She sat in the chair, unstirring while the cat slept on and the catbird screamed, feeling in her that strange sense of family that had driven her all these years and which, given this new development, might drive her further yet.
11. “So,” said the President, leaning back in his chair, “as we have it so far, the Earth some five hundred years from now is being attacked by beings from space. It is impossible for the people of that day to cope with them and their only recourse is to retreat back into the past. Is that a fairly accurate summary of what you’ve told us?”
Gale nodded. “Yes, sir, I would say it is.”
“But now that you are here—or a lot of you are here and more coming all the time—what happens now? Or have you had no opportunity to plan ahead?”
“We have plans,” said Gale, “but we will need some help.”
“What I want to know,” said the attorney general, “is why you came back to us. Why to this particular moment in time?”
“Because,” said Gale, “you have the technology that we need and the resources. We made a thorough historical survey and this particular time slot, give or take ten years, seemed to suit our purpose best.”
“What kind of technology are you thinking of?”
“A technology that is capable of fabricating other time machines. We have the plans and the specifications and the labor force. We will need materials and your forebearance.”
“But why time machines?”
“We do not intend to stay here,” said Gale. “It would be unfair to do so. It would put too great a strain on your economy. As it is we are putting a great strain upon it. But we could not stay up there in the future. I hope you understand that we had to leave.”
“Where will you be going?” asked the President.
“Deeper into time,” said Gale. “To the Mid-Miocene.”
“The Miocene?”
“A geological epoch. It began, roughly, some twenty-five million years ago, lasted for some twelve million years.”
“But why the Miocene? Why twenty-five million years? Why not ten million or fifty million or a hundred million?”
“There are a number of considerations,” said Gale. “We have tried to work it out as carefully as we can. The main reason is that grass first appeared in the Miocene. Paleontologists believe that grass appeared at the beginning of the period. They base their belief upon the development of high-crowned cheek-teeth in the herbivores of that time. Grass carries abrasive minerals and wears down the teeth. The development of high-crowned teeth that grew throughout the animal’s lifetime would be an answer to this. The teeth are the kind that one would expect to find in creatures that lived on grass. There is evidence, too, that during the Miocene more arid conditions came about, which led to the replacement of forests by extensive grass prairies that supported huge herds of grazing animals. This, say the paleontologists, began with the dawn of the Miocene, twenty-five million years ago, but we have chosen as our first target twenty million years into the past. The paleontologists’ timetable may be in error, although we do not believe it is.”
“If that is where you’re heading.” the attorney general asked, “Why are you stopping here? Your time tunnels, I assume—the ones you used to reach us—would have carried you that far.”
“That is true, sir. But we didn’t have the time. This move had to be made as rapidly as possible.”
“What has time to do with it?”
“We can’t go into the Miocene without implements and tools, with no seed stocks or agricultural animals. We have all those in our own time, of course, but it would have taken weeks to gather and transport them to the tunnel mouths. There was also the matter of capacity. Every tool or bag of seed or head of livestock would mean it would take longer to move the people. Given the time and without the pressure of the aliens we would have done it that way, going directly to the Miocene. But the logistics were impossible. The monsters knew something was going on and we knew that as soon as they found out what it was they would attack the tunnel heads. We felt we have to move as swiftly as we could to save as many people as we could. So we arrive here empty-handed.”
“You expect us to furnish you with all the things you need?”
“Reilly,” the President said quietly, “it seems to me you are being somewhat uncharitable. This is not a situation we asked for nor one that we expected, but it is one we have and we must deal with it as gracefully and as sensibly as we can. As a nation we have helped and still are helping other less favored peoples. It is a matter of foreign policy, of course, but it is also an old American tendency to hold out a helping hand. These people on our soil are, I would imagine our own descendants, hence native Americans, and it doesn’t seem to me that we should balk at doing for them what we have done for others.”
“If,” the attorney general pointed out, “any of this is true.”
“That is something,” the President agreed, “we must determine. I imagine that Mr. Gale would not expect us to accept what he has told us without further investigation when that is possible. There is one thing, Mr. Gale, that rather worries me. You say that you plan on going back to a time when grass has evolved. Do you intend going blind? What would happen if, when you got there, you found the paleontologists were mistaken about the grass—or that there were other circumstances that made it very difficult for you to settle?”
“We came here blind, of course,” said Gale. “But that was different. We had fairly good historic evidence. We knew what we would find. We can’t be as certain when we deal with time spans covering millions of years. But we think we have an answer fairly well worked out. Our physicists and other scientists have developed, at least theoretically, a means of communication through a time tunnel. We hope to be able to send through an advance party that can explore the situation and then report back to us.
