Time's Last Gift - txt

by Farmer, Phillip Jose

  The chiefs and the doctors looked apprehensive when they said no to Gribardsun. But he did not threaten or shoot off the thunderstick. He replied, smiling, that he understood how very weary they must be and that they had to prepare for the winter in the short time they had. He thanked them for the great endurance and forbearance they had shown in following him around the great waters. It was true that he had shown them many strange lands and peoples and thus broadened their outlook and their knowledge. And he had strengthened them by bringing about the fusion of the two tribes. Nevertheless, they had shown much courage and patience in this great task, and he thanked them.

  But he and his colleagues had their work, too. They would leave for a good part of the summer. But they would be back. And he would expect the tribes to be on their best behavior, as they were when he was present. The two tribes must continue to submit any disputes to the council, composed of the elders of each tribe. And they must continue to improve their mutual language, Galush. And they must continue to cooperate in every respect. When he came back he would ask how well the two tribes had behaved toward each other and also among themselves.

  If, however, any individuals of either group wished to volunteer to go along with Gribardsun, then they must be allowed to go. He would overrule the tribal elders in this single matter. He needed carriers for the specimens that would be collected.

  A number of juveniles volunteered, but their fathers overruled them. They could not be spared. Their absence would impose great hardships on their families.

  Gribardsun had to admit that the fathers were right. In this primitive economy, every able hand must be used to its fullest ability.

  The juveniles were disappointed, since they would much rather be roaming around the country than working day and night at home under the strict supervision of father in particular and the tribe in general.

  'Very well,' John Gribardsun said. I'll make the trip by myself. I can do it three times as fast by myself. I'll make a flying survey of England as far north as the edge of the glaciers. I think I can do it in four weeks.'

  Von Billmann said, 'Are you running most of the way?'

  'Practically,' Gribardsun said. 'I'll be carrying the rifle and ammunition and a camera and film and some recording balls. I'll live off the country, eat only twice a day, and use every bit of daylight to travel.'

  'It's about six hundred miles from here to the southern edge of the glacier in England as the crow flies,' von Billmann said. 'Twelve hundred miles round trip. And you'll probably cover three hundred or so miles in England itself. To get back here in a month, you'll have to average about fifty miles a day.'

  'I may take a little longer than a month,' the Englishman said.

  'You won't have any thick woods to slow you up,' Rachel said. 'But even so...'

  The night before he was to leave, the four sat around a fire in front of their huts. Most of the tribespeople had gone to bed, filled with meat and berries and boiled greens they had devoured during the feast to celebrate Gribardsun's departure. Many had cried and embraced him, saying that they would miss him very much and hoping that evil spirits or bad animals would not get him. Their grief seemed genuine enough, but Gribardsun remarked later that a sense of relief underlay the sorrow. With him gone, they would be able to get back to a more normal - or at least a less tense - life. Having a demigod around was not conducive to relaxation or comfort.

  'I've said that I object to your going off on your own, and I protest again,' Rachel said. 'You're the one who keeps everybody in line here. Our authority may not be up to keeping the peace between the two tribes. And what if one of us falls sick? You're the doctor. You won't be here to treat us. If something should happen to you - and you must admit that the chances are high - we would have no way of knowing where you are. We couldn't even go looking for you; it would jeopardize the expedition itself. You aren't even taking along a radio.'

  'As the head of this expedition, I make the decisions,' John said. 'Everything we do here is chancy. I believe that a survey of conditions in England will be a valuable addition to our data and so the trip is justified. Besides,' he added with a smile, 'I want to see what jolly old England looks like now. You can't call it a tight little island, of course, since it's just part of a huge land mass extending as far as Iceland. But I am curious to see what the Thames and the site of London-to-be look like. And what my ancestral estates in Derbyshire and Yorkshire look like.'

  At dawn, Gribardsun stepped out from his hut. He wore a wolf-skin vest and deerskin loincloth and his bearskin boots. He carried a pack on his back containing ammunition and his meager scientific and medical equipment, several containers of dehydrated fruit juice and concentrated protein, a suit and a tent of thermicron (though it was summer it would be cold near the ice fields of England), and a pair of binoculars. He was not even taking shaving equipment, though he could have shaved with the edge of his hunting knife. He was growing a beard on this trip.

  Laminak was wailing with the scientists. She threw her arms around him and wept, and he kissed her and told her not to grieve. Rachel looked sour. She had tried to overcome her irrational feelings of jealousy, but she could not endure the child. Gribardsun might seem amused by Laminak's devotion, but she could not get rid of the idea that he was just waiting for her to become a little older. Gribardsun thought so much of her, her intelligence was very high, - she was sensitive, perceptive, and open-hearted, and showed signs of being a beauty. Before it would be time for the travelers to return, she would be fifteen, and Gribardsun might take her back with him. She believed this despite his protests that that could never happen.

