Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (15 page)

 
          
 
The third time Long Johnson made as if to
pitch, Cosner was far off the plate and running toward second.

 
          
 
Snap went the pitcher's hand. Bom went the
ball in Big Poe's glove at first base.

 
          
 
Everything was sort of frozen. Just for a
second.

 
          
 
There was the sun in the sky, the lake and the
boats on it, the grandstands, the pitcher on his mound standing with his hand
out and down after tossing the ball; there was Big Poe with the ball in his
mighty black hand; there was the infield staring, crouching in at the scene,
and there was Jimmie Cosner running, kicking up dirt, the only moving thing in
the entire sunomer world.

 
          
 
Big Poe leaned forward, sighted toward second
base, drew back his mighty right hand, and hurled that white baseball straight
down along the line until it reached Jimmie Cosner's head.

 
          
 
Next instant, the spell was broken.

 
          
 
Jimmie Cosner lay flat on the burning grass.
People boiled out of the grandstands. There was swearing, and women screaming,
a clattering of wood as the men rushed down the wooden boards of the bleachers.
The colored team ran in from the field. Jimmie Cosner lay there. Big Poe, no
expression on his face, limped off the field, pushing white men away from him
like clothespins when they tried stopping him. He just picked them up and threw
them away.

 
          
 
"Come on, Douglas!" shrieked Mother,
grabbing me. "Let's get home! They might have razors! Oh!"

 
          
 
That night, after the near riot of the
afternoon, my folks stayed home reading magazines. All the cottages around us
were lighted. Everybody was home. Distantly I heard music. I slipped out the
back door into the ripe summer-night darkness and ran toward the dance
pavilion. All the lights were on, and music played.

 
          
 
But there were no white people at the tables.
Nobody had come to the Jamboree.

 
          
 
There were only colored folks. Women in bright
red and blue satin gowns and net stockings and soft gloves, with wine-plume
hats, and men in glossy tuxedos. The music crashed out, up, down, and around
the floor. And laughing and stepping high, flinging their polished shoes out
and up in the cakewalk, were Long Johnson and Cavanaugh and Jiff Miller and
Pete Brown, and—limping—Big Poe and Katherine, his girl, and all the other
lawn-cutters and boatmen and janitors and chambermaids, all on the floor at one
time.

 
          
 
It was so dark all around the pavilion; the
stars shone in the black sky, and I stood outside, my nose against the window,
looking in for a long, long time, silently.

 
          
 
I went to bed without telling anyone what I'd
seen.

 
          
 
I just lay in the dark smelling the ripe
apples in the dimness and hearing the lake at night and listening to that
distant, faint and wonderful music. Just before I slept I heard those last
strains again:

 
          
 
"—gonna dance out both of my shoes. When
they play those Jelly Roll Blues; Tomorrow night at the Dark Town Strutters'
Ball!"

 
          
 
The sign on the wall seemed to quaver under a film
of sliding warm water. Eckels felt his eyelids blink over his stare, and the
sign burned in this momentary darkness:

 
          
 
TIME SAFARI, INC.

 
          
 
SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST.

 
          
 
YOU NAME THE ANIMAL.

 
          
 
WE TAKE YOU THERE.

 
          
 
YOU SHOOT IT.

 
          
 
A warm phlegm gathered in Eckels' throat; he
swallowed and pushed it down. The muscles around his mouth formed a smile as he
put his hand slowly out upon the air, and in that hand waved a check for ten
thousand dollars to the man behind the desk.

 
          
 
"Does this safari guarantee I come back
alive?" "We guarantee nothing," said the official, "except
the dinosaurs." He turned. "This is Mr. Travis, your Safari Guide in
the Past. He'll tell you what and where to shoot. If he says no shooting, no
shooting. If you disobey instructions, there's a stiff penalty of another ten
thousand dollars, plus possible government action, on your return."

 
          
 
Eckels glanced across the vast office at a
mass and tangle, a snaking and humming of wires and steel boxes, at an aurora
that flickered now orange, now silver, now blue. There was a sound like a
gigantic bonfire burning all of Time, all the years and all the parchment
calendars, all the hours piled high and set aflame.

