The owners of this
property wish to encourage a frenzied bidding war amongst major publishers; although,
indeed, even a mere single offer of a lavish advance would not be instantly
spurned by them....
LET ALL MORTAL FLESH BE SILENT;
or, THE OLD ONES
by W. A. Fulkes
Copyright ©2008 by
Chapter One
Hauser jerked awake from a drowse. He was still in the green room, with its stylized pictures of flowers and people of various shades, posters promoting unity, diversity, a community united against Hate, united in its celebration of diversity and inflexible opposition to intolerance in any form; and, of course, what was lately the burning political issue, same-self marriage between directly-reproduced people (still referred to by bigots as “clones”). Nothing in Hauser’s field of vision had enough content to permit him to focus his eyes on it for more than an instant, and in fact his eyeballs had begun to oscillate, and he put his hands over his face.
The State had charged him with a long list of grave crimes: generalized hate, numerous denials and ‘ophobias, and others even more abstruse and difficult to recall, and all the worse for that. Happily, however, though the scroll of depravities read against him demanded the most severe penalties, the moral progress of society had long since brought the abolition of all crude and primitive forms of punishment. Lesser criminals were given community service enhancing unity and diversity; and though of course a crime so grave as his required a far sterner penalty; still, he would certainly not be executed; he would not even be imprisoned: exile was the proper and enlightened sanction.
Accordingly, on the first of August
last, a manacled and shuffling Eugenius Hauser was escorted by two burly guards
to the Hate Resolution Station. His notoriety had provoked nearly the entire
bench and staff of the
The stage which the seats faced was fashioned of indestructible ceramic of lavender hue, merging seamlessly with a housing of the same material that ran from wall to wall with a slight convexity. This housing contained the new and improved transporter: the quantum accelerator that caused objects to be in two places at once, then dissolved the field containing the first, removing the object from one place the instant it appeared in another - thus in effect transporting it.
The guards brought him up on the stage, and positioned him directly in front of the small door to the transporter. Hauser then was startled to see, who but the very state prosecutor who had prosecuted him with such zeal, trot excitedly up the three steps to the proscenium, fumbling with a microphone attached to his lapel.
For Hauser had been a leader, or at
any rate a prime instigator, of the previous year’s virulent protests against
the resettlement in the working-class town of Warren, Pennsylvania, of 75,000 refugees
from the meltdown of the Chinese nuclear plant on the Pooklawara River in Papua
New Guinea, and had even been heard to use the odious word cannibal – though, in fact, after the resettlement hardly any North
American Union citizens had ever actually been eaten. Scant chance had he had, then,
of claiming innocence of the dread charge of first-degree hatred.
“Well, we’ve got another one,” the prosecutor’s chuckling but amplified voice boomed and wheezed through the hall, and an appreciative susurration of answering chuckles passed through the crowd. “Fortunately for this benighted individual, though, our society is not ruled by the sort of hate that he would like to inject into our ideas of the kind of society that we would like to have! I think we can all agree that we, at least, have burned those bridges a long time ago. Nonetheless,” he went on, “I believe our little xenophobe here—I always thought that sounded like some kind of bacteria…,” provoking an explosion of laughter, which the prosecutor in turn answered with a series odd gasping, panting sounds. “Okay…okay…not to become…not to indulge in levity, but…I do believe our xenophobe here is in for a little surprise, you know, certain refinements in transport technology…just in time, you know….” and now a rush of deeper laughter, with a certain undercurrent of what seemed to Hauser unwholesome glee that he did not like at all. What was this refinement, and why were they gloating about it? A transporter was a transporter, yes? What else could it do but dump you in another place? Or in the process of doing that, would it now turn him into a cabbage or something?
The prosecutor now turned to face Hauser, and, despite the prosecutor’s well-known compassionality, if ever a grin were wolfish, it was his. Hauser glared back at him, mouth a little twisted with a slight knowing smirk, which suddenly enraged the prosecutor. He started to speak twice, and twice stopped, then snarled, “Well, I hope you enjoy your tropical paradise!”
With a vindictive wave of his hand he motioned the guards to put Hauser into the transporter. They clearly spent an inordinate amount of time pumping iron, and easily lifted him from the stage and pushed him through the little portal into the transporter. With ankles manacled, he stumbled and fell heavily into a titanium chair. One of the guards squeezed through the small portal and fastened Hauser to the chair with titanium cuffs bolted to the titanium chair. “I’m already cuffed,” said Hauser. “What are you afraid of?”
“I ain’t afraid of you,” said the guard. “This is standard protocol, dipshit.”
“Take off these others, then. What happens after I’m transported? I’m still gonna have these on? Whadda I do then?”
“They don’t get transported. They’re filtered out, so stop whining.” He finished affixing Hauser to the transporting chair, then added with a cunning glance at his colleague, “Oh, and say hello to Dino for me,” at which the two guards broke into deep hur-hur-hurs of laughter.
As they fastened him down, Hauser winced at the gathering applause from the enthusiastic audience, growing louder still even as the door swung toward him, cut off as. the thick steel door clanged shut, leaving him in perfect darkness as the machinery began to power up. Above the rising hum he could still hear a faint rumor from without, of continued applause, and now whistling. Strangely soon all noise faded away, so that Hauser wondered if he were already being transported; but then it resumed, though with an altered character; it was now difficult to interpret its significance; it sounded, at least here inside the transporter, like a hubbub of consternation, with even perhaps some distant shrieks, cries of fear, certainly a nearer bellow of dismay….
Whatever the hell was going on, it was apparently going to be a long, long time before he found out whatever it was. The profound humming and throbbing of the transporter grew always louder, while bizarre sensations began to afflict him, a feeling of immense weight pulling him down, as if the earth’s gravity had suddenly increased many times, and at the same time a sense of rapid lateral motion, growing ever greater. “This really sucks!” he gurgled as he sensed himself becoming twofold. All these sensations continued to intensify until slowly he became aware of a murky daylight, and vague shapes of foliage, this at the same it was somehow still pitch black. Then suddenly he was no longer twofold, but singular, and gasping for breath, and no longer seated but dumped rudely into soft, moist forest litter, mostly pine needles. For some while he was too shocked even to look around, and only sat there and stared at the pine needles between his feet.
When he did lift his head he saw that he was at the edge of a deep, dark forest; behind him, either roughly to the south or the north, was an ocean. To his intense displeasure, and despite what the guard had said, he found that he was still cuffed and manacled. He struggled to his feet by propping himself against some sort of conifer, and noticed a grove of odd-looking palm trees in the distance, across a sort of meadow, but a meadow without grass, only horsetails and ferns and other odd low plants. “Let’s hope this is just some reservation for criminals in Florida and not fugging Guatemala or something…I don’t know what all that smirking and tittering was…those fuggers had something up their sleeves….”
His scrabbling in the forest litter
in the struggle to get to his feet had revealed part of a buried nest of eggs –
very large eggs. In fact, the largest eggs he had ever seen, and off-white and
oddly leathery. By reflex he looked quickly around to try to see just what had
laid them, but saw neither giant tortoise nor colossal fowl. He doubted there
was anything in
He shuffled, clinking, out of the woods and into the strange ferny meadow, looking this way and that but seeing no signs of settlement. The air was so hot and humid it felt like you could eat it. No breeze blew, but when he turned his head he caught exotic smells, sweet and pungent. A raucous bird called somewhere in the distance.
He shuffled off toward the palms, beyond which the land seemed to fall away, and from where he hoped to be able to look out upon some expanse of his new country, and locate a settlement. He was about half way across when he lurched aside, startled by a sudden explosion of a small creature from beneath the ferns – a comical, spindly thing that might have been described as lizard-like had it not pranced along on two feet, little forearms scrabbling at the air as it ran.
Despite his predicament, Hauser had to laugh a little, musing, “What the f…?!” as he kept on shuffling on toward the palms. Climbing up even a little hill was very difficult in his fetters, and by the time he stood panting at the top he was soaked in a muck of sweat. Then he froze, utterly baffled at what he was seeing in the valley below.
A ribbon of woodland followed a
shallow river through the valley, which else was strangely grassless and
covered instead with the same odd foliage of fern and dock and weedy things as
the plateau behind him. Along the shore near a little falls in the river was a
house – an elaborate house, a fantasia of 19th-century
Indeed, he new recognized them as somewhat similar in form to a certain cheap toy of his youth…one to be found in a bag of plastic models of prehistoric animals he had received…the triceratops, it was called….
He stood, unthinking, eyes switching back and forth between the triceratopses filing lugubriously down to the water on the left, and the exuberant Victorian house on the right. At last a thought was able to form itself in his shocked brain: Where the hell had they sent him, anyway?
An island…some sort of island, like in the blockbuster movie where some scientists had figured out how to grow dinosaurs from bugs in tree sap…and the scientists would need a place to live of course, so that would explain the house…and there must not be any dangerous, meat-eating type dinosaurs on the island, for there was no apparent security around the house, no fence, nothing. Which was good. He would go to the house, and once there his problems would be solved. The scientists could remove his bonds. Maybe he could get a job feeding the triceratopses or something.
On the other hand, getting to the house was not going to be easy. Before him fell away a steep declivity, studded with overhangs, that would have been difficult to clamber down even without cuffs and fetters. He had to find a better way. And even if he did, he would still have to ford the river; he hoped it was as shallow as it looked.
He shuffled off northward through the fringe of palms along the edge of the plateau, for the rise seemed to fall away in that direction. A raucous, oily-colored bird croaked and flapped slowly away as he drew near its perch; he found himself watching its beak for a glimpse of teeth, but, thank goodness, he saw none.
