Our Children's Children

by Clifford Simak

  Lieutenant Andrew Shelby spoke into the phone to Major Marcel Burns on the other end: "We ain't more than making a dent in them, sir. Christ, I never saw so many people. It would be easier if we could get some of the sightseers out of the area, and we're doing what we can, but it's hard to get them untangled and they don't want to leave and we haven't got the manpower to do a job of it. We've closed off all civilian traffic to the area and the radio has been asking people not to come out here, but they still are coming or are trying to come and the roads are clogged. I hate to think of what it will be like once it gets dark. How about them engineers who were supposed to come out here and put up some flood lights?"

  "They're on their way," said Burns. "Hang in there, Andy, and do everything you can. We got to get those people out of there."

  "I need more carriers," the lieutenant said.

  "I'm feeding them in," the major told him, "as fast as I can lay my hands on them. And another thing — there'll be a gun crew coming out."

  "We don't need no gun. What we need a gun for?"

  "I don't know," the major said. "All I know it is on its way. No one told me what it was coming for."

  13

  "You can't honestly believe this story," Douglas protested. "It's too preposterous to admit of any credence. It is something jerked out of the middle of a science fiction story. I tell you, we've been had."

  Williams said quietly, "So are all these people coming out of the time tunnels preposterous. There has to be some explanation of them. Gale's maybe a bit fantastic, but it holds together in a sort of zany fashion. I admit I have some difficulty…"

  "And his credentials," the Attorney General pointed out. "Identification rather than credentials. Ombudsman for the Washington community, a social service worker of some kind. No connection with any governmental unit…"

  "Maybe," said Williams, "they have no real government. You must realize, five centuries from now there would be changes."

  "Steve," said the President, "what do you make of it? You are the man who brought him in."

  "A waste of time," said Douglas.

  "If you want me to vouch for his story," said Wilson, "I can't do that, of course."

  "What did Molly say?" asked Sandburg.

  "Nothing really. She simply turned him over to me. He told her none of the things that he told us, of that I'm sure, but she wormed out of him and his daughter some sort of story about what kind of world they came from. She said she was satisfied."

  "Did Global News try to make a deal?" asked Douglas.

  "Of course they did. Any news agency or any reporter worth his salt certainly would have tried. They'd have been delinquent in their job if they hadn't tried. But Manning didn't press too hard. He knew as well as I did…"

  "You didn't make a deal?" asked Douglas.

  "You know he didn't," said the President.

  "What I need right now," said Wilson, "is some indication of how much I should tell the press."

  "Nothing," said Douglas. "Absolutely nothing."

  "They know I've been in here. They know something is going on. They won't be satisfied with nothing."

  "They don't need to know."

  "But they do need to know," said Wilson. "You can't treat the press as an adversary. They have a definite function to perform. The people have a right to know. The press has played ball with us before and they will this time, but we can't ignore them. We have to give them something and it had better be the truth."

  "I would think," said Williams, "that we should tell them we have information which tends to make us believe these people may be, as they say, from the future, but that we need some time to check. At the moment, we can make no positive announcement. We still are working on it."

  "They'll want to know," said Sandburg, "why they are coming back. Steve has to have some sort of answer. We can't send him out there naked. And, besides that, they will know, within a short time, that we are placing guns in front of the tunnels."

  "It would scare hell out of everyone," said Williams, "if it was known why the guns were being placed. There would be a worldwide clamor for us to use the guns to shut down the tunnels."

  "Why don't we just say," suggested the President, "that the people of the future are facing some great catastrophe and are fleeing for their lives. The guns? I suppose we'll have to say something about them. We can't be caught in a downright falsehood. You can say they are no more than routine precaution."

  "But only if the question should be raised," said Sandburg.

  "OK," said Wilson, "but that isn't all of it. There'll be other questions. Have we consulted with other nations? How about the UN? Will there be a formal statement later?"

  "You could say, perhaps," said Williams, "that we have contacted other governments. We hate that advisory about the guns."

  "Steve," said the President, "you'll have to try to hold them off. We've got to get our feet under us. Tell them you'll be back to them later."

  14

  By Molly Kimball

  WASHINGTON (Global News) — The people who are coming from the tunnels are refugees from time.

  This was confirmed late today by Maynard Gale, one of the refugees. He refused to say, however, why they were fleeing from a future which he says lies 500 years ahead of us. The circumstances of their flight, he insisted, could only be revealed to a constituted government. He said he was making efforts to get in contact with an appropriate authority. He explained that he held the position of ombudsman for the Washington community in his future time and had been delegated to communicate with the federal government upon his arrival here.

  He did, however, give a startling picture of the kind of society in which he lives, or rather, did live — a world in which there are no longer any nations and from which the concept of war has disappeared.

