by David Drake
Much of the confusion died down after a few minutes. The small hominids made way or were elbowed aside by additional males. Their external genitalia were obvious, though the flat dugs of the females were hidden by their fur. Most of the males were empty-handed, but one of them was dragging forward what could only be the femur of a sivatherium. The bone was too massive even for the molars of the great hyenas; in time it would have been gnawed away by rodents, but nothing of a size to matter would have disputed its possession with the hominids. Vickers frowned, trying to imagine what the latter with the relatively small jaws expected to do with a bone which was beyond the range of hyenas and the big cats.
But the troop’s first order of business was the hyrax. It provided a demonstration that the jaws and limbs of the hominids were by no means despicable themselves. The leader gripped the little animal with his teeth and systematically plucked it apart with his hands. One of the males reached in for a piece. The leader cuffed him away and dropped the hyrax long enough to jabber a stream of obvious abuse at the usurper. With something approaching ceremony, the leader then handed the fleshy hind legs to two males. Despite the confusion, Vickers was sure that at least one of them had been a companion of the leader during the morning’s circuit.
Dignity satisfied, the white-flashed hominid continued parceling out the hyrax. The leader’s motions were precise; each twist or slash of nails that still resembled claws stripped away another fragment. As each hominid received a portion, he or she—a foreleg had gone early to a dun-furred nursing mother—stepped back out of the ruck. There was some squabbling as members of the troop bolted their allotments, but Vickers did not notice anyone’s share actually hijacked.
“Nineteen with him,” Linda Weil counted aloud as the leader stood alone in the widened circle of his juniors. Every member of the troop—Vickers found he had an uneasy tendency to think ‘tribe’—every member of the troop had been given a portion of the hyrax. The leader held only the head and a bloody tendril of hide still clinging to it. With a croak of triumph the leader bent and picked up the lump of quartz he had carried since the encounter with the hyenas. He rotated the hyrax head awkwardly with his thumb, then brought his two hands together with a resounding smack. Dropping the stone again, the leader began to slurp the brains greedily.
“Goddamn it, you know they’re men,” Holgar Nilson whispered hoarsely.
“It’s nothing more than sea otters do,” the paleontologist replied, but she kept the glasses to her eyes and would not face her lover.
Vickers looked from the one to the other, Weil tense, Nilson angry. “I don’t think otters share out meat like that,” Vickers said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen animals share out meat that well. Maybe wolves do.” He paused before adding, “That doesn’t mean they’re not animals.”
The hyrax was a memory, though a memory that had provided each hominid with a good four ounces of flesh in addition to whatever protein individuals might have scavenged for themselves during the morning. Now the females were bringing out the results of their own gathering: roots and probably locust pods, though it was hard to be sure through the binoculars. Females appeared to be approaching males one on one, though the distinguishing marks of most hominids were too subtle for immediate certainty. The dun-colored mother and an adolescent female whose pelt was a similar shade stood to either side of the leader, cooing and attempting to groom his fur as they offered tubers of some kind.
But the males had not completed their own program as yet. The leader barked something which must have been more in the line of permission than a command. Two of the males responded almost before the syllable was complete, squatting down and chopping furiously with rocks gripped in either fist.
“I can’t see them!” Linda Weil said.
Vickers looked at her. Grass blurred all but the heads and flailing arms of the squatting hominids. The crack! of stone on bone denser than teak ricocheted up to the watchers. “Ah, they’re breaking up the giraffe thigh with rocks,” the guide said.
“I know that!” snapped the paleontologist. “Of course they are! And I can’t see it!”
Long flakes of bone were spitting upward, catching stray darts of sunlight that made them momentary jewels. The remaining hominids surrounded the activity in a chattering circle, the nuts and tubers forgotten. Occasionally one of the onlookers might snatch at a splinter of bone which would quickly be cast aside again after a perfunctory mumbling.
Linda Weil stood up, holding her camera.
