Dusty Zebra: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  “Please tell me, sir,” interrupted the secretary, “just where are you located?”

  “Technically, you are our nearest neighbors.”

  “But that is ridiculous!” exploded Protocol.

  “Not at all,” insisted Hudson. “If you will give me a moment, Mr. Secretary, I have considerable evidence.”

  He brushed the fingers of Protocol off his sleeve and stepped forward to the desk, laying down the portfolio he carried.

  “Go ahead, Mr. Hudson,” said the secretary. “Why don’t we all sit down and be comfortable while we talk this over?”

  “You have my credentials, I see. Now here is a propos—”

  “I have a document signed by a certain Wesley Adams.”

  “He’s our first president,” said Hudson. “Our George Washington, you might say.”

  “What is the purpose of this visit, Mr. Hudson?”

  “We’d like to establish diplomatic relations. We think it would be to our mutual benefit. After all, we are a sister republic in perfect sympathy with your policies and aims. We’d like to negotiate trade agreements and we’d be grateful for some Point Four aid.”

  The secretary smiled. “Naturally. Who doesn’t?”

  “We’re prepared to offer something in return,” Hudson told him stiffly. “For one thing, we could offer sanctuary.”

  “Sanctuary!”

  “I understand,” said Hudson, “that in the present state of international tensions, a foolproof sanctuary is not something to be sneezed at.”

  The secretary turned stone cold. “I’m an extremely busy man.”

  Protocol took Hudson firmly by the arm. “Out you go.”

  General Leslie Bowers put in a call to State and got the secretary.

  “I don’t like to bother you, Herb,” he said, “but there’s something I want to check. Maybe you can help me.”

  “Glad to help you if I can.”

  “There’s a fellow hanging around out here at the Pentagon, trying to get in to see me. Said I was the only one he’d talk to, but you know how it is.”

  “I certainly do.”

  “Name of Huston or Hudson or something like that.”

  “He was here just an hour or so ago,” said the secretary. “Crackpot sort of fellow.”

  “He’s gone now?”

  “Yes. I don’t think he’ll be back.”

  “Did he say where you could reach him?”

  “No, I don’t believe he did.”

  “How did he strike you? I mean what kind of impression did you get of him?”

  “I told you. A crackpot.”

  “I suppose he is. He said something to one of the colonels that got me worrying. Can’t pass up anything, you know—not in the Dirty Tricks Department. Even if it’s crackpot, these days you got to have a look at it.”

  “He offered sanctuary,” said the secretary indignantly. “Can you imagine that!”

  “He’s been making the rounds, I guess,” the general said. “He was over at AEC. Told them some sort of tale about knowing where there were vast uranium deposits. It was the AEC that told me he was heading your way.”

  “We get them all the time. Usually we can ease them out. This Hudson was just a little better than the most of them. He got in to see me.”

  “He told the colonel something about having a plan that would enable us to establish secret bases anywhere we wished, even in the territory of potential enemies. I know it sounds crazy….”

  “Forget it, Les.”

  “You’re probably right,” said the general, “but this idea sends me. Can you imagine the look on their Iron Curtain faces?”

  The scared little government clerk, darting conspiratorial glances all about him, brought the portfolio to the FBI.

  “I found it in a bar down the street,” he told the man who took him in tow. “Been going there for years. And I found this portfolio laying in the booth. I saw the man who must have left it there and I tried to find him later, but I couldn’t.”

  “How do you know he left it there?”

  “I just figured he did. He left the booth just as I came in and it was sort of dark in there and it took a minute to see this thing laying there. You see, I always take the same booth every day and Joe sees me come in and he brings me the usual and—”

  “You saw this man leave the booth you usually sit in?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then you saw the portfolio.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You tried to find the man, thinking it must have been his.”

  “That’s exactly what I did.”

  “But by the time you went to look for him, he had disappeared.”

  “That’s the way it was.”

  “Now tell me—why did you bring it here? Why didn’t you turn it in to the management so the man could come back and claim it?”

  “Well, sir, it was like this. I had a drink or two and I was wondering all the time what was in that portfolio. So finally I took a peek and—”

  “And what you saw decided you to bring it here to us.”

  “That’s right. I saw—”

  “Don’t tell me what you saw. Give me your name and address and don’t say anything about this. You understand that we’re grateful to you for thinking of us, but we’d rather you said nothing.”

  “Mum’s the word,” the little clerk assured him, full of vast importance.

  The FBI phoned Dr. Ambrose Amberly, Smithsonian expert on paleontology.

  “We’ve got something, Doctor, that we’d like you to have a look at. A lot of movie film.”

  “I’ll be most happy to. I’ll come down as soon as I get clear. End of the week, perhaps?”

  “This is very urgent, Doctor. Damnest thing you ever saw. Big, shaggy elephants and tigers with teeth down to their necks. There’s a beaver the size of a bear.”

  “Fakes,” said Amberly, disgusted. “Clever gadgets. Camera angles.”

  “That’s what we thought first, but there are no gadgets, no camera angles. This is the real McCoy.”

