BOTANY LESSON
Skip opened two bottles of pop, handed Deidre one, and climbed back up front with his. “Say, look at that crazy tree over there, Mr. Carpenter!”
It was indeed a crazy tree. It had a tail and a big head. And pointed teeth. It was sunning itself in the slanted morning sunlight. It was watching Sam.
A big glob of saliva ran out of the corner of the tyrannosaur’s mouth and dropped with an almost audible plop to the ground. It roared. Or screamed. It was difficult to tell which.
“Lets get out of here!” Skip whispered . . .
Also by Robert F. Young
Published by Ballantine Books:
THE LAST YGGDRASILL
ERIDAHN
ROBERT F. YOUNG
A Del Rey Book
BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK
Published by Ballantine Books
Based on the novelette. “When Time Was New,” copyright © 1964 by The Galaxy Publishing Corporation for If Magazine, December 1964.
Copyright © 1983 by Robert F. Young
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 82-91038
ISBN 0-345-30854-9
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition: June 1983
Cover an by Darrell K. Sweet
To Reggie,
Bonnie,
Eddie,
Mel, and Billy
Chapter 1
THE YOUNG ANATOSAUR standing beneath the ginkgo tree didn’t startle Carpenter, but he was dumbfounded when he saw two kids sitting in the tree’s branches. Since he was in the Age of Reptiles it was only natural that he should meet up with a dinosaur, but it wasn’t in the least natural that he should meet up with a girl and a boy. What in the name of all that was Mesozoic were they doing in the Upper Cretaceous Period?
He leaned forward in the drivers seat of his battery-powered triceratank and stared up into the trees branches through the reptivehicle’s unbreakable windshield, which, from without, was indistinguishable from the reptivehicle’s head. No, the kids weren’t an illusion. They were as real as the anatosaur that had treed them. And they were scared: Their faces were as white as the distant chalklike cliffs that showed to the north above the scattered stands of willows, live oaks, cycads, and ginkgoes that patterned the Cretaceous plain.
Suddenly it dawned on him that they must be connected in some way with the anachronistic fossil whose origin he had come back in time to investigate. Miss Sands, the North American Paleontological Society’s new chronologist, had not spotted them when she timescoped the area, but she could hardly have been expected to, for timescopes could not pick up anything smaller than a sauropod or a hill. The reason he had been taken unawares was that he had failed to think one inch beyond the end of his nose. Simple logic should have told him that if, as the fossil indicated, there were human beings living somewhere in the region, some of them were bound to have children.
The anatosaur was standing on its hind legs, chewing on the lower eaves of the ginkgo tree. Probably it had forgotten all about the two kids it had chased into the branches. But the two kids had not forgotten it, and the appearance of the triceratank, which looked exactly like a ceratopsian of the genus Triceratops elatus, had doubled their fright.
As yet unaware of the mechanical monster creeping up behind it, the anatosaur continued to chomp away with its duck-billed jaws. It was big and fat and flat-headed, with large and powerful lower limbs and much shorter upper ones. It had a long, ponderous tail whose primary purpose was to balance it when it walked. Its skin was muddy brown in color. It was not carnivorous and probably had chased the kids up the tree merely because they happened to be in its way.
“Come on, Sam,” Carpenter said, addressing the triceratank by nickname, “let’s teach it some manners!”
Since emerging from the photon tunnel, NAPS’ big Llonka time machine had drilled down through the eras, he had been traveling in a northerly direction, maintaining a snails pace and looking for some sign of human life. One of the reasons he had failed at first to tie the children in with the fossil was that it consisted of the petrified skeleton of an adult modem man and had led him to think in terms of adults. But the fact that there was only one such skeleton had not led him to think there was only one anachronistic resident of the Upper Cretaceous. In order to have your bones preserved for posterity, you have to be buried in terrain that will not destroy them, and it followed logically that if a human inhabitant of Cretaceous-16—NAPS’ official designation of the area—had been buried in such a way, whether by accident or design, there were other such inhabitants who had not been.
Throwing Sam into higher gear, he sent a charge from the right upper horn-howitzer zooming past the anatosaur’s left hip. The charge struck a nearby cycad, emitted a big bang, and broke the cycad in two. The anatosaur gawked at the broken tree, then, hearing Sam’s approach, twisted its head around. One look at the charging triceratank was enough to send the animal barreling off in the direction of a stand of willows, its tail stretched straight behind it.
