Rivers of Time

VI The Satanic Illusion

Yes, Mr. Proctor, we have had trouble with wowsers like that. If you had come by a couple of years ago, you'd have seen a line of pickets outside our office here. The signs they carried denounced the Raja— that is, my partner, Chandra Aiyar—and me as murderers and emissaries of Satan. I was never quite clear as to whether one of us was supposed to be Old Nick himself, and the other an assistant imp. It was a bloody nuisance while it lasted, but I don't think it actually turned away many would-be clients. The blokes who go on time safaris with us are not the sort to let the seven days of Genesis stop them.

All right, I'll tell you the story. It was my turn to man the office while the Raja took a party to the Jurassic. Somehow the hard cases always seem to come up on my watch.

Anyway, one afternoon Miss Minakuchi told me that two clerical gents were here to see me. This was unusual; but I said, send them in. They turned out to a big, stout one, the Reverend Gilmore Zahn, and a little, skinny one, the Reverend Paul Hubert. I'd heard of Zahn, St. Louis' leading hellfire-and-damnation Fundamentalist preacher. Miss Minakuchi used to cut out newspaper stories, in which Zahn made remarks about Rivers and Aiyar as leading souls into unbelief and damnation; but I never paid much attention.

This visit surprised me, as if the leading anti-liquor crusader were to drop in at the headquarters of Schneider's Brewery for a donation. But in business you have to take the rough with the smooth. So I said:

"What can I do for you gentlemen?"

Zahn answered: "We want to go on one of your time safaris, not to hunt, but to look over the landscape and the fauna and flora for various so-called geological eras. I am Gilmore Zahn, and this is my assistant pastor, the Reverend Paul Hubert."

"Pleased to meet you," I said. "I believe the papers have carried some of the remarks you've made in sermons, touching upon my partner's and my business."

"Oh, that." Zahn waved a big, pudgy hand and smiled a big, round smile. "Nothing personal, I do assure you. From all I hear, you are a pillar of the community, a good family man who faithfully performs his civic duties and leads a quiet, normal life. Naturally, there are philosophical differences between us; but that should not preclude a friendly personal relationship."

The big bloke had an ingratiating manner, which made it hard to dislike him. Then the Reverend Hubert spoke:

"We hope you won't mind if this survey ruins your business. What we're trying to do is to nail down the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

"Eh?" said I. "Why should it ruin our business?"

He leaned forward, pointing his sharp nose at me as if it were a weapon. "Because it will expose the falsity of the whole evolutionary heresy. It will demonstrate that all these prehistoric beasts, whereof your clients bring home heads, hides, and photographs, did not live in succession, but all the same time." To emphasize, he slapped my desk with his palm, which I thought a bit of cheek.

"Oh, really?" I said.

"Yes, really," continued Hubert, shaking a finger at me. "It will show that they were created by God all at once, as the Bible says."

"How about all those thousands of extinct forms, of which they have dug up fossils, and which our safaris have seen in the flesh?"

"They are species that couldn't make it to the Ark," said Hubert.

"Calm down, Paul," said Zahn. "Don't get Mr. Rivers' back up. You, sir, can evidently take hunters back to an ancient time—either thousands of years ago, as we believe, or millions of years, as the false religion of scientism claims, to hunt animals that are extinct in the present world. I do not see why you cannot go on doing just that, regardless of the truth or falsity of the evolutionary theory. Will you take us?"

I shook my head. "No, gentlemen, I don't think a time safari of the sort you have in mind is practicable. Too far out of our regular line of work. Besides, the Reverend Hubert looks to me too small a man to take to the Mesozoic."

"What does my size have to do with it?" asked Hubert, bristling.

"Because you're too small to handle the kind of gun that's needed for confronting dinosaurs. The only time we ever lost a client was the result of taking too small a man to the Cretaceous. A tyrannosaur ate him, even after he had pumped it full of .375 magnums."

"We have no intention of hunting or shooting anything," said Zahn. "From what I hear about wildlife, if you leave them alone they will mostly do you the same courtesy. No guns; we shall be quite satisfied to view the dangerous ones at long range, through binoculars. How about it?"

"No, sorry. Our business is to take trophy hunters to periods where they shan't have to worry about endangered species, not to prove theological points."

"Mr. Rivers," said Zahn, "did you or did you not give a talk on time safaris at the West Side YMCA last March?"

"Yes, I did."

"And did you or didn't you say that you wished you could take some of these foolish Fundamentalists back on one of your safaris, so they could see how the world really was in prehistoric times?"

"Yes, I suppose I did."

"Well then," said Zahn, beaming, "here is your opportunity to have your wish. I am sure a man with your well-developed Australian sporting instincts would not go back on his word."

At that point, this pair had me by the short and curlies. After some more yabber I said: "Okay, I'll do it, provided you fellows can pay our rates. They're admittedly steep, because Professor Prochaska's time chamber uses fantastic amounts of electric power."

"How much?" asked Zahn.

I told him; and do you know, the big bloke pulled out a checkbook on the spot and wrote me out a check for a quarter of the total as a deposit! I saw that the check was drawn on his church.

I told them we couldn't push off until the Raja got back from the Jurassic; but they were agreeable about time. We set the date of departure tentatively for the following month.

As soon as they had left the office, I went around to the Herald Building and asked a friend who worked on that paper about the finances of Zahn's church. It seemed that these were good-o, and I started to go to the bank when my journalistic friend, Spencer McMurtrie, detained me.

"Reggie," he said, "if you're really going to take these godlies back in time, to see whose theory wins— evolution or Genesis—I want to go along, too. I think I can get the paper to put up the cash. It'll make a whopping story!"

"Okay," I said, "if you can make the arrangements. Can you shoot? Neither of these preachers intends to carry a gun, and that makes us too lightly armed for comfort."

"Oh, sure," he said.

Later, I took him out to the range and found him a fair shot. Since he didn't own a gun heavy for the sort of sightseeing we were doing, I rented him one of our double .600s. On the range, being a stocky, well-set-up bloke, he showed he could handle it.

