A few yards down the beach, something waddled out from behind a cluster of boulders, heading for the water. A bird, it stood some thirty inches tall and had a fleeting resemblance to a penguin. The upper plumage was black, white below, a large white spot encircled its eye. Its small wings shifted as it waddled. The bill was sharp and heavy, a vicious striking weapon.
He was looking at, he knew, a great auk, a bird that up in his world had been extinct but which, a few centuries before, had been common from Cape Cod to far north in Canada. Cartier’s seamen, ravenous for fresh meat as a relief from sea rations, had clubbed hundreds to death, eating some of them at once, putting what remained down in kegs with salt.
Behind the first great auk came another and then two more. Paying no attention to him, they waddled down across the pebbles to the water, into which they dived, swimming away.
Latimer remained in his crouch, staring at the birds in fascination. Jonathon had said he would find them on the beach, but knowing he would find them and actually seeing them, were two different things. Now he was convinced, as he had not been before, of exactly where he was.
Off to his left, the guns banged occasionally, but otherwise there were no signs of the others in the house. Far out across the water, a string of ducks went scuddling close above the waves. The pebbled beach held a sense of peace—the kind of peace, he thought, that men might have known long years ago when the earth was still largely empty of humankind, when there was still room for such peace to settle in and stay.
Squatting there upon the beach, he remembered the clump of birch and now, suddenly and without thinking of it, he knew what had attracted his attention to it—an aberration of perspective that his painter’s eye had caught. Knitting his brow, he tried to remember exactly what it was that had made the perspective wrong, but whatever it had been quite escaped him now.
He glimpsed another agate and went to pick it up, and a little farther down the beach he found yet another one. This, he told himself, was an unworked, unpicked rock-hunters paradise. He put the agates in his pocket and continued down the beach. Spotting other agates, he did not pick them up. Later, at some other time, if need be, he could find hours of amusement hunting them.
When he climbed the beach and started up the slope, he saw that Jonathon was sitting in a chair on the veranda that ran across the back of the house. He climbed up to where he sat and settled down in another chair.
“Did you see an auk?” asked Jonathon.
“I saw four of them,” said Latimer.
“There are times,” said Jonathon, “that the beach is crowded with them. Other times, you won’t see one for days. Underwood and Charlie are off hunting woodcock. I suppose you heard them shooting. If they get back in time, we’ll have woodcock for dinner. Have you ever eaten woodcock?”
“Only once. Some years ago. A friend and I went up to Nova Scotia to catch the early flight.”
“I guess that is right. Nova Scotia and a few other places now. Here I imagine you can find hunting of them wherever you can find alder swamps.”
“Where was everyone?” asked Latimer. “When I got out of the sack and had something to eat, there was no one around.”
“The girls went out blackberrying,” said Jonathon. “They do that often. Gives them something to do. It’s getting a little late for blackberries, but there are some around. They got back in time to have blackberry pie tonight.” He smacked his lips. “Woodcock and blackberry pie. I hope you are hungry.”
“Don’t you ever think of anything but eating?”
“Lots of other things,” said Jonathon. “Thing is, here you grab onto anything you can think about. It keeps you occupied. And I might ask you, are you feeling easier than you were last night? Got all the immediate questions answered?”
“One thing still bothers me,” said Latimer. “I left my car parked outside the house. Someone is going to find it parked there and will wonder what has happened.”
“I think that’s something you don’t need to worry over,” said Jonathon. “Whoever is engineering this business would have seen to it. I don’t know, mind you, but I would guess that before morning your car was out of there and will be found, abandoned, some other place, perhaps a hundred miles away. The people we are dealing with would automatically take care of such small details. It wouldn’t do to have too many incidents clustered about this house or in any other place. Your car will be found and you’ll be missing and a hunt will be made for you. When you aren’t found, you’ll become just another one of the dozens of people who turn up missing every year.”
“Which leaves me to wonder,” said Latimer, “how many of these missing people wind up in places such as this. It is probable this is not the only place where some of them are being trapped.”
“There is no way to know,” said Jonathon. “People drop out for very many reasons.”
They sat silent for a time, looking out across the sweep of lawn. A squirrel went scampering down the slope. Far off, birds were calling. The distant surf was a hollow booming.
Finally, Latimer spoke. “Last night, you told me we needed a new philosophy, that the old ones were no longer valid.”
“That I did,” said Jonathon. “We are faced today with a managed society. We live by restrictive rules, we have been reduced to numbers—our Social Security numbers, our Internal Revenue Service numbers, the numbers on our credit cards, on our checking and savings accounts, on any number of other things. We are being dehumanized and, in most cases, willingly, because this numbers game may seem to make life easier, but most often because no one wants to bother to make a fuss about it. We have come to believe that a man who makes a fuss is antisocial. We are a flock of senseless chickens, fluttering and scurrying, cackling and squawking, but being shooed along in the way that others want us to go. The advertising agencies tell us what to buy, the public relations people tell us what to think, and even knowing this, we do not resent it. We sometimes damn the government when we work up the courage to damn anyone at all. But I am certain it is not the government we should be damning, but, rather, the world’s business managers. We have seen the rise of multinational complexes that owe no loyalty to any government, that think and plan in global terms, that view the human populations as a joint labor corps and consumer group, some of which also may have investment potential. This is a threat, as I see it, against human free will and human dignity, and we need a philosophical approach that will enable us to deal with it.”
