by April Hill
Edward laughed. "Thanks, Bill, and I do have an excellent leather belt, with which my wife is already quite familiar. But I appreciate the gift. It's beautiful, isn't it Abby?"
I smiled wanly. "Beautiful, dear."
"And next time she shows that stubborn streak she's got," Bill laughed, "promise me you'll take the little lady's drawers down, put her across your knee, and give her the goldarndest bare-assed lickin' of her life."
"I can certainly promise you that," Edward said grimly. "I haven't forgotten how worried I was."
Bill grinned. "Well, you'd better get goin'. Sorry you all had such a hell of a bad time in Deadwood. I reckon you won't want to come back real soon, even if you could. I've got one more little present for you, so you won't get to town dead broke like you've been." He placed a heavy leather pouch in my hand. "Just a few gold coins. I figure gold'll be good about anywhere you end up, even in London."
"Bill," I murmured. "We can't."
"Sure, you can. I've had me a real streak of luck at the tables lately, and I feel in my bones it's gonna last for a good, long while. Take it, use it, and remember me."
Suddenly, I couldn't stand it any longer. I reached out and grabbed Bill's hand. "Come with us, Bill! There's room."
Bill shook his head. "Thanks for the invite, but Deadwood's kinda grown on me. I figure to stick around for a while."
"Do me a favor, then?" I asked.
"Sure. If I can."
"Don't go back to the Number 10 today. Go to your room and get some rest, instead. You look so tired. I got you up early, remember?"
Bill laughed. "And miss a good poker game? Anything else, darlin', but not that. Now, git! You're burnin' daylight!"
I embraced Bill, thanked him and kissed him once–and then got into the Time Machine. He and Edward shook hands, and Bill backed away as Edward stepped inside to sit next to me.
And then I closed my eyes, and Edward pushed the lever, and Wild Bill Hickock disappeared–back into the mist of time and history.
Chapter Seven
In what seemed like a mere fraction of a second since we had departed Deadwood and last saw the face of our dear, doomed friend, Bill Hickock, Edward and I came to rest with an almost imperceptible bump, and looked around in the slightly dazed manner to which we had now become accustomed. Each time the Time Machine arrived at a new destination, we experienced a peculiar sensation–something akin, I should think, to being struck in the head with a heavy object while still asleep. Upon opening one's eyes, one's vision was blurred, and while there was no actual pain, there was always a sense of lingering confusion, as though the brain had been jarred.
Edward rubbed his eyes, stepped from the machine, and stretched his arms above his head, for while our journeys in the machine seemed short in duration, we always arrived feeling as though we had been traveling for days, or even weeks. He swept his gaze over what appeared to my unscientific eye be a panorama of nothing but cold and desolation, and arrived at his analysis of our location.
"Tundra," he said authoritatively. "With underlying permafrost. Spring, but quite far north, obviously."
I had no idea what either tundra or permafrost might be, but neither word sounded promising. "Not London?" I asked plaintively. "Or any part of England?"
"I'm afraid not, darling."
I looked out once more across a vast expanse of low hills and barren rocks, most of which were still covered with patches of snow, as if it were late in the spring. The sky above us was leaden and gloomy, and the longer I looked, the more familiar the terrain seemed to me. Suddenly, I realized where we were, and my heart leapt with joy.
"Edward," I cried. "Surely, we are in Scotland. Far to the north, perhaps?"
"Scotland?" Edward repeated. "Well, I hardly think… Look at the Machine's time gauge, darling, and..."
I was about to do as he asked when in the distance, I saw something–several somethings, actually–moving rapidly in our direction. It was cattle–perhaps a small herd of those enchanting red Highland cattle one sees on postcards with the long hair and wide horns. When I was a child, Uncle Herbert had taken us on a holiday to Inverness, and I had petted several of these wonderful creatures. I shaded my eyes, and looked again. The somethings were traveling at a shocking speed, and now, I recognized that they were rather larger than any cattle I had ever seen.
