The bear-dog had a piece of her umbrella in its jaws and champed on it. Then the Raja and I both fired. The bear-dog arched its body, shuddered, and went still. Meanwhile the sabertooth had run off and disappeared.
Next, Willow and Larry Swayzey threw themselves into each other's arms. I heard a growl like one the bear-dog might have uttered, but it was only Jim Swayzey. The Raja, who had stepped close to the bear-dog, picked up the mangled remains of Willow's umbrella, saying:
"I am sorry, Miss Lamar, but I fear ..." He stopped when it was plain that there were not listening.
Back at the tiffin site, Willow explained: "I was on my way back here when out of the trees came this cat. It snarled but didn't attack me. Guess it thought I was too different from its usual prey. I opened the umbrella, and it backed off, snarling and yowling. Then out of nowhere came the bear-dog. It roared at the cat as if to say: 'Get out, you; this is my piece of meat!'
"I flapped my umbrella and blew my whistle, but the bear-dog didn't get the message that it was supposed to go away. In fact, my demonstration only seemed to infuriate it. The cat was just leaving and the bear-dog was crouching to spring when you people appeared."
Jim Swayzey said: "Suppose we could track that sabertooth? I'd sure like it for my hunting record."
"Not bloody likely," I said. "But you can have the bear-dog's remains."
"Nope," he said. "You-all shot it and I didn't, so it wouldn't be ethical."
"Why didn't you shoot, Dad?" asked Larry with an edge to his voice. "Were you hoping the bear-dog would eat Willow?"
"No. I was behind the rest of you, and by the time I got out to the side where I'd have a clear shot, y'all had finished it off. No use spoiling the hide with more bullet holes."
"Well," I said, "if you, Larry, want a fine bear-dog rug, you could ask Plautus to skin it."
"Thanks; think I will," said Larry. Then the rain started. So we passed a couple of hours huddling in our slickers while the poor taxidermist did his work in the rain.
There's not much more to tell about the rest of that leg of the safari, save that Jim Swayzey shot a couple more animals: a Synthetoceras, an antelope with a forked horn on its nose; and a hyena-dog about the size of an Alsatian but with thick, bone-crushing jaws. As the name implies, it's mainly a carrion eater, though I shouldn't care to be cornered by a pack of them.
Relations remained strained all the way. Besides the mutual hostility between Jim Swayzey and Willow Lamar, which had not abated in the least, things weren't cozy between Jim and his son Larry, either.
The growing friendship between Larry and Willow stuck in Jim's craw; I heard furious arguments between them in their tent at night.
The transition chamber showed up on time, and back we went to Present. Our basafiri scattered to their homes, and I heard no more about them until about a year later, when I ran into Larry Swayzey at a meeting of one of the societies I belong to. I asked how life was with him. Before he could answer, my wife put in her piece by saying:
"How did things work out between you and Miss Lamar, Larry? Reg told me that you two seemed pretty thick when you came back to Present."
I should never have had the gall to ask such a personal question; but women don't seem to have that kind of inhibition. Larry said:
"We were engaged to be married. It caused all sorts of row with my old man. He was so outraged that he disinherited me, kicked me out of his house, and got me fired from my job with his oil company. He's supposed to have retired, but he still swings a lot of weight with the company he founded."
"How dreadful!" said my wife.
"Oh, I survived. Got another job, with a rival oil company. But poor little Willow's dead."
"Oh!" said I. "Sorry to hear that, even if she was a bit of a problem. What happened?"
He took a deep breath. "We figured out we'd both have to change some attitudes if we were ever to get along as a married couple. So I promised to give up hunting, which I was never so fanatical about as my old man anyway; and she would give up crusading for the S.T.L.O. So things looked hunky-dory.
"But Willow's fanatical streak found another outlet. While she gave up trying to stop hunting, she became instead a fanatical anti-tobacconist. Must be a fanaticism gene, like the one my father has about guns and hunting.
"Of course not many smoke nowadays; neither my old man nor I have ever done it. But there's still an industry of raising tobacco in the Carolinas, and politicians from those parts have enough clout to cause the government to subsidize that crop.
"The anti-tobacco group she joined decided on direct action. That meant going to the Carolinas, hunting down tobacco plantations, spraying the plants with kerosene, and burning them. Willow was in one of these arson parties when the tobacco farmer shot her."
"How about you?" my wife asked.
"Oh, I got over it. Now I have my own house and another girl."
"Reg's told me about trouble between you and your father. Are you and he reconciled?"
"Not yet, though he began to soften a little after he heard of Willow's death. But beware the fanaticism gene, Reggie!"
"I try to," I said. "But how do you tell, just by looking at a bloke, whether he's got it?"
"Wish I knew." Larry Swayzey spread his hands, shrugged, and wandered off.
V
The Synthetic Barbarian
How's that, Miss Bergstrom? My strangest client? Let's see ... There was ... Come to think, I'm sure the balmiest was young Standish, Clifton Standish. Of course you'll be careful of using people's true names in your story, because of the chance of lawsuits.
I first heard about Standish when I got back from taking a party of paleontologists to the Permian, so they could settle arguments over which kind of Permian lizard was the ancestor of the dinosaurs, and which of the mammals, and all the rest. They explained that most of these creatures weren't really lizards but belonged to other orders. But they looked like lizards and scuttled like lizards, so I'm willing to call them "lizards," just as we call all members of two quite distinct later reptilian orders "dinosaurs."
The Raja—that is, my partner, Chandra Aiyar—had been holding down the office in my absence. One day this bloke Standish came in with his friend Hofmann, saying they wanted a time safari to cave-man days, to shoot dinosaurs the way our ancestors used to do.
The Raja told me: "I explained that this was jolly well impossible, since dinosaurs disappeared from the Earth sixty-odd million years ago, and the first organisms one could rightly call 'men' didn't appear till about four or five million years ago, when they were still pretty apish. Also it took them another couple of million years to learn to hunt large, dangerous game. I cited the authorities, but I'm afraid they didn't believe me; they wanted to speak to you. I think I detected a touch of ethnic prejudice."
"You know I won't stand for that sort of thing," I said. "Did you throw them out of the office?"
"No, Reggie. Knowing you were due back shortly, I made another appointment for them. In fact, I think that buzzer means they're here now."
Standish and Hofmann came in and were introduced. Both were in their early thirties, but different in looks. Frank Hofmann was a good-sized bloke with the build of a former football player, now beginning to show a bit of fat. Dark hair, receding, and a little dark mustache.