Mastodonia

by Clifford D. Simak

  I had quit standing and had sat down at the foot of a tree. Catface had slithered lower down his tree so that we were opposite one another, face to face.

  I heard Rila drive back up the ridge, coming home from Willow Bend. I got up and said to Catface, “I’ll visit you again in a day or two and we can talk some more.”

  Rila brought word that Ben had been in contact with the religious group again and they’d be coming to Willow Bend the next day. Ben would bring them in to talk with us. He still had no hint as to what it was they wanted.

  Word from the hospital, she said, was that Hiram could not be released for a while. Ben had driven to Lancaster to see him a few days before and said he’d not found him looking well. He had asked after Bowser and the two of us and Catface; he’d asked how Stiffy was getting along. But other than that, he had done little talking.

  Ben brought in the committee for the religious group the next day. There were three of them, but only one of them did the talking; the other two just sat there, wagging their heads and agreeing with the spokesman, whose name was Hotchkiss. The day was cloudy and chilly, with an occasional mist falling, so we talked with them in the living room.

  Hotchkiss wasn’t a man who believed in wasting time. He was a big man with a doomsday face—sharp and angular, like the muzzle of a wolf. A smile would have been inappropriate on such a face. I doubt if he ever smiled.

  He got swiftly down to business. The usual pleasantries were held to a minimum. He did not express any wonder or doubt about time travel. Apparently, he had accepted it. He did not ask us if it really worked; he asked for no guarantees.

  “What we are interested in,” he told us, “is acquiring the rights, or license, or whatever you may call it, to that period of time covered by the life of Jesus. Exclusive rights, you understand. We and no one else.”

  “I told you,” said Ben, “when I first talked with you, that we are willing to consider any legitimate proposal, but that we would not be able to give you an answer until we have given the proposal some study. You are asking for exclusive rights to a fair-sized chunk of time and we have to know, before we do anything at all, if conflicts might exist.”

  “What kind of conflicts?” Hotchkiss asked.

  Ben was patient with him. “Time segments,” he said, “can be put to many uses. It would help us to know what use you expect to make of the time and the geographical limits that you have in mind. It would cost you a great deal to reserve the entire world for a specific number of years.”

  “We have a fund,” said Hotchkiss, “that should be sufficient. If necessary we could raise more.”

  “There’s still another factor,” said Rila. “Any group that plans to conduct investigations into historic time must be aware of possible dangers. Going into historic time carries the obligation of doing so in a manner that would not upset history. No one living in that time must ever suspect that someone from the future has come into his time. Investigators must dress like the people there, must know the customs and the language, something of the history …”

  “You can rest easy on that matter,” Hotchkiss told her. “We’ll do no investigating.”

  “But if you don’t want to investigate, if you don’t want to go back and see …”

  “That is precisely the point,” said Hotchkiss. “We do not want to go back, but we want no one else to go. That is why we must have exclusive rights.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “This is an area, it seems to me, that any theologian would give his good right arm to study. There is scarcely anything known …”

  “Right there,” said Hotchkiss, “you have hit upon our reason. There always has been a question of the historicity of Jesus. Nothing is known about Him. There are only one or two literary mentions of Him and these may be later interpolations. We don’t know the date or the place of His birth. It is generally accepted He was born in Bethlehem, but even on this, there is some question. The same situation holds true in every other phase of His life. Some students have even questioned the existence of such a man. But through the centuries, the myths that have been brought forward regarding Him have been accepted, have become the soul, the structure, the texture of the Christian faith. We want it left that way. To go probing back would operate to destroy the faith that has been built up through the ages. It would result in unseemly controversy. What do you think would happen if it were found that Jesus was not born in Bethlehem? What would that do to the Christmas story? What if no evidence were found of the Magi?”

  He stopped and looked from one to the other of us.

  “You do understand?” he asked.

  “We can understand your viewpoint,” I said. “I would have to think about it for a while.”

  “Before you decided if what we’re asking for is right or not?”

  “Something like that,” I said. “What you’re asking us to do is slam the door in the face of everyone.”

  “I would not have you think,” said Hotchkiss, “that we are men of little faith. The truth is that our faith is so all-encompassing that we can and do accept Christianity even knowing that little is known of Our Lord and that that little may be wrong. What we fear is that if the story as it now is known should be torn to shreds by investigations, Christianity itself would be torn to shreds. You hold in your hands an awesome power. We’re willing to pay you well for not employing it.”

  Rila asked, “Exactly who are you? You talk of we. Who are we?”

  “We’re a committee,” said Hotchkiss, “very hastily put together, our members including those who very early recognized the danger when we read of the discovery of time travel. We have received support and promise of support from a number of church organizations. We are busily contacting others from which we anticipate support.”

  “You mean money support?”

  “Yes, madam, money support. It will take money, I assume, to buy the rights we seek.”

