Mastodonia

by Clifford D. Simak

  “I suppose,” I said, “they want proof just like your old friend Courtney.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “And the funny thing about it is that all they’re interested in are dinosaurs. They fairly drooled when I asked them if they could get clients to go hunting dinosaurs. Not mastodon, not mammoth, not sabertooth cats, not cave bears, nor even titanotheres, but dinosaurs. Big ones and vicious ones. I asked them what kind of gun you’d have to use to shoot a big dinosaur and they said they didn’t know, but probably the biggest that ever had been made. I asked if they had some of those guns around and they said they did—a couple of them that had never been used. They weren’t even sure they were being manufactured any longer. Elephant guns, but now, with higher muzzle velocity, an elephant can be done in by a much smaller caliber. Not that there are many elephants being shot these days. So I said, by God, that I wanted to buy those two guns, and after some backing and filling, they agreed to sell them to me. By this time, I am sure, they thought I was out of my mind. They charged me a thousand apiece and swore they were losing money, throwing in a few dozen rounds of ammunition to sweeten up the bargain. I suppose they were losing money, but they were unloading items that no one else would buy. Those rifles are monsters. Must weigh twenty pounds or so. And the cartridges are banana-sized.”

  “Look,” I said, “if you think I’m going out and knocking over a brace of carnosaurs just to offer proof, you’d better think again. I’m hell on wheels with a twenty-two, but this is something different. It takes a big man to shoot one of those old-time elephant guns.”

  “You’re big enough,” she said. “Maybe you wouldn’t even have to shoot. Protection, that is all. Just in case some carnosaur should charge while I’m getting the proof on film. I bought a movie camera—color film, with sound, telescopic lens, everything one would ever need.”

  “But why two guns? One is all a man can carry. And you’ll be packing the camera.”

  “I got two guns,” she said, “because I’m not about to have you go out there alone. We have no idea what it will be like, but to me it sounds a little chancy. We’d be better off with two guns. I figured maybe we could persuade one of your old pals …”

  “Rila, we’ve got to keep this under cover for a while. It’s already beginning to leak out. Ben Page got hold of Hiram and got suspicious when Hiram began acting important …”

  “We’ve got to keep it quiet,” she said, “but we’ve got to come back alive, or all the proof in the world won’t help us any.”

  I didn’t like it, but I could see the logic of what she was saying.

  “Maybe Ben would come along with us,” I said. “He’d be a good man to have along. He fancies himself a mighty hunter, and he is fairly good. Each fall he goes up north for deer season, and he’s hunted in Canada and Alaska. Moose, bighorns, grizzly—stuff like that. Years ago he bagged a Kodiak. And a caribou. He still talks about the caribou. For years, he wanted to go to Africa, but he never made it, and now the hunting’s gone.…”

  “Would he go with us and keep quiet about what he sees for a while?”

  “I think so. I had to tell him part of it—about the possibility of a spaceship in the sinkhole—and I swore him to secrecy. He was willing to go along on the secrecy because he’s got some irons of his own in the fire.”

  “We have to have a second man,” she said. “I have no idea what it might be like in dinosaur country, but …”

  “Neither do I,” I said. “It could be pretty awful. It could be fairly safe. There’d be a lot of herbivores, all fairly peaceful, I’d imagine. But there’d be some meat-eaters. I have no idea how thick they might be, nor how pugnacious.”

  “I’d like to get some footage of at least a couple of the more ferocious ones. That would set up the safari outfit. I have no idea what we can squeeze out of them, but I’d guess an awful lot. After all, how much would a true, red-blooded, dyed-in-the-wool sportsman be willing to pay to be the first man to shoot a ravening, bloodthirsty dinosaur?”

  We reached the escalator going down to the baggage area.

  “Give me your check and I’ll pick up the stuff,” I said.

  She opened her purse and took out her ticket envelope. “We’d better arrange for some help,” she said, handing it to me. “There’s more than we can carry.”

  “The two guns,” I said.

  “And the movie stuff.”

  “I’ll get some help,” I said.