The motion drew the eyes of one hominid. His chirp focused every head in the troop. It was the minuscule whirr of the camera that set off the explosion, however. The hominids fanned forward like a rifle platoon, the half-dozen adult males serried out in front while the young and females filled the interstices a pace or two behind. Even at a distance, their racket was considerable. Each throat was snarling out a single, repetitive syllable as loudly as the lungs beneath could drive it. Some of the females threw handfuls of dirt. It pelted the backs of the males, only the wind-blown dust carrying any considerable distance toward the humans.
The males were not throwing anything. For a further icy instant, Vickers studied their hands through the binoculars. Then he dropped the glasses onto their strap and unslung his Garand. One or both fists of each male hominid bulged with a block of stone. The whole troop was beginning to advance.
“Holgar,” Vickers said without taking his eyes off the hominids, “you and Miss Weil strike for camp right now. I’m going to follow just as quick as it’s safe. Right now!”
Both Nilson and the paleontologist turned to speak, so it was the senior guide alone who saw the rush of the sabertooth from the instant it burst from cover. Dirt flew as the cat’s paws hit, its legs doubling under as its spine flexed to fire it along on another leap. In motion, the sabertooth’s mottled body looked so large that it was incredible that it could have sheltered behind the small acacia from which it had sprung. Even more amazing was the fact that it had reached the acacia, for the grass to a considerable distance in every direction seemed sparse and featureless.
Despite their noise and apparent concentration, the hominids saw the sabertooth almost as quickly as Vickers did. They had reacted to the humans as if to a territorial challenge; the response evoked by the big cat was one of blind panic. The orchestrated threats dissolved into patternless shrieking. The individual hominids, even the leader, blasted away like shot from a cylinder bore.
The sabertooth was only a leap from its victim, the dun mother. Nothing the troop could have done at that point would have made the least difference.
Nilson’s Mauser was fitted with an electronic-bead sight, awesomely fast for a shooter trained in its use. The rifle was up and on and as suddenly wrestled away as Linda Weil lunged at it. “No!” the paleontologist shouted, “No! Don’t—”
The dun hominid knew she had been chosen. She plucked off the infant which clung to her with all the strength of its tiny arms. The nearest member of the troop was the adolescent female, possibly an older daughter. To her, poised between love and terror ten feet away, the mother hurled her infant. Then, at the last possible moment, the mother cut against the grain of the charge with an agility that could scarcely have been bettered.
It was not enough. The machairodont twisted. It was unable to flesh its teeth as it intended, but its splayed forepaws commanded a swath six feet broad. The right paw smacked the hominid in the middle of the chest. Four of the five claws hooked solidly and spun the light hominid into the path along which the killer’s momentum carried it. The jaws crunched closed. One of the long canines stabbed through a shoulder blade to bulge the dimple at the base of the victim’s throat.
The surviving hominids had regrouped and were scampering away westward like wind-scud. Vickers retrieved his binoculars. The adolescent had already passed her burden onto an adult female without an infant of her own. The males were bringing up the rear of the troop, but the looks they cast over their shoulders as they retreate
d were more anxious than threatening. The leader still carried the block of quartz he had found near the hyenas. All the rest had dropped their weapons in the panic. The leader continued to call out, his voice a harsh lash driving the troop. Behind them, the sabertooth had begun to feast noisily.
“If you’d’ve shot,” Linda Weil was shouting, “it’d be the last time they’d let us get within a mile of them! They’re smart, I tell you. Smart enough to connect a noise we make with things falling dead!”
The big Norwegian had wrenched away his rifle too late to shoot to any purpose. He stood with the Mauser waist high, half-shielded by his body as if he expected the paleontologist to snatch at the weapon again. “It’s all right for you to frighten them!” the guide shouted back. “When I want to save their lives, what then? You scream, you prevent me! Look at that—” he waved toward the blood-splashed grass beneath the acacias, the muzzle of his rifle quivering as he released the fore-end to gesture. “That could be the end of our race down there!”
