by Jack Dann
Harry beckoned for Hue-man to follow him, and set out to return to the chronokineticon. They gingerly made their way back to the forest, watching out for carnivores all the while. Soon they came to the dark edge of the woods, and after a few minutes Harry found a notched tree. They followed the trail he had blazed through the jungle. A half-hour later they emerged into the blinding sunlight once again, and a few minutes after that Harry caught sight of the chronokineticon. From where they stood, it looked none the worse for wear. His throat pouch ballooned in relief.
As they drew nearer the aggregate of outsize cogs and wheels, Hue-man's expressions ran the gamut. At first she squinted at the chronokineticon, then her eyes widened to show the whites, and finally she made the same startling staccato sound she and her mate had once before produced, exposing her fangs once again. The sound was just as unpleasant as it had been the first time,
Hue-man climbed up onto the outsized bicycle with the aid of a ladder attached to the central wheel. She made the awful staccato, cackling noise again, convincing Harry that it did indeed express pleasure. Did she understand that he had come from a future, at the least. Hue-man must have come from a different one, a future where apes had somehow become ascendant . . . unlikely as that seemed.
She gaped at him as he began to gesticulate, trying to explain his intentions in sign language, although it seemed futile. Perhaps if he just spoke loudly and slowly enough. . . .
A heart-stopping roar cut him short. They both turned at the same time to see a theropod come leaping towards them. It wasn't as large as the tyrannosaur, but it looked just as fierce and hungry. It was bright green with magenta stripes. Harry recognized it as a daspletosaurus.
"By Godfrey, it's coming straight for us!" he cried.
And indeed it was. In another moment it would be on top of them. They would never be able to outdistance the brute on foot. But Harry did not allow himself to succumb to panic. He leaped onto the chronokineticon, slipped the chain off the smallest cog, and lifted the terrified Hue-man off the seat and onto the handlebars. Harry stood on the pedals. He heard Hue-man gasp as they went over the side of the chronokineticon 's central wheel, dropping several feet to the ground. The impact was painfully jolting, and the bicycle bounced wildly, but Harry managed to keep it upright. As they coasted shakily over the edge of a long, downhill slope, the daspletosaurus crashed down onto the very spot where they'd been an instant before.
Harry pointed the wobbling front wheel downhill, and they quickly gathered speed as he pedalled for all he was worth. A furious hiss from behind them convinced him that the daspletosaurus wouldn't give up after only one try. He hoped the beast wouldn't destroy the chronokineticon in its rage.
The ground shook, causing Harry to lose control of the bicycle for a moment. Hue-man lurched forward, but somehow managed to hang on. The daspletosaurus' angry bellow sounded very close behind them now. Harry pedalled even harder, pushing himself to the limit.
Hue-man looked over her shoulder and shouted something.
"What?" Harry cried.
She shouted a second time, some incomprehensible foreign gibberish, and then must have remembered that Harry couldn't understand what she was trying to tell him. She gesticulated wildly to the left as a shadow covered them.
Harry jerked the handlebars in that direction, nearly dislodging Hue-man. The daspletosaurus thundered to ground precisely where they would have been had they kept moving forward. The impact of the huge body hitting ground lifted the bicycle into the air.
Harry held the wheel straight, standing up on the pedals as they sailed aloft. They came down hard and bounced. The bicycle landed again, wobbling dangerously . . . and zigzagged off-course. The damnable thing was out of control!
The front tyre struck a dead log. Harry and Hue-man both were thrown over the handlebars, headlong into the murky waters of a swamp.
"Hue-man! Help! I can't swim!" Harry cried, as soon as he had fought his way to the surface of the muddy water once again. To drown, here in the Cretaceous, ages before his own birth! The horror of it!
Hue-man's white fangs showed through the slime caked on her face. Harry saw that she was standing up to her waist in the muck. He stood up, too, belatedly realizing that there was little danger of drowning. Embarrassed, he began to wade towards the bank, but Hue-man pulled at his forelimb, drawing him ever deeper into the morass.
The daspletosaurus boomed down onto the swamp bank, lashing its tail in frustration. It roared and hissed at them, stamping its clawed foot, but it didn't enter the bog.