“And if you should write this philosophy,” said Latimer, “it would pose a potential threat against the managers.”
“Not at first,” said Jonathon. “Perhaps never. But it might have some influence over the years. It might start a trend of thinking. To break the grip the managers now hold would require something like a social revolution …”
“These men, these managers you are talking about—they would be cautious men, would they not, farseeing men? They would take no chances. They’d have too much at stake to take any chances at all.”
“You aren’t saying …”
“Yes, I think I am. It is, at least, a thought.”
Jonathon said, “I have thought of it myself but rejected it because I couldn’t trust myself. It follows my bias too closely. And it doesn’t make sense. If there were people they wanted to get out of the way, there’d be other ways to do it.”
“Not as safely,” said Latimer. “Here there is no way we could be found. Dead, we would be found …”
“I wasn’t thinking of killing.”
“Oh, well,” said Latimer, “it was only a thought. Another guess.”
“There’s one theory no one has told you, or I don’t think they have. An experiment in sociology. Putting various groups of people together in unusual situations and measuring their reactions. Isolating them so there is no present-world influence to modify the impact of the situation.”
Latimer shook his head. “It sounds like a lot of trouble and expense. More than the experiment would be worth.”
“I think so, too,” said Jonathon.
He rose from his chair. “I wonder if you’d excuse me. I have the habit of stretching out for an hour or so before dinner. Sometimes I doze, other times I sleep, often I just lie there. But it is relaxing.”
“Go ahead,” said Latimer. “We’ll have plenty of time later to talk.”
For half an hour or more after Jonathon had left, he remained sitting in the chair, staring down across the lawn, but scarcely seeing it.
That idea about the managers being responsible for the situation, he told himself, made a ragged sort of sense. Managers, he thought with a smile—how easy it is to pick up someone else’s lingo.
For one thing, the idea, if it worked, would be foolproof. Pick up the people you wanted out of the way and pop them into time, and after you popped them into time still keep track of them to be sure there were no slipups. And, at the same time, do them no real injustice, harm them as little as possible, keep a light load on your conscience, still be civilized.
There were two flaws, he told himself. The staff changed from time to time. That meant they must be rotated from here back to present time and they could be a threat. Some way would have had to be worked out to be sure they never talked, and given human nature, that would be a problem. The second flaw lay in the people who were here. The philosopher, if he had remained in present time, could have been a threat. But the rest of them? What threat could a poet pose? A cartoonist, maybe, perhaps a novelist, but a musician-composer—what threat could lie in music?
On the surface of it, however, it was not as insane as it sounded if you happened not to be on the receiving end of it. The world could have been spared a lot of grief in the last few hundred years if such a plan had been operative, spotting potential troublemakers well ahead of the time they became a threat and isolating them. The hard part of such a plan—from where he sat, an apparently impossible part of it—would lie in accurately spotting the potential troublemakers before they began making trouble. Although that, he supposed, might be possible. Given the state of the art in psychology, it might be possible.
With a start, he realized that during all this time, without consciously being aware of it, he had been staring at the birch clump. And now he remembered another thing. Just before he had stumbled off to bed, he had seen a bird light on the boulder, sit there for a time, then lift itself into the air and disappear—not fly away, but disappear. He must have known this when he saw it, but been so fogged by need of sleep that the significance of it had not made an impression. Thinking back on it, he felt sure he was not mistaken. The bird had disappeared.
He reared out of the chair and strode down the slope until he stood opposite the boulder with the two trees flanking it and the other growing close behind it. He took one of the agates out of his pocket and tossed it carefully over the boulder, aimed so that it would strike the tree behind the rock. It did not strike the tree; he could not hear it fall to the ground. One by one, he tossed all the other agates as he had tossed the first. None of them hit the tree, none fell to the ground. To make sure, he went around the tree to the right and, crouching down, crawled behind the boulder. He carefully went over the ground. There were no agates there.
Shaken, his mind a seething turmoil of mingled doubt and wonder, he went back up the hill and sat in the chair again. Thinking the situation over as calmly as he could, there seemed to be no doubt that he had found a rift of some sort in—what would you call it?—the time continuum, perhaps. And if you wriggled through the rift or threw yourself through the rift, you’d not be here. He had thrown the agates and they were no longer here; they had gone elsewhere. But where would you go? Into some other time, most likely, and the best guess would seem to be back into the time from which he had been snatched. He had come from there to here, and if there were a rift in the time continuum, it would seem to be reasonable to believe the rift would lead back into present time again. There was a chance it wouldn’t, but the chance seemed small, for only two times had been involved in the interchange.
