Our Children's Children

11

"So," said the President, leaning back in his chair, "as we have it so far, the Earth some five hundred years from now is being attacked by beings from out of space. It is impossible for the people of that day to cope with them and their only recourse is to retreat back into the past. Is that a fairly accurate summary of what you've told us?"

Gale nodded. "Yes, sir, I would say it is."

"But now that you are here — or a lot of you are here and more coming all the time — what happens now? Or have you had no opportunity to plan ahead?"

"We have plans," said Gale, "but we will need some help."

"What I want to know," said the Attorney General, "is why you came back to us. Why to this particular moment in time?"

"Because," said Gale, "you have the technology that we need and the resources. We made a very thorough historical survey and this particular time slot, give or take ten years, seemed to suit our purpose best."

"What kind of technology are you thinking of?"

"A technology that is capable of fabricating other time machines. We have the plans and the specifications and the labor force. We will need materials and your forbearance…"

"But why more time machines?"

"We do not intend to stay here," said Gale. "It would be unfair to do so. It would put too great a strain on your economy. As it is, we are putting a great strain upon it. But we could not stay up there in the future. I hope you understand that we had to leave."

"Where will you be going?" asked the President.

"Back deep into time," said Gale. "To the mid-Miocene."

"The Miocene?"

"A geological epoch. It began, roughly, some twenty-five million years ago, lasted for some twelve million years."

"But why the Miocene? Why twenty-five million years? Why not ten million, or fifty million or a hundred million?"

"There are a number of considerations," said Gale. "We have tried to work it out as carefully as we can. For one thing, the main reason, I would guess, grass first appeared in the Miocene. Paleontologists believe that grass appeared at the beginning of the Miocene. They base their belief upon the development of high-crowned cheek teeth in the herbivores of that time. Grass carries abrasive minerals and wears down the teeth. The development of high-crowned teeth that grew throughout the animal's lifetime would be an answer to this. The teeth are the kind that one would expect to find in creatures that lived on grass. There is evidence, too, that during the Miocene more arid conditions came about which led to the replacement of forests by extensive grass prairies that supported huge herds of grazing animals. This, say the paleontologists, began with the dawn of the Miocene, twenty-five million years ago, but we have chosen as our first target twenty million years ago, just in case the paleontologists' timetable may be in error, although we do not believe it is."

"If that is where you're heading," asked the Attorney General, "why are you stopping here? Your time tunnels, I assume, the ones you used to reach us, would have carried you that far."

"That is true, sir. But we didn't have the time. This move had to be made as rapidly as possible."

"What has time to do with it?"

"We can't go into the Miocene without implements and tools, with no seed stocks or agricultural animals. We have all those up in our own time, of course, but it would have taken weeks to gather and transport them to the tunnel mouths. There was also the matter of capacity. Every tool or bag of seed or head of livestock would mean it would take longer to move the people. Given the time and without the pressure of the aliens we would have done it that way, going directly to the Miocene. But the logistics were impossible. The monsters knew there was something going on and as soon as they found out what it was, we knew they would attack the tunnel heads. We felt we had to move as swiftly as we could, to save as many people as we could. So we arrive here empty-handed."

"You expect us to furnish you with all the things you need?"

"Reilly," the President said quietly, "it seems to me you are being somewhat uncharitable. This is not a situation that we asked for nor one that we expected, but it is one we have and we must deal with it as gracefully and as sensibly as we can. As a nation we have helped and still are helping other less-favored peoples. It is a matter of foreign policy, of course, but it is as well an old American tendency to hold out a helping hand. These people coming out of the tunnels located on our soil are, I would imagine, native Americans, our own kind of people, our own descendants, and it doesn't seem to me we should balk at doing for them what we have done for others."

"If," the Attorney General pointed out, "any of this is true."

"That is something," the President agreed, "we must determine. I imagine that Mr. Gale would not expect us to accept what he has told us without further investigation when that is possible. There is one thing, Mr. Gale, that rather worries me. You say that you plan on going back to a time when grass has evolved. Do you intend going blind? What would happen if, when you got there, you find the paleontologists were mistaken about the grass, or that there are other circumstances that would make it very difficult for you to settle there?"

"We came here blind, of course," said Gale. "But that was different. We had fairly good historic evidence. We knew what we would find. You can't be as certain when you deal with time spans covering millions of years. But we think we have an answer fairly well worked out. Our physicists and other scientists have developed, at least theoretically, a means of communication through a time tunnel. We hope to be able to send through an advance party that can explore the situation and then report back to us.

"One thing I have not explained is that, as we have it developed now, our time travel capability is in one direction only. We can go into the past; we cannot move futureward.

So, if any advance party is sent back and finds the situation untenable, they have no recourse other than to stay there. Our great fear is that we may have to keep readjusting the destination of the tunnels and may have to send out, and abandon, several advance parties. We hope not, of course, but it is a possibility, and if necessary it will be done. Our people, gentlemen, are quite prepared to face such a situation. We have men up in your future guarding the tunnel heads who do not expect to travel though the tunnels. They are well aware that there will come a time when each tunnel must be destroyed and that they and whoever else may not have made it through the tunnels must then face death.

"I don't tell you this to enlist your sympathy. I only say it to assure you that whatever dangers there may be we are quite willing ourselves to face. We shall not call upon you for more than you are willing to give. We shall be grateful, of course, for anything that you may do."

"Kindly as I may feel toward you," said the Secretary of State, "and much as I am disposed, short of a certain natural skepticism, to believe what you have told us, I am considerably puzzled by some of the implications. What is happening now, right here this minute, will become a matter of historical record. It stands to reason that it now becomes a part of history that you read up in the future. So you knew before you started how it all came out. You would have had to know."

"No," said Gale, "we did not know. It was not in our history. It hadn't, strange as it may sound, happened yet…"

"But it had," said Sandburg. "It must have."

"Now," said Gale, "you are getting into an area that I do not understand at all, philosophical, and physical concepts, strangely intertwined and, so far as I am concerned, impossible of any real understanding. It is something that our scientific community gave a lot of thought to. At first we asked ourselves if it lay within our right to change history, to go back into the past and introduce factors that would change the course of events. We wondered what effects such history changing would have and what would happen to the history that we already have. But now we are told that it will have no effect at all upon the history that already has been laid down. I know all this must sound impossible to you and I admit that I don't fully understand all the factors myself. The human race passed this way once before, when our ancestors were moving futureward and this thing that is happening now did not happen then. So the human race moved up to our future and the alien invaders came. Now we come back to escape the aliens and this event now is happening, history has been changed and from this moment forward nothing will be quite the same. History has been changed, but not our history, not the history that led forward to the moment that we left. Your history has been changed. By our action you are on another time track. Whether on this second time track the aliens will attack, we cannot be sure, but the indications are they will…"

"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 lifestyle. 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."