Harry Harrison: The Technicolor Time Machine

“Putting a bullet through him will slow him down a lot.”

“No! Positively not. This studio does not indulge in murder, even for self-defense.”

“All right, if that’s the way you want it—but this goes under the personal jeopardy bonus in the contract.”

“I know! I know! Now get out there before—”

Barney was interrupted by a thud, then a tinkling crash followed by even louder howls of victory.

“I can understand what he is saying!” Jens Lyn chortled happily. “He is bragging that he has taken out the monster’s eye…”

“The big slob has chopped off one of the headlights!” Dallas shouted. “Keep him busy, Tex, I’ll be right with you. Draw him away from here.”

Tex Antonelli slid out of the cab and ran down the beach away from the truck, where he was seen by the berserk axman, who instantly began to pursue him. At about fifty yards distance Tex stopped and picked up two fist-sized stones, well rounded by the sea, and bounced one of them in his palm like a baseball, waiting calmly until his raging attacker was closer. At five yards he let fly at the man’s head and, as soon as the shield had been swung up to intercept the stone, he hurled the other at the Viking’s middle. Both stones were in the air at the same time and even as the first one was bounding away from the shield the second caught the man in the pit of the stomach: he sat down with a loud woosh . Tex moved a few feet away and picked up two more stones.

“Bleyoa!”[1] “Coward!” the downed man gasped, shaking his ax.

“Yeah, and you’re one too. C’mon buddy, the bigger they are, the harder they splat.”

“Let’s wrap him up,” Dallas said, coming out from behind the truck and spinning a loop of rope around his head. “The Prof is getting jittery about his gadgets and wants to go back.”

“Okay, I’ll set him up for you.”

Tex shouted some Marine Corps insults, but they did not penetrate the linguistic barrier. He then resorted to the Latin language of gesture that he had learned as a youth and with rapid movement of fingers and hands called the Viking a cuckold, a gelding, ascribed some filthy personal habits to him and ended up with the Ultimate Insult, left hand slapped to right bicep causing the right fist to be jerked up into the air. One—or more—of these obviously had antecedents that predated the eleventh century, because the Viking roared with rage and staggered to his feet. Tex calmly stood his ground, though he looked like a pygmy before the charging giant. The ax swung up and Dallas’s spinning lasso shot out and caught it, while at the same moment Tex put out his foot and tripped him. As the Viking hit the ground with a crash both men were on him, Tex paralyzing him with an armlock while Dallas hogtied him with rapid bights of rope. In a few instants he was helpless, with his arms tied to his legs behind his back and roaring with frustration as they dragged him through the pebbles back to the truck. Tex had the ax and Dallas the shield.

“I have to talk to him,” Jens Lyn insisted. “It is a rare opportunity.”

“We must leave instantly,” the professor urged, making a delicate adjustment on the verniers.

“We’re being attacked!” Amory Blestead squealed, pointing with palsied ringer at the house. A ragged horde of shock-haired men armed with a variety of swords, spears and axes were rushing down the hill toward them.

“We’re getting out of here,” Barney ordered. “Throw that prehistoric lumberjack in the back and let’s get going. You can have plenty of time to talk to him after we get back, Doc.”

Tex jumped into the cab and grabbed up his revolver from the seat. He fired it out to sea until all the chambers were empty, raced the engine, flashed the remaining headlight and blew the horn. The shouts of the attackers turned to wails of fear as they dropped their weapons and fled back into the house. The truck made a U-turn and started back down the beach. When they came to the sharp curve around the headland a horn blasted from the other side of the rocks and Tex just had time to jerk the wheel to the right—until the tires were in the rush of breaking waves—as another olive-drab truck tore around the headland and roared by them.

“Sunday driver!” Tex shouted out the window and kicked the truck forward again.

Barney Hendrickson glanced up as the other truck went by, swinging into their wheel tracks, and was almost petrified as he looked into the open rear. He saw himself standing there, swaying as the truck lurched over the rocks and grinning wickedly. At the last moment, before the second truck vanished from sight, the other Barney Hendrickson raised his thumb to his nose and wiggled his fingers at his duplicate. Barney dropped back onto a box as the rock wall intervened.

“Did you see that?” he gasped. “What happened?”

“Most interesting,” Professor Hewett said, pressing the starter on the motor-generator. “Time is more plastic than I bad ever imagined. It allows for the doubling of world lines, perhaps even for trebling, or even an infinite number of coils. The possibilities are incredible…”

“Will you stop babbling and tell me what I saw,” Barney snapped, lowering the almost empty whiskey bottle.

“You saw yourself, or we saw us who will be—I’m afraid English grammar is not capable of accurately describing a situation like this. Perhaps it would be better to say you saw this same truck with yourself in it as it will be at a later date. That is simple enough to understand.”

Barney groaned and emptied the bottle, then shouted with pain as the Viking managed to wriggle around on the floor and bite him in the leg.

“Better keep your feet up on the boxes,” Dallas warned. “He’s still frothing.”

The truck slowed and Tex called back to them. “We’re coming to the spot where we landed, I can see where the tire tracks begin just ahead. What’s next?”

“Stop as close to the original position of arrival as you can. It makes the adjustments simpler. Prepare yourselves, gentlemen—we begin our return journey through time.”

“Tröll taki yor öll!”[2] “May the trolls take you all!” (A pre-Christian equivalent of “Damn you!”) the Viking roared.

“What went wrong?” L.M. asked suspiciously as they trooped tiredly into his office, dropping into the same chairs they had left eighteen centuries before. “What happened—you walk out of the office ten minutes ago and now ten minutes later you walk in?”

“Ten minutes to you, L.M.,” Barney said, “but it’s been hours for us. The machine is okay, so we’re over the first and biggest hurdle. We know now that Professor Hewett’s vremeatron works even better than we had hoped. The way is open to take a company back in time and film an accurate, full-length, wide-screen, realistic, low-budget high-quality historical. Our next problem is a simple one.”

“A story.”

“Right as always, L.M. And it so happens we have a story, a true-to-life story, and, what is more, a patriotic story. If I was to ask you who discovered America, what would you say?”

“Christopher Columbus, 1492.”

“That’s what most people think, but it was the Vikings who did the job first.”

“Was Columbus a Viking—I thought he was Jewish?”

“Let us please drop Columbus. Five hundred years before Columbus was born Viking ships had sailed from Greenland and discovered what they called Vinland which has since been proven to be part of North America, The first expedition was led by Eric the Red—”

“Kill that idea! You want to get us blacklisted with a commie picture?”

“Just hold on for a bit please, L.M. After Eric found the place it was colonized, Vikings came and lived there and built houses and fanned, and this was all organized by the legendary hero, Thorfinn Karlsefni…”