  Drummond Silverstein said goodbye to Gribardsun and then burst into tears. He had become very much attached to the Englishman, partly because they spent an hour almost every day in therapy. Gribardsun was using a combination of drugs and hypnotism to break through the wall of time that Drummond had erected inside himself. But he had had little success. However, Drummond had become very dependent on him.

  'If I thought that my leaving would injure him, I might stay,' Gribardsun said. 'But the therapy has not been spectacularly successful, so it won't be upset with my absence. But I want you two to watch him closely for signs of improvement or regression. You have my instructions concerning him.'

  Ten minutes later, he was out of sight. He left at a trot, which he said he could keep up all day. Except in the roughest terrain, he expected to average about fifty miles a day.

  The days passed. The summer was hot but short, and the work for both the scientists and the tribespeople was hard. Rachel trained Drummond to help her in her fields of botany, zoology, and genetics, but had to suppress an ever present irritation with him. She tended to regard him as mentally retarded, whereas he was actually a very bright twelve-year-old. He learned swiftly, but he did make mistakes, and she was sharp with him when these occurred. Nor did she feel sympathetic when he now and then called her 'mother.' She was, in fact, furious.

  Von Billmann showed signs of discontent. More and more he complained about the low chances of ever getting to Czechoslovakia.

  'The speakers of proto-Indo-Hittite must be located and their language recorded,' he said. 'And doing this will take time. We should be traveling there right now. But, instead, John Gribardsun is visiting that barren piece of land, England. I doubt that he'll find a single human being there.'

  'That's not what he's looking for,' she said. 'You know he's making a geological and meteorological survey.'

  'We should have brought along a small plane,' he said peevishly. 'We could have covered hundreds of miles, saved months of travel time. I could be in Czechoslovakia right now.'

  She had known von Billmann for many years before the expedition and had never once seen him in a bad humor. Perhaps he was being affected by temporal dislocation. Though he had been more resistant than she or her husband, he was succumbing now. And she, instead of getting better, was feeling less and less attached to reality. She and von Billmann were weakenin
g, she was sure, because their pillar of stability was gone. As long as Gribardsun was around, reality seemed more solid. He radiated strength and assurance.

  Eight

  A month passed. The hunters brought in hares, lemmings, marmots, voles, grouse, foxes, wolves, ibex, reindeer, horses, musk oxen, aurochs, bison, rhinoceroses, and mammoths. The fishermen brought in salmon and fresh-water mussels. The women brought in berries and tubers and greens of various kinds. Meat and fish were smoked and dried. Tubers were dried or ground into a powder. Skins were tanned, cut, and sewn. An old man (about sixty) died. Ten babies were born, four of whom died at birth. Three mothers died. A hunter came too close to a mammoth which had fallen into a trap and was lifted up and dashed to death by the huge beast's trunk. A youth fell off a cliff while hunting ibex, broke his back, and was eaten by cave hyenas before his companions could get to him. A man savagely beat his wife when he found her with another man behind a large boulder. She recovered but lost numerous teeth and an eye.

  Casualties were normally high among these people, but this month they were unusually high, frighteningly so to the tribes-people. They blamed Gribardsun's absence for the evil things happening to them.

  When thirty days had passed, Rachel and von Billmann began to look for Gribardsun. Every day thereafter they expected, or at least hoped, to see his tall, long-legged, broad-shouldered figure and handsome face appear down the valley. But two weeks went by, and they started to worry. They knew that he was not conforming to a timetable, and that he might have run across many interesting phenomena to detain him. But he was a man of his word, and if he said he would be back in a month, he would try to keep reasonably close to that time.

  The day of the seventh week after his departure, Rachel was on a herpetological field trip, about five miles from the camp, with Drummond. She had taken films at long range of a field where vipers lived. Having been fortunate to photograph a viper in the act of swallowing a young lemming, she went into the area to catch the snake. She found the hole into which it had disappeared and she and Drummond began digging into it. After fifteen minutes of hard work with the shovel, she exposed the snake sleeping in the burrow with its middle swollen with the lemming. She lifted it and dropped it into a bag.

  And then she dropped bag and snake as Drummond yelled behind her.

  She whirled and saw him rigid and pointing at a larger viper poised to strike only a foot away.

  'Stand still!' she said. 'And be quiet! I'll get him!'

  She withdrew her pistol slowly from her holster, but Drummond yelled again and jumped away as the upper part of the snake's body swayed back and forth. The snake flashed forward at the sudden movement, and Rachel shrieked. She thought that the snake had struck Drummond.

  Her revolver missed the viper with the first two shots, but the third blew its backbone apart just behind the head.

  Drummond remained frozen and gray.

  'Did it bite you?' she asked. She reached into the bag she wore suspended from her belt. It held anti-venom drugs, but the effect depended on quick injection.

  'I don't think so,' he said finally, staring down at his leg. 'It struck me, but only with the tip of its snout, I think. I was going away from it when it did hit.'

  He suddenly sat down and covered his face with his hands. Rachel got down on her knees and rolled up his pants leg. She could find no bite.

