Mastodonia

TWENTY-SIX

The first safari group arrived shortly after noon.

It was made up of two heavy trucks, three four-wheel drives and a crew of perhaps twenty-five men. The equipment had been flown into Minneapolis on a cargo plane, with some of the crew riding along. A company plane had flown in those not on the cargo flight, including the three clients. From Minneapolis the safari had driven to Willow Bend. At the front gate, they had been besieged by newspapermen and camera crews.

“The press conference, if that is what it could be called, delayed us a full hour and was exasperating,” said Percy Aspinwall, the man in charge. “However, I couldn’t cut it short and had to be as gracious as possible. The folks back in New York want maximum publicity.”

“What you went through today,” I told him, “will be nothing to what will happen when you come out; especially if you bring out a few good heads.”

“Steele, I’m glad of this chance to talk with you,” he said. “I’d hoped we could get together for a while.

You can tell me something of what to expect when we go in. You are one of the three people who have been in the Cretaceous.”

“I was there scarcely more than a day,” I told. him.

“We saw a lot of fauna. The place crawls with strange animals, and not all look the way our paleontologists have said they did. You saw the film Rila made?”’

“Yes. Good job. In ways, a little terrifying.”

“Then you’ve seen most of what we saw. You’re carrying big rifles?”

“Six hundreds. The same as you.”

“One thing,” I said. “Don’t wait too long to allow your clients to make the kill. If there’s something coming at you and you can’t be sure, clobber it. What kind of clients do you have?”

“Steady people,” said Aspinwall. “Getting a bit older than I’d like, but all of them have hunted before. In Africa, before the game fields there went sour. They have field experience, they won’t get rattled, they’ll-perform. Jonathon Fridley and his wife, Jessica. She brought down one of the biggest tuskers I have ever seen. Fridley is chairman of a steel company. The third one is Horace Bridges. President of a chemical conglomerate. Solid people. All three of them.”

“Then you shouldn’t have too much of a problem.”

“No. If I have to get in on a kill, they’ll understand.”

“Senator Freemore wants to go along. Has he talked with you?”

“He collared me almost immediately. I told him no way. I can’t take the responsibility. I’d like to accommodate him, but I can’t stick my neck out. He didn’t like it. He got a little nasty. But I can’t take along hitch-hikers. However, if you’d like to go …”

“No, thanks,” I said. “There’ll be other safaris coming along. I should stay here. Besides, I’ve been there.”

“They’re getting the rigs lined up,” he said. “I have to leave. Nice talking with you.”

I stuck out my hand, “Aspinwall,” I said, “good luck.”

I stood and watched them go, the vehicles moving along, one behind another, each one in turn blanking out as they hit the time road. Rila drove Courtney and the senator back to Willow Bend. The senator was pouting. I went down to the crab-apple grove looking for Catface; found him roosting in a tree at the west end of the grove. I told him one of his time roads was being used and that in the next few days, the others would be put to use. I asked if that pleased him and he said it did. It was a little awkward talking with him. The only way I could do it was to ask him questions that he answered yes or no by blinking. So after a time, I quit trying to carry on a conversation and just stood there, looking at him and feeling friendly toward him. He looked back at me, half grinning in what I suppose was a friendly fashion.

I tried to figure out exactly what he was and somehow or other, I began building an impression that he was not an actual creature — that he did not actually have a body, that he was not made of flesh and bone, although if that,was true, I was unable to figure out exactly what he was.

I found out something else. Up until now, I had regarded him simply as an alien, an inexplicable being that could not be understood. But now I began to think of him as a personality, as another person, as someone I knew and thought of, just possibly, as a friend. I wondered about those fifty thousand years that he’d been here and I tried to imagine what they may have been like for him. I tried to imagine how it would have been for me (if I could have existed for fifty thousand years, which was impossible, of course) and then I knew that this was a wrong way of thinking, that I could not equate myself with Catface, since we were two entirely different life forms. I brought to mind the things that he had done, the contacts that he’d made in the last few years — playing a senseless game of hunter and hunted with Ezra and Ranger, making time roads for Bowser to use (I wondered how many trips Bowser may have made into the past), talking occasionally with Hiram, or trying to talk with him, for Hiram had not understood what Catface had been saying and, in consequence, had not liked him. But all that was only now, in the last few years. Other people, apparently, had seen him (or he had shown himself to them) and they had been frightened. In ages past, I wondered, had he at times been in contact with the Indians and earlier than that, with the proto-Indians? Might he not have been considered a god or spirit by some of these wandering tribesmen?

Could he have been known to the mammoth, the mastodon and the ancient bison?

I had quit standing and had sat down at the foot of a tree. Catface had slithered lower down his tree so that we were opposite one another, face to face.

I heard Rila drive back up the ridge, coming home from Willow Bend. I got up and said to Catface, “I’ll visit you again in a day or two and we can talk some more.”

Rila brought word from the hospital, she said, that Hiram could not be released for a while. Ben had driven to Lancaster to see him a few days before and said he’d not found him looking well. He had asked after Bowser and the two of us and Catface; he’d asked how Stiffy was getting along. But other than that, he had done little talking.

Two more safaris arrived and went into the Cretaceous. The fourth arrived a few days later.

