Mastodonia

THIRTY-ONE

Ben and Herb went back to Mastodonia with us. We used a block and tackle to tip the home upright.

It took us the better part of the day, once that was done, to repair the structural damage. Once we were through, the place was livable. Despite Stiffy’s messing around to get it open, the refrigerator had not been damaged.

The next day, over the protests of both Hiram and Rila, we took two four-wheel drives and went looking for Stiffy. We found him in the valley and herded him down it. He got irate at the treatment and several times threatened to charge. We made discreet use of shotguns loaded with birdshot, which would sting but do no damage, to keep him on the move. He protested, grumbling and groaning every foot of the way.

We shagged him about twenty miles before we turned back home.

A few days later, he was back in his old stamping ground, but from then on, despite whatever memory he might have had of carrots, he did not bother us. I gave Hiram strict orders to leave him alone and, for once, Hiram paid some attention to what I told him.

We had not heard from Courtney for several days.

When he finally got in touch with us, I was in the office talking with Ben. Ben signaled me to pick up another phone.

Courtney said he had moved for a temporary injunction, joined by Safari and the movie people. But the proceedings, he said, were going to take longer than he had thought because of the number of complex arguments cited by both sides. He was particularly incensed by one allegation put forth in defense of the State Department ban — that traveling into time presented a health hazard. He would, he said, be quite willing to agree that travel into more recent, historic times might present such a danger, but the government brief had extended the claim to include time brackets millions of years into the past, postulating that bacteria and viruses that had existed in those times might be able to adapt to the human organism and bring about plagues that could become pandemic.

There had been, Courtney reported, no further word from the CIA.

“Maybe State has called them off,” he said.

Senator Freemore had been in to tell him that bills would be introduced in both houses of Congress to implement emigration of the disadvantaged population (or such of them as might want to go) into prehistoric periods. Freemore, he said, wanted to know what period would be best.

“Asa is on the line with us,” said Ben. “He can tell you about that.”

“Okay,” said Courtney. “How about it, Asa?”

“The Miocene,” I said.

“What about Mastodonia? It would seem ideal to me.”

“There’s not enough time span,” I told him. “If you are going to establish a human population sometime in the past, you have to be sure there is enough time margin so it doesn’t collide with the rise of the human race.”

“Mastodonia is pretty far back, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s not. We’re only a little more than one hundred fifty thousand years back in time. You could go back three hundred thousand and still be in the Sangamon, but even that’s not far enough. There were men on Earth then, primitive men, but still men. We can’t afford a collision with them.”

“But you and Rila?”

“Just the two of us. We’re not going to introduce anyone else into the era. Just transitory people who come in to use the time roads. And there will be no men in America for at least a hundred thousand years.”

“I see. And the Miocene? How far back is that?”

“Twenty-five million years.”

“You judge that’s deep enough into the past?”

“It gives us better than twenty million years before there could be anything even resembling man. Twenty million years from now, when the first possible collision could take place, there probably will be no humans left on Earth. Either in our present time span or twenty million years into our past.”

“You mean we’ll be extinct by that time.”

“Extinct or gone somewhere else.”

“Yes,” said Courtney, “I suppose so.”

He waited for a moment, then asked, “Asa, why the Miocene? Why not earlier? Why not a little later?”

“There’ll be grass in the Miocene. Grass like we have now, very similar to it. Grass is necessary if you are going to raise livestock. Also, grass makes possible the existence of wild game herds. It would be important for settlers to have game herds; in the early days of settlement, they would supply food. And in the Miocene, the climate would be better.”

“How so?”

“A long rain cycle would be coming to an end.

The climate would be drier, but probably still sufficiently rainy for agriculture. The big forests that covered most of the land area would be dying out, giving way to grassland. Settlers wouldn’t have to clear forests to make farmland, but there’d still be plenty of wood for them to use. No really vicious animal life, or, at least, none that we know of. Nothing like the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous. Some titanotheres, giant pigs, early elephants, but nothing that a big rifle couldn’t handle.”

“Okay, you’ve sold me. I’ll tell the senator. And Asa … ”

“Yes?”

“What do you think of the idea? Of sending these people back?”

“It wouldn’t work,” I said. “Not many of them would want to go. They’re not pioneers; they don’t want to be.”

“You figure they’d rather stay right here, on welfare the rest of their lives? For that is what it amounts to. They’re in a poverty trap and they can’t get out.”

“I think most of them would stay right here,” I said. “They know what they’re facing here. Back there, they wouldn’t know.”

Courtney said, “I’m afraid you’re right. I was in hopes that if our injunction move fails, Freemore’s plan might bail us out — if it passes, that is.”

“Don’t count on it,” I said.

Courtney and Ben talked only a short time longer.

There wasn’t much to talk about.

