CROCAMANDER QUEST
L. Sprague de Camp
Please, Ms. Brownlee! I assure you I have nothing against women. I’ve been married to one—the same one—for twenty-odd years, and we get along fine.
Even if I’m not a male chauvinist, though, I bloody well won’t change my rule against taking ladies on time safaris, at least along with men. Not that women can’t rough it in the outback as well as men. But when you mix the sexes in a small, close group, you’re asking for trouble. When people are thrown together so intimately, they either form close attachments or come to hate one another. Adding the sexual factor merely makes a difficult situation impossible. I’ll tell you how we once tried such a mixed party and what came of it.
If your women’s-rights organization would like to get up an all-woman time safari, we’ll consider it. Of course I should have to see how my wife would take it. When she heard I had signed up five clients, including a woman, to the Triassic, she said:
“Reginald Rivers, what on earth are you thinking of? Having a quickie in the cycads with this bird? You’re asking for problems.”
I assured her I had nothing of the sort in mind, but in the end she could have said: “I told you so!” Not that the dear girl ever said it aloud; but I knew she was thinking it.
About the time Aiyar and I launched this mixed safari . . . that’s Chandra Aiyar in the photo on the wall, the dark chap with the dead dinosaur. I call him “Raja” because he’s the hereditary ruler of some little place in India named Janpur. Of course that’s purely honorary nowadays, like the title of that Frenchman, the Comte de Lautrec, who had his head taken off by a flick of the tail of a sauropod he annoyed.
I’d been getting some flak about our men-only policy; so the Raja and I thought we’d try a mixed safari once to see how it worked. There was a couple named Alvarado, Tomás and Inez, who wanted to go back to the Age of Reptiles. Tom Alvarado was a stout Spaniard who made his living singing in operas. He must have been bloody good at it, to be able to afford a time safari. They weren’t much interested in hunting or trophy collecting; but they were ambitious travelers, who had covered all the continents and most of the countries of the present-day Earth and were looking for something new. They weren’t even going to take a gun; but I persuaded them to rent a nine-millimeter Mannlicher. Otherwise the party would have been a little too lightly armed for safety.
It jarred me a bit when Tom introduced Mrs. Alvarado as “my former wife, Inez.” (He pronounced it to rhyme with “Macbeth.”) When I asked him about this later, he said: “Oh, yes, Inez and I have been divorced for years. We could not stand living together; but then we found we liked each other better than anyone else around. So we do what americanos call ‘going steady’.”
Well, I didn’t consider his private arrangements, no matter how bizarre, any of my business. Inez was a Yank of, I believe, Mexican antecedents; quite a stunner in a black-haired Latin way.
The Raja and I decided we wouldn’t send them to the Jurassic or Cretaceous, when one finds the most spectacular dinosaurs, because of the risk. We also had a prospect who was keen to get to the Triassic but couldn’t afford to do it solo, because his grant from the Auckland Museum of Natural History wouldn’t cover the fees. We had to charge high to include the costs to Professor Prochaska’s laboratory, since the time machine uses fantastic amounts of electric power.
This third sahib was a New Zealander, Professor Doctor Sir Edred Ngata, a paleontologist. He was a picturesque bloke, two meters tall, built like a locomotive, with a leather-brown skin and bushy black hair just beginning to gray. He must have been at least three-quarters Maori. I was glad to have a Kiwi along, who wouldn’t poke fun at my accent.
The reason Ngata was keen for the Triassic, where the wildlife is less spectacular than it becomes later, is that he wanted to study all the little lizardy creatures to find out which were the ancestors of the reptiles and mammals of later times. He told me:
“Also, Mr. Rivers, I want to study the distribution of the later rachitomes—”
“Excuse me,” I said, “the racket whats ?”
“Rachitomes, or their offshoot the stereospondyls. They’re orders of amphibians, in decline in the Triassic but still abundant and including some large creatures like Paracyclotosaurus from your own Australia. Imagine a newt or salamander expanded to crocodile size, with a huge head for catching smaller fry, and you’ll have the idea.”
“Might call it a ‘crocamander,’ eh? At least that’s easier to say than the name you just gave it.”
Ngata chuckled. “True; but the short, easy Latin names have been pretty well used up by now.”
“I see,” I said. “Trouble is, I no sooner get one of those jaw-breaking names memorized than you blokes go and change them, or at least change the classification. But why particularly crocamanders?”
He explained: “They help to date the breakup of Pangaea.”
“You mean that super-continent that, they say, once included them all?”
“Right-o. The breakup started in the Triassic. First the northern half, which we call Laurasia, separated from the southern, or Gondwanaland, when the Tethys Sea formed between them. So if we find one of your—ah—crocamanders very similar to one of ours in the southern continent, in the land that became North America, we can be fairly sure that the land connection between the two parts of Pangaea still existed.”
“Why couldn’t crocamanders swim from one to the other, the way the saltwater crocodile does?”
“Because most amphibians can’t take saltwater, with those soft, moist skins.”
The fourth sahib was an American, Desmond Carlyle, who knew the Alvarados. He was a good-sized fellow, well-set-up with sandy hair and a little blond mustache. He had done a bit of mountaineering and had the old idea that it proves one’s manhood to hang the stuffed heads of large wild animals on one’s wall. I’ve outgrown that sort of thing myself; but I don’t discourage it because it keeps clients coming in to the firm of Rivers and Aiyar, Time Safaris. Carlyle hoped to work up to a Cretaceous safari for a Tyrannosaurus head but thought a Triassic jaunt would be a good way to get broken in.
Last to join was a young man named Willard Smith. He was from one of those complicated families where both parents had been divorced and remarried ever-so-many times. One of his many stepfathers had given him the time trip as a present on his graduation from college. I’ve always heard that such extended families are a sure way to produce juvenile delinquents, addicts, and criminals; but young Smith didn’t show any such symptoms. He did, however, confide:
“Mr. Rivers, I hope you won’t mind that I’m a klutz.”
“Eh?” I said. “What’s that? Some sort of secret society, demanding compulsory birth control for comedians or something?”
“No, no, nothing like that. It’s Pennsylvania Dutch for an awkward, clumsy person.”
That gave me pause. I said: “Well, I don’t know. If you’re that kind of gawk, how do I know you won’t trip over a root and blow somebody’s head off?”
“Oh, I’m not interested in shooting,” said Smith. “I’ll be quite happy just tagging along and taking pictures. That’s my real enthusiasm.”
A little against my better judgment, I let Smith’s registration stand. I told myself to keep an extra-close watch on young Willard. In former geological eras, if you gash yourself with a skinning knife, or shoot yourself in the foot, or step in a hole and break your leg, there’s no telephoning the ambulance to come fetch you to the hospital. But if Smith didn’t carry a gun, at least he couldn’t accidentally shoot any of the rest of us.