Rainbow Mars (34 page)

He felt the change; he felt both strong and light-headed, like a drunken ballet master. And if he now narrowed the focus …

The monster's teeth seemed to grind harder. Svetz looked between them, as best he could.

Leviathan was no longer floating. He was hanging straight down from the extension cage, hanging by his teeth. The antigravity beamers still balanced the pull of his mass; but now they did so by pulling straight up on the extension cage.

The monster was in obvious distress. Naturally. A water beast, he was supporting his own mass for the first time in his life. And by his teeth! His yellow eyes rolled frantically. His tail twitched slightly at the very tip. And still he clung …

“Let go,” said Svetz. “Let go, you … monster.”

The monster's teeth slid screeching down the transparent surface, and he fell.

Svetz cut the antigravity a fraction of a second late. He smelled burnt oil, and there were tiny red lights blinking off one by one on his control board.

Leviathan hit the water with a sound of thunder. His long, sinuous body rolled over and floated to the surface and lay as if dead. But his tail flicked once, and Svetz knew that he was alive.

“I could kill you,” said Svetz. “Hold the stunners on you until you're dead. There's time enough…”

But he still had ten minutes to search for a sperm whale. It wasn't time enough. It didn't begin to be time enough, but if he used it all …

The sea serpent flicked its tail and began to swim away. Once he rolled to look at Svetz, and his jaws opened wide in fury. He finished his roll and was fleeing again.

“Just a minute,” Svetz said thickly. “Just a science-perverting minute there…” And he swung the stunners to focus.

*   *   *

Gravity behaved strangely inside an extension cage. While the cage was moving forward in time,
down
was all directions outward from the center of the cage. Svetz was plastered against the curved wall. He waited for the trip to end.

Seasickness was nothing compared to the motion sickness of time travel.

Free fall, then normal gravity. Svetz moved unsteadily to the door.

Ra Chen was waiting to help him out. “Did you get it?”

“Leviathan? No sir.” Svetz looked past his boss. “Where's the big extension cage?”

“We're bringing it back slowly, to minimize the gravitational side effects. But if you don't have the whale—”

“I said I don't have Leviathan.”

“Well, just what
do
you have?” Ra Chen demanded.

Somewhat later he said, “It wasn't?”

Later yet he said, “You killed him? Why, Svetz? Pure spite?”

“No, sir. It was the most intelligent thing I did during the entire trip.”

“But
why?
Never mind, Svetz, here's the big extension cage.” A gray-blue shadow congealed in the hollow cradle of the time machine. “And there does seem to be something in it. Hi, you idiots, throw an antigravity beam inside the cage! Do you want the beast crushed?”

The cage had arrived. Ra Chen waved an arm in signal. The door opened.

Something tremendous hovered within the big extension cage. It looked like a malevolent white mountain in there, peering back at its captors with a single tiny, angry eye. It was trying to get at Ra Chen, but it couldn't swim in air.

Its other eye was only a torn socket. One of its flippers was ripped along the trailing edge. Rips and ridges and puckers of scar tissue, and a forest of broken wood and broken steel, marked its tremendous expanse of albino skin. Lines trailed from many of the broken harpoons. High up on one flank, bound to the beast by broken and tangled lines, was the corpse of a bearded man with one leg.

“Hardly in mint condition, is he?” Ra Chen observed.

“Be careful, sir. He's a killer. I saw him ram a sailing ship and sink it clean before I could focus the stunners on him.”

“What amazes me is that you found him at all in the time you had left. Svetz, I do not understand your luck. Or am I missing something?”

“It wasn't luck, sir,” Svetz hurried to explain. “The sea serpent was just leaving the vicinity. I wanted to kill him, but I knew I didn't have the time. I was about to leave myself, when he turned back and bared his teeth.

“He was an obvious carnivore. Those teeth were built strictly for killing, sir. I should have noticed earlier. And I could think of only one animal big enough to feed a carnivore that size.”

“Ah-h-h. Brilliant, Svetz.”

