Mastodonia

by Clifford D. Simak

  “You mean that if we’d let them use time travel,” said Ben, “the State Department might lift the order. That the order may be no more than a pressure tactic.”

  “I can’t be sure,” said Courtney. “The signal’s not strong enough. If I signaled back to the CIA we were willing, there might suddenly be a lot of pressure on the State Department.”

  “Well, why don’t we try it,” said Ben. “It’s no skin off our noses who uses time travel, or for what.”

  “No,” said Rila.

  “Why not?” asked Ben.

  “Once you give the government a foot in the door, they begin taking over,” she said.

  “I’m inclined to agree,” said Courtney. “My advice, for what it’s worth, is to save the CIA for future consideration. We might want to make that last desperate deal to save ourselves.”

  “Okay,” said Ben. “I guess that makes sense.”

  “Understand, I’m not even sure how the CIA ties into this,” said Courtney. “I’m just guessing.”

  He rose and said, “Ben, if you’d drive me back. I have work to do.”

  Rila and I headed for home. As we drove into Mastodonia, we saw at once something was wrong. The mobile home had been tipped over. Standing beside it was Stiffy. Bowser stood a little way off, barking fiercely. Hiram was belaboring Stiffy with a stick, but the old mastodon was paying no attention to him.

  I speeded up the car.

  “He’s after those goddamn carrots,” I said. “We never should have fed them to him.”

  I saw as we drove nearer that he was not only after the carrots; he already had them. He had smashed the kitchen end of the home, had somehow gotten the refrigerator open, and was contentedly munching carrots.

  I skidded the car to a halt and the two of us jumped out. I started forward, but Rila grabbed me and held on.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked. “If you try to drive him off …”

  “Drive him off, hell,” I yelled. “I’m going to get a rifle and shoot the son-of-a-bitch. I should have done it long ago.”

  “No,” she shouted. “No, not Stiffy. He is such a nice old guy.”

  Hiram was yelling at him, one word over and over: “Naughty, naughty, naughty.”

  And, as he yelled at Stiffy, he beat him with the stick. Stiffy went on eating carrots.

  “You can’t get a gun, anyhow,” said Rila.

  “If I can clamber up there and get the door open, I can. The rack is just inside.”

  Hiram yelled and beat at Stiffy. Stiffy switched his tail, leisurely and happily. He was having a good time.

  As I stood there, I found the anger draining out of me and I began to laugh. It was ridiculous—Hiram yelling and wailing away at Stiffy and Stiffy paying no attention whatsoever.

  Rila was weeping. She had let go of me and her arms hung at her side. She stood erect, too stiffly erect, while she was racked by sobs. Tears ran down her cheeks. In a few more minutes, I realized, she could become hysterical.

  I put an arm around her and got her turned around and urged her back toward the car.

  “Asa,” she gasped between her sobs, “it’s awful. Nothing has gone right today.”

  I got her in the car, then went back to collect Hiram. I grabbed him by the arm that held the stick and took it away from him.

  “Cut out that yelling,” I told him sternly. “It’s not doing any good.”

  He looked at me, blinking, surprised to see me there.

  “But, Mr. Steele,” he said, “I told him and I told him. I told him not to do it, but he did it just the same.”

  “Get in the car,” I said.

  Obediently, he shuffled toward the car.

  “Come on,” I said to Bowser. Bowser, no fool, glad to get off the hook, stopped his barking and trotted at my heels.

  “In the car,” I told him and he jumped in back with Hiram.

  “What are we going to do?” asked Rila wildly. “What can we do?”

  “We’re going back to the farm,” I told her. “We can stay there for a while.”

  That night, in my arms, she cried herself to sleep.

  “Asa,” she said, “I love Mastodonia. I want to have a house there.”

  “You will,” I said. “You will. One too big and strong for Stiffy to tip over.”

  “And, Asa, I so wanted to be rich.”

  I had no assurances on that.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Ben and Herb went back to Mastodonia with us. We used a block and tackle to tip the home upright. It took us the better part of the day, once that was done, to repair the structural damage. Once we were through, the place was livable. Despite Stiffy’s messing around to get it open, the refrigerator had not been damaged.

  The next day, over the protests of both Hiram and Rila, we took two four-wheel drives and went looking for Stiffy. We found him in the valley and herded him down it. He got irate at the treatment and several times threatened to charge. We made discreet use of shotguns loaded with birdshot, which would sting but do no damage, to keep him on the move. He protested, grumbling and groaning every foot of the way. We shagged him about twenty miles before we turned back home.

  A few days later, he was back in his old stamping ground, but from then on, despite whatever memory he might have had of carrots, he did not bother us. I gave Hiram strict orders to leave him alone and, for once, Hiram paid some attention to what I told him.

  We had not heard from Courtney for several days. When he finally got in touch with us, I was in the office talking with Ben. Ben signaled me to pick up another phone.

