Authors: Philip Jose Farmer
Time's Last Gift
ONE
The explosion was as loud as a 75-millimeter cannon’s.
At one second, there had been nothing but dead wet grass and limestone rocks on the edge of the steep hill. A gray torpedo shape appeared as if precipitated by some invisible chemical in the air. The displacement of air caused the boom that rattled down the hillside and the valley and across the distant river and bounced back to the vehicle.
The H. G. Wells I, without moving a micron in space, had traveled from A.D. 2070, Spring, to circa 12,000 B.C., Spring. Immediately after making the long leap in time, it moved in space. The vehicle had appeared two feet in the air and on the lip of the hill. It fell with a crash to the ground and began rolling.
Forty feet long, its hull of irradiated plastic, it did not suffer from the very steep three-hundred-foot descent. It was not even scratched, though it broke off sharp projections of limestone, and eventually stopped upright at the bottom of the hill after snapping off a score of dwarf pines.
‘That was better than the fun-house,’ Rachel Silverstein said in a quivering voice. She smiled, but her skin was almost as pale as her teeth.
Drummond Silverstein, her husband, grunted. His eyes were wide, and his skin was gray. But the blood was returning swiftly.
Robert von Billmann spoke with a very slight trace of German accent.
‘I presume it is safe to unstrap ourselves?’
John Gribardsun twisted some dials on the instrument board before him. A slight whirring told of the projection of a TV camera. The view changed from a blue sky with some high white clouds to dead wet grass ahead and, a mile away, the river at the bottom of the valley.
He turned another dial, and the view switched to the hill down which they had rolled. Halfway up, a fox-like animal jumped out from behind a rock.
The camera swiveled. On the other side of the valley was another animal. Gribardsun turned the closeup dial.
‘A hyena,’ Gribardsun said. His voice was deep and authoritative. ‘A cave hyena. Looks like a Kenyan hyena except it’s much larger and all gray.’
Gribardsun had paled only slightly when they had rolled. He spoke with a British accent with a very slight underlying suspicion of another. Von Billmann, the linguist, had never been able to identify it. He had refused to question the Englishman about it because he wanted to label it himself. He prided himself on his ability to recognize any of the major languages and at least two hundred of the minor. But he had no idea of what tongue underlay the Englishman’s speech.
The screen showed the view behind the vehicle. A tiny figure stepped out from the shadow of a huge overhang of rock. It ran to a large rock and dropped behind it.
Rachel said, ‘That was a man, wasn’t it?’
‘Has to be,’ Gribardsun said.
He kept the camera upon the rock, and, after several minutes, a head appeared. He closed up, and they were looking at a seeming distance of ten feet into the face of a man. His hair and beard were light brown, tangled, and long. The face was broad and a prominent supraorbital ridge shaded eyes of some light color. The nose was large and aquiline.
‘I’m so thrilled,’ Rachel said. ‘Our first man! The first human being. A Magdalenian!’
The man stood up. He was about six feet tall. He wore a fur vest, fur knee-length pants, and calf-length fur boots. He carried a short flint-tipped spear and an atlatl, a stick with a notch at one end, which enabled him to cast the spear with greater force. A skin belt held a skin bag which looked as if it held a small animal or large bird. The belt also supported a skin sheath from which protruded a wooden hilt.
Gribardsun looked at a dial. ‘Outside temperature is fifty degrees Fahrenheit,’ he said. ‘And it’s fifteen minutes past noon, late May - perhaps. Warmer than I had expected.’
‘There’s very little green as yet,’ Drummond Silverstein said.
Nobody spoke for a moment. They were just beginning to feel the awe that they had expected to feel. The transition and the rolling had numbed them, and the anesthesia of wonder and fright was just beginning to dissolve.
Gribardsun checked that the equipment was operating at one hundred per cent efficiency. He ran through the CAA (checkout-after-arrival), calling out each item to von Billmann, who sat on his left. The German repeated each, and the words of both were taped. At the end of the checkout, a green light flashed on the panel.
Gribardsun said, ‘The air outside is pure. It’s air that we haven’t known for a hundred and fifty years.’
