Our Children's Children (6 page)

“This,” said Douglas flatly, “is a lot of nonsense.”

“Believe me,” said Gale, “it is not willing 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. There is one thing else that puzzles me.”

“Please say it, sir,” said Gale.

“Why go back twenty million years? Why 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. We are right now, I mean we were up in our own time, if we had been left undisturbed, only a few centuries from true spaceship capability. Given a few thousand years we will have developed deep space capability and probably will 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 back there,” Williams pointed out. “You'll use up natural resources. You'll use coal and iron, you'll tap oil and gas. You will.…”

“Some iron. Not enough that it will be noticed. With so little left up there five hundred years from now, we've learned to be very frugal. And no fossil fuel at all.”

“You'll need energy.”

“We have fusion power,” said Gale. “Our economy would be a great shock to you. We now make things to last. Not ten years, or twenty, but for centuries. Obsolescence no longer is a factor in our economy. As a result, our manufacturing up in 2498, is less than one percent 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 remaining on the 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 can 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 the dinosaurs alone, but a number of other things. 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, as well. We want to leave room enough for you.”

Douglas leaped to his feet. “For us!” he yelled.

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 from outer space. Yes, I know, because of the second time track we have thrown you on, it 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'd not be up there 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 and.…”

“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 half eighteen million years. Each group of us would be separated by a million years. We'd not interfere with one another.”

“There is one drawback,” said Williams. “We'd not be like you. We would have a disastrous impact on mankind. We'd use up the coal, the iron.…”

“Not,” said Gale, “if you had our philosophy, our viewpoint, our technologies.…”

“You would give these things to us? The fusion power.…”

“If you were going back,” said Gale, “we'd insist on it.”

The President rose. “I think,” he said, “we have reached a point where we must stop. There are many things that must 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 that you should be talking with, men and women who know far more than I do about many aspects of the situation you should be informed on.”

“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 still were marching from the door, but now there were military policemen to direct them either right or left, to keep the mouth of the tunnel free for those who came pressing on behind, moving in tight ranks, and others to hold 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 tiny chatter of a radio could be heard, a radio left on in one of the hundreds of cars parked up and down the street, some of them against the curb, others—in a fine display of the disrespect of property—pulled up onto lawns. Military trucks and personnel carriers trundled down the street, halted long enough to take on a load of refugees, then went roaring off. But the people came out of the tunnel faster than the trucks could cart them off and the great mass of people kept pushing outward, covering ever-widening blocks.

Lieutenant Andrew Shelby spoke into the phone to Major Marcel Burns on the other end: “We ain't more than making a dent in them, sir. Christ, I never saw so many people. It would be easier if we could get some of the sightseers out of the area, and we're doing what we can, but it's hard to get them untangled and they don't want to leave and we haven't got the manpower to do a job of it. We've closed off all civilian traffic to the area and the radio has been asking people not to come out here, but they still are 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 flood lights?”

“They're on their way,” said Burns. “Hang in there, Andy, and do everything 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. It is something jerked out of the middle of a science fiction story. 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.…”

“Maybe,” said Williams, “they have no real government. You must realize, five centuries from now there would be changes.”

“Steve,” said the President, “what do you make of it? You are the man who brought him in.”

“A waste of time,” said Douglas.

“If you want me to vouch for his story,” said Wilson, “I can't do that, of course.”

“What did Molly say?” asked Sandburg.

“Nothing really. She simply turned him over to me. He told her none of the things that he told us, of that I'm sure, but she wormed out of him and his daughter some sort of story about what kind of world they came from. She said she was satisfied.”

“Did Global News try to make a deal?” asked Douglas.

“Of course they did. Any news agency or any reporter worth his salt certainly would have tried. They'd have been delinquent in their job if they hadn't tried. But Manning didn't press too hard. He knew as well as I did.…”

“You didn't make a deal?” asked Douglas.

“You know he didn't,” said the President.

“What I need right now,” said Wilson, “is some indication of how much I should tell the press.”

“Nothing,” said Douglas. “Absolutely nothing.”

“They know I've been in here. They know something is going on. They won't be satisfied with nothing.”

“They don't need to know.”

“But they do need to know,” said Wilson. “You can't treat the press as an adversary. They have a definite function to perform. The people have a right to know. The press has played ball with us before and they will this time, but we can't ignore them. We have to give them something and it had better be the truth.”

“I would think,” said Williams, “that we should tell them we have information which tends to make us believe these people may be, as they say, from the future, but that we need some time to check. At the moment, we can make no positive announcement. We still are working on it.”

“They'll want to know,” said Sandburg, “why they are coming back. Steve has to have some sort of answer. We can't send him out there naked. And, besides that, they will know, within a short time, that we are placing guns in front of the tunnels.”

“It would scare hell out of everyone,” said Williams, “if it was known why the guns were being placed. There would be a worldwide clamor for us to use the guns to shut down the tunnels.”

“Why don't we just say,” suggested the President, “that the people of the future are facing some great catastrophe and are fleeing for their lives. The guns? I suppose we'll have to say something about them. We can't be caught in a downright falsehood. You can say they are no more than routine precaution.”

“But only if the question should be raised,” said Sandburg.

“OK,” said Wilson, “but that isn't all of it. There'll be other questions. Have we consulted with other nations? How about the UN? Will there be a formal statement later?”

“You could say, perhaps,” said Williams, “that we have contacted other governments. We have—that advisory about the guns.”

“Steve,” said the President, “you'll have to try to hold them off. We've got to get our feet under us. Tell them you'll be back to them later.”

14

By Molly Kimball

Washington (Global News)—The people who are coming from the tunnels are refugees from time.

This was confirmed late today by Maynard Gale, one of the refugees. He refused to say, however, why they were fleeing from a future which he says lies 500 years ahead of us. The circumstances of their flight, he insisted, could only be revealed to a constituted government. He said he was making efforts to get in contact with an appropriate authority. He explained that he held the position of ombudsman for the Washington community in his future time and had been delegated to communicate with the federal government upon his arrival here.

He did, however, give a startling picture of the kind of society in which he lives, or rather, did live—a world in which there are no longer any nations and from which the concept of war has disappeared.

It is a simple society, he said, forced to become simple by the ecological problems that we face today. It is no longer an industrial society. Its manufacturing amounts to no more, perhaps less, than one percent of today's figure. What it does manufacture is made to last. The philosophy of obsolescense was abandoned only a short distance into our future, he said, in the face of dwindling natural resources, a dwindling about which economists and ecologists have been warning us for years.