Mastodonia

TWENTY-SEVEN

Hiram was still in the hospital and, once again, I hunted up Catface and found him in the orchard. I told myself I only wanted to keep contact with him to keep him from getting lonely. Hiram had talked with him almost every day, and since Hiram wasn’t here, I thought that someone should make a point of seeing him. But in the back of my mind were those little minnows that had been nibbling at my brain, and I couldn’t help but wonder if, when I saw him again, the minnows would resume their nibbling. I had a queasy feeling about it, but was nevertheless somewhat mystified. Maybe, I told myself, this was Catface’s way of talking, although if it was, I was certainly badly in need of an interpreter. I wondered if the nibbling had been what Hiram had felt and, through some strange quirk in his mind, had been able to understand the language. Maybe this was the ability that enabled Hiram to talk with Bowser and the robin, if he did actually talk with either one of them.

Once I found Catface, I didn’t have to wait long to have my question answered; almost immediately the minnows were in there, nibbling away at me, “Catface,” I asked him, “are you trying to talk with me?”

He blinked his eyes for yes.

“Tell me, do you think that you can do it?”

He blinked three times, very rapidly, which amazed me somewhat as to meaning, but, after a bit of thought, I decided that it meant he didn’t know.

“I hope you can,” I said. “I’d like to talk with you.”

He blinked his eyes for yes, which I imagine meant that he would, too.

But we weren’t able to talk. It seemed to me that while the minnows were more persistent than they had been before, we were getting nowhere. For a time, I tried to open my mind to the minnows, but that didn’t seem to help. Perhaps nothing I could do, I told myself, could help. Whatever was to be done, if anything was to be done, was strictly up to Catface.

I had the feeling that he must have thought he had a chance, or he never would have tried. But once I thought that over, I detected a lot of wishful thinking in it.

When the session came to an end, it didn’t seem to me we were at all ahead of what the situation had been when it had first started.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I told Catface. “You can try again.”

I didn’t tell Rila about it because I was afraid she might laugh at my simple-mindedness. To me, of course, in a sort of sneaking way, it was no simplemindedness. If Catface could fix it so we could talk together, I sure as hell was willing to give him a chance to do it.

I had told him I’d be back the next day, but I wasn’t. In the morning, another of the safaris, number two, returned. They brought back only one tyrannosaur, plus several triceratops, but also three crested hadrosaurs and a Polacanthus, an armored dinosaur with a ridiculously small, tapering head and big horn-like spikes sticking out of its back the entire length of its body. Polacanthus was distinctly out of place.

It shouldn’t have been in our part of the Cretaceous; it was supposed to have died out in the early Cretaceous and should not have been in North America at all. But, there it was, in all its grotesque ugliness.

The safari had brought back the entire body. Despite being dressed out, its body cavity scraped and cleaned as well as possible, the carcass was beginning to get a little high.

“Be sure to call this one to the attention of the paleontologists,” I told the hunter-client. “It will drive them up the wall.”

He grinned a toothy and satisfied grin at me. He was a little squirt and I wondered how a man of his size could stand up to a dinosaur gun. I tried to remember who he was and it seemed to me I had been told that he was some aristocratic bird from somewhere in England, one of the few who had somehow managed to keep a tight grip on the family fortune in the face of the British economy.

“What’s so special about this one?” he asked.

“There were quite a few of them. I picked out the biggest one. How would you, sir, go about mounting such a specimen? It’s a sort of unwieldy creature.”

I told him what was so special about it, and he liked the idea of confounding the paleontologists.

“Some of these learned types,” he told me, “put on too many airs.”

The safari had barely disappeared into Willow Bend when number four came back. It had four tyrannosaurs, two triceratops and a bunch of other stuff. It was lacking one truck, however, and two men were on stretchers.

The white hunter took off his hat and wiped his brow. “It was those damn things with horns,” he said. “The ones with parrot beaks. Triceratops, is that what you call them? Something scared them and they came at us, a dozen or more of the big bulls. They hit the truck broadside and made kindling out of it. We were lucky no one was killed. We had a hell’s own time rescuing the men who were in the truck. We had to stand off the bulls. I don’t know how many we put down. They were milling all around us and had their dander up. Maybe we should have gone back and picked up some of the heads. But when we finally fought our way free, we sort of voted against it.”

