by Anthology
“I don’t know how many times Carol sent me back—just a few minutes or hours—before I made the big jump. I didn’t care about the dinosaurs; I just wanted to see how far the machine would take me on the supply of power I had available. I suppose it was dangerous, but is life so wonderful? The war was on them—One more life?”
He sort of coddled his glass as if he was thinking about things in general, then he seemed to skip a part in his mind and keep right on going.
“It was sunny,” he said, “sunny and bright; dry and hard. There were no swamps, no ferns. None of the accoutrements of the Cretaceous we associate with dinosaurs,”—anyway, I think that’s what he said. I didn’t always catch the big words, so later on I’ll just stick in what I can remember. I checked all the spellings, and I must say that for all the liquor he put away, he pronounced them without stutters.
That’s maybe what bothered us. He sounded so familiar with everything, and it all just rolled off his tongue like nothing.
He went on, “It was a late age, certainly the Cretaceous. The dinosaurs were already on the way out—all except those little ones, with their metal belts and their guns.”
I guess Joe practically dropped his nose into the beer altogether. He skidded halfway around the glass, when the professor let loose that statement sort of sadlike.
Joe sounded mad. “What little ones, with whose metal belts and which guns?”
The professor looked at him for just a second and then let his eyes slide back to nowhere. “THC were little reptiles, standing four feet high. They stood on their hind legs with a thick tail behind, and they had little forearms with fingers. Around their waists were strapped wide metal belts, and from these hung guns.—And they weren’t guns that shot pellets either; they were energy projectors.”
“They were what’!” I asked. “Say, when was this? Millions of years ago?”
“That’s right,” he said. “They were reptiles. They had scales and no eyelids and they probably laid eggs. But they used energy guns. There were five of them. They were on me as soon as I got out of the machine. There must have been millions of them all over Earth—millions. Scattered all over. They must have been the Lords of Creation then.”
I guess it was then that Ray thought he had him, because he developed that wise look in his eyes that makes you feel like conking him with an empty beer mug, because a full one would waste beer. He said, “Look, P’fessor, millions of them, huh? Aren’t there guys who don’t do anything but find old bones and mess around with them till they figure out what some dinosaur looked like. The museums are full of these here skeletons, aren’t they? Well, where’s there one with a metal belt on him. If there were millions, what’s become of them? Where are the hones?”
The professor sighed. It was a real, sad sigh. Maybe he realized for the first time he was just speaking to three guys in overalls in a barroom. Or maybe he didn’t care.
He said, “You don’t find many fossils. Think how many animals lived on Earth altogether. Think how many billions and trillions. And then think how few fossils we find.—And these lizards were intelligent. Remember that. They’re not going to get caught in snow drifts or mud, or fall into lava, except by big accident. Think how few fossil men there are—even of these subintelligent apemen of a million years ago.”
He looked at his half-full glass and turned it round and round.
He said, “What would fossils show anyway? Metal belts rust away and leave nothing. Those little lizards were warm-blooded. I know that, but you couldn’t prove it from petrified bones. What the devil? A million years from now could you tell what New York looks like from a human skeleton? Could you tell a human from a gorilla by the bones and figure out which one built an atomic bomb and which one ate bananas in a zoo?”
“Hey,” said Joe, plenty objecting, “any simple bum can tell a gorilla skeleton from a man’s. A man’s got a larger brain. Any fool can tell which one was intelligent.”
“Really?” The professor laughed to himself, as if all this was so simple and obvious, it was just a crying shame to waste time on it. “You judge everything from the type of brain human beings have managed to develop. Evolution has different ways of doing things. Birds fly one way; bats Ay another way. Life has plenty of tricks for everything.—How much of your brain do you think you use. About a fifth. That’s what the psychologists say. As far as they know, as far as anybody knows, eighty per cent of your brain has no use at all. Everybody just works on way-low gear, except maybe a few in history. Leonardo da Vinci, for instance. Archimedes, Aristotle, Gauss, Galois, Einstein—”
I never heard of any of them except Einstein, but I didn’t let on. He mentioned a few more, but I’ve put in all I can remember. Then he said, “Those little reptiles had tiny brains, maybe quarter-size, maybe even less, but they used it all—every hit of it. Their hones might not show it, but they were intelligent; intelligent as humans. And they were boss of all Earth.”
