by Andre Norton
Tall, thick-haired giants, their backbones sloping from the huge dome of the skull, the hump of shoulder, to the shorter hindquarters dwarfed tree and landscape as they moved. Three of them towered close to fourteen feet at the shoulder. They bore the weight of the tremendous curled tusks proudly, their trunks swaying in time to their unhurried steps. They were the most formidable living things Travis had ever seen. And, watching them, he could not believe that the hunters he had spied upon in the other valley had ever brought down such game with spears. Yet the evidence that they had, had been discovered over and over again—scattered bones with a flint point between the giant ribs or splitting a massive spine.
“One—two—three—” Ross was counting, half under his breath. “And a small one—”
“Calf,” Travis identified. But even that baby was nothing to face without a modem shotgun to hand.
“Four—five—Family party?” Ross speculated.
“Maybe. Or do they travel in herds?”
“Ask the big brains. Ohhh—look at that tree go!”
The leader in the dignified parade set its massive head against a tree bole, gave a small push, and the tree crashed. With a squeal audible to the scouts, the mammoth calf hustled forward and started harvesting the leaves with a busy trunk, while its elders appeared to watch it with adult indulgence.
Ross pushed the wind-blown tails of wig hair out of his eyes. “We may have a problem here. What if they don’t move on? I can’t see a crew working down there with those tons of tusks skipping about in the background.”
“If you want to haze ’em on,” Travis observed, “don’t let me stop you. I’ve drag-herded stubborn cows—but I’m riot going down there and swing a rope at any of those rumps!”
“They might take a fancy to bump over the ship.” “So they might,” agreed Travis. “And what could we do to stop ’em?”
But for the moment the mammoth family seemed content at their own end of the valley, which was at least a quarter of a mile from the ship. After an hour’s watch Ross tightened the thongs of his sandals and gathered up his spears.
“I’ll report in. Maybe those walking mountains will keep hunters away—”
“Or draw them here,” corrected Travis pessimistically. “Think you can find your way back?”
Ross grinned. “This trail is getting to be a regular freeway. All we need is a traffic cop or two. Be seeing you….” He disappeared from their perch with that swift and silent ability to vanish into the surrounding landscape which Travis still found unusual in a white man.
As Travis continued to he there, chin supported on forearm, idly watching the mammoths, he tried again to figure out what made Ashe and Ross Murdock so different from the other members of their race he knew. Of course he had in a measure felt the same lack of selfconsciousness with Dr. Morgan. To Prentiss Morgan a man’s race and the color of his skin were nothing—a shared enthusiasm was all that really mattered. Morgan had cracked Travis Fox’s shell and let him into a larger world. And then—like all soft and de-shelled creatures—he had been the more deeply hurt when that new world had turned hostile. He had then fled back into the old, leaving everything—even friendship—behind.
Now he waited for the old smoldering flame of anger to bite. It was there, but dulled, as the night fire of the volcano was now only a lazy smoke plume under the rising sun. The desert over which he had ridden to find water a week ago was indeed time buried. What—?
The mammoths had moved, with the largest bull facing about. Trunk up, the beast shrilled a challenge that tore at Travis’ ears. This was beyond the squall of the sabertooth, the grunting roar of a sloth prepared to do battle. It was the most frightening sound he had ever heard.
A second time the bull trumpeted. Sabertooth on the hunt? The Alaskan lion? What animal was large, enough, or desperate enough, to stalk that walking mountain? Man?
But if there was a Folsom hunter in hiding, he did not linger. The bull paced along the edge of the wood and then butted over another tree, to tear loose leaved branches and crunch them greedily. The crisis was past.
An hour later a party guided by Ross climbed up to join him. Kelgarries, and four others, wearing dull green and brown coveralls which faded into the general background, spread themselves on the ground to share the lookout.
“That’s our baby!” The Major’s face was alight with enthusiasm as he sighted the derelict. “What can you do about her, boys?”