On the appointed day, we assembled in the time-chamber building. The building belongs to the University, but in fact Prochaska's apparatus and the supporting equipment take up most of it. The preachers were in brand-new khaki safari outfits. The newspapers had sent reporters to see us off, and the man from the Post-Dispatch asked:

"Is it true, Mr. Rivers, that the purpose of this expedition is to convert the Reverend Zahn to evolution? I know he'll try to convert you to his brand of Christianity."

"Not exactly," I said. "I'm not trying to convert anyone to anything. I shall simply lay the evidence before him, and he can bloody well draw his own inferences."

The man from the Globe-Democrat said: "Why aren't you taking along that train of burros, as you have on some previous safaris?"

"Because we don't plan to move camp away from the time chamber—merely to make four or five stops in time and spend about a day or two at each one. We shall start with the Devonian and come on down, fifty or a hundred million years at a jump, to the most recent date we're allowed to travel to, the Pliocene."

"Why can't you stop in the Pleistocene, when all those mammoths and things were running around, with cave men chasing them or vice versa?"

"Not allowed," I said. "We might run into one of those blokes and, by interacting with him, change all subsequent history. The universe doesn't allow that sort of paradox."

"Or," put in the Reverend Zahn with his Humpty Dumpty smile, "as I should express it, 'God is not mocked.' Sixth chapter of Galatians."

I went on: "The instant you start to do something that would affect the present, the space-time forces snap you back to Present and bloody well kill you in the process."

"Then you can't actually show the Reverend an ape-man and say: 'There's our ancestor, believe it or not'?"

"No, we can't. Even if we could, those fellows were all in the Old World, and there's no way to move the chamber around the Earth's surface. They didn't get to the Americas until they had already evolved into Homo sapiens. Those who came over from Siberia were just Red Indians, as we used to call them. Native Americans, I believe, is the favored term now."

Cohen, the chamber wallah, spoke up: "Reggie, are you and your party ready to go?"

"Half a minute, Bruce," I said. "Any more questions? I'll allow just one more."

"Mr. Rivers," said a man from one of the suburban papers, "aren't you and the Reverends going to do any hunting or trophy collecting?"

"I hunt only with these," said Hubert, pointing to the cameras slung round his neck.

"And I am a hunter, not of beasts, but of souls," said Zahn. "Not that I take this environmentalist nonsense seriously, please understand. As it says in first Genesis: God gave man 'dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.' If a species of no practical use to man goes extinct, that's no real loss, except to sentimentalists who care more for such creatures than for their fellow men. But I have never hunted in the usual sense and feel no urge to take it up at my time of life."

"Time to go," I said, and set about herding my lambs into the transition chamber. Although we were stripped down to a minimum as regards equipment, it still would take two trips by the chamber to get us all to whenever we were going. There were eight of us: me, the two preachers, the journalist, and the support crew, consisting of Beauregard Black the camp boss, two helpers, and Ming the cook. We could have squeezed the eight of us into the chamber all at once, with our packs on our backs; but that would still leave no room for the tents, galley, and other needful equipment for the week in the field I had planned.

The door closed. Cohen pushed buttons, and the machinery whined. "When to, Reggie?" said he.

"Set it for this date, 275 million B.C.," I said. "That should put us into the Devonian."

You understand, Mr. Proctor, that the dates of geological eras are more or less approximate. Likewise there are limits to the accuracy of the time-distorting machinery. Accuracy has greatly improved since Prochaska began his project; but your arrival may still be off by hours or days or even months when you arrive. The farther back you go in time, the greater becomes the margin you have to allow for error.

So Bruce Cohen pushed his buttons and twirled his dials, and the light faded. You've never made a trip in the transition chamber, have you, Mr. Proctor? Thought not. It's a bloody devastating experience the first time, with vibration, vertigo, nausea, and a horrid feeling of being in free fall, even though your conscious mind tells you your feet are firmly planted on the chamber floor.

I must say, the preachers took it well. I've known better men than Zahn to chunder up last week's breakfast; that's the reason Cohen had equipped the chamber with airsickness bags. McMurtrie was looking squeamish; but the two men just stood there, jaws grimly set, silently moving their lips. I daresay they were praying.

When the dials indicating time stopped spinning, Cohen carefully turned a little handwheel, looking at a radar screen, to adjust our altitude. The altitude of the ground varies from epoch to epoch, and it wouldn't do to materialize either above or below ground level. In the first case the chamber would drop like a stone; in the second, you'd have an explosion of the nuclear kind, which would leave nothing of the chamber or the people in it.

At last he set us down with hardly a bump and opened the door. From force of habit I jumped out with my gun ready, although I was sure that in this period there wouldn't be anything on land more formidable than an insect or a crab.

Indeed, nothing of an animal nature was in sight. The sun was just rising over a huge range of mountains east of us, curving around to westward on the north; while in the western sky a full moon, looking half again the size of ours of today, prepared to set.

Astronomers tell me that it was closer to the Earth than it now is, and hence the tides were higher. That's why the days were shorter than now. The tides act as a brake, which has slightly slowed the Earth's rotation in the last half a thousand million years. If you go back then, you need a watch or clock that can be set to run several percent faster than normal to keep time under control.

While the others climbed out of the chamber, I looked around. As I said, there was a big range of mountains to the east and north of us. We had materialized at the base of the foothills. These mountains were absolutely bare of vegetation, like some I once saw at the western end of Texas. Likewise our landing place was bare of plant life—at least, plant life large enough to be seen with the naked eye—which gave us a fine view in all directions. Since there wouldn't be any proper firewood in this period, we had brought along a little paraffin camp stove, so my clients wouldn't have to live on cold army rations.

These mountains, I thought, must be the Appalachians, before erosion wore them down to stumps. It turned out later that I was wrong. The forces of erosion had worn these mountains down to a flat plain long before the Appalachians had formed; then another movement of the Earth's surface had raised this part of the country. Erosion had carved out a new range, originally quite as impressive as these, and then had worn it down to low, rounded hills, the present-day Appalachians.

