Mastodonia

TWENTY-FIVE

The next morning, I went looking for Catface.

I didn’t find him. I walked through the crab-apple patch below the mobile home, crisscrossing it in several directions, calling him softly, looking everywhere for him. He did not appear. After several hours of this, I wandered to other groves of trees and looked.

Back at the house, Rila said to me, “I should have gone to help you, but I was afraid I might scare him off. He’s known you for a long time. I’m a newcomer.”

We sat at the lawn table, despondent. “What if we don’t find him?” Rila asked. “Maybe he knows what has happened to Hiram and is hiding, unwilling to show himself until Hiram’s here.”

“If we don’t find him, we don’t find him,” I said.

“But Safari…”

“Safari will have to wait,” I said. “Even if we find him, I don’t know if he will work with me.”

“Is it possible he went back to Willow Bend?” she asked. “To the orchard on the farm. That was his favorite hangout, wasn’t it? Maybe if he knows about Hiram, he’d feel closer to him there.”

In the Willow Bend orchard, I found him almost immediately. He was in one of the trees close to the house. He looked out of it at me with those great cat eyes. He even grinned at me.

“Catface,” I said, “Hiram has been hurt, but he’ll be all right. He’ll be back in a few more days. Catface, can you blink? Can you shut your eyes?”

He shut his eyes and opened them again, then closed them and opened them again.

“All right,” I said, “I want to talk with you. You can hear me, but I can’t hear you. Maybe we can work out a way. I’ll ask you questions. If your answer is yes, close your eyes once. If your answer is no, close them twice. Do you understand?”

He closed his eyes once, then opened them.

“That is fine,” I said, “You understand what I told you about Hiram?”

He closed his eyes once.

“You understand that he’ll be back in a few days?”

Catface signaled yes.

“And you’re willing to talk with me this way? Work with me this way, by closing your eyes?”

Yes, indicated Catface.

“It’s not a very satisfactory way to talk, is it?”

Catface blinked twice.

“All right, then, in Mastodonia — you know where Mastodonia is, don’t you?”

Yes, indicated Catface.

“Back in Mastodonia, we need four time roads laid out. I have set out four lines of stakes, painted red. with a red flag at the end of each line, the red flag marking the point where we want to go into time. Do you understand?”

Catface signaled that he did.

“You have seen the stakes and flags?”

Catface said he had.

“Then, Catface, listen closely now. The first time road should go back seventy million years. And the next one ten thousand years less than that — ten thousand years less than seventy million years.”

Catface didn’t wait for me to ask him if he understood; he signaled yes.

“The third one,” I said, “ten thousand years less than the second and the fourth one, ten thousand years less than the third.”

Yes, said Catface.

We went through it all again to be sure he understood.

“Will you do it now?” I asked.

He said he would and then he disappeared. I stood there, staring stupidly at where he’d been. I suspected that he had taken me at my word, that he was now back in Mastodonia setting up the roads. At least, I hoped he was.

I found Ben in his office with his feet cocked up on the desk.

“You know, Asa,” he said, “this is the best job I ever had. I like it.”

“But you also have a bank to run.”

“I’ll tell you something I shouldn’t tell anyone; the bank runs itself. Of course, I’m still in charge, but now I do barely any work. Only some of the tough decisions and a few papers that I have to sign.”

“In that case, how about getting off your big fat butt and going into the Cretaceous with me?”

“The Cretaceous? You mean you did it, Asa?”

“I think so. I’m not sure. We ought to check it out.

I’d like company. I’m too chicken to do it alone.”

“You still have the elephant guns at your place?”

I nodded. “No hunting, though. Not this time. We just check out the roads.”

Rila went along with us. We debated taking a car, but decided to go on foot. I was quite prepared, as we walked down the first line of stakes, to have nothing happen. But it did. We walked straight into the Cretaceous. It was raining there, a steady downpour.

We set the stakes we carried and walked out a ways, far enough to pick up a clue as to where we were — a bunch of silly ostrich dinosaurs that went skittering away at our approach.

The other three roads were there as well. It was not raining at the ends of any of them. So far as I could see, all the places looked fairly much alike. There’d not be much change in forty thousand years — not at first glance, that is. If we’d spent some time, I suppose we could have detected a number of changes. But we spent almost no time at all. We pounded in the stakes and left. In the fourth time road, however, Ben knocked over a small ankylosaur, six or seven feet long, probably a yearling. The big bullet from his gun almost took its head off.

