"Gooseneck. How many times--Only make it out for my real first name.
It's--" the tramp's voice dropped to a whisper--"It's _Galahad_."
The physicist added a final scribble to the green paper rectangle,
ripped it out and handed it to McCarthy. Pay to the order of Galahad
McCarthy one hundred dollars and 00 cents. On the Beet and Tobacco
Exchange Bank of North Carolina.
Ruddle watched while the check was carefully placed in the outer breast
pocket of the ancient sweater. He picked up an expensive miniature
camera and hung its carrying strap around his employee's neck. "Now,
this is fully loaded. You sure you can operate the shutter? All you
do--"
"I know all right. Fooled around with these doohickeys before. Been
playing with this 'un for two days. You want me to step out of the
machine, take you a couple of snaps of the scenery--and move a rock."
"And nothing else! Remember, you're going back a hundred and ten
million years and any action on your part might have an incalculable
effect on the present. You might wipe out the whole human race by
stepping on one furry little animal who was its ancestor. I think that
moving a rock slightly will be a good first innocuous experiment, but
be careful!"
They moved toward the great transparent housing at the end of the
laboratory. Through its foot-thick walls, the red, black and silver
equipment in one corner shone hazily. An enormous lever protruded from
the maze of wiring like a metallic forefinger.
"You should arrive in the Cretaceous Period, the middle period of the
age of reptiles. Most of North America was under water, but geological
investigation shows an island on this spot."
"You been over this sixteen times. Just show me what dingus to pull and
let me go."
Ruddle executed a little dance that a student of modern ballet might
have called "Man with High Blood Pressure about to Blow his Top."
"Dingus!" he screeched. "You don't pull any dingus! You gently
depress--gently, you hear!--the chronotransit, that large black lever,
thus sliding the quartzine door shut and starting the machine. When you
arrive you lift it--again gently--and the door will open. The machine
is set to go back a given number of years, so that fortunately you have
no thinking to do."
McCarthy stared down at him easily. "You make a lot of cracks for a
little guy. I'll bet you're scared stiff of your wife."
"I'm not married," Ruddle told him shortly. "I don't believe in the
institution." He remembered. "Who was talking about marriage? At
a time like this.... When I think of allowing a stubborn, stupid
character like yourself to run loose with a device having the immense
potentialities of a time machine--Of course, I'm far too valuable to be
risked in the first jerry-built model."
"Yeah," McCarthy nodded. "Ain't it the truth." He patted the check
protruding from his sweater pocket and leaped up into the machine. "I'm
not."
He depressed the chronotransit lever--gently.
The door slid shut on Professor Ruddle's frantic last word, "Goodbye,
Turtleneck, and be _careful_, please!"
"Gooseneck," McCarthy automatically corrected. The machine seemed to
jerk. He had a last, distorted glimpse of Ruddle's shaggy white head
through the quartzine walls. The professor, alarm and doubt mixed on
his face, seemed to be praying.
* * * * *
Incredibly bright sunlight blazed through thick bluish clouds. The time
machine rested on the waterline of a beach to whose edge the lushest
jungle ever had rushed--and stopped abruptly. The semi-transparent
walls enabled him to see enormous green masses of horsetails and
convoluted ivy, giant ferns and luxuriant palms, steaming slightly,
rich and ominous with life.
"Lift the dingus _gently_," McCarthy murmured to himself.
He stepped through the open doors into an ankle-depth of water. The
tide was evidently in and white-flecked water gurgled around the base
of the squat edifice that had brought him. Well, Ruddle had said this
was going to be an island.
"Reckon I'm lucky he didn't build his laboratory shack fifty or sixty
feet further down the mountain!"
He sloshed ashore, avoiding a little school of dun-colored sponges.
The professor might like a picture of them, he decided. He adjusted
the speed of the lens and focused it on the sponges. Then a couple of
pictures of the sea and the jungle.
