The Best of Clifford D. Simak

by Clifford D. Simak

  "Well, sir, it was like this. I had a drink or two and I was wondering all the time what was in that portfolio. So finally I took a peek and--"

  "And what you saw decided you to bring it here to us."

  "That's right. I saw--"

  "Don't tell me what you saw. Give me your name and address and don't say anything about this. You understand that we're grateful to you for thinking of us, but we'd rather you said nothing."

  "Mum's the word," the little clerk assured him, full of vast importance.

  The FBI phoned Dr. Ambrose Amberly, Smithsonian expert on paleontology.

  "We've got something, Doctor, that we'd like you to have a look at. A lot of movie film."

  "I'll be most happy to. I'll come down as soon as I get clear. End of the week, perhaps?"

  "This is very urgent, Doctor. Damnest thing you ever saw. Big, shaggy elephants and tigers with teeth down to their necks. There's a beaver the size of a bear."

  "Fakes," said Amberly, disgusted. "Clever gadgets. Camera angles."

  "That's what we thought first, but there are no gadgets, no camera angles. This is the real McCoy."

  "I'm on my way," the paleontologist said, hanging up.

  Snide item in smug, smartaleck gossip column: Saucers are passé at the Pentagon. There's another mystery that's got the high brass very high.

  II

  President Wesley Adams and Secretary of State John Cooper sat glumly under a tree in the capital of Mastodonia and waited for the ambassador extraordinary to return.

  "I tell you, Wes," said Cooper, who, under various pseudonyms, was also the secretaries of commerce, treasury and war, "this is a crazy thing we did. What if Chuck can't get back? They might throw him in jail or something might happen to the time unit or the helicopter. We should have gone along."

  "We had to stay," Adams said. "You know what would happen to this camp and our supplies if we weren't around here to guard them."

  "The only thing that's given us any trouble is that old mastodon. If he comes around again, I'm going to take a skillet and bang him in the brisket."

  "That isn't the only reason, either," said President Adams, "and you know it. We can't go deserting this nation now that we've created it. We have to keep possession. Just planting a flag and saying it's ours wouldn't be enough. We might be called upon for proof that we've established residence. Something like the old homestead laws, you know."

  "We'll establish residence sure enough," growled Secretary Cooper, "if something happens to that time unit or the helicopter."

  "You think they'll do it, Johnny?"

  "Who do what?"

  "The United States. Do you think they'll recognize us?"

  "Not if they know who we are."

  "That's what I'm afraid of."

  "Chuck will talk them into it. He can talk the skin right off a cat."

  "Sometimes I think we're going at this wrong. Sure, Chuck's got the long-range view and I suppose it's best. But maybe what we ought to do is grab a good, fast profit and get out of here. We could take in hunting parties at ten thousand a head or maybe we could lease it to a movie company."

  "We can do all that and do it legally and with full protection," Cooper told him, "if we can get ourselves recognized as a sovereign nation. If we negotiate a mutual defense pact, no one would dare get hostile because we could squawk to Uncle Sam."

  "All you say is true," Adams agreed, "but there are going to be questions. It isn't just a matter of walking into Washington and getting recognition. They'll want to know about us, such as our population. What if Chuck has to tell them it's a total of three persons?"

  Cooper shook his head. "He wouldn't answer that way, Wes. He'd duck the question or give them some diplomatic double-talk. After all, how can we be sure there are only three of us? We took over the whole continent, remember."

  "You know well enough, Johnny, there are no other humans back here in North America. The farthest back any scientist will place the migrations from Asia is 30,000 years. They haven't got here yet."

  "Maybe we should have done it differently," mused Cooper. "Maybe we should have included the whole world in our proclamation, not just the continent. That way, we could claim quite a population."

  "It wouldn't have held water. Even as it is, we went a little further than precedent allows. The old explorers usually laid claim to certain watersheds. They'd find a river and lay claim to all the territory drained by the river. They didn't go grabbing off whole continents."