  Courtney said he had moved for a temporary injunction, joined by Safari and the movie people. But the proceedings, he said, were going to take longer than he had thought because of the number of complex arguments cited by both sides. He was particularly incensed by one allegation put forth in defense of the State Department ban—that traveling into time presented a health hazard. He would, he said, be quite willing to agree that travel into more recent, historic times might present such a danger, but the government brief had extended the claim to include time brackets millions of years into the past, postulating that bacteria and viruses that had existed in those times might be able to adapt to the human organism and bring about plagues that could become pandemic.

  There had been, Courtney reported, no further word from the CIA.

  “Maybe State has called them off,” he said.

  Senator Freemore had been in to tell him that bills would be introduced in both houses of Congress to implement emigration of the disadvantaged population (or such of them as might want to go) into prehistoric periods. Freemore, he said, wanted to know what period would be best.

  “Asa is on the line with us,” said Ben. “He can tell you about that.”

  “Okay,” said Courtney. “How about it, Asa?”

  “The Miocene,” I said.

  “What about Mastodonia? It would seem ideal to me.”

  “There’s not enough time span,” I told him. “If you are going to establish a human population sometime in the past, you have to be sure there is enough time margin so it doesn’t collide with the rise of the human race.”

  “Mastodonia is pretty far back, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s not. We’re only a little more than one hundred fifty thousand years back in time. You could go back three hundred thousand and still be in the Sangamon, but even that’s not far enough. There were men on Earth then, primitive men, but still men. We can’t afford a collision with them.”

  “But you and Rila?”

  “Just the two of us. We’re not going to introduce anyone else into the era. Just transitory people who come in to use the time roads. And there will be no men in America for at least a hundred thousand years.”

  “I see. And the Miocene? How far back is that?”

  “Twenty-five million years.”

  “You judge that’s deep enough into the past?”

  “It gives us better than twenty million years bef
ore there could be anything even resembling man. Twenty million years from now, when the first possible collision could take place, there probably will be no humans left on Earth. Either in our present time span or twenty million years into our past.”

  “You mean we’ll be extinct by that time.”

  “Extinct or gone somewhere else.”

  “Yes,” said Courtney, “I suppose so.”

  He waited for a moment, then asked, “Asa, why the Miocene? Why not earlier? Why not a little later?”

  “There’ll be grass in the Miocene. Grass like we have now, very similar to it. Grass is necessary if you are going to raise livestock. Also, grass makes possible the existence of wild game herds. It would be important for settlers to have game herds; in the early days of settlement, they would supply food. And in the Miocene, the climate would be better.”

  “How so?”

  “A long rain cycle would be coming to an end. The climate would be drier, but probably still sufficiently rainy for agriculture. The big forests that covered most of the land area would be dying out, giving way to grassland. Settlers wouldn’t have to clear forests to make farmland, but there’d still be plenty of wood for them to use. No really vicious animal life, or, at least, none that we know of. Nothing like the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous. Some titanotheres, giant pigs, early elephants, but nothing that a big rifle couldn’t handle.”

  “Okay, you’ve sold me. I’ll tell the senator. And Asa …”

  “Yes?”

  “What do you think of the idea? Of sending these people back?”

  “It wouldn’t work,” I said. “Not many of them would want to go. They’re not pioneers; they don’t want to be.”

  “You figure they’d rather stay right here, on welfare the rest of their lives? For that is what it amounts to. They’re in a poverty trap and they can’t get out.”

  “I think most of them would stay right here,” I said. “They know what they’re facing here. Back there, they wouldn’t know.”

  Courtney said, “I’m afraid you’re right. I was in hopes that if our injunction move fails, Freemore’s plan might bail us out—if it passes, that is.”

  “Don’t count on it,” I said.

  Courtney and Ben talked only a short time longer. There wasn’t much to talk about.

  As I sat there, listening to Ben’s parting words, I thought about the brightness of the promise that had so quickly darkened. A few weeks ago, it had seemed that nothing could interfere with us; we had the Safari contract, the movie deal was moving forward, and we were confident that other business would be shaping up. But now, unless Courtney could prevail against the State Department’s order, we were out of business.

  Personally, I did not mind too much—oh, of course, I wouldn’t have minded becoming a millionaire, but money and success in business never had mattered too much to me. For Rila, however, it was quite a different story, and while Ben said but little about it, I knew that it meant a lot to him as well. My disappointment, I realized, was not so much for what I had lost as for what the other two had lost.

  When I left Ben’s office, I went out into the orchard and found Catface there. We settled down to talk. He did most of the talking. This time, he told me about and showed me his home planet. It was an entirely different place than the headquarters planet, an outback world that had a poor economic basis. Its land was thin for farming, it had few natural resources, no great cities had arisen. Its people dragged out a dismal existence and they were different from Catface—definitely biological, although there was about them a puzzling ephemeral tendency, as if they hovered indecisively between groundlings and sprites.

  Catface must have sensed my surprise at this, for he said to me, “I was a freak. What would you call it? Perhaps a mutant. I was unlike the rest of them. I changed and they were puzzled at me and ashamed of me and perhaps even a little frightened of me. My beginning was unhappy.”

