“You face a busy day, Mr. President,” said Foote. “If there is nothing further you wish from us—”
The President rose and came around the desk. He shook both his visitors by the hand. “Thanks for coming by,” he said, “This is something we must get busy on immediately.”
Wilson stood up to leave. “Do I call in the press immediately?” he asked. “Or should I wait until after you have talked with Sandburg?”
The President hesitated, considering. “I should think right away,” he said. “I’d like us to be the first to tell them. The military has the lid clamped down, but it won’t stay clamped for long. Some of the people from the Hill are coming in to see me. It would be better if they knew about this before they arrived.”
“There’s another matter, said Wilson. “You were asleep and I didn’t want to wake you. There’s a dispatch case full of diamonds—”
“Diamonds? What have diamonds got to dowith this?”
“It’s a rather awkward business, sir,” said Wilson. “You recall that case Gale was carrying—”
“There were diamonds in that case?”
“It was packed with sacks. He opened one sack and poured out diamonds on the desk. He told me the rest of the sacks also contained diamonds and I’m inclined to believe him. The refugees had the idea they could turn them over to us to pay whatever was laid out to send them back to the Miocene.”
“I would like to have seen your face,” Henderson said, “when he poured out the diamonds. What, may I ask, did you do about it?”
“I called in Jerry Black and put Gale under guard. I insisted he keep the diamonds.”
“I guess that was all you could do. I think maybe I should call in the treasury people to take temporary custody and check with Reilly Douglas about the legality of all this. Did you get any idea how much the diamonds might be worth?”
“Gale said, at present prices, perhaps billions of dollars. That is, if they can be fed into retail outlets slowly, without depressing the market. They’re not, you understand, for us alone, but for the entire world. Gale wants to leave them with us in trust as it were.”
“You realize, of course, how sticky this could be if word leaked out?”
“To be entirely fair,” said Wilson, “we still must realize that they are only trying to be helpful. They want to pay their way.”
“Yes, I know,” said the President. “We’ll have to see what Reilly says about it.”
33. The crowd had been gathering in Lafayette Park across the avenue from the White House since early morning. It was still the quiet and watchful group that had stood the Sunday vigil, stolid in its watchfulness. But now there were a few placards and there had been none before. One of the placards, crudely lettered, read: back to the Miocene. Another read: BRING YOUR SABERTOOTHS. Still another: LET US LEAVE THIS LOUSY WORLD.
A newsman pushed his way through the crowd, zeroing in on the whiskered youth who bore the BACK TO THE MIOCENE placard.
“Would you mind telling me,” he asked, “what is going on?”
“Man,” said the youth, impatiently, “it is there for you to read. It says it loud and clear.”
“It puzzles me,” said the newsman, “what you are trying to prove. Or don’t you have a point to make?”
“No points this time,” the sign-carrier told him. “In the past we have tried to prove some points and have mostly gotten nowhere.” He made a thumb in the direction of the White House. “The man don’t listen too good. No one listens too good.”
“This time,” said a girl who stood beside the sign-carrier, “we’re not proving anything at all. We’re simply saying what we want to do and that’s go back to the Miocene.”
“Or the Eocene,”-said another girl. “Or the Paleocene. Just anywhere at all to get away from this scruffy place. We want to leave this crummy world and get another start. We want to go back and build the kind of world we want. We’ve been trying for years to change this society and we’ve gotten exactly nowhere. And when we saw we couldn’t change it we tried to get out of it. That’s what the communes are all about. But the society won’t let us go. It reaches out and hauls us back. It will not let us go.”
“Finally,” said the sign-carrier, “here’s a way to get shut of it. If these people from the future can travel to the past there’s no reason why we shouldn’t. There aren’t many people who would be sorry to see us go. Most of them would be glad.”
“I suppose,” said the newsman, “that this could be called a movement. Most of the other things you people have done have been labeled movements. Would you mind telling me how many of you—”
“Not at all,” said the first girl. “Not more than Fifteen or twenty of us now. But you write your story and let us get a news spot on television and there’ll be thousands of us. They’ll be coming from Chicago and New York, from Boston and Los Angeles. There’ll be more of us than this town can hold. Because, you see, this is the first real chance we’ve had to get away.”
“That’s all right,” the newsman said. “I can see your point. But how do you go about it? Storm across the street and pound on the White House door?”
“If you mean,” said the sign-carrier, “that no one will pay attention to us, you may be right. But twenty-four hours from now they’ll pay attention to us„ Forty-eight hours from now they’ll be out here in the street talking with us.”
“But you realize, of course, there are no time tunnels yet. There may never be. Those will take materials and manpower.”
“They got their manpower right here, mister. All anyone has got to do is ask. Hand us picks and shovels. Hand us wrenches. Hand us anything at all and tell us what to do. We’ll work until we drop. We’ll do anything to get away from here. We don’t want any pay for working—we don’t want anything at all except to be allowed to go.”
“You tell them that,” said the second girl. “You put it just the way we say.”