"We must get back to the chronokineticon!" Harry shouted. "It's our only hope!"
Hue-man shook her head emphatically and tightened her grasp on Harry's forelimb, wading deeper into the foul-smelling swamp. The roaring and hissing of the daspletosaurus faded as they half-swam, half-walked to the far bank. Hue-man tried to climb out, but slipped in the mud and splashed back into the filthy water. Using his claws, Harry managed to clamber up onto solid ground. He held onto a magnolia branch, its sweet odor welcome after the fetid bog, and, after a moment's hesitation, stretched his tail into the water to pull Hue-man out. Dreadfully undignified, of course, but it couldn't be helped. Ignoring her gibbering, Harry took stock of himself, and discovered that he had lost his hatchet, hammer, pad and pencil. Only his watch remained, fastened as it was by a silver fob to his watch pocket.
Hue-man kept on gibbering and gesticulating wildly, frequently pointing to the north. Her babbling meant nothing, of course, but while she chattered Harry was inspired by the sudden thought that they could attempt a different route back to the chronokineticon, one that was not traversed by so many carnosaurs . . . or so he hoped. His watch still ticked, and as soon as he rubbed the filth from its crystal, he saw that it now read twelve minutes past three. There was plenty of time to circle around the swamp, instead of fording it. The chronokineticon was directly northwest from where they stood. If they proceeded north until they were out of sight of the das-pletosaurus, and then turned due west, they should arrive in a little over two hours, Harry calculated. He gestured towards the north and they began their forced march back to the chronokineticon.
From time to time as they walked, Hue-man scratched the fur on the top of her head. Harry feared that she had lice, or worse, some unknown, prehistoric parasite. If such pests were ever to get under his feathers . . . Stoically, he tried to ignore the thought, as he was already trying manfully to disregard Hue-man's awful smell, which by this time had grown to a rankness of truly vile proportions . . .
Harry's train of thought was interrupted as a creature as large as Hue-man—or himself—came abruptly out of the rushes. Harry and Hue-man ducked behind a sassafras tree and watched, Harry hoping that it wasn't a small carnosaur. By Jove, it wasn't! And when Harry saw what it was, he could hardly believe his luck.
It stood, birdlike, on two stout legs, and its long neck supported a tiny head. It was an ornithomimus, there could be no question of it. The prevalent theory of his day held that this was the primitive ancestor of modern sauriankind . . . though there was extant a crackpot theory that that honor belonged to the minute microvenator, a creature that had survived only by virtue of its insignificant size and timorousness. Harry subscribed to the conventional thesis, and the appearance of the ornithomimus reinforced his prejudice. Over the eons, the neck would shorten and thicken a bit to support the larger head, but his primitive ancestor was nonetheless magnificent for that. Cobalt blue and white feathers contrasted strikingly with a scarlet muzzle. It was an omnivore even in this early form, but—though it possessed an opposable thumb—its grip was not yet prehensile. It was larger than Harry, and undoubtedly much stronger. If it noticed them, there might be trouble. The ornithomimus disappeared behind some rhododendrons, and Harry sighed his relief.
Primitive though his ancestor was, Harry's chest swelled in pride nonetheless. Compared to the shuffling, stinking primate who stood next to him picking her nose, the ornithomimus was the grandest, most
majestic creature in all of nature!
Soon the swamp was behind them, and they turned west until they were swallowed up in tall grass. At least they wouldn't be so easily seen on this plain as they had been when the daspletosaurus attacked them, Harry thought. The grass was taller than they were. The only drawback was that it made him sneeze. Even more distressing, he checked his watch and saw that nearly five hours had elapsed since he had arrived in the Cretaceous. Their overland journey was taking longer than he had anticipated . . . and he was not absolutely certain that they were headed in the right direction.
A peculiar-looking thunderhead glowered in the distance, but—curiously—the sun was still shining brightly on Harry and Hue-man. A shadow passed ominously overhead. Harry looked up to see a pteranodon circling, its crested head pointed at an odd-looking cloud as it banked. Ruefully, Harry remembered that he had lost his hatchet in the swamp. It would have been an effective weapon against the pteranodon, whose wingspan could not have been more than twenty feet. Grappling with it bare-handed was a different matter, of course. That foot-long beak could peck him to pieces.
