by Chuck Dixon
Rick Tells His Story
With a great deal of coaxing and a brand of sweet talk the Rangers would never have thought him capable of, Rick Renzi urged a woman to step out from the shadows of the cave at the base of the cliff face.
“Come on, Neeta. These are friends. My very good friends.”
N’itha stepped into the sunlight, eyes wary. She wore a beaded buckskin skirt that reached her knees and a necklace of gold and turquoise pebbles about her throat. Except for those items she was naked. Her skin was olive-hued and her hair black as night, worn gathered behind her head in a wooden clasp. She was slender and small breasted and a few inches shy of five foot tall. Her dark, almond-shaped eyes shifted warily over the strangers from under loose strands of bangs shading her brow.
“She’s beautiful,” Bat said in a whisper.
“Isn’t she? I bet you fuckers thought I hooked up with one of those butt-uglies.” Rick grinned broadly and drew N’itha to his side where she smiled shyly. Rick was the shortest of the Rangers at five foot eight, but he was easily a head or more taller than his bride.
“Where did she come from?” Chaz said.
“I found her.”
“Just like that? Where does she come from? Are there other people like her?” Jimbo said.
“Don’t know. Don’t care. Me and the boys found her lost in the marsh and brought her back here. I didn’t make her stay. She doesn’t want to go back where she came from, so we started playing house.”
“And here we were worried about you,” Lee said.
“Hey, it’s all good. You guys rest up a day or two and me and Neeta will pack up and head back to the USA.”
“You and—” Chaz started.
He was interrupted by Rick letting out a loud ballpark whistle followed by commands that sounded like he was imitating a pit-bull. One by one, hominids emerged from the surrounding huts and trees. Adult males and females and children. They looked as they did when the Rangers last saw them, bestial and primitive but more docile than before. Only a few were armed with spears which they carried easy over their shoulders like tools rather than weapons. Around the throats of the men were necklaces strung with some items that clattered and jangled as they moved.
Empty .50 caliber shell casings pierced and strung on leather thongs. The symbol of their god Rick Renzi.
That evening saw the strangest dinner the team had ever experienced. After stripping down and bathing in the warm lake water, they ate strips off a roast deer stuffed with wild onions and greens along with bass fresh-caught out of the lake that day. Renzi had taught the skinnies to fish once he got them over their fear of the water. The new Mrs. Renzi supervised the meal preparation and served everyone on the team from wooden trays of meat and fried yams. Dessert was sliced fruit served in carved wooden bowls. The fruit was sliced with honey and crushed cinnamon.
Whatever else had changed in the valley, the skinnies’ table manners were vastly improved. Humans were off the menu in this brave new world.
Some of them, especially the kids, rushed to grab anything the Rangers discarded. Empty food containers or wrappers. There were fights. Especially over the cartons of Marlboros that had been cast aside. A skinny that Rick had renamed Homer after Homer Simpson was the eldest of the tribe. Homer was balding on top and had a long upper lip that recalled the cartoon character. He claimed the Marlboros for himself and pulled one of the cardboard cartons apart. The shiny packs fell to the sand. He ripped one open with his teeth and sniffed the broken cigarettes inside before sticking them in his mouth to chew thoughtfully.
“Let me help you out there, chief,” Rick said and peeled the cellophane from a pack to open it properly. He lit a cigarette with a stick from the fire and took a long drag before handing it over. Homer stuck it between his lips and sucked back smoke in mimicry of his deity. The skinny hacked and coughed before throwing up violently by the fire. He tossed the lit cigarette aside with a screech of rage.
Rick returned to the others and dug into the freeze-dried food packs, gorging on chili-mac and pasta with sausage. Hard candies were handed out to the skinny kids who acted like children everywhere, tussling over who got the most and crowding the Rangers to beg for more. Rick scattered them with a string of barks and grunts that sent them fleeing from the firelight.
