The Fury Out of Time (29 page)

“We’re about to renew our acquaintance with your friend the crocodile,” Karvel observed grimly.

He watched the surface of the stream for a long time, but there were no telltale ripples, no signs of life. Fortunately the barren shores offered no concealment for an ambush. Unfortunately, neither the shores nor the bleak plain they had just left could provide any means of crossing the river.

They followed the bank for several miles. The river widened; the surrounding plain remained bleak. Karvel was about to turn back when they found a large oak tree stranded on a sandbar. The Hras unlimbered their tools and went to work on it, all the time keeping a fearsome watch on the water. Under Karvel’s direction they sliced the log into a manageable length, attached outriggers to keep it from rolling, and mortised safety railings along the sides. They poled across the river without incident, and when all were safely ashore Karvel called a conference.

“The country seems to be getting drier all the time,” he said. “We may be heading into a desert. How long will it be before you need water?”

“We will need some soon,” Hras Klaa admitted.

“You’d better drink now. It could be a long time before you’ll have another chance.”

There was an awkward silence. “We cannot drink without. . .without special arrangements,” Hras Klaa admitted finally.

“Why didn’t you tell me before we started?” Karvel demanded.

“We did not think we would be gone so-long.”

Karvel regarded them incredulously. If they traveled to the limit of their endurance without even attempting to obtain food and water, how could they expect to return? “What sort of special arrangements do you need?” he asked.

“We do not drink as you do.”

“Obviously. What do you need?”

They had some difficulty in describing it, but eventually it dawned on Karvel that all they really wanted was—a bathtub.

“Nonsense,” he said, waving at the river. “There’s a large tub, with plenty of water. Go get wet!”

“It is not safe,” Hras Klaa said, with a visible shudder.

“It is too dirty,” Hras Durr protested.

“The dirt you’ll have to put up with, but I agree that it wouldn’t be safe. Do you need food, too? We’ll spend the rest of the day here. What do you have to dig with?”

The membranes that terminated the Hras limbs made sturdy scoops, and after they had broken up the dried mud on the flats along the river Karvel started them digging. Under the mud was gravel, and as they dug below the water level water began to seep into the holes.

“There you are,” Karvel said. “You can have as many tubs as you feel like digging. Are you able to eat fish?”

They would not eat it by preference, they said, but they might by necessity—though they preferred that he did not burn it first.

“Take your baths,” Karvel said, “and I’ll catch the fish.”

They dug deep holes in which they could lie almost submerged, coming up infrequently for a sputtering breath. Karvel stood at the end of their makeshift boat and caught fish, small fish, no more than a foot or two in length. He cleaned and boned them, and the Hras masticated the meat with their strong membranes until it was reduced to a dry pulp. This they pressed into thin cakes, and before Karvel’s disbelieving eyes they tucked the cakes into pouches whose existence he had not even suspected. Only after he had seen several such performances did it occur to him that the pouches were mouths. They extended completely around the lower part of the body, and they enabled the Hras to absorb a week’s supply of food in one mouthful.

He was curious enough to risk offending them with questions, and they did not seem to mind. He learned that they had no sensation of taste, as he understood it; nor did they have any means, or any necessity, of chewing their food. In actual fact, they chewed it with their hands and placed it directly into their stomachs.

When Karvel whimsically protested that such a shortcut eliminated most of the pleasure to be derived from eating, a Hras pointed out that it also saved a great deal of time. Karvel, for example, had the bother of finding fuel, building a fire, and cooking his food. Then he ate with ridiculous slowness, since he had to chew his food with the most inefficient mechanism that the Hras could imagine. The end result was the same—the food reached the stomach—so why not place it there directly, and have done with it?

“With the kind of food I’ve been eating,” Karvel said, “you have a point.”

When all of the Hras had been fed, they dragged the log boat far up onto the bank. “If it’s not here when we come back,” Karvel told them, “I’ll know that dinosaurs have talents I never suspected.”

They collected driftwood for the fires he meant to maintain that night, for they would have to sleep in the open for the first time. The Hras protested vehemently, but the river’s barren flood plain offered not so much as a clump of bushes with which to succor them. They protested until darkness fell, and then they quietly collapsed into sleep.

They started off again at dawn, and instead of the expected desert they encountered a swamp. Karvel guessed that the sea had curved back toward them, or that the river had channeled out across the flat land. They put in a frustrating day zigzagging around tongues of the swamp, and finally Karvel altered their base course to attempt to find open country. It brought them, late in the afternoon, to the shore of a shallow, curving lake, and when they turned aside to go around it the water bent back toward them.

They made camp that night on a knoll near the end of the lake. Behind them Karvel could see the distant, sinuous line of the river. Their day’s march had gained them only a few miles. There were no trees for shelter and no wood for fires, but as the light faded the Hras formed their protective circle without protest. Karvel’s attempt to build a fire with the long, brittle grass produced only a monumental smudge.

It was a peaceful night, with a bit of a moon, and the rackety night sounds drifting up from the lake were distant and unmenacing. For a long time Karvel restlessly paced around the circle of sleeping Hras, slicing up the darkness with random flicks of his flashlight. He was dreadfully tired—soon they would have to lay up for most of a day while he caught up on his sleep. He rested, nervously scrambled to his feet to resume his pacing, rested again.

The night was already diluted with the first dim light of dawn when he noticed the gap in the circle. At first he would not believe it. He counted the Hras, counted them again. There were nineteen. Instinctively he ran toward the lake. The night noises had subsided; the water was motionless. He followed the shore a short distance and then retreated in panic to count the Hras again. Nineteen.

