Time's Last Gift (2 page)

‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘But I think we could do it far more swiftly and easily if we had the strong backs of some cavemen helping us. So we won’t worry about it now. After all, we have four years.’

Robert yon Billmann said something sharply. He was looking through binoculars to the northeast, across the valley. Gribardsun saw the figures that had attracted von Billmann. He lifted his own binoculars. The heads and antlers of several brownish reindeer came into view. He moved the glasses and within a minute had zeroed in on a big grayish shape. It was a wolf. Soon, he caught about a dozen with a sweep of the glasses.

The deer were well aware of the wolves. They continued to crop at the moss between liftings of the head, to sniff the air, and to eye the slinking beasts some fifty yards distant.

Presently some of the gray shapes floated behind a hill and soon appeared ahead of the herd. They disappeared again, and then those that had remained moved in slowly toward the herd. The deer waited for a minute to make sure that the wolves would not stop and suddenly, as if the leader had spoken, they bounded away. The wolves ran after them, and then, as the herd passed the hill behind which the others were, they veered away. Six wolves had run out at them. One wolf caught a doe that stumbled, and the others leaped upon it. The remaining deer got away, except for a buck that slipped when he leaped across a brook. Before he could get up again, he found two wolves tearing at his legs. These were joined by others, and the wolves quit running.

Gribardsun had been watching with keen interest. He put the binoculars down and said, ‘And to think that the only wolves in our time were in zoos or small reservations. These beasts have a whole world to roam in. And there must be millions of them.’

‘Sometimes I think you’re the zoologist,’ Rachel said.

‘I am a naturalist.’

He turned and looked down the valley where they had seen the man. He had long ago hidden behind a rock and, though Gribardsun had stopped on the way up the hill to search for him with his binoculars, he had failed to find him. Now the man, having seen the four leave the vessel, was approaching it.

‘Curiosity kills more than a cat,’ Gribardsun said.

The man’s home might be a little way off or many miles. The expedition had quite a few daylight hours left, so they might as well take advantage of it. There was much work to do.

He allowed the others to collect their samples of soil, plants, and rocks and to take some more photographs. Then he said that they should return to the vessel, store their samples, pick up food and trinkets, and set out up the valley to look for a human habitation.

They started back down the slope. The man was within a hundred yards of the great torpedo shape. Seeing the four coming down the hill, he ducked behind a boulder. He remained there until Gribardsun opened the port of the vessel. Then he rose and, bending over, ran to a more distant rock. Drummond Silverstein took some more films of him.

They packed their bags and strapped them onto their backs. Gribardsun took the 500-caliber express rifle. Von Billmann and Drummond carried the rifles which shot anesthetic darts. Rachel carried a 30-caliber automatic rifle. Each had an automatic pistol in the holster at his belt, and they had explosive and gas grenades in their sacks.

They started up the valley and presently came to a small stream which meandered down to the river below. They followed along the stream for a time. The man kept ahead of them by a quarter of a mile.

At the end of two miles, they decided to climb up through the base of the cliffs. There were some overhangs that looked interesting. These turned out to have been inhabited by men, judging from the rude hearths of stone, the bones, flint, and chert fragments, and pieces of wood and fur. A half mile on, they found a narrow cave which stank as if hyenas had once lived there. Rachel said that she would study it later and determine what hyenas ate and so forth. She threw some rocks into the interior but got no result.

They walked five miles before they came to the man’s home. The valley suddenly widened here, and the overhang which housed human beings was at the top of a steep slope. They could not see any women or children from this angle, but the twelve men would not have gathered in full sight on the edge of the hill unless they had something to defend.

Gribardsun looked around before giving the order to ascend. It seemed likely that there would be other men out hunting, and he did not want to be surprised by men attacking from behind.

The man they had first seen had scrambled up ahead of them to warn the others. Now he stood with the others, brandishing his spear and yelling at the invaders.

Gribardsun activated the bullhorn device on his chest and then told the others to drop about a hundred feet behind him. He looked for large rocks on the lip of the hill. He was ready to jump if they rolled any down on them. But there did not seem to be any nor was there evidence at the foot of the hill that they had rolled any down in the past.

He wondered what the natives were thinking. There were twelve warriors there, defending their home territory, and there were only three men and a woman boldly approaching them. Their appearance, of course, would be impressive. There would be something very alien about the invaders; the clothes, the weird-looking weapons, the clean-shaven faces. Most mystifying, and terrifying, would be the confidence with which the greatly outnumbered party approached.

Gribardsun had had long experience with savages. He was much older than he looked and remembered when Africa and Asia still hid genuine preliterates with very little knowledge of civilization. It was this experience which gave him confidence, because he knew that these people did not really want to engage in combat with an unknown enemy. The others of his party had had little to do with genuine primitives; they had been born too late; the savages had died out or been citified; the few left on reservations were too well-educated to be ‘real’ primitives.

Nevertheless, the natives were dangerous. They must have fought enemy humans and they must have hunted the dangerous mammoth, rhinoceros, cave bear, and cave lion.

Gribardsun got well within range of the spears before he held up his hand for the others to stop. He advanced slowly then, speaking through the bullhorn. His voice, like a thunder god’s, bellowed at them. They stopped yelling and waving their weapons when the first words struck them. Even at this distance he could see their flushed skins turn pale.

He stopped, too, and pulled out a Very gun and fired it straight up into the air. The parachute expanded from the stick, at two hundred feet, and as it fell it burned a bright green and then a bright scarlet and then exploded loudly at a fifty-foot altitude.

The warriors became rigid and silent.

They must have wanted to run, but that would have meant abandoning the women and children. And that they would not do.

Gribardsun approved of this. Though they must have fell a terrible awe of this evil magician, yet they stood their ground.

