The Fury Out of Time (27 page)

“No, thanks,” Karvel said dryly. “It’s enough breakfast for an army, if the thing is edible. It’s already been breakfast for a navy. This is no place for a quiet morning swim, not even for a fish.”

“Now. . .may. . .we. . .return?” the Hras asked.

Karvel nodded. He clubbed the fish until it stopped snapping, forced the T of his pole into the huge gill, and attempted to hoist it to his shoulder.

A Hras uttered a piercing scream.

From the tangle of vegetation along the path lunged an express train with long jaws. Karvel dropped the fish and stepped to meet it, fumbling for his rifle. The screams crescendoed in a wildly bleating chorus as other Hras joined in. Before Karvel could level his rifle he was looking into the widest mouth he had ever seen, and one of the screaming Hras coolly stepped around him and plunged the upright T of his pole into it. They both leaped back, Karvel snatching an arm from the closing jaw—but the jaws could not close. The beast’s mouth clamped firmly onto the pole. It uttered a furious bellow, and swung the pole wildly. A glancing blow on the head dazed Karvel. At the same time the enormous tail whipped out of the vegetation and knocked a dozen Hras sprawling. One toppled over the bank and clutched desperately at a trailing vine. As the vine parted another Hras pulled it to safety.

Karvel leaped over the tail as it lashed back, and put six rifle bullets into the beast’s head. It seemed not to notice. Jaws still clamped onto the pole, it slid over the bank and into the water. A moment later the broken pole bobbed to the surface.

“And that,” Karvel said awesomely, “is what I’d call a crocodile. Forty feet long, at least. I hope there aren’t any older brothers around.”

The Hras were shaken. “Now. . .return?” one of them pleaded, a pathetic tremolo in its wheezy voice.

Karvel did not answer. The strangest creature he had ever seen came paddling leisurely around a bend in the stream. Its body was almost entirely submerged, and its long, serpentlike neck probed the waters deeply, to emerge with a fish in its jaws.

Karvel had taken the encounter with the crocodile in stride, but this creature unnerved him completely. It was unquestionably a seagoing dinosaur, and his first clue as to how far into the future and the past he had traveled.

“Back to the ship,” he said, and again attempted to hoist the fish to his shoulder. Two of the Hras helped him carry it. He walked warily, and kept to the center of the path quite as conscientiously as did the Hras.

Karvel cleaned his fish, gave it a thick coating of mud, of which there was ample available, and baked it for the remainder of the morning in a long fire that consumed much of the brush pile the Hras had accumulated from their manufacture of T poles. The result was a delicious, tender, flaky meat. The Hras politely refused to share it with him, but until he had eaten his fill and wrapped the remainder of the huge carcass in leaves in the hope that it would keep longer, ten of them stood poised between Karvel and the swamp, their T poles held alertly. He doubted that it was necessary, but when they said “Many dangers!” he was no longer disposed to argue with them.

The spokesman of the previous day, Hras Drawa, joined Karvel on the ramp when he had finished eating. Karvel was beginning to recognize subtle differences between individual Hras, in coloring, in stature, even, in a few cases, in mannerisms. Hras Drawa had two distinctively shaped spots on the breathing band, and an amusing habit of crisscrossing the four upper limbs.

“Have you had many casualties?” Karvel asked.

“Many. It is a horrible world.”

“You must have had some experience with horrible worlds. Why didn’t you bring weapons with you?”

“Our weapons were lost in the explosion.”

“I could show you how to make some, but what you really want to do is to go home, where I presume that you don’t need weapons.”

Hras Drawa wheezed softly, but said nothing.

“Could you make your own fuel if you had uranium?”

“Yes. We are fully equipped for this, because we could not carry enough fuel for the distance we intended to travel.”

“Uranium,” Karvel mused. “Pitchblende ore. Have you tried to find it?”

“We have tried. There is none within two days’ traveling time. The dangers are many, the world is impossibly large for those who must walk, and nowhere have we ever found uranium to be plentiful. The chance of success seemed so slight that we did not look further.”

“If you had some kind of flying machine—”

“We did.” Hras Drawa wheezed an enormous sigh. “A special machine for locating uranium. It was destroyed in the explosion. We used what remained of it in the repairs to the spaceship.”

“I see.”

“All in that part of the ship was destroyed except the U.O., which is difficult to damage.”

“Fuel reserve, armory, aircraft—everything you needed for survival went up in that one blast. When you get home you should put in a recommendation that the ship’s layout be redesigned.”

“Such a thing has never happened before.”

Karvel nodded sympathetically. If creatures brilliant enough to build a U.O. couldn’t solve their problem, there wasn’t much point in Bowden Karvel working at it. He changed the subject. “There’s something I wanted to ask you about the U.O. What instrument setting did your messenger use?”

“The ultimate—the maximum. We did not know how long it would be before intelligent life developed on this planet.”

“The maximum,” Karvel repeated. He took a deep breath, and said slowly, “That means that it went as far as its fuel would take it. Then it arrived in my time with the instruments set—”

“We also removed one instrument. It is a. . .a
limiter.
It prevents the U.O. from going farther than there is fuel to return it to the starting point.”

“That accounts for the empty hole in the instrument panel, but it doesn’t help with my time paradox. If the U.O. arrived with its instruments set at the maximum, the French couldn’t possibly have known how far to send it into the future if it hadn’t already returned from the future.”

“The U.O. did not arrive with its instruments at the maximum. It has. . .what would you call it? A clock? A measuring device? If the progress is stopped for any reason—in this case, by running out of fuel—the instruments set themselves to show how far the U.O. has traveled.”

“Ah!”

“Does that reconcile your paradox?”

