Dusty Zebra: And Other Stories

  “It wouldn’t hold true with forests, either,” said the chairman of the JCS. “Or with pastures or with crops.”

  The economics expert was slightly flushed. “There is another thing,” he said. “If we go back in time and colonize the land we find there, what would happen when that—well, let’s call it retroactive—when that retroactive civilization reaches the beginning of our historic period? What will result from that cultural collision? Will our history change? Is what has happened false? Is all—”

  “That’s all poppycock!” the general shouted. “That and this other talk about using up resources. Whatever we did in the past—or are about to do—has been done already. I’ve lain awake nights, mister, thinking about all these things and there is no answer, believe me, except the one I give you. The question which faces us here is an immediate one. Do we give all this up or do we keep on watching that Wisconsin farm, waiting for them to come back? Do we keep on trying to find, independently, the process or formula or method that Adams found for traveling in time?”

  “We’ve had no luck in our research so far, General,” said the quiet physicist who sat at the table’s end. “If you were not so sure and if the evidence were not so convincing that it had been done by Adams, I’d say flatly that it is impossible. We have no approach which holds any hope at all. What we’ve done so far, you might best describe as flounder. But if Adams turned the trick, it must be possible. There may be, as a matter of fact, more ways than one. We’d like to keep on trying.”

  “Not one word of blame has been put on you for your failure,” the chairman told the physicist. “That you could do it seems to be more than can be humanly expected. If Adams did it—if he did, I say—it must have been simply that he blundered on an avenue of research no other man has thought of.”

  “You will recall,” said the general, “that the research program, even from the first, was thought of strictly as a gamble. Our one hope was, and must remain, that they will return.”

  “It would have been so much simpler all around,” the state department man said, “if Adams had patented his method.”

  The general raged at him. “And had it published, all neat and orderly, in the patent office records so that anyone who wanted it could look it up and have it?”

  “We can be most sincerely thankful,” said the chairman, “that he did not patent it.”

  VI

  The helicopter would never fly again, but the time unit was intact.

  Which didn’t mean that it would work.

  They held a powwow at their camp site. It had been, they decided, simpler to move the camp than to remove the body of Old Buster. So they had shifted at dawn, leaving the old mastodon still sprawled across the helicopter.

  In a day or two, they knew, the great bones would be cleanly picked by the carrion birds, the lesser cats, the wolves and foxes and the little skulkers.

  Getting the time unit out of the helicopter had been quite a chore, but they finally had managed and now Adams sat with it cradled in his lap.

  “The worst of it,” he told them, “is that I can’t test it. There’s no way to. You turn it on and it works or it doesn’t work. You can’t know till you try.”

  “That’s something we can’t help,” Cooper replied. “The problem, seems to me, is how we’re going to use it without the whirlybird.”

  “We have to figure out some way to get up in the air,” said Adams. “We don’t want to take the chance of going up into the twentieth century and arriving there about six feet underground.”

  “Common sense says that we should be higher here than up ahead,” Hudson pointed out. “These hills have stood here since Jurassic times. They probably were a good deal higher then and have weathered down. That weathering still should be going on. So we should be higher here than in the twentieth century—not much, perhaps, but higher.”

  “Did anyone ever notice what the altimeter read?” asked Cooper.

  “I don’t believe I did,” Adams admitted.

  “It wouldn’t tell you, anyhow,” Hudson declared. “It would just give our height then and now—and we were moving, remember—and what about air pockets and relative atmosphere density and all the rest?”

  Cooper looked as discouraged as Hudson felt.

  “How does this sound?” asked Adams. “We’ll build a platform twelve feet high. That certainly should be enough to clear us and yet small enough to stay within the range of the unit’s force-field.”

  “And what if we’re two feet higher here?” Hudson pointed out.

  “A fall of fourteen feet wouldn’t kill a man unless he’s plain unlucky.”

  “It might break some bones.”

  “So it might break some bones. You want to stay here or take a chance on a broken leg?”

  “All right, if you put it that way. A platform, you say. A platform out of what?”

  “Timber. There’s a lot of it. We just go out and cut some logs.”

  “A twelve-foot log is heavy. And how are we going to get that big a log uphill?”

  “We drag it.”

  “We try to, you mean.”

  “Maybe we could fix up a cart,” said Adams, after thinking a moment.

  “Out of what?” Cooper asked.

  “Rollers, maybe. We could cut some and roll the logs up here.”

  “That would work on level ground,” Hudson said. “It wouldn’t work to roll a log uphill. It would get away from us. Someone might get killed.”

  “The logs would have to be longer than twelve feet, anyhow,” Cooper put in. “You’d have to set them in a hole and that takes away some footage.”

  “Why not the tripod principle?” Hudson offered. “Fasten three logs at the top and raise them.”

  “That’s a gin-pole, a primitive derrick. It’d still have to be longer than twelve feet. Fifteen, sixteen, maybe. And how are we going to hoist three sixteen-foot logs? We’d need a block and tackle.”

