The Fury Out of Time (28 page)

He had no worries, and no responsibilities, and—as long as he stayed out of the swamp—a restful primeval world for a residence.

A world without mountains.

He slipped his four-toed, flat right foot from its moccasin and scratched idly at the missing toe.

“How the devil
would
they go about finding uranium?” he asked himself.

Chapter 3

They set out three days later. The unhuman castaways out of space and the human vagrant from time joined forces to attempt that which all of them knew to be impossible.

The longer Karvel thought about the expedition, the sillier it seemed. The Hras were certain it had no chance of success, and said so.

Nevertheless, the expedition left. It was one of the only two alternatives left to the Hras. They could search, and keep searching; or not search, and resign themselves to remaining where they were. They chose to search.

The entire company came to the edge of the swamp to see the expedition off. Karvel, eager to avoid an orgy of leave-taking, gave a last wave to Hras Drawa and marched away with a firm, steady pace. Not until they had topped the first low hill did he step aside to inspect and count the Hras following him.

There were twenty of them.

Karvel swore fervently. He had asked for six; Hras Drawa wanted to bring all of the Hras. Karvel vetoed that notion emphatically, and also refused to take Hras Drawa. Anyone whose skill was essential in operating the spaceship, he said, or for the production of the fuel, should remain in a safe place and wait. For what would be the point of a hazardous expedition to locate pitchblende if the only Hras who knew what to do with it were lost? And why produce fuel, if no one survived who could navigate the ship?

Eventually Hras Drawa agreed; but six, he said, was an impossibly small number.

“As few as possible, then,” Karvel said.

There were twenty. They plodded past in single file, T poles erect, strange tools and instruments tucked casually under spare arms. If they took pride in the fact that each of them had been carefully selected for this expedition, they were keeping it to themselves. Already the procession looked uncomfortably like a death march.

Karvel had left their selection to Hras Drawa. He asked only that they be properly equipped, and have better than average dexterity in the use of the T pole.

Properly equipped.
Karvel’s bellow of indignation halted them in their tracks. “Where are your supplies?” he demanded. “Your food and water—where are they?”

The Hras bringing up the rear wheezed politely. “We do not need any.”

“Of course you do! We may be gone for many days. You can’t do without food and water indefinitely!”

But perhaps they could. Perhaps, like the camel, they had extra stomachs filled with water, and their barrellike bodies concealed sustaining humps of food reserve.

And yet he hesitated to accept this miraculous solution to a worrisome problem. Even a camel would have to have food and water eventually.

He shrugged, and strode to the head of the column. Already the expedition was shaping up as a nightmare, and nightmares, he told himself grimly, should be for sleeping, and not for marching into in the company of twenty unhuman beings.

“Where’s the direction finder?” he asked.

His second-in-command, Hras Klaa—or Klaaa, or Klaaaa, for the name ended in a gargle of indeterminate duration—stepped forward, saluted, and handed the instrument to him. The salute so startled Karvel that he nearly dropped it.

“Where’d you get that idea?” he demanded.

Hras Klaa stood politely at attention, and did not answer.

Karvel studied the direction finder. Its complicated symbols were vaguely reminiscent of those on the U.O. instruments, but the device was absurdly simple to use. A line of red light widened in the direction of the base, in this case the spaceship. The accuracy diminished with the distance, Hras Drawa had told Karvel, but he did not think that they would travel far enough to be bothered by that Karvel found some consolation in the assurance that he would have no difficulty finding his way back. He had uncertainties enough without having to worry about getting lost.

He selected a course, picked out prominent terrain features for the map he intended to sketch in his notebook as they traveled, and said, “Let’s go.”

At midday they were pushing their way through a forest of giant ferns. The low-lying ground had once been under water, but now the mud of the forest floor had hardened beyond recollection of moisture. A dry stream bed wound through it, and the ferns, too, were drying up.

The Hras wielded their T poles in a frenzied slashing at the enormous, drooping fronds. Karvel shouted a protest as a pole narrowly missed his head and another thumped him in the back.

“This ruckus will attract all the Carnivora for miles around,” he told them.

They continued their terrified flailing until finally they broke out into the open. Karvel stood counting them as they emerged from the forest, and two of the Hras slumped into their sitting-dog positions at his feet.

“What’s the matter?” Karvel asked.

Hras Klaa gave him the inevitable salute. “It is the heat.”

“Heat?” Karvel echoed blankly. The day was warm, but not insufferably so. His own clothing was soaked with perspiration, but that was from the weight of his knapsack and the exertion of dodging T poles. The Hras did not perspire, and if they were being felled by the heat on a day such as this one it could mean only one thing.

“You must be accustomed to a cooler climate,” Karvel said.

“Much cooler,” Hras Klaa agreed.

“So that’s why you don’t wear clothing. The Earth should have a cooler climate somewhere, but we aren’t likely to find it by walking. All of the plant life I’ve seen looks subtropical.”

The Hras gathered about their stricken comrades, and Karvel, with an anxious look at the ferns, asked, “Can’t we get them away from here?”

Impulsively he dumped water on them from his canteen. Some of it got into their breathing bands, and they scrambled to their feet, sputtering indignantly. The other Hras wheezed in amazement.

“What’s the matter?” Karvel asked. “Didn’t you ever try that before?”

They had not.

“Water is nice stuff to have around. I told you to carry some.”

For a time he walked beside the heat victims, but they were apparently unaffected by their experience. Even so, the incident seemed ominous to Karvel. He envisioned himself facing a crisis with half of his company prostrate.

