by Larry Niven
The horse stayed to one side and a little behind Svetz's flight stick. It did not seem inconvenienced by the girl's weight. Why should it be? It must have been bred for the task. Svetz notched his speed higher, to find how fast he could conveniently move.
Faster he flew, and faster. The horse must have a limit.
He was up to eight before he quit. The girl lay flat along the animal's back, hugging its neck to protect her face from the wind. But the horse ran on, daring Svetz with its eyes.
How to describe such motion? Svetz had never seen ballet. He knew how machinery moved, and this wasn't it. All he could think of was a man and a woman making love. Slippery-smooth rhythmic motion, absolute single-minded purpose, motion for the pleasure of motion. It was terrible in its beauty, the flight of the horse.
The word for such running must have died with the horse itself.
The horse would never have tired, but the girl did. She tugged on the animal's mane, and it stopped. Svetz gave her the jewels he held, made four more and gave her one.
She was crying from the wind, crying and smiling as she took the jewels. Was she smiling for the jewels, or for the joy of the ride? Exhausted, panting, she lay with her back against the warm, pulsing flank of the resting animal. Only her hand moved, as she ran her fingers repeatedly through its silver mane. The horse watched Svetz with malevolent brown eyes.
The girl was homely. It wasn't just the jarring lack of makeup. There was evidence of vitamin starvation. She was short, less than five feet in height, and thin. There were marks of childhood disease. But happiness glowed behind her homely face, and it make her almost passable, as she clutched the corundum stones.
When she seemed rested, Svetz remounted. They went on.
He was almost out of corundum when they reached the extension cage. There it was that he ran into trouble.
The girl had been awed by Svetz's jewels, and by Svetz himself, possibly because of his height or his ability to fly. But the extension cage scared her. Svetz couldn't blame her. The side with the door in it was no trouble: just a seamless spherical mirror. But the other side blurred away in a direction men could not visualize. It had scared Svetz spitless the first time he saw the time machine in action.
He could buy the horse from her, shoot it here and pull it inside, using the flight stick to float it. But it would be so much easier if...
It was worth a try. Svetz used the rest of his corundum. Then he walked into the extension cage, leaving a trail of colored corundum beads behind him.
He had worried because the heat-and-pressure device would not produce facets. The stones all came out shaped like miniature hen's eggs. But he was able to vary the color, using chromic oxide for red and ferric oxide for yellow and titanium for blue; and he could vary the pressure planes, to produce cat's eyes or star gems at will. He left a trail of small stones, red and yellow and blue. .
And the girl followed, frightened, but unable to resist the bait. By now she had nearly filled a handkerchief with the stones. The horse followed her into the extension cage.
Inside, she looked at the four stones in Svetz's hand: one of each color, red and yellow and light blue and black, the largest he could make. He pointed to the horse, then to the stones.
The girl agonized. Svetz perspired. She didn't want to give up the horse . . . and Svetz was out of corundum.
She nodded, one swift jerk of her chin. Quickly, before she could change her mind, Svetz poured the stones into her hand. She clutched the hoard to her bosom and ran out of the cage, sobbing.
The horse stood up to follow.
Svetz swung the rifle and shot it. A bead of blood appeared on the animal's neck. It shied back, then sighted on Svetz along its natural bayonet.
Poor kid, Svetz thought as he turned to the door. But she'd have lost the horse anyway. It had sucked polluted water from an open stream. Now he need only load the flight stick aboard.
Motion caught his eye.
A false assumption can be deadly. Svetz had not waited for the horse to fall. It was with something of a shock that he realized the truth. The beast wasn't about to fall. It was about to spear him like a cocktail shrimp.
He hit the door button and dodged.
Exquisitely graceful, exquisitely sharp, the spiral horn slammed into the closing door. The animal turned like white lightning in the confines of the cage, and again Svetz leapt for his life.
The point missed him by half an inch. It plunged past him and into the control board, through the plastic panel and into the wiring beneath.
Something sparkled and something sputtered.
