Mastodonia

SEVENTEEN

We had returned from the Cretaceous early Monday morning. It was Friday. A great deal had been going on in those four days. A start had been made on building the fence around the forty — high steel posts set in concrete, heavy wire fencing installed upon them and welded into place. Trenches were being dug along the interior perimeter of the fence to lay electric cable for the floodlights. Foundations had been poured for the administration building and lumber was being delivered. Ben’s motel was going up. Rila had left the day before for New York with the film that she had taken. Courtney McCallahan, the Washington attorney, was flying into New York to sit in with Safari, Inc., on the showing of the films. The films were to be developed in Safari’s laboratory, making it unnecessary to take them outside the organization.

I had worked my tail off to get things going, with a lot of help from Ben. He had made a lot of the necessary contacts, had twisted arms and pleaded, had scrounged up gangs of workmen to turn loose on the projects. A lot of the men were no more than common laborers — farm boys, mostly — but Ben had found some competent foremen to place in charge as well, and things seemed to be going well.

“The idea,” he had said, “is to get started and get the fence and administration building finished as soon as possible, before too many people begin asking questions. Once we get the fence up, they can ask all the questions that they want and, behind the fence, we can thumb our noses at them.”

“But, Ben,” I had protested, “you have things to do yourself. You have your motel to be built and the bank to run. You have no direct interest in this deal.”

“You’re borrowing a lot of money from me and the bank is earning interest,” he’d said. “You gave me an edge on starting the motel and I’ve been doing a lot of other things besides. I’ve bought up every acre around here that is loose. I picked up that farm to the east of you just the other day. Old Jake Kolb stuck me for more than he thought that it was worth, figured I was a sucker, buying it. What he doesn’t know is that it’ll be worth ten times more than I paid for it once your business here gets started. And you took me on that hunting trip after dinosaurs. I wouldn’t have missed that for the world. I would have paid you to take me on it. And I figure that before I’m through with it, you’ll let me in for a small percentage of this deal of yours.”

“Let us get the business started first,” I’d said. “The whole thing may fall into a heap.”

“Hell,” he’d said, “I don’t see how it can. This is the biggest thing that ever happened. Everyone, the whole world, will go mad over it. You’ll have more business than you can handle. You just hang loose.

You keep an eye on things. If you need help, reach for the phone. I tell you, boy, the two of us have it made.”

I was sitting in the kitchen talking with Hiram. The two of us were having a beer. It was the first sitting time I’d had since it all had started. I sat there, drinking my beer, feeling guilty at not doing anything, racking my brain to figure out if there was something that I should be doing.

“Catface,” said Hiram, “is excited about what is going on. He asked about the fence and I tried to explain it to him. I told him once it was finished, he could make a lot of time holes and he was pleased at that. He is anxious to get started.”

“But he could make time holes anytime he wanted.

He could have been doing it all along. There was not a thing to stop him.”

“It seems, Mr. Steele, that he can’t make time holes for just the fun of it. They have to be used or they aren’t any good. He made a few for Bowser, but there wasn’t much satisfaction in that.”

“No, I don’t suppose there would be. Although Bowser had a lot of fun with them. He used one of them to bring home the dinosaur bones.”

I went to the refrigerator to get another beer.

“You want one?” I asked Hiram.

“No, thank you, Mr. Steele. I don’t really like the stuff. I just drink it to be sociable.”

“I asked you to talk with Catface about how big the time holes can be made. The Safari people will probably want to take in some trucks.”

“He says it ain’t no problem. He says the holes are big enough to take anything at all.”

“Did he close the one we used? I’d hate to have some of those dinosaurs stumbling through.”

“He closed it,” Hiram said, “right after you got back. It’s been closed since then.”

“Well, that is fine,” I said and I went on drinking, beer. It was good just to be sitting there.

Footsteps sounded on the steps outside and there was a knocking at the door.

“Come on in,” I yelled.

It was Herb Livingston.

“Grab a chair,” I said. “I’ll get a beer for you.”

Hiram got up. “Me and Bowser will go and lock around outside.”

“That’s all right,” I said, “but don’t move off the place. I may need you later on.”

Bowser got up from his corner and followed Hiram out. Herb pulled the tab on the beer can and tossed it in the wastebasket.

“Asa,” he said, “you’re holding out on me.”

“Not you alone,” I said. “I’m holding out on everyone.”

“Something’s going on,” Herb said. “And I want to know about it. The Willow Bend Record may not be the world’s greatest newspaper, but it’s the only one we have here, and for fifteen years, I have told the people what is happening.”

“Now hold up, Herb,” I said. “I’m not going to tell you and you can yell at me and pound the table and I still won’t tell you.”

“Why not?” he demanded. “We were boys together. We’ve known one another for years. You and me and Ben and Larry and the rest of them. Ben knows. You have told Ben something.”

“Ask Ben, then.”

“He won’t tell me anything, either. He says any information has to come from you. He gave out to start with, about this business of the fence, that he was putting it up for someone who was going into mink farming. But I know you aren’t going into mink farming. So the reason is something else. Someone else had the idea you found a crashed spaceship in that old sinkhole. One that crashed a thousand years ago. Is that what this is all about?”