And if he did go back, what could he do? Maybe not a lot, but he damn well could try. His first move would be to disappear, to get away from the locality and lose himself. Whoever was involved in this trapping scheme would try to find him, but he would make it his business to be extremely hard to find. Then, once he had done that, he would start digging, to ferret out the managers Jonathon had mentioned, or if not them, then whoever might be behind all this.
He could not tell the others here what he suspected. Inadvertently, one of them might tip off a staff member, or worse, might try to prevent him from doing what he meant to do, having no wish to change the even tenor of the life they enjoyed here.
When Underwood and Charlie came up the hill with their guns, their hunting coats bulging with the woodcock they had bagged, he went inside with them, where the others had gathered in the drawing room for a round of before-dinner drinks.
At dinner, there was, as Jonathon had said there would be, broiled woodcock and blackberry pie, both of which were exceptionally tasty, although the pie was very full of seeds.
After dinner, they collected once again before the fire and talked of inconsequential things. Later on Alice played and again it was Chopin.
In his room, he pulled a chair over to the window and sat there, looking out at the birch clump. He waited until he could hear no one stirring about, and then two more hours after that, to make sure all were safely in their beds, if not asleep. Then he went softly down the stairs and out the back door. A half-moon lighted the lawn so that he had little trouble locating the birch clump. Now that he was there, he was assailed by doubt. It was ridiculous to think, he told himself, what he had been thinking. He would climb up on the boulder and throw himself out toward the third tree that stood behind the boulder and he would tumble to the ground between the tree and boulder and nothing would have happened. He would trudge sheepishly up the slope again and go to bed, and after a time he would manage to forget what he had done and it would be as if he had never done it. And yet, he remembered, he had thrown the agates, and when he had looked, there had not been any agates.
He scrambled up the face of the boulder and perched cautiously on its rounded top. He put out his hands to grasp the third birch and save himself from falling. Then he launched himself toward the tree.
He fell only a short distance, but landed hard upon the ground. There had not been any birch to catch to break his fall.
A hot sun blazed down upon him. The ground beneath him was not a greasy lawn, but a sandy loam with no grass at all. There were some trees, but not any birches.
He scrambled to his feet and turned to look at the house. The hilltop stood bare; there was no house. Behind him, he could hear the booming of the surf as it battered itself to spray against the rocky coastline.
Thirty feet away, to his left, stood a massive poplar, its leaves whispering in the wind that blew off the sea. Beyond it grew a scraggly pine tree and just down the slope, a cluster of trees that he thought were willows. The ground was covered—not too thickly covered, for rain-runneled soil showed through—by a growth of small ferns and other low-growing plants he could not identify.
He felt the perspiration starting from his body, running in rivulets from his armpits down his ribs—but whether from fear or sun, he did not know. For he was afraid, stiff and aching with the fear.
In addition to the poplar and the pine, low-growing shrubs were rooted in the ground among the ferns and other ground cover. Birds flew low, from one clump of shrubbery to another, chirping as they flew. From below him, their cries muted by the pounding of the surf, other birds were squalling. Gulls, he thought, or birds like gulls.
Slowly the first impact of the fear drained from him and he was able to move. He took a cautious step and then another
and then was running toward the hilltop where the house should be, but wasn’t.
Ahead of him, something moved and he skidded to a halt, poised to go around whatever had moved in the patch of shrubbery. A head poked out of the patch and stared at him with unblinking eyes. The nose was blunt and scaly and farther back the scales gave way to plates of armor. The thing mumbled at him disapprovingly and lurched forward a step or two, then halted.
It stood there, staring at him with its unblinking eyes. Its back was covered by overlapping plates. Its front legs were bowed. It stood four feet at the shoulder. It did not seem to be threatening; rather, it was curious.
His breath caught in his throat. Once, long ago, he had seen a drawing, an artist’s conception, of this thing—not exactly like it, but very much the same. An anky, he thought—what was it?—an ankylosaurus, that was what it was, he realized, amazed that he should remember, an ankylosaurus. A creature that should have been dead for millions of years. But the caption had said six feet at the shoulder and fifteen feet long, and this one was nowhere near that big. A small one, he thought, maybe a young one, maybe a different species, perhaps a baby ankywhatever-the-hell-it-was.
Cautiously, almost on tiptoe, he walked around it, while it kept turning its head to watch him. It made no move toward him. He kept looking over his shoulder to be sure it hadn’t moved. Herbivorous, he assured himself, an eater of plants—posing no danger to anything at all, equipped with armor plate to discourage the meat eaters that might slaver for its flesh. He tried hard to remember whether the caption had said it was herbivorous, but his mind, on that particular point, was blank.
The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 29