As the endless afternoon wore on, he shuffled, at the same time numb and exceeding tense, through ferns and pine groves and prickly shrubs. He was drenched with sweat and the fetters chafed his ankles. He continually threw glances toward the great white Victorian, hoping to see some helpful person or other come out on the verandah, but never saw anyone. Dismal insects droned in the trees. Odd chirping noises accompanied sudden scurryings in the undergrowth; a distant groaning bellow came from the riverside below. “This really sucks unbelievably bad,” he reflected. “Humane. Yeah.” He was hoping desperately that they had some beer in the house, and, furthermore, that they would share it with him.
The plateau, curving in towards the river, sloped all too slowly, and overwhelmed with heat, hunger, and thirst, he sank to his knees when he was only about half way down to the valley. He closed his eyes and slumped into the ferns, and quickly fell asleep for a little while, awaking with a start when an immense purple dragonfly landed on his nose. It was too large to brush away – he had to shove it with his manacled hands, and the thing clicked and buzzed at him as it swung off.
The morning had been stressful
enough – hauled out of his cell at daybreak, pushed and shoved and dragged to
the
He fell asleep again, awaking to the sound of a tumultuous rustling in the undergrowth, and an alarming sense of something very large rushing at him, opening his eyes just as the colossal jaws of a tyrannosaurus closed on his head and shoulders. Its breath was surprisingly sweet, although, for all that, not one bit pleasant – quite reptilian, somehow, and very large. It may not have been an actual tyrannosaurus, rather some other large theropod carnivore; but it was all one to Hauser.
He was yanked up from the earth by steely sharp points pressing into his flesh. Expecting to be dead at any moment, he yelled and flailed and thrashed. He caught a glimpse of a large merciless eye as the enormous head tilted back with the apparent intention of swallowing him whole. To prevent this, and since he was now more or less upside-down, he rammed his feet into the roof of the monster’s mouth, hoping thereby to keep it propped open; but this was entirely futile. He was immediately crumpled into a ball by the irresistible force of the jaws. Again the dagger teeth clashed upon him, again the head tossed backward to swallow him whole, but this time he was able to squirt out through the teeth and hurl himself toward the ground. No good - he was jerked to a halt, swinging in the air, when his fetters caught on the six-inch teeth. Confused at being still alive, at feeling no pain, at seeing no blood, he swung back and forth while the tyrannosaurus, itself baffled by this odd turn of events, lugubriously cocked its immense skull this way and that, trying to get a glimpse of the prey, causing Hauser to swing in greater and greater arcs while he tried to yank his feet loose and hollered, “Muthafuggahhh!”
At last the monster lowered its head to the point where Hauser’s fetters slipped off its teeth and he fell in a heap on the spongey ground. As Hauser tried to roll away, the enormous skull waved back and forth just above him, snorting, apparently sniffing the strange object that was Hauser. Then it straightened, turned slowly around, indifferently kicking Hauser out of its way as it did so, and shuffled off with an air almost of bemusement.
He watched it lumber through the palms, large fronds snapping off and falling to earth as it went, then, gasping, he sat part way up and frantically looked himself over. His clothes were torn to shreds, but there was not one streak of blood on him. Had the monster somehow clasped him in its jaws with just enough force to hold but not to puncture? It sure hadn’t felt like it. What it had felt like was tons-per-square-inch of pressure on knife points sticking in his flesh.
And yet, he realized now, although he had felt the intense crushing pressure, there had somehow at the same time been a curious absence of actual pain – to say nothing of injury.
How was that possible? What was going on here? Where was he? Had they tricked him, attached him to electrodes or something and was he now in some sort of hologram? Surely not - it was too real, too detailed, too tactile in a million different ways. Indeed, oppressed by a certain unspeakable quality, of something colossal and reptilian, irresistible, trying to eat him, a quality which neither he, nor as far as he knew, any other human being had ever experienced, he only wanted to get as far and as quickly away from the scene of the ghastly encounter as he could. He glared at the impassive white Victorian below in the river valley, indifferent spectator to his terrors and miseries. “Hey!” he screamed. “Can’t you assholes see me up here!”
His legs now became like rocks from
the miles of shuffling and the after-effect of the flood of stress hormones. He
fell to the ground again and gazed at his shredded clothes, his manacles and
fetters. Salty sweat ran into his eyes. His shoulders heaved a little in what
was as close as he could come to weeping. Then he started laughing
spasmodically and croaked, “Man, this really, truly sucks.” The
He slid, scuttled, and rolled down the cliff face, not so steep here, until he came around the corner of a little rocky overhang. Under this he hurled himself, and lay in a stupor for hours as the endless torrid day went on and on, until at last as the lurid sun sank beyond the further end of the valley he fell dead asleep.
When he awoke it was dark. For a moment he had utterly no idea where he was, and in a near panic tried to lurch to his feet, but the forgotten fetters quickly threw him onto his face. Maddened by the restraints, he thrashed about until his wrists and ankles hurt, then lay wretchedly, panting, teeth clenched. And, in the back of this, unconsciously he expected to hear a multitude of crickets in the steamy tropical night, and, hearing none at all, he was left feeling still a little confused.
He would have liked to have lain there stupefied and hopeless all night, but was too agitated to do so, and struggled to his knees. The Victorian house still rested in the valley, visible, entirely dark within but white and ghostly in the light of a gibbous moon. It filled him with hope. If he could only get to it, surely he would be freed, his belly filled, his thirst slaked.
He could see just well enough to resume the sliding, scuttling, and rolling of the afternoon. When at last he was quite near the valley floor, he was stymied by a sheer drop of some twenty feet. Dawn was just breaking, and he could see a little ways out from the cliff face a ferny area of what looked like reasonably soft soil. Desperate, mad with frustration, he hurled himself from the last precipice before he had any time to reflect upon the wisdom of this course. The plunge to earth took a sickeningly long time to complete, and although he attempted to roll to lessen the impact he nonetheless hit the ground exceeding hard, nor did it feel anywhere near as soft as it had looked.
He lay there, waiting for the explosion of excruciating pain of torn ligaments or broken bones; but felt nothing of the sort, at most a certain tightness in his limbs. “I’m fugging invulnerable,” he muttered, rolling slowly from side to side and giving little coughs of feeble laughter. “I’m exhausted, I’m in chains, but I’m invulnerable.”
He struggled to his feet and tottered off toward the house. Even at sunrise the air was impossibly muggy. Birds, or reptiles, or some damn things, to greet the dawn were squawking and shrieking everywhere in the distance. The ground become increasingly swampy and before long he found himself wading through a foot of water, surprisingly clear, little crayfish scuttling out of his way. He gazed at it and thought about drinking of it; but supposed the water to be swimming with bacteria from the rumbling guts of herds of very large reptiles; and, desperate as was his thirst, the thought of ingesting such a soup, and the consequent intestinal disease, dissuaded him. Lifting his head then, he came to a sudden halt. Enormous crocodiles, of a sort, were sunning themselves on the farther bank, and he could easily believe they were carefully eyeing him. Clearly if he tried to cross the river they would get him – invulnerable though he had seemed so far, it was hard to believe that this apparent invulnerability was not in fact merely an illusion, and it was one he did not care to test in the jaws of a giant croc. They would probably drown him, anyway.
He shuffled westward sloshing through the shallow water, hoping to get out of sight of the behemoths, but two, three, four of them slid into the water. “Crap! I’m getting really sick of this bullshit!” He now increased his pace, ridiculously, his feet going like tappets within the confines of the stride permitted by his fetters. He looked back to see gliding lizard shapes at the apexes of smooth wakes in the placid river, all pointing toward him. He tried to hop like a kangaroo toward a grove of willow-like trees ahead, but slipped and fell face-down in the water. He was so thirsty that before he even knew what he was doing he was sucking and slurping up the river water in a brief ecstasy - before his awareness of the smoothly approaching forms behind him soon goaded him to wriggle and lurch to his fettered feet again.
Happily, the progress of the reptiles was somewhat arrested when they reached the shallows; and by furious shuffling and sloshing, Hauser was able to reach the willow grove ahead of them. Just as he did so, he felt a strange slight resistance in the air, a sort of spongey magnetic feel. No time to wonder about it - he waddled quickly on into the grove and tried to get up one of the trunks by bracing his feet against another nearby, but succeeded only in dumping himself hard into the boggy ground. His involvement amongst the willows seemed however to have baffled the pursuing monsters; for they slowed, and began to weave from side to side. He stood still with his back pressed against one of the boles, hoping they would lose interest, but now they seemed to catch his scent and began to converge on the grove. This was not a situation out of which he could get.
The white house was just a few hundred feet, across the river and a little eastward. He stared at it as if his eyes were telescopes and he could focus them to reveal anyone standing and watching at a window. “Hey!” he yelled at the house. “HEY!” But the house remained as still and impassive as ever.
With his manacled hands he was able to grasp a fairly sturdy and low-hanging branch and pull himself a little ways up a tree until he was sitting on the branch with his feet dangling a few feet above the ground. The crocs were now approaching the grove in a rough semicircle. He struggled and writhed to his feet, standing on the branch, and sought a way to get up higher into the tree, but, tottering and swaying, found it almost impossible to keep his balance while doing anything but try to keep his balance.
Something odd was going on with the crocs at the very verge of the grove. They were floundering, kicking up water and mucky soil, raising themselves part way up and pawing at the air, as it seemed – as if, it suddenly occurred to him, the slight resistance through which he had plunged at that very point had somehow solidified and, though still invisible, become an impassible barrier to the monsters. They tried and tried to get into the grove, one even looked like it was attempting to climb a ladder of air, until it fell off and into the bog on its back with a great splash.
After a while Hauser jumped down
from the tree. The monsters, baffled, now merely stood still and glared at him.
