The Technicolor Time Machine

by Harry Harrison

  “Madonna mia,” Gino said, straightening up from behind the camera and wiping his forehead on his sleeve. “What tempers these people got. Worse than Siciliani.”

  “It is nothing but a stupid waste,” Jens said. He was sitting on the ground holding his stomach with both hands. “They were all frightened, just like children, the emotions of children and the bodies of men. So they kill each other. The waste of it all.”

  “But it makes good film,” Barney said. “And we’re not here to interfere with the local customs. What happened to you—get kicked in the stomach during the stampede?”

  “Not interfere with the local customs, very humorous. You disrupt these people’s lives completely for your cinematic drivel, then you avoid the consequences of your actions…” He grimaced suddenly, with his teeth clamped tightly together. Barney looked down and gaped at the spreading red patch between Lyn’s fingers.

  “You’ve been hurt,” he said, unbelievingly, then spun about. “Tex—the first-aid box, quick!”

  “Why the concern about me? I saw you looking at that housecarl with the wounded hand—and that did not seem to bother you. The Norse were reputed to sew up their wounds with carpenter’s thread after a battle. Why don’t you get me some thread?”

  “Take it easy, Jens, you’ve been hurt. We’ll take care of you.”

  Tex ran up with the first-aid box and put it on the ground next to Jens, kneeling at the wounded man’s side.

  “What happened?” he asked in a quiet, surprisingly gentle voice.

  “It was a spear,” Jens said. “So quickly, I never realized. I was between the man and the boats. He was panicked. I raised my hands, tried to talk to him, then there was just this stab of pain and he was past and gone.”

  “Let me look at it. I’ve seen plenty before, bayonet wounds in New Guinea.” His voice was professional and calm, and when he pulled at Jens’ hands they loosened and came away; with a quick slash of his knife he cut open the bloodstained clothing.

  “Not bad,” he said, eyeing the red wound. “Nice clean puncture into the guts. Below the stomach and it doesn’t look deep enough to have got at anything else. Hospital case. They’ll sew up the holes, put in some abdominal drains and fill you full of antibiotics. Try and treat it in the field and you’ll be dead of peritonitis in a couple of days.”

  “You are being damn frank,” Lyn said, but he smiled.

  “Always,” Tex said, taking out a morphine Syrette and cracking it open. “A guy knows what’s going on he don’t complain about the treatment. Helps him, helps everyone else.” He gave the injection with practiced swiftness.

  “Are you sure the nurse cannot treat it here? I don’t wish to return yet…”

  “Full salary and bonus,” Barney said cheeringly. “And a private room in the hospital—don’t worry about a thing.”

  “It is not money I am concerned with, Mr. Hendrickson. Contrary to your beliefs, there are other things in the world beside a buck. It is what I am learning here that counts. One page of my notes is worth more than every reel of your celluloid monstrosity.”

  Barney smiled, trying to change the subject. “They don’t make film out of celluloid any more, Doc. Safety film, can’t burn.”

  Tex shook sulpha powder onto the wound and applied a pressure bandage.

  “You must ask the doctor to come here,” Lyn said, anxiously. “Have his opinion about my leaving. Once I go the film will be finished and I will never return here, never.”

  Almost eagerly, as if to remember everything, he looked around at the bay and the houses and the people. Tex caught Barney’s eye, gave a quick, negative shake of the head, and jerked his thumb toward the company camp. “I’m going for the truck, and I’ll pass the word to the Prof to warm up the platform. Someone ought to bandage that Viking’s hand and give him a bottle of penicillin pills.”

  “Bring the nurse back with you,” Barney said. “I’ll stay here with Jens.”

  “Let me tell you what I have found out, just by chance,” Jens said, laying his hand on Barney’s arm. “I heard Ottar talking to one of his men about the compass repeater on the ship, and they pronounced it their own way, so that it sounded like usas-notra. It shocked me. There is a word in the Icelandic sagas, mentioned more than once, about a navigation instrument that has never been identified. It is called the húsasnotra. Do you understand? It is possible that the word ‘compass repeater’ has entered the language as húsasnotra. If so, then the impact of our arrival in the eleventh century is greater than any of us imagined. All the possibilities of this must be studied. I cannot return now.”

