Mastodonia (24 page)

“They're fanatics,” I said, “and fanatics don't wear well. It seems to me we should write them off.”

Four days later, safari number three, the first group to return, came out several days ahead of the scheduled time. They had had a good hunt: a half-dozen huge triceratops, three tyrannosaur heads, a gaggle of other trophies. They would have stayed out the allotted two weeks, but the hunter-client had become ill and wanted to return.

“Sheer funk,” the white hunter told me. “It's hairy back there. He shot well, but it got to him. Christ, it got to me. Look up and see a monster with a mouthful of teeth coming at you out of nowhere and your guts just turn to water. He's perked up now that we are out. He'll be the great hunter, fearless, intrepid, nerves of iron, when we go through the gates and the newsmen start closing in.”

He grinned. “We'll not stop him. Let him play the role to the hilt. It is good for business.”

Rila and I stood and watched the safari outfit go rolling down the ridge and disappear into Willow Bend.

“That does it,” Rila said. “Once the pictures of those trophies are shown on television and appear in newspapers, there'll be no doubt, any longer, that traveling in time is possible. We no longer have to prove it.”

The next morning, before we were up, Herb was pounding at the door. I went out in robe and slippers.

“What the hell?” I asked.

Herb waved a copy of the Minneapolis
Tribune
at me.

I grabbed the paper from him. There, on page one, was the picture of our client-hunter, posing beside the propped-up head of a tyrannosaur. A six-column headline trumpeted the story about the return of the first safari. In the space underneath the few inches of type under the bigger headline, before the two-column type plunged down the page, was another headline that said:

CHURCH GROUP CHARGES

TIME TRAVEL DISCRIMINATION

The first paragraph of this second story said:

New York, N. Y.

Dr. Elmer Hotchkiss, head of an independent church committee that is committed to the prevention of any study of the times and life of Jesus Christ, declared today that Time Associates has refused to sell it the rights to the time block covering that period of history.…

I lowered the paper and said, “But, Herb, you know that's not accurate. We did not refuse …”

Herb was practically jigging with excitement. “But don't you see?” he shouted. “Here's a controversy, an issue. Before the day is over, church groups and theologians all over the world will be choosing up sides. Asa, we couldn't buy publicity like this.”

Rila came out the door. “What's going on?” she asked.

I handed her the paper.

I had a gone feeling in my guts.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Hiram was still in the hospital and, once again, I hunted up Catface and found him in the orchard. I told myself I only wanted to keep contact with him to keep him from getting lonely. Hiram had talked with him almost every day, and since Hiram wasn't here, I thought that someone should make a point of seeing him. But in the back of my mind were those little minnows that had been nibbling at my brain, and I couldn't help but wonder if, when I saw him again, the minnows would resume their nibbling. I had a queasy feeling about it, but was nevertheless somewhat mystified. Maybe, I told myself, this was Catface's way of talking, although if it was, I was certainly badly in need of an interpreter. I wondered if the nibbling had been what Hiram had felt and, through some strange quirk in his mind, had been able to understand the language. Maybe this was the ability that enabled Hiram to talk with Bowser and the robin, if he did actually talk with either one of them.

Once I found Catface, I didn't have to wait long to have my question answered; almost immediately the minnows were in there, nibbling away at me.

“Catface,” I asked him, “are you trying to talk with me?”

He blinked his eyes for yes.

“Tell me, do you think that you can do it?”

He blinked three times, very rapidly, which amazed me somewhat as to meaning, but, after a bit of thought, I decided that it meant he didn't know.

“I hope you can,” I said. “I'd like to talk with you.”

He blinked his eyes for yes, which I imagine meant that he would, too.

But we weren't able to talk. It seemed to me that while the minnows were more persistent than they had been before, we were getting nowhere. For a time, I tried to open my mind to the minnows, but that didn't seem to help. Perhaps nothing I could do, I told myself, could help. Whatever was to be done, if anything was to be done, was strictly up to Catface. I had the feeling that he must have thought he had a chance, or he never would have tried. But once I thought that over, I detected a lot of wishful thinking in it.