But one of the crew focused glasses in another direction. “Hey—those things are mammoths!” he shouted. As one, his fellows turned to follow his directing finger.
“Sure,” snapped the Major. “Look at the ship, Wilson. If she is intact, can we possibly swing a direct transfer?”
Reluctantly the other man abandoned the mammoth family for business. He studied the derelict through his lenses. “Some job. Biggest transfer we ever did was the sub frame—”
“I know that! But that was two years ago, and Crawford’s experiments have proved that the grid can be expanded without losing power. If we can take this one straight through without any dismantling, we’ve put the schedule ahead maybe five years! And you know what that will mean.”
“And who’s going to go down there to set up a grid with those outsize elephants watching him? We have to have a clear field to work in and no interruptions. A lot of the material won’t stand any rough handling.”
“Yeah,” echoed one of his subordinates. Again the lenses swung to the north. “Just how are you goint to shoo the mammoths out?”
“Scout job, I suppose.” That resigned comment came from Ashe as he joined the party. “Well, I’m admitting right here and now that I have no ideas, bright or otherwise, on how to make a mammoth decide to take a long walk. But we’re open for suggestions.”
They watched the browsing beasts in silence. Nobody volunteered any ideas. It appeared that this particular problem was not yet covered by any rule on or off the book.
6
“What we need is a mine field—like the one planted around H.Q.,” Ross said at last.
“Mine field?” repeated the man Kelgarries had called Wilson. Then he said again. “Mine field!”
“Got something?” demanded the Major.
“Not a mine field,” Wilson corrected. “We could fix it for those brutes to blow themselves up, all right, but they’d take the ship with them. However, a sonic barrier now—”
“Run it around the ship outside your work field—yes!” The Major was eager again. “Would it take long to get it in?”
“We’d have to bring a lot of equipment through. Say a day—maybe more. But it is the only thing I can think of now which might work.”
“All right. You’ll get all the material you need—on the double!” promised Kelgarries.
Wilson chuckled. “Just like that, eh? No howls about expense? Remember, I’m not going to sign any orders I have to defend with my h’feblood about two years from now before some half-baked investigating committee.”
“If we pull this off,” Kelgarries returned with convincing force, “We’ll never have to defend anything before anyone! Man—you get that ship through intact and our whole project will have paid for itself from the day it was nothing but a few wishful sentences on the back of an old envelope. This is it—the big pay-off!”
That was the beginning of a hectic period in Travis’ life which he was never able to sort out neatly in his head afterward. With Ashe and Ross he patrolled a wide area of hill and valley, keeping watch upon the camps of the wandering hunters, marking down the drifting herds of animals.
For two days men shutded back and forth and then erected a second time transfer within the valley of the smaller ship.
Wilson’s sonic barrier—an invisible yet nerve-shattering wall of high-frequency impulses—was in place around the ship. And while its signals did not affect human ears, the tension it produced did reach any man who strayed into its influence. The mammoth family withdrew into the small woodland from wh
ich they had come. The men working on the globe did not know whether that retreat was the result of the vibrations or not—but at least the beasts were gone.
Meanwhile more sonic broadcasters were set up on every path in and out of the valley, sealing it from invasion. Kel-garries and his superiors were throwing every resource of the project into this one job.
About the ship arose a framework of bars as fast as the men could fit one to another. Travis, watching the careful deliberation of the fitting, understood that delicate and demanding work was in progress. He learned from overheard comments that a new type of time transfer was in the process of being assembled here, and that one so large had never been attempted before. If the job was successful, the globe would be carried intact through to his own era for detailed study.
In the meantime another small crew of experts not only explored the ship, taking care not to activate any of its machines, but also made a detailed study of the remains of the crew. Medical men did what they could to discover the cause for the mass death of the space men. And their final verdict was a sudden attack of disease or food poisoning, for there were no wounds.
