Mastodonia

  It was a numbing thing to watch. In 1968 we had sometimes wondered if the republic would stand; now there were times when we were sure it wouldn’t. Personally, and I suppose this also applied to the rest of us, I felt a sense of guilt, although we never talked about it. The thought kept hammering through my head: If we had not developed time travel, none of this would have come to pass.

  We did talk about how we could have been so blind, so complacent in believing that the emigration law was simply an empty political gesture, that few of the underprivileged to whom it would apply had any wish to become pioneers in an unknown land. I felt especially remiss on this, for I had been the one, from the very first, who had said the entire proposal was senseless. The fury of the riots seemed to demonstrate that the ghettos did want the second chance the legislation offered. But it was difficult to judge how much of the violence was keyed to a desire for this second chance, and how much might have been caused by ancient, suppressed hatred and bitterness, cleverly touched off by those who led and directed the rioting.

  There was a rumor that an army of rioters from the Twin Cities was moving on Willow Bend, perhaps with a view to taking over the time-travel operation. The sheriff hastily put out a call for volunteers to block the march, but, as it turned out, there had been no march. It was just another of the many ugly rumors that at times crept even into the news reports. Why the rioters did not think of taking us over, I will never figure out. From their point of view, it would have been a logical move, although, in all likelihood, it would not have worked out as they might have thought it would. If they thought of it at all, they probably envisioned a time machine of some sort that could be physically taken over and which they probably could operate. But, apparently, no one thought of it. Perhaps the leaders of the operation were concentrating on a violent confrontation that would bring the federal establishment to its knees.

  The Five Days passed and relative calm fell over the battered, blackened cities. Talks began, but who was talking and where and what they might be talking about was not disclosed. The newsmen and the networks were unable to penetrate the silence. We tried to reach Courtney, but the long-distance lines were still out.

  Then, late one afternoon, Courtney came walking through the gate.

  “I didn’t phone from Lancaster,” he said, “because it was quicker to grab a cab and come.” He took the drink that Ben offered him and sank into a chair. The man looked tired and harried.

  “Day and night,” he said, “for the last three days. Christ, I hope I never live through anything like this again.”

  “You were sitting in on the negotiations?” asked Ben.

  “That’s right. And I think we have it all worked out. I never saw such stubborn sons-of-bitches in all my life—both sides, the government and the rioters. I had to fight off both of them. Over and over, I had to explain to them that Time Associates had a big stake in the matter, that we had to protect our interests and that without us, no one could get anywhere.”

  He drained the paper cup he’d been given and held it out. Ben slopped more liquor into it.

  “But now,” he said, “I think we have it. The documents are being drawn up. As it stands, if none of the bastards changes his mind, we’ll supply a time road into the Miocene without charge. I had to make that concession. The government points out that the program will cost so much that any fee to us would wreck it. I don’t believe this, but there was nothing much that I could do. If I’d refused, the talks would have collapsed; the government, I think, was looking for some reason to walk out of them. We only furnish the time road, that is all. We say to them, here it is, and then it’s their headache. In exchange for that, the State Department ban is removed and stays removed and there will be no effort, ever, to impose any kind of governmental regulations, state, federal or otherwise. And, furthermore—and this one, once again, almost wrecked the talks—Mastodonia is accorded recognition as an independent state.”

  I looked across the room at Rila and she was smiling—it was the first time she had smiled for days. And, somehow, I knew what she was thinking—that now, we could go ahead with that house in Mastodonia.

  “I think,” said Ben, “that is good enough. You did a good job, Court. We’d probably have trouble, anyhow, collecting any fees from the government.”

  The door opened and Hiram came into the room. We all turned to look at him.

  He shuffled a few feet forward. “Mr. Steele,” he said, “Catface would like for you to come. He wants to see you. He says it is important.”

  I rose and Rila said, “I’ll come with you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but no. I’d better see what this is about myself. It’s probably nothing. It won’t take too long.”

  But I had a horrible feeling it would be more than nothing. Never before had Catface sent for me.

  Outside the building, Hiram said, “He’s down near the chicken house.”

  “You stay here,” I said. “I’ll go alone.”

  I went down across the yard and around the chicken house and there was Catface, in one of the apple trees. As I walked toward the tree, I felt him reach out for me. When he did that, it seemed to me that we were in a place together, just the two of us, with all the rest of it shut out.

  “I am glad you came,” he said. “I wanted to see you before I left. I wanted to tell you …”

  “Leave!” I shouted at him. “Catface, you can’t leave. Not now. What are you leaving for?”

  “I cannot help myself,” said Catface. “I am changing once again. I told you how I changed before, back on my home planet after my beginning.…”

  “But change?” I asked. “What kind of change? Why should you change?”

  “Because I cannot help myself. It comes on me. It’s no doing of my own.”

  “Catface, is this a change you want?”

  “I think so. I have not asked myself yet. And yet, I feel happy at it. For I am going home.”

  “Home? Back to the planet of your birth?”

  “No. To headquarters planet. Now I know that that is home. Asa, do you know what I think?”

