Time's Last Gift Part 20

At dawn, Gribardsun stepped out from his hut. He wore a wolf-skin vest and deerskin loincloth and his bearskin boots. He carried a pack on his back containing ammunition and his meager scientific and medical equipment, several containers of dehydrated fruit juice and concentrated protein, a suit and a tent of thermicron (though it was summer it would be cold near the ice fields of England), and a pair of binoculars. He was not even taking shaving equipment, though he could have shaved with the edge of his hunting knife. He was growing a beard on this trip.

Laminak was wailing with the scientists. She threw her arms around him and wept, and he kissed her and told her not to grieve. Rachel looked sour. She had tried to overcome her irrational feelings of jealousy, but she could not endure the child. Gribardsun might seem amused by Laminak's devotion, but she could not get rid of the idea that he was just waiting for her to become a little older. Gribardsun thought so much of her, her intelligence was very high, - she was sensitive, perceptive, and open-hearted, and showed signs of being a beauty. Before it would be time for the travelers to return, she would be fifteen, and Gribardsun might take her back with him. She believed this despite his protests that that could never happen.

Drummond Silverstein said goodbye to Gribardsun and then burst into tears. He had become very much attached to the Englishman, partly because they spent an hour almost every day in therapy. Gribardsun was using a combination of drugs and hypnotism to break through the wall of time that Drummond had erected inside himself. But he had had little success. However, Drummond had become very dependent on him.

'If I thought that my leaving would injure him, I might stay,' Gribardsun said. 'But the therapy has not been spectacularly successful, so it won't be upset with my absence. But I want you two to watch him closely for signs of improvement or regression. You have my instructions concerning him.'

Ten minutes later, he was out of sight. He left at a trot, which he said he could keep up all day. Except in the roughest terrain, he expected to average about fifty miles a day.

The days pa.s.sed. The summer was hot but short, and the work for both the scientists and the tribespeople was hard. Rachel trained Drummond to help her in her fields of botany, zoology, and genetics, but had to suppress an ever present irritation with him. She tended to regard him as mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded, whereas he was actually a very bright twelve-year-old. He learned swiftly, but he did make mistakes, and she was sharp with him when these occurred. Nor did she feel sympathetic when he now and then called her 'mother.' She was, in fact, furious.

Von Billmann showed signs of discontent. More and more he complained about the low chances of ever getting to Czechoslovakia.

'The speakers of proto-Indo-Hitt.i.te must be located and their language recorded,' he said. 'And doing this will take time. We should be traveling there right now. But, instead, John Gribardsun is visiting that barren piece of land, England. I doubt that he'll find a single human being there.'

'That's not what he's looking for,' she said. 'You know he's making a geological and meteorological survey.'

'We should have brought along a small plane,' he said peevishly. 'We could have covered hundreds of miles, saved months of travel time. I could be in Czechoslovakia right now.'

She had known von Billmann for many years before the expedition and had never once seen him in a bad humor. Perhaps he was being affected by temporal dislocation. Though he had been more resistant than she or her husband, he was succ.u.mbing now. And she, instead of getting better, was feeling less and less attached to reality. She and von Billmann were weakening, she was sure, because their pillar of stability was gone. As long as Gribardsun was around, reality seemed more solid. He radiated strength and a.s.surance.

Eight.

A month pa.s.sed. The hunters brought in hares, lemmings, marmots, voles, grouse, foxes, wolves, ibex, reindeer, horses, musk oxen, aurochs, bison, rhinoceroses, and mammoths. The fishermen brought in salmon and fresh-water mussels. The women brought in berries and tubers and greens of various kinds. Meat and fish were smoked and dried. Tubers were dried or ground into a powder. Skins were tanned, cut, and sewn. An old man (about sixty) died. Ten babies were born, four of whom died at birth. Three mothers died. A hunter came too close to a mammoth which had fallen into a trap and was lifted up and dashed to death by the huge beast's trunk. A youth fell off a cliff while hunting ibex, broke his back, and was eaten by cave hyenas before his companions could get to him. A man savagely beat his wife when he found her with another man behind a large boulder. She recovered but lost numerous teeth and an eye.

Casualties were normally high among these people, but this month they were unusually high, frighteningly so to the tribes-people. They blamed Gribardsun's absence for the evil things happening to them.