“No, but it makes it a bit less drastic. I’ve also been wondering what I would have done if the thing had landed in the ocean.”

“It will not. It will. . .land. . .only on land. I know very little about the U.O. myself. It is a new device, and unfortunately its inventor died in the swamp shortly after we landed. We had used it on other worlds for traveling much smaller distances, and even then the operators proceeded in many short steps. They were studying evolution and the ultimate of mysteries, the origin of life. We knew nothing of the pressure, and of the Force X, because these things are not noticeable when the U.O. travels small distances.”

“Then your messenger would not have been killed, and there would have been no Force X, if the trip had been made in a series of short time leaps. Why wasn’t it?”

“We had too little fuel. It is the starting up, the beginning, that requires the most fuel. The U.O. would need an enormous extra supply to reach your time with the short leaps.”

“A larger extra supply than I brought?”

“A much, much larger supply,” Hras Drawa wheezed firmly.

“I see. Which brings us back to the important question: Where is there some uranium?”

“We have thought about this since you arrived,” Hras Drawa said. “It is your world. Do you not know where uranium is to be found?”

“I have a general idea where the principal deposits are. Rather, I know where they will be in a hundred million years or so. I don’t know how to go about locating them in this time because I don’t know where we are. The landmarks I would need probably aren’t in existence yet. How can I look for a uranium deposit in mountains that haven’t been formed? Even if I did stumble onto one of those locations—and it might require a trek of hundreds or even thousands of miles—the uranium could be miles deep and inaccessible until millions of years of erosion have uncovered it. Or it could be at the bottom of the ocean. I don’t know enough about geology to know if the uranium deposits of my time existed this long ago.”

“We had not thought of those problems.”

“I think it would be foolish to try to find the deposits of my time.”

“I agree.” The pause was much longer than usual. “It was our final hope. Then we must remain here.”

“Not necessarily,” Karvel said. “Do you have instruments to detect the presence of pitchblende deposits? Something like a Geiger counter?”

“Uranium detectors. Yes.”

“Then why not use them? Two days doesn’t represent much of a search. Make it a week, or a month, or even a year. What more important things do you have to do, except sit around and hope you’ll live long enough to die of old age?”

“You do not fully understand the difficulties.”

“Perhaps not,” Karvel admitted. “But I fully understand the problem. You haven’t really tried to find uranium. You’ve been waiting for it to come to you—waiting for the U.O. to bring it to you. Now you know that it won’t, but you’re satisfied to go on waiting. It doesn’t make sense.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Haven’t I said it plainly enough?”

“Would you accompany such an expedition?”

“I?” Karvel exclaimed. “I wouldn’t know how to begin to look for uranium. Don’t you have geologists? Or mineralogists?”

“No,” Hras Drawa said. “We had such specialists, but they were all killed—looking for uranium.”

It seemed like an excellent time to change the subject again, and to Karvel’s intense relief Hras Drawa did so. “You are not comfortable with us?”

“No,” Karvel said. “I prefer not to live in a swamp.”

“It is safe here.”

“It is safe in your ship. I should have to leave it frequently to find food, and the swamp provides too many places for ambush. Also, your ship is not comfortable for me.”

“Surely the U.O. would be less comfortable than our ship.”

“I was just thinking of sleeping there,” Karvel said. “I can look after myself when I’m awake. I’ll build a cabin with those fallen trees, and put some kind of stockade around it, and if I can’t cope with a dinosaur before it gets past those obstacles I’ll take refuge in the U.O. I might not be absolutely safe, but perfect safety doesn’t exist anywhere.”

“You have made your decision?” Hras Drawa asked politely.

“I have made my decision. I would appreciate the loan of tools, if you have any.”

“We will offer our assistance in the building of this cabin. There may yet be time to do it today.”

The Hras built the cabin. They were amazingly strong, their tools produced phenomenal results, and Karvel, once he had given them a general idea of what he wanted, had little to do other than keep out of their way.

They built the cabin around the U.O., and further reduced its living space with an elaborate network of braces. They fitted logs together with artful precision, and covered them with a transparent adhesive that in a few hours’ time became as hard as rock. When they finished Karvel had a weather-tight dwelling that no force less than that of a bomb could have disturbed. He asked for firing slots, rather than windows, and the only real problem was posed by the door—for which they had cut a neat circle before Karvel found out what they were doing. He spent an hour in trying to think of a way to cope with the circular opening, and then they installed one of the dilating doors from the spaceship.

There were not enough logs for a full stockade. Karvel suggested an abatis instead, and the Hras brought great armfuls of the saplings from which they made their T poles, and surrounded the cabin with a circle of sharpened stakes pointed outward. Karvel was convinced that even a tyrannosaur, if there were any about, would think twice before attempting to get past that obstacle.

“We did not envision such an arrangement,” Hras Drawa admitted. “We agree that you will be almost safe here as long as you do not go outside this abatis, and as long as you remain alert. I caution you that not all of the dangerous things are large.”

“I’m sure I’ll be safe enough as long as the water holds out,” Karvel said. The country was obviously suffering a prolonged drought, and the stream at the foot of the hill was a narrow ribbon of water threaded between wide banks.

The Hras hurried off as sunset approached, promising to visit him the next day. Karvel did not blame them for wanting to return to the ship before dark. He stood watching until their long file reached the swamp, and then he seated himself on a log before his circular door, and gazed at the distant, smooth surface of the sea.

It was, he thought sardonically, the first permanent home he’d ever had. His mind lingered on the word
permanent.
He was marooned here just as irrevocably as were the Hras, but that fact did not depress him. He would have sung fervent hosannas, if he’d known any, for his mission was accomplished. There was only one U.O., and it had made its final journey.