Huge, leathery wings beat over a spot two miles in from the edge of
the luxuriant vegetation. McCarthy recognized the awesome, bat-like
creature from drawings the professor had shown him. A Pterodactyl, the
reptilian version of bird life.
The tramp snapped a hasty photograph and backed nervously toward the
time machine. He didn't like the looks of that long pointed beak, so
ferociously armed with jagged teeth.
Some living thing moved in the jungle under the Pterodactyl. It
plummeted down like a fallen angel, jaws agape and slavering.
McCarthy made certain that it was being kept busy, then moved rapidly
up the beach. Near the edge of the jungle, he had observed a round
reddish rock. It would do.
The rock was heavier to budge than he had thought. He strained against
it, cursing and perspiring under the hot sun. His feet sank into the
clinging loam.
Abruptly the rock tore loose. With a sucking sound it came out of the
loam and rolled over on its side. It left a moist, round hole out of
which a centipede fully as long as his arm scuttled away into the
underbrush. A nauseous stink arose from the spot where the centipede
had lain. McCarthy decided he didn't like this place.
Might as well head back.
Before he depressed the lever, the tramp took one last look at the red
rock, the underside somewhat darker than the rest. A hundred bucks
worth of tilt.
"So this is what work is like," he soliloquized. "Maybe I been missing
out on something!"
* * * * *
After the rich sunlight of the Cretaceous, the laboratory seemed
smaller than he remembered it. The professor came up to him
breathlessly as he stepped from the time machine.
"How did it go?" he demanded eagerly.
McCarthy stared down at the top of the old man's head. "Everthin'
O.K.," he replied slowly. "Hey, Professor Ruddle, what for did you
go and shave your head? There wasn't much of it, but that white hair
looked sorta distinguished."
"Hair? Shave? I've been completely bald for years. Lost my hair long
before it turned white. And my name is Guggles, not Ruddle--_Guggles_:
try and remember that for a while. Now let me see the camera."
As he slipped the carrying strap over his head and handed the
instrument over, the tramp pursed his lips. "Coulda _sworn_ that you
had a little patch of white up there. Coulda sworn. Sorry about the
name, prof; we never seem to be able to get together on those things."
The professor grunted and started for the darkroom with the camera.
Halfway there, he stopped and almost cringed as a huge female form
stepped through the far doorway.
"Aloysius!" came a voice that approximated a corkscrew to the ear.
"Aloysius! I told you yesterday that if that tramp wasn't out of my
house in twenty-four hours, experiment or not, you'd hear from me.
Aloysius! You have exactly thirty-seven minutes!"
"Y-yes, dear," Professor Guggles whispered at her broad retreating
back. "We-we're almost finished."
"Who's that?" McCarthy demanded the moment she had left.
"My wife, of course. You must remember her--she made your breakfast
when you arrived."
"Didn't make my breakfast. Made my own breakfast. And you said you
weren't married!"
"Now you're being silly, Mr. Gallagher. I've been married for
twenty-five years and I know how futile it is to deny it. I couldn't
have said any such thing."
"Name's not Gallagher--it's McCarthy, Gooseneck McCarthy," the tramp
told him querulously. "What's happened here? You can't even remember
my last name now, let alone my first, you change your own name, you
shave your head, you get married in a hurry and--and you try 'n tell me
that I let some female woman cook my breakfast when I can rassle up a
better-tastin', better-eatin'--"
"Hold it!" The little man had approached and was plucking at his sleeve
eagerly. "Hold it, Mr. Gallagher or Gooseneck or whatever your name is.
Suppose you tell me exactly what you consider this place to have been
like before you left."
Gooseneck told him. "And that thingumajig was layin' _on_ that
whatchamacallit instead of under it," he finished lamely.
The professor thought. "And all you did--when you went back into the
past--was to move a rock?"
"That's all. One hell of a big centipede jumped out, but I didn't touch
it. Just moved the rock and headed back like you said."