Three days—four—Travis, weary to his very bones, dragged back from a scouting trip southward and hunched down by the fire in the small camp the three field men kept on the heights above the crucial valley. The metallic taste in the air rasped throat and lungs when he breathed deeply.
For the past two days the volcanic activity in the north had become more intense. Once the night before they had all been awakened by a display—luckily miles away—during which half a mountain must have blown skyward. Twice torrents of rain had hit, but it was warm rain and the sultriness of the air made conditions now almost tropical. He would be very glad when that fretwork of bars was in place and they could leave this muggy hotbox.
“See anything?” Ross Murdock tossed aside the hide blanket he had pulled about head and shoulders and coughed raspingly as one of the sulphur-tinged breezes curled about them.
“Migration—I think,” Travis qualified his report. “The big bison herd is already well south and the hunters are following it.”
“Don’t like the fireworks, I suppose.” Ross nodded to the north. “And I don’t blame them. There’s a forest burning up there today.”
“Seen anything more of the mammoths?”
“Not around here, I was northeast anyway.”
“How long before they’ll be through down there?” Travis went to look down at the ship. There was a murky haze gathering about the valley and it was spoiling the clearness of view. But men were still aloft on the scaffolding of rods-hurrying to the final capping of the skeleton enclosure about the sphere.
“Ask one of the brains. The other crew—the medics-finished their poking this afternoon. They went through transfer an hour ago. I’d say tomorrow they’ll be ready to throw the switch on that gadget. About time. I have a feeling about this place….”
“Maybe rightly.” Ashe loomed out of the growing murk. “There’s trouble popping to the north.” He coughed, and Travis suddenly noted that the mat of wig was missing from the older man’s head. He saw that there was a long red mark which could only mark a burn down Ashe’s shoulder, crossing
(he white seam of an earlier scar. Ross, seeing it too, jumped (o his feet and turned Ashe toward the light of the fire to inspect that burn closer.
“What did you do—try to play boy on the burning deck?” His voice held an undernote of concern.
“I miscalculated how fast a stand of green timber can burn —when conditions are right. The top of a mountain did blow off last night, and that may have an encore soon. We’re moving down nearer to the transfer. And we may have visitors—”
“Hunters? I saw them moving south—”
But Ashe was shaking his head in answer to Travis.
“No, but we may have been too clever about rigging that sonic screen. Those mammoths have been holed up in a small sub-valley to the north. If the hell I’m expecting now breaks loose, sonics won’t hold them back, but breaking through such a barrier will make them really wild. They might just charge straight down through here. Kelgarries will have to try his big transfer and quick if that happens.”
The scouts reached the floor of the valley in time to see the technicians dropping from the grillwork and hurrying to the time transfer. But they had not come up to the grill when the world went mad. Flame, noise, a thunder in the north, a great up-leap of fire to scorch the underside of lowering clouds. Travis was thrown off his feet as the ground crawled sickeningly. He saw the grid sway about the globe, heard cries and shouts.
“—quake!” A word out of the general clamor made sense of a sort. The volcanic outburst was being matched by earthquake. Travis stared up at the grid fascinated, expecting every moment to see the rods fly apart, come crashing down upon the dome of the ship. But, strangely enough, though the framework swayed, it did not fall.
In the thickening murk Kelgarries drove his men to the personnel transfer. Travis knew that he should join that line, but he was simply too amazed by the scene to stir. The fogsmoke was denser and out of it arose a shout in a voice he recognized. Getting to his feet, he ran to answer that plea for help.
Ashe lay on the ground. Ross was bending over him, trying to get him to his feet. As Travis blundered up, his spears thrown away, the smoke closed in and set them to a strangled coughing. Travis’ sense of direction faltered. Which way was the time transfer? Light ashes drifting through the air blurred air and ground alike—they might have been caught in a snowstorm.
He heard a scream of sheer terror, scaling up. A black shape, larger than the fruit of any nightmare, pounded into sight. The mammoths were charging down-valley as Ashe had feared.