When thirty days had pa.s.sed, Rachel and von Billmann began to look for Gribardsun. Every day thereafter they expected, or at least hoped, to see his tall, long-legged, broad-shouldered figure and handsome face appear down the valley. But two weeks went by, and they started to worry. They knew that he was not conforming to a timetable, and that he might have run across many interesting phenomena to detain him. But he was a man of his word, and if he said he would be back in a month, he would try to keep reasonably close to that time.

The day of the seventh week after his departure, Rachel was on a herpetological field trip, about five miles from the camp, with Drummond. She had taken films at long range of a field where vipers lived. Having been fortunate to photograph a viper in the act of swallowing a young lemming, she went into the area to catch the snake. She found the hole into which it had disappeared and she and Drummond began digging into it. After fifteen minutes of hard work with the shovel, she exposed the snake sleeping in the burrow with its middle swollen with the lemming. She lifted it and dropped it into a bag.

And then she dropped bag and snake as Drummond yelled behind her.

She whirled and saw him rigid and pointing at a larger viper poised to strike only a foot away.

'Stand still!' she said. 'And be quiet! I'll get him!'

She withdrew her pistol slowly from her holster, but Drummond yelled again and jumped away as the upper part of the snake's body swayed back and forth. The snake flashed forward at the sudden movement, and Rachel shrieked. She thought that the snake had struck Drummond.

Her revolver missed the viper with the first two shots, but the third blew its backbone apart just behind the head.

Drummond remained frozen and gray.

'Did it bite you?' she asked. She reached into the bag she wore suspended from her belt. It held anti-venom drugs, but the effect depended on quick injection.

'I don't think so,' he said finally, staring down at his leg. 'It struck me, but only with the tip of its snout, I think. I was going away from it when it did hit.'

He suddenly sat down and covered his face with his hands. Rachel got down on her knees and rolled up his pants leg. She could find no bite.

'You're all right,' she said.

'Where exactly am I?' His eyes looked at her bewildered through his fingers.

She knew then, without being told, what had happened.

'I remember shooting at you,' he said. 'My G.o.d, what happened? Where are we?'

By the time they had returned to camp, he knew everything. But it was all hearsay to him. He remembered nothing from the moment he had tried to kill her.

'And the old snake-pit treatment brought me back,' he said. 'In one way I wish it hadn't. But of course I wouldn't want to remain a child forever. I wonder why I got stuck at that age? It doesn't matter, I can find out when I get back to our time. If we ever do...'

He began to weep, saying as he regained control, 'My G.o.d, what have I done? What's happened to me? To us?'

She did not reply for a while, and then she said, 'Whatever it is, it's something that brought out in us what already existed. It didn't originate anything.'

'I can't believe that these psychological changes are brought about just by the shock of time dislocation,' he said. 'I wonder if there aren't some subtle somatic effects caused by time travel. Something that causes an electrochemical imbalance.'

'That is something that will be determined by the medics when we get back,' she said. 'Unless, of course, the trip back restores our balance.'

She started to say something, shut her mouth, then put out her hand to stop him.

'John is gone,' she said, 'and it's possible he may never return. I can't help feeling that something bad has happened to him. But if he does return, then what? Are we going to go through the same thing? Do I have to be afraid that you'll be shooting at us?'

'I suppose it's all over between us, no matter what I do from now on,' he said.

'Yes, I won't lie, even if I am afraid of you,' she said. 'I'm getting a divorce as soon as we get out of quarantine.'

'And then you and Gribardsun will be getting married?'

She laughed and said, 'Oh, yes! Right away! You fool! He doesn't love me! I asked him, and he said no!'

'And you two weren't cheating on me? Or intending to?'

'This is the twenty-first century!' she said.

'No, it isn't. It's the hundred and twentieth B.C. You didn't answer my question.'

'No, we weren't cheating on you. You know I wouldn't deceive you; I'd tell you what I was doing or what I intended to do. And John would never stoop to do anything behind a person's back. You should know him better than that! Can you actually conceive of him doing anything base or sneaky?'

'n.o.ble John. Nature's aristocrat!'

They were silent. He started toward the camp again but stopped after a few steps.

'I swore I wouldn't ever say anything about this until we returned. But I feel I must tell you now. Only you will have to promise me you won't tell Robert or Gribardsun.'

'How can I do that if it turns out that what you're going to tell me may hurt John if I keep silent?'