by Larry Niven
"We can distract him."
They had lowered their voices to conspiratorial whispers. Now they turned away from the ostrich and strolled casually down the line of glass cages.
"How?"
"I don't know yet. If I could only get to his nurse," Ra Chen said between his teeth. "I've tried hard enough. Maybe the ISR has bought her. Maybe she's loyal. She's been with him thirty-eight years.
"How do I know what would catch the attention of the Secretary-General? I've only met him four times on formal occasions. I do know his attention span is low. If we could distract him with a new toy, he'd forget about Los Angeles."
The cage they were passing was labeled:
ELEPHANT
Retrieved from the year 700 Ante Atomic, approximately, from the region of India, Earth,
EXTINCT.
The wrinkled gray beast watched them go by with sleepy indifference. He had not been captured by Svetz.
But Svetz had captured almost half of the animals here, including several whose tanks were half full of water. Svetz was afraid of animals. Especially big animals. Why did Ra Chen keep sending him after animals?
The thirty feet of lizard in the next cage definitely recognized Svetz. It jetted orange-white flame at him and flapped its tiny bat-like wings in fury when the flame washed harmlessly across the glass. If it ever got out- But that was why the cages were airtight. The animals of Earth's past must be protected from the air of Earth's present.
Svetz remembered the cobalt-blue sky of Earth's past and was reassured. Today's afternoon sky was brilliant turquoise at the zenith, shading through pastel green and yellow to rich yellow-brown near the horizon. Svetz saw it and was reassured. If the Chinese fire-breather ever got out, it would be too busy gasping for purer air to attack Svetz.
"What can we get him? I think he's tired of these animals. Svetz, what about a giraffe?"
"A what?"
"Or a dog, or a satyr . . . it's got to be unusual," Ra Chen muttered. "A teddy bear?"
Out of his fear of animals, Svetz ventured, "I wonder if you might not be on the wrong track, sir."
"Mph? Why?"
"The Secretary-General has enough animals to satisfy a thousand men. Worse than that, you're competing with Space when you bring back funny animals. They can do that too."
Ra Chen scratched behind his ear. "I never thought of that. You're right. But we've got to do something."
"There must be lots of things to do with a time machine."
They could have taken a displacement plate back to the Center. Ra Chen preferred to walk. It would give him a chance to think, he said.
Svetz walked with bowed head and blind eyes alongside his boss. Inspiration had come to him at similar times, when he needed it. But they had reached the red sandstone cube that was the Center, and the mental lightning had not struck.
A big hand closed on his upper arm. "Just a minute," Ra Chen said softly. "The Secretary-General's paying us a visit."
Svetz's heart lurched. "How do you know?"
Ra Chen pointed. "You should recognize that thing on the walkway. We brought it back last month from Los Angeles, June third, twenty-six PostAtomic, the day of the Great California Earthquake. It's an internal combustion automobile. It belongs to the Secretary-General."
"What'll we do?"
"Go in and show him around," Ra Chen said grimly. "Pray be doesn't insist on being taken back to Watts, August eleventh, twenty PostAtomic."
"Suppose he does?"
"I'll send him back. Oh, not with you, Svetz. With Zeera. She's black, and she speaks american. It might help."
"Not enough," said Svetz, but he was already calmer. Let Zeera take the risks.
They passed close by the Secretary-General's automobile. Svetz was intrigued by its odd, angular look, its complex control panels, the shiny chrome trim. Someone had removed the hood, so that the polished complexity of the motor was open to view.
"Wait," Svetz said suddenly. "Does he like it?"
"Will you come on?"
"Does the Secretary-General like his automobile?"
"Sure, Svetz. He loves it."
"Get him another car. California must have been full of automobiles on the day before the Great Quake."
Ra Chen stopped suddenly. "That could be it. It would hold him for a while, give us time...
"Time for what?"
Ra Chen didn't hear. "A racing car. . . ? No, he'd kill himself. The Circle of Advisors would want to install a robot chauffeur override. Maybe a dune buggy?"
