“Shhh,” hissed Noxon. “Let me hear their shouting.” He noticed that Wheaton was holding up a camera—vid with sound, Noxon assumed. So he could study their utterances later.
Not language, or at least not a language Noxon could understand. The cries were so short.
But then, as he watched, he could see how the men responded to the shouts—the wing men beginning to close in from the sides, the chasers sprinting. And then some of the cries began to have meanings. The leader—one of the chasers, the one with a bit of grey in his hair—was saying a word that meant “gully” and others that meant “run” and “catch.” Nothing like sentences, no syntax. Just commands, all of them. Even “gully” was a command.
“They know this land,” said Noxon softly. “They all know that there’s a gully up here, and they know they’ll catch the !a! there.”
“Catch the what?” asked Ram.
“Click tones,” said Wheaton. “It’s a language, and it uses clicks.”
“It’s words,” corrected Noxon. “No syntax. All commands. Time for us to hide. They’re moving pretty fast.”
He had been thinking about what he was hearing and seeing and it was already too late to keep from being seen. The nearest wing man had spotted them and had veered toward them. Now he would see them disappear. Noxon wondered what he would think he saw—a shape like what he would think of as “people,” but mostly hairless, and wearing fabrics. And Deborah’s artificial eyes. Now you see us, now you don’t.
Except that the wing man kept heading right toward them, looking at them instead of looking back at the prey animal. Was he merely remembering where they had been?
No. Deborah was fumbling with her sound recorder. She was not holding Ram’s hand. She was not slicing with them. She was completely visible to the wing man.
And while Noxon was focused on Deborah, the wing man brought up an arm. Noxon finally saw it because the facemask saw it and forced his attention from Deborah to what the Erectid hunter was doing. He had a fist-sized stone in his hand and he was bringing back his arm and before Noxon could come out of sliced time to shout at Deborah the stone was already in the air, moving faster than any bird—though not so quickly that the facemask could not bring every moment of its flight to Noxon’s attention.
The trajectory was inevitable. It struck Deborah on the side of the head—she wasn’t looking at the wing man who threw at her—and dropped her instantly.
Noxon immediately stopped slicing time—he couldn’t stay invisible and bring her along with him. She would have to move to disappear that way. So now all three of the Sapient men were revealed to the wing man.
He didn’t even register surprise. He was already drawing another stone out of the bag tightly bound around his waist. Survival instinct—strange animals that looked like people, but not from his tribe. There was a constant state of war among Erectid tribes; if they ever had truces, Noxon had seen no evidence of it in their paths.
“Both of you hold on to me and Deborah,” said Noxon.
The wing man’s arm was going back for another throw.
Noxon jumped them all back to the future.
Wheaton was kneeling beside his daughter, checking her vital signs. He began to press on her chest, then breathe into her mouth.
“It’s no good,” said Noxon. “She’s dead.”
“People come back from heart stoppages,” said Wheaton as he pushed on her chest again.
“She’s dead,” said Noxon. “No path.”
After a half-minute this finally registered on Wheaton. He stopped trying to revive her. He just knelt there gasping.
“Calm down,” said Ram. “Remember what Noxon is. What he can do. She isn’t permanently dead. He can go back in time and prevent this.”
That was true, of course, and Noxon was already thinking about when he should intervene in the past in order to prevent it.
“Think of something,” said Wheaton. “Because I can’t bear to stay here much longer, looking down at her dead body.”
Noxon concentrated on Deborah’s corpse and pushed this lifeless object back about two hundred years.
Wheaton looked up in dismay. “What did you do!”
“What you asked me to do,” said Noxon.
“I know,” said Wheaton. “But now I know that there’s something worse than seeing her dead!”
“Quiet, quiet,” said Ram. “There are other people out here. In hovercars, yes, but they have mikes picking up sounds on the savannah.”