Mastodonia (16 page)

“Let's pull in here and park,” said Courtney. “Away from other cars.”

“Sure, if you want to,” I said, “but why?”

“Please humor me,” he said.

I pulled in and found a place to park at the near edge of the parking area. There were no other cars nearby. I shut off the motor and sat back in the seat.

“This is a conspiracy,” said Courtney. “I shudder at the possibility of eavesdropping.”

“So go ahead,” I said. I looked at Rila and saw that she was as puzzled as I was.

Courtney squirmed into a comfortable position. “I've spent a lot of sleepless nights,” he said, “considering your position, and in many respects it seems to me you could be vulnerable. Oh, so far as I can determine, this project of yours is entirely legal. Unique, of course, but legal. But the thing that worries me is that Internal Revenue can clobber you but good. If everything goes as well as I expect it will, you'll be making a lot of money, and when someone makes a lot of money, it's always been my position that as much of it be kept as is possible within the framework of the law.”

“Courtney,” said Rila, “I don't quite understand …”

“Do you have any idea the bite IRS can take,” he asked, “out of a million dollars?”

“I have a rough idea,” I said, “but only a rough idea.”

“The trouble is,” he said, “that you won't have the opportunity of the business pattern, such as is found in large corporations, to set up the sort of tax shelters and loop holes that will afford some protection. We could set you up as a corporation, of course, but it would take a lot of time and would have a number of built-in disadvantages. There is one possibility, however. It looks good to me and I want to see what you think about it. If you did not conduct your business in the United States there'd be no problem. Income tax does not apply to businesses outside the country.”

“But we have to stay at Willow Bend,” said Rila. “That's where our business is.”

“Not so fast,” said Courtney. “Let's give it a little thought. Let us say you used your time-travel capability to provide you a residence a thousand years into the past, or a million years, or wherever was best to go. I suppose that any time prior to the emergence of the United States would do, but it might be better to pick a time prior to any European knowledge of North America. If you could find some desert island, of course, unclaimed by any world power, that would do as well, but I don't know where one is or even if one exists. If it does, you'd still be a long ways from Willow Bend, but if you resided in time, as I suggest, you'd be just a short walk from the farm in Willow Bend.”

“I don't know,” I said. “We'd still be living on land that, in time, would be a part of the nation.”

“Yes, I know,” said Courtney, “and IRS might try to make something of that. They might bring suit, but if they do, I think we could prove that national sovereignty does not extend through time.”

“But the farm in Willow Bend is really where we'd conduct our business,” Rila said.

“Not if you lived someplace else. We'd be very sure you conducted no business in Willow Bend. Nor provided any services there. You could get Hiram and this Catface thing to move into time with you?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“But Willow Bend would still be there,” said Rila.

“Only as your American agency,” said Courtney. “You'd have to have someone to serve as your agent. I had your friend Ben in mind. The time road or tunnel or whatever you want to call it would simply be an entry port to your place of residence, where you'd conduct your business and provide your services. The time roads used to supply your services would be set up from your place of residence. You'd pay your agent a commission—perhaps one percent of all the business that he sent you. That seems the safest way. In effect, he'd then be the agent for a foreign firm. I think it might be best, as well, to sell the farm to him. That way, IRS couldn't seize it as your property for nonpayment of taxes. Ben would be paying his taxes, of course, and that way, they'd not be able to grab the farm, which is your port of entry. Also, it would lend weight to his being in business for himself.”

“But they still might try to seize it,” I said.

“Certainly, they might try. Faced with the facts, I don't think they would. Especially if Ben paid a fair price for it before you went into the time business. That's the crux of the matter. To have even a prayer of escaping the IRS, you can't do any business in the United States. That's why I refused yesterday to talk business with Safari. If they want to talk business, they have to come to your place of residence.”

“But I talked to Safari originally,” said Rila, “and we showed them the film.”

“That fact could make matters a little sticky,” said Courtney, “but I think I can handle that. I think I could demonstrate to the satisfaction of the courts that no business actually was done. As to what happened yesterday, I could show that we refused to negotiate.”

“But there'll be contracts,” said Rila.

“Drawn and executed in New York or in other cities where the party of the second part is headquartered, between an American firm and a non-American company. That is customary. It would stand in law. No trouble there. But you'd have to have an address. Where do you think you might like to set up residence?”

“In one of the more recent interglacial periods,” I said. “Probably the Sangamon. The climate would be good, the environment more homelike.”

“Dangerous?”

“Mastodons,” I said. “Sabertooths. Some bears. Dire wolves. But we could manage. They probably sound worse than they are.”

“We could call our new home Mastodonia,” said Rila.

“Perfect,” Courtney said. “That name carries with it the implications of another time and place.”

“But would we have to stay there all the time?” asked Rila. “I don't think I would like that.”

“Not all the time,” said Courtney, “but enough of the time so you could honestly call it home. You could visit Willow Bend frequently, travel otherwise as you wished. But all your business would have to be conducted from Mastodonia. I had even toyed with the idea that you could proclaim yourself a nation and apply to the State Department, and to other countries, of course, for recognition. But with only two or three residents, that might be hard to do. I'm not sure it would be of any advantage, either. If doing so eventually became advisable, could you get some of your Willow Bend neighbors to move there?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I'm not sure.”

“There'd be advantages. Free land for the taking. No taxes. Lots of elbow room. Good hunting and fishing.”

“I still don't know,” I said.

“Well, we can talk about that later on.”

“How about money and banking?” asked Rila. “How do we handle all that money you say we're going to get? Certainly not in American banks, where the IRS can get their hands on it.”

