Ray Bradbury Stories, Volume 1 (34 page)

‘Hello, Will. This is Janice!’

She swallowed.

‘They say I haven’t much time. A minute.’

She closed her eyes.

‘I want to talk slow, but they say talk fast and get it all in. So I want to say—I’ve decided. I will come up there. I’ll go on the Rocket tomorrow. I
will
come up there to you, after all. And I love you. I hope you can hear me. I love you. It’s been so long…’

Her voice motioned on its way to that unseen world. Now, with the message sent, the words said, she wanted to call them back, to censor, to rearrange them, to make a prettier sentence, a fairer explanation of her soul. But already the words were hung between planets and if, by some cosmic radiation, they could have been illuminated, caught fire in vaporous wonder there, her love would have lit a dozen worlds and startled the night side of Earth into a premature dawn, she thought. Now the words were not hers at all, they belonged to space, they belonged to no one until they arrived, and they were traveling at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second to their destination.

What will he say to me? What will he say back in
his
minute of time? she wondered. She fussed with and twisted the watch on her wrist, and the light-phone receiver on her ear crackled and space talked to her with electrical jigs and dances and audible auroras.

‘Has he answered?’ whispered Leonora.

‘Shhh!’ said Janice, bending, as if sick.

Then his voice came through space.

‘I hear him!’ cried Janice.

‘What does he say?’

The voice called out from Mars and took itself through the places where there was no sunrise or sunset, but always the night with a sun in the middle of the blackness. And somewhere between Mars and Earth everything of the message was lost, perhaps in a sweep of electrical gravity rushing by on the flood tides of a meteor, or interfered with by a rain of silver meteors. In any event, the small words and the unimportant words of the message were washed away. And his voice came through saying only one word:

‘…love…’

After that there was the huge night again and the sound of stars turning and suns whispering to themselves and the sound of her heart, like another world in space, filling her earphones.

‘Did you
bear
him?’ asked Leonora.

Janice could only nod.

‘What did he say, what did he say?’ cried Leonora.

But Janice could not tell anyone; it was much too good to tell. She sat listening to that one word again and again, as her memory played it back. She sat listening, while Leonora took the phone away from her without her knowing it and put it down upon its hook.

Then they were in bed and the lights out and the night wind blowing through the rooms a smell of the long journey in darkness and stars, and their voices talking of tomorrow, and the days after tomorrow which would not be days at all, but day-nights of timeless Time; their voices faded away into sleep or wakeful thinking, and Janice lay alone in her bed.

Is this how it was over a century ago, she wondered, when the women, the night before, lay ready for sleep, or not ready, in the small towns of the East, and heard the sound of horses in the night and the creak of the Conestoga wagons ready to go, and the brooding of oxen under the trees, and the cry of children already lonely before their time? All the sounds of arrivals and departures into the deep forests and fields, the blacksmiths working in their own red hells through midnight? And the smell of bacons and hams ready for the journeying, and the heavy feel of the wagons like ships foundering with goods, with water in the wooden kegs to tilt and slop across prairies, and the chickens hysterical in their slung-beneath-the-wagon crates, and the dogs running out to the wilderness ahead and, fearful, running back with a look of empty space in their eyes? Is this, then, how it was so long ago? On the rim of the precipice, on the edge of the cliff of stars? In their time the smell of buffalo, and in our time the smell of the Rocket? Is this, then, how it was?

And she decided, as sleep assumed the dreaming for her, that yes, yes indeed, very much so, irrevocably, this was as it had always been and would forever continue to be.

The sign on the wall seemed to quaver under a film of sliding warm water. Eckels felt his eyelids blink over his stare, and the sign burned in this momentary darkness:

TIME SAFARI
,
INC
.
SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST
.
YOU NAME THE ANIMAL
.
WE TAKE YOU THERE
.
YOU SHOOT IT
.

A warm phlegm gathered in Eckels’ throat; he swallowed and pushed it down. The muscles around his mouth formed a smile as he put his hand slowly out upon the air, and in that hand waved a check for ten thousand dollars at the man behind the desk.

