"Oh, come off it!" I said. "Murder is what the law says it is, and by that definition it doesn't include hunting."
"We obey a higher law," she snapped, with a fanatical gleam in her pretty eyes.
"I find it all I can do to obey the lower laws," I said. "Anyway, what did you propose to do for your cause on this safari? Preach to the Swayzeys? Pa Swayzey gives the impression of being one bloody tough egg. He says hunting is the only proper sport for a he-man with his pants on."
"That wouldn't stop me," she said. "One method we've found effective is, when we see a hunter about to shoot some poor beast, we wave a flag and blow a whistle. Then almost any animal will run away."
"All the more reason for not taking you along," I said. Then, trying to talk her into a more reasonable frame of mind, I added: "You know, Miss Lamar, believe it or not, I'm a wild-life conservationist, too. I spend my own hard-earned money on organizations that try to protect endangered species, of which the Earth has lost hundreds in the last century. But the beasts my clients hunt on these time safaris are all long extinct anyway. Ending the safaris wouldn't bring any dinosaurs or mastodons back to life.
"In fact, some safaris have captured young extinct animals and brought them back to Present alive, so now they actually exist once again in Present."
My argument missed fire entirely. She said: "But you still foster hunting! It's not whether a species is threatened but the wrong in killing an individual animal that concerns us. Abuse is abuse regardless of the species!"
"Nowadays hunting is almost impossible anyway," I said. "That's why we go back in time."
"But it's still catering to sadistic instincts, left over from primitive times!" She practically spat the words at me. "Killing for fun is a crime against the universe!"
"Now, now, my dear young lady—"
"I'm not your dear young lady!"
"All right then, my good female, remember that hunting was the normal life of our ancestors, along with picking berries and nuts, for millions of years before the discovery of agriculture and the domestication of edible animals. Are you a vegetarian, by the way?"
"Of course!" she snapped.
"Well, you're at least consistent. But the species probably wouldn't have survived, and we shouldn't be ere arguing, without the occasional high-protein food our hunting-gathering ancestors brought in. That means meat. So—"
"Whether or not our ancestors hunted, there's no excuse for it now, when there's plenty of plant food to go round—"
"I don't know about that. Heard about the latest famine in Africa?"
"Oh, you're impossible!" and she flounced out of the office.
One condition in our contract with the Swayzeys was that both the Raja and I should go along on Jim Swayzeys safari. We had by that time begun alternating, one to man the office while the other led the hunting party. But we had no strong objections to our both going.
Jim Swayzey, I found, had a tendency towards imperial ideas, expecting to be attended at all times by flunkeys, the way your American Presidents move surrounded by a swarm of menials and assistants. The older Swayzey had become rich in the petroleum business and retired to devote his life to hunting. Since hunting was practically finished in Present, he gravitated to the time safaris of Rivers and Aiyar and a couple of other hunting-guide groups.
The day before departure, the Raja and I were in the building housing Professor Prochaska's time chamber and its vast mass of supporting equipment. Prochaska, a chunky little man with gray beard and mustache and a Middle-European accent, said:
"Mr. Rivers, do you know a young woman named Willow Lamar?"
"Slightly. Why?"
"She has been hanging around the building asking questions of me and the other chamber personnel. I like to show visitors the transition chamber, but this has become a nuisance."
"Well," I said, "at least this dollybird is easy on the eyes."
Prochaska snorted. "You may not be too old for such considerations, Mr. Rivers, but I most definitely am! Here comes the taxidermist of Mr. Swayzey, senior."
This fellow, a skinny young bloke named Fuller— Plautus Fuller—came in with a whole lorryload of equipment: cans of chemicals, worktables, instruments, and so on, mostly wrapped in black tarpaulins. I could see that this man and his apparatus would require at least one extra trip by the chamber to get him and his equipment back to the upper Miocene, the era we had targeted for the Swayzey safari.
I had little to do with this part of the operation. Beauregard Black, our longtime camp boss, got all this mass of stuff lined up so that it could be efficiently stowed in the chamber when the time came.
The next day, we joined the Swayzeys and Plautus Fuller in Prochaska's building for takeoff. Jim Swayzey was a big bloke, with a leathery skin, bristly gray hair, a Texan accent, and a pair of ice-cold gray eyes that didn't miss much. Larry Swayzey was about half his sire's age, of more average size, shape, and coloring, but handsome in a movie-actor sort of way.
Each brought a couple of big-game rifles—not dinosaur-killers like the Raja's and my double 600s, but there was no need for such heavy artillery in the period we were going to. No dinosaur, although some Creationist preachers insist there must have been dinosaur at that time and we just haven't looked hard enough for them. Since the transition chamber has to stay at the same latitude and longitude, regardless of how far it goes back in time, there's no way we can roam round the world to confirm or disprove their claims.
Anyhow, we trooped into the chamber with our packs and guns. Bruce Cohen shut the doors, twirled his dials, and pushed his buttons. Off we went, with all the usual nausea, vertigo, and general discomfort.
We were aimed for the upper Miocene, 13,500,000 years ago—about the time of the Hemphill and Blanco formations in Texas. At the stop, Cohen turned his handwheel, looking at his radar screen, and shouted to me over the roar of the machinery:
"Hey, Reggie! I think I got you a nice, easy landing this time! No seas or swamps or cliffs!"
One of our problems is that the surface of the ground changes over the eras. Since the chamber can't move horizontally, you have to take what you can get. If there's open water beneath the chamber, or a bottomless bog, or a slope too steep to set the thing down on, you just have to go on to another time until you find a site where you can ground the chamber safely.
As usual, the Raja and I hopped out first, guns ready. But no animals were in sight. The chamber alighted on the crest of a rise in slightly rolling country with an open forest—almost a savannah, like those that covered much of East Africa before it was taken over for farming. The vegetation was enough like that of modern Missouri and Illinois so you'd have to be a paleobotanist to tell the difference. It was mostly cedars, oaks, elms, walnuts, maples, ash, and other common deciduous trees. The rainfall here was not quite enough yearly to support a dense, continuous forest; but if we trekked east a few score kilometers, we should probably find ourselves in such a woodland.
Such a site would be less suitable for our purposes than this more open land. Some people think of a dense forest or jungle as swarming with animals. But it's not so; at least, as regards big game. The reason is that, if the rainfall is heavy enough to support such a flora, then most of the vegetable food is in the form of leaves up in the trees. So the plant eaters have to be able to climb up for their tucker.
The place you find the big herds of plant eaters, or did before people killed them off, are open, grassy plains, where there's plenty of green stuff on the ground where grazers can get at it. For the best game-rich conditions, you want a rainfall roughly between fifty and a hundred centimeters per year. If you have more, you get forest; if less, you get poor steppe or desert, neither of which supports the kind of fauna that hunters go balmy over.