“We’re not out to kick up any trouble,” said the sign-carrier. “We don’t want to cause any fuss. We just want to let them know. This is the only way we can.”
“We won’t ask anything if they’ll only let us leave,” said the first girl. “We would like some hoes and axes, maybe some pots and pans. But if they won’t give us anything we’ll go empty-handed.”
“Prehistoric men. made out with stone,” said the sign-carrier. “If we have to we can do the same.”
“Why stand there listening to them?” asked a burly individual with a cigar stuck in his mouth. “Hell, all they do is talk. They all are full, of crap. They don’t want to go anywhere. They just want to stir up trouble.”
“You’re wrong,” said the man with the sign. “We mean exactly what we say. What makes you think we want to stay here with jerks like you?”
The man with the cigar made a grab at the sign and one of the girls kicked him in the shin. His reaching fingers missed the sign. The carrier clunked him on the head with it. A man who had been standing beside the man with the cigar hit the sign-carrier on the jaw.
The scuffle exploded and the police came in and broke it up.
34. Judy was at her desk. Notes were beginning to accumulate on the spindle. The lights on the console were blinking.
“You get any sleep?” asked Wilson.
She looked up at him. “A little.
I lay awake thinking, scared. It’s not good, is it, Steve?”
“Not good,” he said. “It’s too big for us to handle. If it weren’t for the time element it wouldn’t be so bad. If we only had a little time.”
She gestured toward the door leading to the lounge. “You won’t tell them that, will you?”
He grinned. “No, I won’t tell them that.”
“They’ve been asking when you’re going to see them.”
“Fairly soon,” he said.
“I might as well tell you,” she said. “No use waiting. I’m going home. Back to Ohio.”
“But I need you here.”
“You can get a girl from the
secretarial pool. Couple of days and you won’t know the difference.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I know what you mean. You need me to shack up with. It’s been like that for how long—six months? It’s this damn town. It makes everything dirty. Somewhere else it might have worked for us. But it isn’t working here.”
“Damn it, Judy,” he said, “what’s got into you? Because I didn’t come out last night—”
“Partly that, perhaps. Not all that, of course. I know why you had to stay. But it was so lonely and so many things had happened and I sat there thinking and got scared. I tried to call my mother and the lines were busy. A poor scared girl, for Christ’s sake, running back to mama. But suddenly everything was different. I wasn’t a sleek, competent Washington hussy any longer—I was a kid in pigtails in a little town deep in Ohio. It all started with my getting scared. Tell me honestly now—I had a right to be scared.”
“You had a right,” he said soberly. “I’m scared myself. So is everyone.”
“What’s going to happen to us?”
“Damned if I know. But that isn’t what we were talking about.”
“Monsters running loose,” she said. “Too many mouths to feed. Everyone fighting one another or getting set to fight.”
“We were talking about your going to Ohio. I’m not going to ask you do you really mean it—because I know you do. I suppose you’re lucky to have a place to run to. Most of us have no place. I’d like to ask you to stay, but that would be unfair. What’s more, it would be selfish. But I still wish you would.”
“I have a plane reservation,” she said. “With the phone tied up and all I was surprised to get one. The country’s in a panic. In a time like this you get that terribly helpless feeling.”
“You won’t like Ohio. Once you get there you won’t like it. If you’re scared in Washington, you’ll be scared in Ohio.”
“I still am going, Steve. Come six-fifteen tonight I’ll be on that plane.”
“There’s nothing I can say?”
“There’s nothing you can say,” she said.
“Then you’d better let the press in. I have some news for them.”
35. Senator Andrew Oakes hitched himself up slightly from the depths of the chair. “I’m not right sure, Mr. President,” he said, “that it’s wise to bring home all the troops. We need to keep our bases manned. And it seems to me we’re allowing ourselves to get flustered just a mite too soon. Some itty-bitty monsters raid a chicken coop out in West Virginia and we start bringing home the troops. It don’t scarcely seem right. And I’m not sure it was too smart, either, to tell the newsmen about these little monsters. We’ll get the country all up tight.”
“Senator,” said Congressman Nelson Able, “I think you may have gotten your protocol somewhat twisted. We were not invited here to decide whether the troops were to be brought back home, but rather to learn that they were being brought back and to be told the reason for it.”
“I still believe, said Senator Oakes, “that President Henderson would want to know our thoughts. He might not agree with them, but I think that he should hear them.
“That’s right, Andy,” said the President. “You know that through the years I have listened to you often and almost as often have been fascinated by what you had to say. Which is not to say I agreed with you. Most commonly I don’t.”
“I am well aware of that,” said Oakes, “but it has not stopped me from saying what I think. And I think it’s plain damn foolishness to fly back the troops. It’s not going to take the total strength of our military might to run down some little chicken-killing monsters.”
“I think the point has been made,” said Senator Brian Dixon, “that the monsters will not stay little monsters. The only sensible way for us to tackle them is to run them down before there get to be any more of them and before they have a chance to grow.”
