The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (24 page)

The sign on the glass read:

GILA MONSTER

RETRIEVED FORM THE YEAR 1230 ANTE ATOMIC, APPROXIAMTELY

FROM THE REGION OF CHINA, EARTH:EXTINCT

“You’ll be well out of his reach,” said Ra Chen.

“Yes, sir.” Svetz stood with his arms folded about him, as if he had a chill. He was being sent after the biggest animal that had ever lived; and Svetz was afraid of animals.

“For Science’s sake! What are you worried about, Svetz? It’s only a big fish!”

“Yes, sir. You said that about the Gila monster. It’s just an extinct lizard, you said.”

“We only had a drawing in a children’s book to go by. How could we know it would be so big?”

The Gila monster drew back from the glass. It inhaled hugely, took aim—yellow and orange flame spewed from its nostrils and played across the glass. Svetz squeaked and jumped for cover.

“He can’t get through,” said Ra Chen.

Svetz picked himself up. He was a slender, small-boned man with pale skin, light blue eyes, and very fine ash-blond hair. “How could we know it would breathe fire?” he mimicked. “That lizard almost
cremated
me. I spent four months in the hospital as it was. And what really burns me is, he looks less like the drawing every time I see him. Sometimes I wonder if I didn’t get the wrong animal.”

“What’s the difference, Svetz? The Secretary-General loved him. That’s what counts.”

“Yes, sir. Speaking of the Secretary-General, what does he want with a sperm whale?

He’s got a horse, he’s got a Gila monster—”

“That’s a little complicated.” Ra Chen grimaced. “Palace politics! It’s
always
complicated. Right now, Svetz, somewhere in the United Nations Palace, a hundred plots are in various stages of development. And every last one of them involves getting the attention of the Secretary-General, and
holding
it. Keeping his attention isn’t easy.”

Svetz nodded. Everybody knew about the Secretary-General.

The family that had ruled the United Nations for seven hundred years was somewhat inbred.

The Secretary-General was twenty-eight years old. He was a happy person; he loved animals and flowers and pictures and people. Pictures of planets and multiple star systems made him clap his hands and coo with delight; and so the Institute for Space Research was mighty in the United Nations government. But he liked extinct animals too.

“Someone managed to convince the Secretary-General that he wants the largest animal on Earth. The idea may have been to take us down a peg or two,” said Ra Chen.

“Someone may think we’re getting too big a share of the budget.

“By the time I got onto it, the Secretary-General wanted a brontosaur. We’d never have gotten him that. No extension cage will reach that far.”

“Was it your idea to get him a sperm whale, sir?”

“Yah. It wasn’t easy to persuade him. Sperm whales have been extinct for so long that we don’t even have pictures. All I had to show him was a crystal sculpture from Archeology—dug out of the Steuben Glass Building—and a Bible and a dictionary. I managed to convince him that Leviathan and the sperm whale were one and the same.”

“That’s not strictly true.” Svetz had read a computer-produced condensation of the Bible. The condensation had ruined the plot, in Svetz’s opinion. “Leviathan could be anything big and destructive, even a horde of locusts.”

“Thank Science you weren’t there to help, Svetz! The issue was confused enough.

Anyway, I promised the Secretary-General the largest animal that ever lived on Earth.

All the literature says that that animal was a sperm whale. There were sperm whale herds all over the oceans as recently as the first century Ante Atomic. You shouldn’t have any trouble finding one.”

“In twenty minutes?”

Ra Chen looked startled. “What?”

“If I try to keep the big extension cage in the past for more than twenty minutes, I’ll never be able to bring it home. The—”

“I know that.”

“—uncertainty factor in the energy constants—”

“Svetz—”

“—blow the Institute right off the map.”

“We thought of that, Svetz. You’ll go back in the small extension cage. When you find a whale, you’ll signal the big extension cage.”

“Signal it how?”

“We’ve found a way to send a simple on-off pulse through time. Let’s go back to the Institute and I’ll show you.”

Malevolent golden eyes watched them through the glass as they walked away.