As I sat there, listening to Ben’s parting words, I thought about the brightness of the promise that had so quickly darkened. A few weeks ago, it had seemed that nothing could interfere with us; we had the Safari contract, the movie deal was moving forward, and we were confident that other business would be shaping up. But now, unless Courtney could prevail against the State Department’s order, we were out of business.

Personally, I did not mind too much — oh, of course, I wouldn’t have minded becoming a millionaire, but money and success in business never had mattered too much to me. For Rila, however, it was quite a different story, and while Ben said but little about it, I knew that it meant a lot to him as well. My disappointment, I realized, was not so much for what I had lost as for what the other two had lost.

When I left Ben’s office, I went out into the orchard and found Catface there. We settled down to talk. He did most of the talking. This time, he told me about and showed me his home planet. It was an entirely different place than the headquarters planet, an outback world that had a poor economic basis.

Its land was thin for farming, it had few natural resources, no great cities had arisen. Its people dragged out a dismal existence and they were different from Catface — definitely biological, although there was about them a puzzling ephemeral tendency, as if they hovered indecisively between groundlings and sprites.

Catface must have sensed my surprise at this, for he said to me, “I was a freak. What would you call it?

Perhaps a mutant. I was unlike the rest of them. I changed and they were puzzled at me and ashamed of me and perhaps even a little frightened of me. My beginning was unhappy.”

His beginning — not his childhood, not his boyhood.

I pondered over that.

“But headquarters took you,” I said. “Perhaps that’s why they took you. They were on the lookout, probably, for people just like you — people who could change.”

“I’m sure of it,” said Catface.

“You say you are immortal. Were the other people of your home planet immortal as well?”

“No, they were not. That is one of the measures of the differentness in me.”

“Tell me, Catface, how do you know? How can you be sure that you are immortal?”

“I know, that’s all,” said Catface. “I know inside of me.”

Which was good enough, I thought. If he knew inside of him, he probably was right.

I left him more puzzled than I had ever been before. Each time I talked with him, it seemed I grew more puzzled. For while I felt, for some strange reason, that I knew him more thoroughly than I’d ever known any other being, increasingly I sensed depths in him that seemed forever out of reach. I was puzzled, too, by the illogical feeling that I knew him well.

I had talked with him, really talked with him, not more than a dozen times, and yet I had the impression that he was a lifelong friend. I knew things about him, I felt sure, that we had never talked about. I wondered if this could be attributed to the fact that on many occasions he had taken me inside of him, had made me, for a moment, one with him, in order that I might see with him certain concepts that he could not put in words I would understand. Was it possible that in these times of oneness with him I had absorbed some of his personality, becoming privy to thoughts and purposes that he may not have intended to convey?

By now, most of the newspapermen and camera crews had deserted Willow Bend. Some days, there were none at all, then at times a few would show up and stay for a day or two. We were still occasionally in the news, but the magic had left us. Our story had run out.

The tourists fell off. Usually, there were a few cars in Ben’s parking lot, but nothing like the number that once had been there. Ben’s motel now had vacancies — at times, a number of vacancies. Unless there was a turn in events, Ben stood to lose a lot of money.

We still maintained the guards and turned on the floodlights at night, but this began to seem a little foolish.

We were guarding something that perhaps no longer needed guarding. It was costing us a pile of money and we talked, off and on, of dismissing the guards and not turning on the lights. But we hesitated to do it — principally, I think, because doing it would seem an admission of defeat. As yet, we were not ready to give up.

The debate on the emigration issue raged on in Congress. One side charged the proposal meant abandonment of the disadvantaged; the other side claimed it was a move to offer them the advantages of a fresh start in a new environment not subject to all the stresses of their present one. Arguments thundered over the economics of the issue — the cost of giving the emigrants a fresh start in a new and virgin land as opposed to the yearly cost of welfare. Welfare recipients now and then raised voices that were submerged in the din; no one listened to them. Newspapers published Sunday features and TV networks staged specials explaining and illustrating the situation that would be found in the Miocene. The capitol was picketed by contending groups of citizens.

At Willow Bend, a few bands of cultists showed up.

They carried banners and made speeches that favorered abandonment of the present society and a retreat into the Miocene, or if not into the Miocene, into any place at all to get away from the callous injustices and inequities of the present system. They paraded back and forth in front of the gate and set up camp in Ben’s parking lot. Herb went out to talk with them.

They didn’t stay long. There were no newspapermen to interview them, no photographers to take their pictures, no crowds to jeer them, no police to hassle them. So they went away.

The two houses of Congress passed the emigration bill. The president vetoed it; it was passed over his veto. But the State Department ban still held.

Then, the next day, the court made its decision.

The ruling went against us. The injunction was denied; the ban on travel to Mastodonia stood and we were out of business.