Mastodonia (10 page)

“What's the matter, Rila?”

She pushed herself away and looked up at me. “I'm pissed off,” she said. “I'm sore. I'm angry. No one would believe me.”

“Who wouldn't believe you?”

“Courtney McCallahan, for one. He's the lawyer I was telling you about. We've been friends from way back. It never occurred to me that he'd disbelieve me. But he put his arms down on his desk and put his face down on them and laughed so hard he shook. When he looked up again, he had to take off his glasses so he could wipe his eyes, and he was so beat out with laughter that he could hardly talk. He gulped and strangled and said, ‘Rila, I've known you for a long time, and I didn't know you had it in you. I never thought you could do a thing like this.' Like what, I asked him, and he said a joke, a practical joke, but that he forgave me because it had made his day. So I peeled off on him and said it was no joke and that we wanted him to represent us, to look out for our interests, to protect ourselves. We do need someone to look out for our interests, don't we, I asked him, and he said that if what I had told him was true, we sure did need someone. But he refused to believe me. I don't think he thought it was a joke any longer; I don't know what he thought. But he still didn't believe me, no matter what I said. He took me out for dinner and he bought champagne for me, but I wouldn't forgive him for the way he acted.”

“But will he represent us?”

“You can bet your life he will. He said that if I could show him proof, he wouldn't miss it for the world. Said he'd drop everything, turn all his other work over to his associates, and give us full time. He said that if he was any judge, we would need full time. But he was still chuckling about it when he took me to my hotel and said good night.”

“But, Rila, proof …”

“Wait a minute now. That's not all of it. I went up to New York and I talked with Safari, Inc., and they were interested, of course, and they didn't really laugh at me, but they were skeptical. They plain outright thought I was lying to them—playing some sort of a con game, although it bothered them they couldn't figure out the con. Their head man is a stiff, formal old Britisher who is most correct, and he said to me, ‘Miss Elliot, I don't know what this is all about, but if it should be that it is more than sheer imagination, I can assure you we'd be most interested.' And he said to me, ‘If we'd not been aware of you before, I'd not listen for a moment.'”

“Aware of you before?”

“Well, not him, not this old Britisher. But his outfit. A few years back, I bought a fair amount of stuff they'd been accumulating for years and wondering what to do with. Ivory and native-carved statuary and ostrich feathers and a lot of junk like that. I took all they had and they took me for a sucker. But I was years ahead of them in knowing what the public wanted and would pay money for, and we turned a handsome profit on it. Somehow the safari outfit got wind of how well we'd done and my stock went up with them. They came around later and asked if I would be interested if they could round up some more of the junk. You see, they aren't in the retail business, so they had to find someone …”

“I suppose,” I said, “they want proof just like your old friend Courtney.”

“That's right,” she said. “And the funny thing about it is that all they're interested in are dinosaurs. They fairly drooled when I asked them if they could get clients to go hunting dinosaurs. Not mastodon, not mammoth, not sabertooth cats, not cave bears, nor even titanotheres, but dinosaurs. Big ones and vicious ones. I asked them what kind of gun you'd have to use to shoot a big dinosaur and they said they didn't know, but probably the biggest that ever had been made. I asked if they had some of those guns around and they said they did—a couple of them that had never been used. They weren't even sure they were being manufactured any longer. Elephant guns, but now, with higher muzzle velocity, an elephant can be done in by a much smaller caliber. Not that there are many elephants being shot these days. So I said, by God, that I wanted to buy those two guns, and after some backing and filling, they agreed to sell them to me. By this time, I am sure, they thought I was out of my mind. They charged me a thousand apiece and swore they were losing money, throwing in a few dozen rounds of ammunition to sweeten up the bargain. I suppose they were losing money, but they were unloading items that no one else would buy. Those rifles are monsters. Must weigh twenty pounds or so. And the cartridges are banana-sized.”

“Look,” I said, “if you think I'm going out and knocking over a brace of carnosaurs just to offer proof, you'd better think again. I'm hell on wheels with a twenty-two, but this is something different. It takes a big man to shoot one of those old-time elephant guns.”

“You're big enough,” she said. “Maybe you wouldn't even have to shoot. Protection, that is all. Just in case some carnosaur should charge while I'm getting the proof on film. I bought a movie camera—color film, with sound, telescopic lens, everything one would ever need.”

“But why two guns? One is all a man can carry. And you'll be packing the camera.”

“I got two guns,” she said, “because I'm not about to have you go out there alone. We have no idea what it will be like, but to me it sounds a little chancy. We'd be better off with two guns. I figured maybe we could persuade one of your old pals …”

“Rila, we've got to keep this under cover for a while. It's already beginning to leak out. Ben Page got hold of Hiram and got suspicious when Hiram began acting important …”

“We've got to keep it quiet,” she said, “but we've got to come back alive, or all the proof in the world won't help us any.”

I didn't like it, but I could see the logic of what she was saying.

“Maybe Ben would come along with us,” I said. “He'd be a good man to have along. He fancies himself a mighty hunter, and he is fairly good. Each fall he goes up north for deer season, and he's hunted in Canada and Alaska. Moose, bighorns, grizzly—stuff like that. Years ago he bagged a Kodiak. And a caribou. He still talks about the caribou. For years, he wanted to go to Africa, but he never made it, and now the hunting's gone.…”

“Would he go with us and keep quiet about what he sees for a while?”

“I think so. I had to tell him part of it—about the possibility of a spaceship in the sinkhole—and I swore him to secrecy. He was willing to go along on the secrecy because he's got some irons of his own in the fire.”

“We have to have a second man,” she said. “I have no idea what it might be like in dinosaur country, but …”

“Neither do I,” I said. “It could be pretty awful. It could be fairly safe. There'd be a lot of herbivores, all fairly peaceful, I'd imagine. But there'd be some meat-eaters. I have no idea how thick they might be, nor how pugnacious.”

“I'd like to get some footage of at least a couple of the more ferocious ones. That would set up the safari outfit. I have no idea what we can squeeze out of them, but I'd guess an awful lot. After all, how much would a true, red-blooded, dyed-in-the-wool sportsman be willing to pay to be the first man to shoot a ravening, bloodthirsty dinosaur?”

We reached the escalator going down to the baggage area.

“Give me your check and I'll pick up the stuff,” I said.

She opened her purse and took out her ticket envelope. “We'd better arrange for some help,” she said, handing it to me. “There's more than we can carry.”

“The two guns,” I said.

“And the movie stuff.”

“I'll get some help,” I said.

“The whole trouble,” she explained, “was that I couldn't tell them about some machine—a time-travel machine. If I could have told them we'd developed a machine, they'd have been more able to believe me. We place so much trust in machines; they are magic to us. If I could have outlined some ridiculous theory and spouted some equations at them, they would have been impressed. But I couldn't do that. To tell them about Catface would have only made matters worse. I simply told them that we had developed a technique for traveling in time, hoping that when I mentioned technique they would presuppose a machine. But it didn't seem to have the right effect. They asked me about a machine anyhow, and it floored them when I had to tell them there was no machine.”

“With no machine,” I said, “that's asking them to accept a lot on faith.”

“Asa, when we go back to get our film, where shall we go?”

“I've been thinking about that,” I said, “and I can't be certain. The late Jurassic, maybe, or the early Cretaceous. In either of those periods, you'd be apt to find a greater diversity of forms, though we can't be sure. The fossil record would seem to indicate those two times, but the fossil record is only what we've found. We've probably missed a lot. We make it sound as if we know much more than we do. Actually, we've found only bits and pieces; we have no clear picture. But if we went to the early Cretaceous, we'd probably miss the one dinosaur our white hunters are most interested in, old
Tyrannosaurus rex
.…”

“They mentioned him,” said Rila.

“Rex was a latecomer,” I said, “or we think he was. There may have been bigger and more vicious ones than him that never had the luck to have their fossils found. In any case, it would be nothing short of insanity to go up against him. Eighteen feet tall, a total length of fifty feet, weighing eight tons or more and filled with a senseless hunting instinct. We don't know how many of him there may be. Perhaps not many. You might have to hunt to find him. Large as he was, he probably required a territory measuring many square miles to make no more than a bare living.”

“We can figure it out later,” Rila said.

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.