When the session came to an end, it didn't seem to me we were at all ahead of what the situation had been when it had first started.

“I'll be back tomorrow,” I told Catface. “You can try again.”

I didn't tell Rila about it because I was afraid she might laugh at my simple-mindedness. To me, of course, in a sort of sneaking way, it was no simple-mindedness. If Catface could fix it so we could talk together, I sure as hell was willing to give him a chance to do it.

I had told him I'd be back the next day, but I wasn't. In the morning, another of the safaris, number two, returned. They brought back only one tyrannosaur, plus several triceratops, but also three crested hadrosaurs and a
Polacanthus
, an armored dinosaur with a ridiculously small, tapering head and big hornlike spikes sticking out of its back the entire length of its body.
Polacanthus
was distinctly out of place. It shouldn't have been in our part of the Cretaceous; it was supposed to have died out in the early Cretaceous and should not have been in North America at all. But, there it was, in all its grotesque ugliness.

The safari had brought back the entire body. Despite being dressed out, its body cavity scraped and cleaned as well as possible, the carcass was beginning to get a little high.

“Be sure to call this one to the attention of the paleontologists,” I told the hunter-client. “It will drive them up the wall.”

He grinned a toothy and satisfied grin at me. He was a little squirt and I wondered how a man of his size could stand up to a dinosaur gun. I tried to remember who he was and it seemed to me I had been told that he was some aristocratic bird from somewhere in England, one of the few who had somehow managed to keep a tight grip on the family fortune in the face of the British economy.

“What's so special about this one?” he asked. “There were quite a few of them. I picked out the biggest one. How would you, sir, go about mounting such a specimen? It's a sort of unwieldy creature.”

I told him what was so special about it, and he liked the idea of confounding the paleontologists.

“Some of these learned types,” he told me, “put on too many airs.”

The safari had barely disappeared into Willow Bend when number four came back. It had four tyrannosaurs, two triceratops and a bunch of other stuff. It was lacking one truck, however, and two men were on stretchers.

The white hunter took off his hat and wiped his brow. “It was those damn things with horns,” he said. “The ones with parrot beaks. Triceratops, is that what you call them? Something scared them and they came at us, a dozen or more of the big bulls. They hit the truck broadside and made kindling out of it. We were lucky no one was killed. We had a hell's own time rescuing the men who were in the truck. We had to stand off the bulls. I don't know how many we put down. They were milling all around us and had their dander up. Maybe we should have gone back and picked up some of the heads. But when we finally fought our way free, we sort of voted against it.”

“It was rough,” I said.

“Rough, sure. But when you go into new country, before you know what to expect, it can get rough. I learned one thing: Never press in too close to a herd of triceratops. They're short-tempered, ugly brutes.”

After the day's second safari was gone, Rila said to me, “I'm worried about number one. They are overdue.”

“Only by a day,” I said. “They all set two weeks as the time they would be out, but a couple of days one way or the other doesn't matter.”

“The one that just left got into trouble.”

“They made a mistake. That is all. Remember how Ben stopped us when we walked up too close to the triceratops? He said there was an invisible line that you don't cross over. These folks walked over that line. They'll know better next time.”

I saw Stiffy shuffling up the hill. “We've got to get him out of here,” I said.

“Yes, but be nice about it,” Rila said. “He's such a lovable old guy.”

She went into the house and got a couple of bunches of carrots. Stiffy shuffled up and accepted the carrots very gracefully, grunting and mumbling at us. After a while, I led him off the ridge, back into the valley. “We'll have to take it easy on the handouts,” I warned Rila. “If we don't, we'll have him up here all the time.”

“You know, Asa,” she said, paying no attention to what I had said, “I've decided where we'll build the house. Down there by that patch of crab apples. We can pipe water from the spring and the ridge will protect us from the northwest wind.”

It was the first time I had heard about the house, but I didn't make a point of that. It was a good idea, actually. We couldn't go on living in a mobile home.

“I suppose you've decided what kind of house you want,” I said.

“Well, not entirely. Not the floor plan. No detailed plan. Just in general. One story, low against the ground. Fieldstone, I suppose. That's a little old-fashioned, but it seems the kind of house that would fit in here. Expensive, too, but we should be able to afford it.”

