'But he said you had only a knife to defend yourself against an unwounded lion.'
'That's true,' he said. 'And here I am, and the lion is dead.'
And that was all he would say about the incident.
That night, while his colleagues and the chief men of the two tribes sat around a large fire, he described his journey. He had traveled northwestward on as straight a line as he could maintain. He averaged about fifty miles a day, though there were a few days when he just walked along so that he could make a rapid study of the terrain and the fauna and flora. He had crossed the land that would be under the English Channel when the glaciers had sufficiently melted. He found the Thames and the site of what would be London, much of which was covered with marsh or shallow lakes.
The land was even more barren and tundra-like than in France. He had seen a few mammoths and rhinoceroses, but exceedingly few lions, bears, or hyenas. But there were many wolves, which hunted mostly the reindeer and horses.
He had seen not a single human being, though there should be a few in England along the southern coast.
He journeyed northward and found that the glacier did not cover the site of his ancestral hall between the sites of Chesterfield and Bakewell in Derbyshire-to-be. But it had only recently retreated, and nothing but moss and some azaleas and saxifrage were growing. Gribardsun's other main ancestral holding, in Yorkshire, where his family's twelfth-century castle would stand, was still covered with hundreds of feet of ice.
'I made a number of observations along the glacial front, traveling a hundred miles along it,' he said. 'And then I turned back and headed toward home. But I was held up for two days in a cave in the land bridge by a pack of wolves who didn't seem to know they should have an instinctive fear of man. There must have been over fifty in the pack; I've never seen such a large one.'
'What happened to your rifle?' von Billmann asked.
'I lost it when I was climbing up the hill to get away from the wolves. I was stopping now and then to shoot one, but they were not discouraged by their losses. They just ate their dead and kept on after me. I think they were especially hungry, otherwise they wouldn't have been so determined.
'Anyway, I slipped and had to grab hold of indentations in the rocks to keep from falling into their mouths. And the rifle went down a fissure, and I could not reach it after I got rid of the wolves. So I went on.'
'You should have taken a revolver,' Rachel said.
'I wanted as little weight as possible.'
'But how did you get rid of the wolves if you had only your knife?' Drummond asked him. Gribardsun had told them that the spear he had used on the lioness had been made after the wolf incident.
'I killed a few as they came up the hill at me,' Gribardsun said. 'They could only squeeze through the opening into the cave one at a time. After a while, they gave up. I think they'd eaten so many of their own pack, the edge of their hunger was gone.'
When told that Drummond had regained his sanity, Gribardsun had made only one comment. He said that he hoped that Dummond had regained all of his mind. Rachel supposed that he meant by that that he hoped Drummond had gotten over his desire to kill her and Gribardsun.
Drummond assured them that he had accepted reality, and that, whatever they did, he would not try any violence. Not that he ever had, except for the time when he had shot at Rachel.
Gribardsun gave Drummond a series of psychological tests designed to uncover deeply hidden feelings of violence toward particular persons. The results seemed to satisfy him, since he gave Drummond firearms. But Rachel noticed that Gribardsun never allowed Drummond to get behind him when he was armed.
Something decisive had happened to that group. Though there was always a certain amount of reserve among the three - von Billmann alone being treated quite warmly by all the others - they got along with a minimum of friction. All worked harder than before. Moreover, there were long periods when they did not see each other. Their studies of the area around the campsite had exhausted everything of interest there except the tribespeople themselves. They went farther and farther afield on their own specialties.
Winter struck. Though the world temperature was slowly climbing, and the glaciers would melt a little more every year, the cold and the snow were brutal. And this year the tribes had to leave the overhang and follow the reindeer herds. The big game in this area had been cleaned out. Moreover, the herds seemed to have deserted this part of France.
To von Billmann's joy, Gribardsun decided they should head for Czechoslovakia-to-be. They would progress slowly because of the heavy snows, but when they got to Czechoslovakia, they would settle down there for the winter, and also the next summer. Provided, of course, that game was not too scarce there.
They moved north of the Alps, which were covered with giant glaciers, and into Germany and along the Magdalenian Danube - which did not follow the course of the twenty-first century river - and then northward into Czechoslovakia. There they stayed in a semicave during the whiter. Thammash, the chief, developed arthritis, which Gribardsun alleviated with medicine. But the medicine had an unexpected and long-hidden side effect, and one day that summer, while Thammash was running after a wounded horse, he dropped dead. Gribardsun dissected him and found that his heart muscles were damaged. The damage was the result of an intricate series of imbalances, a sort of somatic Rube Goldberg Mechanism.
No babies or mothers died during birth that year, though there were several miscarriages.
Angrogrim, the strong man, slipped just as he was about to drive a spear into a baby mammoth that had been cut out from the herd. His head struck a rock, and he died even before the baby stepped on his chest and crushed it.
Amaga married Krnal, a Shluwg whose wife had choked on a fishbone.
The following summer, the tribes moved back to the overhang in the valley of La Vezere in France. Von Billmann was very disappointed, because he had not found a single language which seemed capable of developing into Indo-Hittite.
'You really didn't think you would, did you?' John said. 'Whoever the pre-Indo-Hittites are, they are probably in Asia or Russia somewhere. They won't be migrating to Germany for several thousands of years yet - probably.
'Of course,' he added, smiling slightly, 'it's possible that they are only a few miles from us at this very moment.'
'You have a small sadistic streak in you, John,' von Billmann said.
'Perhaps. However, if you are on the next expedition, which will go to 8000 B.C., you may find your long-lost speakers.'
'But I want to find them now!'
'Perhaps something entirely unforeseen will happen to enlighten you.'
Von Billmann remembered that remark much later.
Nine
Time went swiftly, and then suddenly the day of departure was close. Four years had passed. The vessel was crowded with specimens and only a few had yet to be collected. These were mainly spermatozoa and ova which would be taken from animals shot with the anesthetic-bearing missiles. When the vessel returned to the twenty-first century, the frozen sperm and eggs would be thawed out and appropriately united in tubes. The fetuses would be placed in the uteri of foster mothers - cows in the case of most of the larger animals but, in the zoo, elephants or whales in the case of the largest. The biological science of the twenty-first century permitted the young of one species to flourish in the womb of another. And so, the twenty-first century would soon have in their zoos and reservations beasts that had been extinct for many thousands of years.