‘Does this safari guarantee I come back alive?’

‘We guarantee nothing,’ said the official, ‘except the dinosaurs.’ He turned. ‘This is Mr Travis, your Safari Guide in the Past. He’ll tell you what and where to shoot. If he says no shooting, no shooting. If you disobey instructions, there’s a stiff penalty of another ten thousand dollars, plus possible government action, on your return.’

Eckels glanced across the vast office at a mass and tangle, a snaking and humming of wires and steel boxes, at an aurora that flickered now orange, now silver, now blue. There was a sound like a gigantic bonfire burning all of Time, all the years and all the parchment calendars, all the hours piled high and set aflame.

A touch of the hand and this burning would, on the instant, beautifully reverse itself. Eckels remembered the wording in the advertisements to the letter. Out of chars and ashes, out of dust and coals, like golden salamanders, the old years, the green years, might leap; roses sweeten the air, white hair turn Irish-black, wrinkles vanish; all, everything fly back
to seed, flee death, rush down to their beginnings, suns rise in western skies and set in glorious easts, moons eat themselves opposite to the custom, all and everything cupping one in another like Chinese boxes, rabbits into hats, all and everything returning to the fresh death, the seed death, the green death, to the time before the beginning. A touch of a hand might do it, the merest touch of a hand.

‘Hell and damn,’ Eckels breathed, the light of the Machine on his thin face. ‘A real Time Machine.’ He shook his head. ‘Makes you think. If the election had gone badly yesterday, I might be here now running away from the results. Thank God Keith won. He’ll make a fine President of the United States.’

‘Yes,’ said the man behind the desk. ‘We’re lucky. If Deutscher had gotten in, we’d have the worst kind of dictatorship. There’s an anti-everything man for you, a militarist, anti-Christ, anti-human, anti-intellectual. People called us up, you know, joking but not joking. Said if Deutscher became President they wanted to go live in 1492. Of course it’s not our business to conduct Escapes, but to form Safaris. Anyway, Keith’s President now. All you got to worry about is—’

‘Shooting my dinosaur.’ Eckels finished it for him.

‘A
Tyrannosaurus rex
. The Thunder Lizard, the damndest monster in history. Sign this release. Anything happens to you, we’re not responsible. Those dinosaurs are hungry.’

Eckels flushed angrily. ‘Trying to scare me!’

‘Frankly, yes. We don’t want anyone going who’ll panic at the first shot. Six Safari leaders were killed last year, and a dozen hunters. We’re here to give you the damndest thrill a
real
hunter ever asked for. Traveling you back sixty million years to bag the biggest damned game in all Time. Your personal check’s still there. Tear it up.’

Mr Eckles looked at the check for a long time. His fingers twitched.

‘Good luck,’ said the man behind the desk. ‘Mr Travis, he’s all yours.’

They moved silently across the room, taking their guns with them, toward the Machine, toward the silver metal and the roaring light.

First a day and then a night and then a day and then a night, then it was day-night-day-night-day. A week, a month, a year, a decade. A.D. 2055. A.D. 2019. 1999! 1957! Gone! the Machine roared.

They put on their oxygen helmets and tested the intercoms.

Eckels swayed on the padded seat, his face pale, his jaw stiff. He felt the trembling in his arms and he looked down and found his hands tight on the new rifle. There were four other men in the Machine. Travis, the Safari leader, his assistant, Lesperance, and two other hunters. Billings and Kramer. They sat looking at each other, and the years blazed around them.

‘Can these guns get a dinosaur cold?’ Eckels felt his mouth saying.

‘If you hit them right,’ said Travis on the helmet radio. ‘Some dinosaurs have two brains, one in the head, another far down the spinal column. We stay away from those. That’s stretching luck. Put your first two shots into the eyes, if you can, blind them, and go back into the brain.’

The Machine howled. Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them. ‘Good God,’ said Eckels. ‘Every hunter that ever lived would envy us today. This makes Africa seem like Illinois.’

