The Technicolor Time Machine

There was a great ripping sound of torn cloth, cut through by Slithey’s happy giggle.

“That’s enough,” Barney said sharply. “Just the shoulder strap, I’m afraid this has gone too far. Ottar—not that!”

“Yippee!” someone said, and after that there was just a long silence broken only by Ottar’s steam-engine breathing.

Barney finally broke the spell of fascinated attention by walking over and slamming shut the doors. From the other side came a high-pitched, happy shriek. He turned and saw Gino bent over the camera. “What are you doing?” be shouted. “Cut!”

“Cut, sure,” Gino said, straightening up slowly from behind the camera.

“Didn’t you hear me say cut last time!”

“Cut? No, I must have been distracted.”

“Do you mean… the camera was running all the time?”

“All the time,” Gino said with a very wide smile. “I think you’ve got something really new here in cinéma vérité, Mr. Hendrickson.”

Barney looked at the closed doors and fumbled out a cigarette. “You might say that. Though I don’t know if we’ll be able to show the uncut version anywhere out of Scandinavia.”

“Dr. Masters could use it.”

“I know a guy in Beverly Hills who rents out stag movies, he’d buy a print,” Amory said.

There was a moment of silence as happy laughter echoed through the closed doors.

“And he even got a bottle of whiskey in there,” one of the carpenters said dismally.

11

“One thing I really like about the eleventh century,” Barney said, spearing a large chunk of white meat with his fork, “is the sea food. What’s the reason for that, Professor? Lack of pollution or what?”

“It is probably because what you are eating is not sea food from the eleventh century.”

“Don’t try to sell me that. This isn’t any of that frozen TV dinner stuff we brought along. Look, the clouds are breaking up, if it stays like this we can shoot the rest of the homecoming today.”

The front of the mess tent was rolled up, which gave a clear view across the fields, with a bit of ocean visible beyond. Professor Hewett pointed to it.

“The fish in the ocean here are identical with those of the twentieth century, to all practical purposes. But the trilobite on your plate is of a totally different order and era, brought back by the weekend parties from Old Catalina.”

“That’s what all the dripping boxes were about.” He looked suspiciously at the meat on his plate. “Just a minute—this thing I’m eating—it has nothing to do with Charley Chang’s eyes and teeth, does it?”

“No,” the professor said. “You must remember we changed periods when it was decided that members of the company should spend two days a week in a different time, so that work here would be continuous. Santa Catalina is a perfect holiday spot, Mr. Chang verified that, but he was slightly put out by the local life. That was my mistake. I left him in the Devonian period, when amphibian life was beginning to emerge from the sea, totally harmless creatures such as the lung fish for the most part. But there were things in the water…”

“Eyes and teeth. We heard.”

“So I considered the Cambrian a wiser choice for our weekenders. Nothing in the ocean to bother the bathers that is larger than the harmless trilobite.”

“So you’ve used the word again. What is it?”

“An extinct arthropod. A form of life generally classed somewhere between the crustaceans and the arachnidans, some specimens of which are quite small, but the one you’re eating is the largest. A sort of two-foot long, seagoing wood louse.”

Barney dropped his fork and took a long swallow of coffee. “That was a delicious lunch,” he said. “Now if you don’t mind, could we talk about the colony in Vinland. Have you found it yet?”

“My news isn’t too good.”

“After the trilobite anything is good. Tell me.”

“You must understand that my detailed knowledge of the period is limited. But Dr. Lyn is well versed on the history and he has all the records in the original sagas about the Vinland discoveries and settlements, and I have been following his instructions. It was difficult at times to find a suitable arrival location, the coasts of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia are irregular to say the least, but we have been successful at this. The motorboat has been used extensively, so that I can assure you that the search has been carried out as thoroughly as was possible.”

“What have you found?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s the sort of news I like to hear,” Barney said, pushing his plate of french-fried trilobite farther away. “Get the Doc over here, if you don’t mind. I want to hear more about this.”

“It is true,” Jens Lyn said in his gloomiest. North Baltic manner. “There are no Norse settlements in North America. It is most disturbing. We have searched all the possible sites from the tenth to the thirteenth century and have found nothing.”

“What made you think that there was anyting to find?”