"Yes, of course. H'mmm. That may have been it. The centipede jumping
out of the rock may have altered subsequent events sufficiently to make
me a married man instead of a blissful single one, to have changed my
name from Ruddle to Guggles. Or the rock itself. Such an intrinsically
simple act as moving the rock must have had much larger consequences
than I had imagined. Just think, if that rock had not been moved, I
might not be married! Gallagher--"
"McCarthy," the tramp corrected resignedly.
"Whatever you call yourself--listen to me. You're going back in the
time machine and shift that rock back to its original position. Once
that's done--"
"If I go back again, I get another hundred."
"How can you talk of money at a time like this?"
"What's the difference between this and any other time?"
"Why, here I am married, my work interrupted and you chatter about--Oh,
all right. Here's the money." The professor tore his checkbook out and
hastily scribbled on a blank. "Here you are. Satisfied?"
McCarthy puzzled over the check. "This isn't like t'other. This is on a
different bank--The Cotton Growers Exchange."
"That makes no important difference," the professor told him hastily,
bundling him into the time machine. "It's a check, isn't it? Just as
good, believe me, just as good."
As the little man fiddled with dials and adjusted switches, he called
over his shoulder. "Remember, get that rock as close to its original
position as you can. And touch nothing else, do nothing else."
"I know. I know. Hey, prof, how come I remember all these changes and
you don't, with all your science and all?"
"Simple," the professor told him, toddling briskly out of the machine.
"By being in the past and the time machine while these temporal
adjustments to your act made themselves felt, you were in a sense
insulated against them, just as a pilot suffers no direct, personal
damage from the bomb his plane releases over a city. Now, I've set
the machine to return to approximately the same moment as before.
Unfortunately, my chronotransit calibrations can never be sufficiently
exact--Do you remember how to operate the apparatus? If you don't--"
McCarthy sighed and depressed the lever, shutting the door on the
professor's flowing explanations and perspiring bald head.
* * * * *
He was back by the pounding surf off the little island. He paused for
a moment, before opening the door as he caught sight of a strange
transparent object just a little further up the beach. Another time
machine--and exactly like his!
"Oh, well. The professor will explain it!"
He started up the beach toward the rock. Then he stopped again--a
dead-stop this time.
The rock lay ahead, as he remembered it before the shifting. But there
was a man straining at it, _a tall, thin man in a turtleneck sweater
and brown, corduroy pants_.
McCarthy got his flapping jaw back under control. "Hey! Hey, you at the
rock! Don't move it. It's not supposed to be moved!" He hurried over.
The stranger turned. He had the ugliest face McCarthy remembered having
seen on a human being; his neck was ridiculously long and thin. He
examined McCarthy slowly. He reached into his pocket and came out with
a soiled package. He bit off a chaw of tobacco.
McCarthy reached into his pocket and came up with an identically soiled
mass of tobacco. He also took a bite. They chewed and stared at each
other. Then they spat, simultaneously.
"What do you mean this rock ain't supposed to be moved? Professor
Ruddle told me to move it."
"Well, Professor Ruddle told me _not_ to move it. _And_ Professor
Guggles," McCarthy added as a triumphant clincher.
The other considered him for a moment, his jaw working like a
peculiar cam. His eyes traveled up McCarthy's spare body. Then he spat
contemptuously and turned to the rock. He grunted against it.
McCarthy sighed and put a hand on his shoulder. He spun him around.
"What for you have to go and act so stubborn, fella? Now I'll have to
lick you."
Without changing his vacant expression to one of the slightest
hostility, the stranger aimed a prodigious kick at his groin. McCarthy
dodged easily. That was an old hobo trick! He chopped out rapidly
against the man's face. The stranger ducked, moved away and came back
fighting.
This was a perfect spot for the famous McCarthy one-two. McCarthy
feinted with his left, seemingly concentrating all his power at the
other's middle. He noticed that his opponent was also making some
awkward gesture with his left. Then he came up out of nowhere with a
terrific right uppercut.