"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 yards 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 light not fifty feet from us. The shock wave staggered us and broke windows.
We ran toward the place and got there just as a bobby 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 the 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 five 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.
THE EMPEROR'S FAN
IN THE FIFTEENTH YEAR of his reign,Tsotuga the Fourth, Emperor of Kuromon, sat in the Forbidden Chamber of his Proscribed Palace, in his imperial city of Chingun. He played a game of Sachi with his crony, Reiro the beggar.
The pieces on one side were carved from single emeralds; those on the other, from single rubies. The board was of squares of onyx and gold. The many shelves and taborets in the room were crowded with small art objects. There were knickknacks of gold and silver, of ivory and ebony, of porcelain and pewter, of jasper and jade, of chrysoprase and chalcedony.
In a silken robe embroidered with lilies in silver thread and lotuses in golden thread, Tsotuga sat on a semithrone—a chair of gilded mahogany, the arms of which were carved in the form of diamond-eyed dragons. The Emperor was plainly well fed, and within the hour he had been bathed and perfumed. Yet, although he had just won a game, Emperor Tsotuga was not happy.
"The trouble with you, chum," said Reiro the beggar, "is that, not having enough real dangers to worry about, you make up imaginary ones."
The Emperor took no offense. The purpose of the Forbidden Chamber was to afford him a place where he could treat and be treated by his crony as if they were ordinary human beings, without the court's stifling formality.
Nor was it an accident that Reiro was a beggar. As such, he would never try to intrigue against or murder his imperial friend in order to seize the throne.
Although a fairly competent ruler, Tsotuga was not a man of much personal charm. He was in fact rather dull save when, as sometimes happened, he lost his temper. Then he might visit dire dooms on those about him. After he had calmed down, Tsotuga would regret his injustice and might even pension the victim's dependents. He honestly tried to be just but lacked the self-control and objectivity to do so.
Reiro got along with the Emperor well enough. While the beggar cared nothing for art, save when he could filch and sell a piece of it, he was glad to listen to the Emperor's endless tales of his collection in return for the sumptuous repasts he enjoyed. Reiro had gained twenty pounds since he had become intimate with the Emperor.
"Oh, yes?" said Tsotuga. "That is easy for you to say. You are not nightly haunted by your father's ghost, threatening dreadful doom."
Reiro shrugged. "You knew the risk when you had the old man poisoned. It is all in the game, pal. For your pay, I would cheerfully submit to any number of nightmares. How does old Haryo look in these dreams?"
"The same old tyrant. I had to slay him—you know that—ere he ruined the Empire. But have a care with that flapping tongue."
"Nought I hear here goes beyond these walls. Anyway, if you think Haryo's fate be not widely known, you do but befool yourself."
"I daresay it is suspected. But then, foul play is always suspected when an emperor dies. As said Dauhai to the timorous bird, every twig is a serpent.
"Still," continued the Emperor, "that solves not my problem. I wear mail beneath my robe. I sleep on a mattress floating in a pool of quicksilver. I have given up futtering my women, lest whilst I lie in their arms, some conspirator steal up and dagger me. The Empress, I can tell you, mislikes this abstinence. But still Haryo threatens and prophesies, and the warnings of a ghost are not to be flouted. I need some impregnable magical defense. That idiot Koxima does nought but fumigate and exorcise, which may drive out the demons but fails to blunt the steel of human foes. Have you any counsel, Ragbag?"
Reiro scratched. "There is a dark, beak-nosed, round-eyed old he-witch, hight Ajendra, lately come to Chingun from Mulvan. He gains a scanty living by selling love potions and finding lost bangles in trances. He claims to have a magical weapon of such power that none can stand against it."
"What is its nature?"
"He will not say."
"If he have so puissant a device, why is he not a king?"
"How could he make himself ruler? He is too old to lead an army in battle. Besides, he says that the holy order to which he belongs—all Mulvanian wizards call themselves holy men, be they never such rascals—forbids the use of this armament save in self-defense."
"Has anybody seen it?"
"Nay, chum, but rumor whispers that Ajendra has used it."
"Yes? And then what?"
"Know you a police spy named Nanka?"
The Emperor frowned. "Meseems—there was something about such a man who disappeared. It is supposed that the low company he kept at last learnt of his occupation and did him in."