There was movement down in the valley—to the north. But what were issuing from the woods at a leisurely and ponderous pace were not Folsom hunters. Ross whistled very softly between his teeth, watching that advance eagerly, and Travis shared his excitement.
The bison herd, the striped horses, the frustrated sabertooth confronting the giant ground sloths, none had been as thrilling a sight as this. Even the elephant of their own time could generate a measure of awe in the human onlooker by the sheer majesty of its movement. And these larger and earlier members of the same tribe produced an almost paralyzing sense of wonder in the two scouts. “Mammoths!”
Tall, thick-haired giants, their backbones sloping from the huge dome of the skull to the shorter hindquarters, dwarfed tree and landscape as they moved. Three of them towered close to fourteen feet at the shoulder. They bore the weight of the tremendous curled tusks proudly, their trunks swaying in time to their unhurried steps. They were the most formidable living things Travis had ever seen. And, watching them, he could not believe that the hunters he had spied upon in the other valley had ever brought down such game with spears. Yet the evidence that they had, had been discovered over and over again—scattered bones with a flint point between the giant ribs or splitting a massive spine.
“One—two—three—” Ross was counting, half under his breath. “And a small one—”
“Calf,” Travis identified. But even that baby was nothing to face without a modern weapon to hand.
“Four—five—Family party?” Ross speculated.
“Maybe. Or do they travel in herds?”
“Ask the big brains. Ohhh—look at that tree go!”
The leader in the dignified parade set its massive head against a tree bole, gave a small push, and the tree crashed. With a squeal audible to the scouts, the mammoth calf hustled forward and began busily harvesting the leaves, while its elders appeared to watch it with adult indulgence.
Ross pushed the wind-blown tails of wig hair out of his eyes. “We may have a problem here. What if they don’t move on? I can’t see a crew working down there with those tons of tusks skipping about in the background.”
“If you want to haze ’em on,” Travis observed, “don’t let me stop you. I’ve drag-herded stubborn cows—but I’m not going down there and swing a rope at any of those rumps!”
“They might take a fancy to bump over the ship.”
“So they might,” agreed Travis. “And what could we do to stop ’em?”
But for the moment the mammoth family seemed content at their own end of the valley, which was at least a quarter of a mile from the ship. After an hour’s watch Ross tightened the thongs of his sandals and gathered up his spears.
“I’ll report in. Maybe those walking mountains will keep hunters away—”
“Or draw them here,” corrected Travis pessimistically. “Think you can find your way back?”
Ross grinned. “The trail is getting to be a regular freeway. All we need is a traffic cop or two. Be seeing you . . .” He disappeared from their perch with that uncanny ability to vanish silently into the surrounding landscape that Travis still found unusual in a white man.
As Travis continued to lie there, chin supported on forearm, idly watching the mammoths, he tried again to figure out what made Ashe and Ross Murdock so different from the other members of their race that he knew. Of course he had in a measure felt the same lack of self-consciousness with Dr. Morgan. To Prentiss Morgan a man’s race and the color of his skin were nothing—a shared enthusiasm was all that really mattered. Morgan had cracked Travis Fox’s shell and let him into a larger world. And then—like all soft creatures—he had been the more deeply hurt when that new world had turned hostile. He had then fled back into the old, leaving everything—even friendship behind.
Now he waited for that smoldering flame of past anger to bite. It was there, but dulled, just as the night fire of the volcano was now only a lazy smoke plume under the rising sun. The desert over which he had ridden to find water a week ago was indeed buried in time. What—?
The mammoths had moved, with the largest bull facing about. Trunk up, the beast shrilled a challenge that tore at Travis’ ears. This was beyond the squall of the sabertooth, the grunting roar of a sloth prepared to do battle. It was the most frightening sound he had ever heard.
A second time the bull trumpeted. Sabertooth on the hunt? The Alaskan lion? What animal was large enough, or desperate enough, to stalk that walking mountain? Man?
But if there was a Folsom hunter in hiding, he did not linger. The bull paced along the edge of the wood and then butted over another tree, to tear loose leafy branches and crunch them greedily. The crisis was past.
An hour later a party guided by Ross climbed up to join him. Kelgarries and four others wearing camouflage coveralls, spread themselves on the ground to share the lookout.
“That’s our baby!” The major’s face was alight with enthusiasm as he sighted the derelict. “What can you do about her, boys?”
But one of the crew focused glasses in another direction. “Hey—those things are mammoths!” he shouted. As one, his fellows turned to follow his pointing finger.
“Sure,” snapped the major. “Look at the ship, Wilson. If she is intact, can we possibly swing a direct transfer?”
Reluctantly the other man abandoned the mammoth family for business. He studied the derelict through his lenses. “Some job. Biggest transfer we ever did was the sub frame—”
“I know that! But that was two years ago, and Crawford’s experiments have proved that the grid can be expanded without losing power. If we can take this one straight through without any dismantling, we’ve put the schedule ahead maybe five years! And you know what that will mean.”
“And who’s going to go down there to set up a grid with those outsize elephants watching him? We have to have a clear field to work in and no interruptions. A lot of the material won’t stand any rough handling.”
“Yeah,” echoed one of the subordinates. Again the lenses swung to the north. “Just how are you going to shoo the mammoths out?”
“Scout job, I suppose.” That resigned comment came from Ashe as he joined the party. “Well, I’m admitting right here and now that I have no ideas, bright or otherwise, on how to make a mammoth decide to take a long walk. But we’re open for suggestions.”
They watched the browsing beasts in silence. Nobody volunteered any ideas. It appeared that this particular problem was not yet covered by any rule on or off the book.
6
“What we need is a mine field—like the one planted around Headquarters,” Ross said at last.
“Mine field?” repeated the man Kelgarries had called Wilson. Then he said again, “Mine field!”
“Got something?” demanded the major.
“Not a mine field,” Wilson corrected. “We could fix it for those brutes to blow themselves up, all right, but they’d take the ship with them. However, a sonic barrier now—”
“Run it around the ship outside your work field—yes!” The major was eager again. “Would it take long to get it in?”
“We’d have to bring a lot of equipment through. Say a day—maybe more. But it is the only thing I can think of now which might work.”
“All right. You’ll get all the material you need—on the double!” promised Kelgarries.
Wilson chuckled. “Just like that, eh? No howls about expense? Remember, I’m not going to sign any orders I have to defend with my lifeblood about two years from now before some half-baked investigating committee.”
“If we pull this off,” Kelgarries returned with convincing force, “we’ll never have to defend anything before anyone! Man—you get that ship through intact and our whole project will have paid for itself from the day it was nothing but a few wishful sentences on the back of an old envelope. This is it—the big pay-off!”
That was the beginning of a hectic period in Travis’ life which he was never able to sort out neatly in his head afterward. With Ashe and Ross he patrolled a wide area of hill and valley, keeping watch upon the camps of the wandering hunters, marking down the drifting herds of animals. For two days men shuttled back and forth and then erected a second time transfer within the valley of the smaller ship.
Wilson’s sonic barrier—an invisible yet nerve-shattering wall of high-frequency impulses—was in place around the ship. And while its signals did not affect human ears, the tension it produced did reach any man who strayed into its influence. The mammoth family withdrew into the small woodland from which they had come. The men working on the globe did not know whether that retreat was the result of the vibrations or not—but at least the beasts were gone.