As it happened, I did, but just barely. The man made it the last couple of steps with both hands clapped over his mouth. He grabbed the rail, stood there uneasily for a moment, then leaned out over the dark sea, out into blackness, and retched at length. He didn’t actually lose his lunch because he hadn’t any lunch to lose. Only the first visitors to the Paleozoic hadn’t known not to eat before making the jump. They had gone about suited as if for Mars—you weren’t even supposed to breathe the air here, let alone cough up your socks. The past was supposed to be as brittle as a Ming vase—you didn’t dare give it a cross look. It was years before people got comfortable with the idea that if the past was resilient enough to accommodate an 8500-ton ship, it could probably accommodate the everyday stupidity of the species embarked.
I stood behind and slightly to one side of the newcomer. When he turned from the rail, I handed him a bottle of spring water and said, “This’ll help.” He took it, rinsed, spat over the side. When he tried to hand the bottle back, I declined as if I were doing him a favor. He pulled a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and wiped his mouth. He was in his late twenties or early thirties and well-built. He would have had, ordinarily, what I call friendly good looks. At the moment, in the light of the safety lamp, he had the color of oatmeal.
“If you want,” he said, “you can say you told me so.”
“That is our motto here.”
He gingerly felt around the lower edge of his ribcage. His hands fell abruptly to his sides when he saw me watching him.
“I should introduce myself,” I said, and did.
“Rick King,” he said. I was grateful that he didn’t offer to shake hands. “Can’t those technicians do something to make it so you don’t get rattled apart when you come through?”
“They’ve been working on it forever.”
“You want more folks to come and visit you here, you’re going to have to make the trip more pleasant.” I didn’t reply to that. The last thing I wanted was for more folks to come and visit me here. “They told me all those drugs I had to take would help.”
“They did help. Without them, you’d be feeling really bad right about now.”
“And this smell. Hits you right in the face.”
“Uh huh. But we’re moving away from it. Anyway, you get used to it.”
He shook his head. “Can’t imagine how.”
“If you’re up for it, a turn around the deck might be a good way to start.”
I led him up a deck and forward. His color slightly improved after a couple of minutes, but heat and humidity were taking the last measure of starch out of him. I figured he was about ready to collapse, and I’d be able to hustle him off to quarters, then slip ashore before Ruth knew what was up.
“Except for the stink,” King said, “I could be on a boat in the Caribbean or somewhere. With the stink, I guess I could be off the Texas coast. When I first heard about all this, I thought, wow, travel through time, see prehistoric monsters battling fang and claw, you bet!”
“Sorry, fang and claw haven’t quite evolved yet.”
“Well, so far, nothing’s what I expected.”
“Common observation.” I had a niggling suspicion, founded on nothing more substantial than King’s being some kind of film-maker, that all of his expectations had been shaped by the movies, that he had come prepared to see, besides primordial ferocity, jump-station technicians who were prematurely balding men dressed in white coats and carrying clipboards, not guys who could have been mistaken for air-conditioner repairmen and displayed much hairy butt-crack whenever they hunkered down to fix stuff. I wondered what King would make of the scientists ashore, who wore big khaki pants and canvas shoes that made them resemble ducks. Still, if he had to have crewcuts and creased slacks, there were always the naval reservists who attended to the actual running of the ship.
Suddenly, though not exactly unexpectedly, King made a sound like ah-rurr and pressed both hands against his abdomen. His expression was alarmed. “I think I better get to the restroom,” he said.
“This way,” I said, “to the head.”
When he finished in there, I showed him where he was to bunk down. Someone had thoughtfully brought his gear from the jump station and stowed it for him. King took out an object the size of a wallet, unfolded it with the thoughtless ease of long practice, and slipped it over his close-cropped skull—a headheld camera. A thin cable ran from the jawpiece to batteries and recordpack in his pocket; the spikemike stuck out like half of a set of insect antennae. He looked my way, the headheld whirred faintly, and I pretended to become fascinated by the paint on the bulkhead. Headhelds disconcert me. I never know whether to make eye-contact with the wearer’s natural eye or unnatural one.