  “The whole trouble,” she explained, “was that I couldn’t tell them about some machine—a time-travel machine. If I could have told them we’d developed a machine, they’d have been more able to believe me. We place so much trust in machines; they are magic to us. If I could have outlined some ridiculous theory and spouted some equations at them, they would have been impressed. But I couldn’t do that. To tell them about Catface would have only made matters worse. I simply told them that we had developed a technique for traveling in time, hoping that when I mentioned technique they would presuppose a machine. But it didn’t seem to have the right effect. They asked me about a machine anyhow, and it floored them when I had to tell them there was no machine.”

  “With no machine,” I said, “that’s asking them to accept a lot on faith.”

  “Asa, when we go back to get our film, where shall we go?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said, “and I can’t be certain. The late Jurassic, maybe, or the early Cretaceous. In either of those periods, you’d be apt to find a greater diversity of forms, though we can’t be sure. The fossil record would seem to indicate those two times, but the fossil record is only what we’ve found. We’ve probably missed a lot. We make it sound as if we know much more than we do. Actually, we’ve found only bits and pieces; we have no clear picture. But if we went to the early Cretaceous, we’d probably miss the one dinosaur our white hunters are most interested in, old Tyrannosaurus rex.…”

  “They mentioned him,” said Rila.

  “Rex was a latecomer,” I said, “or we think he was. There may have been bigger and more vicious ones than him that never had the luck to have their fossils found. In any case, it would be nothing short of insanity to go up against him. Eighteen feet tall, a total length of fifty feet, weighing eight tons or more and filled with a senseless hunting instinct. We don’t know how many of him there may be. Perhaps not many. You might have to hunt to find him. Large as he was, he probably required a territory measuring many square miles to make no more than a bare living.”

  “We can figure it out later,” Rila said.

  FIFTEEN

  Late that afternoon, I phoned Ben.

  “You want to get started on that motel?” I asked him.

  “You’ve got it, then,” said Ben. “It’s all set. You’ve found what you were after.”

  “We’re fairly close,” I said. “We are on the way. Rila and I would like to talk with you. Could you drop by? It would be more private that way.”

  “It so happens that I’ve just finished for the day. I’ll be right over.”

  I hung up and said to Rila, “I don’t like this business. Ben probably will be all right; after all, he wants to get an early jump on this motel business, and he probably has some other deals in mind as well. But I have a queasy feeling. It’s too early to take someone into our confidence.”

  “You can’t keep the thing under wraps much longer,” she said. “As soon as you start installing the fence, people will know something is going on. You don’t put a ten-foot fence around forty acres just for the fun of it. And we need Ben, or someone else, to carry that second gun. We’ve already decided it’s insanity to go back to face dinosaurs with only one gun. You said Ben is the man you want.”

  “He’s the best I know. He’s a hunter. He knows how to handle guns. He’s big and strong and tough and he wouldn’t panic in a tight situation. But this whole thing could backfire, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed.”

  I opened up a cupboard door and took down a bottle, setti
ng it on the kitchen table. I found three glasses; I made sure that there was ice.

  “You’re going to entertain him out here at the kitchen table?” Rila asked.

  “Hell, he wouldn’t know how to act if we sat down in the living room. It would be too formal; it would spook him. Here he’ll be comfortable.”

  “If that’s the case,” she said, “I’m all for it. I like it myself. A tavern atmosphere.”

  Feet thumped outside on the walk, coming up to the kitchen door.

  “It didn’t take him long,” said Rila.

  “Ben’s anxious,” I said. “He’s smelling money.”

  I opened the door and Ben came in. He had the sort of look a dog has on its face when it smells a rabbit.

  “You have it then?” he asked.

  “Ben,” I said, “sit down. We have business to discuss.”

  Drinks poured, we sat around the table.

  “Asa, what you got in mind?” asked Ben.

  “First of all,” I said, “I have a confession to make. I lied to you the other day. Or halfway lied. I told you only part of the truth and not the important part.”

  “You mean there isn’t any spaceship?”

  “Oh, there’s a spaceship, all right.”

  “Then what is this all about—this half-truth business?”