“It was rough,” I said.

“Rough, sure. But when you go into new country, before you know what to expect, it can get rough. I learned one thing: Never press in too close to a herd of triceratops. They’re short-tempered, ugly brutes.”

After the day’s second safari was gone, Rila said to me, “I’m worried about number one. They are overdue.”

“Only by a day,” I said. “They all set two weeks as the time they would be out, but a couple of days one way or the other doesn’t matter.”

“The one that just left got into trouble.”

“They made a mistake. That is all. Remember how Ben stopped us when we walked up too close to the triceratops? He said there was an invisible line that you don’t cross over. These folks walked over that line. They’ll know better next time.”

I saw Stiffy shuffling up the hill. “We’ve got to get him out of here,” I said.

“Yes, but be nice about it,” Rila said. “He’s such a lovable old guy.”

She went into the house and got a couple of bunches of carrots. Stiffy shuffled up and accepted the carrots very gracefully, grunting and mumbling at us. After a while, I led him off the ridge, back into the valley.

“We’ll have to take it easy on the handouts,” I warned Rila. “If we don’t, we’ll have him up here all the time.”

“You know, Asa,” she said, paying no attention to what I had said, “I’ve decided where we’ll build the house. Down there by that patch of crab apples. We can pipe water from the spring and the ridge will protect us from the northwest wind.”

It was the first time I had heard about the house, but I didn’t make a point of that. It was a good idea, actually. We couldn’t go on living in a mobile home.

“I suppose you’ve decided what kind of house you want,” I said.

“Well, not entirely. Not the floor plan. No detailed plan. Just in general. One story, low against the ground.

Fieldstone, I suppose. That’s a little old-fashioned, but it seems the kind of house that would fit in here. Expensive, too, but we should be able to afford it.”

“Water from the spring,” I said, “but what about the heating? After the telephone line that didn’t work, I’m fairly sure we can’t pipe in gas.”

“I’ve thought about that. Build it tight and solid, well insulated, then use wood. A lot of fireplaces. We could get in men to cut and haul the wood. There’s a lot of it in these hills. Off somewhere where we couldn’t see the cutting. We wouldn’t cut it nearby It would be a shame to spoil the woods we can see.”

We talked about the house through supper. The more I thought about the idea, the better I liked it. I was glad Rila had thought of it.

“I believe I’ll go over to Lancaster tomorrow and talk to a contractor,” she said. “Ben should know a good one.”

“The newsmen outside the gate will gobble you up,” I said. “Herb still wants you to remain a mystery woman.”

“Look, Asa, if need be, I can handle them. I handled them at the hospital that night we took Hiram in. At worst, I could hunker down in the back of the car, cover myself with a blanket or something. Ben would drive me out. Why don’t you come along? We could go to the hospital and see Hiram.”

“No,” I said. “One of us should stay here. I promised Catface I’d see him today and didn’t get around to it. I’ll hunt him up tomorrow.”

“What’s this with you and Catface?” she demanded.

“He gets lonesome,” I said.

The next morning, Catface was in the crab-apple patch, not in the old home orchard.

I squatted down and said to him, half joking, “Well, let’s get on with it.”

He took me at my word. Immediately, the minnows began bumping at my mind, lipping it, sucking away at it, but this time there seemed to be more of them and smaller — small, tiny slivers of minnows that could drive and wriggle themselves deeper and deeper into my mind. I could feel them wriggling deeply into the crevices of it.

A strange, dreamy lassitude was creeping over me and I fought against it. I was being plunged into a soft grayness that entangled me as the gossamer of a finely knit spiderweb might entrap an insect that had blundered into it.

I tried to break the web, to stagger to my feet, but found, with a queer not-caring, that I had no idea where I was. Found, as well, that I really had no concern as to where I might be. I knew, vaguely, that this was Mastodonia and that Catface was with me and that Rila had gone to Lancaster to see a contractor about building a fieldstone house and that we’d have to get men to bring in a winter’s supply of wood for us, but this was all background material, all of it segregated from what was happening. I knew that, for a moment, I need not be concerned with it.

Then I saw it — the city, if it was a city. It seemed that I was sitting atop a high hill, beneath a lordly tree. The weather was fair and warm and the sky was the softest blue that I had ever seen.