And then Joe came up with something that was really good. For a while I was sure that he had the professor and I was awfully glad he came out with it. He said, “Look, P’fessor, if those lizards were so damned hot, why didn’t they leave something behind? Where are their cities and their buildings and all the sort of stuff we keep finding of the cavemen, stone knives and things. Hell, if human beings got the heck off of Earth, think of the stuff we’d leave behind us. You couldn’t walk a mile without falling over a city. And roads and things.”
But the professor just couldn’t he stopped. He wasn’t even shaken up. He just came right back with, “You’re still judging other forms of life by human standards. We build cities and roads and airports and the rest that goes with us—but they didn’t. They were built on a different plan. Their whole way of life was different from the ground up. They didn’t live in cities. They didn’t have our kind of art. I’m not sure what they did have because it was so alien I couldn’t grasp it—except for their guns. Those would be the same. Funny, isn’t it.—For all I know, maybe we stumble over their relics every day and don’t even know that’s what they are.”
I was pretty sick of it by that time. You just couldn’t get him. The cuter you’d be, the cuter he’d be.
I said, “Look here. How do you know so much about those things? What did you do; live with them? Or did they speak English? Or maybe you speak lizard talk. Give us a few words of lizard talk.”
I guess I was getting mad, too. You know how it is. A guy tells you something you don’t believe because it’s all cockeyed, and you can’t get him to admit he’s lying.
But the professor wasn’t mad. He was just filling the glass again, very slowly. “No,” he said, “I didn’t talk and they didn’t talk. They just looked at me with their cold, hard, staring eyes—snake’s eyes—and I knew what they were thinking, and I could see that they knew what I was thinking. Don’t ask me how it happened. It just did. Everything. I knew that they were out on a hunting expedition and I knew they weren’t going to let me go.”
And we stopped asking questions. We just looked at him, then Ray said, “What happened? How did you get away?”
“That was easy. An animal scurried past on the hilltop. It was long—maybe ten feet—and narrow and ran close to the ground. The lizards got excited. I could feel the excitement in waves. It was as if they forgot about me in a single hot flash of blood lust—and off they went. I got back in the machine, returned, and broke it up.”
It was the flattest sort of ending you ever heard. Joe made a noise in his throat. “Well, what happened to the dinosaurs?”
“Oh, you don’t see? I thought it was plain enough.—It was those little intelligent lizards that did it. They were hunters—by instinct and by choice. It was their hobby in life. It wasn’t for food; it was for fun.”
“And they just wiped out all the dinosaurs on the Earth?”
“All that lived at the time, anyway; all the contemporary species. Don’t you think it’s possible? How long did it take us to wipe out bison herd
s by the hundred million? What happened to the dodo in a few years? Supposing we really put our minds to it, how long would the lions and the tigers and the giraffes last? Why, by the time I saw those lizards there wasn’t any big game left—no reptile more than fifteen feet maybe. All gone. Those little demons were chasing the little, scurrying ones, and probably crying their hearts out for the good old days.”
And we all kept quiet and looked at our empty beer bottles and thought about it. All those dinosaurs—big as houses—killed by little lizards with guns. Killed for fun.
Then Joe leaned over and put his hand on the professor’s shoulder, easylike, and shook it. He said, “Hey, P’fessor, but if that’s so, what happened to the little lizards with the guns? Huh?—Did you ever go back to find out?”
The professor looked up with the kind of look in his eyes that he’d have if he were lost.
“You still don’t see! It was already beginning to happen to them. I saw it in their eyes. They were running out of big game—the fun was going nut of it. So what did you expect them to do? They turned to other game—the biggest and most dangerous of all—and really had fun. They hunted that game to the end.”