  “That’s interesting, what you say, Jens.” Barney looked toward the camp but the truck wasn’t in sight yet. “You ought to write that up, a scientific paper, that sort of thing.”

  “Fool! You have no idea what I am talking about. For you the vremeatron exists only as a device to be prostituted to make a trashy film—”

  “Don’t be so free with the insults,” Barney said, trying not to lose his temper with the wounded man. “No one was rushing to help Hewett until we gave him the money. If it hadn’t been for this picture you would still have your nose in the books at U.C.L.A. and wouldn’t have a single one of the facts and figures that you think are so important. I don’t run your job down—don’t run down mine. I’ve heard this prostitution thing before, and it doesn’t wash. Wars prostitute scientists, but all the big inventions seem to get made when there’s a war to pay for them.”

  “Wars don’t pay for basic research, and that is where the real developments are made.”

  “Begging your pardon, but wars keep the enemy and the bombs far enough away so that the basic researchers have the time and the freedom to do their research.”

  “A glib answer, but not a satisfactory one. No matter what you say, time travel is being used to produce a cheap picture, and any historical nuggets of truth will be found only by accident.”

  “Not quite right,” Barney said, sighing inwardly as he finally heard the truck’s engine. “We haven’t interfered with your research, if anything we’ve helped it. You’ve had a pretty free hand. And in making this picture we have invested in the vremeatron so that it is now a working proposition. With the stuff you already have you should be able to talk any foundation into financing another time platform and letting you research to your heart’s content.”

  “I’ll do just that.”

  “But not for a while, yet.” The truck braked to a stop nearby. “We have the professor tied up exclusively for a couple of years, just until we get our investment back of course.”

  “Of course,” Jens said bitterly, watching them unload a stretcher from the truck. “Profits first and culture be damned.”

  “That’s the name of the game,” Barney said, watching as the philologist was carefully slid into the truck. “You can’t stop the world and get off, so you just have to learn to live on it.”

  15

  “Better to die like men than live like cowards,” Ottar bellowed. “For Odin and Frigg—follow me!” He held his shield before him as he threw the door open, and two arrows thudded into it. Shouting with rage, he spun his ax and charged out of the burning building. Slithey, waving a sword, followed him, as did Val de Carlo, blowing loudly on the lurhorn, then all of the others.

  “Cut. Print that!” Barney shouted and dropped down into his safari chair. “That winds it up gang. Go get your lunch so they can pack up the kitchen.”

  The propmen were spraying foam onto the trough of burning oil and it stank abominably. All the lights except one went out and Gino had the camera open, taking out the film. Everything was under control. Barney waited until the rush was over, then went outside too. Ottar was sitting on an upended barrel, folding the arrows back into his shield.

  “Watch this, arrows coming,” he called out to Barney and held up the shield. The springs whipped the concealed arrows into position with a thunk-thunk.

  “A wonderful invention,” Barney said. “We’ve fin
ished the shooting for now, Ottar, so I’m going to move the company ahead to next spring. Do you think you’ll have the palisade completed by then?”

  “Easy. You keep your bargain, Ottar keeps his. We can cut logs for wall easy with the steel saws and axes you leave. But you leave food for the winter so we can eat.”

  “I’ll get the supplies first before we move the company. Is everything clear? Any questions?”

  “Clear, clear,” Ottar mumbled, concentrating on getting the arrows back inside the shield. Barney looked at him suspiciously.

  “I’m sure you remember it all, but just for the record’s sake let’s run through it once more, quickly. We leave you the food, all the cereals and dried and canned stuff I can get from the studio commissary. That way you don’t have to spend the summer and fall laying down food for the winter, so you can take the time to build some more shells of log buildings and a log wall around the camp. If what the Doc said is right you shouldn’t be bothered by the Cape Dorset until the spring when the pack ice closes in near the shore here and the seals band together and raise pups on it. That’s when the hunters come, they’ll all be farther north now. And even if they bother you before then you should be okay behind the log wall.”