“Water from the spring,” I said, “but what about the heating? After the telephone line that didn't work, I'm fairly sure we can't pipe in gas.”

“I've thought about that. Build it tight and solid, well insulated, then use wood. A lot of fireplaces. We could get in men to cut and haul the wood. There's a lot of it in these hills. Off somewhere where we couldn't see the cutting. We wouldn't cut it nearby. It would be a shame to spoil the woods we can see.”

We talked about the house through supper. The more I thought about the idea, the better I liked it. I was glad Rila had thought of it.

“I believe I'll go over to Lancaster tomorrow and talk to a contractor,” she said. “Ben should know a good one.”

“The newsmen outside the gate will gobble you up,” I said. “Herb still wants you to remain a mystery woman.”

“Look, Asa, if need be, I can handle them. I handled them at the hospital that night we took Hiram in. At worst, I could hunker down in the back of the car, cover myself with a blanket or something. Ben would drive me out. Why don't you come along? We could go to the hospital and see Hiram.”

“No,” I said. “One of us should stay here. I promised Catface I'd see him today and didn't get around to it. I'll hunt him up tomorrow.”

“What's this with you and Catface?” she demanded.

“He gets lonesome,” I said.

The next morning, Catface was in the crab-apple patch, not in the old home orchard.

I squatted down and said to him, half joking, “Well, let's get on with it.”

He took me at my word. Immediately, the minnows began bumping at my mind, lipping it, sucking away at it, but this time there seemed to be more of them and smaller—small, tiny slivers of minnows that could drive and wriggle themselves deeper and deeper into my mind. I could feel them wriggling deeply into the crevices of it.

A strange, dreamy lassitude was creeping over me and I fought against it. I was being plunged into a soft grayness that entangled me as the gossamer of a finely knit spiderweb might entrap an insect that had blundered into it.

I tried to break the web, to stagger to my feet, but found, with a queer not-caring, that I had no idea where I was. Found, as well, that I really had no concern as to where I might be. I knew, vaguely, that this was Mastodonia and that Catface was with me and that Rila had gone to Lancaster to see a contractor about building a fieldstone house and that we'd have to get men to bring in a winter's supply of wood for us, but this was all background material, all of it segregated from what was happening. I knew that, for a moment, I need not be concerned with it.

Then I saw it—the city, if it was a city. It seemed that I was sitting atop a high hill, beneath a lordly tree. The weather was fair and warm and the sky was the softest blue that I had ever seen.

Spread out in front of me was the city, and when I looked to either side, I saw that it was everywhere, that it went all around me and spread to the far-off horizon in all directions. The hill stood alone in the midst of the city, a fair hill, its slopes covered by a dark green grass and lovely flowers, blowing in a gentle breeze, and atop it, this one lordly tree beneath which I sat.

I had no idea of how I'd gotten there; I did not even wonder how I'd gotten there. It seemed quite natural that I should be there and it seemed as well that I should recognize the place, but, for the life of me, I couldn't. I had wondered on first seeing it if it was a city and now I knew it was, but I knew as well that it was something else as well, that it had a significance and that a knowledge of this significance was simply something I had forgotten, but would recall any minute now.

It was like no city I had ever seen before. There were parks and esplanades and wide, gracious streets and these all seemed familiar, although they were very splendid. But the buildings were not the kind of buildings one would have expected anywhere. They had no mass and even little form; rather, they were spiderwebby, lacy, filmy, foamy, insubstantial. Yet, when I looked more carefully at them, I could see that they were not as insubstantial as I had thought, that once I'd looked at them for a time, I began seeing them better, that when I first had looked at them, I had not seen them in their entirety, had been seeing only a part of them and that behind this facade of first seeing, the structures took on a more substantial form. But there was still something about it all that bothered me, and in time I realized it was the pattern of the city. The buildings did not stand in the massive rectangles dictated by street patterns, as was the case with cities on the Earth. That was it, I thought: This was not an Earth city, although why this surprised me I don't know, for I must have known from the very beginning that it was no city of the Earth—that it was Catface's city.