  It is a simple society, he said, forced to become simple by the ecological problems that we face today. It is no longer an industrial society. Its manufacturing amounts to no more, perhaps less, than one percent of today's figure. What it does manufacture is made to last. The philosophy of obsolescence was abandoned only a short distance into our future, he said, in the face of dwindling natural resources, a dwindling about which economists and ecologists have been warning us for years.

  Because its coal and fossil fuels are almost gone, the future world, said Gale, relies entirely for its energy on fusion power. The development of that type of power, he said, is the only thing that holds the delicate economic fabric of his world together.

  The world of 500 years from now is highly computerized, with the greater part of the population living in "high rise" cities. Half a dozen towers, some of them reaching as high as a mile, will constitute a city. Urban sprawl is gone, leaving vast surface areas free for agricultural purposes. The cities are built, in large part, from converted scrap metal which in our day would have been buried in landfills, and are computer-operated, almost entirely automatic.

  There is, Gale said, none of the great spread of wealth that is found in our world. No one is rich and there is none of the abject poverty that today oppresses millions. Apparently there has been not only a change in life style, but a change as well in life values. Life is simpler and kinder and less competitive; there are few eager beavers in that world of 500 years ahead…

  15

  A crowd was gathering in Lafayette Park, quiet and orderly, as crowds had gathered through the years, to stand staring at the White House, not demanding anything, not expecting anything, simply gathering there in a dumb show of participation in a nation's crisis. Above the crowd, Andy Jackson still sat his rearing charger, with the patina of many years upon both horse and rider, friends to perching pigeons.

  No one quite knew what this crisis meant or if it might even be a crisis. They had, as yet, no idea how it had come about or what it might mean to them, although there were a few among them who had done some rather specific, although distorted, thinking on the subject and were willing (at times, perhaps, insistent) on
sharing with their neighbors what they had been thinking.

  In the White House a flood of calls had started to come in and were stacking up — calls from members of the Congress, from party stalwarts ready with suggestions and advice, from businessmen and industrialists suddenly grown nervous, from crackpots who held immediate solutions.

  A television camera crew drove up in their van and set up for business, taking footage of the Lafayette crowd and of the White House, gleaming in the summer sun, with a newsman doing a stand-up commentary against the background.

  Straggling tourists trailed up and down the avenue, somewhat astonished at thus being caught up in the midst of history, and the White House squirrels came scampering down to the fence and through it out onto the sidewalk, sitting up daintily, with forepaws folded on their chests, begging for handouts.

  16

  Alice Gale stood in the window, gazing across Pennsylvania Avenue to the gathering crowd in the park beyond it. She hugged herself in shivering ecstasy, not daring to believe that she actually was there, that she could be back in twentieth century Washington, where history had been made, where legendary men had lived, and at this moment in the very room where crowned heads had slept.

  Crowned heads, she thought. What an awful, almost medieval phrase. And yet it had a certain ring to it, a certain elegance that her world had never known.

  She had caught a glimpse of the Washington Monument as she and her father had been driven into the White House grounds, and out there, just beyond it, a marble Lincoln sat in his marble chair, with his arms resting on its arms and his massive, whiskered face bearing that look of greatness, of sorrow and compassion that had quieted thousands into reverent silence as they came climbing up the stairs to stand face to face with him.

  Just across the hallway her father was in the Lincoln bedroom, with its massive Victorian bed and the velvet-covered slipper chairs. Although, she recalled, Lincoln had never really slept there.

  It was history back to life, she thought, history resurrected. And it was a precious thing. It would be something to remember always, no matter what might be ahead. It would be something to remember back in the Miocene. And what, she wondered with a little shiver, might the Miocene be like? If they ever got there, if the people of this time should decide to help them in getting there?

  But whatever might happen, she had something she could say — "Once I slept in the Queen's Bedroom."

  She turned from the window and looked in wonder once-again-renewed at the huge four-poster bed with its hangings and counterpane of rose and white, at the mahogany bookcase-secretary that stood between the windows, the soft white carpeting.

  It was selfish of her, she knew, to be feeling this when so many others of her world at this very moment stood homeless and bewildered, unsure of their welcome, perhaps wondering if they would be fed and where they might lay their heads this night, but even as she tried, she could not rebuke herself.

  17

  "Terry," said the President, speaking into the phone, "this is Sam Henderson."

  "How good of you to call, Mr. President," said Terrance Roberts, on the other end. "What can I do for you?"

  The President chuckled. "You maybe could do a lot for me. I don't know if you would. You've heard what's happening?"

  "Strange things," said the labor leader. "A lot of speculation. Are you folks in Washington making any sense of it?"

  "Some," said the President. "It would seem the people are really from the future. They're facing catastrophe up there and the only way they could escape was to run back into time. We haven't got the full story yet…"

  "But, Mr. President, time travel?"