Carpenter brought the big reptivehicle to a halt several yards from the ginkgo’s trunk and looked up at the two kids again. Their faces had turned from chalk white to gray. The anatosaur had been bad enough, but now they were apparently threatened by an awesome four-legged, three-horned creature with a countenance capable of scaring all the denizens of C-16, with the glaring exception of Tyrannasaurus rex, out of their wits.
Carpenter slid across the driver’s seat and opened the passenger-side door. Hot and humid but incredibly fresh air rushed into Sam’s air-conditioned interior. He jumped down to the ground, his red plaid shirt, brown trousers, and black boots striking a discordant note in the Cretaceous concerto of times past. The ginkgo stood all by itself on a slight rise. The plain encompassing it extended northward to the chalk-white cliffs, westward to wooded highlands beyond which young mountains rose, eastward to the inland sea that was hidden by numerous stands of trees, and southward to a wide river near whose northern banks the photon field of his entry point was located.
“Come on down, you two. Sam won’t hurt you.”
Two pairs of the widest, bluest eyes he had ever seen focused on his face. The amazement filling them was unleavened by even a particle of understanding.
“I said come on down,” he repeated, beckoning to them. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
The girl and the boy faced each other and began talking in a strange tongue. At length they reached a decision, left their aerie, and shinned down the trunk. They stood there with their backs against it, looking at him.
He walked toward them, halted several feet away. The boy was about nine, the girl about eleven. The boy was wearing a dark-blue short-sleeve blouse with gold piping and trousers to match. The girl was similarly clad, except that her garments were azure and her trousers more like pantaloons. It was hard to tell which outfit was the more disheveled. The girl’s appeared dirtier, probably because of its lighter color. Both pairs of boots were caked with mud. The girl was about an inch taller than the boy. She stood very straight, and she had buttercup-color hair that fell to her shoulders. The boy’s hair was darker and cut short. Both kids had delicate features, and both were thin. Carpenter had a hunch they were brother and sister.
At length the boy, gazing earnestly into Carpenter’s gray eyes, gave voice to a series of phrases. Carpenter shook his head, and the boy spoke in what seemed to be another tongue. Carpenter shook his head again. He spoke to the boy in English, then in French and German, the only other modem languages he was familiar with. Each time the boy shook his head. The girl as yet had not said anything. She just stood there, regarding Carpenter stonily.
He did not try any of the ancient languages he was acquainted with. Modern kids were not apt to be familiar with Aramaic or Ionic or Doric Greek—languages he had studied when pasttripping for NAPS’ sister society, the Historical Investigating Association. For these were modern kids. They had “modern kids” written all over them. He had no idea what modern country they were from, or how they had happened to wind up in C-16. but they must have come back via a Llonka time machine, and it was highly unlikely they had come back alone.
All seemed lost insofar as communication was concerned, but this did not prove to be the case. The boy dug into one of the pockets of his trousers and pulled out what appeared to be two pairs of earrings. He attached one pair to his earlobes and handed the other to Carpenter, indicating for him to attach them to his. The rings were tiny pendants with clamps attached to them. No, not pendants—diaphragms. The clamps were self-adhesive and the diaphragms fitted within Carpenter’s ear openings without interfering with his hearing.
The boy turned to the girl. “Come on, Deidre,” he said in English, “you’ve got a pair with you. Mote than one. I know you have. Put them on.”
Deidre? Well, anyway, the name had sounded like Deidre. The girl pulled out an identical pair of earrings from a pocket in her blouse and attached them to her earlobes. But she had yet to say a word.
Carpenter had a hunch he was being conned. “I must say,” he told the boy drily, “you caught onto my language real fast.”
The boy shook his head, “No, I’m still speaking my own,” he said, and Carpenter saw that his lip movements weren’t synchronized with his words. “The hearrings only make it seem to be your language. They work in conjunction with a person’s auditory nerves and effect an idiomatic translation. People’s names, of course, aren’t translatable, and are made to sound similar to names the hearer’s familiar with. And some words just slip through as they are, because the hearrings aren’t one hundred percent perfect. Anyway, now that both of us are wearing them, whatever I say to you sounds the way you would say it, and whatever you say to me sounds the way I would say it. On Mars we have such a medley of languages a single person could never learn them all. Even in individual countries there are many different tongues. So sooner or later hearrings had to be invented, and finally they were. Almost everybody carries at least two pair.”
“Mars?”
“Yes. Mars is where we’re from. Greater Mars. My name is Skip.”
“What’s your last name?”
The boy appeared puzzled. “People on Mars only have one name.”
