‘But she can,’ von Billmann said. ‘The tribe has stories of men and women, and children, who have made themselves sick, killed themselves, with grief at the loss or prolonged absence of a loved one. It’s a psychological mechanism, true, but it operates far too effectively.’
‘We don’t know that that is the cause of her sickness,’ Rachel said.
‘True. But until we have a better explanation, I’ll accept grief.’
Rachel stayed with Laminak even after Glamug returned and began to make the camp hideous with his howlings, shrill chantings, rattlings, bull roarings, and sudden shrieks. She did all she could to help the girl and at the same time stay out of Glamug’s way. She also kept a close observation of the progress of the illness for the expedition’s records.
The morning of the third day, just as the sun came up, Laminak breathed her death rattle.
Glamug stopped his shuffling and chanting, got down on his knees, and marked her forehead and breasts with red ocher.
Then he stood up, removed his mask, and looked at Rachel with tired eyes and drooping face.
‘For a little while last night, I rested,’ he said. ‘And I had a vision. I saw Koorik running toward us across a field with a high cliff ahead. And behind him bounded a lion. The lion was very close, and then Koorik was running through the shallow stream at the base of the cliff. This slowed him down, and the lion roared with triumph, and it seized Koorik. And then they were rolling in the water, and Koorik had only his shining gray knife to defend himself against the great lion. His thunder stick was empty; it had lost its death-dealing powers. And his spear was in the throat of a lioness, the mate of the lion that pursued Koorik.’
Rachel understood that Glamug had fallen asleep for a few minutes, though she could have sworn that his racket had gone on all night without a second’s break. He had had a dream and, as was the custom, he must tell the nearest person the dream as soon as possible.
‘Did Koorik get away from the lion? Or was he… ?’
‘Was he killed?’ Glamug said. ‘I do not know. The vision faded, and I was sitting outside the tent of Laminak and shivering with the cold. Not with the cold of the night wind, because that was warm. With the cold of the wind that blows death.’
Rachel told Drummond and Robert of Glamug’s vision. Drummond scoffed at it, saying that it was a wish on the part of the witch doctor, who must resent Gribardsun’s takeover of his role as healer. That was all there was to it. Von Billmann, who had experience with sanctuary people, was not so skeptical.
‘But if his dream was a form of telepathy, why didn’t I see John instead of Glamug? I’m much closer to John than that primitive quack!’
‘He’s no quack; he believes in what he does and practices to the best of his ability,’ von Billmann said. ‘As for why he received the message - if there was a message - well, he is a receiver, and you are not. He’s tuned in, on the proper wavelength.’
Rachel sneered, but she was worried. She would have laughed about the vision in her own environment, the towering many-leveled twenty-first-century megalopolis, but in this savage world it was as easy to believe in ESP and ghosts as it was to believe in mammoths and cave lions. It was summer and therefore hot. The huge deer flies and the smaller flies were numerous, and the tribe must not be kept too long from reaping the summer. The wake took place that day, and Laminak was buried at dawn the next morning. A hole five feet long and three feet wide and two feet deep was dug. A mammoth hide was placed in the bottom of the hole and on this bear hides were placed. Laminak, wrapped around the loins with the fur of a female bear cub, her body elsewhere daubed with red ocher, and a chaplet of bright saxifrage around her head, was carried by four men to the grave. There, while drums beat, flutes wailed, and a bull roarer boomed, she was placed on her right side. Her face was toward the rising sun. She wore a strand of sea shells around her neck, and a wooden doll with human hair, the doll she had put aside two years ago but kept with her few valuables, was placed by her side.
More bright saxifrage petals were strewn over her and two mammoth tusks were crossed over her. Then dirt was thrown over her with wooden shovels, and afterward large rocks were piled over the dirt to keep the hyenas and the wolves off.
