By coaxing and bullying, the Raja and I got Sir Edred calmed down enough to lash our beast's feet together so we could carry it suspended from the pole. Since Ngata and I were the biggest men of the party, it fell to us to bear the pole. The Raja carried my rifle as well as his.
Hallway back, I asked Willard Smith to take my end of the pole, he being the youngest and almost my size, and I not so young as I once had been. I had forgotten about his being what he called a "klutz." But we hadn't gone another fifty meters when Smith tripped over his own feet and fell flat on the trail. Since Ngata remained upright, the dicynodont slid down the pole on top of Smith, who got pretty crook bloody.
So I took back the pole for the rest of the hike. We got back in time for billy, with enough time left over to clean up before a dinner of dicynodont steaks. Our cook, Ming, has learned never to be surprised by the creatures we bring in to camp and tell him to cook for us.
While our tucker was cooking, we sat round the fire, telling stories and enjoying a tot of whiskey, while Mrs. Alvarado sat with her feet in a bucket of warm water. Alvarado and Carlyle and Smith also wanted to soak their feet; but there was only one bucket, so I gave Inez the first crack at it.
As for the whiskey, I had served out pretty potent portions; but then Desmond Carlyle demanded seconds.
"No, sorry," I said. "I told you, that one's it for tonight."
"Liquor flows like glue here," he grumped. "I could put away half a liter and not feel it."
"Sorry about that," I said. "Our supply is calculated to last the fortnight. I don't want to run short before the chamber returns."
Actually I was more concerned with what might happen if one of my lambs got too disinhibited from liquor. I'd seen that happen on other safaris, where the imbiber did something silly like picking a fight. You never can tell how a person will react to liquor. Some get talkative, some amorous, some despondent, and some belligerent. The only way to find out is to get them drunk, and the risks were too great in these surroundings, a couple of hundred million years from help.
Carlyle's drink was strong enough, however, to get him talking. He told a fanciful tale of hunting a lion in Africa. From what I know of Africa, it wasn't much of a hunt; there isn't any more of that, really, there. Somebody ran a lion farm and then, when a would-be hero with enough money showed up, he would turn one lion loose in a big private preserve and send the man in with a gun.
Since the lion was semi-tame and had never learned either to attack or to fear a human being, it just lay or stood quietly while the joker walked up and shot the poor beast. A pretty poor idea of sportsmanship, if you ask me. But then, I suspected Carlyle of being a skite with a lot of fictitious adventures he liked to trot out to impress the women.
Then my attention was drawn to Sir Edred Ngata. He was squatting in front of a cloth on which he had laid out a score of specimens he had brought down with birdshot. Except for one primitive tortoise they were all lizardlike, looking pretty similar to my unscientific eye. The astonishing thing, though, was that tears were running down Ngata's big brown face.
"Edred!" I said. "What's the matter, cobber?"
He looked up, choked back a sob, and took a swallow of his drink. "You wouldn't understand, Reggie. I'm suffering from information overload."
"So what? I never heard that too much news was anything to cry over."
"No; it's just that there's such a damned colossal job here to be done, and only one man—me—to do it. I can't even scratch the surface. It's as if you were, say, a historian, and were sent back in time with a copying machine to the Library of Alexandria in the days of the Ptolemies and told you could photocopy all the lost manuscripts you could do in one hour. You'd know you couldn't copy more than a fraction of one per cent in the time allowed; and how could you choose among them? I'm in a similar fix."
"Well, hadn't you better get those specimens into the alcohol jars before they begin to stink?"
"Good-o," he said, wiping away the tears.
The party was tired enough from the day's hike so there was no argument over turning in early. In our headquarters tent, the Raja and I talked. It was unlikely there were any very spectacular sights to see within the radius of one-day excursions, such as a huge waterfall like your Niagara. There was that volcano we had seen from where we bagged the dicynodont; but I think volcanoes, like the larger carnosaurs, are best admired from a respectful distance.
So we decided simply to box the compass, taking our lambs out in a different direction until we had covered them all in the two weeks allowed. Then the Raja said:
"Reggie, I have an uneasy feeling about our female time traveler."
"Afraid she'll collapse on the trail?" I said.
"No; she's in good physical shape, even if she got sore feet the first day out. But it's the sexual thing. The way she was trading long, speculative glances with some of the men—well, it gave me qualms. We had better keep an eye on her."
Understand, Ms. Brownlee, I'm no wowser. Got nothing against sex. Marvelous institution and all that, but not when it interferes with the smooth operation of Rivers and Aiyar. So I said:
"Right-o, Raja!"
You see, the Raja s one of these intuitive chaps. I've learned that, when he warns of problems building up in the human sphere, I'd better listen.
As I said, I had given Inez Alvarado a tent of her own. So I was surprised next morning, when I was making rounds just before dawn at the end of my watch, to see that great, hulking Maori, Sir Edred Ngata, coming out of the tent I had assigned to Mrs. Alvarado.
"What the hell?" I said, giving him a sharp look. "I thought you were in with Tom."
He gave a kind of giggle, like a child caught out, and held the tent flap back to show the tent was empty. He finally said, between giggles:
"Well—ah—Inez begged me to change places with her. And—all—what gentleman could refuse a lady such a simple request?"
"You knew they were an ex-couple?"
"Yes, I heard that. But some religions say, once married, always married. So I figured—ah ..."
"Oh, cut it out, mate," I said. "I have enough problems bringing my lambs through these safaris alive without trying to manage their sex lives as well."
So I went about my business. When Inez came out of Alvarado's tent, I just looked through her as if she weren't there.
The Raja and I decided our lambs were bushed enough from the previous bike, so we went nowhere that day. Ngata spent it happily examining his specimens, dissecting those of which he had duplicates and getting blood up to his elbows, and explaining to anyone who would listen that this one was probably a rhincocephalian, while that one was more likely an eosuchian, like those ancestral to the dinosaurs.
"Aren't there any real dinosaurs in this period?" asked Inez Alvarado.
"That depends," said Ngata. "In one sense, it's a matter of where you draw the line between the dinosaurs and their thecodont ancestors. Most of my colleagues put the coelophysids, which we saw yesterday, in with the dinosaurs. In other words, it's a question of definitions.
"From another point of view, I could say no, there weren't, on the ground that there really are no such things as dinosaurs."
"What?" said Inez, startled. "But what about all those big skeletons in the museums? I know there's that preacher who goes around arguing that all those fossil bones are just a hoax by Satan to destroy men's faith ..."
"What I mean," said Ngata, "is that the first paleontologists to dig them up, in the nineteenth century, assumed that all those giant reptiles belonged to the same order, which they called Dinosauria. Now we know that they fall into two long-separated orders: the Saurischia and the Ornithischia, no more closely related than, say, we are to bats. The difference lies in the shape of the pelvis. That difference goes way back, to some thecodont common ancestor in a period earlier than this one. My job is to try to straighten out these obscure family trees.