“Eight seconds.”
His heart began to beat a little faster. He took his lower lip between his teeth, biting on it hard. He stared out at the grass, wondering what it would change to, wondering...
“Six, five...”
“Who’s handling all this?” Masterson asked.
“The control room,” Chuck blurted, surprised he could speak at all.
“Three, two...”
“God be with us,” Arthur whispered gently.
“One!”
Chapter 2
Through the Force Field
Chuck thought it was the beating of his own heart at first. All sound seemed to have stopped suddenly, the crickets, the faraway throb of an airplane motor, the shrill wail of a train whistle cutting across the afternoon. And then, quite abruptly, sound filtered back, but it came in waves-short, beating waves that rose and fell. Accompanying the sound was a faint flicker of light, on and off, on and off.
Chuck stood stockstill, not daring to move, hardly daring to breathe. The waves of sound assailed his ears in unintelligible succession. The area around the marked square was no longer visible through the flickering light. Chuck knew that each light-flick was actually part of the “bumping” process Owen had told them about earlier. And each “bump” was carrying them back farther into the past. A dancing array of colors greeted the eye, now green, now red, now a deep blue. Once or twice, Chuck thought he could distinguish shifting shapes in the flickering light. The colors swirled and danced, massing into a brilliant white, changing to gray, black, orange, yellow, one color blending with the next as they sped back over the years.
He felt no different than he had ten minutes ago. He was, in a small way, disappointed. He had expected something more glamorous, more dramatic. A giant machine, perhaps, with dials and gadgets and knife switches. A scientist in a white robe with a steaming flask in his fist. And the crackle of lightning from one terminal to another, the blue tingle of electricity. He had visualized an enormous screen upon which the colorful panorama of the past would parade. There he would see the Crusades or Columbus crossing the ocean with his small ships or the War Between the States or any and all of the wonderful things he’d only read about. Then the great dials would stop twirling, and the machine would cease its endless hum. He would open the knife switches, press the button which swung wide the glass doors of the big machine and step out into the past.
Instead, there was only the riot of colors and the confusing jumble of sound that beat against his ears.
Even that ended.
Quite abruptly, the sound vanished, and the colors evaporated. Chuck blinked his eyes and stared around him. The low, well-cropped grass of the Time Slip was gone. The white markers were gone. The four red blocks that had been set in the ground had disappeared. The building housing the intricate mechanism of the control unit wasn’t on the horizon any more.
The land was alien, lushly green, steam rising from the vegetation that covered the earth like a green carpet.
“This is it,” Owen said softly. “We are now in the Jurassic period of the Mesozoic Era, approximately 100 million years back in time.”
The party seemed stunned. They looked around them and said nothing. Gardel was the first to speak.
“What’s that Jurassic and Meso... Meso what?”
“Mesozoic. Both are geologic terms. Mesozoic means ‘intermediate life.’ The geologists called this era that because of the development of so many life forms during this time.”
“And Jurassic?”
Owen smiled. “That’s one of the periods of the Mesozoic Era. It got its name from the Jura Mountains between France and Switzerland, where a great many rocks of this time were well exhibited and widely studied.” Owen snapped his fingers. “We’d better get the force field in operation at once. They don’t call this the Age of Reptiles for nothing.” Quickly Owen swung his pack off his shoulders and dropped it to the ground. He unscrewed two screws at the top of the front panel, then lowered the front to reveal a many-dialed face. Several buttons were set in the face of the instrument, too, and Owen stabbed at two of them and began twisting one of the dials very slowly.
“The energy is now going straight up and around us,” he explained, “like an umbrella. As soon as it clears the party...” He studied a meter that measured feet and then said, “There, that’s it.”
His hand flicked another dial and he began turning that, more rapidly this time. “I’ve dropped the field to the ground now and I’m moving it away from us gradually. It will force back any animal it encounters as it moves along. I’ll keep it going until it stretches around us for a radius of one mile. That’ll give us plenty of room to roam around in.”
“Sort of like an invisible, upside-down fishbowl,” Arthur said.
“Yes, that’s it exactly,” Owen replied, nodding his head and watching the footage meter. “Or a canopy of pure energy-electrically generated, of course.”
“How do you know there’ll be no animals left inside the field?” Masterson asked.
“I dropped the force field to the ground as soon as it cleared the party,” Owen said, still watching the meter. “We’re the only animals standing right here, as you can see.” He grinned. “The electric charge will send anything else it hits running like the devil. You can rest assured the area will be cleared.” He looked at the meter again and pressed another button on the face of the panel. “That does it. We can break ranks now.”
All at once they seemed to realize where they were. They stared around in mute fascination, their eyes hungry for details.
Here was the beginning. Here was the earth in its comparative infancy, a wilderness of strange trees and rocks, a land as alien as the most distant planet.
Chuck swallowed hard, and his eyes roamed the land. Ferns covered the ground everywhere, steamy layers of mist rising from them like trails of smoke. The land was silent, slanted with dark gray slates, high outcroppings of sandstone and limestone, conglomerate, shale. Far in the distance, moving among the high plants like shadowy blurs, Chuck could see the bulky forms of animals roaming the edge of the force field. A shiver of apprehension tickled his spine.
Huge cycads, palmlike in appearance, with short stout trunks and clusters of long fronds, rose from the ground. He was surprised to see pine trees and evergreens jutting out of the rolling countryside. And here and there, like splashes of color on a monotonous green canvas, he saw a few flowering plants. These, he knew, were the great-great-grandfathers of the angiosperms, the seed-bearing, true flowering plants that constituted nine-tenths of the land plants in his own time.
The air was mild and it smelled of growing things, of the fetid odor of primitive growth run amok. The odor assailed the nostrils with almost physical force, crowded the senses, made them shrink back in revulsion. A moisture clung to the air like the heavy, water-filled denseness that precedes a summer storm. The sun was shining, though, bearing down with heavy golden rays that touched the plants and the ground with long fingers.
Spread among the pines and cycads and evergreens, their fan-shaped leaves reaching out to the sun, Chuck recognized the ginkgo or maidenhair trees with their fleshy fruit and edible nuts.
His eyes took all this in, and he was filled with a deep sense of wonder and awe. He knew, though, that this was merely the stage. The actors were still in the wings, waiting to put in an appearance. The blurred shadows he had seen on the edge of the force field, the bulky, ponderous, slow-moving shapes — these were what made Jurassic times. The reptiles.