To the west, the prospect was quite different. A few kilometers away, down a gentle slope, stood a band of dark green, and beyond that an arm of the sea, just visible over the treetops.

Hubert asked sharply: "Mr. Rivers, are you sure you haven't taken us forward in time, to a day when mankind has vanished from the Earth?"

"Quite sure," I said. "Professor Prochaska has tried to explain it to me, but I'm no four-dimensional thinker. Seems that, according to his equations, it's theoretically possible to send the chamber forward in time—that is, into the future—but not to get it back. If, for instance, he sent me forward in the machine, and I saw certain things happening, then when I got back I might do something to stop them from happening, or at least to happen differently. That would cause another paradox. Can't have that sort of thing in a logical universe."

"Unless you admit divine intervention," said Zahn, looking benevolent. " 'God hath power to help'—second Chronicles, twenty-five."

"You can admit it if you like," I said. "Me, I'm a hunting guide, not a theologian, and I won't try to argue such questions. Anyway, the professor doesn't want to lose his multi-million-dollar transition chamber by sending it to the future and not be able to recover it."

I pulled out my pocket diastemeter and looked at the distant line of greenery. I said: "The vegetation along the shoreline is about three kilometers from here. If you want to see some Devonian life close up, how about walking down to the shore and back? By that time the crew will have the camp set up, and Ming will have tiffin ready."

The godlies agreed. McMurtrie said: "Reggie, should I bring my gun?"

"I don't think so," I said.

"I see you've got yours."

"Force of habit," I said. "After leading so many safaris and coming upon some bloody formidable creatures, I just don't feel comfortable without it. But I'd suggest you leave yours, so the weight won't tire you out."

The Reverend Zahn proved our least able hiker. Overweight and out of fitness, he kept panting and groaning and complaining about his new field boots. But he stuck with us until we reached the strip of vegetation along the shore of that unknown sea, which stretched to the horizon. The water and sand looked just like water and sand of our own time, the sea being very smooth and calm, with little ripples slapping the sand. But the plant fife was something else.

Have you ever dreamed that you were shrunk to the size of an ant, pushing your way among grass stems on someone's lawn? Well, pushing one's way through a Devonian forest gives that illusion, too. The plants are the ancient relatives of a lot of primitive little things such as you find along stream banks: ferns, horsetails, and lycopods or ground pines. But the lycopods, instead of being little mossy finger-sized plants, were scaly-barked trees ten or fifteen meters tall, without anything you would recognize as leaves.

The horsetails, instead of being the right size for a potted plant, were three or four meters high. And the ferns, like the lycopods, became real trees with trunks like those of palms. The greenery at the top, instead of the fronds of palms, was a mass of fiddlehead ferns. I had the funny feeling that if a man had appeared in this landscape, he'd be the height of a seven-storey building.

At first we saw no sign of animal life. As we strolled through the greenbelt toward the water, looking this way and that, Hubert and McMurtrie had their cameras buzzing. McMurtrie cried:

"Hey, there's a bug!"

He ran a couple of steps and stooped to grab the creature, whatever it was; but it got away from him. He said:

"It looked like a silverfish from our own time. Weren't they the first true insects to come ashore?"

"So scientists tell me," I said.

Hubert said: "I do believe that's a spider!" He adjusted one of his cameras for a close-up shot.

"Better not try to pick it up," said McMurtrie. "I don't know if they'd evolved poison glands so early, but we'd better not take chances."

We sauntered on; McMurtrie exclaimed over a tiny milliped he saw on a tree trunk. He said to Zahn:

"Well, Reverend, you must admit this little forest is like nothing from our own time."

"I admit nothing," said Zahn. "For all I know, Mr. Rivers may have set us down on some forsaken coast of his native Australia. They have all sorts of strange plants and animals there."

"But you must admit we haven't seen any animals except a few—what's the name for all the jointed-legged creatures like insects and spiders, Reggie?"

"Arthropods, I believe," I said.

"Okay, arthropods. But no mammals, birds, or reptiles. That fits what the evolutionists tell us about the earliest land life."

"Does not prove a thing," said Zahn. "There are many parts of the present Earth where the wild life has been killed off or driven away. The fact that we don't see any antelopes or kangaroos does not prove that we might not see plenty if we crossed yonder mountain range." He pointed.

"Hey!" exclaimed Hubert. "There's a real land animal—a reptile, I think!"

We were at the upper edge of the beach, looking toward the water, where little ripples tinkled. On such a coast in Present, you'd expect to find swarms of sea birds, nesting ashore and foraging out in the water. But there was nothing whatever of that sort here.

Hubert indicated a creature lying in the sand a couple of meters from the water's edge. It was of lizardlike shape, clad in a soft, purple-brown skin; I suppose scientists would class it not as a reptile but as an amphibian, a kind of newt or salamander. It must have been about thirty centimeters long and stout for a newt.

Hubert hurried to where the creature lay, bringing up one of his cameras. At his approach, the newt hoisted itself off the sand on its four short legs but did not seem at all inclined to retreat before its human visitor.

It stood there, unmoving, while Hubert shot pictures. Then Hubert thrust out a finger as if to prod the newt into activity. Just as the finger touched the shiny, moist-looking hide, the newt whipped around and clamped its jaws on that finger.

"Ow!" cried Paul Hubert, jumping back and raising his arm. The newt kept its grip and was hoisted off the sand, dangling from Hubert's finger.

"Reggie!" cried Hubert. "How do I get this darned thing to let go? This hurts!"

"Try dunking it in the water," I said.

He stepped to the edge of the sea and lowered the newt into the water. Presently it let go of his finger. Hubert tried to kick it but missed, and it swam away with an eelish wriggle.

"That'll teach you not to bother the local wildlife," I said, "unless you intend to shoot something for a trophy."

"Blast it!" he said. "Got my shoes soaking wet. Can I take them and my socks off to dry before we start back?"

"Whatever you like," I said.