  “There’s another thing,” said Cooper. “Part of those logs might just be beyond the effective range of the force-field. Part of them would have to—have to, mind you—move in time and part couldn’t. That would set up a stress…”

  “Another thing about it,” added Hudson, “is that we’d travel with the logs. I don’t want to come out in another time with a bunch of logs flying all around me.”

  “Cheer up,” Adams told them. “Maybe the unit won’t work, anyhow.”

  VII

  The general sat alone in his office and held his head between his hands. The fools, he thought, the goddam knuckle-headed fools! Why couldn’t they see it as clearly as he did?

  For fifteen years now, as head of Project Mastodon, he had lived with it night and day and he could see all the possibilities as clearly as if they had been actual fact. Not military possibilities alone, although as a military man, he naturally would think of those first.

  The hidden bases, for example, located within the very strongholds of potential enemies—within, yet centuries removed in time. Many centuries removed and only seconds distant.

  He could see it all: The materialization of the fleets; the swift, devastating blow, then the instantaneous retreat into the fastnesses of the past. Terrific destruction, but not a ship lost nor a man.

  Except that if you had the bases, you need never strike the blow. If you had the bases and let the enemy know you had them, there would never be the provocation.

  And on the home front, you’d have air-raid shelters that would be effective. You’d evacuate your population not in space, but time. You’d have the sure and absolute defense against any kind of bombing—fission, fusion, bacteriological or whatever else the labs had in stock.

  And if the worst should come—which it never would with a setup like that—you’d have a place to which the entire nation could retreat, leaving to the enemy the empty, blasted cities
and the lethally dusted countryside.

  Sanctuary—that had been what Hudson had offered the then-secretary of state fifteen years ago—and the idiot had frozen up with the insult of it and had Hudson thrown out.

  And if war did not come, think of the living space and the vast new opportunities—not the least of which would be the opportunity to achieve peaceful living in a virgin world, where the old hatreds would slough off and new concepts have a chance to grow.

  He wondered where they were, those three who had gone back into time. Dead, perhaps. Run down by a mastodon. Or stalked by tigers. Or maybe done in by warlike tribesmen. No, he kept forgetting there weren’t any in that era. Or trapped in time, unable to get back, condemned to exile in an alien time. Or maybe, he thought, just plain disgusted. And he couldn’t blame them if they were.

  Or maybe—let’s be fantastic about this—sneaking in colonists from some place other than the watched Wisconsin farm, building up in actuality the nation they had claimed to be.

  They had to get back to the present soon or Project Mastodon would be killed entirely. Already the research program had been halted and if something didn’t happen quickly, the watch that was kept on the Wisconsin farm would be called off.

  “And if they do that,” said the general, “I know just what I’ll do.”

  He got up and strode around the room.

  “By God,” he said, “I’ll show ’em!”

  VIII

  It had taken ten full days of back-breaking work to build the pyramid. They’d hauled the rocks from the creek bed half a mile away and had piled them, stone by rolling stone, to the height of a full twelve feet. It took a lot of rocks and a lot of patience, for as the pyramid went up, the base naturally kept broadening out.

  But now all was finally ready.

  Hudson sat before the burned-out campfire and held his blistered hands before him.

  It should work, he thought, better than the logs—and less dangerous.

  Grab a handful of sand. Some trickled back between your fingers, but most stayed in your grasp. That was the principle of the pyramid of stones. When—and if—the time machine should work, most of the rocks would go along.

  Those that didn’t go would simply trickle out and do no harm. There’d be no stress or strain to upset the working of the force-field.

  And if the time unit didn’t work?

  Or if it did?

  This was the end of the dream, thought Hudson, no matter how you looked at it.

  For even if they did get back to the twentieth century, there would be no money and with the film lost and no other taken to replace it, they’d have no proof they had traveled back beyond the dawn of history—back almost to the dawn of Man.

  Although how far you traveled would have no significance. An hour or a million years would be all the same; if you could span the hour, you could span the million years. And if you could go back the million years, it was within your power to go back to the first tick of eternity, the first stir of time across the face of emptiness and nothingness—back to that initial instant when nothing as yet had happened or been planned or thought, when all the vastness of the Universe was a new slate waiting the first chalk stroke of destiny.

  Another helicopter would cost thirty thousand dollars—and they didn’t even have the money to buy the tractor that they needed to build the stockade.

  There was no way to borrow. You couldn’t walk into a bank and say you wanted thirty thousand to take a trip back to the Old Stone Age.

  You still could go to some industry or some university or the government and if you could persuade them you had something on the ball—why, then, they might put up the cash after cutting themselves in on just about all of the profits. And, naturally, they’d run the show because it was their money and all you had done was the sweating and the bleeding.

  “There’s one thing that still bothers me,” said Cooper, breaking the silence. “We spent a lot of time picking our spot so we’d miss the barn and house and all the other buildings….”

