Rivers of Time

IX The Honeymoon Dragon

Oh, forget the "Sir Reginald," Mr. Saito! Just call me "Reggie," as everyone else does. Of course, in my native Australia it would be "Reg"; but Americans have got it into their heads that it's "Reggie," and I've given up trying to set them right.

Matter of fact, I don't take the tide so seriously as do many people, especially Americans. I might even have declined the knighthood offer from London, except that my wife had been salivating over the chance to be "Lady Brenda," and I didn't want to disappoint her.

Let me get the dinkum oil on this, Saito-San. You've been sent here to look into the prospects of Japanese financing of another transition chamber in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. So you wish to know about our experience with the first such chamber, here in St. Louis; and also about my recent visit to the new one in Australia? Of course Professor Prochaska, who invented the bloody thing, can tell you more about the technical features; but you want to know what lessons I have learned in running time safaris from the point of view of the travelers in time, eh?

Until my recent jaunt to Australia, I had never taken my wife on a time safari. Once when my partner, Chandra Aiyar—"the Raja," as I call him—and I were new in the business, I planned to take Brenda on a time trip. But then she got preg, and we didn't want to take a chance. Then, after some unfortunate experiences with parties mixed as to sex, the Raja and I decided to turn down any more such mixed parties. Anyway, Brenda was kept busy for years with a couple of active nippers. The subject has come up since, but there was always some problem that made the time trip impracticable.

When our twentieth wedding anniversary was coming up, I asked Brenda what she would like for a bloody ripper present. She said she would love a time safari. Didn't want to kill anything—she never does— but just go back and have a look round. By coincidence, I had just received an invitation from the new Aussie transition chamber in Darwin, urging me to come and try it out. They would pay the travel expenses, not only mine but also those of any colleagues I brought along.

Well, we decided that I should take Brenda and leave the Raja to run the business in my absence. Of course, I had to invite Professor Prochaska. But he had already been there during the construction and testing of the Darwin chamber, so he begged off. Instead, he urged that I take Bruce Cohen, our chamber wallah, who was eager to have a look at the competition.

I had another reason for wanting to go down-under.

Transition-chamber people have a trade journal, The Time Traveler, which comes out bimonthly in Darwin, Australia. It was originally published here in St. Louis, but a few years ago it moved to Australia to cut costs. The then editor of this little magazine was one Mark Prendergast. Although I had never met him, for some strange reason he had taken a violent dislike to me from the start. There was never an issue in which he didn't work in a few gibes and insults. Strange, when you consider that we had never seen each other; but there it was. The latest issue of The Time Traveler ran a piece stating, among other things, quote:

"I hear that we down-under are about to be blessed with a visit from the Lord of Bull Art, Reginald Rivers—beg pardon, now Sir Reginald. They say he is coming on a second honeymoon. I suppose we common Aussies will have to approach His Lordship on our knees, place our hands between his, and swear fealty in medieval style. He will doubtless have a big bloke standing by with a spiked club, to let any impudent upstart who gets above himself have it on the sconce."

Prendergast had been going on like that ever since the magazine started. This puzzled me, since I had never met the cove or exchanged communications with him. Anyway, I thought it would do no harm to meet the bloke and size him up. If he were laboring under some whopping great misapprehension—let's say, he had confused me with another man who was a convicted thief or child molester—perhaps I could straighten him out.

Labor trouble in the Australian transition chamber? Yes, Mr. Saito, there was, in connection with Prendergast's antics. I'll tell the whole story.

Brenda and I alighted at Darwin, a neat, tidy little green-and-white town. One reason it's rather pretty is that it was twice razed in the last century, once with bombs by your fellow countrymen, and again in 1974 by a hurricane. (They call it a "cyclone" there.) So they rebuilt the city with some care, low to the ground, against future calamities.