When Hubert got his shoes and socks laid out on the strand, he decided to go wading. So he rolled up his pants legs above the knee and walked into the sea. McMurtrie decided to do likewise; since he was wearing shorts, the process was simpler for him. Presently the pair were splashing around and having a high old time.

"Like children," said the sonorous voice of Gilmore Zahn. "If you do not mind, I think I will take off my shoes and socks, also; but not for wading. I need to rest my feet."

"Takes a bit of practice to harden one," I said.

"You are right. Gluttony and sloth are my deadly sins, against which I ever struggle. I should take more regular exercise."

Then an outcry from the waders brought me round. They splashed back to shore with alacrity, and McMurtrie said:

"We just saw the damnedest thing out there! I guess you'd call it a Devonian lobster, only it didn't look like any lobster I ever saw."

Hubert chimed in: "About as long as I am, with a tapering jointed body. It had a lot of legs, with the first pair ending in pincers and the last pair flattened for oars."

"Probably harmless," I said. "Not that I should care to get into a tub with one. That's a eurypterid or sea scorpion."

"Scorpion, eh?" said Hubert. "Does it have a sting in its tail?"

"Don't know, but I doubt it," I said. "When you blokes have dried your feet and got yourselves shod again, it'll be time to start back."

There wasn't much more to the Devonian stop. There was really little for non-scientists like my sahibs to see, and we had bloody well exhausted the possibilities that morning. So it was no surprise when, that afternoon, they asked me to have Cohen bring them forward to the next stop without spending a night in the Devonian.

I passed the word to Cohen. Beauregard and his helpers looked a little disgruntled at having to pack up the tents and stuff without using them; but Beauregard was too practiced and self-disciplined to fuss. I thought I heard Pancho mutter something like "¡Tal tonteria!" I pretended not to hear, not wishing to make an issue of it. By tea time we were on our way through time again.

Our next stop was in the Pennsylvanian, which European geologists call the late Carboniferous. This turned out to be even less fruitful than the Devonian stop. The topography had changed around the site; we seemed to be in a flat, swampy plain. Whether anything was left of the range of mountains east and north of the Devonian site, we couldn't tell, because we arrived in a pelting downpour. It rained and rained from a blanket of low gray clouds, blotting out sight of any mountains that might have existed.

We did see a couple of big amphibians—or perhaps reptiles, or halfway between—like overweight newts over a meter long, waddling among the trees. These trees were much like those we had seen in the Devonian, only bigger and more of them, from what little we could see through the deluge. During the lulls in the storm, we heard some grunts and croaks, like the noises frogs make in springtime for mating calls, only these were basso profundo.

Since we had gained a day on our schedule, we thought to wait out the rain. But when on the third day it was pouring as hard as ever, my clients indicated they would be just as glad to go on to the next time stop.

"Very interesting," said Zahn. "I did not know there were any such rain-forest swamps left, since the Brazilians and others have destroyed theirs to grow crops. But I understand they have set aside some areas as national parks; perhaps this is one."

"You mean," said McMurtrie, "you just won't believe we're back two hundred million-odd years B.C.?"

"Not unless you can prove it by the word of God," said Zahn, smiling.

The crew packed up the tents and the galley again, sloshing about in the downpour, and off we went to the later Jurassic.

This time, when we got out of the chamber, I cautioned my clients to stay close by me. "There are some bloody dangerous theropods," I told them. I looked especially hard at the Reverend Hubert, because I had sized him up as an impulsive, combative sort of bloke, just the kind likely to put himself and his fellow trippers in harm's way in dinosaur country.

"But not the famous Tyrannosaurus?" he said.

"No; that comes forty or fifty million years later."

"According to your false theory," said Hubert sharply, as if he wanted to make a Donnybrook out of it.

"Be calm, Paul," said Zahn. "Reggie said he wouldn't try to convert us to evolution; merely present evidence and let us make up our own minds. So let us watch, and observe, and save our inferences till we get home."

"I've made up my mind," said Hubert. "Anyway, I shouldn't think there'd be anything much to worry about without the tyrant lizard."

"Not quite true, I'm afraid," I said. "There's a whole assortment of theropods of different sizes. That's how it works in nature; each size has its special prey, so different species of predator don't much compete. The biggest at this time is Allosaurus, or at least a tyrannosaur-sized theropod, which some think is just an allosaur that has lived a long time. You know, most reptiles lack our internal cut-off mechanism, which stops growth at a certain stage. So the longer they live, the bigger they get.

"Some of my paleontological friends think these biggies should be put in a separate genus, which they call Epanterias. In any case, they are not the sort of blokes you want to take chances with."

Hubert stared about him in the forest. "Don't see any of them here, now," he said.

"Lucky for us," I said. "Here, don't wander into the chamber area! It's got to be kept clear so the chamber wallah can set it down in the same place with the crew."

We were in well-wooded country. As far as I could see from the site—not very far—it was more rolling than the flat plain of the Pennsylvanian. The trees around us were mostly palms of one sort or another; and also cycads, looking like thick, stumpy palms with flowerlike growths on their trunks. There were also a few araucarias or monkey-puzzle trees. At this period ancient relatives of the modern ginkgo also occurred, but I didn't see any of these at this site.

Among the trees were shrubs, some of them calanines or horsetails like those that, back in the Devonian, were among the first plants to invade the land. These were smaller and less impressive than the Devonian ones. There was no grass whatever, since it hadn't yet evolved.

Altogether, the flora began to look a little more like plants from our own era and less like things from another planet. Everything was pretty much the same somber green, which gets monotonous if you have to look at it for a long enough time.

There was also a buzz of insects, lack of which I had noted on the Devonian stop. As to other life forms, we should have to wait and see.

"Don't anybody wander off," I said. "In woods like these, it's the easiest thing in the world to get lost the minute you're out of sight of your base. You memorize a particular tree to help you find your way back; then, when you look for it, it has turned into a dozen trees, all looking exactly alike and all beckoning in different directions."

The crew arrived and set up the camp. While they were doing this, McMurtrie called: "Hey, there's a critter!"

