Bird in the Hand

Larry Niven

Produced by calibre 0.6.40

BIRD IN THE HAND

"IT'S NOT A ROC," said Ra Chen.

The bird looked stupidly back at them from behind a thick glass wall. Its wings were small and underdeveloped; its legs and feet were tremendous, ludicrous. It weighed three hundred pounds and stood nearly eight feet tall.

Other than that, it looked a lot like a baby chick.

"It kicked me," Svetz complained. A slender, small boned man, he stood stiffly this day, with a slight list to port. "It kicked me in the side and broke four ribs. I barely made it back to the extension cage."

"It still isn't a roc. Sorry about that, Svetz. We did some research in the history section of the Beverly Hills Library while you were in the hospital. The roc was only a legend."

"But look at it!"

Svetz's beefy, red-faced boss nodded. "That's probably what started the legend. Early explorers in Australia saw these- ostriches wandering about. They said to themselves, 'If the chicks are this size, what are the adults like?' Then they went home and told stories about the adults."

"I got my ribs caved in for a flightless bird?"

"Cheer up, Svetz. It's not a total loss. The ostrich was extinct. It makes a fine addition to the Secretary-General's vivarium."

"But the Secretary-General wanted a roc. What are you going to tell him?"

Ra Chen scowled. "It's worse than that. Do you know what the Secretary-General wants now?"

People meeting Ra Chen for the first time thought he was constanfly scowling, until they saw his scowl: Svetz had suspected Ra Chen was worried. Now he knew it.

The Secretary-General was everybody's problem. A recessive gene inherited from his powerful inbred family had left him with the intelligence of a six-year-old child. Another kind of inheritance had made him overlord of the Earth and its colonies. His whim was law throughout the explored universe.

Whatever the Secretary-General wanted now, it was vital that he get it.

"Some idiot took him diving in Los Angeles," Ra Chen said. "Now he insists on seeing the city before it sank."

"That doesn't sound too bad."

"It wouldn't be, if it had stopped there. Some of his Circle of Advisors noticed his interest, and they got him historical tapes on Los Angeles. He loved it. He wants to join the first Watts Riot."

Svetz gulped. "That should raise some security problems."

"The Secretary-General is as close to being pure Caucasian as makes no difference."

The ostrich cocked its head to one side, studying them. It still looked like the tremendous chick of an even bigger bird. Svetz could imagine that it had just cracked its way out of an egg the size of a bungalow.

"I'm going to have a headache," he said. "Why do you tell me these things? You know I have no head for politics."

"Can you imagine what would happen if we caused the death of the Secretary-General? Already there are powerful factions that would like to see the Institute for Temporal Research disbanded. Space, for instance, they'd love to swallow us up."

"But what can we do? We can't turn down a direct request from the Secretary-General!"

"We can distract him."

They had lowered their voices to conspiratorial whispers. Now they turned away from the ostrich and strolled casually down the line of glass cages.

"How?"

"I don't know yet. If I could only get to his nurse," Ra Chen said between his teeth. "I've tried hard enough. Maybe the ISR has bought her. Maybe she's loyal. She's been with him thirty-eight years.

"How do I know what would catch the attention of the Secretary-General? I've only met him four times on formal occasions. I do know his attention span is low. If we could distract him with a new toy, he'd forget about Los Angeles."

The cage they were passing was labeled:

ELEPHANT

Retrieved from the year 700 Ante Atomic, approximately, from the region of India, Earth,

EXTINCT.

The wrinkled gray beast watched them go by with sleepy indifference. He had not been captured by Svetz.

But Svetz had captured almost half of the animals here, including several whose tanks were half full of water. Svetz was afraid of animals. Especially big animals. Why did Ra Chen keep sending him after animals?

The thirty feet of lizard in the next cage definitely recognized Svetz. It jetted orange-white flame at him and flapped its tiny bat-like wings in fury when the flame washed harmlessly across the glass. If it ever got out- But that was why the cages were airtight. The animals of Earth's past must be protected from the air of Earth's present.

Svetz remembered the cobalt-blue sky of Earth's past and was reassured. Today's afternoon sky was brilliant turquoise at the zenith, shading through pastel green and yellow to rich yellow-brown near the horizon. Svetz saw it and was reassured. If the Chinese fire-breather ever got out, it would be too busy gasping for purer air to attack Svetz.

