Our Children's Children

by Clifford D. Simak

  “You tell them that,” said the second girl. “You put it just the way we say.”

  “We’re not out to kick up any trouble,” said the sign carrier. “We don’t want to cause any fuss. We just want to let them know. This is the only way we can.”

  “We won’t ask anything if they’ll only let us leave,” said the first girl. “We would like some hoes and axes, maybe some pots and pans. But if they won’t give us anything, we’ll go empty-handed.”

  “Prehistoric men made out with stone,” said the sign carrier. “If we have to, we can do the same.”

  “Why stand there listening to them?” asked a burly individual with a cigar stuck in his mouth. “Hell, all they do is talk. They all are full of crap. They don’t want to go anywhere. They just want to stir up trouble.”

  “You’re wrong,” said the man with the sign. “We mean exactly what we say. What makes you think we want to stay here, along with jerks like you?”

  The man with the cigar made a grab at the sign and one of the girls kicked him in the shin. Wincing from the kick, his reaching fingers missed the sign. The carrier clunked him on the head with it. A man who had been standing beside the man with the cigar hit the sign carrier on the jaw.

  A scuffle exploded and the police came in and broke it up.

  35

  Judy was at her desk. Notes were beginning to accumulate on the spindle. The lights on the console were blinking.

  “You get any sleep?” asked Wilson.

  She looked up at him. “A little. I lay awake thinking, scared. It’s not good, is it, Steve?”

  “Not good,” he said. “It’s too big for us to handle. If it weren’t for the time element, it wouldn’t be so bad. If we only had a little time.”

  She gestured toward the door leading to the lounge. “You won’t tell them that, will you?”

  He grinned. “No, I won’t tell them that.”

  “They’ve been asking when you’re going to see them.”

  “Fairly soon,” he said.

  “I might as well tell you,” she said. “No use waiting. I am going home. Back to Ohio.”

  “But I need you here.”

  “You can get a girl from the secretarial pool. Couple of days and you won’t know the difference.”

  “That’s not what I mean.…”

  “I know what you mean. You need me to shack up with. It’s been like that for how long—six months? It’s this damn town. It makes everything dirty that it touches. Somewhere else it might have worked for us. But it isn’t working here.”

  “Damn it, Judy,” he said, “what’s got into you? Because I didn’t come out last night.…”

  “Partly that, perhaps. Not all that, of course. I know why you had to stay. But it was so lonely and so many things had happened and I sat there thinking and got scared. I tried to call my mother and the lines were busy. A poor scared girl, for Christ’s sake, running back to Mama. But suddenly everything was different. I wasn’t a sleek, competent Washington hussy any longer; I was a kid in pigtails in a little town deep in Ohio. It all started with my getting scared. Tell me honest now, I had a right to be scared.”

  “You had a right,” he said soberly. “I’m half scared myself. Everyone is scared.”

  “What’s going to happen to us?”

  “Damned if I know. But that wasn’t what we were talking about.”

  “Monsters running loose,” she said. “Too many mouths to feed. Everyone fighting one another or getting set to fight.”

  “We were talking about you going to Ohio. I’m not going to ask you do you really mean it, because I know you do. I suppose that you are lucky to have a place to run to. Most of us have no place. I’d like to ask you to stay, but that would be unfair. What’s more, it would be selfish. But I still wish you would.”

  “I have a plane reservation,” she said. “With the phone tied up and all, I was surprised to get one. The country’s in a panic. In a time like this you get that terribly helpless feeling.”

  “You won’t like Ohio. Once you get there, you won’t like it. If you’re scared in Washington, you’ll be scared in Ohio.”

  “I still am going, Steve. Come six-fifteen tonight and I’ll be on that plane.”

  “There’s nothing I can say?”

  “There’s nothing you can say,” she said.

  “Then you’d better let the press in. I have some news for them.”

  36

  Senator Andrew Oakes hitched himself up slightly from the depths of the chair in which he’d sank. “I’m not right sure, Mr. President,” he said, “that it’s wise to bring home all the troops. We need to keep our bases manned. And it seems to me we’re allowing ourselves to get flustered just a mite too soon. Some itty bitty monsters raid a chicken coop out in West Virginia and we start bringing home the troops. It don’t seem scarcely right. And I’m not sure it was too smart, either, to tell the newsmen about these little monsters. We’ll get the country all up tight.”

  “Senator,” said Congressman Nelson Able, “I think you may have gotten your protocol somewhat twisted. We were not invited here to decide whether the troops were to be brought back home, but rather to learn that they were being brought back and to be told the reason for it.”

  “I still believe,” said Senator Oakes, “that President Henderson would want to know our thoughts. He might not agree with them, but I think that he should hear them.”

  “That’s right, Andy,” said the President. “You know that through the years I have listened to you often and almost as often have been fascinated by what you had to say. Which is not to say I agreed with you. Most commonly I don’t.”

  “I am well aware of that,” said Oakes, “but it has not stopped me from saying what I think. And I think it’s plain damn foolishness to fly back the troops. It’s not going to take the total strength of our military might to run down some little chicken-killing monsters.”

