had gone deaf. He had heard no sound since the laughter of the horse. In the year 1100 PostAtomic, such silence could have been found nowhere on Earth. Listening, Svetz knew at last that he had reached the British Isles before the coming of civilization. He had traveled in time.
The extension cage was the part of the time machine that did the traveling. It had its own air supply, and needed it while being pushed through time. But not here. Not before civilization’s dawn—not when the air had never been polluted by fission wastes and the combustion of coal, hydrocarbons, tobaccos, wood, et al.
Now, retreating in panic from that world of the past to the world of the extension cage, Svetz nonetheless left the door open behind him.
He felt better inside the cage. Outside was an unexplored planet, made dangerous by ignorance. Inside the cage it was no different from a training mission. Svetz had spent hundreds of hours in a detailed mockup of this cage, with a computer running the dials. There had even been artificial gravity to simulate the peculiar side effects of motion in time.
By now the horse would have escaped. But he now knew its size, and he knew there were horses in the area. To business, then…
Svetz took the anesthetic rifle from where it was clamped to the wall. He loaded it with what he guessed was the right size of soluble crystalline anesthetic needle. The box held several different sizes, the smallest of which would knock a shrew harmlessly unconscious, the largest of which would do the same for an elephant. He slung the rifle and stood up.
The world turned grey. Svetz caught a wall clamp to stop himself from falling.
The cage had stopped moving twenty minutes ago. He shouldn’t still be dizzy! —But it had been a long trip. Never before had the Institute for Temporal Research pushed a cage beyond zero PA. A long trip and a strange one, with gravity pulling Svetz’s mass uniformly toward Svetz’s navel…
When his head cleared, he turned to where other equipment was clamped to a wall. The flight stick was a lift field generator and power source built into five feet of pole, with a control ring at one end, a brush discharge at the other, and a bucket seat and seat belt in the middle. Compact even for Svetz’s age, the flight stick was a spin-off from the spaceflight industries.
But it still weighed thirty pounds with the motor off. Getting it out of the clamps took all his strength. Svetz felt queasy, very queasy.
He bent to pick up the flight stick, and abruptly realized that he was about to faint.
He hit the door button and fainted.
“We don’t know where on Earth you’ll wind up,” Ra Chen had told him. Ra Chen was the Director of the Institute for Temporal Research, a large round man with gross, exaggerated features and a permanent air of disapproval. “That’s because we can’t focus on a particular time of day—or on a particular year, for that matter. You won’t appear underground or inside anything because of energy considerations. If you come out a thousand feet in the air, the cage won’t fall; it’ll settle slowly, using up energy with a profligate disregard for our budget….”
And Svetz had dreamed that night, vividly. Over and over his extension cage appeared inside solid rock, exploded with a roar and a blinding flash.
“Officially the horse is for the Bureau of History,” Ra Chen had said. “In practice it’s for the Secretary-General, for his twenty-eighth birthday. Mentally he’s about six years old, you know. The royal family’s getting a bit inbred these days. We managed to send him a picture book we picked up in 130 PA, and now the lad wants a horse…”
Svetz had seen himself being shot for treason, for the crime of listening to such talk.
“…Otherwise we’d never have gotten the appropriation for this trip. It’s in a good cause. We’ll do some cloning from the horse before we send the original to the UN. Then—well, genes are a code, and codes can be broken. Get us a male, and we’ll make all the horses anyone could want.”
But why would anyone want even one horse? Svetz had studied a computer duplicate of the child’s picture book that an agent had pulled from a ruined house a thousand years ago. The horse did not impress him.
Ra Chen, however, terrified him.
“We’ve never sent anyone this far back,” Ra Chen had told him the night