"What can we get him? I think he's tired of these animals. Svetz, what about a giraffe?"

"A what?"

"Or a dog, or a satyr . . . it's got to be unusual," Ra Chen muttered. "A teddy bear?"

Out of his fear of animals, Svetz ventured, "I wonder if you might not be on the wrong track, sir."

"Mph? Why?"

"The Secretary-General has enough animals to satisfy a thousand men. Worse than that, you're competing with Space when you bring back funny animals. They can do that too."

Ra Chen scratched behind his ear. "I never thought of that. You're right. But we've got to do something."

"There must be lots of things to do with a time machine."

They could have taken a displacement plate back to the Center. Ra Chen preferred to walk. It would give him a chance to think, he said.

Svetz walked with bowed head and blind eyes alongside his boss. Inspiration had come to him at similar times, when he needed it. But they had reached the red sandstone cube that was the Center, and the mental lightning had not struck.

A big hand closed on his upper arm. "Just a minute," Ra Chen said softly. "The Secretary-General's paying us a visit."

Svetz's heart lurched. "How do you know?"

Ra Chen pointed. "You should recognize that thing on the walkway. We brought it back last month from Los Angeles, June third, twenty-six PostAtomic, the day of the Great California Earthquake. It's an internal combustion automobile. It belongs to the Secretary-General."

"What'll we do?"

"Go in and show him around," Ra Chen said grimly. "Pray be doesn't insist on being taken back to Watts, August eleventh, twenty PostAtomic."

"Suppose he does?"

"I'll send him back. Oh, not with you, Svetz. With Zeera. She's black, and she speaks american. It might help."

"Not enough," said Svetz, but he was already calmer. Let Zeera take the risks.

They passed close by the Secretary-General's automobile. Svetz was intrigued by its odd, angular look, its complex control panels, the shiny chrome trim. Someone had removed the hood, so that the polished complexity of the motor was open to view.

"Wait," Svetz said suddenly. "Does he like it?"

"Will you come on?"

"Does the Secretary-General like his automobile?"

"Sure, Svetz. He loves it."

"Get him another car. California must have been full of automobiles on the day before the Great Quake."

Ra Chen stopped suddenly. "That could be it. It would hold him for a while, give us time...

"Time for what?"

Ra Chen didn't hear. "A racing car. . . ? No, he'd kill himself. The Circle of Advisors would want to install a robot chauffeur override. Maybe a dune buggy?"

"Why not ask him?"

"It's worth a try," said Ra Chen. They went up the steps.

In the Center there were three time machines, including the one with the big extension cage, plus a host of panels with flashing colored lights. The Secretary-General liked those. He smiled and chuckled as Ra Chen led him about. His guards hovered at his shoulders, their faces stiff, their fingernails clicking against their gun butts.

Ra Chen introduced Svetz as "my best agent." Svetz was so overwhelmed by the honor he could only stutter. But the Secretary-General didn't seem to notice.

Whether he had forgotten about seeing the Watts Riot was moot, but he did forget to ask on that occasion.

When Ra Chen asked about cars, the Secretary-General smiled all across his face and nodded vigorously. Faced by a vast array of choices, five or six decades with dozens of new models for every year, the Secretary-General put his finger in his mouth and considered well.

Then he made his choice.

"'Why not ask him? Why not ask him?'" Ra Chen mimicked savagely. "Now we know. The first car! He wants the first car ever made!"

"I thought he'd ask for a make of car." Svetz rubbed his eyes hard. "How can we possibly find one car? A couple of decades to search through, and all of the North American and European continents!"

"It's not that bad. We'll use the books from the Beverly Hills Library. But it's bad enough, Svetz..."

The raid on the Beverly Hills Library had been launched in full daylight, using the big extension cage and a dozen guards armed with stimners, on June third, twenty-six PostAtomic. Giant time machines, crazy men wearing flying belts-on any other day it would have made every newspaper and television program in the country. But June the third was a kind of Happy Hunting Ground for the Institute for Temporal Research.

No Californian would report the raid, except to other Californians. If the story did get out, it would be swamped by more important news. The series of quakes would begin at sunset...had begun at sunset.

Svetz and Ra Chen and Zeera Southworth spent half the night going through the history section of the Beverly Hills Library. Ra Chen knew enough white american to recognize titles, but in the end Zeera had to do the reading.