“What game?” asked Ray. He didn’t get it, but Joe and I did.
“Themselves,” said the professor in a loud voice. “They finished off all the others and began on themselves—till not one was left.”
And again we stopped and thought about those dinosaurs—big as houses—all finished off by little lizards with guns. Then we thought about the little lizards and how they had to keep the guns going even when there was nothing to use them on but themselves.
Joe said, “Poor dumb lizards.”
“Yeah,” said Ray, “poor crackpot lizards.”
And then what happened really scared us. Because the professor jumped up with eyes that looked as if they were trying to climb right out of their sockets and leap at us. He shouted, “You damned fools. Why do you sit there slobbering over reptiles dead a hundred million years. That was the first intelligence on Earth and that’s how it ended. That’s done. But we’re the second intelligence—and how the devil do you think we’re going to end?”
He pushed the chair over and headed for the door. But then he stood there just before leaving altogether and said: “Poor dumb humanity! Go ahead and cry about that.”
DEAR TOMORROW
Simon Clark
Ten
His name was—is—or will be John Salvin. The worst time of his life began when he waved goodbye to his wife and daughter. On that July evening, Kerry and ten-year-old Laurel climbed into a light aircraft that would take them on a sight-seeing flight over a Norwegian fjord.
The plane lifted off from the airfield before soaring out over the calm body of water that perfectly reflected the mountains. The last John saw of the plane—the last anyone saw of the plane—was as it climbed into a deep blue sky. The aircraft resembled a tiny, silver star as it gradually grew smaller, and smaller, and then vanished.
Nine
From the TV Times: Impossible, Isn’t It? The reality show that turns unreality on its head. This week the presenters go time-travelling.
Eight
London: Friday afternoon. Mr and Mrs Banerjee called in at a pizza takeaway to ask directions to a hotel. Mrs Kamana Banerjee had secretly planned a thirtieth birthday treat at the theatre for her husband. They were followed into the takeaway by a youth, who’d fled from a rival gang. One of the youth’s pursuers fired six rounds from a pistol. None of the bullets struck their intended target. Murad Banerjee, however, was, by sheer chance, hit in the throat. When the wounded man turned to his wife, his expression, she remembers, was apologetic, as if this incident was his mistake.
The instant Murad fell Kamana was beside him, cradling his head in her lap. Meanwhile, the hunted youth made good his escape over the pizza-seller’s counter and out the back.
Kamana Banerjee constantly replayed the lethal thirty seconds over and over in her head. The image of that unwarranted and unneeded expression of apology on her husband’s face haunted her ever since he’d died on the takeaway floor three years ago. Every time she recalled the circumstances of the killing she’d ask herself: Why did we choose that particular place to ask directions? Why didn’t we ask in the supermarket next door? Why didn’t we just walk further along the street? And she’d always offer up this heartfelt prayer to her pantheon of many gods: “Please turn back the clock. Please let me be back there in London with my husband, just before we go into the takeaway. Give me the chance to do things differently this time.”
Seven
Every so often, the tiny face of a child will peer out from a mass of starving people in Africa and touch humanity’s conscience. Might our “Dear Tomorrow” messages touch a nerve a thousand years from now? Just as the first, viable time machine shivers into life? So, why not join us, and be part of the greatest experiment in the history of humankind.
Press release for Impossible, Isn’t It?
Six
John Salvin hadn’t yet acquired the knack of living alone, even though five years had passed since his wife, Kerry, and daughter, Laurel, had vanished. This evening, he heard the drone of a light aircraft flying over the house. Instantly, he found himself transported back to the Norwegian airfield. In his imagination, he stood there again near the control tower, watching the single-engine plane dwindle into the distance, eventually turning into a silver speck that resembled a lone star drifting above the fjord.
