Ralph Williams

“ Dolan shook his head helplessly. "I never thought. You seemed so ... so...."
"So human?" her lips curled wryly. "I was made to seem human, twentieth-century human, it was part of my job. I'm not. And soon, I shall not even seem human, without the things I need—things that won't even be invented for ten thousand years—cancer inhibitors, blood clotting agents, insulin surrogate, vaccines, serums, antibiotics—why, I can't even eat your food!" ”

“ He stared gloomily off at the mountains across the river, rising clean and snow-capped above the shanties and garbage piles of the transient workers who had overflowed the city to camp on the flats along the river; thinking:
Just over a hundred years ago this planet was first discovered by men. Less than sixty years ago the first colonists were brought here. They came to a brand-new planet, almost as naked as the day they were born—two hundred pounds per colonist, including their own weight—with a free hand to build a new world as they pleased. ”

“ You understand, the past is really immutable, we only seem to change it. For the time that the time-translator exists at any given time in the past, a sort of enclave, a self-supporting bubble, is established which permits apparent changes. When the time translator returns to its normal existence in my era, that bubble dissolves. I do not know, in terms of our present subjective time, just how long the displacement will hold, but when it vanishes we, you and I, will no longer exist. ”

“ McCullough's gun was hanging over the door, on pegs set into the logs, a gun made from the first steel smelted on Centaurus II. He reached down the gun as he stepped in the door.
There were two natives in the kitchen; one with a roughed-up look who might have been the one Watts had kicked, watching Mary as she huddled in a corner by the stove with her arms about the two children; the other still looking out the window. Both spun around to face him as McCullough burst into the room. ”

“ All night and day after he shot the stinging unit and the carrier unit, the Harn had stayed in its nest. By the second evening, it was getting hungry. It ventured out and found a few morsels, but the organized hunting network it ordinarily maintained had been disrupted, it had lost track of things, and the pickings were poor. Then it stumbled on the rabbit Ed had staked out.
Its first impulse was to leave the rabbit strictly alone. In spite of its early promise, the other world had so far given nothing but trouble. ”

“ Emotion is my trade, as electronics is yours. Electrons, I have been told, have a certain freedom of choice, or appear to have. Yet you know with quite high probability which choice they will make under the influence of certain physical fields. In the same way, I know what choice to expect of a man or a woman, under the influence of certain emotional fields."
"You didn't want me, though, you just wanted a technician. The first man would have done just as well for you, if he had 'reacted.'"
"That is true. And I am the first woman you have ever made love to?" ”

“ Ed shot four times, as fast as he could work the action. The heavy slugs did the job, but not quite well enough. With its dying lunge the thing got to him and tossed him ten feet like a rag doll. He lit on his bad hand and felt the wrist bones go.
As he struggled to get up, digging his elbow in and using one hand, he saw a stinger darting in at him. He had lost both the bug gun and his rifle when the fighting unit swiped him. He swiveled on his hips and kicked the stinger away. Then he saw the second fighting unit coming. He forgot about the stinger. ”

“ Dolan leaned back against the tree, thinking.
"Well, there's one thing sure," he said. "If the machine can't be fixed, it can't be fixed, there isn't much they can do about it. You may all stay in this time yet."
She shook her head gently. "Not all. At least, not all alive. There would be no displacement, and the only hope they would have to avoid the Alwyn action would be to preserve absolute secrecy. You have a saying, I believe: 'dead men—'" She hesitated. "Even if you and I could find a way to escape, even if they told me I might leave, I could not trust them. They are very dangerous men. ”

“ The Harn followed Ed's movements, observing carefully. It needed a specimen from the other world, and this biped would serve nicely, but it might as well learn as much as possible about him first. It could always pick him up some time before he returned to his own world. Just to make sure, it sent a stinging unit to guard the entrance.
All his life, except for a short period in France, Ed had been a hunter, never hunted. Still, you don't grow old in the woods by jumping without looking. Coming into a new situation, he was wary as an old wolf. ”

“ Watts said, "it ought to take the whole bunch and round them up and put them away on a reservation somewhere. You can't civilize a grayskin, they ain't even human to start with, so why try?"
"Nuts," Pete Tallant said. Where Watts was a redneck miner and construction worker; and McCullough a farmer picking up a little easy money on a temporary job; Tallant was an intellectual, a dark restive young Earthman working his way around to see how Earth's far colonies looked. Watts' yapping irritated him, but there was no point in arguing against that sort of brainless conviction, he knew. ”