The Machine slowed; its scream fell to a murmur. The Machine stopped.

The sun stopped in the sky.

The fog that had enveloped the Machine blew away and they were in an old time, a very old time indeed, three hunters and two Safari Heads with their blue metal guns across their knees.

‘Christ isn’t born yet,’ said Travis. ‘Moses has not gone to the mountain to talk with God. The Pyramids are still in the earth, waiting to be cut out and put up.
Remember
that. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler—none of them exists.’

The men nodded.

‘That’—Mr Travis pointed—‘is the jungle of sixty million two thousand and fifty-five years before President Keith.’

He indicated a metal path that struck off into green wilderness, over steaming swamp, among giant ferns and palms.

‘And that,’ he said, ‘is the Path, laid by Time Safari for your use. It floats six inches above the earth. Doesn’t touch so much as one grass blade, flower, or tree. It’s an anti-gravity metal. Its purpose is to keep you from touching this world of the past in any way. Stay on the Path. Don’t go off it. I repeat.
Don’t go off
. For
any
reason! If you fall off, there’s a penalty. And don’t shoot any animal we don’t okay.’

‘Why?’ asked Eckels.

They sat in the ancient wilderness. Far birds’ cries blew on a wind, and the smell of tar and an old salt sea, moist grasses, and flowers the color of blood.

‘We don’t want to change the Future. We don’t belong here in the Past. The government doesn’t
like
us here. We have to pay big graft to keep our franchise. A Time Machine is damn finicky business. Not knowing it, we might kill an important animal, a small bird, a roach, a flower even, thus destroying an important link in a growing species.’

‘That’s not clear,’ said Eckels.

‘All right,’ Travis continued, ‘say we accidentally kill one mouse here. That means all the future families of this one particular mouse are destroyed, right?’

‘Right.’

‘And all the families of the families of the families of that one mouse!
With a stamp of your foot, you annihilate first one, then a dozen, then a thousand, a million, a
billion
possible mice!’

‘So they’re dead,’ said Eckels. ‘So what?’

‘So what?’ Travis snorted quietly. ‘Well, what about the foxes that’ll need those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes, a lion starves. For want of a lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty-nine million years later, a cave man, one of a dozen on the
entire world
, goes hunting wild boar or saber-tooth tiger for food. But you, friend, have
stepped
on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on
one
single mouse. So the cave man starves. And the cave man, please note, is not just
any
expendable man, no! He is an
entire future nation
. From his loins would have sprung ten sons. From
their
loins one hundred sons, and thus onward to a civilization. Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of life. It is comparable to slaying some of Adam’s grandchildren. The stamp of your foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could shake our Earth and destinies down through Time, to their very foundations. With the death of that one cave man, a billion others yet unborn are throttled in the womb. Perhaps Rome never rises on its seven hills. Perhaps Europe is forever a dark forest, and only Asia waxes healthy and teeming. Step on a mouse and you crush the Pyramids. Step on a mouse and you leave your print, like a Grand Canyon, across Eternity. Queen Elizabeth might never be born, Washington might not cross the Delaware, there might never be a United States at all. So be careful. Stay on the Path.
Never
step off!’

‘I see,’ said Eckels. ‘Then it wouldn’t pay for us even to touch the
grass?
’

‘Correct. Crushing certain plants could add up infinitesimally. A little error here would multiply in sixty million years, all out of proportion. Of course maybe our theory is wrong. Maybe Time
can’t
be changed by us. Or maybe it can be changed only in little subtle ways. A dead mouse here makes an insect imbalance there, a population disproportion later, a bad harvest further on, a depression, mass starvation, and, finally, a change in
social
temperament in far-flung countries. Something much more subtle, like that. Perhaps only a soft breath, a whisper, a hair, pollen on the air, such a slight, slight change that unless you looked close you wouldn’t see it. Who knows? Who really can say he knows? We don’t know. We’re guessing. But until we do know for certain whether our messing around in Time
can
make a big roar or a little rustle in History, we’re being damned careful. This Machine, this Path, your clothing and bodies, were sterilized, as you know, before the journey. We wear these oxygen helmets so we can’t introduce our bacteria into an ancient atmosphere.’