Zeera Southworth was tall and slender and very dark, crowned with hair like a black powder explosion. Among men who worked at the Center she was reputed to be as frigid as the caves of Pluto. She was also the only one who could handle the unique horned horse Svetz had brought back from prehistoric Britain.

She sat gracefully cross-legged, reading pertinent sections aloud, while the others paced. They followed a twisting trail of references. .

By two in the morning they were damp and furious.

"Nobody invented the automobile!" Ra Chen exploded. "It just happened!"

"We certainly have a wide range of choices," Zeera agreed. "I take it we won't want any of the steam automobiles. That would eliminate Cugnot and Trevithick and the later British steam coaches."

"Thank Science for eliminating something."

Svetz said, "Our best bets seem to be Lenoir of France and Marcus of Vienna. Except that Daimler and Benz have good claims, and Selden's patent held good for years-"

"Dammit, pick one!"

"Just a minute, sir." Zeera alone retained some semblance of calm. "This Ford might be the best we've got."

"Ford? Why? He invented nothing but a system of mass production."

Zeera held up the book. Svetz recognized it: a biography she had been reading earlier. "This book implies that Ford was responsible for everything, that he created the automobile industry singlehanded."

"But we know that isn't true," Svetz protested.

Ra Chen made a pushing motion with one hand. "Let's not be hasty. We take Ford's car, and we produce that book to authenticate it. Who'll know the difference?"

"But if someone does the same research we just-oh. Sure. He'll get the same answers. No answers. Ford's just as good a choice as any."

"Better, if nobody looks further," Zeera said with satisfaction. "Too bad we can't take the Model T; it looks much more like an automobile. This thing he started with looks like a kiddy cart. It says he built it out of old pipes."

"Tough," said Ra Chen.

Late the next morning, Ra Chen delivered last minute instructions.

"You can't just take the car," he told Zeera. "If you're interrupted, come back without it."

"Yes, sir. It would be less crucial if we took our duplicate from a later time, from the Smithsonian Institute, for instance."

"The automobile has to be new. Be reasonable, Zeera! We can't give the Secretary-General a second-hand automobile!"

"No, sir."

"We'll land you about three in the morning. Use infrared and pills to change your vision. Don't show any visible light. Artificial light would probably scare them silly."

"Right."

"Were you shown-"

"I know how to use the duplicator." Zeera sounded faintly supercilious, as always. "I also know that it reverses the image."

"Never mind that. Bring back the reversed duplicate, and we'll just reverse it again."

"Of course." She seemed chagrined that she had not seen that for herself. "What about dialect?"

"You speak black and white american, but it's for a later period. Don't use slang. Stick to black unless you want to impress someone white. Then speak white, but speak slowly and carefully and use simple words. They'll think you're from another country. I hope."

Zeera nodded crisply. She stooped and entered the extension cage, turned and pulled the duplicator after her. Its bulk was small, but it weighed a ton or so without the lift field generator to float it. One end glowed white with glow-paint.

They watched the extension cage blur and vanish. It was still attached to the rest of the time machine, but attached along a direction that did not transmit light.

"Now then!" Ra Chen rubbed his hands together. "I don't expect she'll have any trouble getting Henry Ford's flightless flight stick. Our trouble may come when the Secretary-General sees what he's got."

Svetz nodded, remembering the gray-and-flat pictures in the history books. Ford's machine was ungainly, slipshod, ugly and undependable. A few small surreptitious additions would make it dependable enough to suit the Secretary-General. Nothing would make it beautiful.

"We need another distraction," said Ra Chen. "We've only bought ourselves more time to get it."

Zeera's small time machine gave off a sound of ripping cloth, subdued, monotonous, reassuring. A dozen workmen were readying the big extension cage. Zeera would need it to transport the duplicate automobile.

"There's something I'd like to try," Svetz ventured.

"Concerning what?"

"The roc."

Ra Chen grinned. "The ostrich, you mean. Don't you ever give up? There wasn't any roc, Svetz."

Svetz looked stubborn. "Do you know anything about neoteny?"

"Never heard of it. Look, Svetz, we're going to be over budget because of the roe trip. Not your fault, of course, but another trip would cost us over a million commercials, and-"

"I don't need the time machine."