 
          
 
A touch of the hand and this burning would, on
the instant, beautifully reverse itself. Eckels remembered the wording in the
advertisements to the letter. Out of chars and ashes, out of dust and coals,
like golden salamanders, the old years, the green years, might leap; roses
sweeten the air, white hair turn Irish-black, wrinkles vanish; all, everything
fly back to seed, flee death, rush down to their beginnings, suns rise in
western skies and set in glorious easts, moons eat themselves opposite to the
custom, all and everything cupping one in another like Chinese boxes, rabbits
into hats, all and everything returning to the fresh death, the seed death, the
green death, to the time before the beginning. A touch of a hand might do it,
the merest touch of a hand.

 
          
 
"Hell and damn," Eckels breathed,
the light of the Machine on his thin face. "A real Time Machine." He
shook his head. "Makes you think. If the election had gone badly
yesterday, I might be here now running away from the results. Thank God Keith
won. He'll make a fine President of the United States."

 
          
 
"Yes," said the man behind the desk.
"We're lucky. If Deutscher had gotten in, we'd have the worst kind of
dictatorship. There's an anti-everything man for you, a militarist,
anti-Christ, anti-human, anti-intellectual. People called us up, you know,
joking but not joking. Said if Deutscher became President they wanted to go
live in 1492. Of course it's not our business to conduct Escapes, but to form
Safaris. Anyway, Keith's President now. All you got to worry about is—"

 
          
 
"Shooting my dinosaur," Eckels
finished it for him.

 
          
 
"A Tyrannosaurus rex. The Thunder Lizard,
the damnedest monster in history. Sign this release. Anything happens to you,
we're not responsible. Those dinosaurs are hungry."

 
          
 
Eckels flushed angrily. "Trying to scare
me!"

 
          
 
"Frankly, yes. We don't want anyone going
who'll panic at the first shot. Six Safari leaders were killed last year, and a
dozen hunters. We're here to give you the damnedest thrill a real hunter ever
asked for. Traveling you back sixty million years to bag the biggest damned game
in all Time. Your personal check's still there. Tear it up."

 
          
 
Mr. Eckels looked at the check for a long
time. His fingers twitched.

 
          
 
"Good luck," said the man behind the
desk. "Mr. Travis, he's all yours."

 
          
 
They moved silently across the room, taking
their guns with them, toward the Machine, toward the silver metal and the
roaring light.

 
          
 
First a day and then a night and then a day
and then a night, then it was day-night-day-night-day. A week, a month, a year,
a decade! a.d. 2055. a.d. 2019. 1999! 1957! Gone! The Machine roared.

 
          
 
They put on their oxygen helmets and tested
the intercoms.

 
          
 
Eckels swayed on the padded seat, his face
pale, his jaw stiff. He felt the trembling in his arms and he looked down and found
his hands tight on the new rifle. There were four other men in the Machine.
Travis, the Safari Leader, his assistant, Lesper-ance, and two
other hunters, Billings and Kramer.
They sat looking at each other, and
the years blazed around them.

 
          
 
"Can these guns get a dinosaur
cold?" Eckels felt his mouth saying.

 
          
 
"If you hit them right," said Travis
on the helmet radio. "Some dinosaurs have two brains, one in the head,
another far down the spinal column. We stay away from those. That's stretching
luck. Put your first two shots into the eyes, if you can, blind them, and go
back into the bram."

 
          
 
The Machine howled. Time was a film run
backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them. "Good
God," said Eckels. "Every hunter that ever lived would envy us today.
This makes Africa seem like Illinois."

 
          
 
The Machine slowed; its scream fell to a
murmur. The Machine stopped.

 
          
 
The sun stopped in the sky.

 
          
 
The fog that had enveloped the Machine blew
away and they were in an old time, a very old time indeed, three hunters and
two Safari Heads with their blue metal guns across their knees.

 
          
 
"Christ isn't born yet," said
Travis. "Moses has not gone to the mountain to talk with God. The Pyramids
are still in the earth, waiting to be cut out and put up. Remember that.
Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler—none of them exists."

 
          
 
The men nodded.

 
          
 
"That"—Mr. Travis pointed—"is
the jungle of sixty million two thousand and fifty-five years before President
Keith."

 
          
 
He indicated a metal path that struck off into
green wilderness, over steaming swamp, among giant ferns and palms.