  “I’m on my way,” the paleontologist said, hanging up.

  Snide item in smug, smart-aleck gossip column: Saucers are passé at the Pentagon. There’s another mystery that’s got the high brass very high.

  II

  President Wesley Adams and Secretary of State John Cooper sat glumly under a tree in the capital of Mastodonia and waited for the ambassador extraordinary to return.

  “I tell you, Wes,” said Cooper, who, under various pseudonyms, was also the secretaries of commerce, treasury and war, “this is a crazy thing we did. What if Chuck can’t get back? They might throw him in jail or something might happen to the time unit or the helicopter. We should have gone along.”

  “We had to stay,” Adams said. “You know what would happen to this camp and our supplies if we weren’t around here to guard them.”

  “The only thing that’s given us any trouble is that old mastodon. If he comes around again, I’m going to take a skillet and bang him in the brisket.”

  “That isn’t the only reason, either,” said President Adams, “and you know it. We can’t go deserting this nation now that we’ve created it. We have to keep possession. Just planting a flag and saying it’s ours wouldn’t be enough. We might be called upon for proof that we’ve established residence. Something like the old homestead laws, you know.”

  “We’ll establish residence sure enough,” growled Secretary Cooper, “if something happens to that time unit or the helicopter.”

  “You think they’ll do it, Johnny?”

  “Who do what?”

  “The United States. Do you think they’ll recognize us?”

  “Not if they know who we are.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
<
br />   “Chuck will talk them into it. He can talk the skin right off a cat.”

  “Sometimes I think we’re going at this wrong. Sure, Chuck’s got the long-range view and I suppose it’s best. But maybe what we ought to do is grab a good, fast profit and get out of here. We could take in hunting parties at ten thousand a head or maybe we could lease it to a movie company.”

  “We can do all that and do it legally and with full protection,” Cooper told him, “if we can get ourselves recognized as a sovereign nation. If we negotiate a mutual defense pact, no one would dare get hostile because we could squawk to Uncle Sam.”

  “All you say is true,” Adams agreed, “but there are going to be questions. It isn’t just a matter of walking into Washington and getting recognition. They’ll want to know about us, such as our population. What if Chuck has to tell them it’s a total of three persons?”

  Cooper shook his head. “He wouldn’t answer that way, Wes. He’d duck the question or give them some diplomatic double-talk. After all, how can we be sure there are only three of us? We took over the whole continent, remember.”

  “You know well enough, Johnny, there are no other humans back here in North America. The farthest back any scientist will place the migrations from Asia is 30,000 years. They haven’t got here yet.”

  “Maybe we should have done it differently,” mused Cooper. “Maybe we should have included the whole world in our proclamation, not just the continent. That way, we could claim quite a population.”

  “It wouldn’t have held water. Even as it is, we went a little further than precedent allows. The old explorers usually laid claim to certain watersheds. They’d find a river and lay claim to all the territory drained by the river. They didn’t go grabbing off whole continents.”

  “That’s because they were never sure of exactly what they had,” said Cooper. “We are. We have what you might call the advantage of hindsight.”

  He leaned back against the tree and stared across the land. It was a pretty place, he thought—the rolling ridges covered by vast grazing areas and small groves, the forest-covered, ten-mile river valley. And everywhere one looked, the grazing herds of mastodon, giant bison and wild horses, with the less gregarious fauna scattered hit and miss.

  Old Buster, the troublesome mastodon, a lone bull which had been probably run out of a herd by a younger rival, stood at the edge of a grove a quarter-mile away. He had his head down and was curling and uncurling his trunk in an aimless sort of way while he teetered slowly in a lazy-crazy fashion by lifting first one foot and then another.

  The old cuss was lonely, Cooper told himself. That was why he hung around like a homeless dog—except that he was too big and awkward to have much pet-appeal and, more than likely, his temper was unstable.

  The afternoon sun was pleasantly warm and the air, it seemed to Cooper, was the freshest he had ever smelled. It was, altogether, a very pleasant place, an Indian-summer sort of land, ideal for a Sunday picnic or a camping trip.

  The breeze was just enough to float out from its flagstaff before the tent the national banner of Mastodonia—a red rampant mastodon upon a field of green ferns.

  “You know, Johnny,” said Adams, “there’s one thing that worries me a lot. If we’re going to base our claim on precedent, we may be way off base. The old explorers always claimed their discoveries for their nations or their king, never for themselves.”

  “The principle was entirely different,” Cooper told him. “Nobody ever did anything for himself in those days. Everyone was always under someone else’s protection. The explorers either were financed by their governments or were sponsored by them or operated under a royal charter or a patent. With us, it’s different. Ours is a private enterprise. You dreamed up the time unit and built it. The three of us chipped in to buy the helicopter. We’ve paid all of our expenses out of our own pockets. We never got a dime from anyone. We never represented anyone. What we found is ours.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said Adams uneasily.

  Old Buster had moved out from the grove and was shuffling warily toward the camp. Adams picked up the rifle that lay across his knees.