"Why not ask him?"
"It's worth a try," said Ra Chen. They went up the steps.
In the Center there were three time machines, including the one with the big extension cage, plus a host of panels with flashing colored lights. The Secretary-General liked those. He smiled and chuckled as Ra Chen led him about. His guards hovered at his shoulders, their faces stiff, their fingernails clicking against their gun butts.
Ra Chen introduced Svetz as "my best agent." Svetz was so overwhelmed by the honor he could only stutter. But the Secretary-General didn't seem to notice.
Whether he had forgotten about seeing the Watts Riot was moot, but he did forget to ask on that occasion.
When Ra Chen asked about cars, the Secretary-General smiled all across his face and nodded vigorously. Faced by a vast array of choices, five or six decades with dozens of new models for every year, the Secretary-General put his finger in his mouth and considered well.
Then he made his choice.
"'Why not ask him? Why not ask him?'" Ra Chen mimicked savagely. "Now we know. The first car! He wants the first car ever made!"
"I thought he'd ask for a make of car." Svetz rubbed his eyes hard. "How can we possibly find one car? A couple of decades to search through, and all of the North American and European continents!"
"It's not that bad. We'll use the books from the Beverly Hills Library. But it's bad enough, Svetz..."
The raid on the Beverly Hills Library had been launched in full daylight, using the big extension cage and a dozen guards armed with stimners, on June third, twenty-six PostAtomic. Giant time machines, crazy men wearing flying belts-on any other day it would have made every newspaper and television program in the country. But June the third was a kind of Happy Hunting Ground for the Institute for Temporal Research.
No Californian would report the raid, except to other Californians. If the story did get out, it would be swamped by more important news. The series of quakes would begin at sunset...had begun at sunset.
Svetz and Ra Chen and Zeera Southworth spent half the night going through the history section of the Beverly Hills Library. Ra Chen knew enough white american to recognize titles, but in the end Zeera had to do the reading.
Zeera Southworth was tall and slender and very dark, crowned with hair like a black powder explosion. Among men who worked at the Center she was reputed to be as frigid as the caves of Pluto. She was also the only one who could handle the unique horned horse Svetz had brought back from prehistoric Britain.
She sat gracefully cross-legged, reading pertinent sections aloud, while the others paced. They followed a twisting trail of references. .
By two in the morning they were damp and furious.
"Nobody invented the automobile!" Ra Chen exploded. "It just happened!"
"We certainly have a wide range of choices," Zeera agreed. "I take it we won't want any of the steam automobiles. That would eliminate Cugnot and Trevithick and the later British steam coaches."
"Thank Science for eliminating something."
Svetz said, "Our best bets seem to be Lenoir of France and Marcus of Vienna. Except that Daimler and Benz have good claims, and Selden's patent held good for years-"
"Dammit, pick one!"
"Just a minute, sir." Zeera alone retained some semblance of calm. "This Ford might be the best we've got."
"Ford? Why? He invented nothing but a system of mass production."
Zeera held up the book. Svetz recog
nized it: a biography she had been reading earlier. "This book implies that Ford was responsible for everything, that he created the automobile industry singlehanded."
"But we know that isn't true," Svetz protested.
Ra Chen made a pushing motion with one hand. "Let's not be hasty. We take Ford's car, and we produce that book to authenticate it. Who'll know the difference?"
"But if someone does the same research we just-oh. Sure. He'll get the same answers. No answers. Ford's just as good a choice as any."
"Better, if nobody looks further," Zeera said with satisfaction. "Too bad we can't take the Model T; it looks much more like an automobile. This thing he started with looks like a kiddy cart. It says he built it out of old pipes."
"Tough," said Ra Chen.
Late the next morning, Ra Chen delivered last minute instructions.
"You can't just take the car," he told Zeera. "If you're interrupted, come back without it."
"Yes, sir. It would be less crucial if we took our duplicate from a later time, from the Smithsonian Institute, for instance."
