Mastodonia

by Clifford D. Simak

  “You’re fishing now,” I said, “and it won’t do you any good. I have a project underway, that’s true, but any publicity right now could raise hell with it. When the time comes, I’ll tell you.”

  “When you need the publicity, you mean.”

  “I suppose that’s it.”

  “Look, Asa, I don’t want the big city papers scooping me on this. I don’t want them to write the story before I have a crack at it. I don’t want to be scooped in my own backyard.”

  “Hell, you’re scooped all the time,” I said. “On all the important stories. What else can you expect with a weekly paper? News doesn’t happen on a weekly basis. Your strength isn’t the big stories. They don’t come often enough. People read the Record because you write about the little things, what people do and the small events that happen here. Look at it this way. If I’m able to pull off what I’m trying to do, it will put Willow Bend on the map. It will help everyone. It will help the businesses here, it will provide more advertising dollars for you. You’ll be better off because it happened. Do you want to muff my chance and yours by rushing into print when that rushing into print might kill the deal?”

  “But I’ve got to write a story of some sort. I just can’t not write anything.”

  “All right, then, write your story. Write about the fence, about Ben’s motel, about all the rest of it. Speculate, if you want to, on what is going on. I can’t stop you. I wouldn’t want to. You have every right. Say you talked with me and I would give you nothing. I am sorry, Herb. That’s the best that I can do.”

  “I suppose,” said Herb, “you have the right not to tell me. But I had to ask. I had to lean on you a little. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Sure, I understand. How about another beer?”

  “No, thanks. Haven’t got the time. We go to press tonight. I have to write this story.”

  After Herb had left, I sat there for a while, feeling sorry about the way I’d had to treat him. But I couldn’t give him the story. I understood how he felt, how any newspaperman might feel. The hell of it was that he would get scooped. Before he went to press again next week, the story probably would be out. But there was, I told myself, no way I could help that.

  I got up and threw the empty beer can into the wastebasket, then went outdoors. It was getting into the late afternoon, but the crews were still at work and I was surprised to see how well the fence was progressing. I looked around to see if there was any sign of Catface. I would not have been surprised to have found him staring at me from one of the apple trees. In the last few days, there had been a lot of evidence of him. Instead of hiding from us, as had been his habit, he had begun sort of mingling with us. But at the moment there was no sign of him, nor of Hiram and Bowser. I walked down the fence line until I reached where the men were working. I stood around for a while watching them, then returned to the house.

  A sheriff’s car was parked out in front and a man in uniform was sitting in one of the lawn chairs. When I came up to him, he rose and held out his hand to me.

  “I’m Sheriff Amos Redman,” he said. “You must be Asa Steele. Ben told me I’d probably find you here.”

  “Glad you dropped by,” I said. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Ben told me a few days ago, you might need some guards to patrol the fence. Would you mind telling me what is happening?”

  “I’ll tell you one thing, sheriff, it’s legal.”

  He chuckled faintly at the bad joke. “I never thought it would be anything else,” he said. “Seems to me you were a Willow Bend boy some years ago. How long have you been back?”

  “A little less than a year,” I said.

  “It appears that you plan to stay.”

  “I hope so.”

  “About the guards,” he said. “I talked with the police association in Minneapolis and they think they can fix you up. Some of the men there have lost their jobs because of an economy cut and should be available to you.”

  “I’m glad,” I said. “We will need trained personnel.”

  “You having any trouble?” the sheriff asked.

  “Trouble? Oh, you mean sightseers.”

  “That’s what I mean. There’ve been some funny stories going about. One of them is about a crashed spaceship.” He looked at me closely to see how I would take it.

  “Yes, sheriff,” I said. “I think there might be a spaceship. Out there in the woods, under tons of overlay.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “If there is such a thing, you’ll be swamped by crowds. I understand why you might need a fence. I’ll tell my deputies to swing around here once in a while and keep an eye on you. If you need any help, you know how to reach me.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “And I think you’ll understand. I’d just as soon no credence be given, quite yet, to that spaceship story.”

  “Certainly,” he said importantly. “Just between the two of us.”

  The phone rang when I was coming in the door. It was Rila.

  “Where have you been?” she asked. “I’ve been trying to get you.”

  “Just out for a walk. I hadn’t expected to hear from you this soon. Is everything all right?”

  “Asa, it’s better than all right. We ran the films this afternoon. They are wonderful. Especially that part with you and Ben polishing off those tyrannosaurs. Everyone was sitting on the edge of his chair. It was so exciting. That cheeping done by the triceratops was weird, primitive. God, I don’t know what. Out of this world. Sent a funny feeling up your spine. Safari is champing at the bit, but we won’t talk with them.”

  “Won’t talk with them! For Christ’s sake, Rila, that was the whole idea. That’s why we risked our necks …”

  “Courtney has some wild idea. He shut me up, said we would talk later. We are coming back tomorrow.”

  “We?”

