ONE
A dog's high kiyoodling brought me up in bed,
still half asleep, barely functional. The first light of
dawn lay within the room, showing in its ghostliness
the worn carpeting, the battered highboy, the open
closet door with its array of hanging clothes.
"What is it, Asa?"
I turned my head and saw Rila sitting there beside
me and I asked myself, for the love of Christ, how
come—that after all these years Rila should be here.
Then I remembered, in a sort of blur, how come she
was here.
The dog cried out again, closer this time, a cry of
anguish and of fright.
I began scrambling out of bed, grabbing for a pair
of trousers, feet scuffing to find the slippers on the
floor. "It's Bowser," I told Rila. "The damn fool never
came home last night. I thought he had a woodchuck."
Bowser was hell on woodchucks. Once he started on
one, he never would give up. He'd dig halfway to
China to get one out. Ordinarily, to put an end to all
his foolishness, I'd go out to get him. But last night,
when Rila had shown up, I'd not gone hunting Bowser.
When I reached the kitchen, I could hear, Bowser
whining on the stoop. I opened the door and there
he stood, with a wooden shaft dragging behind him.
I stooped and put my arm around him and hauled him
to one side so I could see what was going on. Once
I'd done that, I saw that the shaft of wood was a
lance and that the stone blade attached to it was em-
bedded in Bowser's back leg, high up. Bowser whined
piteously at me.

"What's the matter, Asa?" Rila asked, standing in
the door.
"Someone speared him," I said. "He's got a spear
in him."
She came swiftly out on the stoop, moving around
the two of us, and went down the steps to the side-
walk.
"The blade is only halfway in," she said. "It's only
hanging there."
Her hand reached out and grasped the shaft, then
gave a twitch and pulled it free.
Bowser yipped, then whined. He was shivering. I
picked him up and carried him into the kitchen.
"There's a blanket on the davenport in the living
room," I told Rila. "If you would get it, please, we
can make a bed for him over in the corner."
Then I turned to Bowser. "It's all right. You're
home now and it's all right. We'll take care of you."
"Asa!"
"Yes, what is it, Rila?"
"This is a Folsom point." She held up the spear
so that I could see. "Who would use a Folsom point
to spear a dog?"
"Some kid," I said. "They are little monsters."
She shook her head. "No kid would know how to
mount the point on the shaft—not the way this one
is mounted."
"The blanket, please," I said.
She laid the lance on the table and went into the
living room to get the blanket. Back with it, she folded
it and knelt to put it in one corner of the kitchen.
I lowered Bowser onto it. "Take it easy, boy, we'll
fix you up. I don't think the cut's too deep."
"But, Asa, you don't understand. Or didn't hear
what I said."
"I heard," I said. "A Folsom point. Ten thousand
years ago. Used by paleo-Indians. Found associated
with the bones of prehistoric bison."
"Not only that," she went on, "but mounted on a
shaft shaped by scraping—that's the earmark of pre-
historic technology."
"Yes, I know," I said. "I hadn't meant to tell you

right away, but I might as well. Bowser, it seems, is a
time-traveling dog. Once he brought home some dino-
saur bones..."
"Why should a dog want dinosaur bones?"
"You miss the point. Not old bones. Not fossilized.
Not weathered. Green bones, with shreds of flesh still
hanging onto them. Not the bones of a big dinosaur.
Small one. From an animal the size of a dog or maybe
just a little larger."
Rila did not seem curious. "You get scissors and
trim off the hair around that wound. I'll get some warm
water to wash it out. And where's the medicine cabi-
net?"
"In the bathroom. To the right of the mirror." As
she turned to leave, I called, "Rila."
. "Yes," she said.
"I'm glad you're here," I said.