Edward was kneeling on the ground, smelling dirt or some foolish thing such as that. Edward does things like this all the time. It's quite tedious.
"Edward," I said quietly, and as calmly as I could manage. "I believe you should get back in the machine."
Edward dusted the dirt from his hands and stood up. His back was still to the approaching things.
"I want to walk around a bit, darling, and inspect some of the local vegetation. Perhaps I can find something to eat. Afterward we can rest for a bit, while I attempt to recalculate my computations, and..."
"Get in the machine, Edward," I suggested again, more firmly this time. "I believe we have gone in the wrong direction again."
"A bit too far north, I'm afraid, darling. Perhaps Greenland. Until I investigate further, there's no way of..."
"That's quite a bit to the north, isn't it?" I asked nervously.
"Well, yes, but at least we were headed north, when we went astray."
"I don't find that awfully comforting, Edward. There is something strange coming our… Oh, my! Greenland does not have elephants, does it? Elephants with a very great deal of long hair ?" I was speaking with some urgency now, but Edward was merely smiling in that superior way he has. He rolled his eyes.
"No, my darling. Greenland does not have elephants, and it does not have hairy elephants, in particular. How silly! You've been to the Zoological Garden frequently enough to know that elephants have little more than a sprinkling of hair, actually, on the crowns of their skulls, perhaps, and..."
"Well, in that case, I can assure you quite firmly that we are not in Greenland, Edward, but someplace altogether different. Please get back in the machine, this instant."
"Shortly, darling. I'm hoping to find something edible, and..."
"Edward, for the love of Heaven! This is neither the time nor the place for a stupid picnic! Look!" I pointed to the moving things in the distance–all of them coming toward us very, very rapidly now.
Edward smiled at my foolishness, but finally turned and looked in the direction I had suggested.
The several monstrous, hirsute creatures bearing down on us were the largest, tallest creatures, and easily the most frightening I had ever seen, whether in the pages of books or in my own childish nightmares. And Edward was wrong. They were elephants–gigantic and distinctly hairy elephants. Their enormous bodies and immensely heavy trunks were thickly covered with long, snarled red hair, and a pair of terrifying curved tusks protruded from either side of each massive head, virtually touching the ground as they pounded toward us. Their ponderous size appeared not to slow the behemoths in any significant manner, and they covered the ground between themselves and us at a very great speed, in a sort of thunderous trot that made the very ground beneath our feet tremble.
"Mammuthus Primigenius," Edward exclaimed. (All right, so the precise name had escaped me. Hairy elephants.) By now, the very earth was shaking, and the mountainous beasts appeared to be coming directly at us, pursued by several running… men? I looked again, and discovered that the creatures chasing the giant beasts were indeed men–hairy, thick featured men a lesser intellect such as myself would have called cavemen, although I saw no clubs, and no caves. Each man carried several spears, however, and one of these suddenly struck the largest of the enraged beasts in the shoulder, causing it to trumpet in rage and pain.
"My God, Abigail," he cried. "Do you comprehend the enormity of this?" The question hardly required an answer, because we were about to be pounded into the frozen earth. "We are the first human beings to witness the..."
"Get in the dammed machine," I screamed, and Edward did so, still spou
ting about Pleistocene and Holocene and debating aloud with himself whether the monsters, whose vile very breath I could now smell, were Primigenius or Imperator. At that moment, one of the running men, apparently concerned about the prospect of losing his meal to us, reared back and hurled a crude spear directly at the machine, striking Edward a glancing blow in the arm. I pulled him the last few inches into the machine, and with no thought whatsoever of north or south or back or forward, I slammed the lever down, praying fervently as I did so. The machine hummed for a split-second, as though it didn't wish to move, and then, just as we were about to be trampled beneath the feet of the stampeding monsters, there was a brilliant flash of light and an explosion of stars. The welcome blackness descended upon us, and we were gone–on our way to God only knew where, or when.