“ It had been a strain to pass up the juicy little quadruped in the cage, but the inhabitants of the other world seemed shy, and the Harn did not wish to frighten them. At least, it knew now that life could come through the hole, and the small herbivore it had herded through confirmed that passage in the opposite direction was equally possible—plus a gratis demonstration of the other world's pitiful defenses. At swarming time, the whole new world would be open to embryo Harn, as well as this world it presently occupied. ”

“ Dolan frowned. Private work, money no object, very secret—there were implications to this offer which he did not like.
On the other hand—
His eye strayed to the young woman who sat quietly beside the man, silently exercising her specialty. The plastic surgeons of her era had done a beautiful and nearly perfect job on her body; but bone-deep, in ways an observant man could sense, she was still not a twentieth century woman. In a city full of women who made a profession of being young and handsome, she too was young and handsome, but different. ”

“ Watts laughed. "Cops? There ain't going to be any cops coming. We're handling this ourselves. Don't worry about the cops, even if they could get an indictment, there ain't a jury in this town would convict for killing a native."
"I'm not worrying about that," McCullough said stolidly, "but I don't like what you fellows are doing, I might as well say right now, and I'm not going to be a party to it. Those natives stay right where they are till the law comes and gets them." ”

“ She laughed suddenly, as the full implications of what he had said struck her. "The past? Oh, poor Smith. And poor Brown. A long way in the past, where there are no people at all, just dinosaurs and snakes—and they hate such things so." She laughed helplessly, tears rolling down her cheeks. "And poor George, and poor Moirta. All with their clever little plans, their tricks to out-smart each other. Everyone has outsmarted everyone else, and we all lose now, don't we?"
Dolan stared at her narrowly. "We all lose?"
She nodded—
The senior gun runner had been quite confident of victory. ”

“ The first order of business seemed to be to get better acquainted with the Harn, and first thing in the morning he set about it. He took the rabbit out of the live box and tethered it in a spot in the other world close to the hole, where raw earth had been exposed by a big blowdown, sweeping the ground afterward to clear it of tracks. ”

“ The Centauran winced a little and closed his eyes briefly, but made no other sign. Ought to have morphine, McCullough thought, but would morphine work on a Centauran? He didn't know.
He pulled a chair over to the window, where he could watch both doors and the cot, and sat down with the gun across his knees. The riot was apparently still booming along. Men trotted by outside now and then, singly or in little groups, calling to each other. Once several went by with another Centauran corpse slung hand and foot to a pole. ”

“ Toward evening, Ed got to wondering how a living creature would take transition into the other world. He had no intention of trying it himself until he knew a lot more about it, but he thought he might be able to scare up a surrogate. Out by the wood pile some live-traps were piled under a spruce, from the time when Ed had been catching marten for the Fish and Wildlife to transplant. One was still in pretty fair shape. He patched it up and set it among the cottonwoods at the head of the bar, where there were some rabbit trails. ”

“ Dolan said. "Let me think about it a minute." He was not really much surprised at the disclosure. In terms of the technology he knew, the machine was almost completely meaningless. From the beginning, there had only been two possibilities—either it was the product of an alien culture, or it was an elaborate hoax. He had already decided it was not a hoax. He had not, he realized, allowed himself to explore fully the implications of the other possibility. He did so now, and some of the implications were—intriguing. ”

“ There is a nightmare some men know—the implacable deadly-eyed enemy coming with the red, wetly gleaming steel while you stand all alone with the pistol that poufs weakly with the bullets dribbling from the muzzle. The man jerked the trigger and spun about and ran without waiting to see where his shot had gone, and the charge snapped two feet over McCullough's head. ”

“ He'd never thought he'd have a crack at a new country again, a new, good country. Often, he'd thought how lucky people had been who were born a hundred and fifty years ago, moving into an easy, rich country like the Ohio or Kentucky when it was new, instead of the bitter North. ”

“ He put his arms about her, and she came into them, supple but not limp, as a beautifully trained dancer follows a lead. For a very long moment they remained thus, lip to lip and breast to breast, the yearning and response in each rising in swift even balance.
And then Brown opened the door, casting a shaft of light past them in the dusk.
"Oh, Moirta," he called. "Are you there? Could you come here a moment, please—"
The two male gun runners had stepped outside the cottage while Moirta served Dolan his dinner. ”

“ He elbowed his pack up, hooked the left shoulder strap, and headed for home, staying off the trail in ordinary caution and watching his footing, but moving pretty fast just the same.
Actually, he need not have been so careful.
The Harn had been surprised and shocked by the explosive violence of the man's reaction to a routine harvesting maneuver. It was a relatively young Harn, but it retained memories of its own world, where there were also nasty, violent things which killed Harn. It was not pleasant to think that it might have evoked some such monster in this hitherto peaceful place. ”

