He edged sideways, keeping his back to the mesa wall. A few of the bison closest to him eyed him without curiosity for a moment, but most did not even bother looking up. Why should they? They had no reason to fear him. They might never have seen a human being before. The whole human population of North America at this time was probably no more than twenty or thirty thousand widely scattered nomads. And to these bison he must seem utterly harmless, a flimsy little two-legged thing with no teeth or muscles worth worrying about and no claws at all.
Seeing that the bison were ignoring him, Sean moved out a little more boldly into the valley. The hugeness of the animals filled him with awe. They were like mountains. Even the calves seemed immense. He had all the more respect now for the strength of that saber-tooth.
He saw other animals now, smaller ones, animals he could not name. They were almost familiar—something that could almost have been a badger, and waddling birds that were somewhat like turkeys, and little scrambling rodents not much unlike guinea pigs. But they were all somehow different from their modern counterparts.
He wished he knew more about prehistoric zoology. This was an amazing place. Evidently this valley was a rich and fertile location that was particularly attractive to beasts great and small from all over central Arizona. What an amazing privilege it was to be allowed to see this congregation of great creatures!
Then he realized that he was not the only person here.
Shouts came from a fold in the valley floor a few hundred yards away. Glancing up in surprise, Sean was startled to see eight or ten tall, slender men in loincloths pelting one of the bison calves with rocks to drive it into a small box canyon. They were armed with spears tipped with tapering stone points, and as they pursued the angry, frightened calf they jabbed at it again and again, barely penetrating its thick furry hide. Killing it was going to be a difficult job.
Sean had been so concerned with the animals that he hadn’t heard the hunters approach. Now, struck with wonder and amazement, he stepped back behind a tree to watch them in action. They were long-limbed, graceful men. They seemed almost to be floating as they ran along behind the calf. Though they had dark skins of a deep coppery hue, they looked very little like the Indians of his own time. Their heads were narrow and tapering, their shoulders sloped, their features were small, almost delicate. The chilly air seemed to bother them not at all, practically naked though they were.
He leaned forward, peering intently, fascinated by the sight of these prehistoric hunters at their task.
Then he felt a sudden stiff jab between his shoulder blades.
He whirled. And found himself looking at another of the hunters, who had come up silently behind him. His eyes were dark and shining, almost glowing with a light of their own. They were fixed on Sean in absolute concentration. The hunter grasped a spear lightly in his left hand, balancing it easily by the middle of its shaft.
He must have used the wooden end of the spear to poke Sean in the back. But now he had swung it around the other way. Sean stared. The long, sharp, elegantly carved stone point of the spear came into close focus just in front of him. It was aimed at the center of his chest, hovering just a couple of inches over his heart.
21. Eric -5×1010minutes
The rules are never broken. That was the last thing that he remembered the anterstin thelerimane saying, back in the tunnels that ran beneath the world of A.D. 11529. Those two spooky humanoids with the long whiplike limbs had seemed to be telling him that he was going to dwell in the tunnels forever.No one leaves quarantine until the galithismon permits it. You will stay here until your clearance comes, we promise you that. Even if you must remain in the quarantine tunnels for five hundred years.
And then he felt the familiar swooping dizzying sensation-that let him know he was making a shunt, and the anterstin thelerimane disappeared. The weird glistening tunnel with the onyx wall disappeared. The whole world of A.D.11529 disappeared.
So much for the quarantine powers of the galithismon, Eric thought. Whoever or whatever the galithismon might be, it had been unable to withstand the power of the great pendulum that was carrying Eric back and forth across time.
What now? he wondered.
He found himself on an icy windswept plain, bleak and desolate. Leafless trees with dark crooked trunks rose here and there above the snowfields. The air was harsh and sharp, with howling gusts cutting deep. He touched his utility belt to give himself a little protection against the cold.
This was the minus-fifty-billion-minute level. Fifty billion-minutes! He was 95,129 years into the past now—the Pleistocene period, the last Ice Age, the Fourth Glacial. Eric took his bearings. Latitude 41 degrees north. Longitude 6 degrees east. East? He was in Europe, then. Right in the middle of Spain. A whopping spatial displacement, clear across the whole United States and the Atlantic, too. Halfway around the world and smack into the teeth of an Ice-Age gale.
And there were tracks in the fresh snow in front of him.
Human tracks.
No question about it. The tracks had been made by someone with a wide foot, very wide. Probably a short person, because the prints were fairly close together.
But human, without a doubt. Because the feet that had left those tracks in the snow had been clad in sandals of some sort. The imprint was unmistakable: no sign of toes or claws, only the rounded front end of the sandal and the tapering heel.
Human? In Pleistocene Spain?
Neanderthals, Eric thought in sudden wonder. And he began to follow the trail.
It led up and over a hummock of rock that jutted from the snowfield, and down the other side through a region of loose and annoyingly deep snow that gave him much trouble, and then up the side of a steep hill. Climbing it was real work. For one bad moment he thought he had lost the trail altogether; but then he picked it up again, midway up the hill. Behind him, the winds grew wilder and snow began to fall. He scrambled upward.
A cave. A fire burning within.
He stared. Eight, ten people inside, close together by the campfire. Wearing shaggy fur robes, though some were bare to the waist. Short people, stocky and squat, with big heads and thick necks and barrel chests and broad, low-bridged noses. They weren’t pretty, no. But they weren’t apes, either. They were human beings. Different from us, but not by much. Cousins. Our Neanderthal cousins. Eric shivered, and not just from the cold.
One of them was singing, and the others were gathered around, nodding and clapping their hands in time. A slow, rhythmic chant, which suddenly speeded up, then slowed again, speeded again: an intricate rhythm, constantly changing. Almost like a poem. Almost? It was a poem! Those complex rhythms, the solemnity of the chanter’s voice, the rapt attention of the listeners. The Iliad of the Neanderthals, maybe, a tale of heroic battle deeds. Or the Odyssey, the story of a man who had gone to war across the sea and had had a hard time getting home. A tribal poet, telling the great old stories around the campfire. Stories that would fall into the deepest sort of oblivion when these rugged people of the Ice Age were swept away into extinction, thirty or forty thousand years from now.
Neanderthal poetry! The idea stunned and dazzled him.
He leaned forward as far as he dared, peering into the mouth of the cave, straining to hear the words, hoping with an impossible hope to understand the meaning.
Abruptly the chanting stopped. There was silence in the cave.