The beast that had wandered out of the trees and was looking at us in a blank sort of way was a camptosaur, one of the smaller iguanodonts. A typical adult must weigh around a hundred or 150 kilos. When it stands up on its hindlegs, using its tail for a prop, it looks you in the eye. When it drops down to walk or run, it's about waist high, with the head sticking out horizontally in front and the tail projecting aft to balance. Otherwise it's a bloody unimpressive dinosaur: no noteworthy horns, fangs, or killing claws.

This bloke looked us over calmly and began to bite the tips off the nearest shrubs and saplings. Presently it wandered on, and after it came more of the same. The camptosaur is a herd animal, and the first one had been merely the point man—excuse me, point reptile—of a herd of twenty-odd. This included several young, who kept to the middle of the herd. They ambled past, munching browse and casting brief, incurious glances our way. I said:

"If you want dinosaur steak for dinner, there it is on the hoof."

McMurtrie said: "May I shoot, Reggie?"

"Okay," I said. He got out his gun, sighted on the nearest camptosaur, and fired. Down went the little dinosaur, rolling and thrashing. The others of the herd, startled, looked around, first at their conspecific and then at us. Then they all set off at a trot and were soon out of sight.

I was starting toward the carcass to butcher it, when Zahn called: "Hey, Reggie! Look what is coming!"

Here came a stegosaur—in fact, a herd of twelve or fifteen of them. These plodded on all fours, with their back plates upright. They tell me these plates are not armor but heat-control radiators, like an elephant's ears. They browsed much as the camptosaurs did but closer to the ground, because their heads were carried lower in their natural stance.

The stegosaurs seemed even less interested in us than the camptosaurs had been. They were perhaps fifty meters distant through the trees, when Hubert said:

"Reggie, I've got to get closer for some pictures!"

"Me, too," said McMurtrie, almost as hot a camera fanatic as Hubert.

"Okay, provided Spence brings his gun," I said. "How about you, Reverend?" I asked Zahn. The preacher had so imposing a presence that it never occurred to me to address him as "Gilmore" or "Gil."

"I shall be happy where I am," said Zahn, lolling in one of our camp chairs. "After this parade of beasts of the field, the only thing I should really like to see would be a behemoth."

"Eh? Isn't that some mythical Biblical animal?"

"There is no such thing as a 'mythical' Biblical animal, Reggie," he said severely. "Some say the Hebrew word re'em, translated as behemoth,' is nothing but a hippopotamus, which they suppose to have dwelt in the rivers of Palestine in ancient times. But since the word from context means something enormous, I am sure it refers to one of your biggest dinosaurs—the ones with the long necks and small heads."

"You mean sauropods?"

"Yes, I believe that is indeed the name. Since a sauropod, from what I hear, outweighs a dozen hippopotami, this merely shows that the word of God is nought but the literal truth; and the sauropods did not become extinct millions of years ago but still lived in Biblical times."

"Hey, Reggie!" said Hubert. "Come on, or they'll all be out of sight!"

"Okay," I said. "We shall finish the argument later, Reverend. Better let Spence and me go ahead this time." Ordinarily I put the clients in front and follow them so that, first, they shall get the first shot; and second, so that if one of them stumbles he won't blow the guide's head off. Since Hubert had no gun, there was no point in this procedure on this occasion.

We had covered about half the distance to the herd of stegosaurs when a couple of them noticed us. They peered in a dimwitted way and resumed browsing; perhaps they took us for a herd of camptosaurs.

I waved Hubert forward. McMurtrie was already clicking away; he had his gun slung over his back to free his hands. Soon Hubert's video camera was whirring away.

Then the nearest stegosaur snorted. At once the rest of the herd looked around and gave similar snorts. They then all faced toward the center of the herd and plodded forward until they formed a tight circle, heads inward, with the two muskoxen in reverse.

"What's up?" asked Hubert, turning off his machine and looking back at me.

I was peering about pretty lively, too; for I had a suspicion of the meaning of this maneuver. I sniffed the air, trying to detect the rank reptilian odor of carnosaur.

"We'd better start back, sports," I said. "Something tells me this soon won't be a healthy place. Spence, sling your camera and bring your rifle round to where you can see it!"

McMurtrie and I began backing toward the camp, gripping our guns and looking about. Hubert was so involved in his picture taking that he stayed where he was.

"Come on back, Paul!" I shouted.

But Hubert continued photographing, shifting from one of his three cameras to another. Beside me, McMurtrie muttered: "Oh, my God!"

I looked in the direction he did, and here came the biggest Epanterias I've ever seen; must have been over fifteen meters long. It's built much like the tyrannosaur, except that it has much bigger forelimbs, with grasping claws.

This theropod's attention was currently on the circle of stegosaurs, and it strode towards them with the direct approach of a hungry man to dinner.

As it came closer and seemed about to take a bite, the stegosaurs all began to lash their tails right and left. Each tail is armed with four big spikes, like horns. When the carnosaur leaned over to bite, one of these tails struck him in the belly with an impact like that of a bass drum. The sound almost made me say "Ouch!" in sympathy.

The theropod backed up with a grunt. After a few seconds of appraising the situation, it started round the circle. From my experience with animals, I suspected that it was really after, not one of the full-grown stegosaurs, but one of the smaller young ones in the center. I let out a full bellow:

"Paul Hubert! God damn it, come on back!"

He gave us a vague wave and kept on filming. The theropod marched clear around the circle of stegosaurs, now and then making a tentative snap at their hindquarters; but the lashing tails kept him away. At last he came around to the side of the circle where Hubert stood, buzzing and clicking away. It turned toward him as if to say: Well, what have we here?

"Get your gun ready!" I told McMurtrie, and then loudly to Hubert: "Come on, you idiot galah!"

Hubert seemed at last to have got the idea. He slung his cameras and started to run toward us. The theropod came after him with long strides.

"Better shoot," I said. "Don't hit the Reverend by mistake. Aim for the heart."