“One thing I have not explained is that our travel capability is in one direction only. We can go into the past—we cannot move into the future. So, if any advance party is sent back and finds the situation untenable it has no recourse other than to stay there. Our great fear is that we may have to keep readjusting the destination of the tunnels and may have to send out—and abandon—several advance parties. Our people, gentlemen, are quite prepared to face such a situation. We have men guarding the tunnel heads who do not expect to travel through the tunnels. They are well aware that a time will come when each tunnel must be destroyed and that they and whoever else may not have made it through the tunnels must then face death.
“I don’t tell you this to enlist your sympathy. I only say it to assure you that whatever dangers there may be we are quite willing to face. We shall not call upon you for more than you are willing to give. We shall be grateful, of course, for anything that you may do.”
“Kindly as I may feel toward you,” said the secretary of state, “and much as I am disposed, short of a certain natural skepticism, to believe what you have told us, I am considerably puzzled by some of the implications. What is happening now, right here this minute, will become a matter of historical record. It stands to reason that it now becomes a part of history that is read in the future. So you knew before you started how this all came out. You would have had to know.”
“No,” said Gale, “we did not know. It was not in our history. It hadn’t, strange as it may sound to you, yet happened.”
“But it had,” said Sandburg. “It must have.”
“Now,” said Gale, “you are getting into an area that I do not myself understand—philosophical and physical concepts, strangely intertwined and so far as I am concerned, impossible of lay understanding. The point you have made is something that our scientific community gave much thought to. At first we asked ourselves if it lay within our right to change history, to go back into the past and introduce factors that would change the course of events. We wondered what effects such history-changing would have and what would happen to the history that we already have. But now we are told that it will have no eff
ect at all upon the history that already has been laid down. I know all this must sound impossible to you and I admit that I don’t fully understand all the factors myself. The human race passed this way once before, when our ancestors were moving toward their future and what is happening now did not happen then. So the human race moved into our time and the alien invaders came. Now we come back to escape the aliens and from this moment forward nothing will be quite as we understand our past. History has been changed, but not our history, not the history that led to the moment that we left. Your history has been changed. By our action you are on a new and different course. Whether on this second time track the aliens will attack we cannot be sure, but the indications are they will.”
“This,” said Douglas flatly, “is a lot of nonsense.”
“Believe me,” said Gale, “it is not intended as nonsense. The men who worked it out, who thought it through, are honorable and accomplished scholars.”
“This is nothing,” said the President, “that we can resolve at the moment. Since it is done, we can safely put it off until another day. After all, what’s done is done and we have to live with it. One more thing puzzles me.”
“Please say it, sir,” said Gale.
“Those twenty million years—why go back so far?”
“We want to go back far enough so that our occupation of that segment of Earth’s time cannot possibly have any impact on the rise of mankind. We probably will not be there too long. Our historians tell us that man, in his present state of technology, cannot look forward to more than a million years on Earth, perhaps much less than that. In a million years, in far less than a million years, we’ll all be gone from Earth. Once man can leave the Earth he probably will leave it. Give him a million years and he surely will be gone.”
“But you will have impact in the Miocene,” Williams pointed out. “You’ll use up natural resources.”
“Some iron. Not enough for the amount to be noticed. So little is left where we came from that we know how to be frugal.”
“You’ll need energy.”
“We have fusion power,” said Gale. “Our economy would be a great shock to you. We make things to last. Not for ten years or twenty, but for centuries. Obsolescence no longer is a factor in our economy. As a result our manufacturing is less than one per cent of what yours is today.”
“That’s impossible,” said Sandburg.
“By your present standards, perhaps,” admitted Gale. “Not by ours. We had to change our life style. We simply had no choice. Centuries of overuse of natural resources left us impoverished. We had to do with what we had. We had to find ways in which to do it.”
“If what you say about man’s remaining on Earth for no longer than another million years is true,” said the President, “I don’t quite understand why you have to travel back the twenty million. You could go back only five and it would be quite all right.”
Gale shook his head. “We’d be getting too close, then, to the forerunners of mankind. True, man as we recognize him, rose no more than two million years ago, but the first primates came into being some seventy million years ago. We’ll be intruding on those first primates, of course, but perhaps with no great impact. And it would be impossible for us to miss them, for to go beyond them would place us in the era of the dinosaurs, which would not be a comfortable time period. Not just because of the dinosaurs alone. The critical period for mankind, the appearance of the forerunners of the australopithecines, could not have been later than fifteen million years ago. We can’t be certain of these figures. Most of our anthropologists believe that if we went back only ten million it probably would be safe enough. But we want to be sure. And there is no reason why we can’t go deeper into time. So, the twenty million. And there is another thing—we want to leave room enough for you.”