  "That's because they were never sure of exactly what they had," said Cooper. "We are. We have what you might call the advantage of hindsight."

  He leaned back against the tree and stared across the land. It was a pretty place, he thought--the rolling ridges covered by vast grazing areas and small groves, the forest-covered, ten-mile river valley. And everywhere one looked, the grazing herds of mastodon, giant bison and wild horses, with the less gregarious fauna scattered hit and miss.

  Old Buster, the troublesome mastodon, a lone bull which had been probably run out of a herd by a younger rival, stood at the edge of a grove a quarter-mile away. He had his head down and was curling and uncurling his trunk in an aimless sort of way while he teetered slowly in a lazy-crazy fashion by lifting first one foot and then another.

  The old cuss was lonely, Cooper told himself. That was why he hung around like a homeless dog--except that he was too big and awkward to have much pet-appeal and, more than likely, his temper was unstable.

  The afternoon sun was pleasantly warm and the air, it seemed to Cooper, was the freshest he had ever smelled. It was, altogether, a very pleasant place, an Indian-summer sort of land, ideal for a Sunday picnic or a camping trip.

  The breeze was just enough to float out from its flagstaff before the tent the national banner of Mastodonia--a red rampant mastodon upon a field of green.

  "You know, Johnny," said Adams, "there's one thing that worries me a lot. If we're going to base our claim on precedent, we may be way off base. The old explorers always claimed their discoveries for their nations or their king, never for themselves."

  "The principle was entirely different," Cooper told him. "Nobody ever did anything for himself in those days. Everyone was always under someone else's protection. The explorers either were financed by their governments or were sponsored by them or operated under a royal charter or a patent. With us, it's different. Ours is a private enterprise. You dreamed up the time unit and built it. The three of us chipped in to buy the helicopter. We've paid all of our expenses out of our own pockets. We never got a dime from anyone. What we found is ours."

  "I hope you're right," said Adams uneasily.

  Old Buster had moved out from the grove and was shuffling warily toward the camp. Adams picked up the rifle that lay across his knees.

  "Wait," said Cooper sharply. "Maybe he's just bluffing. It would be a shame to plaster him; he's such a nice old guy."

  Adams half raised the rifle.

  "I'll give him three steps more," he announced. "I've had enough of him."

  Suddenly a roar burst out of the air just above their heads. The two leaped to their feet.

  "It's Chuck!" Cooper yelled. "He's back!"

  The helicopter made a half-turn of the camp and came rapidly to Earth.

  Trumpeting with terror, Old Buster was a dwindling dot far down the grassy ridge.

  III

  They built the nightly fires circling the camp to keep out the animals.

  "It'll be the death of me yet," said Adams wearily, "cutting all this wood."

  "We have to get to work on that stockade," Cooper said. "We've fooled around too long. Some night, fire or no fire, a herd of mastodon will come busting in here and if they ever hit the helicopter, we'll be dead ducks. It wouldn't take more than just five seconds to turn us into Robinson Crusoes of the Pleistocene."

  "Well, now that this recognition thing has petered out on us," said Adams, "maybe we can get down to business."

  "Trouble i
s," Cooper answered, "we spent about the last of our money on the chain saw to cut this wood and on Chuck's trip to Washington. To build a stockade, we need a tractor. We'd kill ourselves if we tried to rassle that many logs bare-handed."

  "Maybe we could catch some of those horses running around out there."

  "Have you ever broken a horse?"

  "No, that's one thing I never tried."

  "Me, either. How about you, Chuck?"

  "Not me," said the ex-ambassador extraordinary bluntly.

  Cooper squatted down beside the coals of the cooking fire and twirled the spit. Upon the spit were three grouse and half a dozen quail. The huge coffee pot was sending out a nose-tingling aroma. Biscuits were baking in the reflector.

  "We've been here six weeks," he said, "and we're still living in a tent and cooking on an open fire. We better get busy and get something done."

  "The stockade first," said Adams, "and that means a tractor."