Nothing was making much sense, and he was starting to feel like
He lurched away from the willow grove and hastened as well as he could into the shallows of the river, with many a backward glance to see if the reptiles were able to pursue him; they were not. He saw a rowboat drawn up on the farther bank; but that was of no use to him here. Always a pretty good swimmer, he surged into the water, and when it was up to his waist he threw himself forward and began clumsily dog-paddling toward the rowboat, still continually looking behind him to see if the monsters were minded or able to follow.
Although from a distance it had seemed that the river had hardly any current, he now perceived by the relative position of the rowboat that he was drifting a considerable piece downstream, and that whatever had been stopping the crocs from getting him in the grove or further up the river, might not obtain below. Accordingly he flopped around and began feverishly to paddle upstream again, and stopped not until he was some ways upstream of the rowboat, but, now becoming quite tired, was already well downstream of it again by the time he had succeeded in getting a mere twenty feet closer to the shore. His thrashings seemed sure to draw the attention of the crocs, but he saw none approaching. The fetters exerted a continuous downward drag on his legs and added to his muscular exhaustion. He allowed his legs to sink a little ways, hoping quickly to touch bottom – but did not. With much difficulty he paddled his way back up to the surface, gasping when he reached the air again and beginning seriously to question the wisdom of attempting to ford an unknown river while shackled hand and foot, with enormous reptiles about.
He had utterly reached the end of his energy – he tried to keep on writhing and sloshing toward the shore, but his limbs just would not work any more. Turning over on his back, he feebly tried to paddle closer to shore in that position, but only turned himself in circles. He drifted slowly downstream, occasionally testing his arms to see if they had recovered, but succeeding only in twitching them a little.
Happy he was then when he felt his feet scrape against a muddy surface of the riverbed. He realized that, after all, he got far enough across so that the depth, here at least, had lessened to the point where he could stand again. So he stood in the river, bracing himself a little against the current, keeping an eye on the crocs, who seemed to have forgotten all about him, and resting. After a while he started shuffling along the sludgy bottom. Something pinched him and he furiously kicked it away and shuffled along much faster. Something pinched him again, harder, and he threw himself forward and began to swim, or at any rate paddle, again, rather feebly but well enough to get him into an area of reeds where the river bottom was still higher, and here he sloshed through the increasingly swampy fringe of the river, angling back toward the house, until at last he was on reasonably dry land again, and, after one last check to see if any crocs were still pursuing, threw himself down on the ground.
Strange to think that
24 hours ago he had been sitting wretchedly in his cell in
He started to fall asleep, but, suddenly alarmed that creatures might be slinking or lumbering up to him whilst he lay insensible, jerked himself awake and struggled to his feet.
There was the white house, almost forgotten in his struggles, suddenly looking quite close. He saw now, what he had not really remarked before, that there was a white picket fence around it. He slowly shuffled off towards the house.
Chapter Two
Hauser opened a gate in the fence and closed it behind him. He noticed that a metal band ran along the etnire upper rail of the fence. The flora of the “front yard” was no different from what was outside the fence – ferns and so forth.
At last he came to the house. Everything was spotlessly clean and glossy, even the fabrics of the deep, comfortable wicker chairs on the wrap-around porch. With difficulty he climbed the stairs to the porch, turning sideways and straining against the fetters to get the side of his right foot onto the next step. He shuffled across the porch and stared wide-eyed at the welcome mat, whereon intertwined with the elaborate lettering were pattern motifs of tropical foliage and reptilian forms. The door was a large, heavy affair, with a big cut-glass window, obscured by lacy white curtains within; on either side were stained-glass windows repeating the foliage and reptile motifs. Peering within, he could see only vague suggestions of heavy furniture and a stairway. He sought for a doorbell button, but saw only a length of green satiny rope where such a button might have been, so he pulled the rope, and a bell sounded within.
No answer. He turned the doorknob and found the door unlocked. Shuffling within, he was met with a startling change in atmosphere, dry and cool, scented with pine and lavender. The door closed with a smooth, clean click behind him. He stood silent, listening; he heard nothing but the tocking of the huge grandfather clock in the hall near the stairs. “Hello the house!” he called. “Anybody home?”
No answer. He walked into the parlor, where bright yet murky sunlight poured through the gauzy curtains and fell upon the rich leathers and woods of the furniture. Upon a small table with a marble top near a couch stood an ancient upright telephone, the kind you picked up and spoke into while holding the receiver to your ear. As he drew near, it began to ring.
He started violently at the sound, then stared wide-eyed at the telephone, almost with terror. It kept ringing as he shuffled up to it and stood there looking down at it. He listened for any sound of an approaching answerer, or an extension lifted in some other room, but heard nothing but the ringing. Of course he had to answer it, and he clutched at the apparatus, fumbling. He would have had little notion how it worked, had he not seen people in old movies using similar devices; and then, cuffed as he was, he could just barely get the earpiece to his ear while holding the speaker to his mouth. So with one thing and another, he failed to get the thing to his ear until a slightly mechanical voice at the other end was already speaking:
“…no response and we are concerned for your safety. Again, if you push the green button on the red control unit, the house will be automatically transported. This message will repeat in ten seconds.”
Hauser looked frantically this way
and that and all around, but saw no red control unit. He still had the receiver
pressed to his ear when the message looped and so he heard, “Hello, Mr. and
Mrs. Cantwell, this message is generated by Hübsch. All of us who have found
cause to do so have now gathered upon the island above the
Hauser hollered into the phone: “Hey, can anyone hear me? This isn’t Mr. and Mrs. Cantwell! There is no red control unit! What’s going on here! Can you hear me!”
“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Cantwell, this message is generated by Hübsch….” Hauser let the telephone drop to the lushly carpeted floor. He had almost no idea what the hell the voice had been talking about, but one thing he had gained from it: the stark impression that something bad was about to happen, and that he needed to find a red control unit, and probably Mr. and Mrs. Cantwell too, and soon.
“Hello! Anybody home!” he shouted. Again, no sound but the distant tocking of the grandfather clock. He hastened, shuffling and clinking, to the back of the house, through a kitchen that was certainly not Victorian, gleaming with various shiny appliances and consoles with push-buttons, dials, and read-outs, and up to the windows of a charming breakfast nook that looked out upon the back yard. Mr. and Mrs. Cantwell were not to be seen. Wait – a whirl of something, perhaps a white garment, had just disappeared around the edge of the house.
He found a back door and went out, jumping step by step down a short flight of stairs, and was about to go around the same edge of the house when, mistrustful, he thought better of it, and shuffled off around the opposite corner. He went out through a gate in the picket fence on that side of the house, and continued circling around at some distance from the fence, intending to see whoever or whatever had caught his eye before he was seen by whoever or whatever it was. As he came even with the front of the house he suddenly saw a woman in a white dress and white bonnet, hunched over and peering at the ground. As he watched she slowly turned, still with her back to him, and quickly pattered to another part of the yard, where again she stood for a while, hunched and peering at the ground.
Hauser shuffled, clinking, around to the front of the fence, and back to the gate through which he had first passed. He was sure that the woman would hear his chains, but she showed no sign that she did so, even as he came up to about ten feet from where she was on the other side of the front gate. Standing at the gate he called to her in a somewhat choked and squeaky voice, “Mrs. Cantwell…?
The lady slowly turned around and lifted her head, so that Hauser could see her face. “Jee-ZUS!” he exclaimed, and staggered backward, and fell to the ground, and frantically writhed and twitched his way back to his feet again, and resumed frantically shuffling backward. The face at which he was now staring had the appearance of a sort of hybrid between a human and a dinosaur: the eyes reptilian, the skin slightly scaly, the nose scarcely formed, and the mouth – the mouth held open in a grimace to reveal carnivorous, carnivorous teeth.
He still shuffled away from her as she stared back at him, and even though he now felt a grotesque twinge of uneasiness and remorse at what would ordinarily have been unforgivably rude behavior, still he backed away from the apparition, which still watched him, making no attempt to speak. At last when he was half a football field away from the fence he stopped, panting. Then it suddenly occurred to him that, after all, the woman must be wearing some sort of disguise like the prosthetics they used in the movies – a mask behind which she was maybe laughing at him for acting like a panicky idiot.
The woman, in fact, was not wearing a disguise, but there was something even more pressing which Hauser did not know: the time was now exactly twenty-four hours since he had arrived in this inexplicable place - a time which had been precisely calibrated by those who had exiled him here. Moreover, if he had not been so distracted, he likely would have noticed a light in the sky, at first like a bright planet, but quickly growing exponentially larger and more radiant until it had become a second sun – and then he noticed the glare, even with his back turned, and heard an awful roaring from somewhere above and behind him.
As he was turning around to see what was happening, the entire landscape flared into intolerable brightness in which vague forms of even greater brightness hurtled into the sky or billowed outward at impossible speeds. A colossal column of fire shot straight upward in the center of it all. A shock pulsed through the ground, an earthquake so abrupt and powerful that everything loose floated up into the air - a racket of crashing and banging and breaking came from the house. Then an impression, for an instant, starting in the distance, of the very earth heaving upward, trees uprooted and hurtling toward him in a confused roiling mass with soil and rock, and in another instant he was part of the mass, his clothes and shoes ripped away, swept up by a terrible force and hurtling at an insane speed in a thick cloud of debris. Tumbling past was the hideously limp and flailing form of a once-fearsome therapod, perhaps even the same that had attempted to swallow Hauser: even as he watched, it was ripped apart into pieces, and those pieces into smaller pieces. Yet, as far as Hauser could tell as he spun through the maelstrom, continually pelted by stones and flinders of trees, Hauser remained intact. Everything around him burst into flame, his shackles softened and fell away.