  “Don’t tell me the windmill!” Hudson cried.

  “No. I’m pretty sure we’re clear of that. But the way I figure, we’re right astraddle that barbed-wire fence at the south end of the orchard.”

  “If you want, we could move the pyramid over twenty feet or so.”

  Cooper groaned. “I’ll take my chances with the fence.” Adams got to his feet, the time unit tucked underneath his arm. “Come on, you guys. It’s time to go.”

  They climbed the pyramid gingerly and stood unsteadily at its top.

  Adams shifted the unit around, clasped it to his chest.

  “Stand around close,” he said, “and bend your knees a little. It may be quite a drop.”

  “Go ahead,” said Cooper. “Press the button.”

  Adams pressed the button.

  Nothing happened.

  The unit didn’t work.

  IX

  The chief of Central Intelligence was white-lipped when he finished talking.

  “You’re sure of your information?” asked the President.

  “Mr. President,” said the CIA chief, “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my entire life.”

  The President looked at the other two who were in the room, a question in his eyes.

  The JCS chairman said, “It checks, sir, with everything we know.”

  “But it’s incredible!” the President said.

  “They’re afraid,” said the CIA chief. “They lie awake nights. They’ve become convinced that we’re on the verge of traveling in time. They’ve tried and failed, but they think we’re near success. To their way of thinking, they’ve got to hit us now or never, because once we actually get time travel, they know their number’s up.”

  “But we dropped Project Mastodon entirely almost three years ago. It’s been all of ten years since we stopped the research. It was twenty-five years ago that Hudson—”

  “That makes no difference, sir. They’re convinced we dropped the project publicly, but went underground with it. That would be the kind of strategy they could understand.”

  The President picked up a pencil and doodled on a pad.

  “Who was that old general,” he asked, “the one who raised so much fuss when we dropped the project? I remember I was in the Senate then. He came around to see me.”

  “Bowers, sir,” said the JCS chairman.

  “That’s right. What became of him?”

  “Retired.”

  “Well, I guess it doesn’t make any difference now.” He doodled some more and finally said, “Gentlemen, it looks like this is it. How much time did you say we had?”

  “Not more than ninety days, sir. Maybe as little as thirty.”

  The President looked up at the JCS chairman.

  “We’re as ready,” said the chairman, “as we will ever be. We can handle them—I think. There will, of course, be some—”

  “I know,” said the President.

  “Could we bluff?” asked the secretary of state, speaking quietly. “I know it wouldn’t stick, but at least we might buy some time.”

  “You mean hint that we have time travel?”

  The secretary nodded.

  “It wouldn’t work,” said the CIA chief tiredly. “If we really had it, there’d be no question then. They’d become exceedingly well-mannered, even neighborly, if they were sure we had it.”

  “But we haven’t got it,” said the President gloomily.

  X

  The two hunters trudged homeward late in the afternoon, with a deer slung from a pole they carried on their shoulders. Their breath hung visibly in the air as they walked along, for the frost had come and any day now, they knew, there would be snow.

  “I’m worried about Wes,” said Cooper, breathing heavily. “He’s taking this too hard. We
got to keep an eye on him.”

  “Let’s take a rest,” panted Hudson.

  They halted and lowered the deer to the ground.

  “He blames himself too much,” said Cooper. He wiped his sweaty forehead. “There isn’t any need to. All of us walked into this with our eyes wide open.”

  “He’s kidding himself and he knows it, but it gives him something to go on. As long as he can keep busy with all his puttering around, he’ll be all right.”

  “He isn’t going to repair the time unit, Chuck.”

  “I know he isn’t. And he knows it, too. He hasn’t got the tools or the materials. Back in the workshop, he might have a chance, but here he hasn’t.”

  “It’s rough on him.”

  “It’s rough on all of us.”

  “Yes, but we didn’t get a brainstorm that marooned two old friends in this tail end of nowhere. And we can’t make him swallow it when we say that it’s okay, we don’t mind at all.”

  “That’s a lot to swallow, Johnny.”

  “What’s going to happen to us, Chuck?”

  “We’ve got ourselves a place to live and there’s lots to eat. Save our ammo for the big game—a lot of eating for each bullet—and trap the smaller animals.”

  “I’m wondering what will happen when the flour and all the other stuff is gone. We don’t have too much of it because we always figured we could bring in more.”

  “We’ll live on meat,” said Hudson. “We got bison by the million. The plains Indians lived on them alone. And in the spring, we’ll find roots and in the summer berries. And in the fall, we’ll harvest a half-dozen kinds of nuts.”

  “Some day our ammo will be gone, no matter how careful we are with it.”

  “Bows and arrows. Slingshots. Spears.”

  “There’s a lot of beasts here I wouldn’t want to stand up to with nothing but a spear.”

  “We won’t stand up to them. We’ll duck when we can and run when we can’t duck. Without our guns, we’re no lords of creation—not in this place. If we’re going to live, we’ll have to recognize that fact.”