John sighed. For as long as he heard the plane, which appeared to be doggedly circling above him, he would continue to inhabit that moment when the ill-fated machine carried his wife and daughter off the radar screens and out of his life forever. Quickly he set the tablet computer down on the sofa beside him, grabbed the TV remote then punched up the volume. Television didn’t interest him these days; however, laughter from an excited audience was enough to drown the memory-provoking sound of the aircraft above his house.
John never even glanced at the TV screen. Instead, he returned to the small screen that he balanced on his lap. Working in admin for a publisher of school textbooks kept him busy by day. Evenings were dangerous places, though. All too quickly he could find himself picturing what had become of Kerry and Laurel, so he’d managed to interest the company’s editors in his idea for a history book with an unusual twist.
Now here he was, gratefully busy with Voices from the Past—Letters from Long Ago. For six months he’d been carefully reading, winnowing, and listing items for an anthology of letters, missives and epistles written centuries ago. He preferred letters sent by ordinary people to family and friends, rather than those stilted communiqués emperors despatched to their civil servants. He scrolled down to find a choice example of a more homely missive—this particular one sent from a Byzantine mother to her son during the reign of Empress Theodora, circa AD 1056, in what is present-day Turkey: My son, to meet with your wishes I shall describe our house in Tarsus, which you have yet to see. From the street, we enter through a blue door into a cool hallway that has a floor of marble. To continue along a passageway brings you to the kitchen. This a pleasant place, and smells deliciously of fresh bread that Zoe bakes. The old chap that served us in Nicaea still tends the garden. We watch him munching grapes from the vine. Later he shouts loudly, shakes his arms, and performs such a drama to suggest that birds have stolen our grapes. This old greybeard is strange in his ways now.
John Salvin had been reading this vintage correspondence for several minutes before he realized that someone on television was talking about letters being like little time machines: that they often contain vivid glimpses of the past. John pretty much shared the same thought as he’d worked on his anthology of ancient writings, so the programme tweaked his interest; he looked up as the show’s presenter, a woman with a winning smile and clear, intelligent eyes, spoke to camera.
“Time travel machines don’t exist yet,” she said. “But what if they become a reality in the future
? With that thought in mind, this show will conduct the most exciting and the most important experiment in the history of the human race.”
“Hyperbole,” John murmured, before adding a more resonant sounding, “Bollocks.”
The presenter continued, “Our experiment is beautiful in its simplicity. We ask viewers to record a short video that contains their message to the future. Here’s your opportunity to tell your descendants why you are speaking to them. When you’ve done that, I want you to upload the video to the Impossible, Isn’t It? website. We’ll be there at the rendezvous point on the big day, and our cameras will record what happens next. Now, over to Greg at the video wall.”
Bright and bouncy, Greg at the video wall described how TV programmes had acquired an immortality all of their own. With the aid of computer animations, he demonstrated how the viewers’ messages “will, indeed, be little time machines in their own right. Yes, okay, they will travel slowly into the future—just as slowly as you, me, Uncle Tom Cobley and all; nevertheless, your video messages will eventually be viewed sometime hence—perhaps a thousand years from now, when time travel is as straightforward as it is for us to nip down to the supermarket. So consider your letter to your descendants as being like a message in a bottle tossed into the sea of time.”
The female presenter returned to sum up the experiment. “Next week’s Impossible, Isn’t It? will feature a selection of your Dear Tomorrow messages. Archived recordings of the show will undoubtedly be watched centuries from now. What’s more, it’s my personal belief that time machines will be invented one day; that’s why I’m inviting time-travelling viewers from the distant future to visit us at our rendezvous point on Mount Snowdon in North Wales, on the tenth of July—that’s just twelve days away. We intend to broadcast a special live edition of the programme from the very top of the mountain. With us will be the vigil team, consisting of members of the public who have uploaded what we deem to be the most compelling and moving videogrammes. So will our unique invitation be a success? Will I be greeting people from those far off tomorrows? Find out for yourselves by joining us live on Mount Snowdon for the greatest experiment of all time.”