  “Wait,” said Cooper sharply. “Maybe he’s just bluffing. It would be a shame to plaster him; he’s such a nice old guy.”

  Adams half raised the rifle.

  “I’ll give him three steps more,” he announced. “I’ve had enough of him.”

  Suddenly a roar burst out of the air just above their heads. The two leaped to their feet.

  “It’s Chuck!” Cooper yelled. “He’s back!”

  The helicopter made a half-turn of the camp and came rapidly to Earth.

  Trumpeting with terror, Old Buster was a dwindling dot far down the grassy ridge.

  III

  They built the nightly fires circling the camp to keep out the animals.

  “It’ll be the death of me yet,” said Adams wearily, “cutting all this wood.”

  “We have to get to work on that stockade,” Cooper said. “We’ve fooled around too long. Some night, fire or no fire, a herd of mastodon will come busting in here and if they ever hit the helicopter, we’ll be dead ducks. It wouldn’t take more than just five seconds to turn us into Robinson Crusoes of the Pleistocene.”

  “Well, now that this recognition thing has petered out on us,” said Adams, “maybe we can get down to business.”

  “Trouble is,” Cooper answered, “we spent about the last of our money on the chain saw to cut this wood and on Chuck’s trip to Washington. To build a stockade, we need a tractor. We’d kill ourselves if we tried to rassle that many logs bare-handed.”

  “Maybe we could catch some of those horses running around out there.”

  “Have you ever broken a horse?”

  “No, that’s one thing I never tried.”

  “Me, either. How about you, Chuck?”

  “Not me,” said the ex-ambassador extraordinary bluntly.

  Cooper squatted down beside the coals of the cooking fire and twirled the spit. Upon the spit were three grouse and half a dozen quail. The huge coffee pot was sending out a nose-tingling aroma. Biscuits were baking in the reflector.

  “We’ve been here six weeks,” he said, “and we’re still living in a tent and cooking on an open fire. We better get busy and get something done.”

  “The stockade first,” said Adams, “and that means a tractor.”

  “We could use the helicopter.”

  “Do you want to take the chance? That’s our getaway. Once something happens to it…”

  “I guess not,” Cooper admitted, gulping.

  “We could use some of that Point Four aid right now,” commented Adams.

  “They threw me out,” said Hudson. “Everywhere I went, sooner or later they got around to throwing me out. They were real organized about it.”

  “Well, we tried,” Adams said.

  “And to top it off,” added Hudson, “I had to go and lose all that film and now we’ll have to waste our time taking more of it. Personally, I don’t ever want to let another saber-tooth get that close to me while I hold the camera.”

  “You didn’t have a thing to worry about,” Adams objected. “Johnny was right there behind you with the gun.”

  “Yeah, with the muzzle about a foot from my head when he let go.”

  “I stopped him, didn’t I?” demanded Cooper.

  “With his head right in my lap.”

  “Maybe we won’t have to take any more pictures,” Adams suggested.

  “We’ll have to,” Cooper said. “There are sportsmen up ahead who’d fork over ten thousand bucks easy for two weeks of hunting here. But before we could sell them on it, we’d have to show them movies. That scene with the saber-tooth would cinch it.”

  “If it didn’t scare them off,” Hudson pointed out. “The last few feet showed nothing
but the inside of his throat.”

  Ex-ambassador Hudson looked unhappy. “I don’t like the whole setup. As soon as we bring someone in, the news is sure to leak. And once the word gets out, there’ll be guys lying in ambush for us—maybe even nations—scheming to steal the know-how, legally or violently. That’s what scares me the most about those films I lost. Someone will find them and they may guess what it’s all about, but I’m hoping they either won’t believe it or can’t manage to trace us.”

  “We could swear the hunting parties to secrecy,” said Cooper.

  “How could a sportsman keep still about the mounted head of a saber-tooth or a record piece of ivory? And the same thing would apply to anyone we approached. Some university could raise dough to send a team of scientists back here and a movie company would cough up plenty to use this place as a location for a caveman epic. But it wouldn’t be worth a thing to either of them if they couldn’t tell about it.

  “Now if we could have gotten recognition as a nation, we’d have been all set. We could make our own laws and regulations and be able to enforce them. We could bring in settlers and establish trade. We could exploit our natural resources. It would all be legal and aboveboard. We could tell who we were and where we were and what we had to offer.”

  “We aren’t licked yet,” said Adams. “There’s a lot that we can do. Those river hills are covered with ginseng. We can each dig a dozen pounds a day. There’s good money in the root.”

  “Ginseng root,” Cooper said, “is peanuts. We need big money.”

  “Or we could trap,” offered Adams. “The place is alive with beaver.”

  “Have you taken a good look at those beaver? They’re about the size of a St. Bernard.”

  “All the better. Think how much just one pelt would bring.”

  “No dealer would believe that it was beaver. He’d think you were trying to pull a fast one on him. And there are only a few states that allow beaver to be trapped. To sell the pelts—even if you could—you’d have to take out licenses in each of those states.”