“ There are certain anomalies, the displacement effect for example—but that is immaterial, for all practical purposes we can move at will to and from any time in our past, though not into our future—when the machine is working.
"Naturally, such time travel must be kept secret, if it were not, several undesirable consequences might arise. It is very closely regulated, and may be used only for bona fide historical research by responsible persons."
He looked inquiringly at Dolan. "I am not really sure I can tell you much more about the machine, I am not a technician, as you know. ”

“ In your time there are women who get things from men by seeming to promise more than they intend to give, for simulating emotions they do not feel. You think I am one of those ... no, please don't interrupt ... I am not. In my time there are no such women, people understand each other too well, they are too hard to fool. ”

“ The other world was milder, it had game and fur—good fur, too, from the looks of it, something new that could lick any mutation or synthetic on the market, and the income tax had still left a few fellows who could pay through the nose to see their women look nice. ”

“ They came from an old ingrowing world which had never reached the stars, where there were only men and their works, no blade of grass or micro-organism or sparrow which did not directly serve men. In their time, hereditary traits which had meant untimely and certain death in earlier times had persisted and multiplied. Immunities and instincts which had fitted men to live with tigers and streptococci, and seek their food in the wilderness, had atrophied. ”

“ Ed looked around. The stinger was dead too, three feet from his shoulder, and half a dozen more which had been making for him. A cloud of greasy, stinking smoke was rolling out of the den. The Harn was dead.
Ed put his knife away and lay back. He did not quite pass out, but things got pretty dim.
After a while he got hold of himself and sat up. He was not too surprised to see the man in forest green prodding at the bodies of the fighting units. The stranger looked at the smoke still oozing from the den and nodded approvingly. Then he came over and looked at Ed. ”

“ He still had no idea why the time translator worked, but he was beginning to know quite a bit about how it worked, in the sense of functional operation, the input/output relations of the black boxes. A time came when he could have activated the machine by making a few minor connections.
He did not do so.
With the knowledge that he had the technical problem whipped, some of his urgency faded. He could take time to amplify and clarify his knowledge. Quite probably the time translator could never be duplicated by twentieth century technology. ”

“ It is important in their trade to be suspicious. It would not be wise to let them think we are avoiding them."
"OK, I suppose not," he acknowledged glumly. He rose and followed her down the path.
Like all true artists, Moirta tended to submerge herself completely in her role, a failing which the senior gun runner recognized and allowed for in his calculations.
In the following days, Dolan held her hand often, and kissed her sometimes, and talked with her frequently, and took her in his arms for short periods; but at the crucial moment Smith or Brown always casually appeared upon the scene. ”

“ When Ed came through the next day to set his snares, the Harn was prepared to test his snakeproof pants. They held, which was disconcerting to the Harn, but it was a hard creature to convince, once thoroughly aroused. Ed was not too sure of how well the pants would stand up to persistent assault himself. After the third ambush, he took to spraying suspicious looking spots with tobacco juice. He shot two more stingers in this way, but it slowed him up quite a bit. It took him all day to make four sets. ”

“ Dolan hesitated, studying both Moirta's and the men's positions, and then nodded sullenly.
"I thought there might be," Brown said with satisfaction. "Mr. Smith, help Mr. Dolan up to the machine."
Dolan reached out unsteadily, leaning on Smith, and reversed two connections. "That's it," he mumbled.
"Thank you, Mr. Dolan. Now, Mr. Smith, if you will just carry Mr. Dolan over there into the corner, well away from the machine, and immobilize him—no, no, just temporarily. We may still need him again, Mr. Dolan is a very tricky sort of person." ”

“ The girl frowned thoughtfully and shook her head. "Nothing lights up, moves, buzzes, hums, spins around. When the machine works, it ... well, it just works, and that's all." She studied him with troubled eyes. "You are an expert, it seems to me an expert should be able to look at a machine and see what parts are faulty, isn't that true? Why must you know what the machine does?"
Dolan leaned back against the machine and lit a cigarette. ”

“ In his work, Dolan kept running into reminders of the first technician, and the matter bothered him. The man seemed to have been making progress, and surely he would not have been such a fool as simply to refuse to work, the message he had left showed he understood quite clearly his danger. He asked Moirta about this, and got another shock.
"That was a mistake," she said. "We did not fully understand your world then. In our time, medical science is very exact. ”