  "I know. It doesn't sound possible. I haven't talked to any of our physicists, although I intend to do so, and I suspect they'll tell me it's impossible. But one of the people who came through a time tunnel swears to us it is. If there was any other way to explain it, I'd be more skeptical than I am. But I'm forced by circumstances to accept the idea, at least provisionally."

  "You mean all of them from up ahead are coming back? How many of them are there?"

  "A couple of billion or so, I guess."

  "But, Mr. President, how will we take care of them?"

  "Well, that's really, Terry, what I wanted to talk with you about. It seems they don't intend to stay here. They mean to go farther back in time — some twenty million years farther back in time. But they need help to do it. They need new time tunnels built and they'll need equipment to take back with them."

  "We can't build time tunnels."

  "They can show us how."

  "It would cost a lot. Both in manpower and materials. Can they pay for it?"

  "I don't know. I never thought to ask. I don't suppose they can. But it seems to me we have to do it. We can't let them stay on here. We have too many people as it is.

  "Somehow, Mr. President," said Terrance Roberts, "I can sense what you want to ask me."

  The President laughed. "Not only you, Terry. The industrialists as well — everyone, in fact, but I have to know beforehand what kind of cooperation I can expect. I wonder if you'd mind coming down here so a few of us can talk about it."

  "Certainly, I could come down. Just let me know when you want me. Although I'm not just sure how much I can do for you. Let me ask around some, talk to some of the other boys. Exactly what do you have in mind?"

  "I'm not entirely sure. That's something I'll need some help in working out. On the face of it, we can't do the kind of job that's called for under existing circumstances. The government can't assume alone the kind of costs that would be involved — I'm not thinking just of the tunnels. I have no idea so far what they would involve. But we would need to furnish the resources for an entire new civilization to start over once again and that would cost a lot of money. The taxpaying public would never stand for it. So we'll have to turn elsewhere for some help. Labor will have to help us, industry will have to help. We're facing a national emergency and it calls for some extraordinary measures. I don't even know how long we can feed all these people and…"

  "It's not only us," said Roberts. "It's the rest of the world as well."

  "That's right. And they'll have to take some action, too. If there were time, we could put together some sort of international setup, but a thing like that takes time and we haven't got the time. To start with, at least, it has to be a national action."

  "Have you talked to any of the other nations?"

  "Britain and Russia," said the President. "Some of the others later. But not about this. Once we get an idea or two shaped up, we can see what some of the others think. Pool our ideas, trade them back and forth. But we can't take much time. Whatever we do we'll have to get started on almost immediately and work as fast as we can."

  "You are sure there are people from up ahead who can explain these tunnels? Well enough so that our scientists and engineers can understand the principles involved and the technology well enough so it can be done — hell, Mr. President, this is sheer insanity. American labor building time tunnels! This must be all a dream. Or a bad joke."

  "I'm afraid," said the President, "it is neither. We're in a mess, Terry. I don't know how bad a mess. I imagine it will be a day or two before we have the full story and know what we really face. All I ask right now is that you think about it. Get a few ideas together. Figure out what you can do. I'll let you know about coming down. No use coming now. We have to get a few things sorted out before we can talk. I'll be in touch as soon as I know a little more about it."

  "Any time, Mr. President," said Roberts. "You let me know and I'll be there."

  The President hung up and buzzed Kim. "Ask Steve to come in," he said when she opened the door. He tilted back in his chair and locked his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. Less than five hours ago, he thought, he'd stretched out for a nap, looking forward to a lazy Sunday afternoon. He didn't get many lazy afternoons and when they came he treasured them. He'd no more than shut his eyes than the world ha
d fallen in on him. Christ, he asked himself, what am I to do? What can I do? What's the wise thing to do? Without half trying, a man could make a mistake or a number of mistakes and he sensed that in a situation such as this, he could not afford mistakes.

  Steve Wilson came in the door. The President took his hands from behind his head and tilted forward in the chair.

  "Have you had the press in, Steve?"

  "No, sir, I haven't. They're pounding on the door, but I haven't let them in. I didn't have the guts to face them with the little that you gave me. I had been hoping…"

  "All right, then," said the President. "Your hope paid off. You can give them all of it with two exceptions. You can't tell them why we have the guns planted. That still has to be simply normal precautions. And there must be no hint of Gale suggesting we go back in time with them."

  "I can't tell them, then, about why they're leaving the future. Nothing about the aliens?"

  The President shook his head. "Simply say that this point has not been sufficiently clarified and needs more study before anything can be said of it."

  "They won't like it," said Wilson, "but I guess that I can manage. How about the TV? I have alerted the networks you may want time this evening."

  "How about ten o'clock? That's a little late, I suppose, but…"

  "It would be all right."