The Technicolor Time Machine

18

“This is the sunset we been waiting for, Barney,” Charley Chang said. “Look at those colors.”

“Let’s roll then,” Barney said, glancing around at the film company on the hillside. “Are you ready, Gino?”

“Just about two minutes more,” the cameraman said, peering through the viewfinder of the camera. “Just as soon as that line of clouds moves m front of the sun so I can shoot right into it.”

“Okay, then.” Barney turned to Ottar and Slithey, in their best Viking costumes, Ottar with a rubber scar and gray touches, which were hard to see, on the hair at his temples. “This is the last scene, the really last scene, and we’ve waited until now to get the color right. Everything else is in the can. It’s going to run, one, two, three, but we’re going to shoot it one, three and do two last to get you in silhouette against the sunset. Now in one I want you to walk up the hill, side by side, take it slow, and stop right there at the top where that line is scratched into the ground. You just stand there, looking out to sea, until I shout now, then Slithey you reach out and take Ottar by the arm. That’s the end of the first scene. Then Ottar you put your arm around her waist and I want the two of you to hold it that way, while we dolly back for the closing scene of your figures small against the sunset. Got that?”

They both nodded.

“Ready,” Gino called out.

“One sec more. When I shout cut you stay there on the hill so we can run the camera in and shoot number two, which is the talk. Is that clear?”

It went off well. Ottar was almost a professional by this time. At least he usually followed orders without arguing. They climbed the hill together and looked into the sunset. Boards had been laid over the grass to make a smooth track for the camera dolly to roll along, and the grips, goaded by Barney’s shouted instructions, moved it slowly and smoothly away so the figures of the lovers could fade into the distance.

“Cut!” Barney shouted when the dolly reached the end of the track. “Principals—just hold it on the hill. Let’s move now before the light goes.”

There was a concerted and organized rush. While the camera was being trundled to the top of the hill the sound men were setting up their tape recorder and mikes. Slithey was frowning over her lines while the script girl read Ottar’s aloud to him. The sky was a flaming red as the sun dropped toward the sea.

“Ready,” Gino said.

“Camera,” Barney called out, “and not a sound from anyone, not anyone. Action.”

“Out there,” Ottar said, pointing, “out there somewhere over the sea is our home. Do you still miss it, Gudrid?”

“For a long time I did, but not any more. We have fought and died for this land and it is ours now. Vinland… this new world, that is our home now.”

“Cut. Good, print that. I guess that just about winds it up.”

Everyone cheered then, and Slithey kissed Barney and Ottar crushed his hand well. It was a very exciting moment because the picture was just about finished in most particulars, and by the time the closing scenes were cut, scored and spliced the film would be complete. The party that evening promised to be a very big party indeed.

It was. Even the weather cooperated and, as long as the radiant heaters were left on, the end of the mess tent could be rolled up. They had turkey and champagne, four kinds of dessert and unlimited drink, and all of the company and most of the northmen and a few of their women were there. It swung.

“I don’t want to go,” Slithey wailed and dripped tears into her champagne. Barney patted her free hand and Ottar squeezed her thigh affectionately.

“You’re not really going—or abandoning your baby,” Barney explained for about the twentieth time. He marveled at his own patience, but everything was different tonight. “You know Kirsten will be a wet nurse if you have to be away for a while, but there is no reason for you to be. And you have to admit that having a baby with you right in California, when you weren’t even pregnant last week, would be hard to explain. Particularly during the publicity for the film. So all you do is wait until the film is released, by which time you will have decided just what you want to do about the baby. Remember, you aren’t even married in California and they got a word for that king of thing. Then, soon as you decide, you come back here. The Prof has promised to bring you back no later than one minute after you left. What could be simpler?”

“It will be months and months,” Slithey cried, and Barney started to explain for the twenty-first time when Charley Chang tapped him on the arm and handed him a fresh drink.

“I’ve been talking to the Prof about the nature of time,” Charley said.

“I do not want to talk about the nature of time,” Barney told him. “After the last couple of weeks I would like to forget about the whole thing.”

It had been a trying time for a number of them. Over four days had passed in California—it was now Thursday afternoon on the vremeatron’s time-of-arrival clock—and it had been a very busy four days indeed.

They had been shuttling back and forth to the lot very often to do some of the more technical cutting and dubbing in the labs there. Spiderman and his band had been recording the sound track in one of the studios. There had been much doubling back in time so the facilities could be used on an almost twenty-four-hour-a-day basis, and in many cases the same people had crossed in the same time. Barney had one memory of three Professor Hewetts talking animatedly together that he would just as well like to forget. He sipped his drink.