  "We could use the helicopter."

  "Do you want to take the chance? That's our getaway. Once something happens to it...."

  "I guess not," Cooper admitted, gulping.

  "We could use some of that Point Four aid right now," commented Adams.

  "They threw me out," said Hudson. "Everywhere I went, sooner or later they got around to throwing me out. They were real organized about it."

  "Well, we tried," Adams said.

  "And to top it off," added Hudson, "I had to go and lose all that film and now we'll have to waste our time taking more of it. Personally, I don't ever want to let another saber-tooth get that close to me while I hold the camera."

  "You didn't have a thing to worry about," Adams objected. "Johnny was right there behind you with the gun."

  "Yeah, with the muzzle about a foot from my head when he let go."

  "I stopped him, didn't I?" demanded Cooper.

  "With his head right in my lap."

  "Maybe we won't have to take any more pictures," Adams suggested.

  "We'll have to," Cooper said. "There are sportsmen up ahead who'd fork over ten thousand bucks easy for two weeks of hunting here. But before we could sell them on it, we'd have to show them movies. That scene with the saber-tooth would cinch it."

  "If it didn't scare them off," Hudson pointed out. "The last few feet showed nothing but the inside of his throat."

  Ex-ambassador Hudson looked unhappy. "I don't like the whole setup. As soon as we bring someone in, the news is sure to leak. And once the word gets out, there'll be guys lying in ambush for us--maybe even nations--scheming to steal the know-how, legally or violently. That's what scares me the most about those films I lost. Someone will find them and they may guess what it's all about, but I'm hoping they either won't believe it or can't manage to trace us."

  "We could swear the hunting parties to secrecy," said Cooper.

  "How could a sportsman keep still about the mounted head of a saber-tooth or a record piece of ivory?" And the same thing would apply to anyone we approached. Some university could raise dough to send a team of scientists back here and a movie company would cough up plenty to use this place as a location for a caveman epic. But it wouldn't be worth a thing to either of them if they couldn't tell about it.

  "Now if we could have gotten recognition as a nation, we'd have been all set. We could make our own laws and regulations and be able to enforce them. We could bring in settlers and establish trade. We could exploit our natural resources. It would all be legal and aboveboard. We could tell who we were and where we were and what we had to offer."

  "We aren't licked yet," said Adams. "There's a lot that we can do. Those river hills are covered with ginseng. We can each dig a dozen pounds a day. There's good money in the root."

  "Ginseng root," Cooper said, "is peanuts. We need big money."

  "Or we could trap," offered Adams. "The place is alive with beaver."

  "Have you taken a good look at those beaver? They're about the size of a St. Bernard."

  "All the better. Think how much just one pelt would bring."

  "No dealer would believe that it was beaver. He'd think you were trying to pull a fast one on him. And there are only a few states that allow beaver to be trapped. To sell the pelts--even if you could--you'd have to take out licenses in each of those states."

  "Those mastodon carry a lot of ivory," said Cooper. "And if we wanted to go north, we'd find mammoths that would carry even more...."

  "And get socked into the jug for ivory smuggling?"

  They sat, all three of them, staring at the fire, not finding anything to say.

  The moaning complaint of a giant hunting cat came from somewhere up the river.

  IV

  Hudson lay in his sleeping bag, staring at the sky. It bothered him a lot. There was not one familiar constellation, not one star that he could name with any certainty. This juggling of the stars, he thought, emphasized more than anything else in this ancient land the vast gulf of years which lay between him and the Earth where he had been--or would be--born.

  A hundred and fifty thousand years, Adams had said, give or take ten thousand. There just was no way to know. Later on, there might be. A measurement of the stars and a comparison with their positions in the twentieth century might be one way of doing it. But at the moment, any figure could be no more than a guess.

  The time machine was not something that could be tested for calibration or performance. As a matter of fact, there was no way to test it. They had not been certain, he remembered, the first time they had used it, that it would really work. There had been no way to find out. When it worked, you knew it worked. And if it hadn't worked, there would have been no way of knowing beforehand that it wouldn't.