“Be prepared is my motto,” King said.
I looked at him in wonder. He was still a mess. I asked if he didn’t really want to get some rest, and he said he was too excited. I sneaked a peek at my watch. The boat would be leaving soon, and I was bound and determined to be on it. I made my fateful decision and asked him, “Do you think you’re up for a little boat ride and campout?”
“I’m up for anything.”
I looked doubtful, and not just because I wanted to appear sincerely concerned about him. Then: “Okay, it’s your funeral. I’ll go get my things and meet you back here. We’ll pop into sick bay to see how your friend’s doing—” he had not once inquired about her in all this time “—and then we hit the beach.”
“Great! D-day in the Devonian!”
Silurian, I thought as I turned away.
King’s friend’s name was Claire Duvall. Chance had treated him with kid gloves and smacked her upside the head: she had a mild concussion. King took the news well. I shouldn’t have held that against him, because I was even more impatient than he to get to the boat bay, and with much better reason. Nevertheless, it rankled me.
The boat bay could have stood some redesign. The slap of waves against the hull reduced unamplified speech to so much mutter. You could ruin your voice working in this part of the ship. At night, you could ruin your eyes, too, and your shins if you weren’t careful. Few lights showed. Captain Kelly, it was said, didn’t like to excite the, understand, extremely limited imaginations of light-sensitive Paleozoic marine organisms. I could dimly see human figures working in and around a boat, and called down, “How soon till we leave?”
“Kev!” someone called back. “Come on if you’re coming.”
Someone else bawled out, “Will somebody up there please throw some goddamn light down here?” There ensued a bit of rude jawing back and forth, and then a shaft of stark white light suddenly spotlighted the ramp of the boat bay as if it were a stage. People froze like deer in traffic. I beheld the true object of my desire.
She looked like an ivory statuette from my vantage point. Up close and in good light, she had blue eyes and fair brown hair. She was wearing cut-offs and a T-shirt, and at any distance and in any light she had the best legs in the Paleozoic. Vicki Harris had been haunting my thoughts for some time. All at once, I had seen her, though I’d been looking at her for weeks, months, who knew how long? Sometimes it happens that way.
The light switched off. I remembered to breathe. King and I climbed down, and everybody found a place to sit amid the jumble of boxes in the boat. The motor coughed and gurgled as the pilot revved it. The sides of the bay loomed around us like immense black cliffs. As we eased out, the almost-full moon emerged from the purple clouds, suffusing the air with milky light. Above the rhythmic prum-pum of the motor and the hiss of water parting before the prow, King said, “My God,” and then, “Wow!”
“No kidding,” said someone behind me.
I looked around and found that I could just make out the faces of my companions. Cardwell and Jank were aft with Hirsch, the pilot; Vicki Harris sat amidships. All of them except Hirsch gazed upward. I’d have done so, too, but for the warm pleasure I got from gazing at Vicki Harris. She noticed me staring at her and cocke
d an index finger moonward to redirect my attention.
“Seen it,” I said.
She flashed a grin. “Me too, but I never get over how it looks. It’s like it’s almost but not quite the same moon. Like the features I’m used to seeing don’t exist yet.”
“I asked Hill about that once. You know Sharon Hill? One of the astronomers. She told me it’s the same moon, less some impact craters. The main difference is in rotational velocity or some such. We’re seeing it sort of from behind and off to one side.”
She directed a look past me. I heard a faint whirring and remembered King. I made introductions, and she reached around me to offer him a hand and said, “Mister King.”
“Please,” King said, “Rick,” and held on to her a beat or two longer than I liked.
“Vick,” she said.
“Vee for short,” Jank said, behind her.
“Vee Vee,” said Cardwell, “if you want to be really disarming.”