The extension cage was the part of the time machine that did the moving. Within its transparent shell, Svetz seemed to ride a flying armchair equipped with an airplane passenger’s lunch tray; except that the lunch tray was covered with lights and buttons and knobs and crawling green lines. He was somewhere off the east coast of North America, in or around the year 100 Ante Atomic or 1845 Anno Domini. The inertial calendar was not particularly accurate.

Svetz skimmed low over water the color of lead, beneath a sky the color of slate. But for the rise and fall of the sea, he might almost have been suspended in an enormous sphere painted half light, half dark. He let the extension cage fly itself, twenty meters above the water, while he watched the needle on the NAI, the Nervous Activities Indicator.

Hunting Leviathan.

His stomach was uneasy. Svetz had thought he was adjusting to the peculiar gravitational side effects of time travel. But apparently not.

At least he would not be here long.

On this trip he was not looking for a mere forty-foot Gila monster. Now he hunted the largest animal that had ever lived. A most conspicuous beast. And now he had a life-seeking instrument, the NAI...

The needle jerked hard over, and trembled.

Was it a whale? But the needle was trembling in apparent indecision. A cluster of sources, then. Svetz looked in the direction indicated.

A clipper ship, winged with white sail, long and slender and graceful as hell.

Crowded, too, Svetz guessed. Many humans, closely packed, would affect the NAI in just that manner. A sperm whale—a single center of complex nervous activity—would attract the needle as violently, without making it jerk about like that.

The ship would interfere with reception. Svetz turned east and away; but not without regret. The ship was beautiful.

The uneasiness in Svetz’s belly was getting worse, not better.

Endless gray-green water, rising and falling beneath Svetz’s flying armchair.

Enlightenment came like something clicking in his head.
Seasick.
On automatic, the extension cage matched its motion to the surface over which it flew; and that surface was heaving in great dark swells.

No wonder his stomach was uneasy! Svetz grinned and reached for the manual controls.

The NAI needle suddenly jerked hard over. A bite! thought Svetz, and he looked off to the right. No sign of a ship. And submarines hadn’t been invented yet. Had they? No, of course they hadn’t.

The needle was rock-steady.

Svetz flipped the call button.

The source of the tremendous NAI signal was off to his right, and moving. Svetz turned to follow it. It would be minutes before the call signal reached the Institute for Temporal Research and brought the big extension cage with its weaponry for hooking Leviathan.

Many years ago, Ra Chen had dreamed of rescuing the Library at Alexandria from Caesar’s fire. For this purpose he had built the big extension cage. Its door was a gaping iris, big enough to be loaded while the Library was actually burning. Its hold, at a guess, was at least twice large enough to hold all the scrolls in that ancient Library.

The big cage had cost a fortune in government money. It had failed to go back beyond 400 A.A., or 1550 A.D. The books burned at Alexandria were still lost to history, or at least to historians.

Such a boondoggle would have broken other men. Somehow Ra Chen had survived the blow to his reputation.

He had pointed out the changes to Svetz after they returned from the Zoo. “We’ve fitted the cage out with heavy-duty stunners and antigravity beams. You’ll operate them by remote control. Be careful not to let the stun beam touch you. It would kill even a sperm whale if you held it on him for more than a few seconds, and it’d kill a man instantly. Other than that you should have no problems.”

It was at that moment that Svetz’s stomach began to hurt.

“Our major change is the call button. It will actually send us a signal through time, so that we can send the big extension cage back to you. We can land it right beside you, no more than a few minutes off. That took considerable research, Svetz. The Treasury raised our budget for this year so that we could get that whale.”

Svetz nodded.

“Just be sure you’ve got a whale before you call for the big extension cage.”

Now, twelve hundred years earlier, Svetz followed an underwater source of nervous impulse. The signal was intensely powerful. It could not be anything smaller than an adult bull sperm whale.

A shadow formed in the air to his right. Svetz watched it take shape: a great gray-blue sphere floating beside him. Around the rim of the door were antigravity beamers and heavy duty stun guns. The opposite side of the sphere wasn’t there; it simply faded away.

To Svetz that was the most frightening thing about any time machine: the way it seemed to turn a corner that wasn’t there.

