolling.
The apparition braced its smoky feet against the control panel, heedless of the switches and dials. Its feet and ankles were terribly thin. It pantomimed frantic effort … but the lever marked EMERGENCY STOP did not move.
The figure turned to Svetz and screamed at him without sound. Svetz screamed back and threw his arms across his eyes. That face!
When Svetz dared look again, the thing was gone.
Svetz began to shake. The inertial calendar read +36, +37 …
* * *
“Ghosts, eh?” Svetz’s beefy, red-faced boss scowled ferociously. At least he was taking it seriously. He might as easily have sent Svetz off for a psychiatric examination. “That’s all we need. A haunted time machine. Well, have you got any idea what really happened?”
“There must be something wrong with the time machine. I think we ought to give up using it until we find out what.”
“You do.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Come here a minute.” Ra Chen took Svetz’s arm and walked away with him. He was twice Svetz’s mass; his hand wrapped one and a half times around Svetz’s bicep. He stopped them before the picture window that fronted the Institute for Temporal Research.
Spread below them, the shops and houses and crooked streets of the city of Capitol. On the hill across the valley, tremendous and daunting, the complex of buildings that was the United Nations Palace.
Ra Chen pointed downhill. “There.”
There was a gap in the cityscape. A cluster of broken houses surrounded the broken corpse of a bird, a bird the size of a five-story building. It had been there for two weeks now. The stink reached them even here.
“Our worst failure to date. I forebear to point out to you, Svetz, that it was your idea to use regression treatments on an ostrich. Notice, however, that the futzy thing lies in full view of the Palace. We’ll have to do something spectacular before the Advisors forget that gaff! And we’d better do it soon.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’re in bad odor at the Palace, Svetz.”
“Sir, I think that’s the roc.”
Ra Chen glared.
“We’re already missing one time machine,” he continued. “I had to yank it after we found out it was veering sidewise in time, across probability lines. The technical arm is still trying to find something wrong with it. Now you want me to yank the other one. Svetz, could you have imagined this—manifestation?”
“I’ve asked myself that.”
“Well?”
“No, sir. It was real. Even if I could see through it.”
“It’s just such a lousy time to lose both time machines. Appropriations come up in three months.”
The vets were removing his armadillo from the extension cage. Svetz watched them erect a gauzy filter tent over it to protect it from the air of 1102 Post Atomic.
“We ought to give up on funny animals,” said Ra Chen. “The Secretary-General already has more extinct animals than he knows what to do with. We ought to try something else.”
“Yes, sir. But what?”
Ra Chen didn’t answer. They watched as the medical team took clone samples from the armadillo, then moved away with it. It was awake, but doing very little to prove it. Tomorrow it would be in the Vivarium.
“This ghost, now,” Ra Chen said suddenly. “Was it human, or just humanoid?”
“It—there was something wrong with the face. Something dreadful.”
“But was it a man or an alien?”
“I couldn’t tell. After all, it was thin as smoke! It was wearing a robe. I couldn’t see anything but the face and hands—and they were dreadfully thin. It looked like a walking skeleton.”
“A skeleton, huh? Maybe you were seeing through the flesh. Like a holo of a man in X-ray light.”
“That sounds right.”
“But why? Why would he be transparent?”
“Funny, I was just wondering the same thing.”
“Don’t be sarcastic, Svetz.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“We’ve both been assuming it was a sign of something wrong with the time machine. What if it wasn’t? What if the thing was real?”
Svetz shook his head violently. “There are no such things as ghosts.”
“We thought that about rocs. Why not? Think how long the ghost legend has been around. All over the world, in burial customs, folk tales, all the great religions. There are people who believe in ghosts even today. Not many, I admit—”
“But, sir, it’s nonsense! Even if there were real ghosts, whatever they are, how would they get aboard an extension cage? And what could we do about it?”
“Capture it, of course. The Secretary-General would love it. He could even play with it; it sounded harmless enough—”
“But!”
“—Just ugly. As for how it got there, how should I know? I don’t know anything about the theory of time travel. It should be possible to duplicate the conditions—”
“You say it’s harmless. I saw it. I say it isn’t!”