“No, really,” Charley Chang insisted. “I know we’re all going a little bugs from almost shaking hands with ourselves, but that’s not what I mean. The thing is like why are we shooting the film here at this place in Labrador?”

“Because this is the spot that the Prof brought us to.”

“Correct. And why did the Prof bring us here?”

“Because this is one of the places he and Jens searched for settlers,” Barney said slowly. Tonight he had patience for everybody.

“Right again. Now did you ever stop to think why Jens wanted to search for settlers here? Tell him, will you, Proessor?”

Hewett put down his glass and touched his lips with his napkin. “We came here because of the excavations carried out in this area in the early 1960s by Helge Ingstad. Remains of nine buildings were found and carbon-14 dating of charcoal fragments on the sites placed them around 1000 A.D.”

“Do you dig what that means?” Charley asked.

“Elucidate,” Barney said abstractedly, humming along with the throbbing tones of “A-Viking We Will Go,” the theme song of the picture, which Spiderman was playing softly in the background.

“It is now the year 1006,” Charley said. “And there are nine buildings in the camp below, two of which were just shells to begin with, which we have burned to charcoal for the picture. So there is a Norse settlement here in Epaves Bay in the eleventh century because traces of it were found in the twentieth century. So you could say there is a circle in time with no beginning or end. We came here to leave traces to find here to lead us to come here to leave traces…”

“Enough,” Barney said, raising his hand. “I’ve had this circle-in-time thing before. The next thing you’ll be telling me is that all the old sagas are really true and that we’re responsible, or that Ottar here is really Thorfinn Karlsefni, the guy who started the first settlement in Vinland.”

“Sure,” Ottar said. “That’s me.”

“What do you mean that’s me?” Barney asked, blinking rapidly.

“Thorfinn Karlsefni, son of Thord Horsehead, son of Thorhild Rjupa, daughter of Thord Gellir…”

“Your name is Ottar.”

“Sure. Ottar is the name people call me, short name. Real name is Thorfinn Karlsefni, son of Thord…”

“I remember some of the Karlsefni saga,” Charley said.

“I researched it for the script. In the saga he was supposed to have come by way of Iceland and marry a girl by the name of… Gudrid.”

“That’s Slithey’s name in the film,” Barney choked out.

“Wait, that’s not all,” Charley said in a hollow voice. “I remember that Gudrid was supposed to have had a baby in Vinland, and they named him Snorri.”

“Snorey,” Barney said, and felt the hackles rise on the back of his neck. “One of the seven dwarfs from Snow White…”

“I don’t see what everyone is so concerned about,” Professor Hewett said. “We have known for some weeks now about these circles in time. What you are discussing now are the mere mechanical details of a single circle.”

“But the significance, Professor, the significance,” Barney said. “If this is true, then the only reason that the Vikings settled in Vinland is because we decided to make a motion picture showing how the Vikings settled in Vinland.”

“It’s as good a reason as any other,” the Professor said calmly.

“It just takes a little getting used to, that’s all,” Barney muttered.

Everyone said afterward that it was a very memorable party and it lasted right through until dawn and very little work got done the next day. But the pressure was off and there was no need for the overwhelming majority of the company now. They filtered away a few at a time, some for a holiday on Old Catalina, though roost of them wanted to go straight home. They left, waving their pay cards happily, and lights burned all night in the payroll department of Climactic Studios.

When the film was completed to Barney’s satisfaction and a print had been made and was in the cans, there were only a handful of people left in the camp, and most of them were the drivers needed to move the company out.

“You’re not going to smell fresh air like this again for a long time,” Dallas said, looking down the hillside at the Viking settlement below.

“I’m going to miss more than that,” Barney said. “I’m just beginning to realize that all I have been thinking about is the film, and now that it’s done, well, this all has been something a lot bigger than any of us realized at the time. You understand?”

“I dig. But you have to remember a lot of Joes only got to see Paris because the government sent them there to kill krauts. Things happen, that’s all, things happen.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Barney chewed at the palm of his hand. “But don’t say it. Sounds too much like the Prof’s circle in time.”

“What’s wrong with your hand?” Dallas asked,

“Looks like a splinter.” Barney said.

“You oughta get the nurse to take it out before she locks up shop.”

“You’re probably right. Pass the word, we start moving out in ten minutes.”

The nurse opened the trailer door a crack and peered out suspiciously. “I’m sorry, everything is locked up.”

“I’m sorry too,” Barney said, “unlock it. This is a medical emergency.”

She sniffed at the scope of the emergency, but unlocked the instrument cabinet. “I can’t reach it with the tweezers,” she said, with what sounded not unlike a note of malice, “so I’ll have to cut just a tiny bit with the scalpel.”

