Seven Conquests Page 5

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” Herries was a large man, and the other face looked up at him, white and scared in the wan electric radiance. “I just went off to the head—”

  “You’ll stay here,” said Herries. “I don’t care if you explode. Our presence draws these critters, and you ought to know that by now. They’ve already snatched two men off this dock. They nearly got a third tonight—me. At the first suspicion of anything out there, you’re to pull the pin on a grenade and drop it in the water, understand? One more dereliction like this, and you’re fired—No.” He stopped, grinning humorlessly. “That’s not much of a punishment, is it? A week in hack on bread.”*

  The other guard bristled. “Look here, Mr. Herries, we got our rights. The union-”

  “Your precious union is a hundred million years in the future,” snapped the engineer. “It was understood that this is a dangerous job, that we’re subject to martial law, and that I can discipline anyone who steps out of line. Okay—remember.”

  He turned his back and tramped across the gangplank to the barge deck. It boomed underfoot. With the excitement over, the shack had been closed again. He opened the door and stepped through, peeling off his slicker.

  Four men were playing poker beneath an unshaded bulb. The room was small and cluttered, hazy with tobacco smoke and the Jurassic mist. A fifth man lay on one of the bunks, reading. The walls were gaudy with pinups.

  Olson riffled the cards and looked up. “Close call, Boss,” he remarked, almost casually…“Want to sit in?”

  “Not now,” said Herries. He felt his big square face sagging with weariness. “I’m bushed.” He nodded at Carver, who had just returned from a prospecting trip farther north. “We lost one more derrick today.”

  “Huh?” said Carver. “What happened this time?”

  “It turns out this is the mating season.” Herries found a chair, sat down, and began to pull off his boots. “How they tell one season from another, I don’t know…length of day, maybe…but anyhow the brontosaurs aren’t shy of us any more—they’re going nuts. Now they go gaily hooting around and trample down charged fences or anything else that happens to be in the way. They’ve smashed three rigs to date, and one man.”

  Carver raised an eyebrow in his chocolate-colored face. It was a rather sour standing joke here, how much better the Negroes looked than anyone else. A white man could be outdoors all his life in this clouded age and remain pasty. “Haven’t you tried shooting them?” he asked.

  “Ever try to kill a brontosaur with a rifle?” snorted Hemes. “We can mess ‘em up a little with .50-caliber machine guns or a bazooka—just enough so they decide to get out of the neighborhood—but being less intelligent than a chicken, they take off in any old direction. Makes as much havoc as the original rampage.” His left boot hit the floor with a sullen thud. “I’ve been begging for a couple of atomic howitzers, but it has to go through channels…Channels!” Fury spurted in him. “Five hundred human beings stuck in this nightmare world, and our requisitions have to go through channels!”

  Olson began to deal the cards. Polansky gave the man in the bunk a chill glance. “You’re the wheel, Symonds,” he said. “Why the devil don’t you goose the great Transtemporal Oil Company?”

  “Nuts,” said Carver. “The great benevolent allwise United States Government is what counts. How about it, Symonds?”

  You never got a rise out of Symonds, the human tape recorder, just a playback of the latest official line. Now he laid his book aside and sat up in his bunk. Herries noticed that the volume was Marcus Aurelius, in Latin yet.

  Symonds looked at Carver through steel-rimmed glasses and said in a dusty tone: “I am only the comptroller and supply supervisor. In effect, a chief clerk. Mr. Herries is in charge of operations.”

  He was a small shriveled man, with thin gray hair above a thin gray face. Even here, he wore stiff-collared shirt and sober tie. One of the hardest things to take about him was the way his long nose waggled when he talked.

  “In charge!” Herries spat expertly into a godboon. “Sure, I direct the prospectors and the drillers and everybody else on down through the bull cook. But who handles the paperwork—all our reports and receipts and requests? You.” He tossed his right boot on the floor. “I don’t want the name of boss if I can’t get the stuff to defend my own men.”