The only thing wrong with those parts, aside from their damp tropical climate, is that, although there are fine beaches along the northern coast, nobody in his right mind goes swimming there. The water is infested with the box jellyfish or "sea wasp," whose sting can be fatal; with sea snakes, which are marine members of the cobra family; and with the great white shark, which when it sees a human swimmer says: "Yummy!" If none of these critters gets you, there is also the salt-water crocodile. This croc is the nearest thing in Present to a living dinosaur, ranging up to ten meters long. The name just means that, while it is usually found in fresh-water rivers and lakes, it doesn't mind swimming across stretches of ocean to get where it wants to go. There's a farm nearby where they raise salties for their hides—and for their meat, for people who don't gag at the idea.

The Darwin chamber had a delegation on hand to meet us. As we piled out of the airplane, the Director, Rudy Havens, introduced himself and presented his mates. These included a big black eye-glassed Native Australian, Algernon Malgaru, a professor of anthropology at Northern Territory University; and a little roly-poly bloke with a nervous grin, identified as Mark Prendergast. Meanwhile I was doing likewise for Brenda and Bruce Cohen.

Prendergast gave me a limp-dishrag handshake, muttering about being glad to see me after following my exploits in print for so long. Not a word about the nasty things he had been printing in his trade journal for years. Naturally, I did not bring these matters up in the midst of a ceremonious greeting. Prendergast also stuck out a hand to Brenda; but she only nodded and kept her own hands firmly on her purse and carry-on bag. Havens said:

"Sir Reginald, if you don't object, I shall send Mark and Algy back with you. Mark can't afford to miss recording what is really an historic occasion; while Algernon has already been back to the Pleistocene in our chamber and so gets the picture of the local terrain and biota. He'll take good care of you."

I said: "I hope my visit will be far enough removed in time from Doctor Malgaru's to provide a safety factor against an overlap."

"I'm sure it will," said Havens. There will be a gap in time of at least five thousand years."

You see, Mr. Saito, we must be careful not to put two sets of time travelers into the same past period, or the same party twice into the same time slot. This would create a paradox, and an orderly universe just doesn't allow such contradictions. The minute you tried to do that, the space-time forces would snap your travelers back to Present and kill them in the process.

At the dinner in Darwin's best hotel, the new Darwin Hilton on Mitchell Street, Prendergast showed himself a jolly dinner companion, joking and laughing at a great rate. Perhaps he was trying to forestall any embarrassing discussion of those nasty editorials in The Time Traveler.

I was seated next to the Native Australian, Algy Malgaru. He was a big bloke with a chocolate-brown skin, the snub nose and beetling brows of the Australoid race, and a bush of Oxford-brown beard beginning to gray. I asked how he came to be, of all things, a professor of anthropology. He chuckled, showing those big Australoid teeth in a wide mouth.

"Sir Reginald, if you're born an Abo—" (he used the old abbreviation for "aborigine," nowadays considered rude for a white Australian to use toward a Native Australian) "—if you're born an Abo but have a bent toward reading and writing, your best bet is the academic life. That's where you'll encounter the least ethnic prejudice. And if you've spent much of your youth in the outback among fellow tribesmen, you might as well capitalize on the experience by going into anthropology, since you've already got a bloody head start."

Since we did not expect to meet any large thick-skinned game like elephant or dinosaur, I had brought along my new Mannlicher-Schönauer seven-point-five, with an eight-round magazine. I figured it should pack enough punch to take care of anything we might encounter, up to the marsupial lion Thylacoleo. Bruce Cohen had borrowed from the Raja's and my armory a Bratislava with similar characteristics.

When Cohen, Brenda, and I approached the van to take us to the chamber, Prendergast and Malgaru already occupied the middle seats, behind those of the driver and his seat mate. Havens, who was driving, said:

"Mark, you and Algy will have to move back to make seats for Sir and Lady Rivers and Mr. Cohen."

"Okay," said Prendergast. "Why don't you blokes hand your guns back here? I'll take care of them."

"Be careful!" I said. "Mine's loaded, with the safety on." I don't usually load so early in the game. But when Havens and his van were over an hour late, I'm sorry to say I got restless and loaded up to give my hands something to do.