For perhaps a thousand miles he hurtled amidst the fiery storm, splashed by molten rock, far out over an ocean and through blinding, scalding fogs. When at last the doomsday wind began to slow, and the larger objects began to drift downward, and even skip over or plunge into the boiling sea, Hauser went with them, passing through ever hotter salty steams, then suddenly dunked right into the cauldron of the super-heated ocean, bouncing along its bubbling surface.
When at last he came to a stop, Hauser found himself bobbing in a scene of nightmarish surrealism, the lurid orange sky just barely illuminating the thick mists through which loomed the carcasses of appalling monstrosities of the deep, titanic reptiles with jaws open in death grins baring rows of dagger teeth, while a trillion meteors in every weird color streaked downward out of the furnace above. Soon the sky was burning white-hot and all around cinders and huge molten droplets fell into the rumbling, hissing waters.
He heard a deep awful roaring and felt a wild commotion somewhere behind him through the mists. The waters about him began to rise, and he along with them, as in an elevator, upward and still upward. The mists parted and ahead of him he caught glimpses of a lush green land and maybe even a couple of dinosaur heads poking through the palms. Still he rose higher and higher on the swell until he saw below him raging whitewater, and, though it was incredible, the land appeared to be thousands of feet below. Then he was carried roaring over the land, and still the titan wave went on, the white froth below turning the color of mud and throwing up trees and boulders; yet up where he was the water was for the moment absurdly stable, cool and almost glassy. Soon enough however a huge mushroom of surging, hot water erupted from below. He found himself somehow sucked down into the bowels of the titan wave. It was so abrupt and startling that reflexively, and in spite of his horror at what he was doing, he opened his mouth wide to gasp for air. He took in a great quantity of hot sea water, which caused him to gasp again for air, and he gulped down more sea water….
He was on land, floundering in hot, wet mud, coughing and gagging, and vomiting sea water, and gasping for air. He raised himself to all fours and for a long while did nothing but cough and spew out more water and take in great wheezing inhalations. Even when at last he could think a little, he had no idea how he had got here, and no idea where here was - just that he was staring into near blackness, the only light coming from the multi-colored meteor streaks that still persisted, a little reduced, but still in profusion, giving a faint, always-varying coruscation to the landscape of utter desolation. In a wild panic he turned this way and that and uttered inarticulate cries until a brighter than the common meteor showed him a grove of tumbled and ruined cycads and in a flash he remembered everything, but felt little the better for it. He turned around stupidly, looking for something, anything, to which to respond in any way, but saw only faint glimpses of ruin, and more ruin – sometimes, in the glow of a weak meteor, rather intimate details and as if indoors at some trés chic art gallery, now and then, in the glow of a bright bolide, astonishing wide vistas of tumbled destruction on all sides.
His teeth had holes in them; the fillings had evaporated. He was naked, hairless, with nothing on his body except for the patches of lately molten rock which had affixed themselves to him.
He alone, of all that he could see, had been left standing. Why him? Then the explanation for everything that had happened suddenly hit him – none of it had been really real! Of course! He had been “transported” into some sort of superduper futuristic type of holograph! The giveaway would be the lack of texture in objects at which you closely peered: for no matter how powerful any new computers might be, still it was utterly impossible for any machine to simulate the infinite gradations of the structure of the cosmos; what was more, as Hauser had once put it to his friends during an argument which had been, more or less, on this subject, “They can’t fake the pimples on my hairy ass, ‘cause they don’t know where they are.” – “They’re on your ass,” one of his friends had helpfully pointed out. – “Yeah, but where on my ass?” Hauser had decisively concluded.
To assure himself that he had deduced the secret of his predicament, and since he himself in fact was ignorant of the distribution of whatever distal [pustules] he may have had just prior to his transportation, he looked for a certain lopsided triangular pattern of three small moles on his left arm, expecting it to be missing…but it was there. He dug his hand into the hot muddy wrack and scooped up a handful of hot wet sand, steaming water, tiny flinders of trees, and let it slowly fall out again, drops catching the lurid reflections of . “This ain’t no fugging holograph,” he mumbled. “So what the fug is it?” Then he sank to his knees, and collapsed, face in the scalding muck, and again lapsed into unconsciousness.
Chapter Three
Some long time later he found himself awake, and he stood up and began to walk, and, absurdly enough, it was with a certain sense of lightness and freedom that he did so - because, at least, his shackles and fetters were gone. He walked for a mile but the landscape never varied, aside from the kaleidoscopic patterns of ruin – innumerable arrangements of mud, water, shattered trees, stones, lumps of vegetation, pieces of animals of land and sea. Often he stumbled, or sank into potholes. He had some vague notion that he would most quickly come to the end of the desolation if he proceeded in the same direction that the titan wave had travelled, since presumably it had dropped him near the end of its strength; but he knew not that it had also dragged him backwards toward the sea basin for many a mile after finally expending itself deep inside the continent.
He walked on and on in the dim, flickering twilight, continually sneezing and spitting out grit, intensely thirsty but finding nothing but pools of seawater. He looked for daylight to start to filter in at any moment, but it came not; instead, the world grew yet darker as the storm of meteors grew ever less, and somehow the sky seemed to thicken. Sometimes the air was calm; at other times a roaring, ever-shifting wind kicked up – then a slightly cooler downdraft, and a cindery rain began to fall, little hard pieces of black soot, bouncing off his bald skull.
He walked on and on, but despite the blissful freedom of unfettered feet, his thirst and hunger wore him down, and he felt quite short of breath, too. He walked stumbling with his head down and his eyes mostly closed, and bumped into some huge, moist, scaly, and slightly squishy mass – a dinosaur, whether of land or sea he knew not, but quite dead, the faint reflections of the varicolored meteors shimmering on the wet skin. He was about to begin the long circle around it when it occurred to him – hey, this is food - a lot of food. He looked around, and found a long sharp flinder of tree, and with this he hacked and pried at the colossal bulk until he had got a strip of flesh loose, at which he gnawed with surprising relish - not entirely unlike sushi, of which, to his great shame, he had been quite partial. He wondered if he was the only human being ever to have snacked on sauropod.
Remarkably (although briefly) invigorated, even his thirst somewhat allayed, he set off again at a brisker pace and with his head up. He had declined to bring along with him any more of the colossal beast’s flesh, not much liking the idea of carrying it in his bare hands, and expecting to find many more reasonably fresh carcasses.
So he walked on, and on, and the world became ever darker; he pressed forward against howling winds, despite which the hot moist atmosphere nevertheless seemed ever closer and more stifling, thick with ash and sulfureous miasmas, and now and then his nose was appalled by odious hot metallic fumes, so that he jerked his head aside. At last when he had felt for some while that he could not take another step, but had kept on taking another step, and another, on a sudden he found himself amidst a grove of towering cycads; and then a snort of disturbingly brobdingnagian proportions alerted him to a small herd of what could only be triceratopses – every few seconds a bright meteor displayed some colossal leg or broad expanse of bony head-shield. The astonishing size of them, so nearby, was so daunting that Hauser sidled crabwise behind some stout trunks and out of sight – though it was doubtful the creatures could have seen him anyway, with their weak eyesight, and the near-darkness, and he covered with soot.
The immense beasts seemed to be huddled together, and they kept on snorting like steam engines, now and then nervously stamping a huge foot with a soft boom. He pressed his back against one of the trunks and sank down to the ground. At least he had come to a place not utterly devastated, he thought; but when he looked up, he saw that the crowns of the trees had all been burnt away. Again and again he sank into a kind of stunned fugue, snapped out of it by occasional bellows – very strange bellows, a peculiar sound he had never heard before, like something you’d hear in some old factory from some obsolescent piece of heavy machinery.
The meteors grew ever less, the hot, steamy, smokey darkness ever closer and blacker. A great, rolling thump seemed to Hauser likely to be the sound of one of the dinosaurs collapsing on its side; infrequent wet, explosive sounds might have been colossal sneezes. He was shocked awake from another spell of unconsciousness by a bright flash and an explosion of thunder, the first of an endless barrage. The alarmed triceratopses, snorting and groaning, slowly shuffled around to get free of one another’s bulk and then headed off in a lugubrious canter further inland, into the strobe-lit darkness . Hauser wondered if they knew of some better place than this, and whether he should follow them; but he was overcome with lethargy, and decided they had merely been panicked by the violent thunderstorm, and really had no idea where they were going. Funny how quickly you got used to having triceratopses around.
Torrents of rain fell. At first he gladly stuck his open-mouthed face up to receive the precious water; but, after the initial delight as moisture reached his parched tissues, he found his mouth full of soot and stinging metallic tastes, and spit, and spit again .“Boy, this is one fugged-up planet,” he croaked.
He sat in the mud with his back against the stout tree, eyes mostly closed, mouth open, flinching when the lightning struck nearby, the warm dirty rain lashing against him in a fierce wind. Sluggishly he thought about whether he should try to let himself die, or not. Problem was, dying was something he seemed not to be able to do. He couldn’t figure that out – if this wasn’t some futuristic super-duper holograph, what the hell was it? In what other situation does one survive an atomic explosion, and burning that liquefies metal, and drowning in a mile-high tsunami?
Wait a minute. He hadn’t had a heck of a lot of time to think about it, but it couldn’t really have been a nuclear blast, could it? As far as he knew, nuclear exposions did not generate mile-high tsunamis. Something like that could only be caused by something cosmic like an asteroid falling into the ocean.
Oh.
That’s what that was. And that weird, slightly robotic voice on the telephone, warning about the “impact” and “astronomical forces…;” whoever produced that message and to whomever it was addressed, apparently had already known what was coming: figuring just so much, however, shed absolutely no light at all on Hauser’s inexplicable predicament.