We hoisted up our .600s and let fly, one barrel, then the other. At that range I'm sure all four shots hit. The impact knocked the theropod back on its haunches—or rather, back on its tail, which it uses as a prop when standing. Hubert ran past us, the cameras slung round his neck swinging this way and that and banging one another.

"Reload!" I said, hauling two more rounds out of my vest as I broke the gun.

McMurtrie was reloading when something took our attention and the theropod's too. It neared the place where lay the camptosaur that McMurtrie had shot earlier. Unexpectedly, the camptosaur rolled to its feet, took one look at the theropod towering over it, and ran off. The theropod swiveled its head, following the fleeing camptosaur, and then started after it. In seconds, both were out of sight, though we could hear the crashing of their passage.

"Damn!" said McMurtrie. "I should have done as you advised."

"Why, what did you do?" I asked.

"Tried for a brain shot instead of a heart shot."

"And doubtless the bullet glanced off the skull and stunned the animal. With dinosaur, the brain is so small in proportion to the skull that you have only an outside chance of hitting it."

"I've always heard they were pretty stupid," said McMurtrie.

"No stupider than modern reptiles. They're all equipped with instincts that take care of all the contingencies they're likely to meet, like that circle the stegosaur formed. And these blokes lasted a couple of hundred million years, compared to a mere couple of million for our own land. So don't snoot the dinosaur!"

The stegosaur maintained their circle for at least an hour after the theropod had disappeared; then they broke up and went back to browsing. Whether the Epanterias caught the camptosaur, or whether it lay down and died of its bullet wounds, I shall never know. It's against my principles to let a wounded animal get away, probably to die somewhere and be of no use to anyone but the local scavengers. Not sporting. But in this case, I think I could be excused for not following up the matter. I had enough problems from having to wet-nurse a pair of preachers who, though they tried to be nice about it, were sure I was a limb of Satan.

When we returned to the camp, Zahn grabbed his assistant in a smothering embrace, with tears running down his fat face. "Oh, Paul!" he cried. "I thought you were done for! I should never have let you come on this expedition, knowing your imprudence! What would I ever tell your sister?'

The upshot was that, since the day was nearly gone, we should camp there through the night and set out for the next stop, the early Eocene, on the morrow.

"I have seen all I need to here," said Zahn. "If I missed the behemoth, I have seen the dragon—the veritable dragon alluded to in Job, Isaiah, and sundry other places. Like the Behemoth, it evidently survived down to historic times. It is but one more proof of the Bible's literal veracity."

Of course any geologist would call that nonsense, citing the age of the last deposits in which dinosaurs are found, sixty-odd million years before Present. But such arguments would roll off the Reverend Zahn's mind like gravel off a turtle's shell.

During the night, McMurtrie was on watch and I was trying to get my four-hour turn of sleep, when the sound of raised voices from the next tent woke me up. It sounded as if the preachers were having a dispute. I heard Zahn, in that splendid orotund baritone, say:

"But, Paul, do you not see? Once you start admitting that certain verses in the Bible may be interpreted as figures of speech, you open the door to all the Biblical historians and analysts, who want to reduce God's word to a lot of legends and folk tales. You end up with a document with no more authority than the Mahabharata. It is the camel's head in the tent, the thin edge of the wedge."

"But, Gil!" protested Hubert. "On some points the scholars have us by the short hairs; for instance, where the Bible contradicts itself, as in the two diverse Creation narratives and the two Flood narratives."

"It only seems like a contradiction to our limited mortal minds," said Zahn. "To divine wisdom, the solution is plain; and we should not set ourselves up as wiser than God."

"But, Gil," persisted Hubert, "don't we have to allow some figures of speech, as for example where it speaks of the 'four corners of the earth' in Job and again in Revelations? We all know the Earth doesn't have corners."

"In such cases," said Zahn, "we apply Galileo's explanation, that the Bible was written in language that the people of the time of writing could understand, under divine guidance. But you miss the main point."

"What's that?"

"Once you admit Biblical fallibility, you undermine its authority as the moral code that God commanded men to live by, and you know as well as I that the morals of our country have—if you will excuse the expression—gone to Hell in the last century. You know the figures on divorce, juvenile criminality, and all the rest. If you start by saying: Oh, well, the 'seven days' of Genesis are just a figure of speech for the 'thousand years' of the ninetieth Psalm, the next step is to discard the prohibitions on adultery and fornication as just figures of speech; and you end up discarding the laws against theft and murder. We— ministers of God like us—are civilization's last defense against barbaric anarchy."

"But all those prohibitions can just as well be argued on a rational basis—"

"What rational basis?"

"Why, the long-term effect of unchecked offenses, from fornication to murder, when everybody starts indulging in those vices. You end up with gangster rule.'

"That's how the Secular Humanists talk. A secular philosophy may look fine on paper, but it's like a shiny new boat that will not float. Look what happened to Marxism, which had moral codes much like those of Christianity! It, too, looked fine and logical on paper; so it was tried out in Russia. After seventy years it was obviously not giving people the better fives it had promised. So the people, who had been forced by ferocious penalties to submit to it, rose up and threw it away. I fear, Paul, that you are headed down that same primrose path."

"I am not! If something's plainly untrue, you can't expect me to defend it to the laity—"

"Hush, man! You will awaken the whole camp!" The argument continued but in an unintelligible grumble.

It seemed to me that Zahn implied, without saying so out loud, that a little pious fakery was okay if it helped to lead the masses along the moral paths they ought to follow for their own good. I'm not qualified to judge such a view as either good or bad.

At breakfast next day, I noticed that feelings between two preachers were not of the best. They never spoke to each other, save for such needfuls as "Please pass the salt." It looked as if their disagreement over Biblical interpretation had blown up into a major quarrel. Otherwise they ate in grim silence, and this continued while the crew packed up the equipment for the next jump in time.

The next stop was in the lower Eocene, about the time of the Wasatch formations. This would show the profound difference between this fauna and the one that, fifteen or twenty million years earlier, had roamed the land. Before the K-T Boundary Event, the country swarmed with dinosaurs: big ones, little ones, and every size between. After the Event, there was nothing but the little mammals, the size of rats and mice, and the birds that survived the Event. The pterosaurs had also vanished; so had some of the marine reptiles, though I couldn't demonstrate that in the middle of a continent.