"Oh?"

"I would like the help of the Palace Veterinarian. Have you got enough pull for that?"

The Palace Veterinarian was a stocky, blocky, busty woman with muscular legs and a thrusting jaw. A floating platform packed with equipment followed her between the rows of cages.

"I know every one of these beasts," she told Svetz. "Once I even thought of giving them names. An animal ought to have a name."

"They've got names."

"That's what I decided. GILA MONSTER, ELEPHANT, OSTRICH," she read. "You give Gilgamesh a name so he won't get mixed up with Gilbert. But nobody would get HORSE mixed up with ELEPHANT. There's only one of each. It's sad."

"There are the clones."

"Do you know what we do with the clones? We let them grow to infancy, then freeze 'em. Only one at a time of each species is alive." She stopped before the cage marked OSTRICH. "Is this your prize? I've been meaning to come see him."

The bird shifted its feet in indecision; it cocked its head to consider the couple on the other side of the glass. It seemed surprised at Svetz's return.

"He looks just like a newly hatched chick," she said. "Except for the legs and feet, of course. They seem to have developed to support the extra mass."

Svetz was edgy with the need to be in two places at once. His own suggestion had sparked Zeera's project. He ought to be there. Yet-the ostrich had been his first failure.

He asked, "Does it look neotenous?"

"Neotenous? Obviously. Neoteny is a common method of evolution. We have neotenous traits ourselves, you know. Bare skin, where all the other primates are covered with hair. When our ancestors started chasing their meat across the plains, they needed a better cooling system than most primates need. So they kept one aspect of immaturity, the bare skin.

"The axolotl was a classic example of neoteny-"

"The what?"

"You know what a salamander was, don't you? It had gills and fins while immature. As an adult it grew lungs and shed the gills and lived on land. The axoloti was a viable offshoot that never lost the gills and fins. A gene shift. Typical of neoteny."

"I never heard of either of them, axolotis or salamanders."

"They've been extinct for a long time. They needed open streams and ponds to live."

Svetz nodded. Open water was deadly poison, anywhere on Earth.

"The problem is that we don't know when your bird lost its ability to fly. Some random neotenous development may have occurred far in the past, so that the bird's wings never developed. Then it may have evolved its present size to compensate."

"Oh. Then the ancestor-"

"May have been no bigger than a turkey. Shall we go in and look?"

The glass irised open to admit them. Svetz stepped into the cage, felt the tug of the pressure curtain flowing over and around him. The ostrich backed warily away.

The vet opened a pouch on her floating platform, withdrew a stunner, and used it. The ostrich squawked in outrage and collapsed. No muss, no fuss.

The vet strode toward her patient-and stopped suddenly in the middle of the cage. She sniffed, sniffed again in horror. "Have I lost my sense of smell?"

Svetz produced two items like cellophane bags, handed her one. "Put this on."

"Why?"

"You might suffocate if you don't." He donned the other himself, by pulling it over his head, then pressing the rim against the skin of his neck. It stuck. When he finished he had a hermetic seal.

"This air is deadly," he explained. "It's the air of the Earth's past, reconstituted. Think of it as coming from fifteen hundred years ago. There were so few men then that they might as well have never discovered fire, as far as the composition of the air was concerned. That's why you don't smell anything but ostrich. Nothing's been burned yet.

"You don't need sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide to keep you alive. You do need carbon dioxide. A certain concentration of carbon dioxide in your blood activates the breathing reflex."

She had finished donning her filter helmet. "I take it the concentration is too low in here."

"Right. You'd forget to breathe. You're used to air that's four percent carbon dioxide. In here it's barely a tenth of that.

"The bird can breathe this bland stuff. In fact, it'd die without it. What we've put into the air in the past fifteen hundred years, we've had fifteen hundred years to adapt to. The ostrich hasn't."

"I'll keep that in mind," she said shortly, so that Svetz wondered if he'd been lecturing someone who knew more than he did. She knelt beside the sleeping ostrich, and the platform floated lower for her convenience.

Svetz watched her as she ministered to the ostrich, taking tissue samples, testing blood pressure and heartbeat in reaction to small doses of hormones and drugs.

In a general way he knew what she was doing. There were techniques for reversing the most recent mutations in an animal's genetic make-up. One did not always get what one expected. Still-there was a homo habilis several cages down, who had been in the Circle of Advisors until he called the Secretary-General a tyrannical fugghead.