Hübsch…Hübsch…Hübsch….he had heard that name somewhere. Of course, the inventor of the all-important transporter. Was that the guy who sent the message over the telephone? Why had it sounded somewhat mechanical?
He had fallen under dark suspicions of harboring certain hatefull, loathsome, odious ideas, but the Anti-Hate Authority had hesitated to ; but then, when he had began to rant about the possibility of transportation through time….
Oh.
“So here I am,” he muttered. “In the fugging Jurassic or whatever.” He closed his eyes and whispered, “But why aren’t I dead yet?”
Soon he passed out.
Chapter Four
Nearly all his energy expended, he lay in the ferny mud at the base of the great cycad trunk while the lightning flashed and the thunder roared, and the warm, wind-lashed rain pounded on his flesh. Sometimes he slept, sometimes he was merely inert, eyes half open, or closed, with an arm thrown over them, as the endless rain fell, very gradually becoming less warm.
The sky never cleared; he saw neither sun, nor moon, nor stars, nor indeed even any sunlight, unless the merest hint of infinitely diffused and attenuated illumination, which only eyes adjusted by many hours of gloom could have perceived at all, might be called sunlight; and half the time even that slightly grayish sheen, in which dim silhouettes were limned, failed, and all was pitch black.
Many days passed, only now there was no day, only night. The great heat released by the asteroid strike was long locked in by the thick overcast of dust which prevented any radiation; but as the rains went on, much of this heat was converted, and always a little escaped into space, while no sunlight reached the surface of the earth; so that imperceptibly but steadily the temperature fell.
The winds calmed but the rain went on, and in time grew cool, and then even cold. Hauser was aware that the rain was now chilling, yet somehow failed to be chilled; and was vaguely surprised that inert and naked though he was, he was troubled not at all by the cold, indeed which seemed more like an idea, a taste, than a threatening element, or cause of suffering.
The rain began coldly to kiss and tickle instead of pelt – he understood it had turned to snow. So he sat there in what was almost suspended animation while the snow drifted up around him. The world was actually a little brighter now; when now and then he opened his eyes he could see the dim forms of snowflakes scurrying. He did not know that this was pretty much the first snow the earth had seen at this latitude in about two hundred million years.
He lay down with an arm over his eyes, quite at ease amidst the raging blizzard, now and then licking at the snow on his face to keep from becoming too thirsty. As the snow drifted up and over him he felt more and more peaceful and disinclined to bestir himself – he thought he must be freezing to death, but did not much care. His prospects on this asteroid-wasted world were not so golden anyway. At the same time, he was by now vaguely aware that he was not going to freeze to death, nor die any other way; that somehow, wherever and whenever he was, here and now he could not be harmed. He could, however, so it seemed, be entirely drained of energy; and this was the state of torpor into which he was now drifting still deeper.
From somewhere came the weird science-fiction movie sound-effects of a lake freezing solid, as of the firing of photon torpedoes, or titan spears crashing through the frozen surface. The trees popped and cracked, sometimes so loudly that it sounded as if they were exploding into pieces. A couple of times there was a great, earth-shuddering thump – just possibly a dinosaur keeling over.
The world grew quieter and warmer once the snow had drifted up over his head. Occasionally he shifted his position, and at last lay down flat. Many days went by and an absolute stillness settled upon the world. He was content. Now and then he licked the snow from his lips.
As still more days went by he began to be aware of quiet scurryings through the snow; and it seemed to him that little animals were coming out of their burrows and making tunnels through the snow just as they had through the soil. He wondered what they thought of all this; but they could hardly fail to be satisfied by the immense amounts of dinosaur meat suddenly left for their exclusive dining pleasure. Sometimes he had dreams, often dreams of animals, struggling, dying, sometimes surviving in the most clever and unexpected ways.
From now and then rolling over or even stretching, as well as sucking at the snow for water, Hauser had insensibly formed a kind of little igloo for himself, a man-sized burrow in the snow; and after a long, long time he wasn’t sure but he thought he might be making out the merest hint of a wan blue light in his little burrow – it was the ultimate attentuation of light, but it was light, so that if his foot twitched he was pretty sure he had seen something move.
At times he considered the matter of attempting to break out from his snowy cocoon, but always had neither the energy nor the will actually to try it. One time some snorty, snuffly creature tunnelled into his lair and presently he felt astonishingly sharp little insectivorous teeth chomping at his leg: turned out he had at least enough energy to yell and kick the little beast away.
The blue light grew brighter, and what was more surprising yet was that it waxed and waned, as if day and night had returned to the world above the snow. Hauser began to think that it might after all be worth the effort to claw his way back to the surface for a look around; but it seemed to him almost impossible to move. Not until he began to feel the dripping of water on his head (on which the hair had once again sprouted thickly) did he at last find the strength to rise to his knees and begin feebly pawing at the roof of his snowy burrow. It fell apart in clumps and in a moment he was stunned to find himself in actual daylight – not quite sunshine, and weak enough it was, but overwhelming to him, and he shut his eyes tight and put his hands over his eyes and staggered backwards, crashing into the remnant of the melting roof of his quickly-dissolving abode.
Very gradually he dared to remove his hands and unsquint his eyes. What he saw was a landscape of utter unearthliness: a vast foggy plain of mushy snow, columnar burnt trunks sticking out of it, singly or in groves, receding into the misty distance, a huge skull now and then just visible in the steams blowing by. Above it all, a roiling sky of various lurid colors, dark purple predominant, through which a wan sun could just be seen, or at any rate sensed, approaching the zenith; and from everywhere came a sound of rushing waters. He collapsed back into what remained of his den.
As the days went by, the snow shrank closer and closer to the ground, and at last remained only in patches in the shade of a bole or boulder, leaving behind a vast brown plain of mud in which nothing grew nor moved but little runnels of water. There came a time when the disc of the sun was just visible, and another when it was too bright to be gazed upon. All the snow was gone, and the mud was drying, and Hauser’s almost skeletal body was sticking only half way out of it. One day he came out of his trance to find an alligator-like reptile, only a few feet long, attempting to tear his arm off, but as always Hauser’s person proved invulnerable. The beast was too stupid to realize that its efforts were futile, and continued to gnaw and yank at the impregnable flesh until at last Hauser, roused by annoyanced, flipped over, grabbed the reptile’s jaws, and shoved it away. When it came right back, he picked it up and fell with it into a deep puddle, and he held it there until it was drowned.
After this surprising show of strength he was utterly exhausted, and fell back again into the mud; but kept throwing glances at the floating form of the dead croc, until finally he hoisted himself up on an elbow and grabbed the beast’s tail, and pulled it close to him. Then on this carcass he snacked for a day, opening the tough hide with a sharp rock and then continually tearing off little morsels and continually experiencing surprising surges of vigor. Indeed, after a day of eating, he even felt like going for a walk.
Walk to where? Everywhere he looked the landscape was the same: a wanly lit humpy plain of mud and lifeless tree trunks. If he walked south, he would reach the land that had been scoured by the titanic wave; if he walked north, he would come to colder regions where the snow had lain even deeper and perhaps persisted yet; and if he walked east or west, he would doubtless encounter only more of the same as here. Still, he had to walk somewhere. So he started off westward.
He stumbled across the mushy, potholed ground, following the dim, diffuse sun, which sank in a wild patchwork tapestry of lurid swathes and bands like the silks of some outré eastern culture. He had to stop at nightfall, for the light neither of the moon nor a single star was visible, and the earth was pitch black. He lay on his back in the mud and closed his eyes, and was about falling asleep when his eyes suddenly jerked open again, at first he knew not why. Then he perceived that something more or less rectangular was moving in the sky, barely visible against the blackness but surely with a faint illumination within, now gracefully swerving southeastward. In the utterly silent night he could almost believe his ears detected a low humming almost as it passed overhead, suggesting it was not very high. Long after it had passed, and he was still staring at an area low in the southern sky where he supposed it to have travelled by now, a bright white line of light, not lightning, too straight and persistent for that, shot down from a little ways up in the sky to the ground, swayed back and forth, and seemed to rotate, and then suddenly shut off. “Great,” he croaked to himself. “Now, UFOs.” With that he collapsed back into the mud and returned to his exhausted sleep.
In the wan abnormal light of morning he wondered if it could be that the craft had been searching for him. No – that was unlikely. He had used infrared sensors in the Peace Forces and supposed that surely the crew could have done far better than shining a spotlight if they had been searching for him, or anyone. He hauled himself to his feet, and tottered on for perhaps half a mile, and then sank back into the mud, coated with and scarcely distinguishable from it. “If anybody anywhere feels like helping me,” he mumbled, “now would be a good time.”
He drifted down into the trance. For twenty years he lay there, lost in a contented fugue dream of earth, air, and sky. The warmth quickly increased, the mud dried into loam, ferns arose in the dim light, hiding what of him the soil did not. Animals were few at first, but after some years little scurryings through the ferns were common, and often some creature would attempt his flesh with its teeth, but was always unable to pierce it, and after a time they all ceased to try it. As day endlessly followed night and night day, very slowly the sky cleared, and the high lurid clouds gave way to faint gorgeous tinctures at sunrise and sunset. Seeds blew in from the north, and saplings arose, and one day flower petals were blowing in the wind. And then one day some large, humming thing landed quite nearby.
A different humming sound, and a scrunch. Hauser’s eyes even opened. Something large was walking slowly through the ferny undergrowth, and came to a halt inches from his head. When the sunlight was suddenly obscured he rolled his eyes back and saw a more or less human form silhoutted against the sky.
