Mastodonia (30 page)

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 bellow 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.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1978 by Clifford D. Simak

Cover design by Jason Gabbert

ISBN: 978-1-5040-2412-9

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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