The team caught Rick up on what he’d missed since they’d left him. He had a hard time at first with the idea that he’d been here five years, but to them, only a year had passed. They shared it all with him. Stealing Sir Neal Harnesh’s nuclear reactor and going on the run. The return to the cave where they found Rick’s skeleton and a half ton of gold waiting. Dwayne and Caroline’s trip back to the ancient Aegean and locating a fortune in pirate gold. And how Dwayne and Caroline were married now, under an alias, and had a six-month-old son.
“I thought you said you left here a year ago? How can they have a six-month-old kid?” Rick asked.
“They stole some time on us. It’s complicated,” Chaz said.
“Fuck it then. How’d you lose the eye, Cochise?” Rick said.
“A Roman took it when we went back to save Jesus,” Jimbo said.
“Save Jesus? No shit?”
“No shit,” Chaz said.
“You learned their language?” Jimbo nodded toward the skinnies seated around the fire cracking scorched bones with rocks to get at the marrow.
“More like sounds. There’re no real words to it. None I can make sense of anyway.” Rick shrugged.
“And Neeta? You can communicate with her?” Bat said.
“Look, why don’t I start at the beginning?” Rick said. And between pulls of Jack Daniels, he did just that.
“I was covering your withdraw back into the mist. The skinnies were fucking everywhere. Coming out of the trees for the slope. Climbing up on my flanks, both sides, I was traversing the fifty left and right, and the Ma Deuce was getting hot. I could light a smoke off the barrel. I ran through that last can of ammo in a heartbeat and got up to get clear. I didn’t get far before they were on me from all around. I don’t remember a lot after that. At least for a while.
“I woke up back in the cave, the one back there, the same one they were holding Caroline Tauber in. The skinnies carried me back there. I was sick as a dog with a concussion, and I had a fractured bone in my leg along with cuts and bruises all over. They beat the shit out of me up on that hill, but they didn’t kill me. I’m still not real sure why. They don’t really have a way of telling me. Near as I can make it out, they think that if they killed me it would enrage the other gods who were my friends and they’d come back and finish the job they started. That’s why they hid when you showed up. But now we’re all friends, right?
“There’s no way I’ll ever know how long I was in that cave passing out from pain. Hell, I might have been in a coma for all I know. I can remember some of their women spooning some kind of soup into my mouth. Turns out it was made of game meat, wild onions, and cannabis. There’s primo weed growing in a field above the cliffs. They were keeping me stoned out of my mind until the swelling in my head went down. Staying on a perpetual week-long high might have saved my life. I don’t know.
“The pain in my head went away, and my vision cleared. It was time to deal with my leg. I could manage to hop around even though it hurt like a bitch. I drove a peg into the ground and tied one of my shoelaces around it and my ankle and pulled the leg bone as straight as I could stand it. The bone went back under the skin but not all the way back in place the way it should. I splinted it and wrapped it and found a branch I could use as a sort of crutch. The leg is fucked up, but I manage.
“So I settled down to my new life on the planet of the midget apes. And if I was going to have to live here, it would be on my own terms. There were some objections from the new head asshole. I took care of him with a little help from Sam Colt then the majority voted me god-for-life. I put them to work cleaning up the place, and I taught them how to fish. Even taught the kids to swim. I tried to teach them to farm, but th
ey don’t get it. Guess they can’t see the reason for it when there’s berries and root vegetables growing everywhere.
“I do keep bees though, built some apiaries for the honey. My ma used to tell me my grandpop kept bees back in Capua. Maybe it’s in the blood. Funny, right? Me, a beekeeper.
“It went on like that, getting by, getting high. Until this past spring, when I found Neeta. She was running away from her people somewhere over the ridgeline to the north. Her daddy wanted her to marry some guy. She didn’t want to and ran off. I took her in and, honest-to-God, as horny as I was after four years, I didn’t make any moves. It was all her idea. It was like a courtship, with flowers and all that shit. So, we set up house, and that’s the way it’s been for most of the past year.”
