Credit: Veer

"The Irish Elk," Hendricks said with an intended snort. "A beast or a fraternal organization?"

"Not funny," I said. "In fact a serious subject indeed to scientists and clerics as far back as the seventeenth century. They fought some metaphorically bloody battles over the extinction of the Irish Elk and its implications. And it's still a serious subject to big game hunters. It should be for us."

"Why?"

"Money," I said. "We need it."

That certainly was true. If it wasn't now it would be when we had to pay the huge energy bill we were running up, and the interest payments on the huger loans we had taken out.

Van Otteren was staring out the window at the Irish countryside, trying to hold aloof from this wrangle as a disinterested scientist should. He wasn't a disinterested scientist, though. He was a man with as large an acquisitive drive as any (I had observed him compulsively stroking the leather of my vintage Jaguar XK), and a man who was also a scientist. A scientist who, in lay terms, had invented a time machine.

I didn't buy his above-it-all act in any case. The Irish countryside that he was broodingly surveying was the macadam and brick of an industrial park, not the sort of view likely to fascinate either a Romantic or an Einstein.

"What about it, Van Otteren?" I asked. "You're the swing man in this triumvirate. On this issue, anyway."
Van Otteren pivoted to face us, brisk in his movements but calculating in his thoughts. "Can we ring in a scientific angle?"

"Sure," I said. "We'll include a natural historian or a paleontologist in the hunting party. Let him observe the Irish Elk in its habitat and maybe settle the question of what made him extinct."

Van Otteren nodded. He knew what was involved and he was in a bind. He knew that Tom Hendricks and I - the venture capital firm of Hendricks and Jacoby, to be precise - had bankrolled him and wanted a return. He wanted a financial return. He also wanted to publish.

In fact he ached to publish before someone else doing tachyon research beat him to it. He well knew that you can't patent a scientific principle. He wasn't sure that you could patent its application-not a time machine. Not and make it stick. The first competitor with access to his machine might use it to go back and employ its principles to build an earlier one of his own, upstaging our group. That was just one of the paradoxical scenarios we had played at.

We also knew that some government or an alliance of governments would eventually clamp down on time travel and regulate it. They'd have to in order to avoid chaos and to safeguard their own existences. We had chosen a small country - Ireland - with that in view. The Irish weren't likely to play world policeman. Besides, they had given us great lease terms and loans (we hadn't told them it was for a time machine) in order to foster local industry. But they'd know soon enough.

So we had to make a hefty first chunk of money fast. Trouble was, we each had the excess baggage of a conscience; Hendricks' the largest of any of us, despite - or because of - his disdain of the hunting scheme.

"The Irish Elk," I repeated. "We locate our facility in Ireland and it falls into our laps. We ought to be grateful, even if we had never heard of the beast before."

"What do we know about it now?" Van Otteren asked, and laughed the embarrassed laugh of a scientist having to ask information of a layman.

"The Irish Elk lived in Ireland approximately 11,000 to 12,000 years ago," I told him. "The span of their antlers reached twelve feet. That's by far the hugest rack of any moose elk or deer ever. That's also why the head of an Irish Elk - they're actually deer, by the way - is the ultimate trophy. We're being offered a million pounds to send a hunting party back, with another million if they return with a head."

Van Otteren nodded again. "The word is out on our success if we're getting those kind of offers. That means I publish immediately. And it means we'd better not be too picky if we want to make our money before it's too late." He turned to my partner. "Just what is your objection, Tom?"

"A simple one. I don't want to be the man responsible for initiating the process of rendering a species extinct. As Mike said, the Irish Elk lived for only a thousand years in Ireland, though longer elsewhere. That's the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. No one knows what killed them off, but I can make a pretty good guess now. Hunting parties from the future, starting with us."