Rachel wept as the dirt fell over the blue-gray, red-streaked face and the bright yellow hair. She had resented, even disliked the child, because of her love for Gribardsun and his obvious affection for her. But she was crying, and it may have been for both reasons. Even she did not know. But there was no doubt that in the death of the girl she saw more than one death. Perhaps she was reminded of the inevitability of the death of everyone who had been born and who was to be born. Of what use was life when it must end? Once you were dead, it did not matter if you had lived a hundred years, a happy hundred years. You did not know that you had lived, and you might as well never have lived.
Time had discarded Laminak, and Time would remove even the evidences of her burial. Rachel knew every inch of this area, because part of her training for the expedition had been an archeological survey of the territory. Every bit had been dug up, and there was no grave here in Rachel’s time. There was not even evidence that Laminak’s tribe had camped for generations under this overhang. Sometime in the postglacial age, storms, heavy rains, and floods would wash away everything from under the overhang down to the time when Neanderthals had lived here. And then the dirt deposited above the Neanderthal layers would be free of human traces. And Laminak’s grave would be washed out and her bones carried down the valley and lost somewhere in the river. The waters would come with such force they would roll away even the large stones piled above her.
When the last stone had been placed, Glamug danced nine times around the grave, shaking the baton to the north, east, south, and west. Then he abruptly quit the place, walking toward his tent, where his wife had prepared a broth of water and various boiled roots in a bowl made from the skull of a reindeer. He would drink that cleansing drink, and the ceremony would be over.
Two days later, Rachel saw John Gribardsun. She had been filing away the film pellets and specimens in the vessel. Her work completed, she left the vessel and at once saw the tiny figure far to the northwest. Even at that distance, it was obviously John. Using her binoculars, she was able to amplify him enough so that she could see the details of his face. Her heart began beating even more rapidly.
He recognized her and waved at her but did not increase his pace. He was trotting along at a rate that would have prostrated the other scientists and would have left even the strongest of the tribespeople far behind. Yet, when he stopped before her, he was not breathing overly hard.
He smiled and said, ‘Hello!’ and she came to him put her arms around him, and wept. She told him of Laminak and, with a cruelty she could not understand until later, told him that Laminak had died of grief for him.
Gribardsun pushed her away and said, ‘You don’t really know what killed her, do you? The analyzer isn’t infallible or panoramic in its coverage of diseases, you know.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have told you that. But all of us thought that was why she died. It was so evident.’
‘I can’t be bound to one place or to one person,’ he said. ‘If what you say is true, then she would have been…’
‘Unsuitable for you?’ she said. ‘She wouldn’t have made a good wife for you after all? John, you must be out of your mind. She couldn’t have gone with you to our time. She would have died there, in an alien and completely bewildering world, and cut off from her tribe. If she died just because she thought you would never return, she surely would have died if she were separated forever from her own people. You know how these primitives are.’
‘I didn’t say I planned to marry her,’ he said. ‘I was very fond of her. And I feel - I feel…’
He turned away and walked around to the other side of the vessel. Rachel wept again, this time partly for her sympathy with him, because she was sure he was crying for Laminak, an
d partly for herself, because his grief for Laminak meant that he did not love Rachel. Or perhaps her tears were for everybody.
A few minutes later, his eyes red, he reappeared. ‘Let’s go to the camp,’ he said. ‘You tell me what’s happened while I’ve been gone.’
But Rachel insisted on knowing whether or not he had been attacked by lions. He was surprised, but when she told him of Glamug’s vision, he said, ‘He does have a form of ESP. Nothing too rare in that among preliterates. Yes, I had a run-in with a lion and his mate, and things went much as Glamug said.’
‘But he said you had only a knife to defend yourself against an unwounded lion.’
‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘And here I am, and the lion is dead.’
And that was all he would say about the incident.
That night, while his colleagues and the chief men of the two tribes sat around a large fire, he described his journey. He had traveled northwestward on as straight a line as he could maintain. He averaged about fifty miles a day, though there were a few days when he just walked along so that he could make a rapid study of the terrain and the fauna and flora. He had crossed the land that would be under the English Channel when the glaciers had sufficiently melted. He found the Thames and the site of what would be London, much of which was covered with marsh or shallow lakes.