  Something bumped against the supervisors’ barge; it quivered and the chips on the table rattled. Since there was no outcry from the dock guards, Herries ignored the matter. Some swimming giant. And except for the plesiosaurs and the nonmalicious bumbling bronties, all the big dinosaurs encountered so far were fairly safe. They might step on you in an absent-minded way, but most of them were peaceful and you could outrun those that weren’t. It was the smaller carnivores, about the size of a man, leaping out of brush or muck with a skullful of teeth, that had taken most of the personnel lost. Their reptile life was too diffuse: even mortally wounded by elephant gun or grenade launcher, they could rave about for hours. They were the reason for sleeping on barges tied up by this sodden coast, along the gulf that would some day be Oklahoma.

  Symonds spoke in his tight little voice:”1 send your recommendations in, of course. The project office passes on them.”

  “I’ll say it does,” muttered young Greenstein irreverently.

  “Please do not blame me,” insisted Symonds.

  I wonder. Herries glowered at him. Symonds had an in of some kind. That was obvious. A man who was simply a glorified clerk would not be called to Washington for unspecified conferences with unspecified people as often as this one was. But what was he, then?

  A favorite relative? No…in spite of high pay, this operation was no political plum. FBI? Scarcely…the security checks were all run in the future. A hack in the bureaucracy? That was more probable. Symonds was here to see that oil was pumped and dinosaurs chased away and the hideously fecund jungle kept beyond the fence according to the least comma in the latest directive from headquarters.

  The small man continued: “It has been explained to you officially that the heavier weapons are all needed at home. The international situation is critical. You ought to be thankful you are safely back in the past.”

  “Heat, large economy-size alligators, and not a woman for a hundred million years,” grunted Olson. “I’d rather be blown up. Who dealt this mess?”

  “You did,” said Polansky. “Gimme two, and make ’em good.”

  Herries stripped the clothes off his thick hairy body, went to the rear of the cabin, and entered the shower cubby. He left the door open, to listen in. A boss was always lonely. Maybe he should have married when he had the chance. But then he wouldn’t be here. Except for Symonds, who was a widower and in any case more a government than company man, Transoco had been hiring only young bachelors for operations in the field.

  “It seems kinda funny to talk about the international situation,” remarked Carver. “Hell, there won’t be any international situation for several geological periods.”

  “The inertial effect makes simultaneity a valid approximational concept,” declared Symonds pedantically. His habit of lecturing scientists and engineers on their professions had not endeared him to them. “If we spend a year in the past, we must necessarily return to our own era to find a year gone, since the main projector operates only at the point of its own existence which—”

  “Oh, stow it,” said Greenstein. “I read the orientation manual too.” He waited until everyone had cards, then shoved a few chips forward and added: “Druther spend my time a little nearer home. Say with Cleopatra.”

  “Impossible.” Symonds told him. “Inertial effect again. In order to send a body into the past at all, the projector must energize it so much that the minimal time-distance we can cover becomes precisely the one we have covered to arrive here, one hundred and one million, three hundred twenty-seven thousand, et cetera, years.”

  “But why not time-hop into the future? You don’t buck entropy in that direction. I m
ean, I suppose there is an inertial effect there, too, but it would be much smaller, so you could go into the future-”

  “-about a hundred years at a hop, according to the handbook,” supplied Polansky.

  “So why don’t they look at the twenty-first century?” asked Greenstein.

  “I understand that that is classified information,” Symonds said. His tone implied that Greenstein had skirted some unimaginably gross obscenity.

  Herries put his head out of the shower. “Sure it’s classified,” he said. “They’d classify the wheel if they could. But use your reason and you’ll see why travel into the future isn’t practical. Suppose you jump a hundred years ahead. How do you get home to report what you’ve seen? The projector will yank you a hundred million years into the past, less the distance you went forward.”

  Symonds dove back into his book. Somehow he gave an impression of lying there rigid with shock that men dared think after he had spoken the phrase of taboo.