Cohen set us down on a little hill on a fine spring morning. I got out first, as usual, but there was nothing to be alarmed about. We were in a drier climate than on the last two stops, so the trees tended to cluster in valleys and along watercourses, leaving the hilltops clear. There were even little patches of real grass, though nothing like the grassy meadows and plains that appeared in the Miocene. Grass was a welcome sight after all the bare earth, even in well-watered places, of the Mesozoic and earlier. The bare Mesozoic earth is speckled with shrubs and herbs, often spiny; but these don't give the mental comfort of real grass. And wildflowers bloomed everywhere, red and violet and everything in the spectrum between.

Of animal life, none was in sight until, through my glasses, I picked up a herd of small beasts wandering over a hillside in the middle distance, nibbling at the greenery. I called my clients' attention to it, saying:

"That's the sort of thing you can expect to see in this period."

"How big are those animals?" asked McMurtrie.

"Hard to tell from here, but I should guess about the size of a setter dog. The condylarth Phenacodus, I think. You won't find many larger kinds."

Looking through his own binoculars, Paul Hubert said: "That's funny. They're eating leaves and buds, but they seem to have paws like a dog's instead of hooves."

"That's common in this period. The herbivores had only just begun to evolve their claws into hooves."

"Are you sure there are no dinosaurs?" said Hubert.

I shrugged. "I've been here before, and to the still earlier Paleocene, and I've never seen a sign of one. I won't say that a remnant of the dinosaurs—probably one of the little blokes—might not have survived the Event somewhere; but no fossils have yet been found of such survivors."

"That doesn't prove they don't exist in some other part of the world," said Zahn.

"Quite true, old sport," I said. "But what's been found is all we've got to go on."

"You have the word of God," he said. "But there, I oughtn't to preach to you."

"How about predators?" asked McMurtrie. "Seems to me that, wherever you have a lot of plant eaters, you ought to find some critters that have evolved to eat the plant eaters."

"Right-o!" I said. "But the carnivores here are pretty primitive, too. They belong to an order called Creodonta, which died out without descendants. The biggest locally is a fellow named Oxaena, about the size and shape of our modern sea otter, though it lives on dry land. There are also doglike and foxlike forms.

"And yes, I almost forgot. There's a big flightless bird of prey. Early in the Age of Mammals, such birds evolved to prey on the mammals, which were mostly small, nondescript creatures. They flourished most in South America, which was cut off from the rest of the world. When the more modern carnivores evolved among the mammals, these birds couldn't take the competition and disappeared.

"The one we have to watch out for here is Diatryma, which looks like the Aussie emu; except that instead of a long, thin neck with a small head, it has a stout neck and a head like an eagle's, only bigger."

"Shouldn't think a bird would be anything to worry about," said McMurtrie.

"Famous last words," I said. "The first law of survival is: Don't take chances with anything big enough to kill you. This bird is."

"Here's breakfast, gentlemen," said Ming.

After breakfast, I laid out a course for a two-hour morning's hike. I found this nature walk bloody frustrating, because it proved hard to keep my lambs moving. Zahn complained about bis sore feet. McMurtrie and Hubert wanted to stop and photograph everything, plant or animal. The fauna, as I warned them, proved such a monotonous lot of small, nondescript creatures that they complained about that.

When McMurtrie, pointing to a group of terrier-sized animals, asked: "How would you classify them?"

I replied: "I wouldn't. If we had a real paleontologist here, he could tell us which are the ancestors of the horse, and which of the rhino, and so on. Some are archaic mammals that died out without descendants."

The biggest beasts we flushed were a pair of coryphodonts, like enlarged pygmy hippopotami, about a meter high and two meters long. They were munching plants along the bank of a small stream. When we came up, the male evidentiy thought we threatened his female, for he faced us, flashed his four big tusks, and gave a loud grunt. McMurtrie and I got our guns ready; but when we advanced no closer, the coryphodonts went back to eating.

We were headed back to camp, when Hubert cried: "Hey, look at that!" In an instant he was kneeling and sighting with his camera.

The rest of us lined behind him to see. What he was photographing was a snake—a two-meter one— swallowing a small mammal. The snake had engulfed the head and was, millimeter by millimeter, working its jaws forward over the body.

"Kill it!" cried Zahn.

"No, you don't!" said Hubert. "I want this on film."

"The snake is the symbol of evil! The Lord God cursed the serpent above all cattle, and ordained that man should bruise its head! See Genesis eight."

"Medieval superstition," growled McMurtrie, struggling to untangle his camera from the sling holding his rifle across his back.

"So says an ignorant unbeliever!" cried Zahn. "Know you not—"

"Please!" I said. "We shall be late for tiffin. Come along, all of you, and let the arguments rest. Come on, Paul."

"I want to get the whole sequence," said Hubert, focusing on the snake, which proceeded with engulfing its prey as if we were not even there. "Go ahead. I'll catch up."

"Better come, Paul," I said. "This place may not be so harmless as it looks."

"Oh, leave me alone!" he snapped.

I struggled with my own temper, got it under control, and said: "I'm going back to camp, and I advise all you blokes to come along. Otherwise I shan't be responsible." I was bloody irritated with my clients.

I started off. McMurtrie, after one more camera shot, came after me; and then came Zahn. That left Hubert, still kneeling and filming. I faced determinedly away and marched up the slope leading to the camp.

We had got perhaps thirty meters from Hubert when McMurtrie looked back and cried: "Hey, Reggie! Turn around, quick!"

I turned. Zahn was a few meters behind McMurtrie and me. A big diatryma had come out of the nearest copse and advanced on Hubert, jerking its head back and forth with each stride. Hubert was so absorbed in his photography that he seemed oblivious to the bird's approach.

"Hey, Paul!" I yelled as loudly as I could, at the same time bringing up my own gun. McMurtrie was also trying to get his rifle into the shooting position, but he had got the gun sling tangled with one of his camera straps.

