'I learned that in His Majesty's Service,' he told Rachel.
'His? But...
'I meant Her Majesty's, of course.'
'Even so,' Rachel said, 'that would make you born...'
It was just a matter of speaking,' he said. 'One of the archaic phrases of which I'm so fond. I meant, in the government service, of course. But I learned that if you don't want to kill yourself with work and worry, you delegate responsibility.'
'You should be exhausted,' she said. 'But you took fresh as ever. I'm the one who's dying of overwork and lack of sleep, and yet my duties are as nothing compared to yours.'
'You're worried about Drummond.'
'Yes. It's all over between us. And he may even have tried to - well, he did try to kill me, and I believe he tried to kill you. But he was mentally ill. He couldn't help himself. I don't hate him. I just don't love him any more. Yet, I feel responsible for him. Sorry for him, I suppose. I can understand him. I sometimes feel that I'm going insane myself. I just can't get a strong grip on reality. If this is reality. It all seems so dreamlike and too often nightmarish. Sometimes I think I'll scream if I don't see something familiar. I know it's blasphemy, from a scientific viewpoint, but I wish that we could return to our time tomorrow. I'd chuck all that has to be learned for a chance to climb aboard and know that in a few minutes I'd be back in the twenty-first century.'
'This reaction - this temporal shock - is just as valuable a datum as anything we'll bring back,' he said. 'I hope it won't cause time travel to be abandoned. I doubt it, since only one of us is very much incapacitated, and we can't prove that that happened because of temporal dislocation. In any event, you can be sure that those chosen for future expeditions will be much more deeply tested. But,' he added, smiling, 'it will be too late for anybody on this expedition.'
'Why do you smile?'
'I'll tell you some day.'
The two tribes moved on along the coast of Morocco. Though it was cold, often below freezing, and snow fell, the climate was not as rigorous as in Iberia. They marched more swiftly, but their halts were longer, since the three scientists had enough to do to keep them in each area for six months. They took thousands of photographs, made maps of the coastal areas, took samples of the soil and the water and specimens of flora and fauna, from local bacteria and amoeba and earthworms up to the elephants. They could not take the elephant bodies with them, of course, but Gribardsun and Rachel Silverstein did random dissections and preserved tissue slides. They made Carbon-14 and xenonargon datings on the spot with their equipment. They fished and then studied specimens before giving them over to the cooks.
The tribes living on the coast were generally small and lived by hunting and fishing. Rivers ran through the Sahara and emptied into the western half of the Mediterranean. The river mouths were plentiful with fish and seal and porpoise, and inland were the elephants and rhinoceroses, antelope and deer and goat, horses, aurochs, and even bison. There were also lions and bears and leopards. Although the great snow leopards existed in France and Iberia, Gribardsun had never seen one in those regions. But he had not been in Africa more than a week before he glimpsed three at a distance.
The natives were larger than the Arab-Berber type of the modern era but somewhat smaller, thinner-boned and darker than the modern Europeans. They were also longer-headed and tended toward aquiline faces. So far, no Negroes had been encountered nor had any of the Africans ever heard of black men.
'It's too late, even in 12,000 B.C., to determine the origin of the Negro race,' Gribardsun said. 'I don't suppose we'll ever know if it's true that they arose somewhere in southern Asia and then migrated to Africa and Austronesia and were killed off or absorbed on the Asiatic mainland. Or if they originated in Africa and then, somehow, some migrated to New Guinea and Melanesia, leaving damn few traces along the trail. Even so, we might learn something if we could explore East Africa now and learn what types are living there. I suspect there'd be some Caucasoid and Capsoid types and perhaps some Negritos.'
'You surely aren't thinking of taking us down there?' Rachel said.
'I would object,' von Billmann said. 'That would take us entirely too far from the vessel; it would definitely imperil the expedition. Moreover, if we're going to roam far and wide, we should be doing it in central Europe, preferably somewhere between the Elbe and Vistula. We should be ascertaining whether proto-Indo-Hittite speech exists there, or ...'
Gribardsun smiled but shook his head. 'You're the greatest linguist of the twenty-first century, Robert, and you have a very high intelligence. But I have to keep reminding you that those rivers are buried under vast masses of ice. If you ever did find your proto-I-H-speakers, it would be somewhere to the south. Maybe in Italy. Or in France, a few miles from where the vessel emerged. Or maybe on this coast, a few miles ahead of us. Or behind us, a few miles inland.'
Von Billmann laughed, but his face was red. 'I know,' he said. 'But that's my blind spot. My brain slips a cog every time I think of my love. I know that glaciers cover that area, but I'm so eager to locate my language, my beloved language, that I forgot. But I have a hunch, an intuition, worthless perhaps and only the expression of a wish, that my speakers are living not too far to the south of the glaciers, perhaps in Czechoslovakia.'
'Next year, if circumstances permit, we'll go. to Czechoslovakia,' Gribardsun said. 'We have to study the edges of the glaciers, anyway. And if we can go to North Africa, we can certainly go to central Europe.'
Von Billmann had never looked so happy.
The tribes moved on slowly eastward. By now they could communicate fairly well with signs and a mixture of each other's vocabulary. The structure of the two languages was dissimilar, and each contained sounds difficult for a nonnatal speaker to master. The result was the gradual building up of a pidgin. It contained sounds that both the Wota'shaimg and the Shluwg could pronounce, and vocabulary items which the two tribes had agreed to accept, though the agreement was apparently entirely unconscious. The structure of the pidgin tended more toward that of the Wota'shaimg, since they were the dominant tribe. But it was considerably simplified, and before a year was up, its structure had been determined. Von Billmann was ecstatic at being present at the birth of a new language. He recorded it as it developed and, in fact, since he knew more about pidgins and synthetic and artificial languages than anybody in this or any other time, he played a big part in the development of this one. He knew what the ideal language should be, and he used his influence to shape the pidgin.
'If the two tribes stay together,' he said, 'they may abandon their own language and substitute the pidgin. That would be the most economical and logical course.'
Though the two tribes were of somewhat different physical type, and their way of looking at the universe differed greatly in many respects, they shared many similar customs. Their attitudes toward marriage and their sexual habits were near identical, their methods of hunting were identical, and their governmental systems were much alike. They ate practically the same foods; the tabus of each were few, and neither objected to the other tribe eating its tabu animal
Then Tkant, the big man whom Gribardsun had defeated in the snow arena, decided that he could provide for two families. So he asked for, and got, Neliska, Dubhab's daughter, as his second wife. Gribardsun, as her protector, gave her away. He had one less obligation, though Neliska had asked him, before she accepted Tkant, if he intended to marry her. Gribardsun hesitated and then said that he thought it best if she married Tkant.