Project Mastodon

by Clifford D. Simak

"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 adozen 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 withbeaver."

  "Have you taken a good look at those beaver? They're about thesize 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 weretrying to pull a fast one on him. And there are only a few statesthat allow beaver to be trapped. To sell the pelts--even if youcould--you'd have to take out licenses in each of those states."

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

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

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

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

  IV

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

  A hundred and fifty thousand years, Adams had said, give or taketen thousand. There just was no way to know. Later on, there mightbe. A measurement of the stars and a comparison with theirpositions 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 forcalibration or performance. As a matter of fact, there _was_ noway to test it. They had not been certain, he remembered, thefirst time they had used it, that it would really work. There hadbeen no way to find out. When it worked, you knew it worked. Andif it hadn't worked, there would have been no way of knowingbeforehand that it wouldn't.

  Adams had been sure, of course, but that had been because he hadabsolute reliance in the half-mathematical, half-philosophicconcepts he had worked out--concepts that neither Hudson norCooper could come close to understanding.

  That had always been the way it had been, even when they werekids, with Wes dreaming up the deals that he and Johnny carriedout. Back in those days, too, they had used time travel in theirplay. Out in Johnny's back yard, they had rigged up a timemachine out of a wonderful collection of salvaged junk--a woodencrate, an empty five-gallon paint pail, a battered coffee maker, abunch of discarded copper tubing, a busted steering wheel andother odds and ends. In it, they had "traveled" back toIndian-before-the-white-man land and mammoth-land anddinosaur-land and the slaughter, he remembered, had beenwonderfully appalling.

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

  And they should have known there would be, for they had talkedabout 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-schoolstudent whose last name had been Pritchard.

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

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

  He wondered where that quiet man might be. Some day, Hudson toldhimself, 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 wemight have done it, but we'd been so sure and greedy--greedy forthe triumph and the glory--and now there was no easy way tocollect.

  On the verge of success, they could have sought out help, gone tosome large industrial concern or an educational foundation or evento the government. Like historic explorers, they could haveobtained subsidization and sponsorship. Then they would have hadprotection, funds to do a proper job and they need not haveoperated on their present shoestring--one beaten-up helicopter andone time unit. They could have had several and at least onestanding by in the twentieth century as a rescue unit, should thatbe necessary.

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

  Even so, thought Hudson, they had figured well enough. There hadbeen 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 satisfactoryvehicle for time traveling. You had to get up in the air to clearwhatever upheavals and subsidences there had been through geologicages. The helicopter took you up and kept you clear and gave you achance to pick a proper landing place. Travel without it and,granting you were lucky with land surfaces, you still mightmaterialize in the heart of some great tree or end up in a swampor the middle of a herd of startled, savage beasts. A plane wouldhave done as well, but back in this world, you couldn't land aplane--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 hadbeen lucky, although one could not be entirely sure just how greata part of it was luck. Wes had felt that he had not been workingas blindly as it sometimes might appear. He had calibrated theunit for jumps of 50,000 years. Finer calibration, he had saidrealistically, would have to wait for more developmental work.

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

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

  Boyhood dreams, Hudson thought, were wondrous. It was not oftenthat three men who had daydreamed in their youth could follow itout to its end. But they had and here they were.

  Johnny was on watch, and it was Hudson's turn next, and he'dbetter get to sleep. He closed his eyes, then opened them againfor another look at the unfamiliar stars. The east, he saw, wasflushed with silver light. Soon the Moon would rise, which wasgood. A man could keep a better watch when the Moon was up.

  He woke suddenly, snatched upright and into full awareness by themarrow-chilling clamor that slashed across the night. The very airseemed curdled by the savage racket and, for a moment, he satnumbed by it. Then, slowly, it seemed--his brain took the noiseand separated it into two distinct but intermingled categories,the deadly screaming of a cat and the maddened trumpeting of amastodon.

  The Moon was up and the countryside was flooded by its light.Cooper, he saw, was out beyond the watchfires, standing there andwatching, with his rifle ready. Adams was scrambling out of hissleeping bag, swearing softly to himself. The cooking fire hadburned down to a bed of mottled coals, but the watchfires stillwere burning and the helicopter, parked within their circle,picked up the glint of flames.

