Mastodonia

by Clifford D. Simak

  “That’s only Hiram,” Rila said. “He has a way with animals. He claims to talk with them.”

  “So Hiram’s already at it,” said Ben. “It didn’t take him long.”

  “He’s had a few days here,” I said. “That is all he needs.”

  “Never saw anything like it,” said the old military gent. “Can’t believe my eyes. Quite impossible.”

  “Asa,” said Rila, “our disbelieving friend is Major Hennessey. Major, my partner, Asa Steele.”

  “Pleased, I’m sure,” said Hennessey. “I must say, you have quite a setup here.”

  “We like it,” I said. “Later on, we’ll take you on a tour, if you have the time.”

  “Unbelievable,” said Hennessey. “Absolutely unbelievable.”

  “Mr. Stuart,” said Rila. “Mr. Stuart is chief counsel of Safari, Inc., and Mr. Boyle. If I remember correctly, Mr. Boyle, you are general manager …”

  “In charge of travel arrangements,” said Boyle. “I’m looking forward to safaris after dinosaurs. It should be quite challenging.”

  In more ways than you are thinking, I told myself. Just by the sight of him, I didn’t like the little punk.

  “Since we all know one another,” said Stuart, “why not get down to business. I would like it if we could stay out here. It’s very stimulating.”

  Hennessey thumped his chest. “Smell that air,” he said. “Absolutely clean. No pollution here. I’ve not breathed air like this for years.”

  “Please find chairs,” said Rila. “I’ll bring out some coffee.”

  “You need not bother, really,” said Boyle. “We have had our breakfast. Mr. Page gave us coffee, also, just before we left.”

  “I want some,” said Rila tartly, “and I suppose Asa does as well. I’d hoped that you would join us.”

  “Why, of course,” said the major. “We would be most happy to. And thank you very much.”

  They found chairs around the table and set their briefcases down beside them, all except Stuart, who put his on the table and began taking papers out of it.

  “You’ll have to keep a close watch on Hiram,” Ben said to me. “Maybe a mastodon’s all right, but there are other animals …”

  “I’ve talked with him about it,” I said. “I’ll talk to him again.”

  Rila brought out a tray with cups and I went into the house to bring out the coffee. Sitting on the work-table was a sliced coffee cake and I brought that out as well.

  By the time I got back, everyone was seated around the table and seemed about ready to get down to talking. The table was full so I took a chair and sat off to one side.

  The major said to me, “So this is Mastodonia. Pleasant, I must say. Would you tell me how you managed to pick such a delightful place?”

  “Hunch, mostly,” I said. “From what we guessed about this time. Not us, of course, but the geologists. This is the Sangamon, the interglacial period that lies between the Illinoisian and the Wisconsin glacial periods. We picked it because we felt it would be the most familiar of the various periods that we might have chosen and because the climate should be ideal. We can’t be sure of that yet since we haven’t been here long enough.”

  “Amazing,” said the major.

  “Mr. McCallahan,” Stuart said, “are you ready to begin?”

  “Certainly,” said Courtney. “What do you have in mind?”

  “You understand,” said Stuart, “what we want. We’d like to arrange the rights for our safaris to be introduced into the Cretaceous.”

  “Not the rights,” said Courtney. “We won’t give you rights. We keep those for ourselves. For a consideration, we’ll grant you a limited license.”

  “What the hell do you mean, Courtney? Limited?”

  “I’ve been thinking in terms of a year,” said Courtney. “Renewable, of course.”

  “But such an arrangement would not be worth our while. We’d have to commit a lot of capital. We’d have to set up a staff …”

  “A year,” said Courtney. “To start with.”

  “You’d give us all counsel and consideration …”

  “That’s how you have it written out?” asked Courtney, gesturing at the papers Stuart had spread out in front of him.