Stiffy came shambling up the hill to visit us. Rila fed him some lettuce and a few carrots she found in the refrigerator. He chomped down the carrots, but after sampling it, rejected the lettuce. I guided him back to the valley, with him grunting and mumbling at me all the way.

I went to see Catface again. Not finding him in Mastodonia, I ran him to earth in the orchard on the farm. We did little talking, for talking was difficult, but we did sit together, feeling friendly toward one another, and that seemed to satisfy Catface. Strangely, it satisfied me as well. Contact with him somehow made me feel good. I got the funny feeling that Catface was trying to talk with me. I don’t know what made me think this, but I did get the impression that he was trying to communicate.

I remembered how, as a boy, I used to go swimming in Trout Creek — which was a funny name for it, for it had no trout. Maybe in the pioneer days, when white men first came to the area, there might have been some trout. The creek flowed into the river just above Willow Bend, and it wasn’t much of a stream — in some places, just a trickle — but there was one place, just before it joined the river, where there was a pool.

When my pals and I were small, before we got big enough for our parents to let us go swimming in the river, we used the pool as a swimming hole. It wasn’t more than three feet deep and there was no current; a boy would have had to make a determined effort to drown in it. We used to have a lot of fun there in the lazy summer days, but the thing that I remembered best about it was that when I had got tired of horsing around in the deeper water, I would lie at the shallow edge of the pool, with my head resting on the gravel shore, the rest of me extending out into the water, but barely covered by it. It was good to lie there, for at times you could forget you had a body. The water was just deep enough to buoy up your body so that you became unaware of it. There were a lot of minnows in the pool, little fellows two or three inches long, and if you lay there long enough and were quiet enough, they would come up to you and nibble at your toes, just sort of lipping you with their tiny mouths. I suppose they found dried flakes of skin and maybe tiny scabs — most of us had scabs on our feet because we went barefoot and always had some cuts and bruises — and I suppose these little minnows found the flakes of dried skin and the tiny bloody scabs a very welcome fare. But anyhow, I’d lie there and feel them at my feet, and especially at my toes, bumping against me very gently and lipping at my flesh. Inside of me, there’d be a quiet and bubbling laughter, a bubbling happiness that I could be so intimate with minnows.

That was the way with Catface. I could feel his thoughts bumping in my brain, lipping at my brain. cells, exactly as those minnows in that time of long ago had bumped against my toes. It was a sort of eerie feeling, but it was not disquieting and I felt, much as I had with the minnows, a sense of bubbling laughter that Catface and I could be so close together.

Later on, I told myself that it must have been my imagination, but at the time, I seemed to feel those bumping thoughts quite clearly.

Once I left the orchard, I went to the office to see Ben. When I came in, he was just hanging up the phone. He turned to me with a broad smile on his face.

“That was Courtney,” he said. “There’s a movie outfit on the Coast that is getting serious. They want to make a film showing the history of the Earth, going back to the Precambrian and jumping up the ages.”

“That’s quite a project,” I said. “Do they realize how long it might take?”

“It seems they do,” said Ben. “They seem to be sold on the idea. They want to do a decent job. They’re prepared to take the time.”

“Do they realize that in the earlier periods they’d have to carry oxygen? There can’t have been much free oxygen in the atmosphere until the Silurian, some four hundred million years ago. Perhaps even later.”

“Yes, I think they do. They mentioned it to Courtney. It seems they’ve done their homework..”

“Does Courtney feel their interest is genuine? I would suppose that a movie outfit would have the tendency, at first, to make a cheap, run-of-the-mill movie using one of the prehistoric periods as a background. Not something as ambitious as this. It would cost billions, They’d have to have a scientific staff, people who could interpret what they put on film.”

Ben said, “You’re right about the cost. Courtney seems to think that we will be able to collect a good slice of the budget.”

This was good news, of course, and I was glad to hear it, for we had really made only one deal — Ac-one with Safari, Inc.

Four days later, safari number three, the first group to return, came out several days ahead of the scheduled time. They had had a good hunt: a half-dozen huge triceratops, three tyrannosaur heads, a gaggle of other trophies. They would have stayed out the allotted two weeks, but the hunter-client had become ill and wanted to return.

“Sheer funk,” the white hunter told me. “It’s hairy back there. He shot well, but it got to him. Goodness, it got to me. Look up and see a monster with a mouthful of teeth coming at you out of nowhere and your guts just turn to water. He’s perked up now that we are out. He’ll be the great, hunter, fearless, intrepid, nerves of iron, when we go through the gates and the newsmen start closing in.”

He grinned. “We’ll not stop him. Let him play the role to the hilt. It is good for business.”

Rila and I stood and watched the safari outfit go rolling down the ridge and disappear into Willow Bend.

“That does it,” Rila said. “Once the pictures of those trophies are shown on television and appear in newspapers, there’ll be no doubt, any longer, that traveling in time is possible. We no longer have to prove it.”

The next morning, before we were up. Herb was pounding at the door. I went out in robe and slippers.

“What the hell?” I asked.

Herb waved a copy of the Minneapolis Tribune at me.

I grabbed the paper from him. There, on page one, Was the picture of our client-hunter, posing beside the propped-up head of a tyrannosaur. A six-column headline trumpeted the story about the return of the first safari.