Hubert looked up just as the diatryma stooped, shot out that raptorial head, and snapped up both the snake and its prey. When it raised its head, the snake dangled, writhing, from its beak.

Hubert's obvious cue was to jump up and run like hell. But, as I said, he was an impulsive, hot-tempered bloke. What the silly galah did was to yell: "Bastard!", grab his broad-brimmed canvas hat, and whack the diatryma in the face with it.

I couldn't shoot, because Hubert was directly between me and the diatryma. The bird dropped the snake, shot out that wicked beak, and gave Hubert a mighty peck. Hubert took one step back and fell into the grass.

The diatryma stooped and started looking around for its snake. I fired, and the bird toppled back into the grass.

We all rushed back, but too late to do anything for Paul Hubert. The bird's beak had laid open a gash in his neck as long as the span of your fingers and centimeters deep. Blood was still pouring out. Hubert made a bubbling moan and then lay still. A check of his pulse showed no heart action. I suppose an ambulance with a crew of paramedics could have done something to save him, but we didn't have that.

I took a quick look around for the snake, but there was no sign of it. I imagine that when the bird dropped it, it had beat a hasty retreat, perhaps thanking its reptilian gods for deliverance.

I needn't go into the dismal details of that hike back to camp, with two of us carrying Hubert's body, taking turns. There was no argument for continuing the safari further, although I had planned a stop in the Pliocene. We put the body in a body bag I had stored with our gear. I had packed it without telling anyone, just in case.

While the crew were stowing gear in the chamber, McMurtrie said: "Reggie, may I speak to you privately?"

"Okay," I said. "Let's go over this way, and keep your voice down."

He said: "I saw the whole thing, because I kept looking back when you didn't. The Reverend Zahn saw the bird come out of the woods and start towards Hubert. Instead of warning Hubert, who was so intent on his pictures that he wasn't aware of anything else, Zahn quietly, without a word, started after us. I think he wanted the bird to get Hubert."

"Maybe you've got something," I said, and told McMurtrie about the dispute I had overheard between the preachers the night before, when McMurtrie had been out on watch. "He must have regarded Hubert as a deserter from the army of righteousness."

"It sounds like murder!" said McMurtrie. "Though I don't know if you can indict a man for simply walking away from a disaster in the making. He saw that bird coming and never uttered a peep."

"I doubt if we could make any charge stick," I said. "We never know what's really going on in another bloke's mind, and you'd have a hell of a time proving anything to a jury. Even if we had the good oil on him, he'd claim a murder committed back in the Eocene didn't come under any contemporary laws."

"He doesn't believe we were fifty million years back. Four or five thousand, maybe, to squeeze geological time into the 6,000-year frame of Genesis."

"Four or five thousand would be quite far enough back to antedate the laws of the state of Missouri. No, we'd better leave bad enough alone. This will raise hell with the finances of Rivers and Aiyar; the other time we lost a client we almost went out of business."

That wasn't quite the end of the story. We got back to Present without incident. Zahn took over the disposal of Hubert's body and gear, for which I was grateful. When we parted, he gave me that big, bland smile, waved a farewell, and said:

"Very interesting, Reggie. Very interesting indeed! But I fear you have not converted me to your irreligious views." And off he went.

A few days later, this picket line of marchers from Zahn's church showed up with their signs, some of which not only accused me of being old man Antichrist himself but also implied that I had caused Hubert's death. The story Zahn had told from his pulpit was that I had deliberately exposed Hubert to danger by walking away from him when he wouldn't stop his photographing and come along. As for Gilmore Zahn's part, he said he knew nothing of the diatryma's approach until McMurtrie and I looked around and began shooting. McMurtrie remembered otherwise, so it would have been his word against Zahn's.

In another sermon he made a different claim, that the whole experience was a satanie illusion. They had not gone back in time at all, but I and my assistant devils had cast an illusion on him and Hubert, like the nonsense people think they experience on certain drugs. I couldn't very well disprove this statement, except that it didn't explain why poor young Hubert arrived back in Present dead. But such people don't worry about consistency.

After a few days of picketing, I went to Zahn's sumptuous big church, an ornate structure with lots of gold leaf. I sent word that I wished to speak with Zahn and was led in at once. When we were seated, I told Zahn to call his pickets off, saying:

"McMurtrie and I have sat on the true story of Hubert's death, although Spence has published everything else about the trip in his paper. If you don't call off your dogs, I'll see to it that his unvarnished account is published."

"He could never prove a thing," said Zahn with that damned smile. "Questions of who first saw the bird would be his word against mine, and mine carries a lot of weight."

"I don't doubt that," I said. "But it wouldn't do you and your church any good, now would it?"

"I would sue them for libel!"

"And the paper would counter-sue, and the case would end up enriching the lawyers and impoverishing everyone else."

"I will not be dictated to by a scoffing infidel!"

"I haven't scoffed at you or your beliefs or your church. I daresay it does much good, even if I don't agree with your theology. But I have now told you what I shall do if your people don't leave my partner and me alone. Good-day, sir!"

That was that. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but the next day there were fewer pickets, and the next still fewer. On the third day there was only one sign carrier, and he was the last. I still occasionally saw in the papers where Zahn and his new assistant pastor denounced me as a threat to Christian civilization.

This went on for a year, but then a big scandal blew up. Seems Gilmore Zahn had been siphoning off the church's revenue and spending the money in ways not authorized by his governing board. Officially, it was on certain charitable enterprises he was personally interested in. He did undoubtedly spend some of it thus; whether he also spent some on a dollybird or put it in his own bank account, it was impossible to tell for lack of records. It was plainly illegal, but ostensibly done for such good purposes that they let him off with a slap on the wrist. But a hostile faction in the church used the incident as a pretext for getting him booted out. I don't know where he is now.

Anyway, Mr. Proctor, you can see why I'm averse to leading time safaris to settle theological arguments. Time travel is mysterious enough without dragging in God!