  “That’s the way we’d thought of it. We’re new to this business of the Cretaceous and …”

  “All we give you,” said Courtney, “is the license. Once you have that, the rest is up to you. That doesn’t mean that we won’t give whatever counsel and assistance we can offer, but as a matter of good will, not by contract.”

  “Let’s quit this haggling,” said the major. “We want to send in safaris. Not one safari, but a lot of them. A lot of them early on before the novelty wears off. If I know sportsmen, and I do, it would be important for any one of them to be among the first to bring out a dinosaur. And we don’t want to pile one safari on the other. We want to keep the hunting areas as clear as we can manage. We’ll need more than one time road.”

  Courtney looked at me, questioning.

  “It would be possible,” I told him. “As many as they want, each separated by, say, ten thousand years. We could cut it finer and make the interval less than that.”

  “You realize, of course,” Courtney said to Hennessey, “that each time road will cost you.”

  “We’d be willing,” said Stuart, “to pay you as much as a million dollars for three time roads.”

  Courtney shook his head. “A million for the license for one year. Let’s say a half-million for each time road after the first.”

  “But, my God, man, we’d be losing money!”

  “I don’t think you would,” said Courtney. “Are you willing to tell me what you’d charge for a two-week safari?”

  “We haven’t gotten around to discussing that,” said Stuart.

  “The hell you haven’t. You’ve had a couple of weeks to consider it. With all the publicity, you must have a waiting list.”

  “You’re talking economic nonsense,” said Stuart.

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” Courtney replied. “You’re on your last legs and you know it. Up in the twentieth century, the hunting’s gone. What have you got left—a few limited big-game trips, camera safaris? Here you have a chance to get back in business. An unlimited chance. Hundreds of years of hunting. New and fascinating game animals. If some of your clients would rather have a go at titanotheres or mammoth or a dozen other kinds of big and dangerous game, all you have to do is say the word; we’ll take you there. And we’re the only ones who can take you there.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Stuart. “If Miss Elliot and Mr. Steele can develop a time machine …”

  “That’s something I tried to tell you,” said Rila. “You wouldn’t listen or you didn’t believe. You just glossed over it. There is no machine.”

  “No machine? What, then?”

  “That,” said Courtney smoothly, “is a trade secret that we’re not divulging.”

  “They’ve got us, Stuart,” said Major Hennessey. “There’s no ducking it. They are right. No one else can get us there. Miss Elliot did say no machine. From the very start, she said it. So why don’t we sharpen up our pencils and get down to figuring. Perhaps our friends would be willing to take a cut of our net. Twenty percent, perhaps.”

  “If you want to go that route,” said Courtney, “fifty percent of your gross. No less. We’d rather operate on a license fee. It would be a cleaner deal.”

  I had been sitting there, listening to all of this, and my head was spinning just a little. You can talk about a million dollars and it doesn’t mean too much; it’s just a lot of figures. But when it’s your own million bucks, that’s a different thing.

  I walked down the ridge. I’m not sure the others even knew I had left. Bowser crawled out from under the house and trailed after me. There was no sign of Hiram and I was worried about him. I had told him to come right back, and still there was no sign of him. Stiffy was ambling slowly across the valley, heading fo
r the river, perhaps to get a drink, but Hiram wasn’t with him. I stood on the ridge and looked everywhere. There was no sign of him.

  I heard a sound behind me. It was Ben. His boots made a hissing sound as he walked through the foot-high grass. He came and stood beside me and together we stared off across the valley. Far down it there were a lot of moving dots—perhaps mastodons or bison.

  “Ben,” I asked, “how much is a million dollars?”

  “It’s an awful lot of cash,” said Ben.

  “I can’t get it straight in my mind,” I said, “that back there they are talking about a million and perhaps more than that.”

  “Neither can I,” said Ben.

  “But you’re a banker, Ben.”

  “I’m still a country boy,” said Ben. “So are you. That’s why we can’t understand.”

  “Country boy,” I said, “we’ve come a long way since we roamed these hills together.”