The land was even more barren and tundra-like than in France. He had seen a few mammoths and rhinoceroses, but exceedingly few lions, bears, or hyenas. But there were many wolves, which hunted mostly the reindeer and horses.
He had seen not a single human being, though there should be a few in England along the southern coast.
He journeyed northward and found that the glacier did not cover the site of his ancestral hall between the sites of Chesterfield and Bakewell in Derbyshire-to-be. But it had only recently retreated, and nothing but moss and some azaleas and saxifrage were growing. Gribardsun’s other main ancestral holding, in Yorkshire, where his family’s twelfth-century castle would stand, was still covered with hundreds of feet of ice.
‘I made a number of observations along the glacial front, traveling a hundred miles along it,’ he said. ‘And then I turned back and headed toward home. But I was held up for two days in a cave in the land bridge by a pack of wolves who didn’t seem to know they should have an instinctive fear of man. There must have been over fifty in the pack; I’ve never seen such a large one.’
‘What happened to your rifle?’ von Billmann asked.
‘I lost it when I was climbing up the hill to get away from the wolves. I was stopping now and then to shoot one, but they were not discouraged by their losses. They just ate their dead and kept on after me. I think they were especially hungry, otherwise they wouldn’t have been so determined.
‘Anyway, I slipped and had to grab hold of indentations in the rocks to keep from falling into their mouths. And the rifle went down a fissure, and I could not reach it after I got rid of the wolves. So I went on.’
‘You should have taken a revolver,’ Rachel said.
‘I wanted as little weight as possible.’
‘But how did you get rid of the wolves if you had only your knife?’ Drummond asked him. Gribardsun had told them that the spear he had used on the lioness had been made after the wolf incident.
‘I killed a few as they came up the hill at me,’ Gribardsun said. ‘They could only squeeze through the opening into the cave one at a time. After a while, they gave up. I think they’d eaten so many of their own pack, the edge of their hunger was gone.’
When told that Drummond had regained his sanity, Gribardsun had made only one comment. He said that he hoped that Dummond had regained all of his mind. Rachel supposed that he meant by that that he hoped Drummond had gotten over his desire to kill her and Gribardsun.
Drummond assured them that he had accepted reality, and that, whatever they did, he would not try any violence. Not that he ever had, except for the time when he had shot at Rachel.
Gribardsun gave Drummond a series of psychological tests designed to uncover deeply hidden feelings of violence toward particular persons. The results seemed to satisfy him, since he gave Drummond firearms. But Rachel noticed that Gribardsun never allowed Drummond to get behind him when he was armed.
Something decisive had happened to that group. Though there was always a certain amount of reserve among the three - von Billmann alone being treated quite warmly by all the others - they got along with a minimum of friction. All worked harder than before. Moreover, there were long periods when they did not see each other. Their studies of the area around the campsite had exhausted everything of interest there except the tribespeople themselves. They went farther and farther afield on their own specialties.
Winter struck. Though the world temperature was slowly climbing, and the glaciers would melt a little more every year, the cold and the snow were brutal. And this year the tribes had to leave the overhang and follow the reindeer herds. The big game in this area had been cleaned out. Moreover, the herds seemed to have deserted this part of France.
To von Billmann’s joy, Gribardsun decided they should head for Czechoslovakia-to-be. They would progress slowly because of the heavy snows, but when they got to Czechoslovakia, they would settle down there for the winter, and also the next summer. Provided, of course, that game was not too scarce there.