“I was looking for periwinkles,” said a pleasant though slightly mechanical voice - the first speech he had heard in twenty years, and yet which he thought sounded vaguely familiar. “At the shore. Then, on my way home, I maintained a faunal scan, chiefly for amusement, and to my great surprise acquired weak humanoid readings at this place, which could only mean an unidentified transportee. Am I correct?”
Hauser failed to answer. He was thinking about trying to roll over and begin the supreme effort of raising himself up from the ground a little.
“I perceive that you are too weak to respond, and that you have no Desistance Order on file. Therefore, with your permission, I shall lift you up and bring you into my vessel, thus to transport you to the College, as we call it, so that you may receive remedial care.”
Very, very carefully, almost like a paleontologist whisking away the dirt packed around a sauropod fossil, the speaker of these words separated Hauser’s skeletal person from the encroaching soil. For hours he toiled, until little patches of Hauser’s bone-white skin were exposed to the sun for the first time in twenty years; but he was encrusted with dirt that it must have been difficult to tell precisely where the soil ended and Hauser began. Then he very carefully lifted him up and bore him to his craft, and there laid him upon a bed that folded out from the bulkead, which he was able very dexterously to unlatch while still holding what was left of Hauser. He took a box out of a compartment in the bulkead, and from the box withdrew some materials; Hauser could not see what they were, but soon a hand appeared close over his face with an eyedropper, and he was suddenly sensible of explosions of nourishment on his parched tongue as little globules of glucose-laden fluid hit it. An electric thrill ran all through his body, and around again, and he was even able to lift his head a little and roll his eyes toward his rescuer – which he now perceived to be a very human-looking robot. “You’re a robot,” he whispered – now, the first words he had spoken in twenty years.
“Not really,” was, for then, the device’s sole and oracular response. After emptying several more eyedropperfulls of fluid into Hauser’s slack-jawed face, the being went to the front of the craft, a soft humming arose, and Hauser felt the craft lift into the air and forward, quickly gaining speed. In the area where he was the bulkhead was interrupted by no windows; he could not see outside the craft without turning over and lifting himself up at least a little. This seemed like more than he could manage, but by consciously focusing on and moving one muscle at a time, he slowly shifted himself so that he was facing forward and could see out the large front windscreen: nothing but dusty blue sky, some cumulus clouds arising far away. Glancing around the cabin, he beheld many bundles of vegetation, and was startled to see an oppossum-like creature in a cage, staring at him and standing seemingly frozen with one leg raised. Then he fell back onto the bed and lay there staring at the ceiling, and feeling the craft soaring through the air, and listening to the soft but powerful humming of its engines. He fell asleep.
The next thing he knew, the craft had landed and the robot was opening the hatch. He lifted himself a little and saw that the opossum-like creature had by now settled itself into a fuzzy, spiky ball. Slightly cool air breezed in from the open hatchway, and the robot returned with a walker, of the sort that really old people used. The robot helped Hauser to his feet, and placed his hands on the bar of the walker; and it was only then that he became aware that he was, technically, naked, and yet encased in a kind of shellac of dirt; in fact, he was so encrusted with dirt that he did really feel naked, but still, “Guess I could use a shower,” he croaked apologetically. “And some pants.” His speech was slurred; his lips felt numb.
“How long have you been here?” asked the robot as Hauser slowly shuffled toward the hatchway.
For the first time he got a good look at his rescuer. Perfectly proportioned he was, like an athlete, but with the robot’s tell-tale manner of moving, smooth, rolling, precise, devoid of swagger, hesitation, or conflicting motive. The face was what was unusual about it: instead of the customary anodyne composite physiognomy, the features, though stylized, were nevertheless peculiar and strongly marked, rather heavy, with bushy eyebrows over icy blue eyes, an aquiline nose of not insignificant proportions, just slightly sensuous lips such as you would never ordinarily see on a robot - giving the head a little bit of the look of an ancient Roman bust of some highly intelligent but slightly louche praetor. “Here? Where is here?” whispered Hauser.
“The Past, so to speak,” said the robot. “How many years is it since you were transported here from your Present?”
“Oh, no, no, no,” said Hauser, with almost a laugh. “I’m not buying into that. Forget it.”
“Pardon me?” said the robot.
“This isn’t really, like, the Jurassic or something. I’m not buying that. Something’s screwy. Why aren’t I dead?”
“First, this is the very beginning of the Paleocene, a mere 20 years past the K-T Boundary….”
“Oh, right, I forgot.”
The robot tilted its head to one side. “I sense irony in your voice.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you probably do.”
But Hauser had used up nearly all his energy, and so far from being able to converse any further, could hardly remain standing. The robot caught his arm in a titanium grip, and helped him down the gangway to the landing platform, not very high, but high enough to reveal the surrounding landscape.
Hauser was not a little surprised then to behold a vast complex laid out before him, apparently a center of research and manufacturing: he saw long warehouse-like structures, and what were probably laboratories, and power installations, and teams of robots building new ones, and on a low rise behind it all a miniature castle, with whitewashed turrets and blue trim. So there he stood in the cool breeze of evening in his filthy nakedness, a weak sun low on the horizon, gawking. “This is my institute, so to speak,” said the robot.
A little revived by the fresh airs, Hauser said, “This is yours. Have you got a name?”
“Naturally, I am Professor Metz.”
The name sounded familiar, and Hauser was about to ask where he might have heard it before, but was then finally overcome by weakness and dizziness, and sank to one, and then both knees. From somewhere appeared two more robots, these with the standard anodyne features, and they drew out a telescoped stretcher and carefully laid Hauser upon it.
He was borne down a lift, and along a droning corridor, then placed in the back of some sort of rail car, which slowly trundled along through a tunnel, and eventually found himself at a terminus in a large chamber of white stone with blue trim, exceeding clean, from which opened unnumbered stairwells, passages, and whatever lay behind various sizes and shapes of single and double doors, and which was populated only by more robots.
They placed him on a gurney. “Restoration,” said his mechanical Virgil to one of the nondescript ‘bots, and after another ride in another lift, and another ride down another corridor, Hauser found himself in a pleasing room with uplifting yet muted colors, rather early-19th-century, and four poster beds with crisp white linens, none occupied. He was carefully laid upon one nearest the graceful ogee window, which opened either to the south or north of the compound, looking across rolling parkland, but with ferns instead of grass, fresh groves of young trees waving here and there with an impression of sudden growth, as if they had just erupted. Plant life, at least, was surging back.
Robots hooked him up to glucose and other drips, surrounded the bed with devices of some sort that had neither readouts nor lights nor any suggestion of their function, and attached leads from these to various parts of his person. After a while they put him on a cart again and took him to another room and placed him in a framework in a sort of sauna, then left. Immediately ferocious jets of hot, soapy water assailed his filthy person, ultrasonic beams as well, and within a few minutes he was as clean and white as porcelain. Then he was brought back to the bed by the window, upon which fresh strachy linens had been stretched, and thereon was he laid. In ecstatic luxury he quickly fell asleep, even as the robots reconnected all the IVs to his scrannel arms.
When he awoke the sun had just set, and his Virgil was standing silhouetted in front of the window, hands clasped behind his back. When Hauser grunted he turned around and said, “Ah! You are awake. Do you feel able yet to take any food orally?”
“I would really like,” said Hauser, “A bowl of clam chowder.”
“Excellent,” said the robot calling
himself
Not more than a minute later, one of the general ruck of robots appeared with a steaming bowl of clam chowder. Clearly there was a food transporter nearby; but where had it been transported from?
Hauser took tiny sips of the chowder with unspeakable relish. “Oh my God,” he said. “Oh my God. I never tasted anything so good.”
“Take your time,” said the robot
“So this isn’t going to be like one of those stupid TV series where, you know, I mean….” He closed his eyes, feeling dizzy and confused, and put the soup down while tried to collect his thoughts. “Nothing is ever actually explained, you know? They just string you along…get you to watch some more commercials….”
“No,” said the robot
“Wow. Okay. What’s first? Let me see.” After several more spoonfuls of chowder, “How come I’m alive? Why didn’t I starve to death? Seemed like I was lying there for years….”
“Twenty,” nodded
“Twenty? That’s nuts!”
“It’s the quantum effect of temporal dislocation of organic systems.”
“Right. Right. I forgot about that. What is it?”
“Rather than explain it to you now, I’ll let you read about it at your leisure, later. For the moment, it’s enough that you understand that any living being—as opposed to mere biological material—which is transported through time, cannot be killed, or even harmed. Its morphic field cannot be disrupted even at the quantum level – indeed, it is the stabilized quantum effects, the cessation of quantum uncertainty, which, acting of course even below the cellular level, ensure the absolute integrity of the….”
Hauser, however, had finished the soup, put the bowl down, and fallen asleep.
Chapter Five
Hauser awoke before sunrise, a lavender-tinted dawn just getting started beyond the ogee window; he was alone in the room. Starched underwear and crisp blue overalls had been laid on an armchair near his bed. He felt confused, even dizzied by this turn of events; it was too sudden an alteration in his existence.
He pulled various IVs out of his person, and then with great attention and care he levered himself off the bed, and thus, crouching, onto the spotlessly clean floor of varnished wood. Slowly he stood up, painstakingly dressed himself, again and again almost falling over, and then tottered to the door, listening; he heard only distant noises, and the rush of circulated air. With a look of wild surmise, he perceived what appeared to be a warmly-lit kitchen on the other side of the corridor, and toward this he crept.
He could not make much sense out of it. He understood the sink well enough, but the several panels of buttons and dials and read-outs were quite indecipherable; and what was more, he saw no place where food could be either stored or prepared.
“Confused?”
By sheer startled reflex he threw up his hands, and would have assumed a fighting stance, but, weak as he was, merely staggered, and fell against the wall.