The horse was taking careful aim, sighting along the spear in its forehead. Svetz did the only thing he could think of. He pulled the home-again lever.
The horse screamed as it went into free fall. The horn, intended for Svetz's navel, ripped past his ear and tore his breathing-balloon wide open.
Then gravity returned; but it was the peculiar gravity of an extension cage moving forward through time. Svetz and the horse were pulled against the padded walls. Svetz sighed in relief.
He sniffed again in disbelief. The smell was strong and strange, like nothing Svetz had ever smelled before. The animal's terrible horn must have damaged the air plant. Very likely he was breathing poison. If the cage didn't return in time...
But would it return at all? It might be going anywhere, any-when, the way that ivory horn had smashed through anonymous wiring. They might come out at the end of time, when even the black infrasuns gave not enough heat to sustain life.
There might not even be a future to return to. He had left the flight stick. How would it be used? What would they make of it, with its control handle at one end and the brush-style static discharge at the other and the saddle in the middle? Perhaps the girl would try to use it. He could visualize her against the night sky, in the light of a full moon . . . and how would that change history?
The horse seemed on the verge of apoplexy. Its sides heaved, its eyes rolled wildly. Probably it was the cabin air, thick with carbon dioxide. Again, it might be the poison the horse had sucked from an open stream.
Gravity died. Svetz and the horse tumbled in free fall, and the horse queasily tried to gore him.
Gravity returned, and Svetz, who was ready for it, landed on top. Someone was already opening the door.
Svetz took the distance in one bound. The horse followed, screaming with rage, intent on murder. Two men went flying as it charged out into the institute control center.
"It doesn't take anesthetics!" Svetz shouted over his shoulder. The animal's agility was hampered here among the desks and lighted screens, and it was probably drunk on hyperventilation. It kept stumbling into desks and men. Svetz easily stayed ahead of the slashing horn.
A full panic was developing.
"We couldn't have done it without Zeera," Ra Chen told him much later. "Your idiot tanj horse had the whole center terrorized.
All of a sudden it went completely tame, walked up to that frigid bitch Zeera and let her lead it away."
"Did you get it to the hospital in time?"
Ra Chen nodded gloomily. Gloom was his favorite expression and was no indication of his true feelings. "We found over fifty unknown varieties of bacteria in the beast's bloodstream. Yet it hardly looked sick! It looked healthy as a, healthy as a . . . it must have tremendous stamina. We managed to save not only the horse, but most of the bacteria too, for the Zoo."
Svetz was sitting up in a hospital bed, with his arm up to the elbow in a diagnostician. There was always the chance that he too had located some long-extinct bacterium. He shifted uncomfortably, being careful not to move the wrong arm, and asked, "Did you ever find an anesthetic that worked?"
"Nope. Sorry about that, Svetz. We still don't know why your needles didn't work. The tanj horse is simply immune to tranks of any kind.
"Incidentally, there was nothing wrong with your air plant. You were smelling the horse."
"I wish I'd known that. I thought
I was dying."
"It's driving the internes crazy, that smell. And we can't seem to get it out of the center." Ra Chen sat down on the edge of the bed. "What bothers me is the horn on its forehead. The horse in the picture book had no horns."
"No, sir."
"Then it must be a different species. It's not really a horse, Svetz. We'll have to send you back. It'll break our budget, Svetz."
"I disagree, sir-"
"Don't be so tanj polite."
"Then don't be so tanj stupid, sir." Svetz was not going back for another horse. "People who kept tame horses must have developed the habit of cutting off the horn when the animal was a pup. Why not? We all saw how dangerous that horn is. Much too dangerous for a domestic animal."
"Then why does our horse have a horn?"
"That's why I thought it was wild, the first time I saw it. I suppose they didn't start cutting off horns until later in history."
Ra Chen nodded in gloomy satisfaction. "I thought so too. Our problem is that the Secretary-General is just barely bright enough to notice that his horse has a horn, and the picture book horse doesn't. He's bound to blame me."