“You’re fishing now,” I said, “and it won’t do you any good. I have a project underway, that’s true, but any publicity right now could raise hell with it. When the time comes, I’ll tell you.”

“When you need the publicity, you mean.”

“I suppose that’s it.”

“Look, Asa, I don’t want the big city papers scooping me on this. I don’t want them to write the story before I have a crack at it. I don’t want to be scooped in my own backyard.”

“Hell, you’re scooped all the time,” I said. “On all the important stories. What else can you expect with a weekly paper? News doesn’t happen on a weekly basis. Your strength isn’t the big stories. They don’t come often enough. People read the Record because you write about the little things, what people do and the small events that happen here. Look at it this way.

If I’m able to pull off what I’m trying to do, it will put Willow Bend on the map. It will help everyone. It will help the businesses here, it will provide more advertising dollars for you. You’ll be better off because it happened. Do you want to muff my chance and yours by rushing into print when that rushing into print might kill the deal?”

‘But I’ve got to write a story of some sort. I just can’t not write anything.”

“All right, then, write your story. Write about the fence, about Ben’s motel, about all the rest of it. Speculate, if you want to, on what is going on. I can’t stop you. I wouldn’t want to. You have every right. Say you talked with me and I would give you nothing. I am sorry. Herb. That’s the best that I can do.”

“I suppose,” said Herb, “you have the right not to tell me. But I had to ask. I had to lean on you a little.

You understand, don’t you?”

“Sure, I understand. How about another beer?”

“No, thanks. Haven’t got the time. We go to press tonight. I have to write this story.”

After Herb had left, I sat there for a while, feeling sorry about the way I’d had to treat him. But I couldn’t give him the story. I understood how he felt; how any newspaperman might feel. The hell of it was that he would get scooped. Before he went to press again next week, the story probably would be out.

But there was, I told myself, no way I could help that.

I got up and threw the empty beer can into the wastebasket, then went outdoors. It was getting into the late afternoon, but the crews were still at work and I was surprised to see how well the fence was progressing. I looked around to see if there was any sign of Catface. I would not have been surprised to have found him staring at me from one of the apple trees. In the last few days, there had been a lot of evidence of him.

Instead of hiding from us, as had been his habit, he had begun sort of mingling with us. But at the moment there was no sign of him, nor of Hiram and Bowser. I walked down the fence line until I reached where the men were working. I stood around for a while watching them, then returned to the house.

A sheriff’s car was parked out in front and a man in uniform was sitting in one of the lawn chairs. When I came up to him, he rose and held out his hand to me.

“I’m Sheriff Amos Redman,” he said. “You must be Asa Steele. Ben told me I’d probably find you here.”

“Glad you dropped by,” I said. “What do you have in mind?”

“Ben told me a few days ago, you might need some guards to patrol the fence. Would you mind telling me what is happening?”

“I’ll tell you one thing, sheriff, it’s legal.”

He chuckled faintly at the bad joke. “I never thought it would be anything else,” he said. “Seems to me you were a Willow Bend boy some years ago.

How long have you been back?”

“A little less than a year,” I said.

“It appears that you plan to stay.”

“I hope so.”

“About the guards,” he said. “I talked with the police association in Minneapolis and they think they can fix you up. Some of the men there have lost their jobs because of an economy cut and should be available to you.”

“I’m glad,” I said, “We will need trained personnel.”

“You having any trouble?” the sheriff asked.

“Trouble? Oh, you mean sightseers.”

“That’s what I mean. There’ve been some funny stories going about. One of them is about a crashed spaceship.” He looked at me closely to see how I would take it.

“Yes, sheriff,” I said. “I think there might be a spaceship. Out there in the woods, under tons of over-lay.”

”Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “If there is such a thing, you’ll be swamped by crowds. I understand why you might need a fence. I’ll tell my deputies to swing around here once in a while and keep an eye on you. If you need any help, you know how to reach me.”

“Thanks,” I said. “And I think you’ll understand, I’d just as soon no credence be given, quite yet, to that spaceship story.”

“Certainly,” he said importantly. “Just between the two of us.”

The phone rang when I was coming in the door. It was Rila.

“Where have you been?” she asked. “I’ve been trying to get you.”

“Just out for a walk. I hadn’t expected to hear from you this soon. Is everything all right?”

“Asa, it’s better than all right. We ran the films this afternoon. They are wonderful. Especially that part with you and Ben polishing off those tyrannosaurs. Everyone was sitting on the edge of his chair.

It was so exciting. That cheeping done by the triceratops was weird, primitive. God, I don’t know what.

Out of this world. Sent a funny feeling up your spine.

Safari is champing at the bit, but we won’t talk with them.”

“Won’t talk with them! For Pete’s sake, Rila, that was the whole idea. That’s why we risked our necks…”

“Courtney has some wild idea. He shut me up, said we would talk later. We are coming back tomorrow.”

“We?”

“Courtney and I. He wants to talk with us. He flew back to Washington this afternoon, but will come, back to New York in the morning and pick me up.”

“Pick you up?”

“Yes, he flies his own plane. I guess I never mentioned that.”

“That’s right. You never did.”

“We’ll be landing at Lancaster. It’s a small plane.

The field there is big enough. I’ll let you know when.”

“I’ll pick you up.”

“Probably sometime before noon. I’ll let you know.”