"Sorry; still off-limits. They're afraid we might meet the first immigrants from Siberia, especially since there's a wide disagreement about their date of arrival. Some think they came over much sooner than others do."
Standish furrowed his brow. "But couldn't we go back to a time earlier in the Age of Mammals, but still later than the dinosaurs?"
"Right-o. We've taken groups to every epoch from the Paleocene to the Pliocene." (Actually, we are allowed the earliest Pleistocene in North America; but I thought that too dangerous for this rather eccentric pair.)
"What sort of trophies do those different periods have?"
I got down one of our reference books, which had pages of drawings to scale of contemporary mammals from the epochs and continents of the Cenozoic. For instance, there's a page that shows the principal forms from the lower Miocene of South America; another illustrating the Eocene of eastern Asia; and so on.
Standish, who seemed the dominant one of the pair even though the goofier, thumbed through the book. He and Hofmann muttered over the pictures. Finally Standish said:
"Mr. Rivers, the handsomest trophies shown in here are from the Old World, like that Baluchitherium and those dinotheres. The weirdest are some of those from South America. Could we get to one of those?"
"Afraid not," I said. "Professor Prochaska's transition chamber travels back in time but keeps the same latitude and longitude. It must, to make bloody sure it materializes back in the present in the exact place it departed from. If it didn't, we might have a monster explosion."
"Then," said Hofmann, "let's go over the North American faunas again, Cliff."
There was another wait for them to make up their minds, if that is the word I want. The Raja and I spent the time totting up the accounts of my Permian safari. Then Standish spoke:
"Mr. Rivers, I think we want to go to the Oily—the Oligocene, to get ourselves a brontothere head or two. The critters from the later North American periods seem to be mostly smaller; until we get to the Plasticene, they all look pretty much alike, like hornless sheep and goats, without the wool."
A brontothere, Miss Bergstrom? They were the largest of the titanotheres, dominant in the early Oligocene and related to modern horses and rhinos. The big ones looked like elephant-sized rhinos, except that instead of one or two horns on the centerline of the skull, they had a pair of blunt horns side by side on the nose. My scientific friends say those bumps are not technically horns, but mere bony outgrowths of the skull, covered in life by hard skin. But for practical purposes we call them "horns."
Anyway, we agreed to make this trip to the Oligocene, about the time of the White River formation in Wyoming and Colorado. We don't have a formation of that date in this part of the States, but it must have held a similar fauna, with local differences.
We set the date of departure for a fortnight ahead, to give our clients time to get ready. Then we got a call from a Professor Huang Xijing of the University of Nanjing, asking if he could go on this safari, too. He said he didn't intend to hunt; instead he hoped to settle some scientific questions. Since his university was putting up the money, we were glad to have him; every additional client helps to pay the time-chamber fees, which are bloody steep. The thing uses fantastic amounts of electric power.
Before the date of departure, I went to my friends on your newspaper staff and got them to look up the good oil on these two. Seems they were boyhood chums. Nothing remarkable in Hofmann's record; as I guessed, he had played football in college, but flunked out. Standish had never gone at all. He'd been sent to that fancy school where there was a big scandal around twenty years ago, with a lot of—ah—
Thank you, Miss Bergstrom. Since you say so, it was half the boys buggering one another and the teacher. I wouldn't have put it quite so—ah—baldly to a lady, but…I don't think your editor will let you get away with it; but that's your problem.
Since then, Clifton Standish had held a few jobs, none of which lasted long; and he'd done a spot of traveling. Frank Hofmann's adult record was similar. Since both were filthy rich, they didn't have to worry about their tucker. Standish hadn't been one of the homosexual gang at the school; but he felt tainted by having gone there and was determined to prove his masculinity. This, I suspected, accounted for his itch to play cave man.
I learned one thing more that gave me pause. Seems Hofmann had married the girl that Standish had been courting for several years.
One other preliminary was to check out the clients on the range, to judge how far they were to be trusted with guns. I met the pair there, Hofmann with his Bratislava and Standish with his bow. The gun was straightforward, and Hofmann proved himself a reasonably good shot.
Standish's bow looked like no bow I'd ever seen. The bow proper was an arc of some metal-and-plastic combination, with offsets so the arrow went through the centerline. Instead of a plain cord, the string was led through pulleys. The bow had a sight, adjustable for range and windage. Robin Hood would never have recognized the thing. Standish said:
"You don't think I can kill things with this, Reggie? Set me up a board, two centimeters thick, and I'll show you!"
The board was set up, and Standish sent an arrow clear through it, so that the head stuck out on the further side.
"Okay," I said, "so long as you remember not to shoot at anything without the word from me."
On the appointed day, we gathered in the time-chamber building. Although it was the Raja's turn to lead a party in the field while I manned the office, he wasn't going because his wife was expecting. I was there with Standish, Hofmann, the Chinese professor—a pleasant enough little bloke—and our supporting cast: Ming the cook, Beauregard Black the camp boss, his three helpers, and a dozen asses. You'd call 'em burros, I suppose. Why don't we use motorized transport? That's a long story; remind me to tell you some time.
In the Cretaceous, the chamber materializes on a fairly high ridge, giving a good view of the surrounding country. By the Oligocene, that ridge had disappeared. The country is still somewhat rolling, and the chamber wallah set us down on a low rise, with a bushy flat on one side and several clumps of trees nearby.
Once you get past the K-T Event, which ended the Mesozoic and the dinosaurs along with it, the vegetation looks quite modern. Where we were, the trees ran to oaks, cedars, and maples much like those of today, although I daresay a paleobotanist could point out differences.
Despite the trees, we could see fairly well, though the view did not compare with the one we got in the Cretaceous from that point. The ground sloped in directions different from the Cretaceous ones. In the Cretaceous there's a river, which the Raja has named the Narbada, emptying into the Kansas Sea. It's only half a day's trek south from the chamber site. By the Oligocene, this river had disappeared along with the Kansas Sea.
Instead, there was a bigger stream flowing south about a kilometer west from our site. I don't know if it evolved into the modern Mississippi. We shall know better when the U. S. Geological Survey completes their survey of the area round the chamber site over the geological eras. They have a neat little gadget, a rocket-propelled robot camera. It shoots straight up from the site, deploys a parachute, and snaps pictures on the way down.
Following our usual drill, I hopped out first with my gun ready, although I didn't expect to find anything dangerous waiting for us. The chamber and then Reg Rivers, however, startled the hell out of a spotted feline, devouring its prey on an open space a few meters from the site. In size it was a bit smaller than a leopard or a puma, with a long tail and a pair of big, protruding upper canine teeth. It was, I believe, an ancestor of the later sabertooths, although its sabers had developed only half as far as those of later members of the family.