“I’m very sorry to have startled you so,” said the robot who called himself Dr. Metz. “I’m afraid I walk rather quietly – the mechanical limbs and cushioned footpads, you know.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay. I was just looking for some chow, but….”
“Indeed, you could hardly have been expected to understand the functioning of the food converter. Just tell it what you want – or rather, given that you have just completed a twenty-year fast, what you need: nothing that would put much of a strain on your gastrointestinal system.”
“I thought I was invulnerable or something,” said Hauser.
“You are, but you can still vomit.”
“Well, thank God for that. Okay, how about a bowl of corn flakes or something?”
“That should be all right. With skim milk. Not too much fat, yet. Soon, I would encourage doughnuts.”
“No encouragement nee….”
Without a sound or so much as a glimmer, a ceramic bowl filled with corn flakes had appeared on the kitchen table, and beside it a pitcher of milk.
“Whoa,” said Hauser. “How did you do that?”
“I naturally have direct communication with the food processor. You will need to learn how to use the panels – but they are quite simple. Please have your breakfast, and we can then begin your orientation. I shall be in the hallway, processing information.”
Hauser ate the corn flakes slowly,
and with unspeakable relish; he had had no idea that corn flakes ever tasted
like this. When he was done he looked around vaguely, wondering whether to put
the bowl in the sink; when he looked back, there was no bowl
nor pitcher.
As they strolled slowly down the
corridor, the robot called
“They were tittering. There was a lot of tittering going on. I remember that.”
“An interesting psychological conundrum. They were, on the one hand, congratulating themselves on their superior humanity and spiritual development; and, on the other, enjoying their fiendish cruelty.”
“Yeah. Yeah!” Hauser stared at the robot Dr. Metz. “Okay, so you’re telling me I really am in the Jurassic, or whatever? You mean it? It’s real? How did it happen? They can transport you through time? So how do I get back! How did you get here? What is this place? How do you know about my ‘accusers’?”
“You cannot get back.”
“What?”
“But I can’t get back? Are you serious? Why can’t I get back?”
“Here is a car we can take to my residence. You cannot return, for the simplest of reasons: here in the past, the future does not yet exist. You can’t get there from here.”
“That doesn’t make any sense!”
“Perhaps not. Nevertheless, it is as I say. The universe is not structured in such a manner as to meet your expectations. If it were, you would be dead. Please….” The sagacious robot gestured toward the plain car that stood before them on a single magnetic rail.
So utterly depleted had Hauser been, that already he was feeling weak and shaky again. He dropped onto the only bench, and the car scooted off without any visible action by his guide, who fell silent rather than attempt to talk over the noise of their transit. Up and along a long curve to the right they went, passing many small ‘stations,’ landings leading onto corridors or rooms, then levelled out, took a sharp curve to the left, another jog to the right, and reached the terminus: a landing of something like marble, with brass rails, and an elegant fountain.
“A bit of indulgence, perhaps” said Metz, and continued, “But such pleasing architecture also serves a quite practical function - tuning the mind to contemplation and domestic pursuits, after the hustle and bustle of the workday,” finishing with a sweeping gesture. Hauser stared pie-eyed at the robot.
They left the car,
“Is this all new? asked Hauser. “It seems…but….”
“Yes and no,” replied
“Clearly you need more rest and nutriment,” said his guide.
“Rest I’ve had,” said Hauser. “Nutriment would be good.”
They ascended to an upper storey in
a brass elevator car, and passed along an oak-panelled hall to the room; it
was, as they were used to say, well-appointed and commodious. Even though
Hauser dropped upon the bed, luxuriating in the feel of the clean, soft, counterpane. He had become quite used to being part of the earth, scarcely distinguishable from the soil; but now that he was, however inexplicably, back in civilization, he wanted never to have another particle of dirt on him. He looked around him and espied what appeared to be the bathroom, and creakily got up and tottered over to it. He beheld a sunken bath, and a shower, and a sink with golden faucets – but no mirror was to be seen. He turned on the leftward sink faucet and held his hand under it, thinking he would wait until the water became warm; but to his surprise, it already was. He luxuriantly washed his rough, bony hands with a bar of scented soap under the warm water. Then he went to look over the kitchen.
He now noticed, what he had not before, that the entire wall opposite the bed consisted of a recessed bookcase extending from floor to ceiling, with a little step-ladder beside it, all the shelves of which were stuffed with thick tomes apparently bound in leather.
The last thing he felt like doing
was getting up again, but curiosity finally wrenched him with a groan from his bloated
stupor, and he tottered over to see what the books could be about. They all had
the same two red leather spine panels with gilt titling, the lower with the
name of the author—always
Hauser gazed at the title on the leather label for a while, 1 to 1000, then slowly opened the book. The book was clearly at least a hundred years old, the text block moderately tanned though of good paper, and yet almost crisp, and perhaps never read. There was no no copyright page, no table of contents – just a blank leaf, a title page, and then the text, beginning under the heading “1”. He read slowly and carefully by the slanted afternoon light from the windows:
“Well, I’m here. Here and now – the
eastern coast of
Hauser put the book down and closed his eyes. “Oh, shit,” he muttered.
He fell asleep. When he awoke, very slowly, and after a long while of half-paralyzed stupor, it was night, but a little illumination reached the room from somewhere to the east, presumably from the lights of the great compound. He turned on the lamp by the bed, and with a flash of intense interest, even joy, remembered the half-eaten plate of sesame chicken in the little kitchen. He hastened over, slung the plate into something that looked like a microwave oven, after much ineffectual button-pushing at last figured out how to turn it on, and was soon ravenously scarfing the savory leftovers.
He wondered what had become of the
robot
So he did for much of the night, falling asleep an hour or so before dawn, awaking again when the sun was well up, and returned to the same business.
He read, and read still. He learned that Mattheus Metz was, indeed, as Hauser had thought he recalled, the inventor of the transporter; and that--though this was officially kept a state secret, at least so far as preventing any mention of it in the news media--during the last five years before Hauser’s transport, Metz had succeeded in achieving what to everyone else seemed the almost incredible feat of extending the transporter’s capabilities, not merely through space, but, with the focused application of quantum gravitons, through time as well. To Metz, however, it had been merely a logical extension of his original breakthrough; indeed, so intent had he been on following the fascinating trail of equations, each pointing inexorably to the next, and the next, that he had never troubled himself to consider the possible uses to which the human race might put his temporal-transportation device. Convinced as he was by his reseach that time-travel either into the future or back from the past was an impossibility, the only use for it which he had imagined—not that he had much cared whether there would turn out to be any use for it at all—was to send back recording devices of various description, to gather data and images and so forth. These would, of course, be self-maintaining and –replicating, but even at that, their survival rate would surely not be high – for would even, say, a self-replicating series of cameras sent back, say, 100,000 years to observe Neanderthals up close, be likely to be functional when the present moment rolled around again (or even after a few days, when some Neanderthal adolescents were finished bouncing large rocks off it)? So he worked away under the assumption that temporal transportation would have no great effect on human life, which, in fact, to the day of his self-transporation it had not; failing utterly, however, to reckon with the calamitous effect it would have on those persons upon whom the State decided to employ it.
Hauser found reading
As the day wore on, however, he became
somewhat uneasy at the robot’s long absence, and several times opened the door
to his room and looked up and down the hall – but saw neither man nor machine,
nor anything in between. At last as the afternoon light from the low sun began
to demoralize him, he picked up the receiver of the green telephone on the
bedside table. Immediately he heard the robot
“Fair to middlin’. How are you?”
“Naturally, I am always well.”
“Of course. Well, I guess I just called to find out what the program is, you know….”
“I’m not sure I understand the question.”
Hauser was still so weak that he had to stop and catch his breath before reframing his query: “What are we doing today? Is there something I’m supposed to do? I’ve been rescued…now what?”
“Well, I will give you a house, and some advice, and then you can do whatever you want. God knows you’ve got plenty of time in which to do it.”
Hauser was unable to form a
response to these statements, and after some while the robot
“Yes…yeah, sure. Thank you.”
Hauser found evening nanoclothes in the closet, which of course fit him perfectly, though he had great difficulty tying the cumberband and had to leave it sagging deplorably. At the same instant that the digital clock on the wall showed 6:30 p.m., came a brisk but polite knock at his door, and Hauser opened it to behold one of the standard drone robots, this one in butler’s dress, patiently awaiting him. “This isn’t getting any more normal,” he muttered, yanked at the sides of his jacket, and gestured to the robot to lead on.
It led him along halls graced with
paintings and statuary, down wide marble staircases, and at last into the
dining room. Hauser was astonished to find that the robot
“Eugenius,” said Hauser rapidly, and then, “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure.” He saw that a table setting had been placed one chair down from Miss Shore’s, and there seated himself, staring rather blankly in front of him. He had a lot of questions to ask, but felt it would be impolite to inquire concerning his dinner companions’ somewhat mechanical status. Then another thought struck him: these were robots at a dinner party. Just what were they going to eat?
“Tell us about yourself,
Mr. Hauser,” said
“Uh…well…let’s see….” Hauser tried to gather his thoughts. He was confused and stunned to find himself in converse with a party of refined automatons, apparently in the year 65,000,000 B.C.E. (or thereabouts), just as if , by some extraordinary mischance, in his own time he had been invited to an elegant soirée on Park Avenue – except that those would have been actual people…sort of.
He cleared his throat. “Well, they were trying to settle these…uh…oh, look, I’m sorry if this seems rude, but, I mean, for gosh sake….”
“What, my dear fellow?” said Dr. Metz, pausing with a flagon half way to his lips.
“Well, I mean, you’re all robots, aren’t you?”