Brenda took the front seat next to Havens; Cohen and I took the two middle seats. Malgaru sat on a jump seat behind us, and Prendergast scrunched down in the rear with the guns. Craning my neck, I asked:

"What are you blokes armed with?"

Prendergast spoke up. "I'm relying on you two, since I shall be kept busy working the camera." He pointed to a big video recording apparatus.

Malgaru said: "I was never a good enough shot for guns, because of defective eyesight. That's one reason I never became a real bushie. So I brought along this." He picked up from the floor a boomerang over a meter long. "Whittled it myself. It's not one of those toys that'll spin round in a circle and come back to the thrower. This is a real killer. I practiced with one as a kid until I could knock over a roo at fifty paces."

I said: "If you're determined to use stone-age weapons, Algy, wouldn't a spear be more effective? I've heard you Native Australians can throw spears with such accuracy as to bring down a bird on the wing."

Malgaru shook his head. "Once upon a time, perhaps. But nowadays you won't find any Abos who know how to make a proper spear, let alone throw one accurately. I knew the last Abo flint knapper, before that art died out completely. Now most of them farm or work as stockmen, or as you Yanks call them, cowboys. Or they j*o into white-collar work, as I did."

"I'm no Yank,' I said. "Born and raised in Brisbane."

"Technically I suppose you're not; though you bloody well sound a bit like a Yank."

"It's those years in America, I suppose," I said. "Inside, I'm still a dinkum Aussie."

At last we lined up outside the Australian transition chamber, in the big concrete building they've put up on the outskirts of Darwin. Cohen was deep in conversation with the local chamber wallah, a bloke named Draga Radich.

To my considerable relief, Prendergast handed me back my gun. It had occurred to me during the drive that, if he really felt the way his editorials implied, he might have shot me in the back with it and then said, oh, sorry, that was an accident. But then he unfolded a sketch map, saying:

"This shows the lay of the land about 500,000 B.C., when Algy went back and checked it out. We can hope the topography won't have changed drastically in the interval."

Since we planned to spend only a few hours in the Pleistocene, we did not bring along camp equipment and helpers to set it up. Havens merely shooed us into the transition chamber and waved us off. Radich set his dials for 495,000 B.C. and pushed his buttons.

The vertigo and other symptoms of time travel had Brenda looking like a very dead fish by the time the dials stopped spinning. Radich set the chamber down with scarcely a bump, and out we piled.

The landscape looked pretty much like the present-day Australian bush, dusty green and brown. The timber was mostly eucalyptus and acacia, with some araucaria and pandanus. There was none of that pest, the Opuntia or prickly-pear cactus, which some idiot introduced a century or two ago and whose spread the Aussies have been battling ever since. A few birds flew up, but otherwise we saw no animal life, no sign of the marsupial Hon or other predators.

Prendergast spread out his map. "I figure, we're just about here," he said. "Now, if the terrain is anything like that of five thousand years ago, the ground drops off west of here into a little dingle or gill, with a billabong at the bottom, and then rises back up on the far side. If you want to see wild life, that's the place for it, since the animals have to come to the billabong for a drink. I'll show you the way."

We set out after Prendergast, with his video recorder on his shoulder. It must have weighed twenty kilos, but the little bloke didn't seem to mind.

After a half-hour scramble, we came to the edge of the depression Prendergast had mentioned. Sure enough, through the bush we could glimpse water at the bottom of the depression. There were also a couple of animals drinking at it. We couldn't tell much about them at that distance and with all the bush in the way, even through the glasses, save that looked to be of pretty good size and clad in brown fur.

"Diprotodons," said Prendergast. "Want to go closer for a look, eh?"

"Oh, yes!" breathed Brenda, stringing the cord of her little camera round her neck. She had stood up under the hike very well. "This is what I've dreamed of."

"You two go down, then," said Prendergast. "I'll stay up here to shoot pictures, if I can find a spot with a better view." To Cohen and Malgaru he said: "You stand by, please, since I need your fire power. As soon as I've shot a good strip, we'll go down and join them." Turning to Brenda and me, he added with a nasty little smirk: "That'll give you two some privacy—that is, if Sir Reg can still rise to the occasion."

