Time's Last Gift

Rachel busied herself getting supper, though this took only two minutes to cook and open the prepared packages. She did pour out small glasses of wine to celebrate. Gribardsun ran the specimens through the analyzer while she was getting supper.

'The boy, Abinal, has typhus,' he said. 'That can be caused by a rickettsia or body lice. I didn't see anybody else sick, so I doubt that it was caused by body lice, though Abinal may just be the first. Whatever the cause, he can transmit it through his own body lice. I propose tomorrow to give Abinal an anti-typhus medicine and to give the others a preventative. Plus a medicine which will kill their body lice.'

'How do you propose to get them to take the medicines?' von Billma

'I don't know yet.'

'It might cause more trouble than it's worth,' Drummond said. 'Not that I'm ignoring the human side of this,' he added, seeing Rachel's frown. 'But, after all, we want to study them in their natural habitat and in their natural mode of life as much as possible. If we prevent diseases, how will we know how they react to them? I mean, what medicines and magical rituals they use, their burial ceremonies and so forth. You know they're going to die anyway - in fact, they've been dead for a long time, actually. And what kind of resentments will you stir up if you interfere with the shaman's profession or fail to cure a sick person? You might even get blamed for the death.'

'That's true,' Gribardsun said. 'But if the tribe is wiped out by typhus, or some other disease, then we have no tribe to study, no language to learn. And nobody to help us haul the vessel to the top of the hill. I'm taking what they used to call a calculated risk.'

Rachel looked curiously at him and said, 'Every once in a while you use an old-fashioned phrase. Not self-consciously but as if - well, I don't know. You roll them out as if you were to the phrase born, if you know what I mean.'

'I read a lot,' he said. 'And I have a tendency to repeat some of the good old phrases.'

'I'm not deprecating it,' she said. 'I like to hear them. It's just that they startle me. Anyway, supper's on. Let's have a little toast first. John, you're our chief; you propose it.'

He raised his glass and said, 'Here's to the world we love, whatever she may be.'

They drank down the wine. Rachel said, 'That's a strange toast, John.'

'John's a strange man,' Drummond said, and he laughed.

Gribardsun smiled slightly. He knew that Silverstein resented his wife's obvious admiration for him, but he did not think that the issue would be an irritating one, even if they were forced to be together for four years. The scientists in charge of the project had studied their compatibility charts and were well satisfied with them. Nobody on the expedition was psychologically unstable, as far as the tests could determine.

If Drummond got out of line, he would have to be straightened out. He was a reasonable man, except where his wife was concerned. And even there he could be reassured. Gribardsun was sure of that. It was only in the last few weeks before the launching of the H. G. Wells I that Drummond had started to show signs that he thought his wife admired Gribardsun more than she should. Even then he had expressed himself in only mild oblique remarks. Several mornings, he and Rachel had looked as if they had not slept well the night before. Gribardsun had thought of asking for their withdrawal before the day of launching got too close. But the two had not let whatever was bothering them interfere with their duties, and he knew how deeply they would be hurt if they were taken off the project. So he had said nothing to his superiors.

'We'll get up early,' he said. 'Seven o'clock, ship's time. After breakfast we'll tramp around and collect some more specimens. Then we'll visit our natives. But I think we can establish even better relations if we take them some meat.'

After eating, they went outside. The sun was just touching the horizon. The air was very cold. A herd of about thirty reindeer, a couple of huge rhinoceroses, twelve adult mammoths and three babies, and a dozen bison were by the river. At this distance they looked like small animated toys.

The four were thrilled at their first sight of the rhinos and mammoths. There were still elephants in zoos and reservations in their world, but the mammoths with the hump of fat on their heads and shoulders and the curved tusks were quite different. And the rhinos were extinct in the twenty-first century.

'There're some wolves!' Rachel said.

She pointed, and they saw a dozen of the gray shapes floating out of the shadows of a hill. The reindeer raised their heads, and the faint trumpeting of the mammoths reached the four. But the wolves ignored them and trotted to a spot about sixty yards down from the herbivores. There they drank, and the herbivores continued to drink, though watching the wolves nervously.

The sky above passed from pale blue to dark blue to sable. The stars came out. Drummond Silverstein made sightings, then set out his telescope and camera. Rachel stayed out with him. Von Billma

He faced the wind, which was blowing at about six miles an hour from the northwest. It also brought sounds: from far off a lion's roar; nearer, a small cat's scream; the snorting of some large beast, rhino or bison; the clatter of hoofs on rocks to the west. The lion roared again and then was silent. He smiled. It had been a long time since he had heard a lion roaring. This one was deeper than any he had known; the cave lion was somewhat larger than the African. A mammoth trumpeted shrilly from near where the lion's roar had come. Then there was silence. After a while he heard a fox bark. He lingered a few more moments, drinking in the rising moon and the pure air, and then he returned to the ship below. Drummond Silverstein was putting away his astronomical equipment. Rachel had gone.

'I like this world already,' Gribardsun said. 'I knew I would. It's simple and savage and uncrowded with humans.'

'Next you'll be saying you want to stay behind when we leave,' Silverstein said.

He sounded as if he did not altogether disapprove of the idea.

'Well, if a man wants to know this time thoroughly, hell have to stay here the rest of his life,' Gribardsun said. 'He could explore Europe and then cross the land bridge to Africa. As I understand it, the Sahara is a green and wet land with rivers full of hippos. And the sub-Sahara, my old stamping ground, is a paradise of animal life. And there might even be a few subhumans left, roaming the sava

'That would be self-indulgent and suicidal,' Drummond said. 'Who would gain anything from it? All that data and no one to leave it to.'

'I could leave a record of some sort at an agreed-upon place, and you could pick it up immediately on returning,' Gribardsun said. He laughed, then picked up a large plastic box containing recording equipment and followed Silverstein into the vessel.

'You talk like von Billma

'There's nothing wrong with dreaming,' Gribardsun said. 'But we're all scientists and thoroughly disciplined. We'll do our job and then go home.'

'I hope so,' Drummond said as he stowed away his equipment in the middle cabin. 'But don't you feel something in the air? Something ...?'

'Wild and free?' Rachel said. She was looking at Gribardsun with a peculiarly intent expression. 'The soul of the primitive is floating on the air.'