“That's easy,” said Courtney. “Open an account in Switzerland. Probably Zurich. Your clients can make payment to your Swiss account. They could, of course, pay you some of it in cash so you'd have funds to pay Ben his commissions and to take care of other expenses. But if you are going to do that, you should open an account right away so your record will seem a little cleaner. If you opened an account before you start transacting any time-travel business, we'd be able to pull the rug out from under anyone who tried to charge concealment of funds. The initial payment into the account should be fairly substantial so that no one can say it was only a token deposit.”

“I sold my share of the import-export business to my partner in New York the other day,” said Rila. “His first payment, to be made in a day or two, is a hundred thousand. But we wouldn't have to wait for it. I could assign the first check to Ben's bank and then he could loan us the hundred thousand. We're into him for quite an amount right now, but I think he'd do it.”

“Fine,” said Courtney. “A hundred thousand would be just fine. Before you move into Mastodonia, but giving your address for the account as Mastodonia. I take it you approve of my suggestions.”

“It seems just a little devious to me,” I said.

“Of course, the whole thing is devious. But, by and large, it's legal. We could be challenged, of course, and probably will be, but we have solid grounds for argument.”

“Half of the business world is devious,” said Rila.

“Even if we should go to court and lose on some points,” said Courtney, “you'd be no worse off than you are now and probably better. We'd have enough room to strike deals, if necessary. But I'd not go into it with any idea of a deal. I'd go to court to win. We've only talked about the court matter. A non-American resident would have other advantages. No governmental regulations or interference, no reports to be filled out, no statements to be filed.”

“All things considered I think what you suggest is the right thing to do,” Rila said. “To tell you the truth, I've been worried about the tax situation.”

“You know about such things,” I said. “I don't.”

“So, almost immediately,” said Courtney, “you'll move into Mastodonia and set up residence. I would think, perhaps, that a mobile home …”

“I'll take care of that,” said Rila, “while Asa is off to Zurich.” She said to me, “I seem to remember you can speak French.”

“Some,” I said. “Enough to get by fairly well. But you should be the one …”

“I don't speak French,” she said. “Only Spanish and a little German—a very little German. That's why you are going to Zurich. I'll stay here and see that matters are taken care of from this end.”

“You seem to have everything in hand,” Courtney said. “So I'll leave the rest up to you. Phone me on any little question. Don't wait for the big one; phone on the little ones as well. I suppose you'll want to make that Zurich account a joint one. If that's the case, Rila, be sure Asa has a notarized copy of your signature before he leaves. And don't make Ben your agent until you're settled in Mastodonia.”

“One thing,” I said. “If we exasperate the government sufficiently, could they declare us
personae non gratae
, prevent us from moving back and forth between Mastodonia and Willow Bend, perhaps close the time road into Mastodonia?”

Courtney said, “I suppose they could try, but we'd give them a hell of a fight. Take the matter to the United Nations if we had to. I don't think they'll try.”

“I guess that's it,” I said. “The decision's been made. Strange we could settle such a deal in so short a time.”

“The plan makes sense,” said Rila. “You don't argue with good, sound reasoning.”

“If that's the case,” said Courtney, “you can take me back to the airstrip.”

“You mean you're not even coming out to the farm?” asked Rila. “I thought you wanted to meet Ben.”

“Some other time,” he said. “I've told you all I wanted to, where no one else could hear. These are going to be busy days and there's no time to waste.”

He rubbed his hands together delightedly. “This is going to be more damn fun,” he said, “than I have had in years.”

NINETEEN

On the return flight from Zurich, we had a layover in London. I bought a paper and there it was—a great screaming headline:
MYSTERY AMERICANS TRAVEL IN TIME
!

I bought other papers. The sober
Times
treated the story sedately, all the others thundered in bold, black type.

A lot of the facts were jumbled, but the stories essentially were correct. Rila and I were represented as a mystery pair. She was not to be located; rumor had it that she was living in a place called Mastodonia. No one knew exactly where Mastodonia might be, but some speculation came close to the truth. The popular speculation was that I had gone abroad, although no one knew exactly where. But that did not stop the newsmen from making what seemed to me rather fantastic guesses. Ben had been interviewed. He had acknowledged he was our American agent, but gave them little else. Herbert Livingston, Ben's public relations officer, was quoted as saying, rather curtly, that the announcement was premature and that he would have nothing further to say until a more appropriate time. I wondered, as I read the story, just how in hell Herb suddenly had become our PR man. The story was based on what was described as an authoritative source without any attempt to pinpoint the source. But Safari, Inc., which somehow had been tied into the story, admitted that a film did exist of a dinosaur hunt staged in an era some seventy million years in the past. One movie company executive was even quoted as being at least marginally interested. The Safari people openly admitted their interest. Courtney was not mentioned and from this omission, I was fairly certain where the leak to the press had originated.

Four noted physicists, one of them a Nobelist, had been interviewed, each of them saying with varying degrees of smugness that time travel was impossible. Each of the stories assumed that a time machine was involved—which was understandable since only five people, perhaps six, now that Herb was involved, knew that one was not. There was considerable agonizing among the so-called science writers of the various newspapers as to what kind of form the machine would take and what principles would be involved. Only one of the stories I read failed to mention H. G. Wells.

My first sight of the first paper with its blaring headline left me all tensed up, but before too long, having read some of the other stories, I had become mush inside. As long as only a few people had known about our time-travel capability, it had been possible for me to accept the idea as a sort of silly, almost boyish, secret. But the situation was different when our secret was shared by the entire world. I found myself looking around and behind me to see if anyone might recognize me, but that was rather foolish since none of the London papers had pictures of either Rila or me. But it would not take long, I knew, until our pictures would be splashed across the tabloids. In those early stories, there was no identification of who either of us might be, but before the day was over, the newsmen would run down exactly who we were and would then find photos of us.