 
          
 
"And that," he said, "is the
Path, laid by Time Safari for your use. It floats six inches above the earth.
Doesn't touch so much as one grass blade, flower, or tree. It's an anti-gravity
metal. Its purpose is to keep you from touching this world of the past in any
way. Stay on the Path. Don't go off it. I repeat. Don't go off. For any reason!
If you fall off, there's a penalty. And don't shoot any animal we don't
okay."

 
          
 
"Why?" asked Eckels.

 
          
 
They sat in the ancient wilderness. Far birds'
cries blew on a wind, and the smell of tar and an old salt sea, moist grasses,
and flowers the color of blood.

 
          
 
"We don't want to change the Future. We
don't belong here in the Past. The government doesn't like us here. We have to
pay big graft to keep our franchise. A Time Machine is damn finicky business.
Not knowing it, we might kill an important animal, a small bird, a roach, a
flower even, thus destroying an important link in a growing species."

 
          
 
"That's not clear," said Eckels.

 
          
 
"All right," Travis continued,
"say we accidentally kill one mouse here. That means all the future
families of this one particular mouse are destroyed, right?"

 
          
 
"Right."

 
          
 
"And all the families of the families of
the families of that one mouse! With a stamp of your foot, you annihilate first
one, then a dozen, then a thousand, a million, a billion possible mice!"

 
          
 
"So they're dead," said Eckels.
"So what?"

 
          
 
"So what?" Travis snorted quietly.
"Well, what about the foxes that'll need those mice to survive? For want
of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes, a lion starves. For want of a
lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are
thrown into chaos and destruction. Eventually it all boils down to this:
fifty-nine million years later, a cave man, one of a dozen on the entire world,
goes hunting wild boar or saber-tooth tiger for food. But you, friend, have
stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. So
the cave man starves. And the cave man, please note, is not just any expendable
man, no! He is an entire future nation. From his loins would have sprung ten
sons. From their loins one hundred sons, and thus onward to a civilization.
Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of
life. It is comparable to slaying some of Adam's grandchildren. The stomp of
your foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could
shake our earth and destinies down through Time, to their very foundations.
With the death of that one cave man, a billion others yet unborn are throttled
in the womb. Perhaps Rome never rises on its seven hills. Perhaps Europe is
forever a dark forest, and only Asia waxes healthy and teeming. Step on a mouse
and you crush the Pyramids. Step on a mouse and you leave your print, like a
Grand Canyon, across Eternity. Queen Elizabeth might never be born, Washington
might not cross the Delaware,
there
might never be a
United States at all. So be careful. Stay on the Path. Never step off!"

 
          
 
"I see," said Eckels. "Then it
wouldn't pay for us even to touch the grass?"

 
          
 
"Correct. Crushing certain plants could
add up infinitesimally. A little error here would multiply us sixty million
years, all out of proportion. Of course maybe our theory is wrong. Maybe Time
can't be changed by us. Or maybe it can be changed only in little subtle ways.
A dead mouse here makes an insect imbalance there, a population disproportion
later, a bad harvest further on, a depression, mass starvation, and, finally, a
change in social temperament in far-flung countries. Something much more
subtle, like that. Perhaps only a soft breath, a whisper, a hair, pollen on the
air, such a slight, slight change that unless you looked close you wouldn't see
it. Who knows? Who really can say he knows? We don't know. We're guessing. But
until we do know for certain whether our messing around in Time can make a big
roar or a little rustle in history, we're being damned careful. This Machine,
this Path, your clothing and bodies, were sterilized, as you know, before the
journey. We wear these oxygen helmets so we can't introduce our bacteria into
an ancient atmosphere."

 
          
 
"How do we know which animals to
shoot?"

 
          
 
"They're marked with red paint,"
said Travis. "Today, before our journey, we sent Lesperance here back with
the Machine. He came to this particular era and followed certain animals."

 
          
 
"Studying them?"

 
          
 
"Right," said Lesperance. "I
track them through their entire existence, noting which of them lives longest.
Very few. How many times they mate. Not often. Life's short. When I find one
that's going to die when a tree falls on him, or one that drowns in a tar pit,
I note the exact hour, minute, and second. I shoot a paint bomb. It leaves a
red patch on his hide. We can't miss it. Then I correlate our arrival in the
Past so that we meet the Monster not more than two minutes before he would have
died anyway. This way, we kih only animals with no future, that are never going
to mate again. You see how careful we are?"