  “Kill them, cut them up.”

  “Try not to, will you please? Ninety percent of this film has been shot and I’d feel better if you didn’t get yourself slaughtered before we finished it. We’ll check up on you in February and March, then bring the company as soon as we know the redskins are close by. Give them some trade goods to pay them to launch an attack on the stockade, bum part of it down and that is that. Agreed?”

  “And Jack Daniels whiskey.”

  “That’s in your contract…”

  A brassy moan drowned his words, rising and falling unevenly.

  “Must you?” Barney asked Val de Carlo, who had the length of the lurhorn curled around his body, the nodulated flat plate of the opening over his shoulder, and was blowing on it.

  “This is a wild horn,” Val said. “Listen.” He licked his lips and applied them to the mouthpiece, and, with much puffing and cheek reddening, produced a barely recognizable version of “The Music Goes ’Round and ’Round.”

  “Stick to acting,” Barney said. “You have no future as a musician. You know, I keep thinking I’ve seen that kind of hom somewhere before, outside of a museum I mean.”

  “They’ve got it on every pack of Danish butter. It’s a trade mark.”

  “Maybe that’s where. It sounds like a sick tuba.”

  “Spiderman Spinneke would love it.”

  “He might at that,” Barney squinted as an idea hit him, then snapped his fingers. “That’s what I was thinking about, the Spiderman. He plays all kinds of weirdo instruments in that beat joint the Fungus Grotto. I heard him once, backed up with a brass section and a drum.”

  Val nodded. “I’ve been there. He’s supposed to be the only jazz tuba player in captivity. It’s the most terrible noise I ever heard.”

  “It’s not that bad—and it might be just what we want. It gives me a thought.”

  Ottar thunked his arrows in and out and Barney leaned against the wall listening to the lurhorn until Dallas pulled up in the jeep.

  “Ready to go,” he reported. “All the commissary people are waiting and a couple of grips who volunteered because they wanted to see if Hollywood was still there.”

  “Enough to move the supplies?” Barney asked. “Everyone on the lot will have gone home by now.”

  “More than enough.”

  “Let’s go.”

  One of the big trailer trucks had backed onto the platform and a dozen men were lounging around it. Professor Hewett had the door to the control cabin tied open and Barney looked in.

  “Saturday afternoon, and cut it as close as you can.”

  “To the microsecond. We shall arrive precisely after the moment the platform left on the last trip.”

  It took an effort of will for Barney to realize that, despite all that had happened during the previous months, it was still Saturday afternoon in Hollywood, the same day on which they had begun the operation. The weekend crowds were jamming up on the freeways, the supermarket parking lots were full, and at the top of Benedict Canyon Drive, behind his private golf course on the top floor of his mansion, L.M. Greenspan was suffering his phony heart attack. For a moment Barney considered telephoning him with a progress report, then decided not to. Only a few hours had passed for L.M. and he wouldn’t be worrying yet. Best to let sleeping studio owners lie. Maybe he should ring up the hospital and see how Jens Lyn was doing, it had been weeks since—no it hadn’t, just minutes here. He probably wasn’t even at the hospital yet. Time travel took a lot of getting used to.

  “It’s a scorcher,” one of the cooks said. “I shoulda brought my sunglasses.”

  The high sound-stage doors were rolled back, and when the time platform appeared all the men winced at the sudden onslaught of subtropical light. The northern Newfoundland sky was always a pale blue and the sun never burned down like this. Barney moved the men out of the way while the big diesel truck rumbled to life, then clanked down from the time platform. There was a holiday air about the occasion as they climbed into the truck and rolled through the empty studio streets.

  At the commissary warehouse the holiday ended.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the studio guard said, spinning his club on its thong. “But I’ve never seen you before, and even if I had I couldn’t let you into this warehouse, no sir.”

  “This paper…”

  “I’ve seen the paper, but I have my orders.”

