"Farmer, Philip Jose - Time's Last Gift (1972)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

Philip Jose Farmer - Time's Last Gift (1972)

(Scanned by: Kislany)

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One

The explosion was as loud as a 75-millimeter cannon's.

At one second, there had been nothing but dead wet grass and limestone rocks on the edge of the steep hill. A gray torpedo shape appeared as if precipitated by some invisible chemical in the air. The displacement of air caused the boom that rattled down the hillside and the valley and across the distant river and bounced back to the vehicle.

The H. G. Wells I, without moving a micron in space, had traveled from A.D. 2070, Spring, to circa 12,000 B.C., Spring. Immediately after making the long leap in time, it moved in space. The vehicle had appeared two feet in the air and on the lip of the hill. It fell with a crash to the ground and began rolling.

Forty feet long, its hull of irradiated plastic, it did not suffer from the very steep three-hundred-foot descent. It was not even scratched, though it broke off sharp projections of lime-stone, and eventually stopped upright at the bottom of the hill after snapping off a score of dwarf pines.

'That was better than the fun-house,' Rachel Silverstein said in a quivering voice. She smiled, but her skin was almost as pale as her teeth.

Drummond Silverstein, her husband, grunted. His eyes were wide, and his skin was gray. But the blood was returning swiftly.

Robert von Billmann spoke with a very slight trace of German accent.

'I presume it is safe to unstrap ourselves?'

John Gribardsun twisted some dials on the instrument board before him. A slight whirring told of the projection of a TV camera. The view changed from a blue sky with some high white clouds to dead wet grass ahead and, a mile away, the river at the bottom of the valley.

He turned another dial, and the view switched to the hill down which they had rolled. Halfway up, a fox-like animal jumped out from behind a rock.

The camera swiveled. On the other side of the valley was another animal. Gribardsun turned the closeup dial.

'A hyena,' Gribardsun said. His voice was deep and authoritative. 'A cave hyena. Looks like a Kenyan hyena except it's much larger and all gray.'

Gribardsun had paled only slightly when they had rolled. He spoke with a British accent with a very slight underlying suspicion of another. Von Billmann, the linguist, had never been able to identify it. He had refused to question the Englishman about it because he wanted to label it himself. He prided himself on his ability to recognize any of the major languages and at least two hundred of the minor. But he had no idea of what tongue underlay the Englishman's speech.

The screen showed the view behind the vehicle. A tiny figure stepped out from the shadow of a huge overhang of rock. It ran to a large rock and dropped behind it.

Rachel said, 'That was a man, wasn't it?'

'Has to be,' Gribardsun said.

He kept the camera upon the rock, and, after several minutes, a head appeared. He closed up, and they were looking at a seeming distance of ten feet into the face of a man. His hair and beard were light brown, tangled, and long. The face was broad and a prominent supraorbital ridge shaded eyes of some light color. The nose was large and aquiline.

'I'm so thrilled,' Rachel said. 'Our first man! The first human being. A Magdalenian!'

The man stood up. He was about six feet tall. He wore a fur vest, fur knee-length pants, and calf-length fur boots. He carried a short flint-tipped spear and an atlatl, a stick with a notch at one end, which enabled him to cast the spear with greater force. A skin belt held a skin bag which looked as if it held a small animal or large bird. The belt also supported a skin sheath from which protruded a wooden hilt.

Gribardsun looked at a dial. 'Outside temperature is fifty degrees Fahrenheit,' he said. 'And it's fifteen minutes past noon, late May - perhaps. Warmer than I had expected.'

'There's very little green as yet,' Drummond Silverstein said.