"The automobile has to be new. Be reasonable, Zeera! We can't give the Secretary-General a second-hand automobile!"
"No, sir."
"We'll land you about three in the morning. Use infrared and pills to change your vision. Don't show any visible light. Artificial light would probably scare them silly."
"Right."
"Were you shown-"
"I know how to use the duplicator." Zeera sounded faintly supercilious, as always. "I also know that it reverses the image."
"Never mind that. Bring back the reversed duplicate, and we'll just reverse it again."
"Of course." She seemed chagrined that she had not seen that for herself. "What about dialect?"
"You speak black and white american, but it's for a later period. Don't use slang. Stick to black unless you want to impress someone white. Then speak white, but speak slowly and carefully and use simple words. They'll think you're from another country. I hope."
Zeera nodded crisply. She stooped and entered the extension cage, turned and pulled the duplicator after her. Its bulk was small, but it weighed a ton or so without the lift field generator to float it. One end glowed white with glow-paint.
They watched the extension cage blur and vanish. It was still attached to the rest of the time machine, but attached along a direction that did not transmit light.
"Now then!" Ra Chen rubbed his hands together. "I don't expect she'll have any trouble getting Henry Ford's flightless flight stick. Our trouble may come when the Secretary-General sees what he's got."
Svetz nodded, remembering the gray-and-flat pictures in the history books. Ford's machine was ungainly, slipshod, ugly and undependable. A few small surreptitious additions would make it dependable enough to suit the Secretary-General. Nothing would make it beautiful.
"We need another distraction," said Ra Chen. "We've only bought ourselves more time to get it."
Zeera's small time machine gave off a sound of ripping cloth, subdued, monotonous, reassuring. A dozen workmen were readying the big extension cage. Zeera would need it to transport the duplicate automobile.
"There's something I'd like to try," Svetz ventured.
"Concerning what?"
"The roc."
Ra Chen grinned. "The ostrich, you mean. Don't you ever give up? There wasn't any roc, Svetz."
Svetz looked stubborn. "Do you know anything about neoteny?"
"Never heard of it. Look, Svetz, we're going to be over budget because of the roe trip. Not your fault, of course, but another trip would cost us over a million commercials, and-"
"I don't need the time machine."
"Oh?"
"I would like the help of the Palace Veterinarian. Have you got enough pull for that?"
The Palace Veterinarian was a stocky, blocky, busty woman with muscular legs and a thrusting jaw. A floating platform packed with equipment followed her between the rows of cages.
"I know every one of these beasts," she told Svetz. "Once I even thought of giving them names. An animal ought to have a name."
"They've got names."
"That's what I decided. GILA MONSTER, ELEPHANT, OSTRICH," she read. "You give Gilgamesh a name so he won't get mixed up with Gilbert. But nobody would get HORSE mixed up with ELEPHANT. There's only one of each. It's sad."
"There are the clones."
"Do you know what we do with the clones? We let them grow to infancy, then freeze 'em. Only one at a time of each species is alive." She stopped before the cage marked OSTRICH. "Is this your prize? I've been meaning to come see him."
The bird shifted its feet in indecision; it cocked its head to consider the couple on the other side of the glass. It seemed surprised at Svetz's return.
"He looks just like a newly hatched chick," she said. "Except for the legs and feet, of course. They seem to have developed to support the extra mass."
Svetz was edgy with the need to be in two places at once. His own suggestion had sparked Zeera's project. He ought to be there. Yet-the ostrich had been his first failure.
He asked, "Does it look neotenous?"
"Neotenous? Obviously. Neoteny is a common method of evolution. We have neotenous traits ourselves, you know. Bare skin, where all the other primates are covered with hair. When our ancestors started chasing their meat across the plains, they needed a better cooling system than most primates need. So they kept one aspect of immaturity, the bare skin.
"The axolotl was a classic example of neoteny-"
"The what?"
"You know what a salamander was, don't you? It had gills and fins while immature. As an adult it grew lungs and shed the gills and lived on land. The axoloti was a viable offshoot that never lost the gills and fins. A gene shift. Typical of neoteny."