  'You're all right,' she said.

  'Where exactly am I?' His eyes looked at her bewildered through his fingers.

  She knew then, without being told, what had happened.

  'I remember shooting at you,' he said. 'My God, what happened? Where are we?'

  By the time they had returned to camp, he knew everything. But it was all hearsay to him. He remembered nothing from the moment he had tried to kill her.

  'And the old snake-pit treatment brought me back,' he said. 'In one way I wish it hadn't. But of course I wouldn't want to remain a child forever. I wonder why I got stuck at that age? It doesn't matter, I can find out when I get back to our time. If we ever do...'

  He began to weep, saying as he regained control, 'My God, what have I done? What's happened to me? To us?'

  She did not reply for a while, and then she said, 'Whatever it is, it's something that brought out in us what already existed. It didn't originate anything.'

  'I can't believe that these psychological changes are brought about just by the shock of time dislocation,' he said. 'I wonder if there aren't some subtle somatic effects caused by time travel. Something that causes an electrochemical imbalance.'

  'That is something that will be determined by the medics when we get back,' she said. 'Unless, of course, the trip back restores our balance.'

  She started to say something, shut her mouth, then put out her hand to stop him.

  'John is gone,' she said, 'and it's possible he may never return. I can't help feeling that something bad has happened to him. But if he does return, then what? Are we going to go through the same thing? Do I have to be afraid that you'll be shooting at us?'

  'I suppose it's all over between us, no matter what I do from now on,' he said.

  'Yes, I won't lie, even if I am afraid of you,' she said. 'I'm getting a divorce as soon as we get out of quarantine.'

  'And then you and Gribardsun will be getting married?'

  She laughed and said, 'Oh, yes! Right away! You fool! He doesn't love me! I asked him, and he said no!'

  'And you two weren't cheating on me? Or intending to?'

  'This is the twenty-first century!' she said.

  'No, it isn't. It's the hundred and twentieth B.C. You didn't answer my question.'

  'No, we weren't cheating on you. You know I wouldn't deceive you; I'd tell you what I was doing or what I intended to do. And John would never stoop to do anything behind a person's back. You should know him better than that! Can you actually conceive of him doing anything base or sneaky?'

  'Noble John. Nature's aristocrat!'

  They were silent. He started toward the camp again but stopped after a few steps.

  'I swore I wouldn't ever say anything about this until we returned. But I feel I must tell you now. Only you will have to promise me you won't tell Robert or Gribardsun.'

  'How can I do that if it turns out that what you're going to tell me may hurt John if I keep silent?'

  He shrugged and said, 'Unless you promise not to tell anyone, I won't tell you.'

  Rachel looked steadily at him as if she were trying to tunnel straight into his mind, into the chamber where the secret hid. Then she said, 'All right. I promise.'

  'You mean it?'

  'Have I ever lied to you?'

  'I don't think so,' he said.

  He licked his lips.

  'Well, here goes. The day before our quarantine, de Long-nors called me and asked if he could talk to me in private. You were gone, so I said yes. He was at our apartment in ten minutes, and after making sure the place wasn't bugged, and with me wondering what was going on, he told me everything he knew - and suspected - about Gribardsun.'

  'Naturally he'd be angry with John.'

  'There was more to it than that. You see, he'd talked with Moishe, not too long before Moishe died. Moishe was already sick by then, and he knew he was going to die. He called in de Longnors, who at that time was to be head of our expedition. He told de Longnors a strange tale, one which de Longnors found difficult to believe. Moishe said that thirty years before, in 2038, when he was still working on his theory of time mechanics, he was approached by Gribardsun. At that time almost no one knew what Moishe was working on and those who did thought he was a crackpot. In fact, Moishe almost lost his position as an instructor in physics at the University of Greater Europe because his superiors thought he was an imbecile or psychotic. Or both.

  'But the pressure from them suddenly and inexplicably eased off. And Moishe was given the go-ahead. Not only that; he was granted leave from his teaching duties and given more computer facilities.

  'Mo
ishe said that this took place almost immediately after he had explained to Gribardsun what he was doing. Apparently Gribardsun had a grasp of Moishe's theory that no one else had at that time. Moishe said it wasn't because Gribardsun was such a great mathematician. But he seemed to have an almost intuitive comprehension. As if he spoke - or thought - in a language that had the same structure as Moishe's mathematics. Moishe couldn't explain what his impressions of Gribardsun were, but he felt a repressed force and something slightly unhuman - not inhuman - in him. As if the man had a somewhat non-Homo sapiens Weltanschauung.

  'Whatever Gribardsun was, he wanted Moishe to go full jets ahead. And Moishe was given everything he asked for. At the time he did not connect the Englishman's visit with what followed. Gribardsun had not promised anything. But later, Moishe made a few investigations - after he became suspicious, that is; he could not prove it, but he suspected that Gribardsun had somehow pulled strings to get the project going. All of this was thirty years before construction on the vessel had started. Twenty-four years before the final project was approved.'