“So, on top of everything else, you’re a bigamist,” Chaz said.
“I guess, but technically I married Neeta first, okay? Like a million years before I ever met Lynn, so this is like my first marriage, really. You guys took care of Lynn and my kids, right?”
The Rangers looked at one another. Rick didn’t know he had a new son and that the team knew his adult version from the future. It seemed like too much at once. They silently agreed to let that intel wait for another time.
“In some ways, they’ve been taking care of us,” Chaz said.
Rick narrowed his eyes at that.
“Dwayne’s been handling it out of your cut,” Chaz said.
“He gives Lynn an allowance. They don’t have any worries. And since you just vanished, there’s no connection to us and the shit we pulled to piss off Harnesh and his people.”
Jimbo added, “She’s been good about it. Didn’t buy anything flashy. Stashed some in college accounts saying she won it at a casino. She did right by you and the kids.”
“Yeah, I was a fucking lousy husband. I’m glad she’s okay. She was always so much better than me.”
“We need to talk about your new wife, bro,” Lee started.
“Oh, and I taught the skinnies one more thing.” Rick stood up from where he’d been sitting by N’itha.
Unsteady on his feet; he waved the mostly empty bottle of Jack to the mob of hominids squatting around the fire. He grunted and thumped his chest with a fist. They turned all eyes to him as he began to recite in a rhythmic chant:
“They call me Ranger Rick Got skills that are sick
And I’m Army all the way Like a bullet to a gun
A gun to a bullet, I mean I rock prehistory
It ain’t no mystery
I’m the baddest fucker You ever seen
Got my bitch Neeta And no one’s sweeta Waking up
Before I get to sleep
’Cause I’ll be rockin’ this party eight days a week!”
He nodded his head, chin to chest as he rapped and punched the bottle in the air to the rhythm in his head. The skinnies all around loudly called back in time with his pumping fist as he led them in the chorus. It was a series of practiced, coordinated animal barks and hoots.
“No sleep till
No sleep till Brooklyn!”
“That’s some old-school, right there.” Rick grinned at them and dropped back into N’itha’s waiting arms.
On the other side of the fire, Homer was lighting his third Marlboro after recovering from his initial reaction.
26
Cards on the Table
“Explain this to me,” Mr. Taan said, holding up the square of calcified mud preserving Bat Jaffe’s Pleistocene boot print.
Morris Tauber looked out a window wall in the luxury condo provided for him by his captor. The sun was rising through a murky layer of smog and fog, hanging low over Shanghai harbor. Massive freight cranes down on the piers stood above the layer of gray mist covering everything in a sooty blanket. They were already dipping and rising, looking like giant birds fishing for breakfast through the mist. Taan relaxed behind him in an opulent conversation pit upholstered in highly illegal elephant hide.
“I’m not sure how much I should tell you,” Morris said, sounding petulant to himself.
Taan laughed without malice, with honest amusement.
Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome, Morris thought, wary of being played but unsure of how to prevent it. How much would he do, could he do, to save himself from harm. He was no tough guy like Dwayne and the others. But there was Caroline to think of. The thought of his sister gave him strength. He would aspire to her brand of stubbornness. It was in their DNA, after all.
“I already know most of what you wish would remain hidden, Morris. I know you have stolen a nuclear reactor which has you in trouble with Neal Harnesh and who knows how many governments and international agencies. I know that you have the technology to travel back in time and return safely. I can hardly believe that I just said that out loud. Those are only the broad strokes. What harm is there in sharing something that is strictly theoretical in nature? I’m merely curious.”
Morris sighed. “What is it that you want to know?”
“About this. How does this happen? One day it’s one thing, and the next day it’s another.” Taan turned the tile of stone in his hands.
“The events of the past are mutable. What has happened before isn’t locked in place forever. It can be changed.”
“But doesn’t that alter the present? Toss a spanner into the great cosmic clockwork?”
