Chapter 10

One million BC.

When Kathy pushed herself onto the big rock and her hair fell against the side of her face, she frowned, pulled some around to smell it and grimaced at the odor. Now that she noticed, the all-weather suit was damp down its right side too. She looked over at Thad as he deflated the mattress. He must have taken care of me, even to the point of washing the vomit out of my hair and probably wiping off my suit too. She remembered thinking he was trying to paw her and blushed. Oh, crap. That was dumb.

As the air hissed out, Thad picked up their packs and brought them to where she was sitting. When completely deflated, the mattress “remembered” and resumed its original configuration. Thad packed it and the medkit away, then pulled on his pack. After helping her from the rock, he picked up her pack and pointing, said, “Let’s try that direction. If possible, I want to get to a more defensible location before dark.”

“I can take that,” Kathy said as she reached for her pack.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You look barely able to walk, and hiking on this mountainside will be hard enough on you without the extra weight. I wish we could wait for you to regain your strength, but from what I can see of the sky through the trees, we probably don’t have many hours of daylight left.”

She didn’t argue with him. I’m still shaky and weaker than I can ever remember being. If I protest too much, he might give me the pack, and I’m not all that certain I can even pick it up just now. He didn’t want me here to begin with, then he had to take care of me when the vertigo hit, and now he’s still having to help me. At least the vertigo is gone, and I’m beginning to feel much better.

After glancing around the area to ensure they weren’t leaving anything behind, Thad started on down the mountain. “Walk behind me, but keep alert,” he said gruffly. “Listen for noises, be on the lookout for anything unusual, and don’t be afraid to call something to my attention. Look up in the trees and behind you. I almost died back here from not looking behind me when I should have. This place has big animals with big appetites. And don’t be bashful about taking your gun out.” Then, having second thoughts about her walking behind him with a drawn weapon, he added, “But keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire and pay attention to where you are pointing the weapon. Stay close.”

Kathy nodded assent, and Thad turned and started out. She thought about giving him a swift kick in the rear to see if a sharp pain would change his arrogant attitude but decided that she had better leave well enough alone. Even bantering with him didn’t seem worth it just now. She knew he was right — it was just his cocksure attitude that galled. She had been so sick that she hadn’t even thought about danger from the beasts of the era. With Thad’s comment, full realization of “when” she was finally hit her. No wonder the Ops insisted on saying “where” most of the time. When just doesn’t sound right, she thought.

For the first time since their arrival, she took careful note of her surroundings. They appeared to be on the slightly sloping side of what must be a mountain, if she were correctly interpreting the glimpses she could see through the massive trees that seemed to be everywhere. She had never seen trees like these. Most seemed to have a diameter of at least a meter, and many were much more massive than that. Their branches overlapped until it was difficult to find an unobstructed view of the sky.

Forest sounds that she had never heard before seemed almost unreal but were muffled by the thick foliage that was supported by the massive limbs hanging above them. They finally crossed a small clearing, and she was better able to view the trees that reached farther into the sky than she ever thought possible. This forest had never known man with his saws and machinery. The place is absolutely eerie, she thought, as something screeched in the distance, before something else screamed back what must have been a challenge.

Her nerves frayed, Kathy frequently checked behind them as they continued along what must have been a game trail. Lightning flashed above them, the flash and the accompanying thunder simultaneous and cringe-close, so loud her ears rang. For the second time in less than ten minutes, she stepped on Thad’s heel.

“Not quite that close,” he admonished, but he had been startled as well.

She fell behind a couple of steps, face reddening. Just to have something to say, and knowing the answer anyway, she asked, “If you were back at one million before, aren’t you afraid you’ll meet yourself?”

After skirting a patch of dense underbrush, he hesitated, having heard the tremor in her voice, before answering, “No, not really. I know that in the beginning, we’ve lost people who encroached on their own timeline, but we’re in a different physical location than my other visit, and the computer would have positioned us at a time after I had left the barrier before, just in case. The Traveler went down-time hundreds of miles from where I was last time, and I stopped roughly ten years up-time from the barrier. As you know, when he comes back through, Kessler will try to put us in the Traveler’s time frame — assuming, of course, that the Traveler stops somewhere. If he goes blazing up-time without stopping, we won’t have a chance of catching up to him.”

Kathy tripped over a vine, barely managing to catch herself before she fell. Thad didn’t notice, and she had to hurry to catch up. Breathless, she asked, “How can the Others have equipment so much better than ours?”

“Beats me. I’m not even convinced this is one of the Others. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that this Traveler, as we seem to have started calling him, produced those bursts in 2223 when he was trying out his brand-new time machine.”

“What bursts?” she asked, thankful for the respite. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Thad explained what he had found on one of the graphs he had made. “If you had just invented a time machine, how would you test it?”

“Well, I...”

Thad grinned, “You sure wouldn’t get in it and dial in one million bc. No, you’d probably send something forward a few minutes. Then you might try something larger and send it in either direction to see if you could bring it back.” Thad gestured, warming to the subject. “We’re all natural time Travelers. But without the assistance of a time chamber or its equivalent, we can only go forward, day by day. It’s called growing old,” he said with a laugh, as he started along the gradually sloping mountain. Then over his shoulder, “I believe this person tested his machine from time to time, maybe working up to live subjects like rats or dogs, before one day deciding the process was safe enough and went for a visit with the dinosaurs.”

Kathy felt better after the short break. “Thad, that sounds good up to a point,” she said, again addressing his back as they continued along a game trail, “but how can someone from 2223 or whenever, invent a time machine superior to ours, when ours comes from a culture hundreds of years later? So why don’t we have his machine in a museum somewhere, for that matter?”