  I felt cold inside. I felt limp and beaten and suddenly, bereft. “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “I think that I am becoming a god. When I go back, I will be one of them. I think this is how they come about. They evolve from other forms of life. Maybe only from my form of life. Maybe from other forms of life as well. I don’t know. I think some day, I will know. I have served my apprenticeship. I have grown up.”

  I was in an emptiness, a black abyss of emptiness and the thing that rasped across my soul was the realization that it was not the loss of Catface’s ability to construct time roads for us, but the loss of Catface himself that made the emptiness.

  “Asa,” he said, “I am going home. I had lost the way, but now I know the way and I am going home.”

  I said nothing. There was nothing I could say. I was lost in the emptiness.

  “My friend,” he said, “please wish me well. I must have that to carry with me.”

  I said the words, wrenched out of me as if they were dripping gobbets of flesh wrenched from my body; I wanted to say them, I had to say them, and yet they hurt to say: “Catface, I wish you well. Most sincerely, I do wish you well. I shall miss you, Catface.”

  He was gone. I did not see him go, but I knew that he was gone. There was a chill wind blowing out of nowhere and the black of the emptiness turned to gray and then it changed to nothing and I was standing in the orchard, at the corner of the hen house, looking at an empty apple tree.

  Dusk had come across the land and any minute now, the floodlights would turn on automatically and the homestead would change into a garish nightmare, with the uniformed guards tramping up and down the fence. But, mercifully, for a few moments, I had the dusk and I needed it.

  Then, the lights snapped on and I turned about to head for the office building. I was afraid that I would stagger, but I didn’t. I walked stiff and straight, like a wound-up
toy. Hiram was nowhere around and Bowser, more than likely, was somewhere hunting woodchucks, although it was a little late for woodchucks. Usually, they went to ground shortly after sundown.

  I walked into the office. When I came through the door, they stopped their talking and sat there looking at me.

  “Well?” asked Rila.

  “Catface is gone,” I said.

  Ben came to his feet in a single surge.

  “Gone!” he shouted. “Where has he gone?”

  “He’s gone home,” I said. “He wanted to say goodbye. That is all he wanted—just to say goodbye.”

  “Couldn’t you have stopped him?”

  “There was no way to stop him, Ben. He grew up, you see. He served his apprenticeship.…”

  “Now, just a minute,” said Courtney, trying to be calm. “He’ll be back, won’t he?”

  “No, he won’t,” I said. “He changed. He changed into something else.…”

  Ben banged his fist on the desk. “What a lousy, goddamn break! Where does this leave us? I’ll tell you where it leaves us. It leaves us up the creek.”

  “Not too fast,” said Courtney. “Let’s not go too fast. Let us not close out our options. There may be something left. We may salvage something.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Ben. “You and your lawyer talk …”

  “We could save what we have,” said Courtney. “The Safari contract and that’s a cool two million bucks a year.”

  “But the Miocene. What about the Miocene?”

  “Not the Miocene, Ben. Mastodonia.”

  Rila cried, “Not Mastodonia! I’ll not have them in Mastodonia. They would foul it up. Mastodonia is Asa’s and mine.”

  “With Catface gone and no more time roads,” said Courtney, his voice sharp and cold, “you’ll have them in Mastodonia or you will have nothing at all.” He said to me, “You’re sure that Catface is gone, that he won’t be back?”

  “That is right.”

  “No more time roads?”

  “No,” I said. “There’ll be no more time roads.”

  “You are sure of that?”

  “Positive,” I said. “Why the hell should I lie to you? You think this is a joke? I tell you, it’s no joke. And I’ll tell you something else. You’re sending no one into Mastodonia. I explained to you the other day. There’s not enough of a time margin. In the time of Mastodonia, there are already men. Hunting mastodons in Spain. Chipping flints in France.”

  “You’re crazy!” Ben shouted. “You’d lose the little that we have …”

  “Yes, by God,” I yelled at him, “I’d lose it. To hell with the cool two million. To hell with the government and the rioters.”

  “And to hell with us?” asked Courtney gently, far too gently.

  “Yes,” I said, “to hell with you. By sending those mobs into Mastodonia, we could wreck all we have right now—all the human race may have right now.”

  “You know he’s right,” said Rila softly. “He’s right on one premise and I’m right on another. Mastodonia belongs to the two of us and no one else can have it. Right now, it’s clean; we can’t make it dirty. And there’s something more …”

  I didn’t wait to hear what more she had to say. I turned and stumbled out the door. I went down the hall, scarcely knowing where I was going, and out the front door to the gate. I said to the guard who stood by the gate, “Let me out,” and he let me out.

  The dusk had deepened and it was almost night. I could just make out the dark loom of a clump of trees across the road that ran into Willow Bend. Ben’s big parking lot was empty and I moved toward it. I didn’t know where I was going. And I didn’t really care. All I wanted was to get away.

  Because I knew that no matter what Rila and I did or said, we would lose; that under the pressure that would build up, we’d be forced to let the hordes into Mastodonia. The thing that hurt the most was that Ben and Courtney would be among those who pressured us.