  “In just the last few weeks,” said Ben. “You’re worried, Asa. What is troubling you?”

  “Hiram,” I told him. “He was supposed to come straight back once he led Stiffy out of here.”

  “Stiffy?”

  “Stiffy is the mastodon.”

  “He’ll be back,” said Ben. “He’s just found a woodchuck.”

  “Don’t you realize,” I asked him, “that if anything were to happen to Hiram, we’d be out of business?”

  “Sure, I know,” said Ben, “but there’ll nothing happen to him. He’ll get along all right. He’s half wild animal himself.”

  We stood and looked a while longer and saw nothing of Hiram.

  Finally Ben said, “I’m going back and see how they’re coming.”

  “You go along,” I said. “I’m going to find Hiram.”

  An hour later I found him, coming out of the crab-apple grove below the house.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I asked.

  “I was having a good long talk with Catface, Mr. Steele. With all the exploring we been doing for the last few days, I’ve been neglecting him. I was afraid he would get lonesome.”

  “And had he gotten lonesome?”

  “No,” said Hiram. “No, he said he hadn’t. But he’s anxious to get to work. He wants to lay out some time roads. He wonders why it’s taking us so long.”

  “Hiram,” I said, “I want to talk with you. Maybe you don’t realize it, but you’re the one important person in this entire setup; you’re the only one who can talk with Catface.”

  “Bowser can talk with Catface.”

  “All right. Maybe he can. But that does me no good. I can’t talk to Bowser.”

  I laid out the situation for him. I explained most carefully. I practically drew him diagrams.

  He promised to do better.

  TWENTY-THREE

  When Hiram and I got back to the house, Rila and Courtney were sitting at the table. The others were gone; so was one of the cars.

  “Ben took the others for a drive,” said Rila. “We wondered what happened to you.”

  “I was tracking Hiram down,” I said.

  “I stayed here,” said Courtney, “because there are a couple of things I want to talk about with you two.”

  “The IRS?” I asked.

  “No, not the IRS. They won’t start stirring around until they get wind of the deal with Safari.”

  “How did the negotiations turn out?” I asked. “I suppose the deal was made.”

  “It didn’t take too long,” said Courtney. “They’re hurting and we had them across the barrel.”

  “A million for the license,” said Rila, “and a quarter-million for each time road. They want four time roads. That’s two million, Asa.”

  “For one year,” said Courtney. “They don’t know it yet, but next year the price goes up. By that time, we’ll have them hooked.”

  “And this is just a start,” said Rila.

  “That’s what I wanted to talk with you about,” said Courtney. “Ben told you about the church group?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Interested in the time of Jesus.”

  “A couple of them came to see me the other day,” he said. “Ben had told them to talk with me. Damned if I can figure them. I don’t know what they want. They’re interested, but they wouldn’t open up. I don’t know if we should waste time on them.”

  “I don’t like it,” I said. “The whole thing could get sticky. To start with, we should stay away from anything controversial. Pay some attention to our image. Not create an issue the country, or the world, can choose up sides on.”

  “I think the same,” said Rila. “There is not apt to be too much money in it, anyhow, and it could be a headache.”

  “I feel pretty much the same,” said Courtney. “They’ll be back to see me. I’ll try to cool them off. There’s someone else who has me worried. Senator Abel Freemore. He’s from Nebraska or Kansas, I can never remember which. He’s been trying to set up an appointment with me and my secretary has been fending him off. But you can fend off a United States senator for only so long. One of these days, I’ll have to find out what he wants.”

  “You have no idea?” Rila asked.

  “None at all. He’s a big agricultural man, of course. Hellbent for the poor downtrodden farmer. But that’s not all—he’s three kinds of bleeding heart. Whatever he has in mind, I’m afraid it’s nothing good.”