She had come out of the past—at least twenty
years out of the past—only the evening before.
I had been sitting in front of the house, in a lawn
chair under the big maple tree, when the car turned
off the highway and came up the access road. It was
a big, black car, and I wondered, just a little idly, who
it might be. To tell the truth, I wasn't particularly
happy at the prospect of seeing anyone at all, for, in
the last few months, I had gotten to the point where
I appreciated being left alone and felt some mild re-
sentment at any intrusion.
The car drew up to the gate and stopped, and she
got out of it. I rose from my chair and started walk-
ing across the yard. She came through the gate and
walked toward me. She was well up the path before I
recognized her, saw in this svelte, well-dressed woman
the girl of twenty years before. Even then, I could not
be sure that it was she; the long years of remembering
might have made me susceptible to seeing in any beau-
tiful woman that girl of twenty years before.
I stopped when she was still some distance off.
"Rila?" I called, making it a question. "Are you Rila
Elliot?"
She stopped as well and looked at me across the
dozen feet that separated us, as if she, as well, could
not be absolutely sure that I was Asa Steele.
"Asa," she finally said, "it is really you. I can see
it's really you. I'd heard that you were here. I was
talking with a friend just the other day and he told me
you were here. I had thought you were still at that
funny little college somewhere in the West. I had
thought so often of you ..."

 She kept up her talk so that she would not have to
do anything else, letting the talk cover whatever un-
certainty she might still feel.
I crossed the space between us and we stood close
together.
"Asa," she said, "it's been so damn long."
Then she was in my arms and it seemed strange
that she should be there: this woman who had stepped
out of a long, black car in this Wisconsin evening
across two decades of time. How hard it was to equate
her with the gaily laughing girl of that Mideastern dig,
where we had slaved together to uncover the secrets
of an ancient tumulus that, finally, turned out to be of
slight importance—I digging and sifting and uncover-
ing, while she labeled and tried to somehow identify
the shards and other prehistoric junk laid out on long
tables. That hot and dusty season had been far too
short. Laboring together during the day, we slept to-
gether on those nights when we could elude the notice
of the others, although, toward the end, I remembered,
we had ceased being careful of the others, who had not
really seemed to care or to take notice of us.
"I had given up ever seeing you again," I said. "Oh,
I thought of it, of course, but I couldn't bring myself
to break in on you. I told myself you had forgotten.
I told myself you wouldn't care to see me. You'd be
polite, of course, and we'd exchange some silly, stilted
talk, and then it would be the end, and I didn't want
to end it that way. I wanted the memories to stay,
you see. I had heard ten years or so ago that you'd
gone into some sort of import-export business, then I
lost all track of you...."
She tightened her arms around me and lifted her
.face to be kissed, and I kissed her, perhaps not with
the excitement I might once have felt, but with deep
thankfulness that we were together once again.
"I am still in business," she said. "Import-export
business, if you want to call it that; but shortly, I
think, I will be getting out of it."
"It's a little silly, standing here," I said. "Let's sit
down underneath the tree. It's a pleasant place. I

spend a lot of evenings here. If you'd like, I could
rustle up some drinks."
"Later on," she said. "It's so peaceful here."
"Quiet," I said. "Restful. The campus, I suppose,
could be called peaceful, too, but this is a different
kind of peace. I've had almost a year of it."
"You resigned your university post?"
"No, I'm on sabbatical. I'm supposed to be writing
a book. I've not written a line, never intended to.
Once the sabbatical is over, it's possible I'll resign."
"This place? Is this Willow Bend?"
"Willow Bend is the little town just up the road,
the one you drove through getting here. I lived there
once. My father ran a farm-implement business at the
edge of town. This farm, this forty acres, was once
owned by a family named Streeter. When I was a boy,
I roamed the woods, hunting, fishing, exploring. This
farm was one place that I roamed, usually with friends
of mine. Streeter never minded. He had a son about
my age—Hugh, I think his name was—and he was
one of the gang."
"Your parents?"
"My lather retired a number of years ago. Moved
out to California. My father had a brother out there
and my mother a couple of sisters up the coast. Five
years or so ago, I came back and bought this farm.
I'm not returning, as you may think, to my roots, al-
though this place, Willow Bend and the country here-
about, has some happy associations."
"But if you're not returning to your roots, why Wil-
low Bend and why this farm?"
"There was something here I had to come back and
find. I'll tell you about it later, if you're interested.
But about yourself—in business, you say."
"You'll be amused," she told me. "I went into the
artifact and fossil business. Started small and grew.
Mostly artifacts and fossils, although there was some
gem material and some other stuff. If I couldn't be an
archaeologist or a paleontologist, at least I could turn
my training to some use. The items that sold best
were small dinosaur skulls, good trilobites and slabs of
rock with fish imprints. You'd be surprised what you