  “What it means is that the spaceship is only part of it, a small part of it. The important thing is that we have found how to travel into time. Into the past and maybe even into the future. We never asked about the future. We were so excited about it, that we never thought to ask.”

  “Ask who?” Ben had a slack-jawed look, as if someone had clobbered him with something heavy.

  “Perhaps we’d better start at the beginning,” said Rila, “and tell him all of it, the way it happened. These questions and answers aren’t getting anywhere.”

  Ben emptied his glass in a gulp and reached for the bottle.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You go ahead and tell me.”

  He was believing none of it.

  I said to Rila, “You tell him. I can’t afford to take the time. I’ve fallen a long ways behind in my drinking.”

  She told the story precisely and economically, without the use of an extra word, from the time I had bought the farm up to this very moment, including her interviews in Washington and New York.

  During all the time that she was talking, Ben didn’t say a word. He just sat there, glassy-eyed. Even for a time after she had finished, he still sat in silence. Then, finally, he stirred. “There’s one thing about it,” he said, “that beats me. You say Hiram can talk with this Catface thing. Does that mean he can really talk with Bowser?”

  “We don’t know,” said Rila.

  He shook his head. “What you’re saying is mighty hard to swallow. There ain’t no way to go back into the past.”

  “That’s what everyone says,” said Rila. “We’ll have to prove it. We’ll have to go back into the past, into the kind of past that no one’s ever seen, and bring back movies of it. There’s one thing we didn’t tell you, Ben. Asa and I are going back to the time of the dinosaurs, and we want you to go with us.”

  “Me? You want me to go back with you? Back to the dinosaurs?”

  I got up from the table and went into the living room where we’d stashed the stuff that Rila had brought on the plane. I came back with one of the two guns and laid it on the table in front of Ben.

  “You know what that is?” I asked him.

  He picked it up, hoisting it, weighing it. He swung around in his chair, pointed the rifle at a kitchen window and broke the breech. He squinted through the barrels.

  “An elephant gun,” he said. “I’ve heard of them, but I’ve never seen one. Double-barreled. Would you take a look at that bore! With a thing like that, you could knock an elephant off its feet.”

  He looked at me inquiringly. “Would it do the same to a dinosaur? One of the big ones?”

  “No one knows,” I said. “A well-placed shot should stop one. Knocking it over, I don’t know. We have two of those rifles. When Rila and I go into dinosaur country, I’ll carry one of them. She’ll be loaded down with camera equipment. We are hoping you will carry the other gun. Back there, we won’t know what to expect, but, in any case, two guns will be better than one.”

  Ben drew in his breath. “Dinosaurs!” he said. “You’re offering me a chance to go along? With a gun like this?”

  “You have it turned around,” said Rila. “We aren’t offering you a chance to go. We’re begging you to go.”

  “You don’t have to beg,” said Ben. “You’d have to lay me out to stop me. Africa—I always wanted to go to Africa. This will be better than Africa.”

  “It could be dangerous. Maybe not. As Asa says, there’s no way to know.”

  “But you’re going?”

  Rila said smugly, “I’ll have to run the camera.”

  “Movies, yet,” he yelled. “My God, the film boys would kill one another to get hold of that footage. A million bucks. Five million bucks. You could name your price.”

  “We’ll take that up later on,” said Rila. “Maybe the movie people would like to do their own shooting. A professional job of film making.”

  “And you’d sell them the rights,” said Ben. “At a handsome figure.”

  “We’ll not make it cheap,” said Rila.

  “And me,” said Ben, “getting all excited about a little two-by-four motel. Although, it will take a chunk of capital to get this venture on its feet. How are you fixed? Any chance of buying in? Not a big slice of the action. Only a small percentage.”

  “We can talk about that later,” said Rila. “First, let’s see what kind of proof we can get when we go back to find the dinosaurs. If we don’t get proof, then all bets are off. There’s no future in it.”

  “How far back are you going?”

  “We’ll have to take a closer look at the possibilities,” I said. “Seventy million years at least. Perhaps a good bit farther.”

  “We’re glad you’re willing to go with us,” Rila said. “We need a man who can handle a gun. Someone who has done some hunting, who can rough it and who knows what to watch out for.”

