Eric Flint - Time spike

He looked at the small fire in the chimney they were sitting by, for a moment. "On the other side of the coin-again, with the caveat that this is really just an educated guess-I think that two thousand females would be enough." "Oh, swell. We're screwed, then." A bit grumpily: "And don't lecture me about my choice of words. We're still not even in the ballpark." "Not… necessarily. We have no idea how many little Indian villages or hunter-gatherer bands are out there.

But I can tell you this much. I think it has to be a fair number."

"Why?" "Because the Quiver-whatever it was; which we don't know and I doubt we ever will-wasn't just a temporal phenomenon. It was also a spacial phenomenon. And it looks to me as if the spacial dimension involved in its effects-call it the radius-got larger the farther back in time it went. Or maybe it started way back in ancient time and came forward, narrowing as it went. Either way, if you were to plot the Quiver in three dimensions, it would look like a cone rather than a cylinder." "Run that by me again." "Think about it, Rod. Who got taken in our day? Just us. The prison, and a little bit of territory around it. Go back almost a hundred and seventy years, and who got taken among the Cherokee? I've asked, and the answer is interesting. Chief Watkins and his people weren't all gathered together in one small area when they got snatched by the Quiver, the way we were. They were strung out along a trail-and the soldiers were riding point quite a ways ahead. Still, most of them got snatched. The only ones who didn't, in his band, were a group that had been bringing up the rear a long ways behind, and the soldiers who were with them. Which was most of them." "Ha. I'll be damned. I hadn't even thought about that."

"Don't feel bad," said Andy. "Neither had I." "Jeff, have you tried to figure out-" "Don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Of course I've tried to figure out what the radius must have been. As near as I can tell, at least a half a mile and maybe even a mile. The problem is that nobody knows exactly how far back the group that didn't get taken were lagging. The soldiers were a good quarter of a mile ahead, though, according to Sergeant Kershner. So no matter how you slice it, the territory involved was a lot bigger than the prison area." Idly, he picked up a stick and fed it to the fire. "Okay. The next group of people who got snatched, that we know of, were de Soto and his army.

Please note the use of the term 'army.' Fine, a small army-but you don't cram even a small army into a small space. Not when you're on campaign, for sure-and every report we've gotten about the Spaniards seems to indicate they're foraging constantly. What little we've been able to squeeze out of the one Spaniard we captured seems to confirm that. No matter which way I look at it, I figure it has to have been a lot bigger radius than the one the Cherokees were in, much less us."

Another stick went into the fire. "I get the same results when I look at the animals, except it's even more extreme. We haven't seen more than four deer-and yet, between us and the Cherokees, we've seen three allosaurs. There's no way to explain that ratiowithout presuming a steady increase in the radius of the Quiver as it went further and further back in time." "Uh… sorry, I'm not following you."

"That's because you're not a biologist. One of the laws of biology is that predators are always outnumbered-a lot-by prey, and the bigger an animal gets, the scarcer it gets. Especially predators. That's because big predators need a very big hunting range." It didn't take Rod, with his extensive outdoor experience, more than a second to grasp the point. "Jesus. What's the hunting range of something like a grizzly bear or a tiger?" "Tigers, I don't know. And I don't remember the specific numbers for big bears. It's different anyway, for male and female bears. But I do know the numbers, from the lowest to highest, are all measured in square kilometers. Hundreds of square kilometers."

"Gotcha. And a big bear weighs what, approximately? Half a ton?" "Not quite, although a few individuals get even bigger that that. The biggest are the southern Alaskan brown bears. If I remember right, the males average somewhere around four hundred kilos. Call it nine hundred pounds." Hulbert nodded. "What do you figure an allosaur weighs? And spare me the lecture about variation. I know that.

Ballpark figures, Jeff, ballpark figures. For right now, that's plenty good enough." Edelman smiled. "They're at least three times bigger than a large male Alaskan brown bear. Probably closer to five or six times bigger, on average, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of them got up to four or five tons. Which would make them eight to ten times bigger." "Four deer and three allosaurs…" Rod mused. "Yeah, I see your point. There's simply no way you could have found three allosaurs in an area the size of the prison, or even that stretch of trail the Cherokees were on." "Not unless they were having a convention or a rock concert. No, by the time the Quiver reached the Cretaceous, the radius had to have been something like fifty miles. Probably more, and maybe a lot more. We have no reason to think that the three allosaurs we've seen or heard about are all there are." Rod pondered the matter, for a minute or so. "In other words-this is the gist of it, stripped down to the essentials-the future of the human race in this world depends ultimately on the most primitive people in it. Those pre-Mounds Indians out there, in their villages." "Yup. Just like the Bible says. The meek shall inherit the Earth." Rod scratched his cheek. "Andy, since you're the big shot, I do believe I'll follow Jeff's example. When the time comes, I'm ducking behind the podium while you tell an assembled crowd of prison guards and prehistoric hunter-gatherers that they've got to start dating." All three of them laughed. When the laughter died down, Edelman shook his head. "It won't have to come that, thankfully. This is a generational problem, not something measured in years. And while I don't know nearly as much history and anthropology as I do biology and geology, I do know one thing. There has never been a time recorded in human history or told about in myths and legends, when two groups of human beings met for the first time, that they didn't start screwing each other." He leaned back on his stool, looking very complacent. "Besides, that's what adolescence is for. Let our teenage descendants deal with it, the snotty worthless brats." Rod sighed, and ran fingers through his hair.

"But we can do what they can't. Keep those Indians alive to begin with." "Yeah, that's right," said Andy. "Look at it this way, Rod. We had a job to do in our old world, and all that seems to have happened is that we're picking up the same job in this one. Protecting people against the worst people." Rod chuckled, softly and without much humor. "I don't think the term 'correctional officer' was ever intended to be applied to Spanish damn-the-bastards conquistadores.

But, okay, I see your point. When do we leave tomorrow?"

Chapter 38 Susan Fisher sat down next to Jenny. She didn't say anything, just sat on one of the stools positioned in front of the stone bowls the Cherokee women used to grind the nutmeal. Jenny nodded at her, her mind still distracted. She and Andy had had a very heated, whispered argument this morning. She hadn't been happy at all that he wasn't taking her along on the expedition to fight the Spaniards. But, in the end, she had agreed. Andy was right, and she'd known it all along. She'd just had a fierce emotional reaction to the idea of being left behind. Especially, to the idea of being separated from him. In the type of battle that lay ahead, her supply level made her skill level almost useless. She could do more good staying behind than as a field surgeon. Which, given what she had available, wouldn't mean much more than amputations-and the Cherokees had their own people who knew how to do that. Andy had made the alliance with Watkins, but he figured it was still shaky. If not for Watkins, for many of the other Cherokees. And Watkins' authority as their chief was very far from absolute. The Cherokee power structure wasn't exactly what modern Americans would call a democracy, but that was mostly a matter of formalities and custom. It was far closer to a democracy than a dictatorship. For that matter, it was far more democratic than any number of supposedly democratic institutions in their own society.