can get for really good material—and even some that
is not so good. Couple of years ago, a breakfast cereal
company came up with the idea that it would be good
promotion to enclose little cubes of dinosaur bone in
their packages as premiums. They came to me about
it. Do you know how we got the dinosaur bone? There
was a bed out in Arizona and we mined it with bull-
dozers and front-end loaders. Hundreds of tons of
bones to be sawed up into little cubes. I don't mind
telling you I'm a bit ashamed of that. Not that it
wasn't legal. It was. We owned the land and we broke
no laws, but no one can ever guess how many priceless
fossils we may have ruined in the process."
"That may be true," I said, "but I gather you have
little use for archaeologists or paleontologists."
."On the contrary," she said, "I have high regard
for them. I would like to be one of them, but I never
had a chance. I could have gone on for years, the way
you and I went out into that godforsaken dig in Tur-
key. I could have spent all summer digging and classi-
fying and cataloging, and when the dig closed down,
I could have spent more months in classifying and
cataloging. And in between times, I could have taught
moronic sophomores. But did I ever get my name on
a paper? You bet your life I didn't. To amount to
anything in that racket, you had to be at Yale or
Harvard or Chicago or some such place as that and
even then, you could spend years before anyone took
any notice of you. There's no room at the top, no mat-
ter how hard you work, or how you scratch and fight.
A few fat cats and glory-grabbers have it all nailed
down and they hang on forever."
"It worked out pretty much that way for me as
well," I told her. "Teaching in a small university.
Never a chance to do any research. No funds for
even small-time digs. Now and then, a chance to get
in on a big one if you applied early and were willing
to do the donkey work of digging. Although I'm not
really complaining. For a time, I didn't really care
too much. The campus was safe and comfortable and
I felt secure. After Alice left me—you knew about
Alice?"

"Yes," she said, "I knew."
"I don't think I even minded that much," I said.
"Her leaving me, I mean. But my pride was hurt and,
for a time, I felt I had to hide away. Not here, I don't
mean that, and now I'm over it."
"You had a son."
"Yes, Robert. With his mother in Vienna, I believe.
At least, somewhere in Europe. The man she left me
for is a diplomat—a professional diplomat, not a po-
litical appointee."
"But the boy, Robert."
"At first, he was with me. Then he wanted to be
with his mother, so I let him go."
"I never married," she said. "At first, I was too
busy, then, later, it didn't seem important."
We sat silently for a moment as the dusk crept
across the land. There was the scent of lilacs from the
misshapen, twisted clump of trees that sprawled in one
corner of the yard. A self-important robin hopped se-
dately about, stopping every now and then to regard
us fixedly with one beady eye.
I don't know why I said it. I hadn't meant to say it.
It just came out of me.
"Rila," I said, "we were a pair of fools. We had
something long ago and we didn't know we had it."
"That is why I'm here," she said.
"You'll stay a while? We have a lot to talk about.
I can phone the motel. It's not a very good one,
but..."
"No," she said. "If you don't mind, I'm staying here
with you."
"That's okay," I said. "I can sleep on the daven-
port."
"Asa," she said, "quit being a gentleman. I don't
want you to be a gentleman. I said stay with you, re-
member."