* * * *
We had no sooner stopped again than Edward turned to me and asked what I regarded as a remarkably stupid question.
"What was the exact year on the time gauge, Abigail? Back there, where we encountered the..." He took a small pad and a pen from his pocket, prepared to write down more of his endless scientific notes. I looked quickly at his arm, relieved to see only a smallish bruise where the spear had struck.
"I have no idea whatever," I said caustically. "And I should think that the only thing of the least significance about that encounter is that if were it not for me, we would both have been trampled and squashed like bugs by those horrible beasts! In the future, I would appreciate it if you would listen to me when I try to tell you something! The fact is, that this entire awful business is your fault! All of it! All I want to do is to go home!" I looked through the Time Machine's mud-spattered windscreen only to discover that, yet again, we had come to rest in a thoroughly inhospitable location–this one a steaming jungle! "Merciful God!" I cried. "Where are we now? If I see just one dinosaur, or a saber-toothed tiger, or anything remotely similar, Edward, I promise you that I will leave you this very minute!"
Edward inspected the time gauge. "There will be no dinosaurs, darling. The year appears to be..." He wiped a bit of mud from the gauge. "Precisely, 1682."
My enraged scream drove a flock of colorful birds from a nearby tree. "That's it," I shouted. "I am now leaving you, Edward. You will hear from my solicitor, if and when I can find one in this godforsaken hellhole!" I stepped from the machine and began flailing my way through the thick tropical undergrowth. "Unless the occupants of this place are cannibals, I am going to live among them," I called back over my shoulder. "I am sick of travel, and I am sick of you! The year 1682 cannot possibly be any less pleasant than any other year we've visited."
By now, Edward had followed me into the jungle, swearing mightily and shouting.
"Come back here, this instant, Abigail. There may well be snakes or wild animals about."
"Hah," I retorted. "And how would you know? Thus far, your inept leadership and less than brilliant scholarship has brought us nothing but unending catastrophe." I stuck both fingers in my ears and continued walking, singing "Rule, Brittania," at the top of my lungs to drown out Edward's shouts.
Edward's long legs enabled him to overtake me easily, and before we had even gotten out of sight of the Time Machine, he grabbed my elbow. "If you do not stop this hysterical nonsense immediately, Abigail," he warned, "I am going to administer a whipping–right in this hellish spot–of such a stupendous nature that you will remember it in exquisite detail each time you attempt to sit for a fortnight, and perhaps for a full month!"
"Ho, hum," I thought to myself. Edward uses this threat frequently, changing the length of time during which I will feel the results of a proposed spanking from two days to a week, and sometimes even to a month. I have often explained to him that such a thing (a full month) would be scientifically impossible without inflicting long-term, unsightly and very unattractive damage to a part of my person at which he rather enjoys gazing on a daily basis. (I have found in the past, however, that the fortnight thing is quite possible.)
My mistake, at this juncture, was repeating aloud what I had been thinking silently. "Ho, hum, and la-di-da to you, Edward dear! I do hate to tell you this, darling, but your silly threats ring a bit hollow in our present circumstances. Of course, there is always the chance that you will finally be correct about something, in which case we will both be eaten by boa constrictors or stung to death by great, hairy, poisonous spiders. In any case, we will no doubt both be dead long before you have time to inflict..."
I was wrong.
Perhaps predictably, Edward took my words not only as an insult, but also as a challenge, and within seconds, he had whipped off his belt and dragged me across his thigh. Then, with my upper portions tucked neatly under his arm and his belt doubled in one hand, he tossed up the dreadful brown dress I had acquired in Deadwood and was still wearing, yanked down my ill-fitting drawers, and commenced to apply a long and uncommonly vigorous whipping to my completely bare buttocks–right in the middle of the jungle, and exactly as he had promised. The painful truth is I have rarely seen Edward so determined to make a lasting impression.