  “Uh…yes. I get it.” Greenstein nodded. He had been recruited only a month ago, to replace a man drowned in a moss-veiled bog. Before then, like nearly all the world, he had had no idea time travel existed. So far he had been too busy to examine its implications.

  To Herries it was an old, worn-thin story.

  “I daresay they did send an expedition a hundred million years up, so it could come back to the same week as it left,” he said. “Don’t ask me what was found. Classified: Tiptop Secret, Burn Before Reading.”

  “You know, though,” said Polansky in a reflective tone, “I been thinking some myself. Why are we here at all? I mean, oil is necessary to defense and so forth, but it seems to me it’d make more sense for the U.S. Army to come through, cross the ocean, and establish itself where the enemy nations are going to be. Then we’d have a gun pointed at their heads!”

  “Nice theory,” said Herries. “I’ve daydreamed myself. But there’s only one main projector, to energize all the subsidiary ones. Building it took almost the whole world supply of certain rare earths. Its capacity is limited. If we started sending military units into the past, it’d be a slow and cumbersome operation—and not being a security officer, I’m not required to kid myself that Moscow doesn’t know we have time travel. They’ve probably even given Washington a secret ultimatum: ‘Start sending back war material in any quantity, and we’ll hit you with everything we’ve got.’ But evidently they don’t feel strongly enough about our pumping oil on our own territory—or what will one day be our own territory—to make it, a uh, casus belli”

  “Just as we don’t feel their satellite base in the twentieth century is dangerous enough for us to fight about,” said Greenstein. “But I suspect we’re the reason they agreed to make the moon a neutral zone. Same old standoff.”

  “I wonder how long it can last?” murmured Polansky.

  “Not much longer,” said Olson. “Read your history. I’ll see you, Greenstein, boy, and raise you two.”

  Herries let the shower run about him. At least there was no shortage of hot water. Transoco had sent back a complete nuclear reactor. But civilization and war still ran on oil, he thought, and oil was desperately short up there.

  Time, he reflected, was a paradoxical thing. The scientists had told him it was utterly rigid. Perhaps, though of course it would be a graveyard secret, the cloak-and-dagger boys had tested that theory the hard way, going back into the historical past (it could be done after all, Herries suspected, by a roundabout route that consumed fabulous amounts of energy) in an attempt to head off the Bolshevik revolution. It would have failed. Neither past nor future could be changed; they could only be discovered. Some of Transoco’s men had discovered death, an eon before they were bom…But there would not be such a shortage of oil in the future if Transoco had not gone back and drained it in the past. A self-causing future…

  Primordial stuff, petroleum. Hoyle’s idea seemed to be right—it had not been formed by rotting dinosaurs but was present from the beginning. It was the stuff that had stuck the planets together.

  And, Herries thought, was sticking to him now. He reached for the soap.

  Earth spun gloomily through hours, and morning crept over wide brown water. There was no real day as men understood day; the heavens were a leaden sheet with dirty black rainclouds scudding below the permanent fog layers.

  Herries was up early, for a shipment was scheduled. He came out of the bosses’ messhall and stood for a moment looking over the mud beach and the few square miles of cleared land, sleazy buildings, and gaunt derricks inside an electric mesh fence. Automation replaced thousands of workers, so that five hundred men were enough to handle everything, but still the compound was the merest scratch, and the jungle remained a terrifying black wall. Not that the trees were so utterly alien. Besides the archaic grotesqueries, like ferns and mosses of gruesome size, he saw cycad, redwood, and gingko, scattered prototypes of oak and willow and birch. But Herries missed wild flowers.

  A working party with its machines was repairing the fence the brontosaur had smashed through yesterday, the well it had wrecked, the inroads of brush and vine. A caterpillar tractor hauled a string of loaded wagons across raw red earth. A helicopter buzzed overhead, on watch for dinosaurs. It was the only flying thing. There had been a nearby pterodactyl rookery, but the men had cleaned that out months ago. When you got right down to facts, the most sinister animal of all was man.