While she was identifying the neotenous developments, she would also be trying to guess what she would have when they were eliminated. Then there were matters of metabolism. If Svetz was right, the bird's mass would increase rapidly. It must be fed intravenously, and even more rapidly.

In general-but the details of what she was doing were mysterious and dull.

Svetz found himself studying her filter helmet. Full inflation had rendered it almost invisible. A golden rim of it showed by diffraction against the yellow-brown sky.

Did Space really want to take over the Institute for Temporal Research? Then that golden halo was support for their claim. It was a semipermeable membrane. It would selectively pass gases in both directions in such a way as to make an almost breathable atmosphere breathable.

It had been taken unchanged from a Space warehouse.

Other ITR equipment had come from the space industries. Flight sticks. Anesthetic needle guns. The low mass antigravity unit in the new extension cage.

But their basic argument was more subtle.

Once the ocean teemed with life, Svetz thought. Now the continental shelf is as dead as the Moon: nothing but bubble cities. Once this whole continent was all forest and living desert and fresh water. We cut down the trees and shot the animals and poisoned the rivers and irrigated the deserts so that even the desert life died, and now there's nothing left but the food yeast and us.

We've forgotten so much about the past that we can't separate legend from fact. We've wiped out most of the forms of life on Earth in the last fifteen hundred years, and changed the composition of the air to the extent that we'd be afraid to change it back.

I fear the unknown beasts of the past. I cannot breathe the air.

I cannot recognize the edible plants. I would not kill animals for food. I don't know which would kill me.

The Earth's past is as foreign to me as another planet.

The Palace Veterinarian was busy hooking the ostrich intravenously to tubing of several colors. Svetz's pocket phone rang.

For a wild moment Svetz considered not answering. But good manners won out, and Svetz opened the phone.

"There's trouble," said Ra Chen's image. "Zeera's cage is on its way back. She must have pulled the go-home lever right after she called for the big extension cage."

"She left before the big cage could get there?"

"Yah," said Ra Chen. "Whatever happened must have happened fast. If she called for the big cage, then she had the automobile. A moment later she aborted the mission. Svetz, I'm worried."

"I'd hate to leave now, sir." Svetz turned to look at the ostrich. In that moment all of the bird's feathers fell out, leaving it plump and naked.

That decided him. "I can't leave now, sir. We'll have a full-grown roc in a few minutes."

"What? Good! But how?"

"The ostrich was a neotenous offshoot of the roc. We've produced a throwback."

"Good! Stick with it, Svetz. We'll handle it here." Ra Chen switched off.

The Palace Veterinarian said, "You shouldn't make promises you can't keep."

Svetz's heart leapt. "Trouble?"

"No. It's going beautifully so far."

"All the feathers fell out. Is that good?"

"Don't worry about it. See for yourself: already there's a coat of down. Your ostrich is reverting to chickhood," she said cheerfully. "Its ancestor's chickhood. If the ancestor really was no bigger than a turkey before it lost the ability to fly, it'll be even smaller as a chick."

"What'll happen then?"

"It'll drown in its own fat."

"We should have taken a clone."

"Too late. Look at it now, look at the legs. They aren't nearly as overdeveloped."

The bird was a big ball of pale yellow down. Its frame had shrunk, but its legs had shrunk much more. Standing, it would have been no more than four feet tall. The extra mass had turned to fat, so that the ostrich was nearly spherical; it bulged like a poolside toy, lying on its inflated side in a pool of feathers.

"Now it really looks like a chick," said Svetz.

"It does, Svetz. In fact, it is. That was a big chick. The adult is going to be tremendous." The Palace Veterinarian jumped to her feet. "Svetz, we've got to hurry. Is there a basic yeast source in this cage?"

"Sure. Why?"

"He'll starve at the rate he's growing, unless. . . just show me, Svetz."

The animals of the Zoo ate yeast, like everyone else, but with special additives for each animal. A brain tap could induce the animal to imagine it was eating whatever it was used to eating when the time probe had picked it up.

Svetz showed her the yeast tap. She hooked the pipeline to one of the machines on her floating platform; she made adaptations, added another machine.