Spread out in front of me was the city, and when I looked to either side, I saw that it was everywhere, that it went all around me and spread to the far-off horizon in all directions. The hill stood alone in the midst of the city, a fair hill, its slopes covered by a dark green grass and lovely flowers, blowing in a gentle breeze, and atop it, this one lordly tree beneath which I sat.

I had no idea of how I’d gotten there; I did not even wonder how I’d gotten there. It seemed quite natural that I should be there and it seemed as well that I should recognize the place, but, for the life of me, I couldn’t. I had wondered on first seeing it if it was a city and now I knew it was, but I knew as well that it was something else as well, that it had a significance and that a knowledge of this significance was simply something I had forgotten, but would recall any minute now.

It was like no city I had ever seen before. There were parks and esplanades and wide, gracious streets and these all seemed familiar, although they were very splendid. But the buildings were not the kind of buildings one would have expected anywhere. They had no mass and even little form; rather, they were spiderwebby, lacy, filmy, foamy, insubstantial. Yet, when I looked more carefully at them, I could see that they were not as insubstantial as I had thought, that once I’d looked at them for a time, I began seeing them better, that when I first had looked at them, I had not seen them in their entirety, had been seeing only a part of them and that behind this facade of first seeing, the structures took on a more substantial form. But there was still something about it all that bothered me, and in time I realized it was the pattern of the city. The buildings did not stand in the massive rectangles dictated by street patterns, as was the case with cities on the Earth. That was it, I thought: This was not an Earth city, although why this surprised me I don’t know, for I must have known from the very beginning that it was no city of the Earth — that it was Catface’s city.

“It is headquarters,” said Catface. “Galactic headquarters. I thought that to understand it, you should see it.”

“Thank you for showing it to me,” I said. “It does help me understand.”

I was not surprised at all that Catface had spoken to me. I was in that state where I’d have been surprised at nothing.

About this time, too, I realized that the little lipping minnows were no longer bumping against my mind. Apparently, they had finished their job, gotten all there was to be gotten, all the flaky skin, all the little bloody scabs, and had gone away.

“This is where you were born?” I asked.

“No,” said Catface. “Not where I began. I began on another planet, very far from here. I will show it to you some day if you have the time to look.”

“But you were here,” I said.

“I came as a volunteer,” he said. “Or rather, I was summoned as a volunteer.”

“Summoned? How summoned? Who would summon you? If you’re summoned, you’re not a volunteer.”

I tried to figure out if Catface and I were actually speaking words, and it seemed to me we weren’t, although it made no difference, for we were understanding one another just as well as if we had been speaking words.

“You have the concept of a god,” said Catface.

“Through the history of your race, men have worshipped many gods.”

“I understand the concept,” I said. “I’m not sure I worship any god. Not the way most men would mean if they said they worshipped a god.”

“Nor I,” said Catface. “But if you saw who summoned me, and not only me, but many other creatures; you’d be convinced that they are gods. Which they are not, of course, although there are those who think they are. They are simply a life form, biological or otherwise — of that I can’t be certain — that got an early start at intelligence and over millions of years were wise enough or lucky enough to avoid those catastrophic events that so often cause the downfall and decay of intelligence. They may have been biological at one time; certainly, they must have been. I’m not certain what they are now; over the long millennia, they may have changed themselves….”

“Then you have seen them? Met them?”

“No one ever meets them. They are above all mingling with other creatures. They disdain us, or they may fear us, an unworthy thought that I had at one time. I must have been the only one, for no other has ever spoken to me of such a thing. But I saw one once, or think I saw one once, although I could not see him clearly. To impress the volunteers, they afford them all this glimpse — although care is taken not to let volunteers see too clearly — either through a veil of some sort or a shadow of one of them, I have no idea which.”

“And you were not impressed?”

“At the time, I may have been. It was so long ago, it is difficult to remember. In your numerology, perhaps a million years ago. But I have thought about it since and have concluded that if I was impressed, I should not have been.”

“This is their city? The so-called gods’ city?”

“If you want to think of it that way. It was planned by them, although it was not built by them. It is not a city, really. It is a planet covered by buildings and installations. If that’s a city, then it is a city.”

