Sitting on the bench on the hard-packed earth in front of the ramshackle house, the sheriff looked about him—at the listlessly scratching chickens, at the scrawny hound sleeping in the shade, its hide twitching against the few remaining flies, at the clothes-line strung between two trees and loaded with drying clothes and dish towels, at the washtub balanced on its edge on a wash bench leaning against the side of the house.
Christ, he thought, the man should be able to find the time to put up a decent clothes-line and not just string a rope between two trees.
“Ben,” he said, “you’re just trying to stir up trouble. You resent Daniels, a man living on a farm who doesn’t work at farming, and you’re sore because he won’t let you hunt his land. He’s got a right to live anywhere he wants to and he’s got a right not to let you hunt. I’d lay off him if I were you. You don’t have to like him, you don’t have to have anything to do with him—but don’t go around spreading fake accusations against the man. He could jerk you up in court for that.”
2
He had walked into the paleontologist’s office and it had taken him a moment fully to see the man seated toward the back of the room at a cluttered desk. The entire place was cluttered. There were long tables covered with chunks of rock with embedded fossils, Scattered here and there were stacks of papers. The room was large and badly lighted. It was a dingy and depressing place.
“Doctor?” Daniels had asked. “Are you Dr. Thorne?”
The man rose and deposited a pipe in a cluttered ashtray. He was big, burly, with graying hair that had a wild look to it. His face was seamed and weather-beaten. When he moved he shuffled like a bear.
“You must be Daniels,” he said. “Yes, I see you must be. I had you on my calendar for three o’clock. So glad you could come.”
His great paw engulfed Daniel’s hand. He pointed to a chair beside the desk, sat down and retrieved his pipe from the overflowing tray, began packing it from a large canister that stood on the desk.
“Your letter said you wanted to see me about something important,” he said. “But then that’s what they all say. But there must have been something about your letter—an urgency, a sincerity. I haven’t the time, you understand, to see everyone who writes. All of them have found something, you see. What is it, Mr. Daniels, that you have found?”
Daniels said, “Doctor, I don’t quite know how to start what I have to say. Perhaps it would be best to tell you first that something had happened to my brain.”
Thorne was lighting his pipe. He talked around the stem. “In such a case, perhaps I am not the man you should be talking to. There are other people—”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” said Daniels. “I’m not seeking help. I am quite all right physically and mentally, too. About five years ago I was in a highway accident. My wife and daughter were killed and I was badly hurt and—”
“I am sorry, Mr. Daniels.”
“Thank you—but that is all in the past. It was rough for a time but I muddled through it. That’s not what I’m here for. I told you I was badly hurt—”
“Brain damage?”
“Only minor. Or so far as the medical findings are concerned. Very minor damage that seemed to clear up rather soon. The bad part was the crushed chest and punctured lung.”
“But you’re all right now?”
“As good as new,” said Daniels. “But since the accident my brain’s been different. As if I had new senses. I see things, understand things that seem impossible.”
“You mean you have hallucinations?”
“Not hallucinations. I am sure of that. I can see the past.”
“How do you mean—see the past?”
“Let me try to tell you,” Daniels said. “exactly how it started. Several years ago I bought an abandoned farm in south-western Wisconsin. A place to hole up in, a place to hide away. With my wife and daughter gone I still was recoiling from the world. I had got through the first brutal shock but I needed a place where I could lick my wounds. If this sounds like self-pity—I don’t mean it that way. I am trying to be objective about why I acted as I did, why I bought the farm.”
“Yes. I understand,” said Thorne. “But I’m not entirely sure hiding was the wisest thing to do.”
“Perhaps not, but it seemed to me the answer. It has worked out rather well. I fell in love with the country. That part of Wisconsin is ancient land. It has stood uncovered by the sea for four hundred million years. For some reason it was not overridden by the Pleistocene glaciers. It has changed, of course, but only as the result of weathering. There have been no great geologic upheavals, no massive erosions—nothing to disturb it.”
“Mr. Daniels,” said Thorne, somewhat testily, “I don’t quite see what this has to do—”
“I’m sorry. I am just trying to lay the background for what I came to tell you. It came on rather slowly at first and I thought that I was crazy, that I was seeing things, that there had been more brain damage than had been apparent—or that I was finally cracking up. I did a lot of walking in the hills, you see. The country is wild and rugged and beautiful—a good place to be out in. The walking made me tired and I could sleep at night. But at times the hills changed. Only a little at first. Later on they changed more and finally they became places I had never seen before, that no one had ever seen before.”
Thorne scowled. “You are trying to tell me they changed into the past.”
Daniels nodded. “Strange vegetation, funny-looking trees. In the earlier times, of course, no grass at all. Underbrush of ferns and scouring rushes. Strange animals, strange things in the sky. Saber-tooth cats and mastodons, pterosaurs and uintatheres and—”
“All at the same time?” Thorne asked, interrupting. “All mixed up?”
“Not at all. The time periods I see seem to be true time periods. Nothing out of place. I didn’t know at first—but when I was able to convince myself that I was not hallucinating I sent away for books. I studied. I’ll never be an expert, of course—never a geologist or paleontologist—but I learned enough to distinguish one period from another, to have some idea of what I was looking at.”
Thorne took his pipe out of his mouth and perched it in the ashtray. He ran a massive hand through his wild hair.
“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “It simply couldn’t happen. You said all this business came on rather slowly?”
“To begin with it was hazy, the past foggily imposed upon the present, then the present would slowly fade and the past came in, real and solid. But it’s different now. Once in a while there’s a bit of flickering as the present gives way to the past—but mostly it simply changes, as if at the snap of a finger. The present goes away and I’m standing in the past. The past is all around me. Nothing of the present is left.”
“But you aren’t really in the past? Physically, I mean.”
“There are times when I’m not in it at all. I stand in the present and the distant hills or the river valley changes. But ordinarily it changes all around me, although the funny thing about it is that, as you say, I’m not really in it. I can see it and it seems real enough for me to walk around in it. I can walk over to a tree and put my hand out to feel it and the tree is there, But I seem to make no impact on the past. It’s as if I were not there at all. The animals do not see me. I’ve walked up to within a few feet of dinosaurs. They can’t see me or hear or smell me. If they had I’d have been dead a dozen times. It’s as if I were walking through a three-dimensional movie. At first I worried a lot about the surface differences that might exist. I’d wake up dreaming of going into the past and being buried up to my waist in a rise of ground that since has eroded away. But it doesn’t work that way. I’m walking along in the present and then I’m walking in the past. It’s as if a door were there and I stepped through it. I told you I don’t really seem to be in the past—but I’m not in the present, either. I tried to get some proof. I took a camera with me and shot a lot of pictures. When the films were developed there was nothing on them. Not the past—but what is more important, not the present, either. If I had been hallucinating, the camera should have caught pictures of the present. But apparently there was nothing there for the camera to take. I thought maybe the camera failed or I had the wrong kind of film. So I tried several cameras and different types of film and nothing happened. I got no pictures. I tried bringing something back. I picked flowers, after there were flowers. I had no trouble picking them but when I came back to the present I was empty-handed. I tried to bring back other things as well. I thought maybe it was only live things, like flowers, that I couldn’t bring, so I tried inorganic things—like rocks—but I never was able to bring anything back.”