“2016 is when I set out from.”
“Ah. 2016. The fabulous future, indeed. Well, well, we will have much to talk about, then. No one else here comes from any year later than 1853, I believe. Most are much earlier. We have a Roman couple, do you know, and several Greeks, and an Egyptian or two. And some who speak no language any of us can fathom. They must be quite ancient. I myself was seized in 1809.”
“Seized?”
“Oh, yes, of course, boy! How did you think we all got here?”
Eric moistened his lips. “I’m here as a result of an experiment in travel through time carried out at the California Institute of Technology,” he said. “But you—”
Bathurst shrugged. “A victim of kidnapping. Forced transport. Seized unawares. The same fate that has befallen all the creatures here, both human and otherwise. Except you, it would seem, if you indeed have come voluntarily. The rest of us are captives. It is a very comfortable captivity, I must say, but it is captivity all the same. And it is imprisonment for life, I grieve to say. Yet it is a very comfortable imprisonment, for all that.”
Kidnapped from 1809? Romans? Greeks? Neanderthals? Australopithecines?
“But who—who—”
“Who is responsible for bringing us here, you mean to ask? Why, the demigods who inhabit this distant eon, boy! Our own remote descendants! Perhaps you’ll meet them someday. I myself have seen them on three occasions thus far. Quite remarkable, you’ll find. True demigods, as far beyond us as we are beyond these shaggy apelike fellows here. We’ve been collected, do you see? All manner of historical specimens, and prehistorical specimens too, I dare say. It’s a kind of zoological garden here. An exhibit, do you see, of the people of ages gone by, collected by mysterious magical means from every era of antiquity. I’m one of the items on display, boy, for the amusement and edification of our remote descendants. And now so are you, do you see? So are you.”
24. Sean -5×1011minutes
He was almost coming to believe that it was real. The tender succulent turkey meat, the sweet rich cranberry sauce, the hot steaming rolls—it was all so much like the family feasts of his boyhood that after a while he simply accepted it and let it engulf him like a warm bath. Mom, Dad, his grandparents, Eric—
But then it all turned misty and insubstantial. He had a final glimpse of the sphere of green light once again, and he thought he saw a row of faces behind the light, faces that might have been human and might have been something else. Then everything went black and the shunt took him and swept him away.
He was in heavy jungle terrain now. The air was thick and close, the trees were tall and slender and set close together with their crowns meeting overhead to form a canopy. Here and there, through a break in the foliage, he saw pale sugarloaf-shaped mountains on the horizon. This, he knew, was the world of 951,293 years before Time Zero.
And there was the biggest gorilla anyone had ever seen, standing twenty feet in front of him.
Actually he doubted that it was a gorilla. Perhaps it was more like an orangutan, with that deep chest and short neck. Or something midway between the two. But it was colossal. It was supporting itself on all fours, but he suspected that when it stood upright it would be close to nine feet tall.
It was watching him with a who-the-devil-are-you?look in its beady yellow eyes, and it was making a low growling sound, very ominous. Gorillas and orangutans, Sean told himself, eat fruits and vegetables. This guy doesn’t look like a hunter to me. But he’s big. Very big. And not friendly looking. Absolutely not friendly. And I’m on his personal turf, and he doesn’t like it.
“Listen,” Sean said, “I don’t want you to get annoyed about anything, okay? Just as I was telling those Indians a little while ago, it’s not my plan to bother you in the slightest. I’m only a visitor here. I’m simply passing through, and I’m not going to be here very long, let me assure you of that.”
The giant ape appeared to frown. It seemed to consider what Sean was telling it.
It didn’t seem to like what it had heard, though.
It began to snort and growl. It raised itself to its full unbelievable height and pounded itself on its chest like King Kong in a feisty mood. It made unmistakably angry sounds. Sean wondered if it was going to charge him. He wasn’t sure. The ape didn’t seem quite sure, either. For a long moment it rocked back and forth in place, growling, beating its chest, glaring at the intruder.
Then it leaned forward on its knuckles and made a different sound, deep and ominous.
Yes, Sean thought. It is going to charge. It very definitely is going to charge.
And I’m going to die, back here in the umptieth century B.C.
Or else I’ll get shunted out of here in the nick of time and it’s Eric who’ll die when he shows up right in front of a crazed charging ape. It’s just as bad either way.
Damn! Damn! Damn!
25. Eric -5×1012minutes
The shunts were coming too fast, too close together. Eric was drowning in a torrent of wonders. To be given a glimpse of Neanderthals in their own time, chanting by their own campfire, and then to be swept far onward to a magical place where pithecanthropi and australopithecines and Romans and Greeks and nineteenth century Englishmen lived all jumbled together in some kind of far-future zoo, and to be pulled away from that much too soon, before he had even begun to learn the things he wanted to know—
And now this. Nine and a half million years in the past. Paradise for the sort of dreamer who once built fossil dinosaurs out of papier-mâché. Not that there were any dinosaurs here, of course. Not in the Pliocene period, no. Dinosaurs were much earlier than that: this was mammal time, here. But, dinosaurs or no, he had been let loose in a garden of zoological wonders and he would gladly have spent a year here, five years, ten. There was so much to see. Paleozoology wasn’t even his field—he barely knew the names of half the creatures who were parading before his astounded eyes—and even so he would have given anything to be allowed to remain.
Another month—another week—
But he knew that the irresistible force of the shunt soon would surround him and tear him free of this place and sweep him onward.
That giant piglike thing with the fantastic bristly face and the terrifying teeth, a creature bigger than any rhinoceros, snorting and snuffling in the underbrush—
That hairy elephant with the short trunk and the long outthrust jaw, and the second pair of tusks jutting down over the other ones—
That skittish yellow animal with a camel’s silly face and a gazelle’s agile body, running in frantic herds across the plains—
That one that had a camel’s body and a camel’s head, but a neck like a giraffe’s, reaching up easily to graze on treetops close to twenty-five feet high—
The deer with its horns on its nose, and the one with fangs like a tiger’s, and the one whose head was all knobs and crests and other strangenesses—
The giant ground sloth with the long weird drooping snout, almost like a little trunk—
The armadillo as big as a tank, angrily lashing its spiked tail against the ground—
Dream-animals. Nightmare-animals. They were everywhere on this wondrous plain, grazing, creeping, crawling, climbing, hunting, sleeping. He wanted to see every one, to commit them all to memory, to come home with mind-pictures of this Pliocene wonderland that would keep paleozoologists busy for decades. Unique discoveries, animals unknown to science. But already he felt the force tugging at him.