The Englishman held out both hands - his express rifle was still supported by a strap over his shoulder - and he advanced smiling.

A tall heavily built man with dark red hair mingled with gray stepped out of the line and approached Gribardsun slowly. The brown-haired man whom the party had followed also came down the slope though he stayed a few feet behind the red-haired man. The chief held a big stone axe in his right hand and a thick-shafted spear in his left. He was about as tall as Gribardsun.

The Englishman spoke through the bullhorn again. At the thundering speech, the chief and his companion stopped. But Gribardsun continued to smile, and then he turned the amplifier off, lowering his hand slowly so he would not alarm the two. After that, he raised his hand and spoke with his normal voice. The eyes of the two widened at this. However, they seemed to understand that the change in loudness was meant to signify friendliness.

Gribardsun walked slowly upward until he was about ten feet from them. At this range, he could see that both were quivering. But it was the alienness of the intruders that was making them shake, not the prospect of combat.

Gribardsun talked and at the same time made signs to reinforce the words. He used the sign language of the Kalahari bushmen, not because he expected the sign language of these people - if they had any - to coincide but because the signs would be additional reassurances of his peaceful intentions.

He told them that the four came from a far place and that they brought gifts and that they were friends.

The chief finally smiled and lowered his weapons, though he still kept his distance. The other man also smiled. The chief turned, still watching Gribardsun out of the corner of his eyes, and shouted at the warriors above. Then he beckoned Gribardsun to follow him, and he and the brown-haired man preceded the four. At the top they found themselves ringed by the warriors but these made no threatening gestures.

The four could now see that there was a large camp under the immense limestone overhang. The north end was blocked by stones piled on top of each other and part of the eastern end was also blocked. There were about thirty ‘wigwams,’ tents of skin supported by wooden poles, near the rear of the overhang. Gribardsun counted thirty adult women, ten juvenile girls, six juvenile males, and thirty-eight children. Later, when hunters returned, the total adult male population would be twenty-four.

There were small fires in every hearth and wooden spits over many, some of which held skinned and gutted rabbits, marmots, birds, and parts of a bear. In one corner was a wooden cage in which was a bear cub. Before one of the tents was a pole held up by a pile of rocks and dirt. Stuck on its end was a bear skull easily as large as the largest of the Kodiak bears of Gribardsun’s time. Gribardsun wondered if the skull and the cub meant that the tribe had a bear cult.

Water would have to be brought up from the river. A number of skin bags on the dirt floor seemed to hold water.

There were bones all over the place, and a strong odor from the north indicated that human excrement was dropped over the edge of the hill on the other side of the rude wall. The odor of the natives, and their matted hair and beards and dirty skins, showed that they cared little for personal cleanliness.

Gribardsun walked over to the nearest tent and looked inside without objection from anybody. There were very low beds with wooden frames and furs piled on top. On one lay a boy of about ten. He stank of sickness.

Gribardsun crawled into the tent after telling Rachel to hold the skin flap open for him. The boy looked at him with glazed eyes. He was too sick to be frightened by the stranger.

A woman shouted something outside and then crawled in to watch the stranger. She was making sure that the mysterious man with the voice like thunder did not intend to harm her child.

Gribardsun smiled at her but also made a gesture for her not to interfere.

He put a reflector on his head and shone a light into the boy’s eyes and down his throat and into his ears. The boy submitted though he trembled with fear.

Gribardsun had to decide whether or not to take samples of skin tissue, blood, saliva, and urine. So many of the preliterate societies he had known had objected to giving specimens. They feared that these would be used against them by evil magic. If this tribe had the same superstitions, it might react violently, no matter how awed they were at this moment.

He considered. The flat instrument he had applied to the boy’s skin indicated a fever of 104° Fahrenheit. The skin was flushed and dry. The breath was foul. The heartbeat was eighty-five per minute. The breathing was rapid and shallow. These symptoms could mean a dozen different diseases. He needed specimens for a diagnosis.

He could just back off and let nature, or whatever the local witch doctor might have in the way of efficacious medicine, do its work. He had been warned that he should not get involved with medical matters if he thought that his interference might backfire. After all, everybody he would meet was doomed to die, would have been dead for almost fourteen thousand years when he was born. But procedure was left to his discretion. If he thought he could cure a sick native, and thereby aid the goal of the project, he could proceed. But if he did not wish to endanger the project, he could just let the natives die.

There was no question of concern about his interference changing the course of events. Whatever he was to do had been done, and events and lives had been determined before he was born even if he had helped determine them.

Gribardsun’s back kept the mother from seeing what he was doing. She said something in a protesting tone, but he paid no attention. He stuck the tip of the instrument against the arm, twisted a little knob on its side, the syringe filled with blood. He drew off some saliva from lie boy’s open mouth. Getting urine would be difficult only if the mother objected. He secured another instrument at the proper place, and pressed a button plunger on the end of a flexible metal tube. If there was any urine available, it would come out without delay, and it did. He removed the instrument and packed it away. When he returned to the vessel, he would make his analyses. Rather, the small medical computer in the ship would. And tomorrow, if things went right here today, he would transport the computer-analyzer to this site.

The mother protested some more, but she crawled out of the tent a moment later. Perhaps she was going to the chief and the medicine man. He took advantage of her absence to drop a pill into the boy’s mouth, raise his head, and pour ill-smelling water into his mouth from a skin bag.

The pill was a general panacea - a redundancy in terms - which could slow down the development of a dozen diseases. It might not contain anything to help whatever was making the boy sick, but there was nothing in it to hurt him.

Outside, the woman was talking rapidly and loudly and gesticulating to the chief and a short muscular man with a forehead covered with symbols painted with ocher. The symbols matched those on the skin of the tent. This man had just come in from the hunt. His woman was carrying off two rabbits and a large badger.