We took our men and beasts down to the old laboratory building that the university has fitted up as a serai for such expeditions. We paid everybody off and found we were broke. The advance payments from Holtzinger and James didn't cover our expenses, and we should have precious little chance of collecting the rest of our fees either from James or from Holtzinger's estate.
And speaking of James, d'you know what that drongo was doing? He went home, got more ammunition, and came back to the university. He hunted up Professor Prochaska and asked him:
"Professor, I'd like you to send me back to the Cretaceous for a quick trip. If you can work me into your schedule right now, you can just about name your own price. I'll offer five thousand to begin with. I want to go to April twenty-third, eighty-five million B.C."
Prochaska answered: "Why do you wish to go back again so soon?"
"I lost my wallet in the Cretaceous," said James. "I figure if I go back to the day before I arrived in that era on my last trip, I'll watch myself when I arrived on that trip and follow myself around till I see myself lose the wallet."
"Five thousand is a lot for a wallet," said the professor.
"It's got some things in it I can't replace," said James.
"Well," said Prochaska, thinking. "The party that was supposed to go out this morning has telephoned that they would be late, so perhaps I can work you in. I have always wondered what would happen when the same man occupied the same stretch of time twice."
So James wrote out a check, and Prochaska took him to the chamber and saw him off. James's idea, it seems, was to sit behind a bush a few meters from where the transition chamber would appear and pot the Raja and me as we emerged.
Hours later, we'd changed into our street clothes and 'phoned our wives to come and get us. We were standing on Forsythe Boulevard waiting for them when there was a loud crack, like an explosion, and a flash of fight not twenty meters from us. The shock wave staggered us and broke windows.
We ran towards the place and got there just as a policeman and several citizens came up. On the boulevard, just off the kerb, lay a human body. At least, it had been that, but it looked as if every bone in it had been pulverized and every blood vessel burst, so it was hardly more than a slimy mass of pink protoplasm. The clothes it had been wearing were shredded, but I recognized an H. & H. .500 double-barreled express rifle. The wood was scorched and the metal pitted, but it was Courtney James's gun. No doubt whatever.
Skipping the investigations and the milling about that ensued, what had happened was this: Nobody had shot at us as we emerged on the twenty-fourth, and that couldn't be changed. For that matter, the instant James started to do anything that would make a visible change in the world of eighty-five million B.C., such as making a footprint in the earth, the space-time forces snapped him forward to Present to prevent a paradox. And the violence of the passage practically tore him to bits.
Now that this is better understood, the professor won't send anybody to a period less than a thousand years prior to the time that some time-traveler has already explored, because it would be too easy to do some act, like chopping down a tree or losing some durable artifact, that would affect the later world. Over longer periods, he tells me, such changes average out and are lost in the stream of time.
We had a rough time after that, with the bad publicity and all, though we did collect a fee from James's estate. Luckily for us, a steel manufacturer turned up who wanted a mastodon's head for his den.
I understand these things better, now, too. The disaster hadn't been wholly James's fault. I shouldn't have taken him when I knew what a spoiled, unstable sort of bloke he was. And, if Holtzinger could have used a really heavy gun, he'd probably have knocked the tyrannosaur down, even if he didn't kill it, and so have given the rest of us a chance to finish it.
So, Mr. Seligman, that's why I won't take you to that period to hunt. There are plenty of other eras, and if you look them over I'm sure you'll find something to suit you. But not the Jurassic or the Cretaceous. You're just not big enough to handle a gun for dinosaur.
II
The Cayuse
Yes, Mr. Ahmadi, we use asses for transport on these time safaris—oh, the proper Arabic plural is safariin? Very well, safariin it shall be. But as I was saying, when we have to move supplies and equipment, we use asses—no, I don't mean our arses or rumps. That's a bloody Americanism. Where I come from, down-under, an ass is a beast I ride on, while an arse is the part of me I sit on.
Why not power vehicles? Several reasons. One, only the smallest kind can fit into Prochaska's transition chamber and leave space for the necessary equipment and personnel. Two: There's no source of fuel in case we run out. Three: No roads. Four: If anything goes wrong with your off-trail vehicle, you're stuck. And finally, in an emergency you can eat an ass, which you cannot do with an OTV.
I suppose that, if one made enough trips in the transition chamber and brought back enough supporting equipment and people, one could put such a vehicle to effective use. It's like our guns. In theory, if we were stuck back there long enough, we might run out of ammunition and have to try making ourselves bows and arrows, which probably wouldn't work worth a wombat's arse. Even if we were competent bowmen and fletchers, the game's too bloody big. If you shot an arrow into a big theropod, you'd only rile him up to come looking for you to eat you. So we allow a large safety factor in extra ammunition.
Power vehicles are, you might say, on the borderline between what is practical and what is not. I was once talked into trying one out, and the results made it pretty plain that they weren't for Rivers and Aiyar, Time Safaris.
You want the story? Okay. It was seven or eight years ago, when Charles Redmond, the manufacturer, signed up for one of our trips. Like most trophy hunters, he wanted to go to the Cretaceous and bring back a theropod head for his new mansion—
What's a theropod? The Theropoda is one of the suborders of the Saurischia, which is one of the two orders of reptiles that in common speech are lumped together as "dinosaurs." The suborder Theropoda includes all the meat eaters: Allosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, and such down to little ones the size of a chook. The big theropods are the only really dangerous dinosaurs. They will not only go after any other creature that looks edible, but in addition they're smarter than the plant eaters. Not that any reptile is an animal genius: but theropods are less stupid than most. All the others, the plant eaters, will generally leave you alone if you do the same with them.
Redmond was the head of Superior Motors, which builds all those lorries and recreational vehicles. From all I'd heard, he built the company up from nothing, and it was a major independent motor maker until one of the Big Three bought control a few years ago.
Redmond had the reputation of a whiz as a businessman, and he had got fantastically rich in the process. He turned out a pretty average sort of bloke: middle-aged, middle-sized, and well-set-up except for a bit of a paunch. But that happens to most men, especially if they lead sedentary lives.
Anyway, he came in with a gorgeous dollybird half his age on his arm. He introduced her as "Mrs. Redmond" and asked if we could set up a safari for the pair of them.
"Sorry," I said, "but we don't take ladies. To be exact, we don't take parties mixed as to sex."
Redmond started to argue: "Now look, Mr. Rivers—" in that forceful way of his, intense but still smiling and friendly, so it was hard to work up a real snit against him. That mannerism was probably half the secret of his success. But then the twist put a hand on his arm, saying: