Mastodonia

by Clifford D. Simak

  That evening as we sat watching dusk come across the land, Rila said to me, “Something is bothering you, Asa.”

  “Hiram upset me,” I said.

  “But he’s going to be all right. Just a few more days and he’ll be back here with us.”

  “It made me realize how shaky we are,” I said. “The time business is based on Hiram and Catface. Let something happen to either one of them …”

  “But you did all right with Catface. You got the time roads open. Even if everything went sour right now, we’d have them, and it is this deal with Safari that will be the backbone of our business. There’ll be other things, of course, as time goes on, but it’s the big-game hunting …”

  “Rila, would you be satisfied with that?”

  “Well, no, I suppose not satisfied, but it would be more than we had before.”

  “I wonder,” I said.

  “You wonder what?”

  “Please try to understand,” I said. “Bear with me a moment. The other day, the day you took Hiram to the hospital, I was at the farm. Me and Bowser. We walked around a bit and sat on the back steps the way we used to. We even went into the house, but I didn’t go farther than the kitchen. I sat at the kitchen table and thought how it once had been. I felt lost. No matter what I did, no matter where I went, I was lost. Things had changed so much.”

  “You didn’t like the changes?”

  “I’m not sure. I should, I know. There’s money now and there never was before. We can travel in time now and no one ever did that. I suppose it was Hiram and the realization of how thin we run.…”

  She took one of my hands in hers. “I know,” she said. “I know.”

  “You mean you, too?”

  She shook her head. “No, Asa. No, not me. I’m the pushy bitch, remember. But you, I know how you might feel. I feel just slightly guilty. I pushed you into it.”

  “I was easy to push,” I said. “Don’t blame yourself. There is nothing against which to assess any blame. The thing is, I loved that farm. When I saw it the other day, I knew I’d lost it.”

  “Let’s go for a walk,” she said.

  We walked hand in hand down the ridge and all around us was the peace of Mastodonia. Off in the hills, a whippoorwill struck up his chugging cry and we stopped, enchanted. It was the first time here that we’d heard a whippoorwill. Never for a moment had I expected to hear one; I had illogically assumed there’d be no whippoorwills. But hearing the cry, I knew it as the sound of home, bringing back to me memories of years plunged deep in summer with the scent of freshly mown hay blowing from a new-cut field and the tinkling of cow bells as the herd filed out to pasture once the milking had been done. As I listened, I felt a strange contentment flooding over me.

  We went back to the mobile home and called Bowser in. He went stalking into Hiram’s room. For a time we heard him pawing at the blanket on the floor, making his bed before he lay down to sleep. In the kitchen, I fixed up a pitcher of manhattans and took them into the living room. We sat drinking, relaxed and civilized.

  “Do you remember that day when I appeared?” asked Rila. “After twenty years, suddenly here I was.”

  I nodded. I did remember. I think that I remembered every minute of it.

  “I asked myself all the time I was driving to Willow Bend,” she said, “if the time might ever come when I might regret coming here. From time to time since then, I’ve asked myself the question. Asa, I want to tell you now I have never regretted it. I don’t ask the question any more. I don’t mean the time travel and the fun and money. I mean you. I’ve never regretted coming back to you.”

  I put down my glass and went to where she was sitting on the davenport. I sat down beside her and took her in my arms. We sat for a long time, like a pair of silly kids who suddenly have discovered they love one another. I was thankful she had told me, and I thought maybe I should tell her so, but there were no words that I could put together to tell her how I felt. I told her, instead, what was in my heart. “I love you, Rila. I think I always have, from the first day that I saw you.”

  The next day, shortly after noon, Courtney came driving in, with a car that Ben had loaned him. With him was Senator Abel Freemore.

  “I deliver him into your hands,” said Courtney. “The old so-and-so won’t talk with me. He has to talk with you. He must go to the horse’s mouth. Also, the IRS has come to life; they’ve been in to see me. But I don’t think the senator’s business with you has anything to do with them.”

  “Not at all,” said the senator. “Like all sensible men, I keep my distance from them.”

  He was a little wisp of a man with a farmer’s face. His hair was white and skimpy; his hands and face were weather-beaten. He stood small beside the car and looked around.

  “So this is Mastodonia,” he said. “Courtney has been telling me of it. When are you going to start subdividing it?”

  “We aren’t going to,” said Rila sharply. “We don’t own it.”

  “I should tell you,” said Courtney, speaking to us, “that Safari will be coming in tomorrow. Ben phoned several days ago to say the roads are open. I’m glad you managed it.”

  “No sweat,” I said.

  “I’d like to stick around and witness the first safari going in. So would the senator. Do you have the room to put us up for the night?”

  “We have two rooms,” said Rila. “You are welcome. One of you will have to let Bowser sleep in the same room with you.”

  “Would there be a chance of going in with them?” asked the senator. “Just for a look around. A quick look around, then I’d come right back.”

  “That would be up to the Safari people,” I said. “You can talk with whoever is in charge.”

  The senator looked at Courtney. “How about you?” he asked. “If they allow us, would you go along?”

  “I don’t know,” said Courtney. “I saw the film. There are bloodthirsty brutes back there. I’d have to think on it.”

  The senator stalked around for a while, looking things over, then gravitated toward the table. Rila had brought out coffee. The senator, sitting down, held out a cup. “Thank you, my dear,” he said to Rila when she poured. “I’m an old farm boy. I prize a cup of coffee.”

  The rest of us joined him around the table and Rila filled cups for us.

  “I suppose,” said Freemore, “that I might as well get said the things I want to say. It’s not a proposition. Nothing very weighty. Nothing to do with the Senate or the government. Just some questions that keep bouncing in my mind.”

  The senator spilled a few drops of coffee on the table, then wiped it off with the palm of his hand, taking his time about it.

  “I fear,” he said, “you may think me a foolish old man, jumping in fright at shadows. But there is a problem that has caused me many sleepless nights. There are two problems, actually. Now, how should I put this in the best possible light, in the least foolish way?”

  He paused as if to ponder. He had no need to ponder, I was sure. It was just an oratorical trick. Through the years, he had declaimed too often on the Senate floor.

  “Simply put,” he said, “we do have two overriding problems: the state of agriculture in the world and the great masses of poverty-stricken people, many of them in our own country. The disadvantaged, the unemployed, the bottom of the social heap.

  “So far, we have been able to grow enough food to feed all the people of the Earth. When people starve, it is a matter of poor distribution, not a problem of supply. But I fear the day may not be too distant when the supply, as well, will fail. Meteorologists tell us, and very convincingly, I must say, that at least the northern hemisphere and perhaps the entire world as well is entering upon a colder, drier cycle. We’ve had it good, they tell us, for sixty years or more—the most favorable weather the world has known for hundreds of years. Now we are beginning to experience droughts. Vast areas of our productive croplands are getting little rain and the climate is growing colder. If this cold trend continues,
the growing season will be shortened. All this spells less food. If food production is cut even marginally, say ten percent or so for several years, there are areas that could face mass starvation. During our years of unparalleled growing weather, the world has made great social and economic advances, but the population has also grown, with no prospect that the growth can be slowed, so that in only a few favored areas has the economic boom operated to alleviate human misery.

  “You can see, no doubt, what I am driving at. Your mind is leaping ahead of my words. With the advent of time travel, a concept I was, at first, reluctant to accept, we now have the capability of opening up vast new agricultural areas that would more than compensate for the drop in food productivity that will come about if the climate deteriorates as much as our meteorologists seem to think it will.

  “That is one of the problems. You remember I said there were two problems. The other problem is that there exist vast segments of our population who face no future other than lifelong privation. You find great masses of these unfortunates in the ghettos of the larger cities and other pockets of them scattered throughout rural areas, and still others, single examples of bad fortune, almost everywhere. It has seemed to me that some of these people could be sent by time travel to certain virgin areas of the past where they would have a chance to help themselves. So far as my thinking has gone, I see them as a new generation of pioneers transported to a new land where, with some land to call their own, with the natural resources undestroyed, they might be able to fashion for themselves a better life. I am painfully aware that many of these people would not make good pioneers. Their poverty and dependence, their bitterness toward society, their self-pity may have robbed them of any possibility of standing on their feet. Perhaps, no matter where you put them, they’d be no better off than they are now …”

  “But at least,” I said, “you’d be getting them out of our hair.”

  The senator glanced sharply at me. “Young man,” he said, “that was unfair and perhaps unworthy of you.”

  Courtney said, “You make it all sound easy, but it wouldn’t be. It would cost a lot of money. You couldn’t just tuck these people out of the way somewhere in another time and say to them, now you’re on your own. Government and society would still have to bear some responsibility. You’d have to see to it that they had a decent start. And I would suspect a lot of them would not want to go, many of them would refuse to go. There’d be some advantages, of course. You’d reduce the welfare load and I wonder if that is not what you’re counting on for support when you get around to announcing your plan. But in all conscience, you can’t reduce welfare costs simply by throwing people into a howling wilderness and telling them you’ve washed your hands of them.”

  The senator nodded. “Courtney, you’re making me sound like an ogre. You can’t believe I failed to have these factors you have mentioned very much in mind. The program, if there were to be such a program, would have to be carefully worked out. The initial cost probably would exceed any savings in welfare by several times over. The humanitarian aspects of the move would have to be of equal weight with the economic aspect. I have talked with no one yet—no one, except you three. Before I move, I need some answers from you. It seems to me that by certain astute moves, you people have this time-travel business sewn up neatly. You are offering it as a service. You have made a business of it. I have the strong personal feeling that it should be viewed as a public utility, subject to rules and regulations. But, by operating it from your so-called Mastodonia, you appear to have effectively removed any such possibility. I have no idea if the concept of Mastodonia would stand up in court …”

  “We are convinced it would,” said Courtney. “My feeling is, it will never be contested.”

  “You’re bluffing now,” said the senator. “You are making lawyer talk. I have a feeling that it will. But that matters neither here nor there. What I seek from you is some indication of how sympathetically you would view such a program and how much cooperation we could expect from you.”

  “We can’t give you an answer,” said Courtney in his best grave, gray lawyer tone. “We would have to see some concrete proposals and have a chance to study them. You realize that you would be asking us to commit to your purposes vast time areas, thus forcing us to give up our option of granting licenses for their use by others.”

  “I realize that,” said Freemore. “When one comes down to it, that is the nub of the situation. Could you possibly view going along with my proposed program as a public contribution, a gift to society? Needless to say, if you demanded the kind of fees I suppose you could ask of others, the program would be doomed. It would never get off the ground. My proposal would cost enough without piling license fees to Time Associates atop the budget.”

  “If you are asking us to search our consciences,” said Courtney, “that we are quite willing to do. But at this juncture, we’re not prepared to give you a commitment.”

  The senator turned to me. “If such a program were decided upon,” he said, “where in the past would be the best place to site it? Right here? Right in Mastodonia?”

  Rila beat me to it. “Not Mastodonia,” she said. “We’re homesteading it. We will not give up this place.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  The first safari group arrived shortly after noon. It was made up of two heavy trucks, three four-wheel drives and a crew of perhaps twenty-five men. The equipment had been flown into Minneapolis on a cargo plane, with some of the crew riding along. A company plane had flown in those not on the cargo flight, including the three clients. From Minneapolis, the safari had driven to Willow Bend. At the front gate, they had been besieged by newspapermen and camera crews.

  “The press conference, if that is what it could be called, delayed us a full hour and was exasperating,” said Percy Aspinwall, the man in charge. “However, I couldn’t cut it short and had to be as gracious as possible. The folks back in New York want maximum publicity.”

  “What you went through today,” I told him, “will be nothing to what will happen when you come out, especially if you bring out a few good heads.”

  “Steele, I’m glad of this chance to talk with you,” he said. “I’d hoped we could get together for a while. You can tell me something of what to expect when we go in. You are one of the three people who have been in the Cretaceous.”

  “I was there scarcely more than a day,” I told him. “We saw a lot of fauna. The place crawls with strange animals, and not all look the way our paleontologists have said they did. You saw the film Rila made?”

  “Yes. Good job. In ways, a little terrifying.”

  “Then you’ve seen most of what we saw. You’re carrying big rifles?”

  “Six hundreds. The same as you.”

  “One thing,” I said. “Don’t wait too long to allow your clients to make the kill. If there’s something coming at you and you can’t be sure, clobber it. What kind of clients do you have?”

  “Steady people,” said Aspinwall. “Getting a bit older than I’d like, but all of them have hunted before. In Africa, before the game fields there went sour. They have field experience, they won’t get rattled, they’ll perform. Jonathon Fridley and his wife, Jessica. She brought down one of the biggest tuskers I have ever seen. Fridley is chairman of a steel company. The third one is Horace Bridges. President of a chemical conglomerate. Solid people. All three of them.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have too much of a problem.”

  “No. If I have to get in on a kill, they’ll understand.”

  “Senator Freemore wants to go along. Has he talked with you?”

  “He collared me almost immediately. I told him no way. I can’t take the responsibility. I’d like to accommodate him, but I can’t stick my neck out. He didn’t like it. He got a little nasty. But I can’t take along hitch-hikers. However, if you’d like to go …”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “There’ll be other safaris coming along. I should stay here. Besides, I’ve been there.”
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  “They’re getting the rigs lined up,” he said. “I have to leave. Nice talking with you.”

  I stuck out my hand. “Aspinwall,” I said, “good luck.”

  I stood and watched them go, the vehicles moving along, one behind another, each one in turn blanking out as they hit the time road. Rila drove Courtney and the senator back to Willow Bend. The senator was pouting. I went down to the crab-apple grove looking for Catface; found him roosting in a tree at the west end of the grove. I told him one of his time roads was being used and that in the next few days, the others would be put to use. I asked if that pleased him and he said it did. It was a little awkward talking with him. The only way I could do it was to ask him questions that he answered yes or no by blinking. So after a time, I quit trying to carry on a conversation and just stood there, looking at him and feeling friendly toward him. He looked back at me, half grinning in what I suppose was a friendly fashion.

  I tried to figure out exactly what he was and somehow or other, I began building an impression that he was not an actual creature—that he did not actually have a body, that he was not made of flesh and bone, although if that was true, I was unable to figure out exactly what he was.

  I found out something else. Up until now, I had regarded him simply as an alien, an inexplicable being that could not be understood. But now I began to think of him as a personality, as another person, as someone I knew and thought of, just possibly, as a friend. I wondered about those fifty thousand years that he’d been here and I tried to imagine what they may have been like for him. I tried to imagine how it would have been for me (if I could have existed for fifty thousand years, which was impossible, of course) and then I knew that this was a wrong way of thinking, that I could not equate myself with Catface, since we were two entirely different life forms. I brought to mind the things that he had done, the contacts that he’d made in the last few years—playing a senseless game of hunter and hunted with Ezra and Ranger, making time roads for Bowser to use (I wondered how many trips Bowser may have made into the past), talking occasionally with Hiram, or trying to talk with him, for Hiram had not understood what Catface had been saying and, in consequence, had not liked him. But all that was only now, in the last few years. Other people, apparently, had seen him (or he had shown himself to them) and they had been frightened. In ages past, I wondered, had he at times been in contact with the Indians and earlier than that, with the proto-Indians? Might he not have been considered a god or spirit by some of these wandering tribesmen? Could he have been known to the mammoth, the mastodon and the ancient bison?