“You said a galactic headquarters.”

“That is right. A galactic headquarters, not the galactic headquarters. There may be others we do not know about. Other gods we do not know about. It seems credible to me that there may be other galactic groups that function exactly as this city does, but without the benefit of a central headquarters. Nothing nearly so formal as a headquarters, but perhaps some other plan that may perform much better.”

“You’re just guessing there may be another headquarters. You don’t know.”

“A galaxy is large. I don’t know.”

“These people, these gods, take over planets and exploit them?”

“Exploit? I snare the meaning, but the concept is hazy. You mean own? Use?”

“Yes.”

“Not that,” said Catface. “Information only. The knowing, that’s the thing.”

“Gathering knowledge, you mean?”

“That is right. Your comprehension amazes me.

They send out ships, with many study groups. Drop one study group here, another there. Later, another ship comes and picks them up, each one in turn. I was of one study group, the last one. We had dropped four others.”

“Then your ship crashed?”

“Yes. I do not understand how it could have happened. Each of us is a specialist. Knows his job, nothing else. The creatures that operated the ship were also specialists. They should have known, should have foreseen. The crash should not have happened.”

“You told Hiram, or was it Rila, you told one of them that you do not know the location of this planet that you came from. That’s why you don’t know; it was not your specialty to know. Only the pilot or the pilots knew.”

“My specialty was only to go into time. To observe and record the past of the planet under study.”

“You mean your planetary surveys not only included what the planet was at the present moment, but what it, had been in the past. You studied each planet’s evolution.”

“Must do so. The present is only a part of it. How the present came to be is important, too.”

“The others were killed when the ship crashed. But you …”

“I was lucky,” said Catface.

“But once you got here, you did not study the past.

You stayed in Willow Bend, or what was about to become Willow Bend.”

“I made a few excursions only. My observations alone would have been worthless. I made the way for others. And something else — I knew another ship would come to pick us up. They would not know of the crash; they would come expecting to find us. And I told myself if the ship should come, I must be here to meet it. I could not leave. If I went into the past, there would not be others here to call me if the ship should come. The ship would have found evidence of the crash, would assume that all were dead, would not wait. To be picked up, to be rescued as you call it, I knew I must stay close to the crash site so I could be found.”

“But you opened roads for Bowser, roads for us.”

“If I cannot use roads myself, why not let others use them? Why not let my friends use them?”

“You thought of us as friends?”

“Bowser first,” he said, “then the rest of you.”

“Now you are concerned there’ll be no ship to pick you up.”

“Long,” said Catface. “Too long. And yet, they may look. Not many of my kind. We are valuable. They would not lightly give us up.”

“You still have hope?”

“Very feeble hope.”

“That is why you spend so much time in the old home orchard? So you will be there if they come to pick you up.”

“That is why,” said Catface.

“You are happy here?”

“What is happy? Yes, I suppose I’m happy.”

What is happy? he had asked, making out that he did not know what happiness might be. But he knew all right. At one time, he had been happy, exalted, overawed — on that day, when on summons, he had come to that great galactic headquarters, joining the elite company that was legend through those parts of the star system touched by the great confederation.

Unquestionably, not asking how it could be so, I moved with him through that fantastic city, fresh from a backwoods planet, agape at all I saw, filled with wonderment not only at what I saw, but at the fact I should be there at all. And I went with him to other planets as well, catching only glimpses of them, burrowing briefly into the kinds of places they had been in ages past. I stood before glories that put a pang into my heart, glimpsed miseries that engulfed my soul in sadness, worried over mysteries as a dog would worry an ancient bone, grasped frantically at sciences and cultures that were beyond my capacity to understand.

Then, quite suddenly, it was all gone, and I was back in the crab-apple patch, face to face with Catface. My mind still seethed with wonder and I had lost all track of time.

“Hiram?” I asked. “Did Hiram …”

“No,” said Catface. “Hiram could not understand.”

And that was right, of course. Hiram could not have understood. He had complained, I remembered, that Catface had said many things he could not understand.

“No one else,” said Catface. “No one else but you.”

“But I’m confused,” I said. “Many things I do not understand.”

“Your understanding,” he said, “is greater than you know.”

“I’ll be back again,” I said. “We will talk again.”