“I used to think that. I know better now. So much is predetermined by…I’m not sure what. Small, isolated changes have no discernible effect on the present. Bradbury was wrong.”
“Bradbury? A scientist?”
“Ray Bradbury. A science fiction writer. He posited that the slightest change to events that have already occurred can effect catastrophic changes in the present. Someone steps on a butterfly and the world is altered when the travelers return to their own time.” Morris warmed to his subject, overcoming his reticence to share anything with this man. Next stop, Sweden. All out for Stockholm.
“I’ll have to read that. But you specified ‘small, isolated changes.’ What about more profound alterations of established history?” Taan said.
A servant, a middle-aged European man in a dark suit, silently appeared from another room to set a silver tea service down on a Queen Anne occasional table.
Morris stood silent, waiting for the man to depart.
“Franz is Serbian. He doesn’t speak English,” Taan said. Franz did not even respond to his own name as he poured one cup of tea then another.
“Well, take the stone there. For a hundred thousand years, it was a pair of bird tracks in the mud of a river bank or something. By chance, they were preserved by replacement minerals over centuries and centuries, and, against all the odds, were found by a high school student on a field trip.”
“Yes. Go on please,” Taan said. He lifted a cup of tea on a saucer to offer it to Morris. Franz bowed slightly and departed as silently as he’d arrived.
“And for all those centuries it was just a pair of bird tracks. First lying in the desert in California and finally on a shelf in a dorm room. Unchanged. Unaltered. Until a member of our team walked in the mud along that same river bank and stepped over the bird tracks. Now, that boot print is history. That boot print is the record. What happened then, all those years before, is not as it was. It is now changed forever.”
“And that change is reflected retroactively from that time to this.” Taan nodded over his steaming cup.
“Well, whatever the opposite of retroactive would be, I guess.” Morris shrugged and picked up a silver creamer to add a dollop of skim milk to his tea.
“We’ll need a whole new lexicon for this branch of science you and your sister have created. But that was a small event. The passage of a single extinct bird long dead. Of no importance. A fart in a hurricane. But what about larger events? What if you went back and killed Einstein? Or caused Napoleon to win at Waterloo? Or China to win a World Cup in football?”
Morris said nothing. The casual mention of his sister chilled him.
“Is that possible? To cause a more momentous shift in the path of history?” Taan feigned interest in a bit of fig cake he’d picked from a plate on the tray, waiting for Morris’ response.
After a moment, Morris said, “Then you could, theoretically, change the course of history and, tail wagging the dog, the present and future.”
“You say, ‘theoretically.’ Your eyes and manner tell me otherwise. I am a very good poker player and you, Dr. Tauber, have a lot of tells. You know that this is all more than just two guys talking, isn’t it? You know that catastrophic changes can be made.”
“Well,” was all Morris could manage in reply.
“That’s what Sir Neal is up to, am I right? I know that old bastard. I’ve had dealings with him. A pain in the arse. And not half mad. He takes no prisoners and probably had grand plans for your device before you, and your band of villains snatched it away.”
“Let’s say he saw the Tauber Tube as a means to an end.”
“To conquer the world? Like a James Bond bad guy? That’s just like that audacious bastard.” Taan was amused.
“More like remake the world to his benefit.”
“I don’t care for remakes. That’s not my interest in your device.” Taan smiled.
“What is your interest? What is it you do want, Mr. Taan?” Morris asked, seated now on the opposite side of the upholstered pit. Oddly, the Bond reference gave him new confidence. If this was to be a game of wits, then wasn’t he fully armed? His PhDs had to mean something, right?
“Simple. I want you and your people to go back and get something for me. Something forgotten. Something I need. It’s purely for profit. A business venture. I have no desire to rule the world. My current holdings take up too much of my time as it is.” Taan set down his cup and settled back in the cushions.
“And until you get it, I’m your prisoner.”
“Prisoner? Have you been coerced? Was a gun held to your head? A knife to your throat?”
“Then I’m free to walk out of here?”