“We can look into that after we’ve got it. Svetz, we need a coup. We’re going after that ghost.”
“We? Me! And I won’t!”
“Come,” said Ra Chen. “Let us reason together.”
* * *
Gravity behaved oddly in an extension cage. Going backward in time, the pull was inward, toward Svetz’s navel. Its intensity fluctuated to no known laws.
“I must be getting used to this,” Svetz thought.
He found that ominous. Svetz hated time travel. If he was getting used to the odd motion, he had probably given up hope of changing careers.
At least he didn’t get sick anymore.
“How did he talk me into this?”
The extension cage slowed. Gravity dwindled, was gone, came back pointing down.
The inertial calendar read –704. 704 Ante Atomic, seven hundred years before the first nuclear explosion. Through the transparent hull of the extension cage Svetz could see a thousand shades of dark green, green in all directions: a place of obscenely proliferating life. It was the South American jungle where he had found the armadillo.
Svetz donned a filter sac and waited for it to inflate around his head. Then he cut the air system and opened the vents to flood the extension cage with outside air. The ghost had first appeared around 20 PA. If there was a ghost, and if it came, it would probably suffocate in Industrial Age air.
Svetz took a sonic stun gun from its place on the wall. Subsonics were less material than anaesthetic crystals, more likely to affect a ghost, he told himself.
He pulled the go-home lever.
And that was that. Svetz had no controls, only signals. The controls were in the future, with the bulk of the time machine in the Institute building. Now the technicians began bringing him home. They had readings from his last mission. They could make his cage behave as it had then.
Svetz had nothing to do but wait.
Time travel still cost over a million commercials a shot. If the cage simply brought him home now, he was going to feel like an idiot. But then, so would Ra Chen.
* * *
He was passing 17 Post Atomic when the haze began to form. Svetz stayed on his back, but he raised the handgun.
It was clearer now, more solid. A dark, voluminous cloak and hood showed behind the pale, translucent outline of a human skeleton. Details were blurred, mercifully perhaps, because the thing was moving too fast, screaming and pleading and gesticulating, all without a sound. It was frantic
. It begged Svetz to stop the machine.
Svetz fired the stun weapon.
He kept the stud down until his own head buzzed from the echoes. The apparition screamed what must have been a string of curses, and thereafter ignored him. It wrapped the bones of its hands around the Emergency Stop, braced the bones of its feet against the control panel, and pulled.
The lever didn’t move. It was as if fog clung to the control panel.
+46, +47, +48 …
Svetz began to relax. The thing was harmless.
He was willing to believe that it was man-shaped, though he could see no trace of the ghostly flesh that must surround the smoky bones. Perhaps he was watching some kind of probability phenomenon. As if the ghost-figure marked where a man might be if there were another man aboard Svetz’s extension cage, and its transparency was a measure of just how improbable that was … Svetz’s head began to ache. Certainly he could not be expected to capture a probability phenomenon.
The ghost slowly faded, then became clear. It shifted its grip. The white of bones gleamed faintly through dark cloak.
+132, +133, +134 …
The ghost came solid in an instant. It pulled the Emergency Stop down hard, turned and leapt.
It was still a skeleton.
Svetz screamed high and shrill, turned and tried to burrow into the hull. He felt the thing land on his back, light and dry and hard. He wailed again. He was in the fetal position now, hugging his knees. Bony fingers tugged at his hand, and he screamed and let go of the stun gun. The fingers took it away.
For a long time nothing happened. Svetz waited for the end. Instead he heard slow footsteps, clickings …
And a hollow, grating voice that said, “All right, that’s enough of that. Roll over.”
Small bones prodded Svetz’s ribs. He rolled over and opened his eyes.
* * *
It was as bad as he’d thought. Worse. The ghost-figure had turned solid, but it was still no more than a mobile skeleton. It stood now with its cloak flung back and a sonic stun gun in its finger bones. Its face was a skull. Far back in the black eye sockets, eyes watched him steadily.
“Stop staring,” said the apparition.
It spoke Speech. It spoke Svetz’s language. But the consonants came out mushy, because the thing’s skull was lipless.