  I walked out quite a ways into the parking lot and then I turned around. And there, looming against the lights that shone upon it, was the fence. I’d not seen it from the outside except for that time I’d come home from Europe, and on that occasion, there’d been so much else to see—the crowds of people, the jam-packed parking lot, the hot dog stands and the man who was selling balloons—that I’d scarcely noticed the fence. But now I saw it in all its grotesqueness and other-worldliness, and its being there made me remember how it had been before—before there was a fence. Standing there, I felt the lostness and the loneliness of one who’s lost his home—not only the old farm, but Mastodonia, as well. For I knew it was only a matter of time until Mastodonia would be gone. And gone with it, the fieldstone house with its many chimneys, the house that Rila had planned and of which we’d talked so many nights.

  Rila, I thought—Rila, the self-styled pushy bitch who wanted to be rich—and yet, only a little while ago, she had made her choice, without any hesitation, between Mastodonia and a cool two million bucks a year.

  You’re a fraud, I told her. It had all been a pose, the bitchy business side of her. When it had come down to the final mark, she had dropped the pose and made her choice. She was still, no matter how you cut it, no matter all the growing up, that girl I’d loved back at the dig in the Middle East, the one whose face had been burned by the relentless sun, the one who always had a dirty face because she had to rub her itchy, sunburned, peeling nose with a dirty hand.

  The Miocene, I thought, why couldn’t we have reached the Miocene? Why didn’t I think to have Catface engineer a road into the Miocene days ago, so it would be ready if we needed it? If we had the Miocene, even with Catface gone, we could still save Mastodonia.

  And Catface? A memory now. No longer grinning from a tree. Finally knowing what he was and would be.

  Catface, I said to him, so long, old friend. I wish you well; I will miss you sorely.

  It seemed in the instant of that thought that I was with him once again, that I had become one with him as I had so many times before, when he’d taken me in with him to see as he saw, to know what he knew.

  To know what he knew.

  To know, even if I did not entirely understand them, the things he had never told me; to be aware of, even if I could not understand them, the things that he had shown me.

  Like the time equations, for example.

  Suddenly, thinking of them, the time equations were there again, exactly as he had shown them to me, and looking at them, through his eyes from inside himself, I saw how they fit together neatly and how they could be used.

  The Miocene, I thought, twenty-five million years into the past, and the equations fit together and I did other things that were necessary and I engineered a time road.

  I receded out of him and he went away. I was inside of him no longer. I was not seeing through his eyes. And the equations … the equations … they had meant … but I’d lost the equations, the feel and shape of them, the knowing how to use them. If I had ever known. I was just a stupid human being now, one who had dared to dream he’d engineered a time road, using the information and the knowledge that had been fed into him, that had been given him without conscious telling, the gift of a being that was now a so-called god far among the stars.

  I found that I was shaking. I hunched up my shoulders and clasped my hands together, hard, to try to stop the shaking. You goddamn fool, I told myself, you’ve psyched yourself into a classic state of jitters. Pull yourself together, fool; know yourself for what you are.

  And yet … and yet … and yet …

  Go ahead, I raged at myself, walk those few feet forward, tread that silly time road. You’ll see. There is no Miocene.

  I walked the few feet forward and there was a Miocene. The sun was halfway down the western sky and a stiff breeze from the north was billowing the lushness of the grass. Down the ridge, a quarter-mile away, a titanothere, an ungainly beast with a ridiculous flaring horn set upon his nose raised his head from grazing and let out a bello
w at me.

  Carefully, I turned about and stepped back down the road, walking back into the parking lot. Stooping, I took off my shoes and set them precisely, one ahead of the other, to mark the entrance to the road. Then, in my stocking feet, I walked down the lot to pull up an armload of the numbered stakes that had been driven into the ground to mark the stalls where cars should park. Along the way, I picked up a fist-sized stone and used it to drive in the stakes to mark the way into the Miocene.

  Having done this, I sat down, flat upon the ground, to put on my shoes. Suddenly, I was tired and drained. I sought for triumph and found little of it in me. I just felt a sort of thankful peace. And I knew that everything would be all right now, for if I could engineer a road into the Miocene, I could engineer other roads as well. Not by myself, I couldn’t. Not as I was now, I couldn’t. But once I stepped inside of Catface …

  It took quite a while to put on my shoes, for I seemed to be extraordinarily fumble-fingered. But I finally got them on and stood up, then headed for the gate. There was something very urgent that I must do. I must, as soon as possible, tell Rila that the two of us could keep Mastodonia.

  About the Author

  During his fifty-five-year career, Clifford D. Simak produced some of the most iconic science fiction stories ever written. Born in 1904 on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin, Simak got a job at a small-town newspaper in 1929 and eventually became news editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, writing fiction in his spare time.

  Simak was best known for the book City, a reaction to the horrors of World War II, and for his novel Way Station. In 1953 City was awarded the International Fantasy Award, and in following years, Simak won three Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award. In 1977 he became the third Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and before his death in 1988, he was named one of three inaugural winners of the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.

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