"Mmm." Svetz wasn't sure what was expected of him.
"I'll have to have the horn amputated."
"Somebody's bound to notice the scar," said Svetz.
"Tanj it, you're right. I've got enemies at court. They'd be only too happy to claim I'd mutilated the Secretary-General's pet." Ra Chen glared at Svetz. "All right, let's hear your idea."
Svetz was busy regretting. Why had he spoken? His vicious, beautiful horse, tamely docked of its killer horn . . . he had found the thought repulsive. His impulse had betrayed him. What could they do but remove the horn?
He had it, "Change the picture book, not the horse. A computer could duplicate the book in detail, but with a horn on every horse. Use the center computer, then wipe the tape afterward."
Morosely thoughtful, Ra Chen said, "That might work. I know someone who could switch the books." He looked up from under bushy black brows. "Of course, you'd have to keep quiet."
"Yes, sir."
"Don't forget." Ra Chen got up. "When you get out of the diagnostician, you start a four weeks vacation."
"I'm sending you back for one of these," Ra Chen told him four weeks later. He opened the bestiary. "We picked up the book in a public park around ten Post Atomic; left the kid who was holding it playing with a carborundum egg."
Svetz examined the picture. "That's ugly. That's really ugly. You're trying to balance the horse, right? The horse was so beautiful, you've got to have one of these or the universe goes off balance."
Ra Chen closed his eyes in pain. "Just go get us the Gila monster, Svetz. The Secretary-General wants a Gila monster."
"How big is it?"
They both looked at the illustration. There was no way to tell.
"From the looks of it, we'd better use the big extension cage."
Svetz barely made it back that time. He was suffering from total exhaustion and extensive second-degree burns. The thing he brought back was thirty feet long, had vestigial bat-like wings, breathed fire, and didn't look very much like the illustration; but it was as close as anything he'd found.
The Secretary-General loved it.
Leviathon
TWO MEN STOOD on one side of a thick glass wall. "You'll be airborne." Svetz's beefy red-faced boss was saying. "We made some improvements in the small extension cage while you were in the hospital. You can hover it or fly it at up to fifty miles per hour or let it fly itself: there's a constant-altitude setting. Your field of vision is total. We've made the shell of the extension cage completely transparent."
On the other side of the thick glass, something was trying to kill them. It was 40 feet long from nose to tail and was equipped with vestigial batlike wings. Otherwise, it was built something like a slender lizard. It screamed and scratched at the glass with murderous claws.
The sign on the glass read:
GILA MONSTER
RETRIEVED FROM THE YEAR 230 ANTE ATOMIC, APPROXIMATELY, FROM THE REGION OF CHINA, EARTH. EXTINCT.
"You'll be well out of his reach," said Ra Chen.
"Yes, sir." Svetz stood with his arms folded about him, as if he had a chill. He was being sent after the biggest animal that had ever lived; and Svetz was afraid of animals.
"For science' sake! What are you worried about Svetz? It's only a big fish!"
"Yes, sir. You said that about the Gila monster. It's just an extinct lizard, you said."
"We had only a drawing in a children's book to go by. How could we know it would be so big?"
The Gila monster drew back from the glass. It inhaled hugely and took aim. Yellow-and-orange flame spewed from its nostrils and played across the glass. Svetz squeaked and jumped for cover.
"He can't get through," said Ra Chen.
Svetz picked himself up. He was a slender, small-boned man with pale skin, light-blue eyes and very fine ash-blond hair. "How could we know it would breathe fire?" he mimicked. "That lizard almost cremated me. I spent four months in the hospital, as it was. And what really burns me is, he looks less like the drawing every time I see him. Sometimes I wonder if I didn't get the wrong animal."
"What's the difference, Svetz? The secretary-general loved him. That's what counts."
"Yes, sir. Speaking of the secretary-general, what does he want with a sperm whale? He's got a horse, he's got a Gila monster-"
"That's a little complicated." Ra Chen grimaced. "Palace politics! It's always complicated. Right now, Svetz, somewhere in the United Nations palace, a hundred different scientists are trying to get support, each for his own project. And every last one of them involves getting the attention of the secretary-general and holding it. Keeping his attention isn't easy."