"Edward," I wailed, as he dealt a pair of especially disagreeable blows to those soft, round, dreadfully tender portions of my bottom where cheeks meet thighs. "Please! I didn't mean… Owww! I promise not to… Owww-www!" Somewhere overhead, there was a sudden flurry of wings, and the sky was filled with a vast number of enormous black bats. I covered my eyes in fright, but Edward looked up only briefly, identified the species to his satisfaction, and continued–indeed, increased the tempo of what he was about. "Bats are gentle creatures," he explained over my agonized howls. "And easily alarmed. Another fifteen, I think, for disturbing them!" Thwack! Thwack! The sound of the fifteen extra, very hard whacks echoed throughout the forest, followed by my echoing shrieks.
When he had finished, I hopped about for several moments, clutching my scalded buttocks and whimpering piteously. Edward, like the unfeeling beast he is, simply watched my misery with obvious satisfaction.
"Now," he said finally, when I at last was able to stop my jig. "Are you done whining?"
"I was NOT whining," I hissed, rubbing an especially fiery spot on my poor welted bottom. "I was simply trying to make you see how stupid you were being."
"I do not like the word stupid, Abigail. Would you like to begin, again? I will, of course, forego a second bat penalty, but in every other regard, I promise that..."
"All right," I groaned. "May we please just get out of this place–quickly?"
I was still rubbing my inflamed buttocks when we returned to the Time Machine, and as I climbed in, I lowered myself onto my half of the seat with extreme caution. Edward got in beside me, checked the gauges, and depressed the lever. The machine merely hummed with a low tone for some time, and then did nothing at all. Edward tried again, with the same result.
"Is it ruined?" I asked nervously, almost forgetting the discomfort in my nether regions.
Edward frowned and shook his head. "No, I don't believe so. Our laboratory experiments indicted that this could happen. I believe our two departures in such a short time has overtaxed the power capacity of the machine's propulsion terminals."
"What does that mean, Edward?" With my bottom still throbbing, I had no wish to annoy him further, so I tried not to sound as irritable and anxious as I had begun to feel.
"If I'm correct, it will require perhaps a week of sustained solar radiation–sunlight–to recharge the system."
"A week?" I cried.
"I'm afraid so. Perhaps longer under the canopy of all this dense foliage. The fact is, I can't be certain. We've never drained it in this way, before."
"We don't even know where we are," I observed. "Africa, perhaps?"
Edward glanced around. "No, somewhere in the Caribbean, I should think, from what I've seen of the flora and fauna. And have you noticed that noise in the distance? I believe we're very near the sea."
And so, after covering the machine (except for the crystalline projections Edward calle
d its solar collection rods) we began walking through the sweltering forest, toward the sounds of the distant ocean.
* * **
Before long, and to my great relief, we came upon a road, and just beyond the road, we saw waves lapping gently upon a wide white beach. The sea was a startling emerald-green, and it was with even greater relief that we crossed the road with haste and waded into the pleasantly tepid surf. I looked around and was quite prepared to doff my ugly dress and underthings and swim naked in the jewel-like water, but Edward suddenly took my arm, whispered for me to be quiet, and pointed down the road. There, sitting by the side of the road, was a coach and two horses. We ducked quickly behind a bush and waited, but the coach remained where it was. There was no sign whatever of any driver, passenger, or footman.
We had stayed hidden for close to an hour when Edward took it upon himself to go and investigate.
"Edward," I objected. "What if… Look at us! What will they think, seeing such strangely dressed people?"
"The manner of dress wasn't that different in 1682," he said without conviction. "Perhaps they will simply take us as foreigners. The carriage is obviously European in design." With that, he started walking. I hurried along after him, terrified but afraid to be separated again.
Astonishingly, upon closer inspection, the carriage appeared to have simply been abandoned. The two white horses stood quietly, their backs cool to the touch–not recently driven.
"Perhaps the animals broke free and ran away from the carriage's owner," I suggested. Edward had climbed inside now and was searching its interior for some clue as to the carriage's origin.