The bird grew visibly. Its fat layer shrank, deflated. Its legs and wings stretched outward. The beak began to take a distinctive hooked form, sharp and wicked looking.

Svetz began to feel panic. Beneath its downy feathers the bird was little more than taut skin stretched over long bones.

The yeast was now feeding directly into two tanks on the floating platform, and from there into the colored tubes. Somehow the Palace Veterinarian was converting the yeast directly into sugar-plasma.

"It's working now," she said. "I wasn't sure it would. He'll be all right now, if the growth cycle slows down in time." She smiled up at him. "You were right all along. The ostrich was a neotenous roc."

At that moment the light changed.

Svetz wasn't sure what had disturbed him. But he looked up- and the sky was baby blue from the horizon to the zenith.

"What is it?" The woman beside him was bemused rather than frightened. "I never saw a color like that in my life!"

"I have."

"What is it?"

"Don't worry about it. But keep your filter helmet on, especially if you have to leave the cage. Can you remember that?"

"Of course." Her eyes narrowed. "You know something about this, Svetz. It's something to do with time, isn't it?"

"I think so." Svetz used the key beam then, to avoid further questions. The glass peeled back to let him out.

He turned for a last look through the glass.

The Palace Veterinarian looked frightened. She must have guessed too much for her own comfort. But she turned away to care for her patient.

The ostrich lay on its side, its eyes open now. It was tremendous, and still scrawny despite the volume of the intravenous feed. Its feathers were changing color. The bird would be black and green.

It was half as big as the elephant next door . . . whose air of gray wisdom was giving way to uneasiness as he watched.

It looked nothing like an ostrich.

The sky was baby blue, the blue of the deep past, crossed with fluffy clouds of clean and shining white. Blue from the horizon to the zenith, without a trace of the additives that ought to be there.

Unconscious men and women lay everywhere. Svetz dared not stop to help. What he had to do was more important.

He slowed to a walk as he neared the Center. There was pain like a knife blade inserted between his partly healed ribs.

ITR crewmen had fallen in the walkway around the Center, presumably after staggering outside. And there was the Secretary-General's automobile sitting quietly in front. Behind it, flat on his back, was Ra Chen.

What did he think he was doing there?

Svetz heard the purr of the motor as he approached. So that was it Ra Chen must have hoped that the exhaust would revive him. Damn clever; and it should have worked. Why hadn't it?

Svetz looked into the polished metal guts of the motor as he passed. The motor had changed...somehow. What ran it now? Steam? Electricity? A flywheel? In any event, the exhaust pipe Ra Chen had been searching for was no longer there.

Ra Chen was alive, his pulse rapid and frantic. But he wasn't breathing. Or. . . yes, he was. He was breathing perhaps twice a minute as carbon dioxide built up enough to activate the reflex.

Svetz went on into the Center.

More than a dozen men and women had collapsed across lighted control panels. Three more figures sprawled in an aisle. The Secretary-General lay in angular disorder, smiling foolishly up at the ceiling. His guards wore troubled sleeping expressions and held drawn guns.

The small extension cage had not returned.

Svetz looked into the empty gap in the time machine, and felt terror. What could he accomplish without Zeera to tell him what had gone wrong?

From 50 AnteAtomic to the present was a thirty minute trip. Ra Chen's call to the Zoo must have come less than thirty minutes ago. Weird, how an emergency could telescope time.

Unless that was a side effect of the paradox. Unless the paradox had chopped away Zeera's extension cage and left her stranded in the past, or cast off into an alternate world line, or...

There bad never been a temporal paradox.

Math was no help. The mathematics of time travel was riddled with singularities.

Last year somebody had tried to do a topological analysis of the path of an extension cage. He had proved not only that time travel was impossible, but that you couldn't travel faster than light either. Ra Chen had leaked the news to Space on the off chance that their hyperdrive ships would stop working.

What to do? Start putting filter helmets on everyone? Great, but the helmets weren't kept at the Center; he'd have to go across town. Did he dare leave the Center?

Svetz forced himself to sit down.

Minutes later, he snapped alert at the pop of displaced air. The small extension cage had returned. Zeera was crawling out of the circular doorway.

"Get back in there," Svetz ordered. "Quick!"

"I don't take orders from you, Svetz." She brushed past him and looked about her. "The automobile's gone. Where's Ra Chen?" Zeera's face was blank with shock and exhaustion. Her voice was a monotone, ragged at the edges.