“But how do we know,” persisted Oakes, “that they will really grow or increase in numbers? We’re taking the word of people who came scurrying back to us because they couldn’t face them. And they couldn’t face them because they had let down their guard. They had no military and they had no weapons—”
“Now, just a minute, Senator,” protested Congressman Able. “It’s all right for you to make your military speeches up on the Hill. You get a good press there and can impress the public. .But this is just among ourselves. We won’t be impressed.”
“Gentlemen,” Henderson said, “as I see it, this is all beside the point. With all due deference to the Senator, the military will be brought back home. It will be brought home because the secretary of defense and the chiefs of staff have told me the forces are needed here. We discussed matters very thoroughly earlier in the day. The feeling was that we cannot take the chance of anything going wrong. We may be aiming at overkill, but that is better than negligence. It may be true that we have been given poor information by the people from the future, but I am not inclined to think so. They have faced the monsters for twenty years and it seems to me that they would know far more of them than we do. I have talked with members of the Academy of Sciences and they tell me that while the characteristics attributed to this life form may be unusual they do not go contrary to any established biological rule. So I don’t think you can say there has been any lack of responsibility in the reaching of our decisions. Because of the press of circumstances we have moved faster than we ordinarily would, but we simply haven’t got the time to go at any of this with due deliberation.”
Oakes did not reply, but settled back in his chair, grunting softly to himself.
“There was a report of a monster loose in the Congo,” said Congressman Wayne Smith. “Have you, sir, any further information?”
“None,” Henderson said. “We can’t be sure one did get through. The reports are unreliable.”
“There has been no request for aid to hunt it down?”
“No request,” said the President. “Nothing official at all.”
“How about the tunnels, sir? The news reports seem to be in some conflict. Some of them, we know, have closed, but I can’t seem to get a clear idea of what is going on.”
“You probably know as much as we do here, Wayne. Here at home the Virginia tunnel is closed, of course. Two more were closed without our intervention—one in Wisconsin, the other down in Texas. I suppose those were shut down by the people in the future when the monsters were moving too close. Either that or there were malfunctions. Otherwise all the tunnels in the United States still are operating.”
“Would you think that the two you mentioned as closing may have done so because all the people had come through? There has to be an end to all these people some time.”
“We know the Wisconsin tunnel closed because of an attack at the other end. The last of the people who came through told us that. I don’t know about the Texas closing. But as to the implied question of all the people having come through—yes, I would hope that soon the tunnels would start closing because they’ve done their job.”
“Mr. President,” asked Senator Dixon, “what do you know about the practical side of tunnel building? Can we build the tunnels so the people can go back into the past?”
“I am told we can,” said the President. “Our physicists and engineers are working with refugee scientists and engineers right now. The refugees have picked out the sites where the tunnels should be built. One encouraging feature is that not as many tunnels need be built as were used in bringing these people here. There isn’t the immediate time pressure to get them all back into the Miocene. Also, as I understand it, transportation can be used to get the people to tunnels several hundred miles away. The one problem is getting some tunnels built and the people moving out before the refugees eat us out of house and home.”
“The construction of the tunnels, then, isn’t beyond our capability? All we need is time, money and labor.”
“That is right, Brian. Labor is no problem. The refugees represent a huge and
willing labor force and just an hour or so ago I had word from Terry Roberts that our labor people will raise no objection to our using them on what must be viewed as a federal project. Terry assures me that unions will cooperate in every way. Money is a problem. Even should industry be as willing to go along with us as labor is a vast amount of retooling will be necessary before we can start fabricating the components for the tunnels. Ordinarily retooling is a time-consuming process and a costly one. The fact that we must get at it immediately and around the clock makes it expensive beyond anything that can be imagined. Next, the components themselves will be costly items. And the brunt of the work must be borne by the predominantly industrial nations. We, Germany, Russia, France, Britain, China, Japan and a few others must build the components—not only for ourselves but for the rest of the world. And we must build enough tunnels for there to be a fairly consistent regional distribution when they go back to the Miocene. While the population of the future is not as great as ours, it still must be scattered. The building of a new civilization in the past would be defeated if we dumped too many people in one area. And we must also furnish the refugees with the tools, livestock and seed they will need to make a new beginning. Furnishing the tools is going to call for a significant industrial capacity.”
“Have you talked with anyone in the industrial community?”
“Not personally. Commerce is making some tentative approaches to see what sort of reaction is forthcoming. I have no word as yet. But it seems to me there should be some positive reaction. I should be disappointed if there weren’t.”
Oakes hunched up out of his chair. “Have you any idea yet, Mr.
President, what all of this might cost? Any good round figure?”
“No,” Henderson said, “I haven’t.”
“But it’s going to be costly.”
“It is going to be costly.”
“Maybe a great deal more than the defense budget, which everyone seems so horrified about.”
“You want me to say it, of course—” Henderson smiled—“so I will. Yes, it is going to be more costly than the defense budget, many times more costly. It will be even more costly than a war. It may bankrupt the world—but what would you have us do? Go out and shoot down all the refugees? That would solve the problem. Is that a solution you would like?”
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