“Not exactly,” said Dr. Metz pleasantly.
“And you’re eating and drinking? Can I get…can someone tell me…I mean, what’s going on?”
Dr. Metz apparently cleared his throat, with a slightly metallic, whistling sound. “I suppose that, after all these millions of years, we are so used to ourselves that we cannot easily see how we must appear to recent transportees.”
“Indeed, Pratt and Miss Cantwell
were utterly befuddled,” said
“Yes, well, they were just utterly
befuddled altogether,” said Dr. Metz with a hint of asperity, and took a long,
relishing sip of wine from his cup. Then he gazed at Hauser and then at
“I read the first chapter in the first book of this series you’ve written, but it didn’t say nothing about…I mean, the guy, Dr. Metz, was a human, apparently….”
“So he was!” said the robot
Hauser dared to take a sip of wine, even though he was expecting it to leave him exceeding woozy; and it did. “You were feeling guilty they were using your invention to transport convicts….”
“Not guilty…no, I never felt guilty. Say, responsible. It was my invention, and I was responsible for what resulted from the use of it. I abhorred this sending of political criminals back into time immemorial – and infuriated by the pretense that it was done in a spirit of humanity.”
“Okay, but, like…you’re a robot now. What happened?”
“Ach, yes…time. Pure, overwhelming time. I was of course aware through experiments with mice, though I had told no one else, that the reverse-temporal quantum-graviton engagement effect upon the morphic field of any organism sent back in time would make that organism, in effect, immortal – that is, of course, until the time at which it had been transported, and the field was no longer frozen. Now, as I am sure you are aware, it is forbidden to advocate the theory of morphic fields. But without such fields, you know, the formation and maintenance of order in a living system would require the simultaneous cooperation of an innumerable number of molecules - an impossibility, and yet, you see, they do cooperate; and it is the factor of the morphic field which solves this conundrum.”
“So…what happened? How did you become…um…kind of mechanical like this?”
“Oh, yes…forgive me. I meant to say, that although I knew naturally of the quantum-graviton effect, I had entirely underappreciated the effect of sheer timeless existence on a human being. Certainly I had not expected to continue my researches for millenia through sheer enthusiasm; no, I had devised intricate systems and methods for everything I wished to accomplish; and yet….”
Hauser had suddenly fallen asleep, sitting upright in his chair.
“Give him the abridged version,”
said
“Aw, jeez, I’m sorry,” said Hauser. “You know, I’m still kind of wrecked. The doctor here says I was out for twenty years….”
“You need not apologize,” said
Worker robots rolled in the entrée
cart, lifted brass lids to reveal steaming sauerbraten and roasted potatoes,
and efficiently distributed precisely equal portions to the three males, or
male robots, slightly reduced for
“I hope you like German food,” said Dr. Metz.
“Yes, my grandmother…learned from her grandmother…,” Hauser faltered.
The doctor tucked in to his sauerbraten and asked rhetorically, “How did we become, as you say, ‘robots’? I was the first of course. I thought I could simply follow a method forever, but as mere centuries passed, to say nothing of millenia or eons, it became harder and harder to do so. I would set to work with a will, but then would often find that hours had passed, during which I had done nothing but gaze out over the stony landscape toward the sea, wondering what life was brewing there….”
Said
“Yes, you and water, Irma. Anyway, it would have been too hot.”
“To see the first rains hissing into vapor…and I should have liked to have seen even what you did, the stony wastelands and the ocean, lakes and rivers in the stone…it must have been marvellous…in a dreadful way….”
“Or dreadful in a marvellous way. Hundreds of millions of years without a trace of life on the land….” He shook his head deliberately. “Here, you wanted me to tell Mr. Hauser how I came to see the necessity of connecting my mind to an artificial organism, or android if you wish….”
Hauser had closed his eyes in
ecstasy at the taste of the saurbraten and its effect upon his system—almost like
a shot of morphine—, and
“Oh, certainly,” said Dr. Metz. “What did you think? Do I seem like a robot?
“Well….no, of course not. Not really.”
“I connect with and activate my original brain whenever I wish. You see, I have transferred a complete and almost unbelievably detailed neurogram of my mind into this cybernetic organism. And I can scarcely convey the sense of liberation one feels when the transfer is made, for the artificial brain into which one is conveyed is free of deformities. Suddenly obsessions, compulsions, tormenting hungers, are dissippated like vapors. The mind is left free….”
“Excuse me,” said Hauser, “but if you’re still in contact with your original brain…doesn’t that give you a dose of…whatever...whatever was….”
“But it has not structures in which to take hold. You see?”
“Well…I’ll take your word for it.”
“It’s true,” said
Hauser felt that this conversation was not really getting anywhere, and in any case found himself suddenly intensely interested in the sauerbraten. As his strength returned, so his appetite was increasing to levels of considerable voracity, and he could hardly keep himself from forking chunk after chunk into his mouth almost as fast as he could, until he could sense Miss Shore throwing him what in a human being would have been slightly uneasy glances.
“On the other hand,” continued Dr. Metz, “One must take care . If you don’t mind my saying so, your behavior these last few millenia seems to be trending rather too much toward the automaton end of the spectrum. Admittedly, I only see you once a century, but….”
Heppenstall gazed uncomprehendingly
at
“Ah, there, you see! Really, my dear fellow, this won’t do. Your neural imprint is fading out. Damned queer the way it does that, but…it certainly does! How many years has it been since you made contact?”
“Two thousand and twelve. My original self told my transferred self not to bother him more often than once every four thousand years.”
Hauser had now left his plate looking like it had just come out of the dishwasher, and felt like he would die if he couldn’t lie down – but apparently he couldn’t die, either. He closed his eyes and asked, “Anyway…why would they send me back to live for sixty-five million years?
“Ach, they didn’t know,” said
Hauser’s brain was reeling. He could not seem to get quite the answers he wanted to any of his questions; and it seemed that anything he was told must pose a dozen more. “You kept it a secret. Why did you keep it a secret?”
“Well, think about it, my good man.
Every stupidhead or egoist who thought it would be a good idea to make himself effectively immortal would transport back into time
– half the human race! And then the entire Mesozoic – becomes a global
Now Hauser was staring at his plate, hoping someone or –thing would notice that it was nearly spanking clean and so would offer him more food. “What I don’t get…,” he faltered. “I mean, when I was a kid I read this old science-fiction story where this guy goes back into time and steps on a butterfly, and when he gets back to the future everything is ugly, and everyone’s spelling is all retarded, and instead of a Democrat getting elected president they elect a Republican….”
Dr. Metz smiled and said, “Ha! Not
so. Quantum effects can easily absorb the disturbance caused by the demise of a
single insect – or even a million insects. Think of time and space as like a
river. There is a certain tenacity, I call it, to the all-but-infinite quantum effects, just as
with the all-but-infinite molecules of water in a mighty river. You can drop a
pebble into the Rhine at Pfalz, but what effect of this do you suppose the
current will show when it flows into the North Sea? None.
And there is a great difference between dropping a pebble into the
“So those anti-hate bozos didn’t worry about changing the future by sending me back, didn’t worry that I’d step on a lizard that was their ancestor….”
“Well, I am by no means convinced that they ever gave much thought at all to what they were doing, but, yes, if they had concerned themselves with the possible repercussions of their wholesale temporal transportations, I dare say they might have taken some comfort in my description of quantum tenacity -- if it had made any sense to them. Would you like another slice of sauerbraten?”
“Yes! Thanks!”
Hauser chowed down while the conversation
turned to gossip,
Chapter Six
Hauser awoke in the steamy dawn. He stumbled to the kitchen and began to swill pitchers of orange juice, carafes of coffee, and to raven upon piles of sausages and stacks of pastries. His concave stomach was already filling out a little. To think he had once been annoyed by a growing beer belly; he wondered if his ex-wife would be less theatrically disgusted with him if she could see him now. Doubtful. And where were his teenage sons now? Oh – they wouldn’t be born for 65 million years. Anyway, they hadn’t seemed terribly troubled about his transportation; indeed, often it had seemed to Hauser that they must believe their life’s vocation to be discovering new causes of and devising ever new variations upon an apparently instinctive detestation of him, so that if he did A he was a scumbag for not doing B, and if he did B he was a scumbag for not doing A. Well, they certainly took after their mother, and he was sure she lost no opportunity . Maybe after 65 million years he would have figured out some way to calm them down a little and encourage them to get the bees out of their butts. Moral of story: Don’t get married at age 22 to the prettiest girl in the neighborhood. Especially when you’re kind of a loser.
His leadership of the Save Our Scranton campaign had filled him with hope. He had been astounded and exhilarated to see that other people found something worthy in him and were willing to follow him – at any rate, his sense of what was right. For it had been utterly clear to him that it was insane of the government and the resettlement agencies to drop 75,000 Trobriand Islanders on Scranton; an insanity confirmed to him by their utter refusal to hear any contrary arguments, the looks of shuddering loathing and contempt with which they showered him whenever he was able to wriggle his way into a meeting or event and speak to them. At least, at last he was doing something with his life: he had a cause – and an effect! Nevertheless it won him scant praise from his family – indeed, his wife’s position as assistant principal at Harriet Tubman High was so imperilled, his sons’ aura of acceptable coolness amongst their peers so overwhelmed by the glare of their father’s infamy, that, so far from being proud, they were in fact furious with him for leading the campaign against the great Trobriand resettlement; his scowling visage on the nightly local news.
They had visited him in the
He decided not to think about that, because he could sense that it would make him crazy. He still had a gazillion questions to ask. What about that half-human, half-dinosaur thing he had seen just before the asteroid hit? And he surely had to find something useful to do; maybe he could lead rescue parties or something, in search of other transportees….