  Adams had been sure, of course, but that had been because he had absolute reliance in the half-mathematical, half-philosophic concepts he had worked out--concepts that neither Hudson nor Cooper could come close to understanding.

  That had always been the way it had been, even when they were kids, with Wes dreaming up the deals that he and Johnny carried out. Back in those days, too, they had used time travel in their play. Out in Johnny's back yard, they had rigged up a time machine out of a wonderful collection of salvaged junk--a wooden crate, an empty five-gallon paint pail, a battered coffee maker, a bunch of discarded copper tubing, a busted steering wheel and other odds and ends. In it, they had "traveled" back to Indian-before-the-white-man land and mammoth-land and dinosaur-land and the slaughter, he remembered, had been wonderfully appalling.

  But, in reality, it had been much different. There was much more to it than gunning down the weird fauna that one found.

  And they should have known there would be, for they had talked about it often.

  He thought of the bull session back in university and the little, usually silent kid who sat quietly in the corner, a law-school student whose last name had been Pritchard.

  And after sitting silently for some time, this Pritchard kid had spoken up: "If you guys ever do travel in time, you'll run up against more than you bargain for. I don't mean the climate or the terrain or the fauna, but the economics and the politics."

  They all jeered at him, Hudson remembered, and then had gone on with their talk. And after a short while, the talk had turned to women, as it always did.

  He wondered where that quiet man might be. Some day, Hudson told himself, I'll have to look him up and tell him he was right.

  We did it wrong, he thought. There were so many other ways we might have done it, but we'd been so sure and greedy--greedy for the triumph and the glory--and now there was no easy way to collect.

  On the verge of success, they could have sought out help, gone to some large industrial concern or an educational foundation or even to the government. Like historic explorers, they could have obtained subsidization and sponsorship. Then they would have had protection, funds to do a proper job and they need not have operated on their present shoestring--one beaten-up helicopter and one time unit. They could have had several
and at least one standing by in the twentieth century as a rescue unit, should that be necessary.

  But that would have meant a bargain, perhaps a very hard one, and sharing with someone who had contributed nothing but the money. And there was more than money in a thing like this--there were twenty years of dreams and a great idea and the dedication to that great idea--years of work and years of disappointment and an almost fanatical refusal to give up.

  Even so, thought Hudson, they had figured well enough. There had been many chances to make blunders and they'd made relatively few. All they lacked, in the last analysis, was backing.

  Take the helicopter, for example. It was the one satisfactory vehicle for time traveling. You had to get up in the air to clear whatever upheavals and subsidences there had been through geologic ages. The helicopter took you up and kept you clear and gave you a chance to pick a proper landing place. Travel without it and, granting you were lucky with land surfaces, you still might materialize in the heart of some great tree or end up in a swamp or the middle of a herd of startled, savage beasts. A plane would have done as well, but back in this world, you couldn't land a plane--or you couldn't be certain that you could. A helicopter, though, could land almost anywhere.

  In the time-distance they had traveled, they almost certainly had been lucky, although one could not be entirely sure just how great a part of it was luck. Wes had felt that he had not been working as blindly as it sometimes might appear. He had calibrated the unit for jumps of 50,000 years. Finer calibration, he had said realistically, would have to wait for more developmental work.

  Using the 50,000-year calibrations, they had figured it out. One jump (conceding that the calibration was correct) would have landed them at the end of the Wisconsin glacial period; two jumps, at its beginning. The third would set them down toward the end of the Sangamon Interglacial and apparently it had--give or take ten thousand years or so.

  They had arrived at a time when the climate did not seem to vary greatly, either hot or cold. The flora was modern enough to give them a homelike feeling. The fauna, modern and Pleistocenic, overlapped. And the surface features were little altered from the twentieth century. The rivers ran along familiar paths, the hills and bluffs looked much the same. In this corner of the Earth, at least, 150,000 years had not changed things greatly.