  "It's Buster," Adams told him angrily. "I'd know that bellowing ofhis anywhere. He's done nothing but parade up and down and bel
lowever since we got here. And now he seems to have gone out andfound himself a saber-tooth."

  Hudson zipped down his sleeping bag, grabbed up his rifle andjumped to his feet, following Adams in a silent rush to whereCooper stood.

  Cooper motioned at them. "Don't break it up. You'll never see thelike of it again."

  Adams brought his rifle up.

  Cooper knocked the barrel down.

  "You fool!" he shouted. "You want them turning on us?"

  Two hundred yards away stood the mastodon and, on his back, thescreeching saber-tooth. The great beast reared into the air andcame down with a jolt, bucking to unseat the cat, flailing the airwith his massive trunk. And as he bucked, the cat struck andstruck again with his gleaming teeth, aiming for the spine.

  Then the mastodon crashed head downward, as if to turn asomersault, rolled and was on his feet again, closer to them nowthan he had been before. The huge cat had sprung off.

  For a moment, the two stood facing one another. Then the tigercharged, a flowing streak of motion in the moonlight. Busterwheeled away and the cat, leaping, hit his shoulder, clawed wildlyand slid off. The mastodon whipped to the attack, tusks slashing,huge feet stamping. The cat, caught a glancing blow by one of thetusks, screamed and leaped up, to land in spread-eagle fashionupon Buster's head.

  Maddened with pain and fright, blinded by the tiger's rakingclaws, the old mastodon ran--straight toward the camp. And as heran, he grasped the cat in his trunk and tore him from his hold,lifted him high and threw him.

  "Look out!" yelled Cooper and brought his rifle up and fired.

  For an instant, Hudson saw it all as if it were a single scene,motionless, one frame snatched from a fantastic movie epic--thecharging mastodon, with the tiger lifted and the sound track onegreat blast of bloodthirsty bedlam.

  Then the scene dissolved in a blur of motion. He felt his riflethud against his shoulder, knowing he had fired, but not hearingthe explosion. And the mastodon was almost on top of him, bearingdown like some mighty and remorseless engine of blind destruction.

  He flung himself to one side and the giant brushed past him. Outof the tail of his eye, he saw the thrown saber-tooth crash toEarth within the circle of the watchfires.

  He brought his rifle up again and caught the area behind Buster'sear within his sights. He pressed the trigger. The mastodonstaggered, then regained his stride and went rushing on. He hitone of the watchfires dead center and went through it, scatteringcoals and burning brands.

  Then there was a thud and the screeching clang of metal.

  "Oh, no!" shouted Hudson.

  Rushing forward, they stopped inside the circle of the fires.

  The helicopter lay tilted at a crazy angle. One of its rotorblades was crumpled. Half across it, as if he might have fallen ashe tried to bull his mad way over it, lay the mastodon.

  Something crawled across the ground toward them, its spitting,snarling mouth gaping in the firelight, its back broken, hind legstrailing.

  Calmly, without a word, Adams put a bullet into the head of thesaber-tooth.

  V

  General Leslie Bowers rose from his chair and paced up and downthe room. He stopped to bang the conference table with a knottedfist.

  "You can't do it," he bawled at them. "You can't kill the project.I _know_ there's something to it. We can't give it up!"

  "But it's been ten years, General," said the secretary of thearmy. "If they were coming back, they'd be here by now."

  The general stopped his pacing, stiffened. Who did that littlecivilian squirt think he was, talking to the military in that toneof voice!

  "We know how you feel about it, General," said the chairman of thejoint chiefs of staff. "I think we all recognize how deeply you'reinvolved. You've blamed yourself all these years and there is noneed of it. After all, there may be nothing to it."

  "Sir," said the general, "I _know_ there's something to it. Ithought so at the time, even when no one else did. And what we'veturned up since serves to bear me out. Let's take a look at thesethree men of ours. We knew almost nothing of them at the time, butwe know them now. I've traced out their lives from the time thatthey were born until they disappeared--and I might add that, onthe chance it might be all a hoax, we've searched for them foryears and we've found no trace at all.

  "I've talked with those who knew them and I've studied theirscholastic and military records. I've arrived at the conclusionthat if any three men could do it, they were the ones who could.Adams was the brains and the other two were the ones who carriedout the things that he dreamed up. Cooper was a bulldog sort ofman who could keep them going and it would be Hudson who wouldfigure out the angles.