“There was corroborative evidence. Our research never found any mention of giant sea serpents. The great geological surveys of the first century Post Atomic should have turned up something. Why didn't they?”

“Because the sea serpent quietly died out two centuries earlier, after whalers killed off his food supply.”

Svetz colored. “Exactly. So I turned the stunners on Leviathan before he could swim away, and I kept the stunners on him until the NAI said he was dead. I reasoned that if Leviathan was here, there must be whales in the vicinity.”

“And Leviathan's nervous output was masking the signal.”

“Sure enough, it was. The moment he was dead the NAI registered another signal. I followed it to—” Svetz jerked his head. They were floating the whale out of the extension cage. “To him.”

*   *   *

Days later, two men stood on one side of a thick glass wall.

“We took some clones from him, then passed him on to the Secretary-General's Vivarium,” said Ra Chen. “Pity you had to settle for an albino.” He waved aside Svetz's protest: “I know, I know, you were pressed for time.”

Beyond the glass, the one-eyed whale glared at Svetz through murky seawater. Surgeons had removed most of the harpoons, but scars remained along his flanks; and Svetz, awed, wondered how long the beast had been at war with Man. Centuries? How long did sperm whales live?

Ra Chen lowered his voice. “We'd all be in trouble if the Secretary-General found out that there was once a bigger animal than this. You understand that, don't you, Svetz?”

“Yes sir.”

“Good.” Ra Chen's gaze swept across another glass wall, and a fire-breathing Gila monster. Further down, a horse looked back at him along the dangerous spiral horn in its forehead.

“Always we find the unexpected,” said Ra Chen. “Sometimes I wonder…”

If you'd do your research better,
Svetz thought …

“Did you know that time travel wasn't even a concept until the first century Ante Atomic? A writer invented it. From then until the fourth century Post Atomic, time travel was pure fantasy. It violates everything the scientists of the time thought were natural laws. Logic. Conservation of matter and energy. Momentum, reaction, any law of motion that makes time a part of the statement. Relativity.

“It strikes me,” said Ra Chen, “that every time we push an extension cage past that particular four-century period, we shove it into a kind of fantasy world. That's why you keep finding giant sea serpents and fire-breathing—”

“That's nonsense,” said Svetz. He was afraid of his boss, yes; but there were limits.

“You're right,” Ra Chen said instantly. Almost with relief. “Take a month's vacation, Svetz, then back to work. The Secretary-General wants a bird.”

“A bird?” Svetz smiled. A bird sounded harmless enough. “I suppose he found it in another children's book?”

“That's right. Ever hear of a bird called a
roc?
”

BIRD IN THE HAND

“It's not a roc,” said Ra Chen.

The bird looked stupidly back at them from behind a thick glass wall. Its wings were small and underdeveloped; its legs and feet were tremendous, ludicrous. It weighed three hundred pounds and stood nearly eight feet tall.

Other than that, it looked a lot like a baby chick.

“It kicked me,” Svetz complained. A slender, small-boned man, he stood stiffly this day, with a slight list to port. “It kicked me in the side and broke four ribs. I barely made it back to the extension cage.”

“It still isn't a roc. Sorry about that, Svetz. We did some research in the history section of the Beverly Hills Library while you were in the hospital. The roc was only a legend.”

“But look at it!”

Svetz's beefy, red-faced boss nodded. “That's probably what started the legend. Early explorers in Australia saw these—
ostriches
wandering about. They said to themselves, ‘If the chicks are this size, what are the adults like?' Then they went home and told stories about the adults.”

“I got my ribs caved in for a flightless bird?”

“Cheer up, Svetz. It's not a total loss. The ostrich was extinct. It makes a fine addition to the Secretary-General's Vivarium.”

“But the Secretary-General wanted a roc. What are you going to tell him?”

Ra Chen scowled. “It's worse than that. Do you know what the Secretary-General wants now?”

People meeting Ra Chen for the first time thought he was constantly scowling, until they saw his
scowl.
Svetz had suspected Ra Chen was worried. Now he knew it.