As the implications of Prendergast's remark sank in, I felt myself getting as mad as a meat-ax. I started to make a fist to bash the blighter. It wouldn't have been sporting, with my being twice the fellow's size; but at that instant I didn't care.

Then Brenda smiled sweetly in a way that warned me she was going to slip in the stiletto. She said:

"I assure you, Mister Prendergast, that Sir Reginald can do all the things he did as a young man—perhaps better if not quite so often. Come on, Reg!"

Away she went, skidding down the slope in her new boots.

Ordinarily I should have been a bit more cautious in my approach; but I couldn't let my life's partner show me up. So I slung my rifle over my back to leave both hands free; and down I went, skidding and stumbling. I took one small tumble, but I grabbed a branch and stopped my fall before it did any harm. I called out to Brenda:

"Watch where you put your feet! Snakes!"

Australia has today a fine assortment of venomous serpents, and we may assume that they slithered around quite as frequently in the Pleistocene. But Brenda bounded on ahead of me as if she were still a schoolgirl. After so many years of dealing with wildlife, I have no irrational horror of snakes, as many have. But I don't take chances with organisms that can kill me with one little bite.

"Slow up!" I called. "You'll scare the critters away from the water hole with a noisy approach." Actually, most of the animals we see in prehistoric times show little or no instinctive fear of human beings, because they have never been hunted by man.

As we neared the bottom of the slope, we began pushing through the bush toward the billabong. Soon we had a good view of the diprotodons, relatives of the present-day wombat but vastly larger. In size this pair resembled a grizzly bear or even a rhinoceros. Otherwise they were rather nondescript creatures, with thick plantigrade limbs and big, bulbous heads with little round ears, and all clad in the same dark-brown fur.

The diprotodons had finished drinking and were just turning away from the pool, when Brenda exclaimed "Hey!" She had her little camera up. "Wait!"

The diprotodons paused at her shout, swiveling those huge heads around. Brenda burst out from cover, ran forward a few steps, dropped to one knee, and focused the camera.

The diprotodons turned away again and lumbered off. Brenda ran a few steps after them, trying for another shot. In so doing, she bumped into—literally bumped into—another patron of the water hole, who had just come out of the bush on its way to the billabong.

The newcomer was a fawn-colored giant kangaroo, so large that it made the biggest present-day kangaroos look like joeys. It had been poling its way forward at the slow-moving gait that modern roos employ in grazing, using its forelimbs as crutches to swing its huge hindlimbs forward as a pair. When Brenda brushed against it, the animal reared back and straightened up, raising its head a good three meters above ground. It towered over Brenda, who is a good-sized girl.

I must confess that I had been so busy watching Brenda and the animals that I had forgotten to unsling my rifle, still strapped across my back. I squirmed out of that sling faster than ever before and started to bring the rifle to bear.

At the same time, the giant roo took a swipe with one of its forefeet at this strange little creature that had barged into it. Brenda gave a yelp of pain and swung her camera on its cord so that it banged the roo on its nose. The roo jerked away in a startled manner and cut loose with a huge bound, over some low bush. By the time I had the beast in my sights, it had taken off on a second bound and quickly disappeared.

The whole confrontation lasted only a few seconds. I could, I suppose, have shot the roo before it passed out of sight. But the brute evidently had no intention of bothering us further, and my main concern was for Brenda. I hurried up to find her nursing a single long scratch on her forearm, with little drops of blood forming along it.

I had a bottle of disinfectant in the pocket of my safari vest, and in a few seconds I was swabbing the scratch. It was not serious—the roo's claws had barely penetrated the skin—but we don't take chances with strange infections.

I was bandaging the injured arm when I saw Brenda's eyes, looking past me, widen with apprehension. I spun round as something huge came pouring down the slope after us. A large hole yawned in the side of the slope, and we had passed that gap without noticing it in our carefree descent. The new arrival had popped out of this cave and was headed toward us with evidently unfriendly intent.