After a quick glance at his companions, Vickers had resumed giving his attention to the scene focused in his glasses. Neither of the humans appeared to be immediately dangerous, and the big cat certainly was. It was ripping its prey apart by mouthfuls, pulling against stiff forelegs which pinned the small carcass to the ground. The hominid’s bones affected the killer no more than a sardine’s bones affect a hungry human. The cat was obviously aware of the humans watching it, but for the moment it had food and did not feel threatened.
“We aren’t here to save animals,” Weil said, pitching her voice normally in contrast to the shouts she had exchanged with Nilson a few moments before. “We’re here to observe them. Those, ah, primates reacted to me as they would to another troop of primates—display, threats—warnings, that’s all. They’ll continue to let me come close enough to observe. But if you’d shot, from then on they’d have reacted to us the way they did to the machairodont—and I damned well doubt any of us can stalk the way that cat did!”
Holgar Nilson’s face was red beneath his hat brim. He turned and spat, knocking dust from the heads of brazen oat-grass. “Observe?” he said. “Meddle! You’re going to meddle us all out of existence!”
“It’s already been a pretty long day, as early as we started,” Vickers suggested with what was for him unusual diplomacy. “I think we’ve seen about all we’re going to see today . . . and if we’re going to discuss it, I’d rather it was after a meal and coffee. A lot of coffee.”
Vickers led his sullen companions back past the looted trapline. He was not sure whether either of the others noticed that three of the traps were still set, even though the tops of all of them had been unlatched. Since the bait was still there, it meant that the hominids had opened the traps purely for fun.
“All right,” said Holgar Nilson. “I’ll tell you just what’s bothering me.” The blond man’s concern had not affected his appetite. He gestured with the remnants of his hipparion chop, an experiment which the others were willing to call a failure. “You play games with me with words, but these are men we’ve found. What I am saying is, what if these are the only ones? What if we do something that gets them all killed? Like we did this morning, drawing their attention to something that shouldn’t be in this, in this time at all so that they don’t see the tiger waiting to kill them!”
Weil raised her hands in frustration. “I couldn’t guess within a million years what time we’ve been inserted into, Holgar,” she said. “You know that. The chances of us being landed on exactly the right time and place to find the absolutely earliest individuals who could be called human—that’s absurd! Now, I’m not saying the troop we’ve observed isn’t typical of the earliest, well . . . men.”
Vickers swallowed the bite of coarse, musky hipparion flesh he had been chewing for some time. “That’s fine, what you say about likelihood,” he said quietly. “But I suppose there had to be a first some time. It’s an open secret, in the Project at least, that the reason some of the brass Topside is so excited about time intrusion is the chance that it will turn out to be possible to change the past.”
“You’re both still looking for the missing link!” the paleontologist said with more acid than she had intended to show. “There isn’t any such thing, isn’t, wasn’t, whatever. There were at least three primate stocks we know about that could have and would have become Homo sapiens in time. One of them did—and both the others, Australopithecus and Homo habilis, so called, were thought to have been direct ancestors during your lifetime and mine. They could have been, they were that close; and if it weren’t for competition from our own stock, one or the other of them would certainly have evolved into a higher hominid that you couldn’t tell from your next-door neighbor.”
The younger guide’s face was still as a death mask. “That’s all very well,” he said, “but would they be my next-door neighbor? Would they be my wife, my children? Will there be my farm in the Transvaal as I left it if we upset the—the past that all that grows from? This cosmic viewpoint is very scientific, no doubt, but I at least am human!”
Linda Weil swallowed with difficulty though her mouth held nothing but saliva. “I—” she said. Then, “Holgar, don’t let’s talk about this now. I can see you’re upset and I . . . I’m upset also. This is . . . this is a very big opportunity for me. I shiver when I think how big an opportunity it is.”