Svetz was almost over the signal. Now he used the remote controls to swing the antigravity beamers around and down.

He had them locked on the source. He switched them on, and dials surged.

Leviathan was
heavy.
More massive than Svetz had expected. Svetz upped the power, and watched the NAI needle swing as Leviathan rose invisibly through the water.

Where the surface of the water bulged upward under the attack of the antigravity beams, a shadow formed. Leviathan rising...

Was there something wrong with the shape?

Then a trembling spherical bubble of water rose shivering from the ocean, and Leviathan was within it.

Partly within it. He was too big to fit, though he should not have been.

He was four times as massive as a sperm whale should have been, and a dozen times as long. He looked nothing like the crystal Steuben sculpture. Leviathan was a kind of serpent armored with red-bronze scales as big as a Viking’s shield, armed with teeth like ivory spears. His triangular jaws gaped wide. As he floated toward Svetz he writhed, seeking with his bulging yellow eyes for whatever strange enemy had subjected him to this indignity.

Svetz was paralyzed with fear and indecision. Neither then nor later did he doubt that what he saw was the Biblical Leviathan. This had to be the largest beast that had ever roamed the sea; a beast large enough and fierce enough to be synonymous with anything big and destructive. Yet—if the crystal sculpture was anything like representational, this was not a sperm whale at all.

In any case, he was far too big for the extension cage.

Indecision stayed his hand—and then Svetz stopped thinking entirely, as the great slitted irises found him.

The beast was floating past him. Around its waist was a sphere of weightless water, that shrank steadily as gobbets dripped away and rained back to the sea. The beast’s nostrils flared—it was obviously an air-breather, though not a cetacean.

It stretched, reaching for Svetz with gaping jaws.

Teeth like scores of elephant’s tusks all in a row. Polished and needle sharp. Svetz saw them close about him from above and below, while he sat frozen in fear.

At the last moment he shut his eyes tight.

When death did not come, Svetz opened his eyes.

The jaws had not entirely closed on Svetz and his armchair. Svetz heard them grinding faintly against—against the invisible surface of the extension cage, whose existence Svetz had forgotten entirely.

Svetz resumed breathing. He would return home with an empty extension cage, to face the wrath of Ra Chen... a fate better than death. Svetz moved his fingers to cut the antigravity beams from the big extension cage.

Metal whined against metal. Svetz whiffed hot oil, while red lights bloomed all over his lunch-tray control board. He hastily turned the beams on again.

The red lights blinked out one by reluctant one.

Through the transparent shell Svetz could hear the grinding of teeth. Leviathan was trying to chew his way into the extension cage.

His released weight had nearly torn the cage loose from the rest of the time machine.

Svetz would have been stranded in the past, a hundred miles out to sea, in a broken extension cage that probably wouldn’t float, with an angry sea monster waiting to snap him up. No, he couldn’t turn off the antigravity beamers.

But the beamers were on the big extension cage, and he couldn’t keep the big extension cage more than about fifteen minutes longer. When the big extension cage was gone, what would prevent Leviathan from pulling him to his doom?

“I’ll stun him off,” said Svetz.

There was dark red palate above him, and red gums and forking tongue beneath, and the long curved fangs all around. But between the two rows of teeth Svetz could see the big extension cage, and the battery of stunners around the door. By eye he rotated the stunners until they pointed straight toward Leviathan. 

“I must be out of my mind,” said Svetz, and he spun the stunners away from him. He couldn’t fire the stunners at Leviathan without hitting himself.

And Leviathan wouldn’t let go.

Trapped.

No,
he thought with a burst of relief. He could escape with his life. The go-home lever would send his small extension cage out from between the jaws of Leviathan, back into the time stream, back to the Institute. His mission had failed, but that was hardly his fault. Why had Ra Chen been unable to uncover mention of a sea serpent bigger than a sperm whale?

“It’s all his fault,” said Svetz. And he reached for the go-home lever. But he stayed his hand.

“I can’t just tell him so,” he said. For Ra Chen terrified him.

The grinding of teeth came itchingly through the extension cage.

“Hate to just quit,” said Svetz. “Think I’ll try something... “