“My name’s Jim Carpenter,” Carpenter said. He looked at Deidre. She looked back at him, but in such a way that she seemed to be looking right through him. “Is she your sister?”
“Yes, sir.’’
“Doesn’t she talk?”
“Well, you see, Mr. Carpenter, she can’t talk to you. She’s a princess.”
“I see. Well, if she’s a princess, that means you’re a prince. And you’re talking to me.”
“Yes, but with me its different. She’s next in line for the throne of Greater Mars, and that makes her something special. And not only that,” Skip added, “she’s kind of conceited to begin with.”
Deidre glared a him but said nothing.
“The reason we’re here on Earth,” Skip explained, “is that we were kidnapped.”
* * *
So here I am, Carpenter thought, way back in the Upper Cretaceous, and whom do I rescue from the duck-billed jaws of an anatosaur but a princess of Mars and her younger brother, Skip! And now, it turns out, they were kidnapped!
But what Skip had told him probably was not any harder to believe than what he now proceeded to tell Skip and his sister. “I’m from Earth of the year AD. 1998, which is 74,051,622 years from now.” He pointed to the triceratank. “Sam over there is my van, although actually he’s more like a tank than a van, and, to call a spade a spade, he’s really an armored truck. Sam is his nickname. He has a big Camins engine which works off batteries that the engine keeps recharging, and he’s equipped with a small photon diffusion unit that enables him to make limited jumpbacks in time. After he jumps back, he can return to when he was plus whatever lime he spent in the past, but an inbuilt governor prevents him from jumping any farther into the future. He has automatic holo cameras concealed in his sides, and usually when I go back to prehistorical times I do so solely to make holo documentaries, but this time I came back for an additional reason: to find the origin of a human fossil. New techniques in dating have enabled paleontologists to pinpoint time periods with precise accuracy, and they can determine when whatever turned into a fossil died almost to within a week. But they can’t tell exactly where it happened because of geological changes, in this particular case because of the Laramide Revolution.”
Even Deidre’s eyes had grown large. They made him think of autumn asters.
“Usually when I come back I don’t come back alone,” he went on, “but the holographer who was supposed to come with me quit and I didn’t want to wait for a replacement. I’m supposed to take holographs for two weeks. In case you kids don’t know how a Llonka time machine works, it does so by diffusing light. Light is a sort of yardstick you measure time by, and when you spread it out it loses its continuity and you can travel through time almost the same way you travel through space. Sam provides me with the protection I need from the big theropods and from pteranodons. The North American Paleontological Society, which is the outfit I work for, has other similar vehicles for the Age of Reptiles, and it also has some for the Age of Mammals. But what you see when you look at Sam isn’t exactly what you think you see. He doesn’t really have a tail, and he has treads instead of legs. But an illusion field gives the impression of legs, stationary when he’s stopped and moving when the treads are turning. And it makes you think he’s got a great big tail.”
“Gosh!” Skip said.
It was clear that he believed every word Carpenter had said, even the ones his hearings could not possibly have coped with. Whether or not Princess Deidre did, it was impossible to tell.
“Well,” Skip said, it’s all settled then. We’re from Mars-present and you’re From Earth-future. I knew you couldn’t possibly be a Martian.”
“One small question, Skip. Living on Mars, you can’t possibly be used to Earth gravity, so how could you and your sister have climbed that tree?”
“We just climbed it is all. We didn’t know there was any difference in gravity.”
“But there is. Mars’ gravity is only thirty-eight percent that of Earth’s.”
“You’re talking about Mars-future, Mr. Carpenter. We’re from Mars-present. Maybe gravity on Mars is stronger now than it will be in the future.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Then maybe there’s more gravity on Mars-future than you think. Have you ever been there, Mr. Carpenter? Has anyone from Earth-future?”
“No. But we know what the gravity is.”
“Maybe if someone from Earth landed there and walked around, they’d he surprised.”
Carpenter, realizing he was getting nowhere, relinquished the argument.
Perhaps the two kids really were from Mars. Perhaps they really had been kidnapped.
But they could be from Earth-future and still have been kidnapped.
He began to feel foolish about telling them about the Llonka time machine and about NAPS and about Sam. Probably they had learned all about modem-day paleontological work in school.
Then why had their eyes grown so large?
The sun was halfway down the afternoon slope of the Cretaceous sky, and its light, slightly muted by the hazy atmosphere, lay softly upon Deidre’s and Skip’s faces. He saw how thin their cheeks were; he looked at their thin arms. If they really had been kidnapped, the kidnappers certainly had not fed them very well.
Could they possibly be from Mars?...
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