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “Not really. It’s too early. Everyone is sitting back. Intrigued, of course, but still filled with a natural skepticism. Waiting to see what’s going to happen. When the first safari brings out a dinosaur, then is when everything will break. But until then, mostly all that we will get are opportunists and con artists. There’s that mining engineer who wants to go out into the Black Hills country and skim off the easy gold. No money, but he’s willing to give us half of what he finds—more likely, half of what we force him to admit to. I sort of like him. He’s an engaging sort of buccaneer. Utterly without principle and figures everyone else is the same. What was that idea you had, Rila, of going to South Africa and picking up all the easy diamonds off the ground?”

  Rila said, “Yes, I admit to the idea. It probably wouldn’t work. Maybe there never were a lot of diamonds waiting to be picked up. But it had a nice sound to it.”

  “This safari business,” said Courtney, “is apt to be one of the most straightforward, least complicated deals that we can make. An easy one to handle. No tricky angles. What bothers me is that none of your scientific or intellectual types have crawled out of the woodwork. Wanting to study the techniques and motives of the prehistoric cave painters or to observe the Neanderthalers at work and play or to sit in on Marathon or Waterloo.”

  “They have to be convinced first,” said Rila. “They are sitting in the smug composure of their academic retreats, telling one another that it can’t be done.”

  “There is another outfit that has been sniffing around,” said Courtney. “I almost forgot them. Genealogists—those people who, for a price, will trace back the family tree. Seems now they have the idea of providing a more personal, and, of course, a more expensive service. Not just tracing back the record, but actually going back to talk with and, possibly, to sneak pictures of someone’s ancient forebears. Great-great-great-uncle Jake being hung for horse thievery—things like that. They’re being fairly cagey in their approach to us, but they’ll be around again.

  “There will be others. Or I think there’ll be. With a thing like this, you can never be sure. Can’t foresee how time travel will strike the general public and those you might suspect would be interested in using it. It would seem to me that as time went on, we ought to be hearing from the petrochemical people and the coal and iron interests. There are a lot of natural resources back in time.”

  “I’ve thought of that,” said Rila. “It worries me. What I don’t understand is this: The natural resources are back there, sure, and there is nothing to stop us from grubbing them out. There is no question t
hey’re there for the taking. But if we take them, then what happens in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Will those essential minerals still be there to take, and the answer seems they will be because we have, indeed, taken them. If you’re worried about paradoxes, there’s a classic one for you to mumble over.”

  “Rila,” said Courtney, “I just don’t know. I suspect we’re just not thinking right, that our thinking on things like that will have to be readjusted. At the moment, there are other things to do; I’m not going to worry about it.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  So began a period of waiting. Safari had said it might be ten days or two weeks before the first of their parties arrived. We went on a few trips into the surrounding country. We saw a number of mastodons and bisons. We found another colony of giant beavers. We sighted a number of bears and a few cats, but none of the cats was a sabertooth. I began to wonder if the sabertooths might be thinning out or be already extinct, although that seemed unlikely. Once Rila thought she glimpsed a glyptodont, one of the prehistoric giant armadillos, but when we arrived at the place where she had thought she’d seen it, we were unable to find any trace of it. We kept a lookout for horses, but saw none. There were a lot of wolves and foxes.

  We selected a spot for a garden—Rila said we should put the virgin soil to use—but we never got around to doing anything about it. One thing we did do was lay in a telephone line from Ben’s office so that someone wouldn’t have to come trotting into Mastodonia each time they wanted to talk with us. We got the line in, but it wouldn’t work; a signal would not pass through whatever it was that separated Mastodonia from the twentieth century. I had Ben get me a number of steel rods. I painted their tops red and hammered them into line to serve as guides into the time roads that Catface would be setting up into the Cretaceous. Hiram’s wooden stakes had been all right, but the steel rods were more permanent; they could not be broken off as could the wooden stakes. I laid out lines for four time roads, and still had plenty of rods remaining to mark the other ends once we had the time roads.