Mastodonia

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, setting 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,” be 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 elbow room.”

“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.”

“Hell,” I said, “that’s no great virtue. You were like everybody else. We were just a bunch of small-town boys and everybody was like everybody else.”

“You see,” Ben said to Rila. “You see why I trust this guy.”

“I’m glad you do,” said Rila, “and we’ll be thankful for any help you give us. This is going to be a big job just for the two or us.”

“Why don’t you let me nose around a little on this fence deal? I can ask some questions and sort of line up some people and no one will think a great deal about it. I can sort of let it out that I’m doing it for someone who is going into the mink farming business.

Nothing definite, of course, acting as if I were being cagey about it. They’d expect that sort of foxiness in me. I can get it all lined up so the fence can start moving the moment you give the word. I think I could manage to line up quite a crew of men to go to work.

The thing is that the fence has to go in fast, before there’s too much speculation about it. With the crops in by now, there are bound to be a bunch of farm boys who’d be glad of a chance to earn some money. I suppose you ought to have the land surveyed before you slap up the fence. No sense in taking the chance of it slopping over on someone else’s land. Security guards will be a little tougher, but I think they can be gotten. The Minneapolis police department has been hit by a new city budget cutback and has let twenty or thirty of their boys go. Maybe some of them would be available. I’ll talk to the sheriff over at Lancaster and see if he has any other ideas. Not telling him any more than I have to. You’ll need to get some good-sized No Trespassing signs painted. I think there are some regulations about that. They have to be a certain size, and the law has something to say about the wording on them. I’ll look into that.”

“You think of everything,” said Rila. “You’re way ahead of us.”

“When you’re going to do a thing,” said Ben, “you should do it right. A little advance planning can save a lot of trouble.”

He looked at his watch. “Got to go,” he said. “I’ll be late for supper and Myra will have my hide. There’s some sort of doings she is dragging me to tonight’ and she wanted to eat early.”

He rose and said, “We’ll be in touch. You let me know when you plan on leaving. I’ll have to figure out. some phoney excuse for taking a few days off. A trip or something.”

“Two days might be enough to do what we want to do,” said Rila.

“I shouldn’t have too much trouble arranging that,” he said.

After he had left, Rila said, “The man’s a steam-roller.”

“You heard what he said early on,” I told her.

“He’s planning to horn in.”

“We’ll sell him five percent,” said Rila. “Has he any money?”

“The first nickel he ever made,” I said, “plus the family fortune — which may not be all that great, but it is enough.”