Svetz nodded. Everybody knew about the secretary-general.
The family that had ruled the United Nations for 700 years was somewhat inbred.
The secretary-general was 44 years old. He was a happy person; he loved animals and flowers and pictures and people. Pictures of planets and multiple star systems made him clap his hands and coo with delight; so the Institute for Space Research shared amply in the United Nations budget. But he liked extinct animals, too.
"Someone managed to convince the secretary-general that he wants the largest animal on earth. The idea may have been to take us down a peg or two," said Ra Chen. "Someone may think we're getting too big a share of the budget.
"By the time I got onto it, the secretary-general wanted a Brontosaurus. We'd never have gotten him that. No extension cage will reach that far."
"Was it your idea to get him a whale, sir?"
"Yeah. It wasn't easy to persuade him. Whales have been extinct for so long that we don't even have pictures. All I had to show him was a crystal sculpture from Archaeology-dug out of the Steuben Glass building-and a Bible and a dictionary. I managed to convince him that Leviathan and the sperm whale were one and the same."
"That's not strictly true." Svetz had read a computer-produced condensation of the Bible. The condensation had ruined the plot, in Svetz's opinion. "Leviathan could be anything big and destructive, even a horde of locusts."
"Thank science you weren't there to help, Svetz! The issue was confused enough. Anyway. I promised the secretary-general the largest animal that ever lived on earth. All the literature says that that animal was a whale. And there were sperm-whale herds all over the oceans as recently as the First Century Ante-Atomic. You shouldn't have any trouble finding one."
"In twenty minutes?"
Ra Chen looked startled. "What?"
"If I try to keep the big extension cage in the past for more than twenty minutes. I'll never be able to bring it home. The-"
"I know that."
"-uncertainty factor in the energy constants-"
"Svetz-"
"-will blow the institute right off the map."
"We thought of that, Svetz. You'll go back in the small extension cage. When you f
ind a whale, you'll signal the big extension cage."
"Signal it how?"
"We've found a way to send a simple on-off pulse through time. Let's go back to the institute and I'll show you."
Malevolent golden eyes watched them through the glass as they walked away.
The small extension cage was the part of the time machine that did the moving. Within its transparent shell, Svetz seemed to ride a flying armchair equipped with an airplane passenger's lunch tray; except that the lunch tray was covered with lights and buttons and knobs and crawling green lines. He was somewhere off the East Coast of North America, in or around the year 100 AnteAtomic or 1845 Anno Domini. The temporal-precession gauge was not particularly accurate.
Svetz skimmed low over water the color of lead, beneath a sky the color of slate. But for the rise and fall of the sea, he might almost have been suspended in an enormous sphere painted half light, half dark. He let the extension cage fly itself, 60 feet above the water, while he watched the needle on the NAI, the Nervous Activities Indicator.
Hunting Leviathan.
His stomach was uneasy. Svetz had thought he was adjusting to the peculiar gravitational side effects of time travel. But apparently not.
At least he would not be here long.
On this trip, he was not looking for a mere 40-foot Gila monster. Now he hunted the largest animal that had ever lived. A most conspicuous beast. And now he had a life-seeking instrument, the NAI.
The needle twitched violently.
Was it a whale? But the needle was trembling in apparent indecision. A cluster of sources, then. Svetz looked in the direction indicated.
A clipper ship, winged with white sail, long and slender and graceful as hell. Crowded, too, Svetz guessed. Many humans, closely packed, would affect the NAI in just that manner. A sperm whale-a single center of complex nervous activity-would attract the needle as violently, without making it jerk about like that.
The ship would interfere with reception. Svetz turned east and away, but not without regret. The ship was beautiful.
The uneasiness in Svetz's belly was getting worse, not better.
Endless gray-green water, rising and falling beneath his flying armchair.