The operation took only a minute and Barney’s thoughts were on more pressing matters until she dabbed iodine on the tiny cut.

“Ouch,” he said.

“Now that could not have hurt, Mr. Hendrickson, not a big man like you.” She rummaged through another cabinet. “I’m sorry, but all the Band-Aids are gone, so I’ll have to wrap a little gauze around that, just for the time being.”

She had looped two turns of the bandage around his palm before he realized what was happening and burst out laughing.

“A splinter!” he said, and looked down and realized that he had put his best twill slacks on that morning, and was wearing his horsehide jacket. “I’ll bet you have Mercurochrome here, in fact I’ll guarantee it!”

“What a curious thing to say, of course I have.”

“Then wrap this bandage on well, nice and big. I’ll show him, that sadistic S.O.B.”

“What? Who… ?”

“Me, that’s who. I treated me like that and now I’m going to get even with myself. I thinks I can treat me like that!”

The nurse did not say anything else after that, and wrapped the bandage wide and bulky the way he asked, nor did she protest when he dumped so much Mercurochrome over it so that it dropped onto her clean floor. When Barney left, chuckling to himself, she locked the door behind him.

“You hurt?” Ottar asked.

“Not really,” Barney said, and reached over so that this time Ottar crushed his left hand. “Take it easy and watch out for the Indians.”

“Not afraid of them! We’ve cut plenty of hardwood, get a fortune in Iceland. You bring Gudrid back?”

“In a couple of minutes, your time, but what happens then is up to her. So long, Ottar.”

“Far heill,[23] Barney. You make another movie and pay with Jack Daniels.”

“I may do just that.”

It was the last trip and everyone else was gone and the time platform sat in the middle of an acre of flattened grass and muddy wheel tracks. The cans of film were in the pickup, the only vehicle on the platform, and Dallas was at the wheel with a red-eyed and sodden Slithey sitting beside him.

“Take it away,” Barney shouted to Professor Hewett, and he took one last lungful of fresh air.

Professor Hewett dropped the truck and the others off on Friday, and only Barney and the cans of film rode the loop in time back to the Monday morning of the same week.

“Leave me plenty of time, Prof,” he said. “I have to get to L.M.’s office by ten-thirty.”

When he arrived he phoned, then had to wait at the sound stage until the page arrived with the handcart. They loaded the film on and it was already twenty past ten.

“Bring this to L.M.’s office,” Barney said. “I’ll go on ahead with reel one.”

Barney walked fast, and as he turned the last comer he saw a familiar, hang-dog figure plodding up the steps. He smiled wickedly and followed himself down the hall right up to L.M.’s door, and the figure m front never looked back. Barney waited until he had actually pushed the door open before reaching over his shoulder and pulling his hand away.

“Don’t go in there,” he said.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the earlier Barney shouted, then took one look at him and collapsed like a second-rate actor in a ninth-rate horror film, all shaking limbs and popping eyes.

“A very nice take,” Barney said. “Maybe you should be acting in films, not directing them.”

“You’re… me…” The idiot figure burbled.

“Very observant,” Barney said, then remembered the diagram. He would be glad to get rid of that. “Hold this a sec,” he said, and shoved the can of film into the other’s arms. He couldn’t reach into his pocket with his gorily bandaged hand so he had to grope around with his left hand and dig his wallet out. The other Barney just held the can and mumbled to himself until Barney pulled it back and pushed the diagram into his hand.

“What happened to my hand—your hand?” the horrified other Barney asked.

I should tell you Barney thought to himself, then saw that the page was coming with the handcart and he opened the door for him.

“Give that to the Prof,” Barney said as the page went past, then couldn’t resist one last dig. “And stop horsing around and finish the picture, will you?”

He followed the page in and let the door swing behind him without a backward glance. He knew, without the slightest trace of doubt, that it would not open, and enjoyed the sensation of being positively certain of something for the first time in his life. This sureness carried him past Miss Zucker, who was standing and trying to tell him something about men from the bank; he brushed her aside and opened the inner door for the page. A very pale L.M. looked up at him and six gray-haired, frozen-faced men turned to see what the interruption was about.

“I’m very sorry to be late, gentlemen,” Barney said with calm assurance. “But I’m sure that Mr. Greenspan has explained everything. We were out of the country and I have just arrived with the print of the film he has been telling you about. A multimillion dollar asset, gentlemen, that will usher in a new era of cinematic art and profit for this studio.”

The cans of film rattled together as the page straightened up the handcart, and Sam, from the darkest comer of the room, uttered a small and almost inaudible sigh.