Time's Last Gift Part 9

Von Billmann, embarra.s.sed, walked away. He looked back a moment later and saw them face to face, their skins flushed and their mouths writhing.

The last of the carca.s.ses was brought in after dusk. Everybody except the babies went to bed very late that night. They cooked a great quant.i.ty of the meat and ate with good appet.i.te, despite the wails and tears of the mourning women and children. Some of these ate greedily between fits of grief. And racks of wood were prepared and meat placed over them to be smoked. The meat was sc.r.a.ped off the rhino skulls, which were then broken open so that the brains could be cut out. The skulls were later placed in holes in the ground and filled with water. Heated stones were dropped in, and the pieces of meat left on the skulls were boiled free to make soup. Rachel talked to some of the widows. Their lot was not to be a happy one, not that it had been enviable when their mates were still alive. They would become the secondary wives of the most important men in the community, if they were still of childbearing age. They would be under the authority of the first wives. They and their children would always get what was left over in the way of food or attention. This would be more than enough when times were good. The tribe did not want widows and orphans to suffer needlessly. But when meat was scarce, the first wives and their children would get first choice.

On the other hand, the high death rate among females of childbearing age gave the secondary wives a chance to become first. Life was hard and insecure for everybody.

Four days went by. The three fretted. Rachel and Drummond hardly spoke to each other until the morning of the fourth. Then they became civil and kissed each other good morning. Apparently they had had some form of reconciliation that night, though probably not until after some verbal violence.

Von Billmann said, 'Too much time has gone by. I'm going out to look for him tomorrow. Would you two want to come along?'

'Of course we will,' Rachel said.

'He should have taken along a radio,' Drummond said. 'His idea of going native was stupid. He could at least have taken a radio and we'd know where he was and if he was all right.'

'It was stupid of us not to think of it,' von Billmann said. 'But I was too excited, and he just doesn't think about such things as keeping people informed of his whereabouts. He's a strange man, no doubt of that. There's something very peculiar about his being picked to go on this expedition, you know. Almost sinister, though I hate to say that about Gribardsun.'

'I would think so!' Rachel said. She made no attempt to hide her anger. 'How can you say anything bad about him? What's he done? Let's hear it!'

'Your emotions are showing,' Drummond said in a dull voice.

'Why shouldn't they?' she said. 'Isn't it natural for me to get upset if any one of us should be missing? Isn't it right?'

'I'm sorry I said anything,' he replied.

'What did you mean, almost sinister?' Rachel said to von Billmann. 'And why is there anything strange about his being chosen? He's certainly qualified, isn't he?'

'I don't think there's any doubt about that now,' von Billmann said. 'But when the expedition was first proposed, de Longnors was the outstanding candidate as the leader. He was a brilliant medical doctor, both as diagnostician and researcher. He also had written many outstanding - some of them cla.s.sic - works on physical anthropology, and he had done brilliant work as an archeologist and botanist. He was just the type of man needed, one who could carry out superb research in a number of fields.'

'I had heard that he was considered,' Drummond said. 'But I thought that he was finally rejected because he was too hard to get along with.'

'That did go against him, but n.o.body else had his brilliance. John Gribardsun was one of the other candidates considered. He had the same versatile background as de Longnors but he had not been famous in any of them. He had published very little, and his medical practice was limited to taking care of the natives on the Inner Kenyan Sanctuary, where he lived so many years. But then the name of Gribardsun was heard more and more often in the news media and the guests shows. And he appeared on various guest panels, you know, and charmed his audience.'

'Hypnotized them, you mean,' Drummond said.

'In a way perhaps; he does have some curiously magnetic quality,' von Billmann said. 'Anyway,' he went on, 'we people interested in the project, in the know about the scene behind the curtains, you might say, soon found out that he was being considered as de Longnors' backup. There were other men even more qualified who had been bypa.s.sed.'

'How do you know they were more qualified?' Rachel said.

'The project executives thought so,' von Billmann said. 'At first, anyway. I was told that the test ratings indicated Gribardsun was about sixth on the list. But, suddenly, he was second. There was a good deal of talk about that. Some people thought Gribardsun must have found out something about some of the top executives, or some of the politicians connected with the project, and was blackmailing them.'

'That's a terrible thing to say!' Rachel said. 'How could anybody believe it?'

'You know how people are,' von Billmann said. 'You'll have to admit that it was mysterious. It's still mysterious. Though there's no doubt in my mind that the right man was chosen. The question is, were the right methods used to pick him? Or, rather, did he use the proper channels and procedures to get chosen?'

'Did he?' Rachel said.

Von Billmann shrugged and said, 'I do not know. It was all so odd and so sudden. De Longnors disappears...'

'We knew about that, of course,' Drummond said.

'And after a while the executives announce that John Gribardsun has been chosen to take his place. Then, a week later, de Longnors is found wandering on the seventh level of Center Paris. He is incoherent and suffering from amnesia. He recovers somewhat in that he remembers everything except the period of his disappearance. That is a blank. By then, the vessel was scheduled for launch. De Longnors had missed too much of the necessary training. Besides, he might be mentally unstable. So he was left behind.'

