by Larry Niven
Enlightenment came like something clicking in his head. Seasick. On automatic, the extension cage matched its motion to that of the surface over which it flew; and that surface was heaving in great dark swells.
No wonder his stomach was uneasy! Svetz grinned and reached for the manual controls.
The NAI needle suddenly jerked hard over. A bite! thought Svetz, and he looked off to the right. No sign of a ship. And submarines hadn't been invented yet. Had they? No, of course they hadn't.
The needle was rock-steady.
Svetz flipped the call button.
The source of the tremendous NAI signal was off to his right and moving. Svetz turned to follow it. It would be minutes before the call signal reached the Institute for Temporal Research and brought the big extension cage with its weaponry for hooking Leviathan.
Many years ago, Ra Chen had dreamed of rescuing the library at Alexandria from Caesar's fire. For this purpose, he had built the big extension cage. Its door was a gaping iris, big enough to be loaded while the library was actually burning. Its hold, at a guess, was at least twice large enough to hold all the scrolls in that ancient library.
The big cage had cost a fortune in government money. It had failed to go back beyond 400 A.A., or 1545 A.D. The books burned at Alexandria were still lost to history, or at least to historians.
Such a boondoggle would have broken other men. Somehow, Ra Chen had survived the blow to his reputation.
He had pointed out the changes to Svetz after they returned from the zoo. "We've fitted the cage out with heavy-duty stunners and anti-gravity beams. You'll operate them by remote control. Be careful not to let the stun beam touch you. It would kill even a sperm whale if you held it on him for more than a few seconds and it'd kill a man instantly. Other than that, you should have no problems."
It was at that moment that Svetz's stomach began to hurt.
"Our major change is the call button. It will actually send us a signal through time, so that we can send the big extension cage back to you. We can land it right beside you, no more than a few minutes off. That took considerable research. Svetz. The treasury raised our budget for this year, so that we could get that whale."
Svetz nodded.
"Just be sure you've got a whale before you call for the big extension cage."
Now, 1200 years earlier, Svetz followed an underwater source of nervous impulse. The signal was intensely powerful. It could not be anything smaller than an adult bull sperm whale.
A shadow formed in the air to his right. Svetz watched it take shape: a great gray-blue sphere floating beside him. Around the rim of the door were anti-gravity beamers and heavy-duty stun guns. The opposite side of the sphere wasn't there; it simply faded away.
To Svetz, that was the most frightening thing about any time machine: the way it seemed to turn a corner that wasn't there.
Svetz was almost over the signal. Now he used the remote controls to swing the anti-gravity beamers around and down.
He had them locked on the source. He switched them on and dials surged.
Leviathan was heavy. More massive than Svetz had expected. He upped the power and watched the NAI needle swing as Leviathan rose invisibly through the water.
Where the surface of the water bulged upward under the attack of the antigravity beams, a shadow formed. Leviathan rising...
Was there something wrong with the shape?
Then a trembling spherical bubble of water rose, shivering, from the ocean, and Leviathan was within it.
Partly within it. He was too big to fit, though he should not have been.
He was four times as massive as a sperm whale should have been and a dozen times as long. He looked nothing like the crystal Steuben sculpture. Leviathan was a kind of serpent, armored with red-bronze scales as big as a viking's shield, armed with teeth like ivory spears. His triangular jaws gaped wide. As he floated toward Svetz, he writhed, seeking with his bulging yellow eyes for whatever strange enemy had subjected him to this indignity.
Svetz was paralyzed with fear and indecision. Neither then nor later did he doubt that what he saw was the Biblical Leviathan. This had to be the largest beast that had ever roamed the sea; a beast large enough and fierce enough to be synonymous with anything big and destructive. Yet-if the crystal sculpture was anything like representational, this was not a sperm whale at all.
In any case, he was far too big for the extension cage.
Indecision stayed his hand-and then Svetz stopped thinking entirely, as the great slitted irises found him.