  “I think the point has been made,” said Senator Brian Dixon, “that the monsters will not stay little monsters. The only sensible way for us to tackle them is to run them down before there get to be any more of them and before they have a chance to grow.”

  “But how do we know,” persisted Oakes, “that they will really grow or increase in numbers? We’re taking the word of people who came scurrying back to us because they couldn’t face them. And they couldn’t face them because they had let down their guard. They had no military and they had no weapons.…”

  “Now just a minute, Senator,” protested Congressman Able. “It’s all right for you to make your military speeches up on the Hill. You get a good press there and can impress the public. But this is just among ourselves. We won’t be impressed.”

  “Gentlemen,” said the President, “as I see it, this is all beside the point. With all due deference to the Senator, the military will be brought back home. It will be brought home because the Secretary of Defense and the Chiefs of Staff have told me the forces are needed here. Among ourselves, we discussed it very thoroughly earlier in the day. The feeling was that we cannot take the chance of anything going wrong. We may be aiming at overkill, but that is better than negligence. It may be true that we have been given poor information by the people from the future, but I am not inclined to think so. They have faced the monsters for twenty years and it seems to me that they would know far more of them than we do. I have talked with members of the Academy of Sciences and they tell me, while the characteristics attributed to the monsters may be unusual, that these characteristics do not go contrary to any established biologic rule. So I don’t think that you can say there has been any lack of responsibility in the reaching of our decisions. Because of the press of circumstances, we have moved faster than we ordinarily would, but we simply haven’t got the time to go at any of this with due deliberation.”

  Oakes did not reply, but settled back in his chair, grunting softly to himself.

  “There was a report of a monster loose in the Congo,” said Congressman
Wayne Smith. “Have you, sir, any further information?”

  “None,” said the President. “We can’t be sure one did get through. The reports are unreliable.”

  “There has been no request for aid to hunt it down?”

  “No request,” said the President. “Nothing official at all.”

  “How about the tunnels, sir? The news reports seem to be in some conflict. Some of them, we know, have closed, but I can’t seem to get a clear idea of what is going on.”

  “You probably know as much as we do here, Wayne. Here at home, the Virginia tunnel is closed, of course. Two more were closed without our intervention, one in Wisconsin, the other down in Texas. I suppose those were shut down by the people up in the future when the monsters were coming in too close. Either that or there were malfunctions. Otherwise than that, all the tunnels in the United States still are operating.”

  “Would you think that the two you mentioned as closing may have done so because all the people had come through? There has to be an end to all these people sometime?”

  “We know the Wisconsin tunnel closed because of an attack at the other end. The last of the people who came through told us that. I don’t know about the Texas closing. But as to the implied question of all the people through—yes, I would hope that soon the tunnels would start closing because they’ve done their job.”

  “Mr. President,” said Senator Dixon. “what do you know about the practical side of tunnel building? Can we build the tunnels so the people can go back into the past?”

  “I am told we can,” said the President. “Our physicists and engineers are working with refugee scientists and engineers right now. The refugees have picked out the sites where the tunnels should be built. One encouraging feature is that not as many tunnels need be built as they used in getting here. There isn’t the immediate time pressure to get back into the Miocene that there was in getting here. They built a lot of tunnels up in the future because they knew they must get out quickly if they were to get any appreciable part of the population out at all. Also, as I understand it, there will be no need to build tunnels in all the smaller countries. Transportation can be used to get the people to tunnels several hundred miles away. The same situation applies here. It will be easier to transport the refugees to the tunnels than to build the tunnels. The one thing that is difficult about it is that we must get some tunnels built and the people moving out before the refugees eat us out of house and home.”

  “The construction of the tunnels, then, isn’t beyond our capability? All we need is time, money and labor.”

  “That is right, Brian. Labor is no problem. The refugees represent a huge and willing labor force and just an hour or so ago I had word from Terry Roberts that our labor people will raise no objection to our using them on what must be viewed as a federal project. Terry assures me that organized labor will cooperate in every way, even to the extent of waiving union rules, if that should be necessary, in the employment of their own members. Labor is no problem. Money is. Even should industry be as willing to go along with us as labor is, a vast amount of retooling will be necessary before we can start fabricating the components for the tunnels. Ordinarily retooling is a time-consuming process and a costly one. The fact that we must get at it immediately and around the clock, and must get it completed within a fraction of the time it would customarily take, makes it expensive beyond anything that can be imagined. When that is done, the components themselves will be costly items. You must remember this is not a problem that we face alone. It is faced by the entire world. The brunt of the work must be borne by the predominantly industrial nations—we, Germany, Russia, France, Britain, China, Japan, and a few others must build the components, not only for ourselves, but for the rest of the world. While we do not need to match the number of tunnels the future people built to get here, we do need to build enough so that there will be a fairly consistent regional distribution when they go back to the Miocene. While the population of the future is not as great as ours, it still is great enough that it must be scattered. The building of a new civilization in the past would be defeated if we dumped too many people in one area. And the building of the components is only part of the industrial problem that we face, although it is the greatest and the most important part. We must also furnish the refugees with the tools and livestock and seed they will need to make a new beginning. Furnishing the tools is going to call for a. significant industrial capacity.”