“My delightful colleagues, Doctors Jankowski and Cardwell.” Her tone of voice fell somewhere in the middle of affection, tolerance, and reproach. I’d learned from Jank—who’d affected not to find my sudden curiosity remarkable—that she hated her first name. I have few opinions about what parents should call their girl babies, though I know a trend when I see it: names ending with the letter i have become true artifacts; more and more young women are answering to monikers that end with o, Fujiko, Tamiko. Still, I had had a lovely, sweet girlfriend by the name of Vicki in high school and was ever afterward kindly predisposed toward anyone who bore it. Not, of course, that I didn’t find Vicki Vick Vee Vee Harris entirely attractive in her own right.
“It’s Cardwell’s performing trilobites,” I said, “whose antics we hope to see.”
“I should get some great stuff,” said King. He talked past me, to her. “I make documentaries and things.” Talk about disarming. Documentaries and things.
She said, “Really?”
Vick and Rick, I suddenly thought, oh no.
Jank evidently thought it was a bit much, too, for he said, “What other things,” and paused, and added, “Rick?”
“Commercials,” King said, “infotainment, that kind of thing.” I could tell that he was slightly taken aback.
“So which is it this time,” Jank demanded, “documentary or commercial?”
“Documentary, of course.”
“Of course. And when do you start?”
King lightly touched the headheld. “I already have. You don’t have any objection to being on television, do you?”
Now Jank was taken aback.
“We’ve been on television,” Cardwell said. “Not lately, though. Been a while since we had a documentary crew through here.” He had the same interested attitude he’d had the time he showed me my first prehistoric shellfish. He could have been joining in two colleagues’ discussion of trilobites.
By the way Jank shifted in his seat, I could tell that he was buckling down for business. He said to King, “You seem a little undercrewed.”
“My partner was badly shaken up by the jump. But what you mean, of course, is, why aren’t I hauling around a lot of help? No one does that any more unless they’re making big Hollywood product.”
Jank wouldn’t let up. “What’s your background?”
“Media arts, of course.”
“Of course. Aren’t there any real scientists who can do documentaries any more?”
“I took the famous crash course in rocks, bugs, and stones before I came.” King laughed. “Whoa, Mister Overqualified, huh?”
“Yeah,” said Jank, “thank goodness you’re not just some facile slime-sucking adman.”
Everyone lapsed into silence. Vick and I exchanged embarrassed smiles. The wind sweetened. Hirsch turned the boat and expertly took it in, bringing us to rest without so much as a bump alongside a natural stone jetty. We all scrambled ashore carrying something and were greeted by several of the semi-permanent residents of Number Four camp. The jetty dipped into the beach’s sandy slope at the high-tide mark; the camp sat above. The moon was down and the sky was turning gray by the time we had the boat unloaded. I somehow found myself at Vick’s side as we lugged the last of the cargo along the jetty. King and Cardwell were right behind us. Jank was already out of sight among the tents.
“Let’s do breakfast,” I said to Vick.
“Sounds good to me,” and then, probably—I told myself—because she wanted to make up for Jank’s rudeness, she said over her shoulder, “Join us, Mister King?”
“You bet.” He obviously was happy that she’d asked but sorry that she hadn’t called him Rick.
We entered the camp, and Vick veered off. “Meet you at the mess tent,” she said to no one of us in particular. I didn’t care for how King watched her walk away.
I had Cardwell and Jank’s standing invitation to share their tentspace; a geologist named Crumhorn agreed to take King in, though it was on short notice. Cardwell and I delivered him to Crumhorn’s tent and were about to move on when he said, “I don’t believe I’ve actually sucked any slime since grade school. I’m just a film-maker, Kevin.” When he spoke my name, I felt a sudden, irrational, tremendous urge to rub myself all over with hot sand or maybe ground glass. “If I said or did something to set Doctor Jankoski off—”
“Jankowski,” I said.
“Oh, Jank,” Cardwell said, “Jank’s just,” and shrugged as if that explained everything. He had the dimensions but not the temperament of a bear.