“Dinosaur steaks tonight,” said Ben.

It took the three of us to haul it back to Mastodonia.

There we. used an axe to cut through the armor. Once we had a cut down the length of the body, it was possible to peel off the armor, but it wasn’t easy. Ben cut off the clublike tail as a trophy. I hauled the broiler out from under the mobile home and got a fire going.

While Ben was broiling thick slabs of meat, I went down the hill to the crab-apple grove and found Catface. “I just want to say thank you,” I told him. “The roads are magnificent.” He blinked his eyes at me, four or five times, grinning all the while.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked.

He blinked his eyes twice, saying no.

The ostrich dinosaur that we had eaten on our exploratory trip into the Cretaceous had been tasty, but I figured the anky steak might be a disappointment.

Ankylosaurs are such crazy-looking beasts. There was no disappointment, however. I wolfed down the steaks, faintly ashamed of how much I ate.

Later on, we cut up the rest of the carcass, putting a few cuts in our refrigerator and wrapping up the rest of it for Ben to take back home.

“We’ll have a dinosaur cookout tomorrow night,” he said. “Maybe I’ll invite those news jockeys in to have a taste of it. It’ll give them something to write about.”

We hauled the rest of the carcass down the hill and buried it. Left where it was, it would have stunk up the place in a few days. Two days later, walking down that way, I found that something, probably wolves or foxes, had dug out the remains and performed a re-markable scavenging job. There were only a few pieces of armor plate scattered about.

With Ben gone, Rila and I took it easy, sleeping late. doing a lot of sitting at the lawn table, looking out over our domain. I took a shotgun and set out with Bowser to hunt for rattlesnakes. We found none. Stiffy came up the hill to visit us. He kept shuffling in closer, putting out his trunk to sniff in our direction, flapping his ears at us. I knew something had to be done; otherwise, he’d be right in our laps. While Rila held a rife covering me, I walked up to him, going slowly, shaking in my boots. He smelled me over and I scratched his trunk. He rumbled and groaned in ecstasy. I moved in closer, reached up to scratch his lower lip. He liked that; he did his best to tell me that he liked me. I led him down into the valley and told him to stay there, to keep the hell away from us. He grunted companionably. I was afraid he’d try to follow me back home, but he didn’t.

That evening as we sat watching dusk come across the land, Rila said to me, “Something is bothering you, Asa.”

“Hiram upset me,” I said.

.”But he’s going to be all right. Just a few more days and he’ll be back here with us.”

“It made me realize how shaky we are,” I said.

“The time business is based on Hiram and Catface.

Let something happen to either one of them …”

“But you did all right with Catface. You got the time roads open. Even if everything went sour right now, we’d have them, and it is this deal with Safari that will be the backbone of our business. There’ll be other things, of course, as time goes on, but it’s the big-game hunting…”

“Rila, would you be satisfied with that?”

“Well, no, I suppose not satisfied, but it would be more than we had before.”

“I wonder,” I said.

“You wonder what?”

“Please try to understand,” I said. “Bear with me a moment. The other day, the day you took Hiram to the hospital, I was at the farm. Me and Bowser. We walked around a bit and sat on the back steps the way we used to. We even went into the house, but I didn’t go farther than the kitchen. I sat at the kitchen table and thought how it once had been. I felt lost. No matter what I did, no matter where I went, I was lost.

Things had changed so much.”

“You didn’t like the changes?”

“I’m not sure. I should, I know. There’s money now and there never was before. We can travel in time now and no one ever did that. I suppose it was Hiram and the realization of how thin we run. …”

She took one of my hands in hers. “I know,” she said. “I know.”

“You mean you, too?”

She shook her head. “No, Asa. No, not me. I’m the pushy bitch, remember. But you, I know how you might feel. I feel just slightly guilty. I pushed you into it.”

“1 was easy to push,” I said. “Don’t blame yourself. There is nothing against which to assess any blame. The thing is, I loved that farm. When I saw it the other day, I knew I’d lost it.”

“Let’s go for a walk,” she said.

We walked hand in hand down the ridge and all around us was the peace of Mastodonia. Off in the hills, a whippoorwill struck up his chugging cry and we stopped, enchanted. It was the first time here that we’d heard a whippoorwill. Never for a moment had I expected to hear one; I had illogically assumed there’d be no whippoorwills. But hearing the cry, I knew it as the sound of home, bringing back to me memories of years plunged deep in summer with the scent of freshly mown hay blowing from a new-cut field and the tinkling of cow bells as the herd filed out to pasture once the milking had been done. As I listened,I felt a strange contentment flooding over me.