What Harry had believed to be a cloud suddenly began to blur in and out of focus. There was an audible pop, and the cloud's outline became cleanly limned. Something that looked very much like a small, gabled house had appeared abruptly in mid-air!
The pteranodon screeched and soared away. The strange house hovered in mid-air for a second, then came crashing to earth. There were quite a few strange objects littering a nearby hillside, Harry noticed, the grass flattened under them, but the small gabled house was much closer than any of these others.
"Hello!" Harry shouted. "It must be another time-traveller! "
He ran towards the rubble of the house, Hue-man right behind him, just in time to see the first of its inhabitants emerge. They were bipeds, covered with grey fur and wearing bright plaid kilts. From their muzzles lolled long, pink tongues. They yipped with emotion as they helped each other out of the wreckage of their time machine—an entire pack of them.
"Good Lord—intelligent canines!" Harry said in wonderment. "Whatever shall we have next?"
As if in reply, a cagelike device appeared in mid-air and clattered to earth. Inside was an intricate series of treadmills and a number of dazed bipedal rodents wearing spectacles that reflected like mirrors.
"Rats! Sapient rats!" Harry gasped. "By Jove, it's beyond belief!" As they watched, the cage door opened and perhaps a dozen of the Rat-Men scurried out, their naked tails switching behind them. They scuttled past the dazed canines and made their way over the hilltop.
Harry approached the dog-creatures with every intention of politely lending a helping hand, but the nearest of them turned and snarled at him, baring its fangs. Harry and Hue-man kept their distance as the canines pulled the last of their people from the rubble, licking each other and yapping joyously.
But what would the dogs do now that the present danger was past? Harry and Hue-man began to back away just as the pack turned towards them and set up a frightful din with their barking. At that moment, another fuzzy object swam into existence between Harry and the pack of dogs. A golden, sphinx-like device glided gracefully to the ground.
From the sphinx emerged a bipedal feline wearing a jaunty black beret. It hissed at the dogs, its fur standing on end. The dogs growled at the cat-creature, standing their ground as it warily circled them.
"Good Heavens!" Harry cried. "Yet another time-travelling race!"
But how could he communicate with any of them when they all insisted on fighting with one another?
Yet another time-machine appeared. This one was a rather ramshackle, formless construction. From it emerged two bushy-tailed, masked mammals that, Harry speculated, might be descended from Procyon lotor, or raccoons. They wore no clothing but ascots.
"Extraordinary!" Harry exclaimed. "This must be a nexus, a place where all the time-lines are tangled together. We two came in just at the fringes of it, Hue-man!"
In short order, they observed the appearance of intelligent, time-travelling horses, cetaceans, pigs, snakes, gazelles, vultures, rabbits, weasels, wolverines, gerbils, and a bear wearing penny-loafers and a derby hat. These creatures emerged from dozens of time-machines of every size and shape, all of them pouring from the odd thunderhead above, which must have been the very heart of the Time Nexus. As Harry and Hue-man drew closer to it; they saw that the Nexus was a dark rent in an otherwise clear, blue sky, through which time-machines constantly dropped. They threaded their way through the milling throngs of dazed temponauts and climbed to the top of the hill. From that vantage, they saw thousands of time-machines, in various states of repair, littering the landscape in the valley just beyond. Swarming about them were thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of creatures, chit-tering, squawking, roaring and squeaking, for as far as the eye could see.
As the entire spectacle came into view, a sea-green globe bounced on the hilltop and rolled toward them. Harry studied the globe, amazed to see fishy beings peering from its aqueous depths through crafty, button eyes. Intelligent fish! Harry's mind reeled.
Then from the chaos at the foot of the hill, a repulsive creature emerged. Good Lord, it was a . . . a six-foot-tall cockroach! The insectile temponaut staggered about on its hind legs and held its shiny brown head between two fore-limbs. A second cockroach stumbled after it, and then dozens more of the loathsome things.
