Departures

Chapter 92 of the Shidkhan Arukh dealt with laws concerning one dangerously ill and one forced to transgress a precept. Karo wrote, “If one who is dangerously ill requires meat, and only forbidden meat is obtainable, an animal should be slaughtered for his sake in order not to feed him with forbidden meat, as it is apprehended lest he will become aware of having been fed on forbidden meat and he will become nauseated thereby.”

Kaplan had come across that passage before. Now he had no doubt it described something real. When a couple of hours of theoretical knowledge came up against forty years of ingrained practice, distress was inevitable.

He clamped his jaw shut to hold down his gorge, then realized he could not eat that way. He took a deep breath, chewed, swallowed, then set his jaw again.

“Well?” Ruth demanded. “How is it?”

He laughed shakily. “You know, it’s just like the time I ate bacon and eggs when I was a kid. I have no idea what it tasted like.”

“Well, let’s find out, shall we?” Ruth cut a large piece and chewed with deliberation. “Not bad,” she said reflectively. “Nothing to write home about, but not bad.”

The second bite, Kaplan found, came much easier than the first. This time he too, was able to consider the flavor of the- of the R strain, he told himself firmly. “Different,” he agreed.

They ate a chop apiece, not with any great speed or relish, but steadily. Looking at the meat still on the platter, Kaplan asked, “Still hungry?”

“Not especially.”

“Neither am I. Even honestly believing that was acceptable food, it was harder than I ever thought it would be.” Ruth nodded. “You did very well.”

“Thanks. So did you, and thanks for that, too.” He hugged her again. “Shall we give Delahanty his office back and show him the dreadful deed is done?”

“Just a second.” She took a tissue from her pocket and brushed at his beard. “Now.”

“Okay.”

Not surprisingly, the head of Genetic Enterprises had been hovering just outside in the hallway. He hurried in, saw the bones on the platter. “Rabbi, Mrs. Kaplan, thank you very much,” he said, shaking hands with them both.

“It’s all right,” Kaplan said. “You’ve given me one of the more, ah, interesting afternoons of my life, that I can tell you.”

“I really didn’t mean to pressure you,” Delahanty said. But, like any scientist, he was curious by nature and could not help asking. “How did you like it?”

“We got through it,” Kaplan said.

Later, driving home, he wondered if he had been short with the man. Then he thought of twenty-five hundred years of history, of conquest and captivity under Babylon; persecution by the Greeks; savage and futile war against Rome; European ghettos and Christian mobs; Dreyfus; the Holocaust, still too appalling for any sane mind to take in; round after round of war in the Middle East, and no end in sight. No end to Jews in sight either, though.

Without much thought, he had managed to sum up the history of a people in four words. That wasn’t bad.

He changed lanes.

LURE

This one is in large measure my wife Laura’s fault. She gave me the ending. Of course, I’m partly to blame, too, because I’m the one who went and wrote a story around it.

Miocene Italy. To be precise, a swamp in Miocene Italy, in what would be Tuscany ten million years from now, give or take a few thousand. It certainly smelled like a swamp, Harvey Cutter thought as he squelched through the mud to check his latest trap.

The smells of mud, stale water, and rotting vegetation never changed much, the hunter thought as he scraped his hip boots one after the other on a branch. Or was that never would change! Despite a hundred years of commercial time travel, English tenses remained ill-adapted to the phenomenon.

The branch on which he’d cleaned his boots was part of a myrtle shrub. Maybe an uptime botanist could tell the difference between it and its modem equivalent, but Cutter couldn’t. The mosquitoes, he thought resentfully as one bit him on the arm, also hadn’t changed much.

But he wasn’t hunting plants and he wasn’t hunting mosquitoes, even if they were hunting him. He was hunting primates for the San Diego Cenozoic Zoo, and he wasn’t having a whole lot of luck.

Things had been easier on his last run, when he’d brought back a dozen Notharctus-plenty to start a breeding colony- from Eocene North America. Notharctus looked like a lemur and wasn’t much smarter than a squirrel. He could have caught a hundred if he’d wanted them.

Now he was after larger-and smarter-game. Hominoids, even offbeat Miocene hominoids like the ones he was after now, were nobody’s fools. That wasn’t surprising; people and the great apes were the survivors of the hominoid clan.

Something squealed in pain and terror out on the firmer ground farther east. Cutter’s head whipped around. A Diceratherium was down and kicking, with several wolfish Cynodesmus scrambling over its bulky body and already beginning to feed.