“Breakfast,” I told King, “is in the big tent over yonder,” and set off to get mine and left him to get his as he would.
Vick had saved two places at the table. I settled into one of them and happily stirred my coffee. We listened to Rubenstein, a cartographer, who, two days before, had completed a trek overland from Stinktown, Number Two camp, on the estuary. “Only sign of life we saw the whole time,” he said, “was one of our own ‘copters, headed inland.”
Crumhorn dropped into a chair across from me and scooped up a piece of toast. I asked where his houseguest was, and he said, “Conked out. Just like that. Hi, how do you do, snork, zzz.”
“I was wondering when it’d catch up with him. He jumped in a few hours ago, and he’s been going like a chipmunk on an exercise wheel ever since.”
“So,” said De La Cerda, another geologist, “he’s, what, a video producer or something?”
“Or something.”
She shook her head. “These people just keep trickling in.”
Rubenstein said, “You say that about everybody.”
“I’m part-Indian,” De La Cerda said, “and Indians know about people who keep trickling in. The Sioux had a word for white people, wasichu. It means, you can’t get rid of them.”
Rubenstein looked at her askance for a moment. Then: “You’re not Sioux, you’re mestizo or some goddamn something.”
Hendryx, yet another geologist, said, “So sue her.”
Amid the groans, Crumhorn observed that punning was a cry for help, and Westerman, the slight blonde botanist seated next to Hendryx, said, “I used to love this man. Now I’m for feeding him to the fishes.”
Hendryx looked smug. “No fishes this time of the Paleozoic, right, Vick?”
“Just some armored ones that look like tadpoles wearing football padding.”
“They always looked kind of art deco to me,” said De La Cerda.
“Well,” said Vick, “you have to go to Stinktown to find them, and then they’re only about as big as your hand.”
“Are they edible?” I said. One thing I did miss in the Silurian was catfish sandwiches.
Vick made a face. “They’ve got a taste sort of between salt and mud.”
“Vick Harris,” Rubenstein murmured over the rim of his coffee cup, “girl ichthyologist and gourmet.” He sipped and grimaced. “Talk about salt and mud. So where’re all the big exciting fish? Where’s old Dinowhatsit? You know the one, ten meters long, armored head. Mouth like a big ugly
pinking shears.”
“Dunkleosteus, alias Dinicthys.”
“Yeah, that’s the one, where’s old Dunkywhatsit?”
“Not even a glimmer in his great-great-granddaddy’s eye, I’m afraid.”
“So,” De La Cerda said to me, “what about this video guy?”
“Northemico sent him to make a documentary about you folks.”
Both De La Cerda and Rubenstein gave me the same sharp look, and Westerman said, flatly, “Northemico.”
In spite of myself, I spread my fingers in the air and said, “He’s just a film-maker.”
“You mean like you’re just a writer, I’m just a botanist?” Westerman shook her head. “Nobody who’s made the jump in the last month or so has been just anything. This film guy’s just not as obscurely specialized as most of them.”
“Wait a minute,” Vick began, but Rubenstein cut her off.
“If he really is a film guy. Probably a spy.”
“I don’t think you’re being fair,” said Vick. “You can’t go around automatically assuming someone’s a spy just because—”
“Vick,” said Rubenstein, “you gotta admit, Northemico and the rest of that pack’ve been slavering to get in here from day one. There’s money waiting to be made here.”
She appeared doubtful. “I don’t see trilobites and seaweed as the basis for growth industries.”
“Try oil.” De La Cerda gave her a not-unkindly look. “Something’s sure going on. On the ship—” she nodded vaguely in the direction of the sea “—we’re suddenly cramped for space. Too many newcomers all at once. People I’ve never seen before are suddenly looking over my shoulder all the time. Suddenly it’s harder to schedule use of a helicopter. Then it’s just impossible, because they’re all the time flying people and surveying equipment into the interior.”
The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Page 65