Nilson looked at her silently, then tossed the rib bone toward the coals. Ash spurted and the rib spun off into the grass beyond. “I’m going to shoot a hyena,” the guide said, wiping grease from his hands on the grass. He gripped his Mauser and stood. They had been eating as they always did, beneath a nylon fly. Sunlight now bisected the tall man diagonally. “Or perhaps you want as many as possible carnivores left alive, now, to kill men?”
Weil’s forehead scrunched up, but she would not call to the Norwegian as he walked away. Vickers said, “Look, Holgar, hang on a moment and I’ll—”
Nilson’s head spun around. “No, thank you!” he said. “I will take no risks—we are both aware of how dangerous the land is now, are we not? But I will do this thing alone, thank you.”
Vickers shrugged. Technically the younger man was his subordinate, but they were several million years from any further chain of command. Vickers’ own bad experience the day before did not make Nilson’s proposal unreasonable. Only the situation was unreasonable, and that wasn’t something Vickers could help the Norwegian with. “All right,” he said, “but call in every half-hour on the radio.”
The blond man nodded but did not turn around again as he stalked off.
Linda Weil cursed in a dull voice. She looked at the forkful of meat she was holding and put it down again. “Vickers,” she said, then paused to clear her throat. “Ah, Henry, I’ll need a specimen of these primates before we go back.”
The guide met her eyes while continuing to chew. “Tell you the truth,” he said, “I don’t know that I’m ready to shoot anything quite that, ah, anthropoid, without a good reason. What do you need a specimen for?”
“Oh, of course killing one was out of the question,” the paleontologist said. Vickers continued to look at her, blinking but not speaking. Touching her tongue to her lips, Weil went on, “The specimens would be for the same purpose as the others that we’ve gathered, dating . . . We’re probably dealing with an advanced ramapithecus. I think that’s the safest assumption. But a careful examination of dentition and cranial capacity, plus the knee and pelvic joints in particular, could . . . well, it’s—possible—that the primates we’ve observed could really belong in the genus homo after all. If we knew that, we’d know as much about when we are as those macheirodont specimens, for instance, can tell us. Among other things.”
Vickers’ face softened in a tired grin. “So in terms of the task I’ve been sent to aid you in,” he said, “you’re justified in ordering me to help gather primate specimens. You can burn me with the administration Topside if I start—having qualms the way Holgar seems to b
e.”
The woman scowled and looked away. “I’m not threatening you,” she said. “You’re not the sort who needs to be threatened to get him to do his job—are you? I’m just pointing out that it is your job; that yes, I am the one who has final say over what specimens are to be collected. That’s why they sent a paleontologist.”
“All right,” said Vickers, “but if you had a notion of retrieving that sabertooth’s kill, you can forget it.” He stood up and walked to the edge of the fly, where he could observe the tiny dots that were vultures a thousand feet above the plain.
“Umm?”
“Our friend treated it just like a cat with a field mouse,” the guide explained. “Ate the whole head while I watched it. Its mate would likely have done the same thing with me—if it hadn’t been for Holgar.” He paused. “You might find the knee joints. I wouldn’t count on anything much higher up.”
“Oh,” the paleontologist said, her careful eyes on the guide’s back. “Well, to tell the truth, that wasn’t really what I had in mind anyway.” After a moment, Vickers turned around. Weil continued, “There’s nothing we need to know that can’t be learned as well or better from X-rays of a living specimen. Without hurting it a bit. All we have to do is carry one back Topside.”
“Jesus,” said the guide in disbelief. “Jesus Christ.” He spread his hands, then closed them and looked away from the dark-haired woman. “Did it ever occur to you,” he said, speaking toward the heat-shimmer above the fire, “that Holgar could be right? That we mess up this, this present, and when we get back Topside there’s nothing there?” He jerked his head back to look at Weil. “Or that what is there is as different from us as baboons are from chimps? Does that bother you?”
“It doesn’t bother me,” Linda Weil said calmly, “because it’s absurd. I’m bothered by the realistic problems of completing my task. That’s all.”
Vickers smiled again. “That’s really all?” he asked, letting his eyes brush Nilson’s empty camp stool.