The beast was floating past him. Around its waist was a sphere of weightless water that shrank steadily as gobbets dripped away and rained back to the sea. The beast's nostrils flared-it was obviously an air breather, though not a cetacean.
It stretched, reaching for Svetz with gaping jaws.
Teeth like scores of elephant's tusks all in a row. Polished and needle-sharp. Svetz saw them close about him from above and below, while he sat frozen in fear.
At the last moment, he shut his eyes tight.
When death did not come, Svetz opened his eyes.
The jaws had not entirely closed on Svetz and his armchair. He heard them grinding faintly against-against the invisible surface of the extension cage, whose existence Svetz had forgotten entirely.
Svetz resumed breathing. He would return home with an empty extension cage, to face the wrath of Ra Chen-a fate better than death. He moved his fingers to cut the anti-gravity beams from the big extension cage.
Metal whined against metal. Svetz whiffed hot oil, while red lights blinked on all over his lunch-tray control board. He hastily turned the beams on again.
The red lights blinked out, one by reluctant one.
Through the transparent shell, Svetz could hear the grinding of teeth. Leviathan was trying to chew his way into the extension cage.
His released weight had nearly torn the cage loose from the rest of the time machine. Svetz would have been stranded in the past, 100 miles out to sea, in a broken extension cage that probably wouldn't float, with an angry sea monster waiting to snap him up. No, he couldn't turn off the anti-gravity beamers.
But the beamers were on the big extension cage, and he couldn't hold it more than about 15 minutes longer. When the big cage was gone, what would prevent Leviathan from pulling him to his doom?
"I'll stun him off," said Svetz.
There was dark-red palate above him and red gums and forking tongue beneath, and the long curved fangs all around. But between the two rows of teeth, Svetz could see the big extension cage and the battery of stunners around the door. By eye, he rotated the stunners until they pointed straight toward Leviathan.
"I must be out of my mind," said Svetz, and he spun the stunners away from him. He couldn't fire them at Leviathan without hitting himself.
And Leviathan wouldn't let go.
Trapped.
No, he thought with a burst of relief. He could escape with his life. The go-home lever would send his small extension cage out from between the jaws of Leviathan, back into the time stream. back to the institute. His mission had failed, but that was hardly his fault. Why had Ra Chen been unable to uncover mention of a sea serpent bigger than a sperm whale?
"It's all his fault," said Svetz. And he reached for the go-home lever. But he stayed his hand.
"I can't just tell him so," he said. For Ra Chen terrified him.
The grinding of teeth came through the extension cage.
"Hate to just quit," said Svetz. "Think I'll try something. . .
He could see the anti-gravity beamers by looking between the teeth. He could feel their influence, so nearly were they focused on the extension cage itself. If he focused them just on himself. .
He felt the change; he felt both strong and lightheaded, like a drunken ballet master. And if he now narrowed the focus...
The monster's teeth seemed to grind harder. Svetz looked between them, as best he could.
Leviathan was no longer f
loating. He was hanging straight down from the extension cage, hanging by his teeth. The antigravity beamers still balanced the pull of his mass, but now they did so by pulling straight up on the extension cage.
The monster was in obvious distress. Naturally. A water beast, he was supporting his own mass for the first time in his life. And by his teeth! His yellow eyes rolled frantically. His tail twitched slightly at the very tip. And still he clung.
"Let go," said Svetz. "Let go, you. . . monster."
The monster's teeth slid, screeching, down the transparent surface, and he fell.
Svetz cut the anti-gravity a fraction of a second late. He smelled burnt oil and there were tiny red lights blinking off one by one on his lunch-tray control board.
Leviathan hit the water with a sound of thunder. His long, sinuous body rolled over and floated to the surface and lay as if dead. But his tail flicked once and Svetz knew that he was alive.
"I could kill you," said Svetz. "Hold the stunners on you until you're dead. There's time."
But he still had ten minutes to search for a sperm whale. It wasn't time enough. It didn't begin to be time enough, but if he used it all...