  “A lot of it,” said Rila.

  “If we’re willing to sell at all,” I said.

  “Promise me this,” said Hotchkiss. “At least let us know when you get other offers, for you will get other offers, I am sure. Give us a chance to meet the terms the others offer.”

  “I’m not sure we can do that,” said Ben. “I’m fairly sure we can’t. But we’ll consider your proposal.”

  Standing outside the mobile home, watching the delegation go down the path to Willow Bend with Ben, I sensed trouble in them. Their attitude, their viewpoint, went against my grain, but I could not analyze or define the repugnance that I felt. As a matter of fact, I told myself, I should hold some sympathy for them, for without realizing it until now, I knew that I held some reservations about entering into certain areas of mankind’s history. Much of what was buried in the past should be allowed its burial in the past.

  “Asa, what do you think?” asked Rila.

  “I don’t like the sound of it,” I said. “I don’t know why. It just goes against the grain.”

  “I feel much the same,” she said. “They talk about paying well. I can’t imagine they have too much. Mention a million and they’d fall down dead.”

  “We’ll see,” I said. “I dislike having anything to do with them. I feel just a little dirty at the thought of it. I suppose we’ll have to see what Ben and Courtney think.”

  Two more safaris arrived and went into the Cretaceous. The fourth arrived a few days later.

  Stiffy came shambling up the hill to visit us. Rila fed him some lettuce and a few carrots she found in the refrigerator. He chomped down the carrots, but after sampling it, rejected the lettuce. I guided him back to the valley, with him grunting and mumbling at me all the way.

  I went to see Catface again. Not finding him in Mastodonia, I ran him to earth in the orchard on the farm. We did little talking, for talking was difficult, but we did sit together, feeling friendly toward one another, and that seemed to satisfy Catface. Strangely, it satisfied me as well. Contact with him somehow made me feel good. I g
ot the funny feeling that Catface was trying to talk with me. I don’t know what made me think this, but I did get the impression that he was trying to communicate.

  I remembered how, as a boy, I used to go swimming in Trout Creek—which was a funny name for it, for it had no trout. Maybe in the pioneer days, when white men first came to the area, there might have been some trout. The creek flowed into the river just above Willow Bend, and it wasn’t much of a stream—in some places, just a trickle—but there was one place, just before it joined the river, where there was a pool. When my pals and I were small, before we got big enough for our parents to let us go swimming in the river, we used the pool as a swimming hole. It wasn’t more than three feet deep and there was no current; a boy would have had to make a determined effort to drown in it. We used to have a lot of fun there in the lazy summer days, but the thing that I remembered best about it was that when I had got tired of horsing around in the deeper water, I would lie at the shallow edge of the pool, with my head resting on the gravel shore, the rest of me extending out into the water, but barely covered by it. It was good to lie there, for at times you could forget you had a body. The water was just deep enough to buoy up your body so that you became unaware of it. There were a lot of minnows in the pool, little fellows two or three inches long, and if you lay there long enough and were quiet enough, they would come up to you and nibble at your toes, just sort of lipping you with their tiny mouths. I suppose they found dried flakes of skin and maybe tiny scabs—most of us had scabs on our feet because we went barefoot and always had some cuts and bruises—and I suppose these little minnows found the flakes of dried skin and the tiny bloody scabs a very welcome fare. But anyhow, I’d lie there and feel them at my feet, and especially at my toes, bumping against me very gently and lipping at my flesh. Inside of me, there’d be a quiet and bubbling laughter, a bubbling happiness that I could be so intimate with minnows.

  That was the way with Catface. I could feel his thoughts bumping in my brain, lipping at my brain cells, exactly as those minnows in that time of long ago had bumped against my toes. It was a sort of eerie feeling, but it was not disquieting and I felt, much as I had with the minnows, a sense of bubbling laughter that Catface and I could be so close together. Later on, I told myself that it must have been my imagination, but at the time, I seemed to feel those bumping thoughts quite clearly.

  Once I left the orchard, I went to the office to see Ben. When I came in, he was just hanging up the phone. He turned to me with a broad smile on his face.

  “That was Courtney,” he said. “There’s a movie outfit on the Coast that is getting serious. They want to make a film showing the history of the Earth, going back to the Precambrian and jumping up the ages.”

  “That’s quite a project,” I said. “Do they realize how long it might take?”

  “It seems they do,” said Ben. “They seem to be sold on the idea. They want to do a decent job. They’re prepared to take the time.”

  “Do they realize that in the earlier periods they’d have to carry oxygen? There can’t have been much free oxygen in the atmosphere until the Silurian, some four hundred million years ago. Perhaps even later.”

  “Yes, I think they do. They mentioned it to Courtney. It seems they’ve done their homework.”