The Hras became increasingly listless as the afternoon wore on. Their pace, which had pushed Karvel uncomfortably when they started out, taxed him more severely when it lagged to a crawl. He knew that they were capable of sudden bursts of startling speed and activity, but evidently sustained effort over a period of time wilted them.

“Perhaps all they need is a siesta,” he told himself hopefully.

He turned the column toward a clump of strange-looking trees that stood on the bank of a small stream. They were short and stubby, with armored trunks and palmlike clusters of small leaves on long stems. The shade that they cast was negligible and the stream held a mere trickle of water, but it was the only oasis that the bleak landscape offered.

Karvel got the Hras settled under the trees, and while they rested he refilled his canteen. Then he took the uranium detector and walked a circle with it. It was a heavy globe of milky crystal not much larger than a golf ball, and it was alleged to glow in the presence of uranium—shine like the sun, Hras Drawa had said. One of the Hras watched it constantly as they traveled.

Karvel did not really expect to find uranium on that parched, rolling plain; but he was certain he would find it, if he found it at all, unexpectedly. For all he knew, this plain of the Age of Reptiles could be the uranium-bearing mountains of the twentieth century.

But the globe did not flicker—did not even reflect the hot afternoon sun—and Karvel completed his circle and silently handed it back to its custodian, Hras Hrul.

They started off strongly after an hour’s rest, but soon the Hras were lagging again. A heavy pine forest angled toward them from the west, sending out thick tongues of growth along the valleys, and Karvel cautiously detoured around them. The Hras seemed irresistibly drawn toward the forest. They kept veering in that direction whenever Karvel was not leading the march, and several times he had to hurry to the head of the column to get them pointed in the direction he wanted to travel.

There was life everywhere. The startlingly strange merged and blended with the unexpectedly familiar. Long-beaked, toothed birds circled above the trees, swarms of insects probed small blossoms in the dry, thick-bladed vegetation that crunched underfoot, and an endless variety of scurrying, lizardlike creatures fled their line of march or watched them warily from a distance.

Twice Karvel glimpsed dinosaurs: a long neck arching briefly beyond a rise of ground; several of an ostrichlike species skipping over a distant hill. He had seen nothing that looked dangerous, nothing that did not timidly seek to avoid them, and yet every faltering footstep the Hras took betrayed their dread.

Reluctantly Karvel began to look for a campsite.

He tossed a question over his shoulder. “Where would you rather spend the night—around a fire in the open, or in the forest?”

Hras Hrul, who was plodding directly behind him, answered immediately with a salute. “The forest.”

Karvel felt doubtful. His instinct told him that reptiles would fear the fire, but his reason was less certain. He’d have to experiment before he risked it.

He turned toward the forest. “Pick your own place, then,” he said.

They followed with alacrity, and abruptly broke into a waddling, panicky run. They were already at work at the edge of the forest when he caught up with them. They were bending young trees to the ground and wedging their T poles into place, and they’d made a good start on a formidable-looking barricade.

Karvel examined it skeptically. It would not keep out anything heavy that chose to crash through it, nor anything agile enough to jump over. He dropped his knapsack and said with a grin, “Carry on.”

He made another wearisome circuit with the uranium detector and had the good luck to secure his supper along the way. It was a large, gaudily colored, saber-toothed lizard, and Karvel regretted his action as soon as he’d killed it. He had never seen a creature with such a nauseous appearance.

“But I’ll probably be eating worse things before this is finished,” he told himself, and carried it back to the forest.

The Hras had completed their barricade, a circle of some fifteen feet in diameter that looked vaguely like a huge nest. The one good feature, Karvel thought, was that nothing could break into it without awaking the whole camp.

“We won’t post sentries until dark,” he said. “Any of you care to share my lizard?”

None of them did. He gathered an armload of dead branches and soon had a small fire going at the edge of the forest. He relaxed in the fading light and watched the sizzling lizard meat. When he forgot what it had come from it looked and smelled almost appetizing. It tasted better than he’d hoped, but not nearly as well as he would have preferred.

It was dark when he finished eating. He drank sparingly and put out the fire. “Time to post sentries!” he called.

There was no answer. He forced his way through the barricade, and inside he found the Hras in doglike crouches, huddled tightly in a circle with their ridiculous little wings outspread protectively. All of them were sound asleep.

He shouted, he prodded and shook them, he tried to jerk their heavy bodies erect. They remained inert under his anxious hands, their deep, circular breathing producing an unbroken, faintly whistling hiss. Finally he desisted and sat alone in the dark, his rifle across his knees, shuddering at the unearthly noises that were flung through the treetops.

The Hras’s fickle stamina was a nuisance he could tolerate, but this was sheer catastrophe. So deep, so hypnotic was their slumber that a hungry carnivore could help itself to one or several Hras steaks and the Hras would know nothing about it until what was left of them woke up in the morning.

He did not wonder that they had limited their previous searches to two days, and that they felt a compelling affinity for the forest as night came on. Even small carnivores would be a terrible menace when they were so helplessly asleep. Several of them could decimate the party—saber-toothed lizards, for example, such as the one he’d eaten.

He leaped up in alarm and played his flashlight over the sleeping Hras. It quickly drew a swarm of gigantic night f insects, so he turned it off and glumly sat down again.

Their camp had to be guarded at night, and obviously the Hras could not do it. If Karvel remained awake at night he would have to get what sleep he could during the day, and even a bare minimum of sleep for himself would cut severely into their traveling time. Their trek would take longer than he’d expected.

And they could not go as far.

On the sixth day they reached the river. The broad, slow-moving, silty water coursed slowly between vast, encrusted mud flats that were crisscrossed with the spoor of enormous, tailed animals. The river, too, was drying up.