“—get out!” Ross pulled Ashe to the right. Now the older man was between them, stumbling dazedly along.
They skirted the wall of rods about the globe, squeezed through to the ball. A mammoth trumpeted behind them. There was little hope now of reaching the personnel transfer in time and Ashe must have realized that. For he pulled free of the other two and began to move around the ship, one hand on its surface for guide.
Travis guessed his reason—Ashe wanted to find the ladder which led to the open port, use the ship as a refuge. He heard Ashe call, and slipped around behind him to discover that the other held the ladder.
Ross gave his officer a boost, then followed on his heels, while Travis steadied the dangling ladder as best he could. He started to ascend when he saw Ashe, only a dark blot, claw through the port above. He heard again the screeching trumpet of a mammoth and wondered that the beasts had not already smashed into the framework about the ship. Then he in turn was able to scramble through the port, and lay gasping and coughing, the irritation carried in the fog biting into nose and throat tissues.
“Shut it!” Travis was jerked roughly away from the door us someone pushed past him. The outer covering closed with a clang. Now the fog was only a wisp or two, and utter silence look the place of the bedlam outside.
Travis drew a long breath, one which did not this time rasp in his throat. The bluish light from the walls of the ship was subdued, but it was not so dim that he could not see Ashe clearly. The older man lay with his head and shoulders supported by the wall. A bruise was beginning to discolor on his forehead, which was no longer shadowed by any wig. Ross came back from the outer hatch.
“Kind of close quarters here,” he commented. “We might as well spread out some.”
They went out the inner door of the lock, and Murdock swung that shut behind them, a move which was perhaps to save their lives.
“In here—” Murdock indicated the nearest door. Those barriers which had been tightly closed on their first visit to the ship had been opened by the technicians. And the cabin beyond contained a furnishing which was a cross between a bunk and a hammock, being both fastened to the wall and swung on straps from the ceiling. Together they guided Ashe to it and got him down, still dazed. Travis had time for no m
ore than a quick glance about when a voice rang down the well of the stair.
“Hey! Who’s down there? What’s going on?”
They climbed to the control cabin. In front of them stood a wiry young man wearing technician’s coveralls, who stared at them wide-eyed.
“Who are you?” he demanded, as he backed away, his fists up to repel an attack.
Travis was completely bewildered until he caught sight of a reflection on the shining surface of the control board—a dirty, three-quarters naked savage. And Ross was his counterpart—the two of them must certainly look like savages to the stranger. Murdock’s hands went to his ash-encrusted wig and he peeled it off, a gesture Travis copied. The technician relaxed.
“You’re time agents.” He made that recognition sound close to an accusation. “What’s going on, anyway?”
“General blowup.” Ross sat down suddenly and heavily in one of the swinging chairs. Travis leaned against the wall. Here in this silent cabin it was difficult to believe in the disaster and confusion without. “There’s a volcanic eruption in progress,” Murdock continued. “And the mammoths charged— just before we made it in here—”
The technician started for the stairwell. “We’ve got to get to the transfer.”
Travis caught his arm. “No getting out of the ship now. You can’t even see—ash too thick in the air.”
“How close were they to taking this ship through?” Ross wanted to know.
“All ready, as far as I know,” the technician began, and then added quickly, “d’you mean they’ll try to warp her through now—with us inside?”
“It’s a chance, just a chance. If the grid survived the quake and the mammoths.” Ross’s voice was a thin thread, overlaid with a crust of fatigue. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
“We can see—a little.” The technician stepped to one of the side panels his hand going to a button there.
Ross moved, coming out of his seat in a spring which rivaled a sabertooth’s for speed and deadly purpose. He struck out at the other, sent him sprawling on the floor. But not before the button was pressed home. A plate arose from the board, glowed. Then, over the head of the bewildered and angry technician still on his hands and knees, they caught sight of swirling ash-filled vapor, as if they were looking through a window into the valley.