This formidable creature stood at the apex of the Australian Pleistocene food chain: not a marsupial or even a mammal, but a reptile, Megalania. It was a monitor lizard, related to the Komodo dragon but ranging up to fifteen meters in length. It thus surpassed the biggest crocodiles, the salties; to find a crocodile of such size you would have to go back to the Cretaceous. Megalania had larger and stouter limbs, enabling it to get around faster on land than any croc; and crocs can trot along faster than you might think when you see one snoozing after a meal.

One argument among paleontologists has to do with the way the limbs of quadrupeds are joined to the body. In salamanders, the legs protrude sideways and have only limited mobility. In the more primitive reptiles, the shoulder and hip joints still cause the upper part of the limb, the thigh and the upper arm, to project horizontally from the body; but the forearm and lower leg are set vertically, enabling the animal to move in a livelier way.

The final step towards full quadrupedal locomotion is the modification of the hip and shoulder joints to bring the upper limb bones to vertical, as it is in mammals. A completely vertical limb, acting as a column, can obviously support the weight of the body with less muscular effort than a limb that is bent into a right angle.

Back in the Permian, some lines of reptiles made this transition. These included the dinosaurs, the crocodiles, and those that evolved into mammals. But the ancestors of the lizards did not. Well, at the K-T boundary between Cretaceous and Paleocene, all the dinosaurs went poof, along with several other orders of reptiles. But the lizards survived, despite this awkward limb arrangement of the upper joints. The dragon that charged Brenda and me was just an oversized lizard, with the primitive hip and shoulder joints. But that fact did not stop it from being a bloody effective predator, about the nearest thing to the conventional dragon that I had ever seen—

Oh, sorry, Mr. Saito. I sometimes get to lecturing on the wonders of prehistoric life and forget the story I'm telling.

Believe it or not, in setting up this jaunt into the Aussie Pleistocene, I had completely forgotten about Megalania. I had read about the animal, of course; but in planning this mini-safari I must have thought only of the larger marsupial carnivores that we might meet. During the Cenozoic, South America had a marsupial sabertooth, Thylacosmilus, just as big and bloodthirsty as the more familiar sabertooth cats from other continents.

So here came this super-lizard, scrambling down the slope with its big yellow eyes locked on ours. It was mostly slate gray, like the Komodo dragon; but with faint grayish-green stripes on its flanks instead of those red markings on that model Megalania in the Australian Museum in Sydney.

I brought the animal's head into my sights, aimed between the eyes, and pulled the trigger. The gun went—click!

I worked the bolt and tried again: another click. The Megalania approached within a dozen meters, looking a hell of a lot more dragonny than any Komodo monitor. It was quite as intimidating as any theropod dinosaur I had ever faced, although in a fight between a Megalania and a Tyrannosaurus or an Epanterias I'd bet on the dinosaur. Being a biped, the theropod could simply bend down and grab the lizard by its spine, either the neck or the back.

Sorry, I'm digressing again. You can bloody well bet I didn't think any such thoughts while the super-lizard was rushing upon us.

A quick check showed that the magazine of the rifle was empty. I felt as that bloke Siegfried in the opera would have felt, as he stood outside the dragon's cave and cocked a snook at the dragon. Then, when Fafnir (I think that was its name) took him up on the challenge and came roaring out, the hero found he had left his sword back in camp.

Brenda threw a stone. It bounced off the dragon's head, but the animal seemed not to notice. On it came, hissing like the whistle of one of those steam-powered excursion boats they run on the Mississippi and some other places for tourists.

I stepped in front of Brenda, fumbling in my safari vest for a cartridge. It was a toss-up whether I could get a round into the chamber before the Megalania got its teeth into one of us; it was already gaping and showing the scarlet lining of its gullet. I remember thinking that, if bashing the brute over the head with the butt didn't stop it, perhaps I could jam the gun down its throat.