"Now, I must say!" Harry cried, disgust finally overmastering wonderment. "This is simply too much! Abominable! Odious! Damnable! These creatures were so offensive and vile as to make Hue-man look decidedly normal—even attractive—by comparison. Even Hue-man herself seemed staggered by the appearance of this latest batch of time-travellers, for she had turned pale and swayed slightly on her feet. And indeed, why not? Intelligent cockroaches! Hideous beyond belief! Even an ape could be expected to sicken at this.
The cockroaches gathered round, their antennae wildly waving. Would they attack? Their chitinous carapaces looked as solid as steel, and doubtless their mandibles could tear saurian flesh as easily as paper. They moved closer, and Hue-man began to shriek horribly.
Just when Harry was certain that he was about to die, yet another time-machine popped onto the scene, an accordionlike attachment at its base to absorb the shock of falling. This one looked something like a sleigh, with an enormous, engraved disc spinning in the rear. Well-polished brass gleamed, and the time-traveller's seat was upholstered in plush, red velvet.
The time-traveller himself was attired in a vest, tie, and smoking jacket. A pipe was clenched between his teeth, accentuating the determined cast of his jaw. So civilized was his demeanor—so, so . . . saurian—that it was difficult to believe he was of the same race as Hue-man . . . and yet he was indeed a simian!
The newcomer looked around him, and his eyes widened to show the whites, in a familiar manner, as he saw Hue-man and the giant cockroaches. His eyes narrowed again to a steely grey glint. Apparently perceiving a threat to a female of his species, he set his pipe down on a brass panel before him. leaped out of his time-machine, and swung a meaty fist at the nearest cockroach.
The poor creature landed on its back, legs churning furiously. Before the enraged simian could strike it again, two of the other cockroaches turned their companion over, and then every last one of the insectile horrors scuttled away on all sixes, seeking shelter in the very mob from whence they had so recently escaped. The bullying ape spat into his palms and turned towards Harry. His jaw was set, and his grey eyes gleamed like swordblades.
Shrinking before him, Harry commended his soul to heaven as the bulky simian raised a mighty fist high to strike him down . . .
Harry's throat pouch ballooned in fear. What was he to do? He grasped Hue-man's wrist and pushed her towards the male ape.
"Take this flea-bitten creature for your mate!" he screamed. "She is quite uncivilized, but not unintelligent, for an ape. Perhaps you, old chap, could even school her in proper manners, eh what? Go o
n, man! Take her!"
The male ape hesitated as Hue-man clung to him. She gibbered in their language for a moment and then dismissed Harry with a spiteful wave of her hand. They both bared their teeth and cackled in their staccato manner. Finally, Hue-man and the male, who had indeed become her new mate, clambered into his time-machine. The male lit his pipe, puffed it contemplatively for a moment, and then pulled a bejeweled lever. The metal wheel clanked and whirred as it began to turn. The simian time-machine and its occupants became blurry.
"Ta-ta, old girl!" Harry shouted after Hue-man, greatly relieved. "It really is better this way, you know. You wouldn't have fit at all well into society back where I come from. You'll be much happier among your own kind." His inner ear reacted uncomfortably to the time displacement effect as the two apes vanished. He stood staring at the spot where he had last seen Hue-man, finding that, oddly enough, he almost missed her . . . until a falling device full of intelligent lobsters nearly struck him down. He had better get away from this torrent of time-machines and return to the chronokineticon, posthaste. Consulting his watch, he saw that only thirty-three minutes remained before the Law of Forward Time Conversion took effect. Could he make it back in time? Even if he reached the bicycle, he still had to attach it to the chronokineticon. And, even if the chronokineticon remained undamaged, it was unlikely that the bicycle was all right. There was a very good chance that he was doomed to spend the rest of his life in the Cretaceous.
Harry began to run. The curious but cowardly cockroaches followed him for a while, but as he approached the yapping Dog-Men, those loathsome vermin became frightened and scurried away once again. He stole one last glance at the incredible sight of a myriad of time-machines and tempo-nauts, and then he was on his way. Only twenty-four minutes remained!
Harry guessed that he must travel due west to find the chronokineticon, if his calculations about the proximate location of the Time Nexus were correct. He ran up one hill and down another, wheezing, feeling the precious minutes slipping away, searching desperately for some sign of the bicycle or the chronokineticon.