  “Courtney and I. He wants to talk with us. He flew back to Washington this afternoon, but will come back to New York in the morning and pick me up.”

  “Pick you up?”

  “Yes, he flies his own plane. I guess I never mentioned that.”

  “That’s right. You never did.”

  “We’ll be landing at Lancaster. It’s a small plane. The field there is big enough. I’ll let you know when.”

  “I’ll pick you up.”

  “Probably sometime before noon. I’ll let you know.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Courtney McCallahan was a somewhat younger and bigger man than I had expected. It’s strange how one will picture someone mentally before ever meeting him. I suppose it was his name that did it; I had pictured McCallahan as a little gnome of a man, suave, round faced, snow white hair, with an unhurried grace. In actuality, he was a big man and no longer young, but younger than I had pictured him. His hair was turning and had reached the iron gray stage; his face was cragged, like a block of rough wood that someone had chopped into a face with a dull hatchet. His hands were like hams. Instinctively, I liked him.

  “How is the fence coming along?” he asked.

  “It’s going up,” I told him. “We’ll build right through the weekend. No Saturday or Sunday off.”

  “Double-time, I suppose.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “I left that up to Ben.”

  “This Ben is a good man?”

  “He’s been my friend,” I said, “for the greater part of my life.”

  “If you’ll allow me,” he said, “I thought you and Ben were magnificent in that tyrannosaur bit. Took a lot of guts to stand up to those creatures. I’m afraid I might have flunked it.”

  “We had big guns,” I said, “and, besides, there was no place to run.”

  We got into the car, with Rila next to me. She put both hands on my arm and squeezed hard.

  “The same to you,” I said.

  “I forgot to tell you about the films,” she said. “And you forgot to ask. They’re safe. In the vault of a New York bank.”

  “As soon as this m
atter becomes public,” said Courtney, “we’ll have distributors bidding for them, and bidding high.”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, “that we’ll want to sell them.”

  “We’ll sell anything,” said Rila, “if the price is right.”

  I backed out of the parking space. There were only a few other cars. Courtney’s plane and another were the only ones on the strip. Over in the ramshackle hangar, on the other side of the field, I knew, were a few others, locally owned.

  A mile or two down the road, at the edge of town, we came to a small shopping center—a supermarket, a hardware store, a small department store, a branch bank, a men’s clothing store, and a few other shops.

  “Let’s pull in here and park,” said Courtney. “Away from other cars.”

  “Sure, if you want to,” I said, “but why?”

  “Please humor me,” he said.

  I pulled in and found a place to park at the near edge of the parking area. There were no other cars nearby. I shut off the motor and sat back in the seat.

  “This is a conspiracy,” said Courtney. “I shudder at the possibility of eavesdropping.”

  “So go ahead,” I said. I looked at Rila and saw that she was as puzzled as I was.

  Courtney squirmed into a comfortable position. “I’ve spent a lot of sleepless nights,” he said, “considering your position, and in many respects it seems to me you could be vulnerable. Oh, so far as I can determine, this project of yours is entirely legal. Unique, of course, but legal. But the thing that worries me is that Internal Revenue can clobber you but good. If everything goes as well as I expect it will, you’ll be making a lot of money, and when someone makes a lot of money, it’s always been my position that as much of it be kept as is possible within the framework of the law.”

  “Courtney,” said Rila, “I don’t quite understand …”

  “Do you have any idea the bite IRS can take,” he asked, “out of a million dollars?”

  “I have a rough idea,” I said, “but only a rough idea.”

  “The trouble is,” he said, “that you won’t have the opportunity of the business pattern, such as is found in large corporations, to set up the sort of tax shelters and loop holes that will afford some protection. We could set you up as a corporation, of course, but it would take a lot of time and would have a number of built-in disadvantages. There is one possibility, however. It looks good to me and I want to see what you think about it. If you did not conduct your business in the United States there’d be no problem. Income tax does not apply to businesses outside the country.”

  “But we have to stay at Willow Bend,” said Rila. “That’s where our business is.”

  “Not so fast,” said Courtney. “Let’s give it a little thought. Let us say you used your time-travel capability to provide you a residence a thousand years into the past, or a million years, or wherever was best to go. I suppose that any time prior to the emergence of the United States would do, but it might be better to pick a time prior to any European knowledge of North America. If you could find some desert island, of course, unclaimed by any world power, that would do as well, but I don’t know where one is or even if one exists. If it does, you’d still be a long ways from Willow Bend, but if you resided in time, as I suggest, you’d be just a short walk from the farm in Willow Bend.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We’d still be living on land that, in time, would be a part of the nation.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Courtney, “and IRS might try to make something of that. They might bring suit, but if they do, I think we could prove that national sovereignty does not extend through time.”

  “But the farm in Willow Bend is really where we’d conduct our business,” Rila said.

  “Not if you lived someplace else. We’d be very sure you conducted no business in Willow Bend. Nor provided any services there. You could get Hiram and this Catface thing to move into time with you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “But Willow Bend would still be there,” said Rila.