The sea serpent flicked its tail and began to swim away. Once, he rolled to look at Svetz and his jaws opened wide in fury. He finished his roll and was fleeing again.
"Just a minute." Svetz said thickly. "Just a science-perverting minute, there." And he swung the stunners to focus.
Gravity behaved strangely inside an extension cage. While the cage was moving forward in time, down was all directions outward from the center of the cage. Svetz was plastered against the curved wall. He waited for the trip to end.
Seasickness was nothing compared with the motion sickness of time travel.
Free fall, then normal gravity. Svetz moved unsteadily to the door.
Ra Chen was waiting to help him out. "Did you get it?"
"Leviathan? No, sir." Svetz looked past his boss. "Where's the big extension cage?"
"We're bringing it back slowly, to minimize the gravitational side effects. But if you don't have the whale-"
"I said I don't have Leviathan."
"Well, just what do you have?" Ra Chen demanded.
Somewhat later, he said. "It wasn't?"
Later yet, he said. "You killed him? Why, Svetz? Pure spite?"
"No. sir. It was the most intelligent thing I did during the entire trip."
"But why? Never mind, Svetz, here's the big extension cage." A gray-blue shadow congealed in the hollow cradle of the time machine. "And there does seem to be something in it. Hi, you idiots, throw an anti-gravity beam inside the cage! Do you want the beast crushed?"
The cage had arrived. Ra Chen waved an arm in signal. The door opened.
Something tremendous hovered within the big extension cage. It looked like a malevolent white mountain in there, peering back at its captors with a single tiny, angry eye. It was trying to get at Ra Chen, but it couldn't swim in air.
Its other eye was only a torn socket. One of its flippers was ripped along the trailing edge. Rips and ridges and puckers of scar tissue, and a forest of broken wood and broken steel, marked its tremendous expanse of albino skin. Lines trailed from many of the broken harpoons. High up on one flank, bound to the beast by broken and tangled lines, was the corpse of a bearded man with one leg.
"Hardly in mint condition, is he?" Ra Chen observed.
"Be careful, sir. He's a killer. I saw him ram a sailing ship and sink it clean before I could focus the stunners on him."
"What amazes me is that you found him at all in the time you had left. Svetz, I do not understand your luck. Or am I missing something?"
"It wasn't luck, sir. It was the most intelligent thing I did the entire trip."
"You said that before. About killing Leviathan."
Svetz hurried to explain. "The sea serpent was just leaving the vicinity. I wanted to kill him, but I knew I didn't have the time. I was about to leave myself, when he turned back and bared his teeth.
"He was an obvious carnivore. Those teeth were built strictly for killing, sir. I should have noticed earlier. And I could think of only one animal big enough to feed a carnivore that size."
"Ahhh. Brilliant, Svetz."
"There was corroborative evidence. Our research never found any mention of giant sea serpents. The great geological surveys of the First Century Post-Atomic should have turned up something. Why didn't they?"
"Because the sea serpent quietly died out two centuries earlier, after whalers killed off his food supply."
Svetz colored. "Exactly. So I turned the stunners on Leviathan before he could swim away and I kept the stunners on him until the NAI said he was dead. I reasoned that if Leviathan was there, there must be whales in the vicinity."
"And Leviathan's nervous output was masking the signal."
"Sure enough, it was. The moment he was dead, the NAI registered another signal. I followed it to"-Svetz jerked his head. They were floating the whale out of the extension cage- "to him."
Days later, two men stood on one side of a thick glass wall.
"We took some clones from him, then passed him on to the secretary-general's vivarium," said Ra Chen. "Pity you had to settle for an albino." He waved aside Svetz's protest: "I know, I know, you were pressed for time."
Beyond the glass, the one-eyed whale glared at Svetz through murky sea water. Surgeons had removed most of the harpoons, but scars remained along his flanks; and Svetz, awed, wondered how long the beast had been at war with man. Centuries? How long did sperm whales live?