Douglas leaped to his feet. “For us?”
The President raised a restraining hand. “Wait a minute, Reilly. Let’s have the rest of it.”
“It makes good sense,” said Gale, “or we think it does. Consider this—just five hundred years ahead lies the invasion of Earth from space. Yes, I know, because of the new course of events our arrival in your time has created the attack may not happen, but our scholars think it will—they’re almost sure it will. So why should you move forward to meet it? Why not go back with us? You’ve got a five-hundred-year margin. You could make use of it. You could go back, not in a hurry as we’ll be going, but over the course of a number of years. Why not leave Earth empty and go back to make a new beginning? It would be a fresh start for the human race. New lands to develop—”
“This is sheer insanity!” shouted Douglas. “If we, your ancestors, left, you wouldn’t be here to start with and—”
“You’re forgetting what he explained to us,” said Williams, “about a different time track.”
Douglas sat down. “I wash my hands of it,” he said. “I’ll have no more to do with it.”
“We couldn’t go back with you,” said Sandburg. “There are too many of us.”
“Not with us. Like us. Together there would be far too many of us. There are too many of you now. Here is the chance, if you will take it, to reduce your population to more acceptable numbers. We go back twenty million years. Half of you go back nineteen million years, the other eighteen million years. Each group of us would be separated by a million years. We wouldn’t interfere with one another.”
“There is one drawback,” said Williams. “We wouldn’t be like you. We would have a disastrous impact on the resources of whatever period we inhabited. We’d use up whatever fuels and iron—”
“Not,” said Gale, “if you had our philosophy, our viewpoint and our technologies.”
“You would give these things to us?”
“If you were going back,” said Gale, “we would insist on it.”
The President rose. “I think,” he said, “we have reached a point where we must stop. There are things to be done. We thank you, Mr. Gale, for coming to us and bringing along your lovely daughter. I wonder if we might have the privilege—later—of talking further with you.”
“Certainly,” said Gale. “It would be a pleasure. There are others of us whom you should be talking with, men and women who know far more than I do about many aspects of the situation.”
“Would it be agreeable to the two of you,” asked the President, “to be my house guests? I’d be glad to put you up.”
Alice Gale spoke for the first time. She clapped her hands together, delighted. “You mean here in the White House?”
The President smiled. “Yes, my dear, in the White House. We’d be very glad to have you.”
“You must pardon her,” her father said. “It happens that the White House is a special interest of hers. She has studied it. She has read everything about it she can lay her hands on. Its history and its architecture, everything about it.”
“Which,” said the President, “is a great compliment to us.”
12. The people were still marching from the door, but now military policemen were there to direct them and to keep the mouth of the tunnel free for those who pressed on from behind. Other soldiers held back the crowds of curious sightseers who had flocked into the area. A bullhorn voice bawled out directions and when the bullhorn fell silent, the tinny chatter of a radio could be heard from one of the hundreds of cars parked up and down the street. Some were against the curb—others, in a fine display of the disrespect of property, had pulled up on lawns. Military trucks and personnel carriers trundled down the street, halted long enough to take on a load of refugees, roared off. But the people came out of the tunnel faster than the trucks could cart them away and the great mass of people kept pushing outward.
Lieutenant Andrew Shelby spoke into his phone. “We ain’t more than making a dent in them, Major Bums. Christ, I never saw so many people. It would be easier if we could get some of the sightseers out of the area. They don’t want to leave and we haven’t got the manpower to make them. We’ve closed
off all civilian traffic to the area and. the radio has been asking people not to come out here, but they are still coming or are trying to come and the roads are clogged. I hate to think of what it will be like once it gets dark. How about them engineers who were supposed to come out here and put up some floodlights?”
“They’re on their way,” said Burns. “Hang in there, Andy, and do every ting you can. We got to get those people out of there.”
“I need more carriers,” the lieutenant said.
“I’m feeding them in,” the major told him, “as fast as I can lay my hands on them. And another thing—there’ll be a gun crew coming out.”
“We don’t need no gun. What we need a gun for?”
“I don’t know,” the major said. “All I know it is on its way. No one told me what it was coming for.”
13. “You can’t honestly believe this story,” Douglas protested. “It’s too preposterous to admit of any credence. I tell you, we’ve been had.”
Williams said quietly, “So are all these people coming out of the time tunnels preposterous. There has to be some explanation of them. Gale’s may be a bit fantastic, but it holds together in a sort of zany fashion. I admit I have some difficulty—”
“And his credentials,” the attorney general pointed out. “Identification rather than credentials. Ombudsman for the Washington community, a social service worker of some kind. No connection with any governmental unit—”
The Complete Serials Page 141