  “Only as your American agency,” said Courtney. “You’d have to have someone to serve as your agent. I had your friend Ben in mind. The time road or tunnel or whatever you want to call it would simply be an entry port to your place of residence, where you’d conduct your business and provide your services. The time roads used to supply your services would be set up from your place of residence. You’d pay your agent a commission—perhaps one percent of all the business that he sent you. That seems the safest way. In effect, he’d then be the agent for a foreign firm. I think it might be best, as well, to sell the farm to him. That way, IRS couldn’t seize it as your property for nonpayment of taxes. Ben would be paying his taxes, of course, and that way, they’d not be able to grab the farm, which is your port of entry. Also, it would lend weight to his being in business for himself.”

  “But they still might try to seize it,” I said.

  “Certainly, they might try. Faced with the facts, I don’t think they would. Especially if Ben paid a fair price for it before you went into the time business. That’s the crux of the matter. To have even a prayer of escaping the IRS, you can’t do any business in the United States. That’s why I refused yesterday to talk business with Safari. If they want to talk business, they have to come to your place of residence.”

  “But I talked to Safari originally,” said Rila, “and we showed them the film.”

  “That fact could make matters a little sticky,” said Courtney, “but I think I can handle that. I think I could demonstrate to the satisfaction of the courts that no business actually was done. As to what happened yesterday, I could show that we refused to negotiate.”

  “But there’ll be contracts,” said Rila.

  “Drawn and executed in New York or in other cities where the party of the second part is headquartered, between an American firm and a non-American company. That is customary. It would stand in law. No trouble there. But you’d have to have an address. Where do you think you might like to set up residence?”

  “In one of the more recent interglacial periods,” I said. “Probably the Sangamon. The climate would be good, the environment more homelike.”

  “Dangerous?”

  “Mastodons,” I said. “Sabertooths. Some bears. Dire wolves. But we could manage. They probably sound worse than they are.”

  “We could call our new home Mastodonia,” said Rila.

  “Perfect,” Courtney said. “That name carries with it the implications of another time and place.”

  “But would we have to stay there all the time?” asked Rila. “I don’t think I would like that.”

  “Not all the time,” said Courtney, “but enough of the time so you could honestly call it home. You could visit Willow Bend frequently, travel otherwise as you wished. But all your business would have to be conducted from Mastodonia. I had even toyed with the idea that you could proclaim yourself a nation and apply to the State Department, and to other countries, of course, for recognition. But with only two or three residents, that might be hard to do. I’m not sure it would be of any advantage, either. If doing so eventually became advisable, could you get some of your Willow Bend neighbors to move there?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’m not sure.”

  “There’d be advantages. Free land for the taking. No taxes. Lots of elbow room. Good hunting and fishing.”

  “I still don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, we can talk about that later on.”

  “How about money and banking?” asked Rila. “How do we handle all that money you say we’re going to get? Certainly not in American banks, where the IRS can get their hands on it.”

  “That’s easy,” said Courtney. “Open an account in Switzerland. Probably Zurich. Your clients can make payment to your Swiss account. They could, of course, pay you some of it in cash so you’d have funds to pay Ben his commissions and to take care of other expenses. But if you are going to do that, you should open an acco
unt right away so your record will seem a little cleaner. If you opened an account before you start transacting any time-travel business, we’d be able to pull the rug out from under anyone who tried to charge concealment of funds. The initial payment into the account should be fairly substantial so that no one can say it was only a token deposit.”

  “I sold my share of the import-export business to my partner in New York the other day,” said Rila. “His first payment, to be made in a day or two, is a hundred thousand. But we wouldn’t have to wait for it. I could assign the first check to Ben’s bank and then he could loan us the hundred thousand. We’re into him for quite an amount right now, but I think he’d do it.”

  “Fine,” said Courtney. “A hundred thousand would be just fine. Before you move into Mastodonia, but giving your address for the account as Mastodonia. I take it you approve of my suggestions.”

  “It seems just a little devious to me,” I said.

  “Of course, the whole thing is devious. But, by and large, it’s legal. We could be challenged, of course, and probably will be, but we have solid grounds for argument.”

  “Half of the business world is devious,” said Rila.

  “Even if we should go to court and lose on some points,” said Courtney, “you’d be no worse off than you are now and probably better. We’d have enough room to strike deals, if necessary. But I’d not go into it with any idea of a deal. I’d go to court to win. We’ve only talked about the court matter. A non-American resident would have other advantages. No governmental regulations or interference, no reports to be filled out, no statements to be filed.”

  “All things considered I think what you suggest is the right thing to do,” Rila said. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been worried about the tax situation.”

  “You know about such things,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “So, almost immediately,” said Courtney, “you’ll move into Mastodonia and set up residence. I would think, perhaps, that a mobile home …”

  “I’ll take care of that,” said Rila, “while Asa is off to Zurich.” She said to me, “I seem to remember you can speak French.”