Rachel was 'furious but controlling herself. She said, 'Are you hinting that John might have had something to do with de Longnors' disappearance and his amnesia? That he was abducted and drugged?'

'No, I'm not hinting that John had anything to do with it. As you must know by now, I have nothing but the greatest admiration for John Gribardsun. I'm glad that he, and not de Longnors, was picked. All I'm saying is that something strange was going on at the time. And that, a year before the vessel was launched, John Gribardsun had little chance of being on it.

'It's a tremendously important thing to be chosen as one of the crew of the H. G. Wells,' von Billmann continued. 'This is a unique voyage. There will be other trips into time, but none this far back again. We are indeed fortunate. I've thanked whatever G.o.ds there are that I was one of the four chosen out of thousands who qualified. And that brings up another thing. John once told me that he started training for this trip over twenty years ago, when it was first proposed that the theory of time travel might be made a reality. He was already a cultural anthropologist; he had a Ph.D., though he had never taught. So he figured out what type of man would be needed on an expedition into the past, and he became an M.D., and then got a doctor's degree in archeology and botany and several master's degrees in related fields.

'Now, a man that determined to get a berth on the time ship, one who sets out twenty years before it is established that there will be a ship - that man isn't going to let a kidnapping and a drugging get in his way.'

'You make me furious!' Rachel said. 'First you tell us all these sinister bits of information. Then you say they're just guesses, and you worship Gribardsun, and then...'

'I admire and respect him very much. I didn't say anything about worshipping him. You must understand. I don't want to think any ill of John. I like him too much for that. But I am a scientist, and I have to consider certain theories. Especially when certain facts start to build up a certain picture. But nothing is proved anyway. Or probably ever will be.'

'Well, I wouldn't blame him if he had played a dirty trick on de Longnors,' Drummond said.

Rachel looked surprised. Her husband said, 'Nor would I have blamed de Longnors if Gribardsun had been in his place and he was the one who did the abducting and drugging. The crew of the H. G. Wells I will be famous forever.'

'I think that it won't be good to have this kept among us three,' von Billmann said. 'We should bring it out in the open; talk it over with Gribardsun. I don't want you to think I'm talking behind his back. Nor would I want him to think that. So why don't we tell him about this conversation?'

'That would at least be honest,' Rachel said.

'But not womanly,' Drummond said.

'What do you mean by that?'

'Just a thought,' Drummond said. 'It doesn't apply to you, of course, since you're so outspoken.'

'I don't know,' she said. 'Perhaps we should reconsider. If he felt that we suspected him of underhandedness - of, in fact, criminal behavior - wouldn't that make things difficult? It's bad enough as it is, being forced into intimate contact for four years, never seeing any other human beings. Real human beings, I mean,' she said, as von Billmann opened his mouth to protest.

Drummond laughed.

'You know what I mean!' she said. 'Civilized men, then! People who think as we do! But, really, what good will it do? You don't expect him to admit anything dishonest, do you? And what if he did? Or didn't, for that matter? What then? What good would it do? I've changed my mind. I think we ought to keep such suspicions to ourselves.'

'I don't,' von Billmann said. 'John isn't the kind who likes festering secrets. He'd rather bring them out in the open.'

'I think it should be discussed,' Drummond said, looking strangely at Rachel.

The funeral rites took most of one day. The dead men were placed side by side in a single shallow grave. They were placed on their right sides, knees drawn up against their bellies and arms down their sides, the fingers touching the ankles. They were clad in full skin suits, their necks hung with chains of perforated stones and pierced bear teeth and claws. Their stones and wooden weapons were placed beside them and pieces of mammoth and rhino meat were placed near the mouths. The bodies were then covered with bearskins and more bear teeth strewn over the skins. Dirt was piled over the skins while the widows and their children, along with Thrimk's parents, circled the grave widdershins. They wailed and wept and beat their b.r.e.a.s.t.s with their fists and sometimes called on Wota'aimgkrimq, the Great She-Bear. Later, Rachel would ask them what they thought about the afterlife. But they, like the civilized and savage people of the time-travelers own period, had only a vague and often contradictory concept of what happened after they died.

The adult men and women then piled rocks on top of the dirt until there was enough to discourage bears and hyenas from digging them up. Glamug danced around shaking a baton and chanting from behind his bear mask. When the last rock was piled on, the tribe walked slowly back to the shelf under the overhang. And there they had a big feast.

The scientists stood around at a respectful distance and filmed the entire ceremony.

On the way home that evening, Rachel said, 'I wonder what happened to that burial site? I know that very spot was dug up sometime in 1980, and nothing was found there.'

Drummond shrugged and said, 'I suppose very few graves survived. They were dug up eventually by animals or washed away. And many must have been removed during the building of houses and other constructions in the early days when people didn't pay much attention to such things. And, of course, there must be thousands of burial sites which just haven't been discovered yet because there was no apparent reason to dig. In any case nothing but the stone implements and beads would remain.'

'When we get back, I'm going to look this spot over,' Rachel said. 'There might be something they overlooked, even if it's only a fossilized bear tooth or a flint spear head.'