Svetz took her arm. "Zeera, we've-"

She jerked away. "We've got to do something. The automobile's gone. Didn't you hear me?"

"Did you hear me? Get back in the extension cage!"

"But we've got to decide what to do. Why can't I smell anything?" She sniffed at air that was scentless, empty, dead. She looked about herself in bewilderment, realizing for the first time just how strange everything was.

Then the eyes rolled up in her head, and Svetz stepped forward to catch her.

He studied her sleeping face across the diameter of the extension cage. It was very different from her waking face. Softer, more vulnerable. And prettier. Zeera had quite a pretty face.

"You should relax more often," he said.

His ribs throbbed where the ostrich had kicked him. The pain seemed to beat like a heart.

Zeera opened her eyes. She asked, "Why are we in here?"

"The extension cage has its own air system," said Svetz. "You can't breathe the outside air."

"Why not?"

"You tell me."

Her eyes went wide. "The automobile! It's gone!"

"Why?"

"I don't know. Svetz, I swear I did everything right. But when I turned on the duplicator the automobile disappeared!"

"That . . . doesn't sound at all good." Svetz strove to keep his voice level. "What did you-"

"I did it just the way they taught me! I hooked the glow-painted end to the frame, set the dials for an estimated mass plus a margin of error, read the dials off-"

"You must have hooked up the wrong end somehow. Wait a minute. Were you using the infrared flash?"

"Of course. It was dead of night"

"And you'd taken the pills so you'd be able to see infrared."

"Do you always think that slowly, Svetz?" Then her eyes changed, and Svetz knew she'd seen it. "I was seeing infrared. Of course. I hooked up the hot end."

"The duplicator end. Sure. That would duplicate empty space where there was an automobile. You'd get emptiness at both ends."

Zeera relaxed against the curved side of the extension cage, with her arms hooked under her knees. Presently she said, "Henry Ford sold that automobile for two hundred dollars, according to the book Later he had trouble getting financed. Could the money have been crucial?"

"It must have been. How much is two hundred dollars?"

"Then someone else used mass production to make automobiles. And he must have liked steam or electricity."

"Steam, I'd guess. Steam came first."

"Tell me this, Svetz. If the air changed, why didn't we change with it? We evolved to be able to breathe air with a certain percentage of carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide and nitrous and nitric oxides and so forth. Shouldn't the evolution have been canceled too? For that matter, why do we remember?"

"There's a lot we don't know about time travel. How do you expect logic to hold when paradoxes hold too?"

"Does that mean you don't know?"

"Yes."

"I'm not nagging, Svetz. I don't know either."

More silence.

"It's clear enough," Zeera said presently. "You have to go back and warn myself to get the duplicator on straight."

"That won't work. It didn't work. If you'd gotten the ends of the duplicator straight, we wouldn't be in this mess. Therefore you didn't."

She looked irritated. "Too logical. Well, what then?"

"Maybe we can go around you." Svetz hesitated, then plunged in. "Try this. Send me back to an hour before the earlier Zeera arrives. The automobile won't have disappeared yet. I'll duplicate it, duplicate the duplicate, take the reversed duplicate and the original automobile past you in the big extension cage. That lets you destroy the duplicate. I reappear after you're gone, leave the original automobile, and come back here with the reversed duplicate. How's that?"

"It sounded great. Would you mind going through it again?"

"Let's see. I go back to-"

She was laughing at him. "Never mind. But it has to be me, Svetz. You couldn't find your way. You couldn't ask directions or read the street signs. You'll have to stay here and man the machinery."

Reluctantly Svetz agreed.

They were leaving the extension cage when there came a scream like the end of the world.

Momentarily they froze. Then Svetz ran around the swelling flank of the cage. Zeera followed, wearing the filter helmet she had worn during her attempt to duplicate Ford's automobile.

One wall of the Center was glass. It framed a crest of hill across from the palace and a double row of cages that made up the Zoo. One of the cages was breaking apart as they watched, smashing itself to pieces like-

-like an egg hatching. And like a chick emerging, the roe stood up in the ruin of its cage.

The scream came again.

"What is it?" Zeera whispered.

"It was an ostrich. I'd hate to give it a name now."

