"Yes, I suppose I did."
"Well then," said Zahn, beaming, "here is your opportunity to have your wish. I am sure a man with your well-developed Australian sporting instincts would not go back on his word."
At that point, this pair had me by the short and curlies. After some more yabber I said: "Okay, I'll do it, provided you fellows can pay our rates. They're admittedly steep, because Professor Prochaska's time chamber uses fantastic amounts of electric power."
"How much?" asked Zahn.
I told him; and do you know, the big bloke pulled out a checkbook on the spot and wrote me out a check for a quarter of the total as a deposit! I saw that the check was drawn on his church.
I told them we couldn't push off until the Raja got back from the Jurassic; but they were agreeable about time. We set the date of departure tentatively for the following month.
As soon as they had left the office, I went around to the Herald Building and asked a friend who worked on that paper about the finances of Zahn's church. It seemed that these were good-o, and I started to go to the bank when my journalistic friend, Spencer McMurtrie, detained me.
"Reggie," he said, "if you're really going to take these godlies back in time, to see whose theory wins— evolution or Genesis—I want to go along, too. I think I can get the paper to put up the cash. It'll make a whopping story!"
"Okay," I said, "if you can make the arrangements. Can you shoot? Neither of these preachers intends to carry a gun, and that makes us too lightly armed for comfort."
"Oh, sure," he said.
Later, I took him out to the range and found him a fair shot. Since he didn't own a gun heavy for the sort of sightseeing we were doing, I rented him one of our double .600s. On the range, being a stocky, well-set-up bloke, he showed he could handle it.
On the appointed day, we assembled in the time-chamber building. The building belongs to the University, but in fact Prochaska's apparatus and the supporting equipment take up most of it. The preachers were in brand-new khaki safari outfits. The newspapers had sent reporters to see us off, and the man from the Post-Dispatch asked:
"Is it true, Mr. Rivers, that the purpose of this expedition is to convert the Reverend Zahn to evolution? I know he'll try to convert you to his brand of Christianity."
"Not exactly," I said. "I'm not trying to convert anyone to anything. I shall simply lay the evidence before him, and he can bloody well draw his own inferences."
The man from the Globe-Democrat said: "Why aren't you taking along that train of burros, as you have on some previous safaris?"
"Because we don't plan to move camp away from the time chamber—merely to make four or five stops in time and spend about a day or two at each one. We shall start with the Devonian and come on down, fifty or a hundred million years at a jump, to the most recent date we're allowed to travel to, the Pliocene."
"Why can't you stop in the Pleistocene, when all those mammoths and things were running around, with cave men chasing them or vice versa?"
"Not allowed," I said. "We might run into one of those blokes and, by interacting with him, change all subsequent history. The universe doesn't allow that sort of paradox."
"Or," put in the Reverend Zahn with his Humpty Dumpty smile, "as I should express it, 'God is not mocked.' Sixth chapter of Galatians."
I went on: "The instant you start to do something that would affect the present, the space-time forces snap you back to Present and bloody well kill you in the process."
"Then you can't actually show the Reverend an ape-man and say: 'There's our ancestor, believe it or not'?"
"No, we can't. Even if we could, those fellows were all in the Old World, and there's no way to move the chamber around the Earth's surface. They didn't get to the Americas until they had already evolved into Homo sapiens. Those who came over from Siberia were just Red Indians, as we used to call them. Native Americans, I believe, is the favored term now."
Cohen, the chamber wallah, spoke up: "Reggie, are you and your party ready to go?"
"Half a minute, Bruce," I said. "Any more questions? I'll allow just one more."
"Mr. Rivers," said a man from one of the suburban papers, "aren't you and the Reverends going to do any hunting or trophy collecting?"
"I hunt only with these," said Hubert, pointing to the cameras slung round his neck.
"And I am a hunter, not of beasts, but of souls," said Zahn. "Not that I take this environmentalist nonsense seriously, please understand. As it says in first Genesis: God gave man 'dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.' If a species of no practical use to man goes extinct, that's no real loss, except to sentimentalists who care more for such creatures than for their fellow men. But I have never hunted in the usual sense and feel no urge to take it up at my time of life."
"Time to go," I said, and set about herding my lambs into the transition chamber. Although we were stripped down to a minimum as regards equipment, it still would take two trips by the chamber to get us all to whenever we were going. There were eight of us: me, the two preachers, the journalist, and the support crew, consisting of Beauregard Black the camp boss, two helpers, and Ming the cook. We could have squeezed the eight of us into the chamber all at once, with our packs on our backs; but that would still leave no room for the tents, galley, and other needful equipment for the week in the field I had planned.
The door closed. Cohen pushed buttons, and the machinery whined. "When to, Reggie?" said he.
"Set it for this date, 275 million B.C.," I said. "That should put us into the Devonian."
You understand, Mr. Proctor, that the dates of geological eras are more or less approximate. Likewise there are limits to the accuracy of the time-distorting machinery. Accuracy has greatly improved since Prochaska began his project; but your arrival may still be off by hours or days or even months when you arrive. The farther back you go in time, the greater becomes the margin you have to allow for error.
So Bruce Cohen pushed his buttons and twirled his dials, and the light faded. You've never made a trip in the transition chamber, have you, Mr. Proctor? Thought not. It's a bloody devastating experience the first time, with vibration, vertigo, nausea, and a horrid feeling of being in free fall, even though your conscious mind tells you your feet are firmly planted on the chamber floor.
I must say, the preachers took it well. I've known better men than Zahn to chunder up last week's breakfast; that's the reason Cohen had equipped the chamber with airsickness bags. McMurtrie was looking squeamish; but the two men just stood there, jaws grimly set, silently moving their lips. I daresay they were praying.
When the dials indicating time stopped spinning, Cohen carefully turned a little handwheel, looking at a radar screen, to adjust our altitude. The altitude of the ground varies from epoch to epoch, and it wouldn't do to materialize either above or below ground level. In the first case the chamber would drop like a stone; in the second, you'd have an explosion of the nuclear kind, which would leave nothing of the chamber or the people in it.
At last he set us down with hardly a bump and opened the door. From force of habit I jumped out with my gun ready, although I was sure that in this period there wouldn't be anything on land more formidable than an insect or a crab.
Indeed, nothing of an animal nature was in sight. The sun was just rising over a huge range of mountains east of us, curving around to westward on the north; while in the western sky a full moon, looking half again the size of ours of today, prepared to set.
Astronomers tell me that it was closer to the Earth than it now is, and hence the tides were higher. That's why the days were shorter than now. The tides act as a brake, which has slightly slowed the Earth's rotation in the last half a thousand million years. If you go back then, you need a watch or clock that can be set to run several percent faster than normal to keep time under control.