The Technicolor Time Machine

“Out there,” Ottar said, pointing, “out there somewhere over the sea is our home. Do you still miss it, Gudrid?”

“For a long time I did, but not any more. We have fought and died for this land and it is ours now. Vinland… this new world, that is our home now.”

“Cut. Good, print that. I guess that just about winds it up.”

Everyone cheered then, and Slithey kissed Barney and Ottar crushed his hand well. It was a very exciting moment because the picture was just about finished in most particulars, and by the time the closing scenes were cut, scored and spliced the film would be complete. The party that evening promised to be a very big party indeed.

It was. Even the weather cooperated and, as long as the radiant heaters were left on, the end of the mess tent could be rolled up. They had turkey and champagne, four kinds of dessert and unlimited drink, and all of the company and most of the northmen and a few of their women were there. It swung.

“I don’t want to go,” Slithey wailed and dripped tears into her champagne. Barney patted her free hand and Ottar squeezed her thigh affectionately.

“You’re not really going—or abandoning your baby,” Barney explained for about the twentieth time. He marveled at his own patience, but everything was different tonight. “You know Kirsten will be a wet nurse if you have to be away for a while, but there is no reason for you to be. And you have to admit that having a baby with you right in California, when you weren’t even pregnant last week, would be hard to explain. Particularly during the publicity for the film. So all you do is wait until the film is released, by which time you will have decided just what you want to do about the baby. Remember, you aren’t even married in California and they got a word for that king of thing. Then, soon as you decide, you come back here. The Prof has promised to bring you back no later than one minute after you left. What could be simpler?”

“It will be months and months,” Slithey cried, and Barney started to explain for the twenty-first time when Charley Chang tapped him on the arm and handed him a fresh drink.

“I’ve been talking to the Prof about the nature of time,” Charley said.

“I do not want to talk about the nature of time,” Barney told him. “After the last couple of weeks I would like to forget about the whole thing.”

It had been a trying time for a number of them. Over four days had passed in California—it was now Thursday afternoon on the vremeatron’s time-of-arrival clock—and it had been a very busy four days indeed.

They had been shuttling back and forth to the lot very often to do some of the more technical cutting and dubbing in the labs there. Spiderman and his band had been recording the sound track in one of the studios. There had been much doubling back in time so the facilities could be used on an almost twenty-four-hour-a-day basis, and in many cases the same people had crossed in the same time. Barney had one memory of three Professor Hewetts talking animatedly together that he would just as well like to forget. He sipped his drink.

“No, really,” Charley Chang insisted. “I know we’re all going a little bugs from almost shaking hands with ourselves, but that’s not what I mean. The thing is like why are we shooting the film here at this place in Labrador?”

“Because this is the spot that the Prof brought us to.”

“Correct. And why did the Prof bring us here?”

“Because this is one of the places he and Jens searched for settlers,” Barney said slowly. Tonight he had patience for everybody.

“Right again. Now did you ever stop to think why Jens wanted to search for settlers here? Tell him, will you, Proessor?”

Hewett put down his glass and touched his lips with his napkin. “We came here because of the excavations carried out in this area in the early 1960s by Helge Ingstad. Remains of nine buildings were found and carbon-14 dating of charcoal fragments on the sites placed them around 1000 A.D.”

“Do you dig what that means?” Charley asked.

“Elucidate,” Barney said abstractedly, humming along with the throbbing tones of “A-Viking We Will Go,” the theme song of the picture, which Spiderman was playing softly in the background.

“It is now the year 1006,” Charley said. “And there are nine buildings in the camp below, two of which were just shells to begin with, which we have burned to charcoal for the picture. So there is a Norse settlement here in Epaves Bay in the eleventh century because traces of it were found in the twentieth century. So you could say there is a circle in time with no beginning or end. We came here to leave traces to find here to lead us to come here to leave traces…”

“Enough,” Barney said, raising his hand. “I’ve had this circle-in-time thing before. The next thing you’ll be telling me is that all the old sagas are really true and that we’re responsible, or that Ottar here is really Thorfinn Karlsefni, the guy who started the first settlement in Vinland.”

“Sure,” Ottar said. “That’s me.”