  “Give me a war ax,” one of the grips shouted. “I’ll get that door open!”

  “Kill! Kill!” another called out. They had been too long in the eleventh century and had picked up some of the Vikings’ simple solutions to most problems.

  “Don’t come any closer!” the guard ordered, stepping away and dropping his hand toward his gun.

  “All right you jokers, enough of that,” Barney ordered. “Just sit quiet while I straighten this out. Where’s your phone?” he asked the guard.

  Barney took a chance that someone might be there and called the administration building first. He hit pay dirt. Sam, L.M.’s personal accountant, was there, undoubtedly cooking the books in private.

  “Sam,” he said, “it’s good to talk to you again, how’ve you been… What?… Sorry, I forgot. It’s just been a couple of hours for you, natch, but it’s been months for me… No, of course I haven’t been drinking, I’ve been shooting the film… That’s right, it’s almost complete… Sam, no… don’t get excited… This is no more a one-day picture than the script was a one-hour script. We’ve been working hard. Look, I’ll explain it all later, but right now I want you to help me. I want you to talk to one of the studio guards, a real thick-headed job, must be a new man. Tell him to unlock the commissary warehouse so we can clean out all the dry cereals and canned stuff… No, we are not getting very hungry already, this is trade goods for the natives. Pay for the extras… Sam, what do you mean you have to think about it… if we can pay them off in Quaker Oats instead of greenbacks what possible difference can it make?”

  It wasn’t easy, it never was with Sam, but he was finally convinced. Sam—who hated to spend money even if it was only Quaker Oats—took his temper out on the guard, who emerged from the phone booth red-faced and angry.

  By five-thirty the truck was loaded, and by a quarter to six it was back aboard the time platform. Barney checked to make sure that everyone was aboard, then poked his head into Hewett’s control cubby.

  “Take it away. Prof, but let me get clear first.”

  “Am I to understand that you are not returning with us?”

  “Correct. I have a bit of business here. You can unload these people and the supplies, then come back to pick me up in a couple of hours, say about ten o’clock. If I’m not here I’ll ring you on the warehouse phone over there and let you know what’s happening
.”

  Hewett was feeling waspish. “I seem to be running a specie of temporal taxi, and I am not quite certain that I enjoy it. My understanding was that we would go to the eleventh century to make your film, then return. Instead I seem to be operating a constant shuttle service…”

  “Relax, Prof, we’re coming down the home stretch. Do you think I would lose a couple of hours like this if I wasn’t sure of the production? We do one more time jump, finish the picture up and that is that. All over but the shouting.”

  Barney stood by the door and watched the platform vanish into the past. Back to the wilds of primitive Canada, chapped lips and cold rain. Let them. He was going to take a couple of hours off, get some business done at the same time, of course, but that wasn’t going to stop him from enjoying himself as well. He couldn’t really relax yet, not until the film was in the can, but the end was in sight and he had been driving himself for months. The first order of business was going to be a first-class, deluxe dinner at Chasen’s, that much at least he owed himself. There was no point in getting to the Fungus Grotto before nine o’clock at the very earliest.

  There was an unreality about being back in California, and in the twentieth century. Things seemed to move too fast, there were too many garish colors and the stink of exhaust fumes made his head ache. Rube! Dinner—with drinks before, brandy after and champagne in the middle—helped, and he was feeling no pain when the cab dropped him in front of the club at a little after nine. He even managed not to be offended by the bilious green doorway with the red skulls and crossbones on it.

  “Beware,” a sepulchral voice moaned when he pushed open the door. “Beware that all who enter the Fungus Grotto do so at their own risk. Beware…” The recorded voice cut off as he closed the door and felt his way down the ill-lit and black-velvet-lined stairwell. A curtain of glowing plastic bones was the last barrier before the inner sanctum of the club itself. He had been here before, so the novelty of the decor did not impress him. It had not impressed him the first time either, being just a cut above—or below—the ghost house at a carnival. Green lights flickered, rubber cobwebs hung in the comers and the chairs were shaped like giant toadstools. He had the room to himself.