Harry Harrison: The Technicolor Time Machine

“They never bothered the truck or the camp, so Gino must have been grinding away all the time.” He looked down at the laughing northmen, who were tearing the burning wood away from the wall. “There’s your Indian battle, so it looks like there’s your film.”

Barney turned away from the dead and wounded and began to climb shakily down.

“This is the sunset we been waiting for, Barney,” Charley Chang said. “Look at those colors.”

“Let’s roll then,” Barney said, glancing around at the film company on the hillside. “Are you ready, Gino?”

“Just about two minutes more,” the cameraman said, peering through the viewfinder of the camera. “Just as soon as that line of clouds moves m front of the sun so I can shoot right into it.”

“Okay, then.” Barney turned to Ottar and Slithey, in their best Viking costumes, Ottar with a rubber scar and gray touches, which were hard to see, on the hair at his temples. “This is the last scene, the really last scene, and we’ve waited until now to get the color right. Everything else is in the can. It’s going to run, one, two, three, but we’re going to shoot it one, three and do two last to get you in silhouette against the sunset. Now in one I want you to walk up the hill, side by side, take it slow, and stop right there at the top where that line is scratched into the ground. You just stand there, looking out to sea, until I shout now, then Slithey you reach out and take Ottar by the arm. That’s the end of the first scene. Then Ottar you put your arm around her waist and I want the two of you to hold it that way, while we dolly back for the closing scene of your figures small against the sunset. Got that?”

They both nodded.

“Ready,” Gino called out.

“One sec more. When I shout cut you stay there on the hill so we can run the camera in and shoot number two, which is the talk. Is that clear?”

It went off well. Ottar was almost a professional by this time. At least he usually followed orders without arguing. They climbed the hill together and looked into the sunset. Boards had been laid over the grass to make a smooth track for the camera dolly to roll along, and the grips, goaded by Barney’s shouted instructions, moved it slowly and smoothly away so the figures of the lovers could fade into the distance.

“Cut!” Barney shouted when the dolly reached the end of the track. “Principals—just hold it on the hill. Let’s move now before the light goes.”

There was a concerted and organized rush. While the camera was being trundled to the top of the hill the sound men were setting up their tape recorder and mikes. Slithey was frowning over her lines while the script girl read Ottar’s aloud to him. The sky was a flaming red as the sun dropped toward the sea.

“Ready,” Gino said.

“Camera,” Barney called out, “and not a sound from anyone, not anyone. Action.”

“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.”