  “Have you talked with anyone in the industrial community?”

  “Not personally. Commerce is making some tentative approaches to see what sort of reaction is forthcoming. I have no word as yet. But it seems to me there should be some positive reaction. I should be disappointed if there weren’t. This is their neck as well as the rest of us.”

  Oakes hunched up out of his chair. “Have you any idea yet, Mr. President, what all of this might cost? Any good round figure?”

  “No,” said the President, “I haven’t.”

  “But it’s going to be costly.”

  “It is going to be costly.”

  “Maybe a great deal more than the defense budget, which everyone seems so horrified about.”

  “You want me to say it, of course,” said the President, “so I will. Yes, it is going to be more costly than the defense budget, many times more costly. It will be even more costly than a war. It will maybe break us. It may bankrupt the world, but what would you have us do? Go out and shoot down all the refugees? That would solve the problem. Is that a solution you would like?”

  Grumbling, Oakes let himself sink back into the chair.

  “One thing has occurred to me,” said Able. “There is just the possibility that no matter what it costs us, we may get value received. The refugees come from a time period where many technological problems have been worked out, new approaches have been developed. One thing that has been mentioned is fusion power. We are nowhere near that yet; it may take us years to get there. If we had fusion power that would be a great leap forward. Undoubtedly there are many others. I would assume that, in return for what we propose to do for them, they’d be willing to acquaint us with the basics of these technological advances.…”

  “It would ruin us,” Oakes said wrathfully. “It would finish up the job they’ve started. Take fusion power, for instance. There, gentlemen, in the twinkling of an eye, the gas and oil and coal industries would go down the drain.”

  “And,” said Able, “I suppose the medical profession as well if up in the future they had found the cause and cure of cancer.”

  Dixon said, “What the Congressman says is true. If we had the advantages of all their scientific and technological advances, perhaps their social and political advances, that have been made, or will be made, in the next five hundred years, we would be much better off than we are today. To whom, I wonder, would the new knowledge and principles belong? To the man who was able to acquire the information, by whatever means? Or to the governments? Or to the world at large? And if to the governments and the world, how would it be handled or implemented? It seems to me that, at best, we would have many thorny problems to work out.”

  “This is all in the future,” said Congressman Smith. “It is speculative at the moment. Right now, it seems to me, we have two immediate problems. We have to somehow dispose of the monsters and we must do whatever is possible to send the future people back to the Miocene. Is this the way you read it, Mr. President?”

  “Exactly,” said the President, “as I read it.”

  “I understand,” Oakes rumbled, “that the Russian ambassador is coming over to have a powwow with you.”

  “You were not supposed to know that, Andy.”

  “Well, you know how it is, Mr. President. You stay up on the Hill long enough and you get a lot of pipelines. You get told a lot of things. Even things you were not supposed to know.”

  “It’s no secret,” said the President. “I have no idea why he’s coming. We are trying to work closely with all the gov
ernments in this matter. I have had phone conversations with a number of heads of state, including the Russian head of state. I take it that the ambassador’s visit is no more than an extension of these talks.”

  “Perhaps,” said Oakes. “Perhaps. I just tend to get a mite nervous when the Russians become too interested in anything at all.”

  37

  There was something in the hazel thicket at the edge of the tiny cornfield—a vague sense of a presence, a tantalizing outline that never quite revealed itself. Something lurked there, waiting. Sergeant Gordy Clark was quite sure of that. Just how he knew he could not be sure. But he was sure—or almost sure. Some instinct born out of hundreds of patrols into enemy country, something gained by the sharp, hard objectivity that was necessary for an old soldier to keep himself alive while others died—something that he nor no one else could quite define told him there was a lurker in the thicket.

  He lay silent, almost unbreathing in his effort to be quiet and still, stretched out on the little ridge that rose above the cornfield, with his rocket launcher steadied on an ancient, rotted log and the cross-hairs centered on the thicket. It could be a dog, he told himself, or a child, perhaps even nothing, but he could not bring himself to think that it was nothing.

  The drooping sumac bush bent close above him, shielding him from the view of whatever might be in the thicket. He could hear the faint mutter of the mountain brook that ran just beyond the cornfield, and from up the hollow hugged between the hills, where the farm buildings were located, came the senseless cackling of a hen.

  There was no sign of any other member of the patrol. He knew several of them must be close, but they were being careful not to betray their presence. They were regulars, every one of them, and they knew their business. They could move through these woods like shadows. They would make no noise, disturb no brush or branch to give away their presence.

  The sergeant smiled grimly to himself. They were good men. He had trained them all. The captain thought that he had been the one who had trained them, but it had not been the captain. It had been Sergeant Gordon Fairfield Clark who had beaten their business into them. They all hated him, of course, and he’d have it no other way. For out of hatred could sometimes come respect. Fear or respect, he thought—either one would serve. There were some of them, perhaps not now, but sometime in the past—had cherished the fantasy of putting a bullet through his skull. There must have been opportunities, but they had never done it. For they needed him, the sergeant told himself—although not really him, of course, but the hatred that they had for him. There was nothing like a good strong hatred for a man to cling to.