THREE
Bowser lay quietly in his corner, regarding us
with accusing, doleful eyes as we sat at the breakfast
table.
"He seems to have recovered," said Rila.
"Oh, he'll be all right," I told her. "He'll heal up
fast."
"How long have you had him?"
"Bowser has been with me for years. A sedate city
dog to start with, very correct and pontifical. Chased
a bird sedately every now and then when we went out
for a walk. But once we came here, he changed. He
became a roustabout and developed a mania for
woodchucks. Tries to dig them out. Almost every
evening, I have to go hunting him and haul him out
of the hole he's dug, with the woodchuck chittering
and daring him from deep inside his burrow. That's
what I thought Bowser was doing last night."
"And see what happened when you didn't go to
find him."
"Well, I had more important things to do, and I
thought it might do him good to leave him out all
night."
"But, Asa, it was a Folsom point. I can't be mis-
taken. I've seen too many of them and they are dis-
tinctive. You said some kid might have got hold of it,
but I know no kid could mount it on the shaft the
way that it is mounted. And you said something about
dinosaur bones."
"I told you he was a time-traveling dog," I said.
"Impossible as that sounds."
"Asa Steele, you know that's impossible. No one
can travel in time, least of all a dog."

"All right. Explain fresh dinosaur bones."
"Maybe they weren't dinosaur bones."
"Lady, I know dinosaur bones. I taught paleontol-
ogy at the college and dinosaurs became a sort of
hobby for me. I read all the papers I could lay my
hands on and one year we picked up some dino bones
for the museum. I mounted the damn things. I spent
one entire winter stringing all those bones together and
making artificial skeletal details that were lacking,
coloring them white so no one could accuse us of fak-
ing anything."
"But, fresh!"
"Shreds of flesh still clinging to them. Some gristle
and tendons. The meat was getting high. So was
Bowser. Apparently, he had found a decaying carcass
and had rolled in it, picking up all that lovely scent.
It took three days of scrubbing him to get the stench
out of him. He was so high there was no living with
him."
"All right, then, if you say so. How do you explain
it?"
"I don't. I've gotten so I don't even try. For a time,
just to show you, I toyed with the idea that maybe a
few smallish dinosaurs had survived into modern times
and that Bowser had somehow found one that had
died. But that doesn't make any more sense than a
time-traveling dog."
There was a knock on the door.
"Who is there?" I yelled.
"It's Hiram, Mr. Steele. I came to see Bowser."
"Come on in, Hiram," I said. "Bowser's in here. He
had an accident."
Hiram stepped inside, but when he saw Rila at the
table, he started to back out. "I can come back later,
Mr. Steele," he said. "It was just that I didn't see
Bowser outside."
"It's all right, Hiram," I told him. "The lady is Miss
Elliot, a friend of mine I haven't seen for a long time."
He shuffled in, snatching off his cap, clutching it
with both hands to his chest.
"Pleased to meet you, miss," he said. "Is that your
car outside?"

"Yes, it is," said Rila.
"It's big," said Hiram. "I never saw as big a car.
And you can see your face in it, it shines so nice."
He caught sight of Bowser in the corner and hurried
around the table to kneel beside him.
"What's the matter with him?" he asked. "He's
got all the hair off one of his hams."
"I cut it off," I told him. "I had to. Someone shot
him with an arrow."
The explanation wasn't exactly correct, but it was
simple enough for Hiram to understand and not start
asking questions. Arrows he knew about. A lot of kids
in town still had bows and arrows.
"Is he bad hurt?"
"I don't think so."
Hiram bent and wrapped an arm around Bowser's
shoulders. "That ain't right," he said. "Going around
and shooting dogs. There ain't no one should shoot a
dog."
Bowser, inviting sympathy, beat the floor feebly
with his tail and lapped at Hiram's face.
"Especially Bowser," said Hiram. "There ain't no
better dog than Bowser."
"You want some coffee, Hiram?"
"No, you go ahead and eat. I'll Just sit here with
Bowser."
"I could fry you up some eggs."
"No, thank you, Mr. Steele. I already had break-
fast. I stopped at Reverend Jacobson's and he gave
me breakfast. I had cakes and sausages."
"All right, then," I said. "You stay with Bowser.
I'm going to show Miss Elliot around the place."
When we were in the yard and out of earshot, I
said to her, "Don't let Hiram bother you. He's all right.
Harmless. Wanders around. The town sort of takes
care of him. Drops in and people give him food. He
gets along all right."
"Hasn't he anyplace to live?"
"He has a shack down by the river, but doesn't
spend much time there. He goes around visiting
friends. He and Bowser are great friends."
"I gathered that," said Rila.

