The Synthetic Barbarian
L. Sprague de Camp
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 caveman 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 apeish. 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.
What you noticed first of all about Standish was his height; he must have topped two hundred centimeters. I'm a good-sized bod, but he stared down at me. He had a decided stoop, probably from ducking door lintels. He was a skinny fellow with blond hair and blue eyes, clean-shaven, wearing gold-rimmed glasses. He thrust out a hand and bawled at me:
"Jambo, bwana!"
It had been some years since I was last in East Africa, but I managed to recall enough Kiswahili to answer:
"Hujambo, rafiki yangu! Unataka nini?"
That bloody well shut Standish up. Hofmann spoke next: "Mr. Rivers, we want a safari to the days of the dinosaurs, so we can hunt them the way our caveman ancestors did. Mr. Aiyar says we can't. Is it true they lived at entirely different times?"
"Absolutely," I said. "If the Raja tells you something like that, you can take it as fair dinkum; he knows the field as well as I do. I've seen enough Mesozoic landscapes to have a good idea, and there was never any sign of human beings."
Hofmann looked around uneasily. "Mind if I smoke?" he said.
"No. Hand him that ashtray, Raja, will you?"
Hofmann lit a cigarette. "Sorry; I'm a genuine addict. I once tried to stop it; but after a year without smoking, the craving was just as strong as ever. So I said what the hell? and gave up." He blew rings.
"But," said Standish, in a strained, high-pitched voice, "how about all those movies and comic strips that show men chasing dinosaurs and vice versa?"
"If you believe that Alice fell down a rabbit hole, or crawled through a mirror into Looking-Glass Land—you've read Lewis Carroll's 'Alice' books, of course?"
Those two looked blankly at each other. No offense, Miss Bergstrom, but I can't say I'm overwhelmed by your American educational system, if upper-class blokes grow up in such ignorance of the classics.
I explained, as patiently as I could, that something in fiction proves nothing about the real world. I went into the geological eras, but the argument ground on and on without getting anywhere. Standish was one of those coves a little loose in the top paddock, who won't give up an idea no matter how wrong you prove it. He was still muttering about cave men and dinosaurs when I said:
"Now look here, sport! Would you, today, buy a ticket to France on the theory that you'd meet Napoleon?"
"No, of course not—oh, I see what you're driving at. All right. Then let's go back to the dinosaur age, the one you call the Missi—Mesa—"
"Mesozoic," I said.
"Okay, Mesozoic. We'll still go hunting dinosaurs, even if there aren't any Neanderthal men around to watch us do it."
"Very well," I said. "The next thing is armament. Have you your own guns, or will you rent them from Rivers and Aiyar?"
"Thought I'd take my Bratislava 11-millimeter," said Hofmann.
"That's a good gun," I said. It actually has a higher muzzle energy than my old Continental 600, and is also a magazine rifle. With four in the magazine and one in the chamber, you're better off if a dinosaur or whatever comes after you than you would be with a double-barrel like mine. On the other hand, it's a heavy bastard—must weigh over ten kilos—to lug round rough Mesozoic country, where the ground is bloody uneven. The grasses had not yet begun to take over the bare ground in the Cretaceous, so erosion was faster than in similar wild country today. I next asked:
"How about you, Mr. Standish?"
"Oh," he said, "I don't plan to take a gun at all."
"Mean you're a camera fan? That's okay."
"No, that's not what I meant. I'm going to kill a dinosaur all right, but the way our ancestors would have done it—with a bow and arrow."
"What on earth—"
"I'll explain. You see, I'm really a barbarian at heart. A psychic once told me I'd been a barbarian in a previous life, and I knew right away what she meant. It all fitted together."
"You mean you think you're a reincarnation of Attila the Hun or one of those types?"
"Exactly, though I can't say whether it was Attila or somebody else. I don't think I could have been a Hun, since they were Mongolians and I'm a Nordic type. Maybe a Goth or a Viking."
"Never heard that souls were given a choice of bodies in their next lives," I said. "But I can tell you right now, I bloody well won't lead any jaunt into the Mesozoic for bow hunting."
"Why not?"
"Look, sport. Have you ever killed a large reptile of any kind?"
"N-no."
"Well, I can tell you they're damned hard to kill—much harder than mammals or birds. That is, they can absorb fatal damage that would instantly lay out a mammal or bird of that size and still remain active long enough to kill you dead. The fact that such a reptile later lay down and died of its wounds wouldn't be much consolation."
"I'll take my chances—"
"You can take all the chances with your life you bloody well wish, but not with our business. Losing a client is one of the worst things that can happen to us…"
That argument ground on for another half-hour, till I wondered whether taking on these clients was worth the money they'd pay us. At last Standish said:
"All right then, suppose we don't go clear back to the Age of Dinosaurs. Why can't we go back to this Plasticene" (He meant Pleistocene) "when men lived with mammoths and saber-toothed tigers?"
"Sorry, but we're not allowed to send parties into that period."
"Why not?" he asked.
"Because they're afraid we might interact with those human beings and alter subsequent history. Can't have that sort of thing in a logical universe. The instant you start to do that, the space-time forces snap you back to Present. The effect is like being dropped from an aircraft a kilometer up. Nobody survives it."
Standish took off his glasses, wiped them, and put them back on. He said: "I read somewhere that the ancestors of the Native Americans only arrived in the Americas ten or twenty thousand years ago. Why couldn't we go back to a little before they arrived? Plenty of big game, like those mastodons and things that got caught in the tar in California."