The bird seemed to move in slow motion. There was so much of it! Green and black, beautiful and evil, big as eternity, and a crest of golden feathers had sprouted on its forehead. Its hooked beak descended toward a cage.

That cage ripped like paper.

Zeera was shaking his arm. "Come on! If it came from the Zoo, we don't need to worry about it. It'll suffocate when we get the car back where it belongs."

"Oh. Bight," said Svetz. They went to work moving the big extension cage a few hours further back in time.

When Svetz looked again, the bird was just taking to the air. Its wings flapped like sails, and their black shadows swept like cloud shadows over the houses. As the roe rose fully into view, Svetz saw that something writhed and struggled in its tremendous talons.

Svetz recognized it. . . and realized just how big the roe really was.

"It's got ELEPHANT," he said. An inexplicable sorrow gripped his heart; inexplicable, for Svetz hated animals.

"What? Come on, Svetz!"

"Um? Oh, yes." He helped Zeera into the small extension cage and sent it on its way.

Despite its sleeping crew, the machinery of the Center seemed to be working perfectly. If anything got off, Svetz would have six men's work to do. Therefore he prowled among the control boards, alert for any discrepancy, making minor adjustments

And occasionally he looked out the picture window.

The roc reached a tremendous height. Any ordinary bird would have been invisible long since. But the roc was all too visible, hovering in the blue sky while it killed and ate ELEPHANT.

Time passed.

Twenty minutes for Zeera to get back.

More time to make two duplicates of the automobile. Load them into the big extension cage. Then to signal Svetz- The signal came. She had the cars; she wanted to be moved forward. Svetz played it safe and moved her forward six hours almost to dawn. She might be caught by an early riser, but at least Ford would have his automobile.

The roc had finished its bloody meal. ELEPHANT was gone, bones and all. And-Svetz watched until he was sure-the bird was dropping, riding down the sky on outstretched wings.

Svetz watched it grow bigger, and bigger yet, until it seemed to enfold the universe. It settled over the Center like a tornado cloud, in darkness and wind. Like twin tornado tunnels, two sets of curved talons touched down in the walkway.

The bird bent low. An inhuman face looked in at Svetz through the picture window. It nearly filled the window.

It knows me, Svetz thought. Even a bird's brain must be intelligent in a head that size.

The vast head rose ponderously out of sight above the roof.

I had the ostrich. I should have been satisfied, thought Svetz. A coin in the hand is worth two in the street. The ancient proverb could as easily be applied to birds.

The roof exploded downward around a hooked beak. Particles of concrete spattered against the walls and floor. A yellow eye rolled and found Svetz, but the beak couldn't reach him. Not through that hole.

The head withdrew through the roof.

Three red lights. Svetz leapt for the board and began twisting dials. He made two lights turn green, then the third. It had not occurred to him to run. The bird would find him wherever he hid.

There! Zeera had pulled the go-home lever. From here it was all automatic.

Crash!

Svetz was backed up against the big time machine, pinned by a yellow eye as big as himself. Half the roof was gone, but still the bird's beak couldn't reach him. But a great talon came seeking him through the shattered glass.

The light changed.

Svetz sagged. Behind the green and black feathers he could see that the sky had turned pale yellow-green, marked with yellow-brown streamers of cloud.

The bird sniffed incredulously. It didn't have to be told twice. Its head rose through the ceiling; it stepped back from the Center for clearance; its great wings came down like thunderclouds.

Svetz stepped out to watch it rise.

He had to hug an ornamental pillar. The wind of its wings was a hurricane. The bird looked down once, and recognized him, and looped away.

It was still well in view, rising and circling, when Zeera stepped out to join him. Presently Ra Chen was there to follow their eyes. Then half the Center maintenance team was gaping upward in awe and astonishment . . . while the bird dwindled to a black shadow. Black against pale green, climbing, climbing.

One sniff had been enough. The bird's brain was as enormously proportioned as the rest of it. It had started climbing immediately, without waiting to snatch up its dessert.

Climbing, climbing toward the edge of space. Reaching for clean air.

The Secretary-General stood beside Svetz, smiling in wonder, chuckling happily as he gazed upward.

Was the roe still climbing? No, the black shadow was growing larger, sliding down the sky. And the slow motion of the wings had stopped.

How was a roc to know that there was no clean air anywhere?