Then something whirled across the terrain with a swishing noise and struck the dragon in the flank with a boom. It was Malgaru's boomerang. The dragon staggered and swiveled round toward the source of the blow. At that instant, Cohen's Bratislava banged, once, twice, and thrice. The impacts knocked the dragon off its feet, writhing and thrashing in the bush. Three more shots, one from my rifle, which I finally got loaded, quieted the lizard down—though like other reptiles it continued to twitch and snap long after it was officially dead.

The boomerang had not done the dragon much harm, save perhaps to crack a rib. But without the distraction of that blow, the lizard would surely have fleshed its fangs in one or the other of the Riverses before anyone could shoot.

Cohen and Malgaru burst out of the bush and trotted up to see if we were safe. I said: "Where's Prendergast?"

"Over that way, taking some more shots," said Malgaru. "Told us to go ahead and he'd catch up. Here he comes now."

Prendergast, with the video camera balanced on his shoulder, stepped into view, burbling: "What a marvelous film sequence! This will make a bonzer story for my next issue!"

As he approached, I looked closely at Prendergast's safari vest, and found the pockets bulged suspiciously. I said:

"Mark, let me have a look at those pockets."

"No need for that," he replied airily. "Just spools of extra film."

"Then there's no harm in examining them." Smiling, I took a step toward him.

"No, sir!" he said, backing away. "I won't have you searching my person: that would be an invasion of privacy! I know my rights as an Australian citizen. Go get a warrant from a magistrate!"

"Okay," I said, trading looks with Cohen and Malgaru. "Since there won't be any magistrates for half a million years, we shall have to do it the hard way."

I started for Prendergast. He turned to run, but I brought him down with the kind of tackle they use in American football. Cohen and Malgaru grabbed his arms. In his pockets, as I suspected, I found the missing cartridges for my Mannlicher-Schönauer.

We hauled him back to the chamber, tied him up, and told Radich to return us to Present. There was one delay, when Brenda said:

"Darling, do you know what I'd really love as a souvenir of this trip? The hide of that dragon, to hang on our family-room wall, would make this honeymoon just perfect!

Well, that's the story, Mr. Saito. When we got back, there was the kind of stink you would expect. We told our story; Prendergast told his. He said my rifle had been fully loaded, but I got buck fever at the sight of the dragon and couldn't shoot. Then we three had ganged up to frame him in revenge for some of the things he had written in his magazine. Since Cohen's, Malgaru's, and my stories tallied, Prendergast's version failed to convince. Havens fired him.

The Australian union of time-chamber employees struck to try to force Doctor Havens to take Prendergast back. Unions have long been a major force in Australia, you know; and these were loyally standing up for a fellow employee regardless of what he had done. Algy Malgaru said with a broad grin:

"What do you expect, Reg? That's simple tribalism, among people who think themselves superior to us Abos because they've evolved beyond that sort of thing."

After a couple of months, the dispute was compromised by the chamber's paying Prendergast some back salary instead of re-hiring him. Prendergast dropped out of sight, and I have no idea of where he is now.

But if you would care to visit us, I'll show you the hide of a fine Megalania, spread out on our wall. Of course the tail is bent around, because we have no rooms with walls fifteen meters long!

Why did Prendergast carry on this one-sided feud? Damned if I know, Mr. Saito. I'm no shrink; but if I had to guess, I should say it was simple jealousy, allowed to flower into an obsession. I'm no world shaker; but I have been, and done, and seen a lot of things that I daresay Prendergast wishes he had been and done and seen. Because he is younger than I, and because the paradox tabu stops transition chambers from affecting human history, there is no way he could go back in time a little way and get into the time-safari business ahead of me.

No, I have no idea of how he knew there was a cave in that slope, with a Megalania lurking in it. Perhaps he had made an unauthorized time trip just before the one we made—say, within a year of our safari. That's dangerous, because a slight miscalculation can throw you into a paradox, and then—bam! you've had it. He must have known the risk but have hated me with sufficient venom to have taken the chance. l£ that's what the silly galah did, he got away with it on his time trip, but in the long run he lost.