Ra Chen lowered his voice. "We'd all be in trouble if the secretary-general found out that there was once a bigger animal than this. You understand that, don't you, Svetz?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good." Ra Chen's gaze swept across another glass wall and a fire-breathing Gila monster. Farther down, a horse looked 'back at him along the dangerous spiral horn in its forehead.
"Always we find the unexpected," said Ra Chen. "Sometimes I wonder."
If you'd do your research better, Svetz thought.
"Did you know that time travel wasn't even a concept until the First Century Ante-Atomic? A writer invented it. From then until the Fourth Century Post-Atomic, time travel was pure fantasy. It violates everything the scientists thought were natural laws. Logic. Conservation of matter and energy. Momentum, reaction, any law of motion that makes time a part of the statement. Relativity.
"It strikes me," said Ra Chen, "that every time we push an extension cage past that particular five-century period, we shove it into a world that isn't really natural. That's why you keep finding giant sea serpents and fire-breathing-"
"That's nonsense," said Svetz. He was afraid of his boss, yes; but there were limits.
"You're right," Ra Chen said instantly. Almost with relief.
"Take a month's vacation. Svetz, then back to work. The secretary general wants a bird."
"A bird?" Svetz smiled. A bird sounded harmless enough. "I suppose he found it in another children's book?"
"That's right. Ever hear of a roc?"
Bird in the Hand
"IT'S NOT A ROC," said Ra Chen.
The bird looked stupidly back at them from behind a thick glass wall. Its wings were small and underdeveloped; its legs and feet were tremendous, ludicrous. It weighed three hundred pounds and stood nearly eight feet tall.
Other than that, it looked a lot like a baby chick.
"It kicked me," Svetz complained. A slender, small boned man, he stood stiffly this day, with a slight list to port. "It kicked me in the side and broke four ribs. I barely made it back to the extension cage."
"It still isn't a roc. Sorry about that, Svetz. We did some research in the history section of the Beverly Hills Library while you were in the hospital. The roc was only a legend."
"But look at it!"
Svetz's beefy, red-faced boss nodded. "That's probably what started the legend. Early explorers in Australia saw these- ostriches
wandering about. They said to themselves, 'If the chicks are this size, what are the adults like?' Then they went home and told stories about the adults."
"I got my ribs caved in for a flightless bird?"
"Cheer up, Svetz. It's not a total loss. The ostrich was extinct. It makes a fine addition to the Secretary-General's vivarium."
"But the Secretary-General wanted a roc. What are you going to tell him?"
Ra Chen scowled. "It's worse than that. Do you know what the Secretary-General wants now?"
People meeting Ra Chen for the first time thought he was constanfly scowling, until they saw his scowl: Svetz had suspected Ra Chen was worried. Now he knew it.
The Secretary-General was everybody's problem. A recessive gene inherited from his powerful inbred family had left him with the intelligence of a six-year-old child. Another kind of inheritance had made him overlord of the Earth and its colonies. His whim was law throughout the explored universe.
Whatever the Secretary-General wanted now, it was vital that he get it.
"Some idiot took him diving in Los Angeles," Ra Chen said. "Now he insists on seeing the city before it sank."
"That doesn't sound too bad."
"It wouldn't be, if it had stopped there. Some of his Circle of Advisors noticed his interest, and they got him historical tapes on Los Angeles. He loved it. He wants to join the first Watts Riot."
Svetz gulped. "That should raise some security problems."
"The Secretary-General is as close to being pure Caucasian as makes no difference."
The ostrich cocked its head to one side, studying them. It still looked like the tremendous chick of an even bigger bird. Svetz could imagine that it had just cracked its way out of an egg the size of a bungalow.
"I'm going to have a headache," he said. "Why do you tell me these things? You know I have no head for politics."
"Can you imagine what would happen if we caused the death of the Secretary-General? Already there are powerful factions that would like to see the Institute for Temporal Research disbanded. Space, for instance, they'd love to swallow us up."
"But what can we do? We can't turn down a direct request from the Secretary-General!"