  Ben looked at me. “You ever fire one of these things?”

  I shook my head.

  “If you don’t handle it right,” he said, “this gun could take your head off. The kick must be terrific. We’ll have to practice before we go.”

  “There’s no place here we can try them out,” I said. “Too heavily populated. We couldn’t take the chance. The report would be too loud, and people would begin asking questions. We can’t have that. For a while, we’ll have to keep this under cover.”

  “You have cartridges?”

  “A few. Probably enough.”

  “And you figure one of them could stop a dinosaur?”

  “It would depend on how big a dinosaur. Some of them are so big, it would take a cannon. But we don’t have to worry about them if we keep out of their way. They’ll give us no trouble. The ones we worry about are the meat-eaters.”

  Ben squinted through the barrels again. “In good shape,” he said. “A little haze, probably dust. No sign of rust. Do no harm to run an oiled rag through the barrels. Ought to break them down and oil them before we use them. In a place like that, you’d want a smooth-working gun.”

  He slapped the barrels with an open hand. “Good steel,” he said. “Never saw anything like it in my life. Must have set you back a pile.”

  Rila said, “I got them from the safari people at a bargain. They want to do business with us if we have anything. That is, once they are convinced we have something they can use.”

  “There is one thing about this trip that I want to emphasize,” I said. “It is not a hunting trip. We’re not going out to bag a dinosaur. Our job is to get enough good film to convince the safari people and Rila’s lawyer friend. We don’t start any trouble. The two of us simply stand by in case trouble comes to us. I want you
to understand that, Ben.”

  “Oh, sure, I understand that,” he said. “Later on, perhaps …”

  “Once things have settled down,” I promised, “we’ll fix it up for you to do some hunting.”

  “That’s fair enough,” he said. “But once we get where we are going, we’ll have to try out these guns. To see how they shoot, how we can handle them. I’d like to know what to expect of such a piece before having to fire in earnest.”

  “We’ll do that,” said Rila. “We can’t fire them here.”

  He laid the gun back on the table. “What kind of schedule have you got?” he asked.

  “Soon as we can,” said Rila. “In a day or two.”

  “This trip is just one phase of it,” he said. “The beginning, really. There are other things you have to think about. Once this deal goes public, we’ll have people crowding in. You’ll have to set up some sort of security. You can’t have people clogging up the place and falling into time roads or whatever you may call them. You have to buy yourself some elbowroom.”

  “We plan to build a fence all around the forty,” Rila replied. “High as we can manage. Floodlighted at night and with guards patrolling around the clock.”

  Ben whistled. “That will take some money. Enclosing forty acres takes a lot of fence.”

  “And we’ll need an administration building,” said Rila, “and a staff to man it. Probably only a few to start with.”

  “Tell you what,” said Ben. “Why don’t you let me set up a credit line for you down at the bank? Fifty thousand to start with, increasing if you need it. You borrow only what you need, as you need it. You write the checks and we’ll honor them.”

  “Ben,” I told him, “that’s damn generous of you. Where’s the flint-hearted banker?”

  “Well, what I mean,” he said, “is that we’ll do it if this trip turns out all right. Naturally, I’d want to know what you have.”

  “You still have some reservations?”

  “Not really reservations. When I walk out of here and go back to the car, I’ll be wondering what I’ve let myself in for. I’ll spend the night telling myself that I am a fool to listen to you, that it’s impossible to travel into time. But sitting here, lapping up your booze and listening to you, I have no reservations. My hands itch to have a part in it. If it were anyone but you, Asa, I wouldn’t believe a word. I remember how it was when we were boys. I was one of the gang, sure, but I was the banker’s son, and a lot of the other fellows resented it. They thought my folks were better off than their folks and we really weren’t, but they thought so. They never passed up a chance to shaft me. Nobody loves a small-town banker—well, I guess no one loves any kind of banker, and let us face it, my old man didn’t have a record that inspired much confidence, and I suppose the same applies to me. But the point is you never shafted me, you never went along with the shafting. There were times you even fought for me. You accepted me just like anybody else.”