The Secretary-General was everybody's problem. A recessive gene inherited from his powerful, inbred family had left him with the intelligence of a six-year-old child. Another kind of inheritance had made him overlord of the Earth and its colonies. His whim was law throughout the explored universe.

Whatever the Secretary-General wanted now, it was vital that he get it.

“Some idiot took him diving in Los Angeles,” Ra Chen said. “He wants to see the city before it sank.”

“That doesn't sound too bad.”

“It wouldn't be, if it had stopped there. Some of his Circle of Advisors noticed his interest. They got him historical tapes on Los Angeles. He loves them. He wants to join the first Watts Riot.”

Svetz gulped. “That should raise some security problems.”

“You'd think so, wouldn't you? The Secretary-General is almost pure caucasian.”

The ostrich cocked its head to one side, studying them. It still looked like the tremendous chick of an even bigger bird. Svetz could imagine that it had just cracked its way out of an egg the size of a bungalow.

“I'm going to have a headache,” he said. “Why do you tell me these things? You
know
I don't like politics.”

“Can you imagine what would happen if the Secretary-General got himself killed with the help of the Institute for Temporal Research? There are enough factions already that would like to see us disbanded. Space, for instance; they'd
love
to swallow us up.”

“But what can we do? We can't turn down a direct request from the Secretary-General!”

“We can distract him.”

They had lowered their voices to conspiratorial whispers. Now they turned away from the ostrich and strolled casually down the line of glass cages.

“How?”

“I don't know yet. If I could only get to his nurse,” Ra Chen said between his teeth. “I've tried hard enough. Maybe the Institute for Space Research has bought her. Then again, maybe she's loyal. She's been with him twenty-four years.

“How do I know what would catch his attention? I've only met the Secretary-General four times, all on formal occasions. But his attention span is low. He'd forget about Los Angeles if we could distract him.”

The cage they were passing was labeled:

ELEPHANT

Retrieved from the year 700 Ante Atomic, approximately, from the region of India, Earth. EXTINCT.

The wrinkled gray beast watched them go with sleepy indifference. His air of inhuman age and wisdom was such that he must have recognized Svetz as his captor. But he didn't care.

Svetz had captured almost half of the animals in the Vivarium. And Svetz was afraid of animals. Especially big animals. Why did Ra Chen keep sending him after animals?

The thirty feet of lizard in the next cage (
GILA MONSTER,
the placard said) definitely recognized Svetz. It jetted orange-white flame at him, and flapped its tiny batlike wings in fury when the flame washed harmlessly across the glass. If it ever got loose—

But that was why the cages were airtight. The animals of Earth's past must be protected from the air of Earth's present.

Svetz remembered the cobalt-blue sky of Earth's past and was reassured. Today's afternoon sky was brilliant turquoise at the zenith, shading through pastel green and yellow to rich yellow-brown near the horizon. If the Chinese fire-breather ever got out, it would be too busy gasping for purer air to attack Svetz.

“What can we get him? I think he's tired of these animals. Svetz, what about a giraffe?”

“A what?”

“Or a dog, or a satyr … it's got to be unusual,” Ra Chen muttered. “A teddy bear?”

Out of his fear of animals, Svetz ventured, “I wonder if you might not be on the wrong track, sir.”

“Mph? Why?”

“The Secretary-General has enough animals to satisfy a thousand men. Worse than that, you're competing with Space when you bring back funny animals. They can do that too.”

Ra Chen scratched behind his ear. “I never thought of that. You're right. But we've got to do
something.
”

“There must be lots of things to do with a time machine.”

*   *   *

They could have taken a displacement plate back to the Center. Ra Chen preferred to walk. It would give him a chance to think, he said.

Svetz walked with bowed head and blind eyes alongside his boss. Inspiration had come to him at similar times. But they had reached the red sandstone cube that was the Center, and the mental lightning had not struck.

A big hand closed on his upper arm. “Just a minute,” Ra Chen said softly. “The Secretary-General's paying us a visit.”