“Good question.” After a moment, he added, “Unfortunately, I don’t have the answer. I can punch other holes in my theory too,” he said, sobering. “Maybe we’ll get lucky, and the techs will manage to put us in sync with him. Or her.”

Conversation stopped, except for an occasional comment concerning the better route around a dense area or such like. After about an hour of walking along the mountain without finding anything suitable for a campsite, they stopped beside a roaring stream to top off their canteens. Thad dipped his into the rushing water, and without waiting for the canteen to sterilize the water, he took a drink.

“Give your canteen a slow count of thirty, and the water will be sterile,” he advised.

Kathy chuckled and replied, “I’m with you. This water is too clear and fresh to need sterilization. Besides, with what the temporal fields have done to our bodies, I doubt if anything in the water would hurt us very much.”

“Suit yourself. So how do you feel now?”

“I’m fine,” she answered, then thinking about it, realized that she actually did feel good. “I can carry my pack now.”

Thad hesitated for a minute. “Okay, try it for a while,” he said, handing over one of the packs. He watched her struggle to get it on for a moment before relenting enough to support the weight for her while she put her arms through the straps and snapped the buckle closed around her waist. He was glad to get rid of the extra burden. Carrying the rifle with one hand and her pack with the other, not only was tiring, but left him feeling vulnerable should he suddenly need to use the rifle. Most rifles weren’t made to be fired with one hand, and this one was no exception.

When Kathy had the pack adjusted to her satisfaction, they continued for another thirty minutes before Thad said, “Let’s try over that way. If we can’t find a cave, maybe we can find partial shelter among those boulders.” He stopped and looked around him as he tried to get a good view of the sky through the branches. “Does it seem to be getting darker to you?”

“I think it does,” she answered, becoming aware of the dimming light and mist in the air. “I thought it would surely rain during the lightning storm, but it never did. The wind in the trees is getting more noticeable now, though.”

The first set of boulders had little to offer in the way of shelter, but just before dark, they crossed another of the small streams that ran crashing down the mountain in an area where the whole region was strewn with boulders, some as big as houses. When they had almost given up hope of finding a place, they worked their way between two overhanging giant rocks partially embedded in the mountainside to find an area that had been eroded away, leaving a space high enough to stand in. The area extended back for three or four meters and was almost as wide.

Thad made his way inside. “Well, would you look at this?” he said as Kathy came in behind him. “The place doesn’t smell all that good,” he conceded, “but it’s dry, and the narrow opening should, at least, slow down any big animal wanting to visit.”

Kathy didn’t care. The area smelled a bit ripe, but she was beyond ready to get the pack off her back, and most anything was preferable to hiking in this forest at night.

Thad went back outside and cut the top out of a small evergreen tree as Kathy shrugged the pack off her shoulders and put it in a corner. She planned on sitting on the pack until he finished cleaning the place.

Thad returned with his makeshift broom and dropped it in front of her. “Would you be so kind as to tidy our house while I get some wood for a fire?”

Before she could think of an appropriate comeback, he was gone. Does he think I’m his maid? He throws his makeshift broom at my feet and expects me to start sweeping. She stretched her aching back, grimacing as she ruefully admitted that her job with Mr. Kessler hadn’t prepared her for this much physical exercise. Carrying the heavy pack was different from the exercises she did in PT. I’m going to be sore tomorrow, but he carried it most of the way along with his.

After a few minutes, Thad returned with a load of wood that he crashed to the ground just inside the entrance and said, “If you don’t sweep this place out, it’s going to get rank in here before morning. If you want to swap jobs, you can cut enough wood to last until morning, and I’ll clean up in here.”

Kathy glared at him, but the expression was probably lost in the gloom of the interior. If he noticed, he didn’t say anything. When she didn’t respond, he said, “Okay. I’ll get the wood, and you can clean up or not. Suit yourself.” Without further comment, he turned and left.

She thought about defying him, but she knew Thad well enough to know he would do exactly as he said. Shrugging, she began cleaning out the cave as best she could. The place reeked of animal dung and was dusty, but smelly or not, she was grateful for a roof over her head. Some animal had brought in small limbs and twigs to use for a nest. It must have been a while ago, since most of the branches were rotted now. She carried all the larger limbs and debris out and swept the place. By the time she had finished, Thad had already added a considerable amount of wood to the pile just to the left of the entrance and was cutting more a short distance from the cave. She went outside and watched in the faltering light as he cut branches from a fallen tree. Each time he swung the belt knife he had been carrying, a limb, usually as large as her arm, would be cleanly severed. He appeared to be extremely careful with the knife, and she understood why.

She walked over to assist in bringing the wood in, resigning herself to the fact that she would have to help around the camp, but she was tired of him ordering her around. “I’ve never seen a knife that sharp,” she commented to break the silence.

He stopped and very carefully replaced it in the sheath on his belt. “Something I picked up up-time. I have two of them; one small one I wear on my leg and this one on my belt.”

“How did you get the blade that sharp?” she asked, not overly interested, but just trying to keep her mind off the approaching night and the changing jungle sounds.

“I didn’t. They’re made that way, and the blades can’t be sharpened. Shouldn’t need to be, for that matter. I was told that the edge on each knife is only a few angstroms thick,” he said, while watching her stack wood in her arms. “The metal is supposed to be made by a packed bonding process that makes the blade ultra-hard and nearly indestructible. I don’t think the material could really be called metal in the sense we use the term. The edge is so thin that it’s invisible.”