Not until it was lighter, almost light enough to bring the Hras lurching out of their somnolence, was he able to pick out the telltale blurred path of crushed grass. Something heavy had passed that way, or been dragged, and Karvel followed the trail until it ended in a deep furrow in the soft mud of the lake shore.

The Hras were awake when he returned. They seemed to know instinctively what had happened. They asked for no explanation, and he was much too horrified and torn with doubt to offer one.

For a week he had been getting no more than four widely separated hours of sleep in twenty-four. Had he dozed off in the peaceful darkness? He did not think so, but neither did he think that the lake’s unspeakable inhabitant could have made off with a creature as large and as heavy as a Hras without producing a noticeable disturbance.

However it happened, Hras Hnil, whom Karvel remembered only for abnormally small wings and a large irregular spot like an ink blot on the breathing band, had vanished.

Hras Klaa said politely, “It is not your fault. It is no one’s fault. It is this horrible world.”

The Hras, so uneasy at the slightest threat of danger, so queerly cool and panicky at once when it struck, were strangely unmoved after a tragedy had occurred.
Resigned
was a better word. They had been nearly a year on this violent world, they had seen their numbers steadily diminished by its savage attrition, and they regarded tragedy as inevitable.

“Shall we turn back?” Karvel asked.

“It is for you to decide,” Hras Klaa said.

Karvel gestured across the lake. “We should at least see what lies beyond the swamp. Another day. Or two. . .”

He cautiously filled his canteen with lake water and drank deeply while they formed a protective barricade with their T poles. Then he strode off, and the Hras silently followed him.

Chapter 4

At noon on the second day Karvel stood on a low hill and saw a dark streak on the horizon. The undulating land in between shaded away into desert, and it teemed with dinosaurs. At a distance the slow-moving, drably colored beasts looked neither remarkable nor menacing, but the Hras drew back in alarm.

For the moment Karvel was more interested in the horizon. He called Hras Klaa back to the hilltop and asked, “Is it mountains?”

“Tall hills, at least,” Hras Klaa said, “and I think they soon become mountains.”

Hras vision was still a mystery to Karvel. Apparently the dark spots of their upper bands were their organs of vision—he could not make himself call them eyes—and they saw in all directions simultaneously, but also very badly. But when there was something specific that they wanted to see, they invariably saw farther and much more clearly than Karvel. It was as though their organs did not focus automatically, and rather than devote their waking existence to a tiresome focusing and refocusing, the Hras were content with a blurred existence. They looked carefully only at those things they thought important.

“How far away?” Karvel asked.

“I could not say.”

“Three days?”

“I could not say. The heat becomes worse. We would need to rest often, and there is no shade.”

Doubtfully Karvel studied the barren terrain. The dinosaurs were of slight concern to him. The beasts were plodding across their line of march, and would soon be gone; and if they had anything specific on their diminutive minds it would be water, for they were just emerging from a westward thrust of the desert.

But the land looked terrifying. The sand would be soft underfoot, difficult to walk in. The heat would be formidable, and as Hras Klaa had pointed out, there was no shade.

And the Hras could not travel at night.

By pushing themselves the Hras might cross safely, but they would be in desperate need of water when they reached the hills. Karvel was much less certain about himself. He still had a full canteen, but he had not drunk for more than twenty-four hours. He estimated that his water would take him no further than halfway.

Even if they were able to cross, there was no certainty that they would find water in the hills.

Karvel took the uranium detector and made his customary, futile circuit. The Hras waited silently. He could sense their uneasiness, but he made no effort to understand it He had long since abandoned any hope he’d had of understanding the Hras. They had been together for nine days, and he had learned their names and noted enough minor differences in their appearances to be able to tell them apart, but he was not—could not be—one of them. He had more kindred feeling for the dinosaurs. The reptiles had necks, even though some seemed unnecessarily exaggerated. They had reasonably organized heads. And they were
of Earth.

Karvel found it impossible to develop even a feeling of comradeship for a being who could not be looked in the eyes, or—which actually seemed worse—who could be looked in the eyes from any direction.

He completed his circuit and returned the uranium detector to Hras Hrul. “We’ll rest here,” he said, “and then we’ll start back.”

The Hras said nothing, and he had no way of knowing what they were thinking.

They moved back down the slope, where they might partially escape the searing desert wind, and sat down to rest. They had formed up again and were starting to move off when Karvel heard a distant, unending roll of thunder.

He turned a questioning gaze on Hras Klaa. “Do you hear that?”

Hras Klaa did not answer. The other Hras stood fussing nervously with their T poles.

“I’ll see what it is,” Karvel said, and hurried toward the hilltop.

Suddenly he realized that the thunder was crescendoing toward him. The ground began to shake underfoot, and a wave, a torrent of dinosaurs swept over the crest of the hill. A glance told him that there was no escape. They could outrun the terrified monsters for yards, but not for miles. He screamed, “Stand still!” and stood his ground, hoping that the stampede would pass around him.

Long necks swayed over him and were gone. Armored monsters charged past with unbelievable speed, their lowered horns protruding like lances. It was an outpouring of all of the museum cases he could remember, their speculative restorations brought suddenly into the sharper focus of stomping, bellowing, snorting reality.

On and on they came, quadrupeds and bipeds, weirdly shaped heads and grotesque bodies, the tailed and the tailless, giants and midgets, a churning, dust-choked deluge of horrors.

Karvel made no attempt to unsling his rifle. He stood motionless and the dinosaurs flowed by harmlessly. The beasts kept their distance, wider gaps opened and closed between them, and there even seemed to be a certain jockeying for position, a drifting away from the vicious horns of the quadrupeds.