Ten minutes later, he was out of sight. He left at a trot, which he said he could keep up all day. Except in the roughest terrain, he expected to average about fifty miles a day.
The days passed. The summer was hot but short, and the work for both the scientists and the tribespeople was hard. Rachel trained Drummond to help her in her fields of botany, zoology, and genetics, but had to suppress an ever present irritation with him. She tended to regard him as mentally retarded, whereas he was actually a very bright twelve-year-old. He learned swiftly, but he did make mistakes, and she was sharp with him when these occurred. Nor did she feel sympathetic when he now and then called her 'mother.' She was, in fact, furious.
Von Billmann showed signs of discontent. More and more he complained about the low chances of ever getting to Czechoslovakia.
'The speakers of proto-Indo-Hittite must be located and their language recorded,' he said. 'And doing this will take time. We should be traveling there right now. But, instead, John Gribardsun is visiting that barren piece of land, England. I doubt that he'll find a single human being there.'
'That's not what he's looking for,' she said. 'You know he's making a geological and meteorological survey.'
'We should have brought along a small plane,' he said peevishly. 'We could have covered hundreds of miles, saved months of travel time. I could be in Czechoslovakia right now.'
She had known von Billmann for many years before the expedition and had never once seen him in a bad humor. Perhaps he was being affected by temporal dislocation. Though he had been more resistant than she or her husband, he was succumbing now. And she, instead of getting better, was feeling less and less attached to reality. She and von Billmann were weakening, she was sure, because their pillar of stability was gone. As long as Gribardsun was around, reality seemed more solid. He radiated strength and assurance.
Eight
A month passed. The hunters brought in hares, lemmings, marmots, voles, grouse, foxes, wolves, ibex, reindeer, horses, musk oxen, aurochs, bison, rhinoceroses, and mammoths. The fishermen brought in salmon and fresh-water mussels. The women brought in berries and tubers and greens of various kinds. Meat and fish were smoked and dried. Tubers were dried or ground into a powder. Skins were tanned, cut, and sewn. An old man (about sixty) died. Ten babies were born, four of whom died at birth. Three mothers died. A hunter came too close to a mammoth which had fallen into a trap and was lifted up and dashed to death by the huge beast's trunk. A youth fell off a cliff while hunting ibex, broke his back, and was eaten by cave hyenas before his companions could get to him. A man savagely beat his wife when he found her with another man behind a large boulder. She recovered but lost numerous teeth and an eye.
Casualties were normally high among these people, but this month they were unusually high, frighteningly so to the tribes-people. They blamed Gribardsun's absence for the evil things happening to them.
When thirty days had passed, Rachel and von Billmann began to look for Gribardsun. Every day thereafter they expected, or at least hoped, to see his tall, long-legged, broad-shouldered figure and handsome face appear down the valley. But two weeks went by, and they started to worry. They knew that he was not conforming to a timetable, and that he might have run across many interesting phenomena to detain him. But he was a man of his word, and if he said he would be back in a month, he would try to keep reasonably close to that time.
The day of the seventh week after his departure, Rachel was on a herpetological field trip, about five miles from the camp, with Drummond. She had taken films at long range of a field where vipers lived. Having been fortunate to photograph a viper in the act of swallowing a young lemming, she went into the area to catch the snake. She found the hole into which it had disappeared and she and Drummond began digging into it. After fifteen minutes of hard work with the shovel, she exposed the snake sleeping in the burrow with its middle swollen with the lemming. She lifted it and dropped it into a bag.
And then she dropped bag and snake as Drummond yelled behind her.
She whirled and saw him rigid and pointing at a larger viper poised to strike only a foot away.
'Stand still!' she said. 'And be quiet! I'll get him!'
She withdrew her pistol slowly from her holster, but Drummond yelled again and jumped away as the upper part of the snake's body swayed back and forth. The snake flashed forward at the sudden movement, and Rachel shrieked. She thought that the snake had struck Drummond.
Her revolver missed the viper with the first two shots, but the third blew its backbone apart just behind the head.
Drummond remained frozen and gray.
'Did it bite you?' she asked. She reached into the bag she wore suspended from her belt. It held anti-venom drugs, but the effect depended on quick injection.
'I don't think so,' he said finally, staring down at his leg. 'It struck me, but only with the tip of its snout, I think. I was going away from it when it did hit.'
He suddenly sat down and covered his face with his hands. Rachel got down on her knees and rolled up his pants leg. She could find no bite.
'You're all right,' she said.
'Where exactly am I?' His eyes looked at her bewildered through his fingers.
She knew then, without being told, what had happened.
'I remember shooting at you,' he said. 'My God, what happened? Where are we?'
By the time they had returned to camp, he knew everything. But it was all hearsay to him. He remembered nothing from the moment he had tried to kill her.
'And the old snake-pit treatment brought me back,' he said. 'In one way I wish it hadn't. But of course I wouldn't want to remain a child forever. I wonder why I got stuck at that age? It doesn't matter, I can find out when I get back to our time. If we ever do...'
He began to weep, saying as he regained control, 'My God, what have I done? What's happened to me? To us?'
She did not reply for a while, and then she said, 'Whatever it is, it's something that brought out in us what already existed. It didn't originate anything.'
'I can't believe that these psychological changes are brought about just by the shock of time dislocation,' he said. 'I wonder if there aren't some subtle somatic effects caused by time travel. Something that causes an electrochemical imbalance.'
'That is something that will be determined by the medics when we get back,' she said. 'Unless, of course, the trip back restores our balance.'
She started to say something, shut her mouth, then put out her hand to stop him.
'John is gone,' she said, 'and it's possible he may never return. I can't help feeling that something bad has happened to him. But if he does return, then what? Are we going to go through the same thing? Do I have to be afraid that you'll be shooting at us?'
'I suppose it's all over between us, no matter what I do from now on,' he said.
'Yes, I won't lie, even if I am afraid of you,' she said. 'I'm getting a divorce as soon as we get out of quarantine.'
'And then you and Gribardsun will be getting married?'
She laughed and said, 'Oh, yes! Right away! You fool! He doesn't love me! I asked him, and he said no!'
'And you two weren't cheating on me? Or intending to?'
'This is the twenty-first century!' she said.
'No, it isn't. It's the hundred and twentieth B.C. You didn't answer my question.'
'No, we weren't cheating on you. You know I wouldn't deceive you; I'd tell you what I was doing or what I intended to do. And John would never stoop to do anything behind a person's back. You should know him better than that! Can you actually conceive of him doing anything base or sneaky?'