"Farmer, Philip Jose - Time's Last Gift (1972)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

One of the theories about the failure of the first two models to be found was immediately dismissed. This theory postulated that the structure of time was such that time travel was impossible within any period in which contemporaries had been living. In other words, time, to avoid a paradox, but not the pathetic fallacy, would not permit travel except in a time before anybody living in A.D. 2070 had been born. The critics pointed out, none too gently, that this would mean that somebody born before A.D. 1875 was still living and that his presence was keeping the models from appearing in A.D. 1973 and 1890. If the hypothetical person was born in, say, A.D. 1870, then he would today be 200 years old. And that was impossible, for several reasons. For one thing, a record existed of the birth date of everybody living, and the oldest person in the world was 130. She had been bora in A.D. 1940.

The theory was admittedly farfetched, if not crackpotted. Its proponent, who later committed suicide for unknown reasons, and so discredited any reputation he had for sanity, replied that anyone that old might have some reason for not wanting to be known. And it was not impossible to fake records.

John Gribardsun was thinking of this when Rachel Silverstein touched his arm. She seemed to be touching him at least ten times a day, as if she were testing to make sure that he existed. Or because she liked to touch him. He did not mind it, though he knew that Drummond disliked it. But it was up to her husband to say something about it to her, and, so far as he knew, the man had never opened his mouth about it.

'Do you think we can get the ship back up by ourselves?' she said. Her light blue eyes were bright, as if she were burning with excitement.

'I suppose so,' he said. 'But I think we could do it far more swiftly and easily if we had the strong backs of some cavemen helping us. So we won't worry about it now. After all, we have four years.'

Robert yon Billmann said something sharply. He was looking through binoculars to the northeast, across the valley. Gribardsun saw the figures that had attracted von Billmann. He lifted his own binoculars. The heads and antlers of several brownish reindeer came into view. He moved the glasses and within a minute had zeroed in on a big grayish shape. It was a wolf. Soon, he caught about a dozen with a sweep of the glasses.

The deer were well aware of the wolves. They continued to crop at the moss between liftings of the head, to sniff the air, and to eye the slinking beasts some fifty yards distant.

Presently some of the gray shapes floated behind a hill and soon appeared ahead of the herd. They disappeared again, and then those that had remained moved in slowly toward the herd. The deer waited for a minute to make sure that the wolves would not stop and suddenly, as if the leader had spoken, they bounded away. The wolves ran after them, and then, as the herd passed the hill behind which the others were, they veered away. Six wolves had run out at them. One wolf caught a doe that stumbled, and the others leaped upon it. The remaining deer got away, except for a buck that slipped when he leaped across a brook. Before he could get up again, he found two wolves tearing at his legs. These were joined by others, and the wolves quit running.

Gribardsun had been watching with keen interest. He put the binoculars down and said, 'And to think that the only wolves in our time were in zoos or small reservations. These beasts have a whole world to roam in. And there must be millions of them.'

'Sometimes I think you're the zoologist,' Rachel said.

'I am a naturalist.'

He turned and looked down the valley where they had seen the man. He had long ago hidden behind a rock and, though Gribardsun had stopped on the way up the hill to search for him with his binoculars, he had failed to find him. Now the man, having seen the four leave the vessel, was approaching it.

'Curiosity kills more than a cat,' Gribardsun said.

The man's home might be a little way off or many miles. The expedition had quite a few daylight hours left, so they might as well take advantage of it. There was much work to do.

He allowed the others to collect their samples of soil, plants, and rocks and to take some more photographs. Then he said that they should return to the vessel, store their samples, pick up food and trinkets, and set out up the valley to look for a human habitation.

They started back down the slope. The man was within a hundred yards of the great torpedo shape. Seeing the four coming down the hill, he ducked behind a boulder. He remained there until Gribardsun opened the port of the vessel. Then he rose and, bending over, ran to a more distant rock. Drummond Silverstein took some more films of him.

They packed their bags and strapped them onto their backs. Gribardsun took the 500-caliber express rifle. Von Billmann and Drummond carried the rifles which shot anesthetic darts. Rachel carried a 30-caliber automatic rifle. Each had an automatic pistol in the holster at his belt, and they had explosive and gas grenades in their sacks.

They started up the valley and presently came to a small stream which meandered down to the river below. They followed along the stream for a time. The man kept ahead of them by a quarter of a mile.

At the end of two miles, they decided to climb up through the base of the cliffs. There were some overhangs that looked interesting. These turned out to have been inhabited by men, judging from the rude hearths of stone, the bones, flint, and chert fragments, and pieces of wood and fur. A half mile on, they found a narrow cave which stank as if hyenas had once lived there. Rachel said that she would study it later and determine what hyenas ate and so forth. She threw some rocks into the interior but got no result.

They walked five miles before they came to the man's home. The valley suddenly widened here, and the overhang which housed human beings was at the top of a steep slope. They could not see any women or children from this angle, but the twelve men would not have gathered in full sight on the edge of the hill unless they had something to defend.

Gribardsun looked around before giving the order to ascend. It seemed likely that there would be other men out hunting, and he did not want to be surprised by men attacking from behind.

The man they had first seen had scrambled up ahead of them to warn the others. Now he stood with the others, brandishing his spear and yelling at the invaders.

Gribardsun activated the bullhorn device on his chest and then told the others to drop about a hundred feet behind him. He looked for large rocks on the lip of the hill. He was ready to jump if they rolled any down on them. But there did not seem to be any nor was there evidence at the foot of the hill that they had rolled any down in the past.

He wondered what the natives were thinking. There were twelve warriors there, defending their home territory, and there were only three men and a woman boldly approaching them. Their appearance, of course, would be impressive. There would be something very alien about the invaders; the clothes, the weird-looking weapons, the clean-shaven faces. Most mystifying, and terrifying, would be the confidence with which the greatly outnumbered party approached.

Gribardsun had had long experience with savages. He was much older than he looked and remembered when Africa and Asia still hid genuine preliterates with very little knowledge of civilization. It was this experience which gave him confidence, because he knew that these people did not really want to engage in combat with an unknown enemy. The others of his party had had little to do with genuine primitives; they had been born too late; the savages had died out or been citified; the few left on reservations were too well-educated to be 'real' primitives.