Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (16 page)

 
          
 
"But if you came back this morning in
Time," said Eckels eagerly, "you must've bumped into us, our Safari!
How did it turn out? Was it successful? Did all of us get through—alive?"

 
          
 
Travis and Lesperance gave each other a look.

 
          
 
"That'd be a paradox," said the
latter. "Time doesn't permit that sort of mess—a man meeting himself. When
such occasions threaten, Time steps aside. Like an airplane hitting an air
pocket. You felt the Machine jump just before we stopped? That was us passing
ourselves on the way back to the Future. We saw nothing. There's no way of
telling // this expedition was a success, // we got our monster, or whether all
of us—meaning you, Mr. Eckels—got out alive."

 
          
 
Eckels smiled palely.

 
          
 
"Cut that," said Travis sharply.
"Everyone on his feet!"

 
          
 
They were ready to leave the Machine.

 
          
 
The jungle was high and the jungle was broad
and the jungle was the entire world forever and forever. Sounds like music and
sounds like flying tents filled the sky, and those were pterodactyls soaring
with cavernous gray wings, gigantic bats out of a delirium and a night fever.
Eckels, balanced on the narrow Path, aimed his rifle playfully.

 
          
 
"Stop that!" said Travis.
"Don't even aim for fun, damn it! If your gun should go off—"

 
          
 
Eckels flushed. "Where's our
Tyrannosaurus?"

 
          
 
Lesperance checked his wrist watch. "Up
ahead. We'll bisect his trail in sixty seconds. Look for the red paint, for
Christ's sake. Don't shoot till we give the word. Stay on the Path. Stay on the
Path!"

 
          
 
They moved forward in the wind of morning.

 
          
 
"Strange," murmured Eckels. "Up
ahead, sixty million years, Election Day over. Keith made President. Everyone
celebrating. And here we are, a million years lost, and they don't exist. The
things we worried about for months, a lifetime, not even born or thought about
yet."

 
          
 
"Safety catches off, everyone!"
ordered Travis. "You, first shot, Eckels. Second, Biflings. Third,
Kramer."

 
          
 
"I've hunted tiger, wild boar, buffalo,
elephant, but Jesus, this is it," said Eckels. "I'm shaking like a
kid."

 
          
 
"Ah," said Travis.

 
          
 
Everyone stopped.

 
          
 
Travis raised his hand. "Ahead," he
whispered. "In the mist. There he is. There's His Royal Majesty now."

 
          
 
The jungle was wide and full of twitterings,
rustlings, murmurs, and sighs.

 
          
 
Suddenly it all ceased, as if someone had shut
a door.

 
          
 
Silence.

 
          
 
A sound of thunder.

 
          
 
Out of the mist, one hundred yards away, came
Tyrannosaurus rex.

 
          
 
"Jesus God," whispered Eckels.

 
          
 
"Sh!"

 
          
 
It came on great oiled, resilient, striding
legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding
its delicate watchmaker's claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower
leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of
muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible
warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the
great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangled out
front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the
snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted
easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers.
Its eyes rolled, ostrich eggs, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed
its mouth in a death grin. It ran, its pelvic bones crushing aside trees and
bushes, its taloned feet clawing damp earth, leaving prints six inches deep
wherever it settled its weight. It ran with a gliding ballet step, far too
poised and balanced for its ten tons. It moved into a sunlit arena warily, its
beautifully reptile hands feeling the air.

 
          
 
"My God!" Eckels twitched his mouth.
"It could reach up and grab the moon."

 
          
 
"Sh!" Travis jerked angrily.
"He hasn't seen us yet."

 
          
 
"It can't be killed." Eckels
pronounced this verdict quietly, as if there could be no argument. He had
weighed the evidence and

 
          
 
this was his considered opinion. The rifle in
his hands seemed a cap gun. "We were fools to come. This is
impossible."

 
          
 
"Shut up!" hissed Travis.

 
          
 
"Nightmare."

 
          
 
"Turn around," commanded Travis.
"Walk quietly to the Machine. We'll remit one half your fee."

 
          
 
"I didn't realize it would be this
big" said Eckels. "I miscalculated, that's all. And now I want
out."

 
          
 
"It sees us!"

 
          
 
"There's the red paint on its
chest!"

 
          
 
The Thunder Lizard raised itself. Its armored
flesh glittered like a thousand green coins. The coins, crusted with slime,
steamed. In the slime, tiny insects wriggled, so that the entire body seemed to
twitch and undulate, even while the monster itself did not move. It exhaled.
The stink of raw flesh blew down the wilderness.

 
          
 
"Get me out of here," said Eckels.
"It was never like this before. I was always sure I'd come through alive.
I had good guides, good safaris, and safety. This time, I figured wrong. I've
met my match and admit it. This is too much for me to get hold of."