‘How do we know which animals to shoot?’

‘They’re marked with red paint,’ said Travis. ‘Today, before our journey, we sent Lesperance here back with the Machine. He came to this particular era and followed certain animals.’

‘Studying them?’

‘Right,’ said Lesperance. ‘I track them through their entire existence, noting which of them lives longest. Not long. How many times they mate. Not often. Life’s short. When I find one that’s going to die when a tree falls on him, or one that drowns in a tar pit, I note the exact hour, minute, and second. I shoot a paint bomb. It leaves a red patch on his hide. We can’t miss it. Then I correlate our arrival in the Past so that we meet the Monster not more than two minutes before he would have died anyway. This way, we kill only animals with no future, that are never going to mate again. You see how
careful
we are?’

‘But if you came back this morning in Time,’ said Eckels eagerly, ‘you must’ve bumped into
us
, our Safari! How did it turn out? Was it successful? Did all of us get through—alive?’

Travis and Lesperance gave each other a look.

‘That’d be a paradox,’ said the latter. ‘Time doesn’t permit that sort of mess—a man meeting himself. When such occasions threaten, Time steps aside. Like an airplane hitting an air pocket. You felt the Machine jump just before we stopped? That was us passing ourselves on the way back to the Future. We saw nothing. There’s no way of telling
if
this expedition was a success,
if
we got our Monster, or whether all of us—meaning
you
, Mr Eckels—got out alive.’

Eckels smiled palely.

‘Cut that,’ said Travis sharply. ‘Everyone on his feet!’

They were ready to leave the Machine.

The jungle was high and the jungle was broad and the jungle was the entire world forever and forever. Sounds like music and sounds like flying tents filled the sky, and those were pterodactyls soaring with cavernous gray wings, gigantic bats out of a delirium and a night fever. Eckels, balanced on the narrow Path, aimed his rifle playfully.

‘Stop that!’ said Travis. ‘Don’t even aim for fun, damn it! If your gun should go off—’

Eckels flushed. ‘Where’s our
Tyrannosaurus?
’

Lesperance checked his wristwatch. ‘Up ahead. We’ll bisect his trail in sixty seconds. Look for the red paint, for Christ’s sake. Don’t shoot till we give the word. Stay on the Path.
Stay on the Path!
’

They moved forward in the wind of morning.

‘Strange,’ murmured Eckels. ‘Up ahead, sixty million years, Election Day over. Keith made President. Everyone celebrating. And here we are, a million years lost, and they don’t exist. The things we worried about for months, a lifetime, not even born or thought about yet.’

‘Safety catches off, everyone!’ ordered Travis. ‘You, first shot, Eckels. Second, Billings. Third, Kramer.’

‘I’ve hunted tiger, wild boar, buffalo, elephant, but Jesus, this is
it
,’ said Eckels. ‘I’m shaking like a kid.’

‘Ah,’ said Travis.

Everyone stopped.

Travis raised his hand. ‘Ahead,’ he whispered. ‘In the mist. There he is. There’s His Royal Majesty now.’

The jungle was wide and full of twitterings, rustlings, murmurs, and sighs.

Suddenly it all ceased, as if someone had shut a door.

Silence.

A sound of thunder.

Out of the mist, one hundred yards away, came
Tyrannosaurus rex
.

‘Jesus God,’ whispered Eckels.

‘Shh!’

It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body, those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers. Its eyes rolled, ostrich eggs, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed its mouth in a death grin. It ran, its pelvic bones crushing aside trees and bushes, its taloned feet clawing damp earth, leaving prints six inches deep wherever it settled its weight. It ran with a gliding ballet step, far too poised and balanced for its ten tons. It moved into a sunlit arena warily, its beautifully reptile hands feeling the air.