We went back to the mobile home and called Bowser in. He went stalking into Hiram’s room. For a time we heard him pawing at the blanket on the floor, making his bed before he lay down to sleep. In the kitchen, I fixed up a pitcher of manhattans and took them into the living room. We sat drinking, relaxed and civilized.

“Do you remember that day when I appeared?”

asked Rila, “After twenty years, suddenly here I was.”

I nodded. I did remember. 1 think that I remembered every minute of it.

“I asked myself all the time I was driving to Willow Bend,” she said, “if the time might ever come when I might regret coming here. From time to time since then, I’ve asked myself the question. Asa, I want to tell you now I have never regretted it. I don’t ask the question any more. 1 don’t mean the time travel and the fun and money. I mean you. I’ve never regretted coming back to you.”

I put down my glass and went to where she was sitting on the davenport. I sat down beside her and took her in my arms. We sat for a long time, like a pair of silly kids who suddenly have discovered they love one another I was thankful she had told me, and I thought maybe I should tell her so, but there were no words that I could put together to tell her how I felt. I told her, instead, what was in my heart. “I love you, Rila.

I think I always have, from the first day that I saw you.”

The next day, shortly after noon, Courtney came driving in, with a car that Ben had loaned him. With him was Senator Abel Freemore.

“I deliver him into your hands,” said Courtney.

“The old so-and-so won’t talk with me. He has to talk with you. He must go to the horse’s mouth. Also, the IRS has come to life; they’ve been in to see me. But I don’t think the senator’s business with you has anything to do with them.”

“Not at all,” said the senator. “Like all sensible men, I keep my distance from them.”

He was a little wisp of a man with a farmer’s face.

His hair was white and skimpy; his hands and face were weather-beaten. He stood small beside the car and looked around.

“So this is Mastodonia,” he said. “Courtney has been telling me of it. When are you going to start subdividing it?”

“We aren’t going to,” said Rila sharply. “We don’t own it.”

“I should tell you,” said Courtney, speaking to us, “that Safari will be coming in tomorrow. Ben phoned several days ago to say the roads are open. I’m glad you managed it.”

“No sweat,” I said.

“I’d like to stick around and witness the first safari going in. So would the senator. Do you have the room to put us up for the night?”

“We have two rooms,” said Rila. “You are welcome.

One of you will have to let Bowser sleep in the same room with you.”

“Would there be a chance of going in with them?”

asked the senator. “Just for a look around. A quick look around, then I’d come right back.”

“That would be up to the Safari people,” I said.

“You can talk with whoever is in charge.”

The senator looked at Courtney. “How about you?”

he asked. “If they allow us, would you go along?”

“I don’t know,” said Courtney. “I saw the film.

There are bloodthirsty brutes back there. I’d have to think on it.”

The senator stalked around for a while, looking things over, then gravitated toward the table. Rila had brought out coffee. The senator, sitting down, held out a cup. “Thank you, my dear,” he said to Rila when she poured. “I’m an old farm boy. I prize a cup of coffee.”

The rest of us joined him around the table and Rila filled cups for us.

“I suppose,” said Freemore, “that I might as well get said the things I want to say. It’s not a proposition.

Nothing very weighty. Nothing to do with the Senate or the government. Just some questions that keep bouncing in my mind.”

The senator spilled a few drops of coffee on the table, then wiped it off with the palm of his hand, taking his time about it.

“I fear,” he said, “you may think me a foolish old man, jumping in fright at shadows. But there is a problem that has caused me many sleepless nights. There are two problems, actually. Now, how should I put this in the best possible light, in the least foolish way?”

He paused as if to ponder. He had no need to ponder, I was sure. It was just an oratorical trick. Through the years, he had declaimed too often on the Senate floor.

“Simply put,” he said, “we do have two overriding problems: the state of agriculture in the world and the great masses of poverty-stricken people, many of them in our own country. The disadvantaged, the unemployed, the bottom of the social heap.

“So far, we have been able to grow enough food to feed all the people of the Earth. When people starve.. it is a matter of poor distribution, not a problem of supply. But I fear the day may not be too distant when the supply, as well, will fail. Meteorologists tell us, and very convincingly, I must say, that at least the northern hemisphere and perhaps the entire world as well is entering upon a colder, drier cycle. We’ve had it good, they tell us, for sixty years or more — the most favorable weather the world has known for hundreds of years. Now we are beginning to experience droughts.