 
          
 
"Don't run," said Lesperance.
"Turn around. Hide in the Machine."

 
          
 
"Yes." Eckels seemed to be numb. He
looked at his feet as if trying to make them move. He gave a grunt of
helplessness.

 
          
 
"Eckels!"

 
          
 
He took a few steps, blinking, shuffling.

 
          
 
"Not that way!"

 
          
 
The Monster, at the first motion, lunged
forward with a terrible scream. It covered one hundred yards in four seconds.
The rifles jerked up and blazed fire. A windstorm from the beast's mouth
engulfed them in the stench of slime and old blood. The Monster roared, teeth
glittering with sun.

 
          
 
Eckels, not looking back, walked blindly to
the edge of the Path, his gun limp in his arms, stepped off the Path, and
walked, not knowing it, in the jungle. His feet sank into green moss. His

 
          
 
legs moved him, and he felt alone and remote
from the events behind.

 
          
 
The rifles cracked again. Their sound was lost
in shriek and lizard thunder. The great lever of the reptile's tail swung up,
lashed sideways. Trees exploded in clouds of leaf and branch. The Monster
twitched its jeweler's hands down to fondle at the men, to twist them in half,
to crush them like berries, to cram them into its teeth and its screaming
throat. Its boulder-stone eyes leveled with the men. They saw themselves
mirrored. They fired at the metallic eyelids and the blazing black iris.

 
          
 
Like a stone idol, like a mountain avalanche,
Tyrannosaurus fell. Thundering, it clutched trees, pulled them with it. It
wrenched and tore the metal Path. The men flung themselves back and away. The
body hit, ten tons of cold flesh and stone. The guns fired. The Monster lashed
its armored tail, twitched its snake jaws, and lay still. A fount of blood
spurted from its throat. Somewhere inside, a sac of fluids burst. Sickening
gushes drenched the hunters. They stood, red and glistening.

 
          
 
The thunder faded.

 
          
 
The jungle was silent. After the avalanche, a
green peace. After the nightmare, morning.

 
          
 
Billings and Kramer sat on the pathway and
threw up. Travis and Lesperance stood with smoking rifles, cursing steadily.

 
          
 
In the Time Machine, on his face, Eckels lay
shivering. He had found his way back to the Path, climbed into the Machine.

 
          
 
Travis came walking, glanced at Eckels, took
cotton gauze from a metal box, and returned to the others, who were sitting on
the Path.

 
          
 
"Clean up."

 
          
 
They wiped the blood from their helmets. They
began to curse too. The Monster lay, a hill of solid flesh. Within, you could
hear the sighs and murmurs as the furthest chambers of it died, the organs
malfunctioning, liquids running a final instant from pocket to sac to spleen,
everything shutting off, closing up forever. It was like standing by a wrecked
locomotive or a steam shovel at quitting time, all valves being released or
levered tight.

 
          
 
Bones cracked; the tonnage of its own flesh,
off balance, dead weight, snapped the delicate forearms, caught underneath. The
meat settled, quivering.

 
          
 
Another cracking sound. Overhead, a gigantic
tree branch broke from its heavy mooring, fell. It crashed upon the dead beast
with finality.

 
          
 
"There." Lesperance checked his
watch. "Right on time. That's the giant tree that was scheduled to fall
and kill this animal originally." He glanced at the two hunters. "You
want the trophy picture?"

 
          
 
"What?"

 
          
 
"We can't take a trophy back to the
Future. The body has to stay right here where it would have died originally, so
the insects, birds, and bacteria can get at it, as they were intended to.
Everything in balance. The body stays. But we can take a picture of you
standing near it."

 
          
 
The two men tried to think, but gave up,
shaking their heads.

 
          
 
They let themselves be led along the metal
Path. They sank wearily into the Machine cushions. They gazed back at the
ruined Monster, the stagnating mound, where already strange reptilian birds and
golden insects were busy at the steaming armor.

 
          
 
A sound on the floor of the Time Machine
stiffened them. Eckels sat there, shivering.

 
          
 
"I'm sorry," he said at last.

 
          
 
"Get up!" cried Travis.

 
          
 
Eckels got up.

 
          
 
"Go out on that Path alone," said
Travis. He had his rifle pointed. "You're not coming back in the Machine.
We're leaving you here!"

 
          
 
Lesperance seized Travis' arm.
"Wait—"

 
          
 
"Stay out of this!" Travis shook his
hand away. "This son of a bitch nearly killed us. But it isn't that so
much. Hell, no. It's his shoes! Look at them! He ran off the Path. My God, that
ruins us! Christ knows how much we'll forfeit! Tens of thousands of dollars of
insurance! We guarantee no one leaves the Path. He left it. Oh, the damn fool!
I'll have to report to the government. They might revoke our license to travel.
God knows what he's done to Time, to History!"