  Greenstein joined Herries. The new assistant was tall, slender, with curly brown hair and the defenseless face of youth. Above boots and dungarees he wore a blue sports shirt; it offered a kind of defiance to this sullen world. “Smoke?” he invited.

  “Thanks.” Herries accepted the cigarette. His eyes still dwelt on the drills. Their walking beams went up and down, up and down, like a joyless copulation. Perhaps a man could get used to the Jurassic rain forest and eventually see some dark beauty there, for it was at least life; but this field would always remain hideous, being dead and pumping up the death of men.

  “How’s it going, Sam?” he asked when the tobacco had soothed his palate.

  “All right,” said Greenstein. “I’m shaking down. But God, it’s good to know today is mail call!”

  They stepped off the porch and walked toward the transceiving station. Mud squelched under their feet. A tuft of something, too pale and fleshy to be grass, stood near Herries’ path. The yard crew had better uproot that soon, or in a week it might claim the entire compound.

  “Girl friend, I suppose,” said the chief. ‘That does make a month into a hell of a long drought between letters.”

  Greenstein flushed and nodded earnestly. “We’re going to get married when my two years here are tip,” he said.

  “That’s what most of ‘em plan on. A lot of saved-up pay and valuable experience—sure, you’re fixed for life.” It was on Herries’ tongue to add that the life might be a short one, but he suppressed the impulse.

  Loneliness dragged at his nerves. No one waited in the future for him. It was just as well, he told himself during the endless nights. Hard enough to sleep without worrying about some woman in the same age as the cobalt bomb.

  “I’ve got her picture here, if you’d like to see it,” offered Greenstein shyly.

  His hand was already on his wallet. A tired grin slid up Herries’ mouth. “Right next to your…er…heart, eh?” he murmured.

  Greenstein blinked, threw back his head, and laughed. The field had not heard so merry a sound in a long while. Nevertheless, he showed the other man a pleasant-faced, unspectacular girl.

  Out in the swamp, something hooted and threshed about.

  Impulsively, Herries asked: “How do you feel about this operation, Sam?”

  “Huh? Why, it’s…interesting work. And a good bunch of guys.”

  “Even Symonds?”

  “Oh, he means well.”

  “We could have more fun if he didn’t bunk with us.”

  “He can’t help being…old,” said Greenstein.


  Herries glanced at the boy. “You know,” he said, “you’re the first man in the Jurassic Period who’s had a good word for Ephraim Symonds. I appreciate that. I’d better not say whether or not I share the sentiment, but I appreciate it.”

  His boots sludged ahead, growing heavier with each step. “You still haven’t answered my first question,” he resumed after a while. “I didn’t ask if you enjoyed the work, I asked how you feel about it. Its purpose. We have the answers here to questions which science has been asking—will be asking—for centuries. And yet, except for a couple of underequipped paleobiologists, who aren’t allowed to publish their findings, we’re doing nothing but rape the Earth in an age before it has ever conceived us.”

  Greensteiri hesitated. Then, with a surprise dryness: “You’re getting too psychoanalytic for me, I’m afraid.”

  Herries chuckled. The day seemed a little more alive, all at once. “Touche! Well, I’ll rephrase Joe Polansky’s question of last night. Do you think the atomic standoff in our home era—to which this operation is potentially rather important—is stable?”

  Greenstein considered for a moment. “No,” he admitted. “Deference is a stopgap till something better can be worked out.”

  “They’ve said as much since it first began. Nothing has been done. It’s improbable that anything will be. Ole Olson describes the international situation as a case of the irresistibly evil force colliding with the immovably stupid object.”

  “Ole likes to use extreme language,” said Greenstein. “So tell me, what else could our side do?”

  “I wish to God I had an answer.” Herries sighed. “Pardon me. We avoid politics here as much as possible; we’re escapists in several senses of the word. But frankly, I sound out new men. I was doing it to you. Because in spite of what Washington thinks, a Q clearance isn’t all that a man needs to work here.”