"I never heard of either of them, axolotis or salamanders."
"They've been extinct for a long time. They needed open streams and ponds to live."
Svetz nodded. Open water was deadly poison, anywhere on Earth.
"The problem is that we don't know when your bird lost its ability to fly. Some random neotenous development may have occurred far in the past, so that the bird's wings never developed. Then it may have evolved its present size to compensate."
"Oh. Then the ancestor-"
"May have been no bigger than a turkey. Shall we go in and look?"
The glass irised open to admit them. Svetz stepped into the cage, felt the tug of the pressure curtain flowing over and around him. The ostrich backed warily away.
The vet opened a pouch on her floating platform, withdrew a stunner, and used it. The ostrich squawked in outrage and collapsed. No muss, no fuss.
The vet strode toward her patient-and stopped suddenly in the middle of the cage. She sniffed, sniffed again in horror. "Have I lost my sense of smell?"
Svetz produced two items like cellophane bags, handed her one. "Put this on."
"Why?"
"You might suffocate if you don't." He donned the other himself, by pulling it over his head, then pressing the rim against the skin of his neck. It stuck. When he finished he had a hermetic seal.
"This air is deadly," he explained. "It's the air of the Earth's past, reconstituted. Think of it as coming from fifteen hundred years ago. There were so few men then that they might as well have never discovered fire, as far as the composition of the air was concerned. That's why you don't smell anything but ostrich. Nothing's been burned yet.
"You don't need sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide to keep you alive. You do need carbon dioxide. A certain concentration of carbon dioxide in your blood activates the breathing reflex."
She had finished donning her filter helmet. "I take it the concentration is too low in here."
"Right. You'd forget to breathe. You're used to air that's four percent carbon dioxide. In here it's barely a tenth of that.
"The bird can breathe this bland stuff. In fact, it'd die without it. What we've put into the air in t
he past fifteen hundred years, we've had fifteen hundred years to adapt to. The ostrich hasn't."
"I'll keep that in mind," she said shortly, so that Svetz wondered if he'd been lecturing someone who knew more than he did. She knelt beside the sleeping ostrich, and the platform floated lower for her convenience.
Svetz watched her as she ministered to the ostrich, taking tissue samples, testing blood pressure and heartbeat in reaction to small doses of hormones and drugs.
In a general way he knew what she was doing. There were techniques for reversing the most recent mutations in an animal's genetic make-up. One did not always get what one expected. Still-there was a homo habilis several cages down, who had been in the Circle of Advisors until he called the Secretary-General a tyrannical fugghead.
While she was identifying the neotenous developments, she would also be trying to guess what she would have when they were eliminated. Then there were matters of metabolism. If Svetz was right, the bird's mass would increase rapidly. It must be fed intravenously, and even more rapidly.
In general-but the details of what she was doing were mysterious and dull.
Svetz found himself studying her filter helmet. Full inflation had rendered it almost invisible. A golden rim of it showed by diffraction against the yellow-brown sky.
Did Space really want to take over the Institute for Temporal Research? Then that golden halo was support for their claim. It was a semipermeable membrane. It would selectively pass gases in both directions in such a way as to make an almost breathable atmosphere breathable.
It had been taken unchanged from a Space warehouse.
Other ITR equipment had come from the space industries. Flight sticks. Anesthetic needle guns. The low mass antigravity unit in the new extension cage.
But their basic argument was more subtle.
Once the ocean teemed with life, Svetz thought. Now the continental shelf is as dead as the Moon: nothing but bubble cities. Once this whole continent was all forest and living desert and fresh water. We cut down the trees and shot the animals and poisoned the rivers and irrigated the deserts so that even the desert life died, and now there's nothing left but the food yeast and us.
We've forgotten so much about the past that we can't separate legend from fact. We've wiped out most of the forms of life on Earth in the last fifteen hundred years, and changed the composition of the air to the extent that we'd be afraid to change it back.