  "And they knew the angles, gentlemen. They had it all doped out.

  "What Hudson tried here in Washington is substantial proof ofthat. But even back in school, they were thinking of those angles.I talked some years ago to a lawyer in New York, name ofPritchard. He told me that even back in university, they talkedof the economic and political problems that they might face ifthey ever cracked what they were working at.

  "Wesley Adams was one of our brightest young scientific men. Hisrecord at the university and his war work bears that out. Afterthe war, there were at least a dozen jobs he could have had. Buthe wasn't interested. And I'll tell you why he wasn't. He hadsomething bigger--something he wanted to work on. So he and thesetwo others went off by themselves--"

  "You think he was working on a temporal--" the army secretary cutin.

  "He was working on a time machine," roared the general. "I don'tknow about this 'temporal' business. Just plain 'time machine' isgood enough for me."

  "Let's calm down, General," said the JCS chairman, "After all,there's no need to shout."

  The general nodded. "I'm sorry, sir. I get all worked up aboutthis. I've spent the last ten years with it. As you say, I'mtrying to make up for what I failed to do ten years ago. I shouldhave talked to Hudson. I was busy, sure, but not that busy. It'san official state of mind that we're too busy to see anyone and Iplead guilty on that score. And now that you're talking aboutclosing the project--"

  "It's costing us money," said the army secretary.

  "And we have no direct evidence," pointed out the JCS chairman.

  "I don't know what you want," snapped the general. "If there wasany man alive who could crack time, that man was Wesley Adams. Wefound where he worked. We found the workshop and we talked toneighbors who said there was something funny going on and--"

  "But ten years, General!" the army secretary protested.

  "Hudson came here, bringing us the greatest discovery in allhistory, and we kicked him out. After that, do you expect them tocome crawling back to us?"

  "You think they went to someone else?"

  "They wouldn't do that. They know what the thing they have foundwould mean. They wouldn't sell us out."

  "Hudson came with a preposterous proposition," said the man fromthe state department.

  "They had to protect themselves!" yelled the general. "If you haddiscovered a virgin planet with its natural resources intact, whatwould you do about it? Come trotting down here and hand it over toa government that's too 'busy' to recognize--"

  "General!"

  "Yes, sir," apologized the general tiredly. "I wish you gentlemencould see my view of it, how it all fits together. First therewere the films and we have the word of a dozen competentpaleontologists that it's impossible to fake anything as perfectas those films. But even granting that they could be, there arecertain differences that no one would ever think of faking,because no one ever knew. Who, as an example, would put lynxtassels on the ears of a saber-tooth? Who would know that youngmastodon were black?

  "And the location. I wonder if you've forgotten that we trackeddown the location of Adams' workshop from those films alone. Theygave us clues so positive that we didn't even hesitate--we drovestraight to the old deserted farm where Adams and his friends hadworked. Don't you see how it all fits together?"

  "I presume," the m
an from the state department said nastily, "thatyou even have an explanation as to why they chose that particularlocation."

  "You thought you had me there," said the general, "but I have ananswer. A good one. The southwestern corner of Wisconsin is ageologic curiosity. It was missed by all the glaciations. Why, wedo not know. Whatever the reason, the glaciers came down on bothsides of it and far to the south of it and left it standing there,a little island in a sea of ice.

  "And another thing: Except for a time in the Triassic, that samearea of Wisconsin has always been dry land. That and a few otherspots are the only areas in North America which have not, time andtime again, been covered by water. I don't think it necessary topoint out the comfort it would be to an experimental traveler intime to be certain that, in almost any era he might hit, he'd havedry land beneath him."

  The economics expert spoke up: "We've given this matter a lot ofstudy and, while we do not feel ourselves competent to rule uponthe possibility or impossibility of time travel, there are someobservations I should like, at some time, to make."

  "Go ahead right now," said the JCS chairman.

  "We see one objection to the entire matter. One of the reasons,naturally, that we had some interest in it is that, if true, itwould give us an entire new planet to exploit, perhaps more wiselythan we've done in the past. But the thought occurs that anyplanet has only a certain grand total of natural resources. If wego into the past and exploit them, what effect will that have uponwhat is left of those resources for use in the present? Wouldn'twe, in doing this, be robbing ourselves of our own heritage?"