  “Does Courtney feel their interest is genuine? I would suppose that a movie outfit would have the tendency, at first, to make a cheap, run-of-the-mill movie using one of the prehistoric periods as a background. Not something as ambitious as this. It would cost billions. They’d have to have a scientific staff, people who could interpret what they put on film.”

  Ben said, “You’re right about the cost. Courtney seems to think that we will be able to collect a good slice of the budget.”

  This was good news, of course, and I was glad to hear it, for we had really made only one deal—the one with Safari, Inc.

  “Did you talk with Courtney about the Jesus Committee?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I did. He doesn’t think too much of them. Doubts if they can pull together the cash. They claim wide church support, but it is doubtful if they can come up with anything.”

  “They’re fanatics,” I said, “and fanatics don’t wear well. It seems to me we should write them off.”

  Four days later, safari number three, the first group to return, came out several days ahead of the scheduled time. They had had a good hunt: a half-dozen huge triceratops, three tyrannosaur heads, a gaggle of other trophies. They would have stayed out the allotted two weeks, but the hunter-client had become ill and wanted to return.

  “Sheer funk,” the white hunter told me. “It’s hairy back there. He shot well, but it got to him. Christ, it got to me. Look up and see a monster with a mouthful of teeth coming at you out of nowhere and your guts just turn to water. He’s perked up now that we are out. He’ll be the great hunter, fearless, intrepid, nerves of iron, when we go through the gates and the newsmen start closing in.”

  He grinned. “We’ll not stop him. Let him play the role to the hilt. It is good for business.”

  Rila and I stood and watched the safari outfit go rolling down the ridge and disappear into Willow Bend.

  “That does it,” Rila said. “Once the pictures of those trophies are shown on television and appear in newspapers, there’ll be no doubt, any longer, that traveling in time is possible. We no longer have to prove it.”

  The next morning, before we were up, Herb was pounding at the door. I went out in robe and slippers.

  “What the hell?” I asked.

  Herb waved a copy of the Minneapolis Tribune at me.

  I grabbed the paper from him. There, on page one, was the picture of our client-hunter, posing beside the propped-up head of a tyrannosaur. A six-column headline trumpeted the story about the return of the first safari. In the space underneath the few inches of type under the bigger headline, before the two-column type plunged down the page, was another headline that said:

  CHURCH GROUP CHARGES

  TIME TRAVEL DISCRIMINATION

  The first paragraph of this second story said:

  New York, N. Y.

  Dr. Elmer Hotchkiss, head of an independent church committee that is committed to the prevention of any study of the times and life of Jesus Christ, declared today that Time Associates has refused to sell it the rights to the time block covering that period of history.…

  I lowered the paper and said, “But, Herb, you know that’s not accurate. We did not refuse …”

  Herb was practically jigging with excitement. “But don’t you see?” he shouted. “Here’s a controversy, an issue. Before the day is over, church groups and theologians all over the world will be choosing up sides. Asa, we couldn’t buy publicity like this.”

  Rila came out the door. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  I handed her the paper.

  I had a gone feeling in my guts.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Hiram was still in the hospital and, once again, I hunted up Catface and found him in the orchard. I told myself I only wanted to keep contact with him to keep him from getting lonely. Hiram had talked with him almost every day, and since Hiram wasn’t here, I thought that someone should make a point of seeing him. But in the back of my mind were those little minnows that had been nibbling at my brain, and I couldn’t help but wonder if, when I saw him again, the minnows would resume their nibbling. I had a queasy feeling about it, but was nevertheless somewhat mystified. Maybe, I told myself, this was Catface’s way of talking, although if it was, I was certainly badly in need of an interpreter. I wondered if the nibbling had been what Hiram had felt and, through some strange quirk in his mind, had been able to understand the language. Maybe this was the ability that enabled Hiram to talk with Bowser and the robin, if he did actually talk with either one of them.

  Once I found Catface, I didn’t have to wait long to have my question answered; almost immediately the minnows were in there, nibbling away at me.

  “Catface,” I a
sked him, “are you trying to talk with me?”

  He blinked his eyes for yes.

  “Tell me, do you think that you can do it?”

  He blinked three times, very rapidly, which amazed me somewhat as to meaning, but, after a bit of thought, I decided that it meant he didn’t know.

  “I hope you can,” I said. “I’d like to talk with you.”

  He blinked his eyes for yes, which I imagine meant that he would, too.

  But we weren’t able to talk. It seemed to me that while the minnows were more persistent than they had been before, we were getting nowhere. For a time, I tried to open my mind to the minnows, but that didn’t seem to help. Perhaps nothing I could do, I told myself, could help. Whatever was to be done, if anything was to be done, was strictly up to Catface. I had the feeling that he must have thought he had a chance, or he never would have tried. But once I thought that over, I detected a lot of wishful thinking in it.