I went up the hillside, and when I got back to the mobile home, there was no one there. I wondered if that last safari might have come out while I had been With Catface. I had not worried about it when I’d left because I felt that if they came out, most certainly I’d hear them. But during my conversation with Catface, I doubted I’d have heard anything at all. So I went down to the mouth of time road number one and there were no tracks coming out. That meant they were two days overdue. If they didn’t come out tomorrow, I told myself, Ben and I probably should go in to see what was delaying them. Not that I was worried. Percy Aspinwall had struck me as a man who was entirely competent. Yet I found myself uneasy.

I went back to the mobile home and sat on the steps. Bowser crawled from underneath the house and clambered up the steps to sit beside me, plastered close against me. It was almost like the old days, before Rila had arrived and all this business of time travel had started.

I had been half numbed at first after what had happened with Catface, but now I could begin to think about it. At first, while it had been happening, the whole thing had seemed almost routine, nothing to be greatly astounded at, the sort of circumstance that one could confidently have anticipated. But now, with time to think about it, I began to feel cold spider feet walking up and down my spine, and while I knew that it had really happened, I began to feel a flood of denial welling up in me. The old human game of saying that something had not happened so that it would not have happened.

But despite the automatic denial, I knew damn well that it had happened, and I sat there on the steps trying to get it straight in my mind. But I didn’t have the chance to do much straightening out because just when I had got settled down to it, Rila, came driving up the ridge and beside her sat Hiram.

Hiram leaped down as soon as the car had stopped and made straight for Bowser. He didn’t waste any words on me; I’m not sure he even saw me. Bowser came down off the steps at the sight of him and Hiram went down on his knees, throwing his arms around the dog, while Bowser, whimpering and whining in his happiness, washed Hiram’s face with a busy tongue.

Rila rushed up to me and threw her arms around me and there were the four of us, Hiram hugging Bowser and Rila hugging me.

“Isn’t it nice to have Hiram back?” she asked. “The hospital said it was all right for him to leave, but that he had to take it easy and build up his strength. It seems he lost a lot of strength. He’s not to do much work and he …”

“That’s all right,” I said. “Hiram never was what you might call addicted to work.”

“He should take some exercise every day,” she said.

“Walking is the best. And he should have a high-protein diet and there is some medicine that he has to take. He doesn’t like the medicine. Says it tastes awful bad. But he promised to take it if they let him leave. And, oh, Asa, you should see the kind of house we’re going to build. I haven’t got the plans as yet, but I can draw you a rough sketch of it. All fieldstone and lots of big chimneys — there’ll be fireplaces in almost every room. And a lot of glass. Entire walls of thermoglass so that we can look out on this world of ours. Just like we were sitting outdoors. There will be a patio and an outdoor broiler, built of stone just like the house and a stone chimney to carry off the smoke and a swimming pool if it’s something that you’d like.

I think that I would like it. Water from the spring to fill it and that water’s awfully cold, but the contractor said that in a day or two, the sun will warm it and then there’s …”

I saw Hiram and Bowser walking off, heading down the ridge, and they either didn’t hear me shout at them or paid no attention, so I went running after them.

I caught Hiram by the shoulder and turned him around.

“Where do you think you’re going?” I asked. “Rila says you have to take it easy, not too much exertion.”

“But Mr. Steele,” said Hiram, in all reasonableness, “I just have to see how Stiffy is getting along. I have to let him know I’m back.”

“Not today,” I said . “Tomorrow, maybe. We’ll take a car and see if we can find him.”

I herded the two of them back, Hiram protesting all the way.

“And you,” said Rila, “how did you spend your day?”

“Talking with Catface,” I said.

She laughed gaily. “What did you find to talk about?”

“Quite a lot,” I said.

Then she was off on the matter of the house and I never got a word in edgewise. She talked about it until we went to bed. I’d never seen her so happy and excited.

I told myself that I’d tell her about Catface in the morning, but it didn’t work out that way. Ben got me out of bed, pounding on the door and yelling for me to get out of there.

I staggered out bias-eyed, not dressed.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked. “What is it that can’t wait?”

“The Safari bunch is on the prod,” he said. “They are getting nervous. They want us to go in and see what is holding up Aspinwall and his outfit.”