  His beginning—not his childhood, not his boyhood. I pondered over that.

  “But headquarters took you,” I said. “Perhaps that’s why they took you. They were on the lookout, probably, for people just like you—people who could change.”

  “I’m sure of it,” said Catface.

  “You say you are immortal. Were the other people of your home planet immortal as well?”

  “No, they were not. That is one of the measures of the differentness in me.”

  “Tell me, Catface, how do you know? How can you be sure that you are immortal?”

  “I know, that’s all,” said Catface. “I know inside of me.”

  Which was good enough, I thought. If he knew inside of him, he probably was right.

  I left him more puzzled than I had ever been before. Each time I talked with him, it seemed I grew more puzzled. For while I felt, for some strange reason, that I knew him more thoroughly than I’d ever known any other being, increasingly I sensed depths in him that seemed forever out of reach. I was puzzled, too, by the illogical feeling that I knew him well. I had talked with him, really talked with him, not more than a dozen’ times, and yet I had the impression that he was a lifelong friend. I knew things about him, I felt sure, that we had never talked about. I wondered if this could be attributed to the fact that on many occasions he had taken me inside of him, had made me, for a moment, one with him, in order that I might see with him certain concepts that he could not put in words I would understand. Was it possible that in these times of oneness with him I had absorbed some of his personality, becoming privy to thoughts and purposes that he may not have intended to convey?

  By now, most of the newspapermen and camera crews had deserted Willow Bend. Some days, there were none at all, then at times a few would show up and stay for a day or two. We were still occasionally in the news, but the magic had left us. Our story had run out.

  The tourists fell off. Usually, there were a few cars in Ben’s parking lot, but nothing like the number that once had been there. Ben’s motel now had vacancies—at times, a number of vacancies. Unless there was a turn in events, Ben stood to lose a lot of money. We still maintained the guards and turned on the floodlights at night, but this began to seem a little foolish. We were guarding something that perhaps no longer needed guarding. It was costing us a pile of money and we talked, off and on, of dismissing the guards and not turning on the lights. But we hesitated to do it—principally, I think, because doing it would seem an admission of defeat. As yet, we were not ready to give up.

  The debate on the emigration issue raged on in Congress. One side charged the proposal meant abandonment of the disadvantaged; the other side claimed it was a move to offer them the advantages of a fresh start in a new environment not subject to all the stresses of their present one. Arguments thundered over the economics of the issue—the cost of giving the emigrants a fresh start in a new and virgin land as opposed to the yearly cost of welfare. Welfare recipients now and then raised voices that were submerged in the din; no one listened to them. Newspapers published Sunday features and TV networks staged specials explaining and illustrating the situation that would be found in the Miocene. The capitol was picketed by contending groups of citizens.

  At Willow Bend, a few bands of cultists showed up. They carried banners and made speeches that favored abandonment of the present society and a retreat into the Miocene, or if not into the Miocene, into any place at all to get away from the callous injustices and inequities of the present system. They paraded back and forth in front of the gate and set up camp in Ben’s parking lot. Herb went out to talk with them. They didn’t stay long. There were no newspapermen to interview them, no photographers to take their pictures, no crowds to jeer them, no police to hassle them. So they went away.

  The two houses of Congress passed the emigration bill. The president vetoed it; it was passed over his veto. But the State Department ban still held.

  Then, the next day, the court made its decision. The ruling went against us. The injunction was denied; the ban on travel to Mastodonia st
ood and we were out of business.

  THIRTY-TWO

  A day later, the riots broke out. As if on signal (and perhaps on signal, for we never knew how they came about), the ghettos flared—in Washington, New York, Baltimore, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, the West Coast, everywhere. Mobs invaded the glittering downtown business areas and now, unlike the situation in 1968, it was not the ghettos that burned. The great plate-glass windows of the downtown stores were shattered, the stores were looted and fires were set. Police and, in some cases, the National Guard, fired on the rioters; the rioters fired back. The placards that said: GIVE US THE MIOCENE; that said: LET US GO; that said: WE WANT ANOTHER CHANCE, lay scattered in the streets, soaked in rain and, at times, stained with blood.

  It went on for five days. The dead, on both sides, ran into the thousands, and business came to a standstill. Then, at the end of the fifth day, the violence dwindled to a halt. The two sides, the side of law and order and the side of outraged protest, drew apart. Slowly, haltingly, fumblingly, the talks began.

  At Willow Bend, we were isolated. For the most part, intercontinental phone lines were out of order. The television stations, as a rule, continued in operation, although in a few instances, they, too, were silenced. We had one phone call from Courtney, but after that we heard nothing more from him. Attempts to reach him failed. In his one call, he had said that he was considering the possibility of appealing the court’s action, but there were some situations he would have to study first.

  Night after night, sometimes during the day, we gathered in Ben’s office and watched the television screen. At all times of the day or night, whenever there was a new bit of news about the riots, reports were put out, so that, in effect, television became an almost continuous news program.