‘Let’s breathe it,’ Drummond Silverstein said.
The Englishman unstrapped himself and stood up. He was six-foot-three, and the top of his head missed the ceiling by only an inch. He looked as if he were thirty. He had long, straight, very black hair, dark gray eyes, and a handsome, slightly hawkish face. The sheer single-piece tunic revealed a body like Apollo’s. He was the M.D. of the expedition, a physical anthropologist, an archeologist, a botanist, and a linguist. If England had not abolished titles, he would have been a duke.
Robert von Billmann stood up a minute later. He was six-foot-two, well-built, thirty-five, titian-haired, and handsome in a pale Baltic way. He was the world’s foremost linguist, a cultural anthropologist, an art specialist, and had the equivalent of a master of arts in chemistry.
Rachel Silverstein followed him. She was short, petite, and dark but had light blue eyes. She was long-nosed, but pretty. She had Ph.D.s in genetics and zoology and considerable training in botany and meteorology.
Drummond Silverstein was about six feet tall, thin, and dark. He was a physicist and astronomer and was well trained in geology. He was also a well-known virtuoso on the violin and expert on musicology, preliterate and civilized.
Gribardsun turned the large wheel and pushed open the bank-vault-like port. He stood for a moment in the exit while the others crowded behind him. He breathed deeply and then turned his head to them and smiled slightly.
‘I suppose I should say something as poetic as Armstrong’s words when he first put foot onto the Moon,’ he said.
He stepped out onto a narrow strip, the top of a flight of twelve steps, which had slid out when the port was opened. The air was bracing. He sniffed as if he were a great cat, and then he went down the steps. The camera on top of the vehicle had bent over to take in the area of the port because he had set it to track him when he emerged. Its audio was also on. His image and words would be recorded for posterity - if the vehicle returned.
‘This is Time’s last gift,’ he said loudly, looking up at the camera. ‘Modern man will never again be able to travel to this point in time. We, the crew of the H. G. Wells I, will do our best to thank Time and Mankind for this great gift.’
The others looked disappointed. Evidently they thought that, if they had been given the chance, they could have uttered more notable words.
Gribardsun went back into the vessel and unlocked a box of weapons. Rachel followed him and removed clothes of some light but very warm material which retained body heat very effectively. Armed and weaponed, and two equipped with cameras the shape and size of American footballs, they moved out. The port had been closed, but the camera on top of the vessel tracked them. They began the steep climb with the Englishman at their head. They were in excellent physical condition, but all except Gribardsun were puffing and red-faced by the time they reached the top.
Gribardsun turned and looked back down. The vessel was small. But it weighed three hundred tons, and it had to be moved back up to the physical point where it had emerged from Time. Otherwise, when the time came to be pulled back to A.D. 2074, the vessel would remain in 12,000 B.C. And so would its crew. The mechanics of time-travel devices required that the vessel, and its original mass within plus or minus ten ounces, be in the exact landing place.
Gribardsun drove a number of sharp plastic spikes into the ground to mark the outlines of the depression formed where the vessel had fallen. Four years from now, the depression might be smoothed out, and thus it would be impossible to locate.
Rachel and von Billmann took films of the spot, and then Gribardsun and Drummond Silverstein took the coordinates of the depression from three large rocks sticking out of the soil nearby.
The H. G. Wells I had been set on a wooden platform on top of a hill before being chronologically launched. The edge of the hill in the Vezere River valley, France, A.D. 2070, was forty feet away from the vessel. It had been expected that the edge of the hill in 12,000 B.C. would be even more distant. The geologists had affirmed this to be a fact. Gribardsun wondered if they had been correct but a slight displacement in space had occurred. The theoreticians said that this would not occur, but the truth was that they did not know what would happen in practice.
The process of time travel required an enormous amount of energy. The further back into time the machine went, the more the energy. This period was as far back as a machine could be sent. There was a factor, which only a few mathematicians understood, which required that the most expensive and most dangerous journey be made first. If the time travelers waited, say, eight years more before attempting to go into the Magdalenian, they would find themselves in circa 8000 B.C. The era of 12,000 B.C. would be forever out of reach. And if they waited for ten years, they would find that 4000 B.C. was as far back as they could go.