They moved north of the Alps, which were covered with giant glaciers, and into Germany and along the Magdalenian Danube - which did not follow the course of the twenty-first century river - and then northward into Czechoslovakia. There they stayed in a semicave during the whiter. Thammash, the chief, developed arthritis, which Gribardsun alleviated with medicine. But the medicine had an unexpected and long-hidden side effect, and one day that summer, while Thammash was running after a wounded horse, he dropped dead. Gribardsun dissected him and found that his heart muscles were damaged. The damage was the result of an intricate series of imbalances, a sort of somatic Rube Goldberg Mechanism.
No babies or mothers died during birth that year, though there were several miscarriages.
Angrogrim, the strong man, slipped just as he was about to drive a spear into a baby mammoth that had been cut out from the herd. His head struck a rock, and he died even before the baby stepped on his chest and crushed it.
Amaga married Krnal, a Shluwg whose wife had choked on a fishbone.
The following summer, the tribes moved back to the overhang in the valley of La Vezere in France. Von Billmann was very disappointed, because he had not found a single language which seemed capable of developing into Indo-Hittite.
‘You really didn’t think you would, did you?’ John said. ‘Whoever the pre-Indo-Hittites are, they are probably in Asia or Russia somewhere. They won’t be migrating to Germany for several thousands of years yet - probably.
‘Of course,’ he added, smiling slightly, ‘it’s possible that they are only a few miles from us at this very moment.’
‘You have a small sadistic streak in you, John,’ von Billmann said.
‘Perhaps. However, if you are on the next expedition, which will go to 8000 B.C., you may find your long-lost speakers.’
‘But I want to find them now!’
‘Perhaps something entirely unforeseen will happen to enlighten you.’
Von Billmann remembered that remark much later.
* * *
NINE
Time went swiftly, and then suddenly the day of departure was close. Four years had passed. The vessel was crowded with specimens and only a few had yet to be collected. These were mainly spermatozoa and ova which would be taken from animals shot with the anesthetic-bearing missiles. When the vessel returned to the twenty-first century, the frozen sperm and eggs would be thawed out and appropriately united in tubes. The fetuses would be placed in the uteri of foster mothers - cows in the case of most of the larger animals but, in the zoo, elephants or whales in the case of the largest. The biological science of the twenty-first century permitted the you
ng of one species to flourish in the womb of another. And so, the twenty-first century would soon have in their zoos and reservations beasts that had been extinct for many thousands of years.
Moreover, the sperm and eggs of humans were in the cryogenic tanks. These would be united and implanted in human females, and the children would be brought up by their foster parents. In everything except physical structure, they would be twenty-first centurians. But they would be studied by scientists. And their children, hybrids of Magdalenians and modern, would be studied.
To compensate for the mass of the specimens, parts of the vessel had to be removed. Everything was removed except the files and those devices needed to keep the specimens from decay. Everything had been carefully weighed before the vessel was launched, but everything was weighed again. The day before the vessel was to be retrieved, the weighing apparatus was removed, and its mass was replaced with artifacts from thirty tribes, each of which had been weighed. It was Gribardsun who suggested that each member of the four should also be reweighed.
‘If something should happen to one of us, and he wasn’t able to get aboard, his weight should be replaced by something valuable.’
‘For heaven’s sake, John!’ Rachel said. ‘What could happen? We’re not leaving the vicinity of the vessel except to go to the farewell feast tonight. And if somebody got sick or fell and broke his neck, we’d still take him along.’
‘True, but I feel that we should take no chances. You know how serious a deviation in weight can be when the tracers’ll be searching for us. Let’s take no chances whatsoever.’
The ‘reserves,’ as von Billmann called them, were artifacts reluctantly discarded because there just was not enough room for them. Four piles were carefully selected, each representing the weight of one of the four. Whatever additions or subtractions had to be made were done with mineral specimens.
The celebration that night was long and exhausting and often touching. The tribes, carrying pine torches, followed them to the vessel and then each member of the Wota’shaimg and the Shluwg kissed each of the explorers. And then, wailing and chanting, they retreated to a distance of a hundred yards. There they settled down to wait for the dawn, since the departure retrieval was set for shortly after sunrise.