Vast areas of our productive croplands are getting little rain and the climate is growing colder. If this cold trend continues, the growing season will be shortened. All this spells less food. If food production is cut even marginally, say ten percent or so for several years, there are areas that could face mass starvation.

During our years of unparalleled growing weather, the world has made great social and economic advances, but the population has also grown, with no prospect that the growth can be slowed, so that in only a few favored areas has the economic boom operated to alleviate human misery.

“You can see, no doubt, what I am driving at. Your mind is leaping ahead of my words. With the advent of time travel, a concept I was, at first, reluctant to accept, we now have the capability of opening up vast new agricultural areas that would more than compensate for the drop in food productivity that will come about if the climate deteriorates as much as our meteorologists seem to think it will.

“That is one of the problems. You remember I said there were two problems. The other problem is that there exist vast segments of our population who face no future other than lifelong privation. You find great masses of these unfortunates in the ghettos of the larger cities and other pockets of them scattered throughout rural areas, and still others, single examples of bad fortune, almost everywhere. It has seemed to me that some of these people could be sent by time travel to certain virgin areas of the past where they would have a chance to help themselves. So far as my thinking has gone, I see them as a new generation of pioneers transported to a new land where, with some land to call their own, with the natural resources undestroyed, they might be able to fashion for themselves a better life. I am painfully aware that many of these people would not make good pioneers. Their poverty and dependence, their bitterness toward society, their self-pity may have robbed them of any possibility of standing on their feet. Perhaps, no matter where you put them, they’d be no better off than they are now …”

“But at least,” I said, “you’d be getting them out of our hair.”

The senator glanced sharply at me. “Young man,” he said, “that was unfair and perhaps unworthy of you.”

Courtney said, “You make it all sound easy, but it wouldn’t be. It would cost a lot of money. You couldn’t just tuck these people out of the way somewhere in another time and say to them, now you’re on your own. Government and society would still have to bear some responsibility. You’d have to see to it that they had a decent start. And I would suspect a lot of them would not want to go, many of them would refuse to go. There’d be some advantages, of course. You’d reduce the welfare load and I wonder if that is not what you’re counting on for support when you get, around to announcing your plan. But in all conscience, you can’t reduce welfare costs simply by throwing people into a howling wilderness and telling them you’ve washed your hands of them.”

The senator nodded. “Courtney, you’re making me sound like an ogre. You can’t believe I failed to have these factors you have mentioned very much in mind The program, if there were to be such a program, would have to be carefully worked out. The initial cost probably would exceed any savings in welfare by several times over. The humanitarian aspects of the move would have to be of equal weight with the economic aspect. I have talked with no one yet — no one, except you three. Before I move, I need some answers from you. It seems me that by certain astute moves you people have this time-travel business sewn up neatly. You are offering it as a service. You have made a business of it. I have the strong personal feeling that it should be viewed as a public utility, subject to rules and regulations. But, by operating it from your so-called Mastodonia, you appear to have effectively removed any such possibility. I have no idea if the concept of Mastodonia would stand up in court…”

“We are convinced it would,” said Courtney. “My feeling is, it will never be contested.”

“You’re bluffing now,” said the senator. “You are making lawyer talk. I have a feeling that it will. But that matters neither here nor there. What I seek from you is some indication of how sympathetically you would view such a program and how much cooperation we could expect from you.”

“We can’t give you an answer,” said Courtney in his best grave, gray lawyer tone. “We would have to see some concrete proposals and have a chance to study them. You realize that you would be asking us to commit to your purposes vast time areas, thus forcing us to give up our option of granting licenses for their use by others.”

“I realize that,” said Freemore. “When one comes down to it, that is the nub of the situation. Could you possibly view going along with my proposed program as a public contribution, a gift to society? Needless to say, if you demanded the kind of fees I suppose you could ask of others, the program would be doomed.

It would never get off the ground. My proposal would cost enough without piling license fees to Time Associates atop the budget.”

“If you are asking us to search our consciences,” said Courtney, “that we are quite willing to do. But at this juncture, we’re not prepared to give you a commitment.”

The senator turned to me. “If such a program were decided upon,” he said, “where in the past would be the best place to site it? Right here? Right in Mastodonia?”

Rila beat me to it. “Not Mastodonia,” she said.

We’re homesteading it. We will not give up this place,”