Moreover, there was a strange and unexplained limit at the other end. The first small experimental manless model had been sent back one day into time. But it had never arrived, as they knew it would not, having been present the day before. Where the model went was not known. Then another model, at great expense of materials and energy, was sent back a week. This did not appear, as the experimenters knew it would not. But they had to be sure.
At this time, the news media learned about Project Chronos, and it was suspended for a while until the public, and Congress, were satisfied that it was safe. The old science-fiction idea that tampering with time would change the course of events had to be dealt with. Stories by various writers from Wells to Silverberg and Bradbury and Heinlein, illustrating the paradox and danger of time travel, were reprinted and even dramatized. Millions of people were fearful that time travel would result in one of their ancestors being killed, and so their descendants would vanish from the face of Earth, as if the boojum were prowling it.
Jacob Moishe, leader of the project team that had invented the time-travel machines, quieted this form of protest. He showed, in a series of articles, that if time travel was going to make any changes, it had already done so, and therefore there was nothing to fear. By then the original goal of circa 25,000 B.C. was lost forever. Too much time had elapsed. The expedition would have to settle for the middle Magdalenian. The funds were restored, and a small model was sent back to one hundred years, and a search was made for it. The theory was that it had appeared in A.D. 1973 and had been picked up by someone who did not, of course, recognize it. But, since it was practically indestructible, it existed now and was probably in someone’s possession. Or perhaps buried some place. Worldwide advertising failed to turn up the model.
Meanwhile, another had been sent to A.D. 1875, and the advertising for this one went around the world. None showed up. A third one was sent back at a cost that staggered Congress and the public. This one was set to bob up about A.D. 1850 within fifty feet of where the project buildings stood.
Dr. Moishe’s researches had shown that, in 1850, this hilltop in Syracuse, New York, had been the scene of a mysterious and exceedingly violent explosion. He reasoned that the explosion had been caused when the model had appeared inside some solid matter, such as soil or a tree; the result of two solid objects trying to occupy the same space had been the explosion. A complete conversion of matter to energy had not occurred, of course. Otherwise, the hill and much of the surrounding countryside would have disappeared.
The model contained radioactive particles, and so, after it was sent back to 1850, the area for a mile around was scanned with geiger counters. A piece of the radioactive particle-bearing model was located and identified. Accusations of fraud were, of course, made, but Dr. Moishe had foreseen this and made foolproof arrangements. He had even gotten six congressmen and the Secretary of Science to watch the entire procedure.
One of the theories about the failure of the first two models to be found was immediately dismissed. This theory postulated that the structure of time was such that time travel was impossible within any period in which contemporaries had been living. In other words, time, to avoid a paradox, but not the pathetic fallacy, would not permit travel except in a time before anybody living in A.D. 2070 had been born. The critics pointed out, none too gently, that this would mean that somebody born before A.D. 1875 was still living and that his presence was keeping the models from appearing in A.D. 1973 and 1890. If the hypothetical person was born in, say, A.D. 1870, then he would today be 200 years old. And that was impossible, for several reasons. For one thing, a record existed of the birth date of everybody living, and the oldest person in the world was 130. She had been bora in A.D. 1940.
The theory was admittedly farfetched, if not crackpotted. Its proponent, who later committed suicide for unknown reasons, and so discredited any reputation he had for sanity, replied that anyone that old might have some reason for not wanting to be known. And it was not impossible to fake records.
John Gribardsun was thinking of this when Rachel Silverstein touched his arm. She seemed to be touching him at least ten times a day, as if she were testing to make sure that he existed. Or because she liked to touch him. He did not mind it, though he knew that Drummond disliked it. But it was up to her husband to say something about it to her, and, so far as he knew, the man had never opened his mouth about it.
‘Do you think we can get the ship back up by ourselves?’ she said. Her light blue eyes were bright, as if she were burning with excitement.