Our Children's Children (5 page)

Wilson glanced at the girl sitting on the sofa beside Gale and caught on her face a shadow of terror.

“Twenty years, you say,” said Sandburg. “You held these things off for twenty years.”

“We are doing better now,” said Gale. “Or at least we were doing better before we left. We have weapons now. At first we had none. The Earth had been without war and weapons for a hundred years or more when their spaceship came. They would have exterminated us then if they had fought a total war, but as I have explained, it has not been total war. That gave us time to develop some defense. We fabricated weapons, some of them rather sophisticated weapons, but even your weapons of today would not be enough—your nuclear weapons, perhaps, but no sane society.…”

He stopped in some embarrassment, waited for a moment and then went on. “We killed a lot of them, of course, but it seemed to make no difference. There always seemed as many of them as ever, if not more. Only the one spaceship came, so far as we could determine. It could not have carried many of them, large as it was. The only answer to their numbers seems to be that they are prolific breeders and that they reach maturity in an incredibly short time. They don't seem to mind dying. They never run or hide. I suppose, again, that it is their warrior's code. Nothing quite so glorious as a death in battle. And they took so damn much killing. Kill a hundred of them and let one get through and it more than evens the score. I imagine that we lived the same kind of fear-ridden life as the old American pioneers who lived in the shadow of Indian raids. If we had stayed, they would eventually have wiped us out. Even trying to conserve us, as they may have been trying, they still would have exterminated us. That is why we're here.

“It is impossible, I think, for the human race to accept the sort of creatures they are. There is nothing that we know that can compare with them. The traditionally blood-crazed weasel in the chicken coop is a pale imitation of them.”

“Perhaps,” said the President, “in view of what we have been told, we should do something now in regard to that artillery.”

“We have, of course,” the Attorney General pointed out, “no real evidence.…”

“I would rather,” said Sandburg sharply, “move without ironclad evidence than find it suddenly sitting in my lap.”

The President reached for his phone. He said to the Secretary of Defense, “You can use this phone. Kim will put through the call.”

“After Jim has made his call,” said State, “perhaps I should use the phone. We'll want to get off an advisory to the other governments.”

10

Miss Emma Garside turned off the radio and sat in silence, bolt upright in her chair, in something approaching awe of herself for the brilliance of the idea that had just occurred to her. It was not often (well, actually never before) that she had felt that way, for although a proud woman, she also was inclined to be mousy in both her actions and her thought. The pride she had was a secret pride, divulged only occasionally and in a very guarded manner to Miss Clarabelle Smythe, her very closest friend. It was a pride she held close within herself, for comfort, although there were times she flinched a little when she remembered the undoubted horse thief and the man who had been hanged for a rather heinous offense. She had never mentioned either the horse thief or the hanged man to her good friend Clarabelle.

The Sunday sun of afternoon slanted through the westward-facing windows, falling on the worn carpeting where the aged cat slept, tightly rolled into a ball. In the garden at the rear of the dowdy house on the dowdy street the catbird was calling sassily—perhaps preparing for a new inroad on the raspberry patch—but she paid it no attention.

It had cost a deal of money, she thought, and a lot of work and letter writing and some traveling, but it had been worth it, she told herself, all the money and the time. For there was no one else in this little town who could trace back their blood as far as she—to the Revolution and beyond, back to English days and little English villages that lay sunken deep in time. And while there had been a horse thief and a hanged man and others of somewhat dubious character and undistinguished lineage, they had been offset by country squires and sturdy yeomen, with even the hint of an ancient castle somewhere in the background, although she never had quite honestly been able to authenticate the castle.

And now, she thought, and now! She had carried her family research back as far as human ingenuity and records went. Now could she—would she dare—proceed in the opposite direction—forward into the future? She knew all the old ancestors and here, she told herself, was the opportunity to acquaint herself with all the new descendants. If these people were really what the radio hinted they might be, it surely could be done. But if it were to be done, she would have to do it, for there would be no records. She would have to go among them—those who came from the area of New England—and she would have to ask her questions and she might ask many different people before she got a clue. Are there, my dear, any Garsides or Lamberts or Lawrences in your family tree? Well, then, if you think so, but don't really know, is there anyone who would? Oh, yes, my dear, of course it is most important—I cannot begin to tell you how important.

She sat in the chair unstirring, while the cat slept on and the catbird screamed, feeling in her that strange sense of family that had driven her all these years, and which, given this new development, might drive her further yet.

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 emptyhanded.”

“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 through 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.…”