"He claims he and Bowser talk together—that he
talks to Bowser and Bowser talks back to him. It's not
only Bowser. He's a friend of all the animals and
birds. He sits out in the yard and talks to a crazy,
cockeyed robin and the bird stands there, with its
head tilted to one side, listening to him. You'd swear,
at times, it understands what he is saying. He goes
out into the woods to visit the rabbits and the squir-
rels, the chipmunks and the woodchucks. He gets
after Bowser for hasseling the woodchucks. Says if
Bowser let them alone, the woodchucks would come
out and play with him."
"He sounds simpleminded."
"Oh, there's no doubt of that. But there are people
like him all over the world. Not just in little villages."
"You sound as if you like him,"
"More accurately, I don't mind him. There's no
harm in him. As you say, he's a simple soul."
"Bowser likes him."
"Bowser dotes on him," I said.
"You said—I think you said—forty acres here.
What in the world would a man like you want with
forty acres?"
"Look around you," I told her. "Perhaps you'll un-
derstand. Listen to the birds. Look at that old apple
orchard over there. Filled with blossoms. No great
shakes at producing apples. Most of them are small
and wormy. I could spray them, I suppose, but that's
a lot of bother. But small and wormy as they may be,
there are apples here most people have forgotten, if
they ever knew. There is one old snow apple tree and
a couple or three russets. You haven't tasted anything
until you bite into a russet."
She laughed. "You're making fun of me," she said.
"You always made fun of me. In your nice, soft-
spoken, gentle way. You're not here for bird song or
for some long-forgotten apples. That may be part of
it, of course, but there is more than that. You said
last night, you came here to find something, then you
never told me what it was."
I took her by the arm. "Come along," I said. "I'll
give you the tour."

The path went around the weather-beaten barn with
the sagging door, across one corner of the orchard with
its scraggly trees and then along the edge of a long-
neglected field overgrown by weeds and bordered by
woods. At the end of the field, the path stopped at the
edge of a depression.
"This is a sinkhole," I told her. "Or, at least, it is
thought of as a sinkhole."
"You've been digging here," she said, looking at the
trenches I had excavated.
I nodded. "The natives think I'm crazy. At first,
they thought I was treasure hunting. I found no treas-
ure, so now they are agreed I'm crazy."
"You're not crazy," she said, "and that is not a sink-
hole, either. Tell me what it is."
I took a deep breath and told her. "I think it's a
crater where a spaceship crashed God knows how long
ago. I've been finding bits of metal. Nothing big, noth-
ing that really tells me anything. The vehicle, if that
was what it was, didn't crash at any great speed. Not
like a meteorite. Otherwise, even the kind of metal I
am finding would have not survived except as molten
chunks. It came in hard enough to dig a hell of a big
hole, but there is no sign of plasma reaction. Down
deeper, I am confident, lies the greater part of the
mass of whatever it was that hit here."
"You knew of this hole before, when you lived here
as a boy?"
"That is right," I said. "This country is laced with
so-called mineral holes. There is a lot of lead in this
country. At one time, there were mines—nothing big,
of course, but small, operating mines. In the old days,
more than a hundred years ago, prospectors swarmed
all over this county and the next. They dug explora-
tory holes all over the landscape, hoping to uncover
strikes. In later years, every hole came to be, regarded
as a mineral hole. A lot of them, of course, weren't.
My pals and I, when I was a boy, were sure this was a
mineral hole and off and on, of summers, we did some
digging here. The old codger who farmed the place
didn't seem to mind. He used to joke with us about it,
calling us miners. We found some strange metallic

fragments, but they weren't ore and were in no way
spectacular. So, after a while, we lost interest. But,
through the years, I kept thinking back on it and the
more I thought about it, the more I became convinced
that what we'd found had been the debris of a space-
ship. So I came back, pretending just to be coming
back to the scenes of my childhood. When I found the
farm had been put up for sale, I bought it, sort of on
the spur of the moment. If I had taken time to think
about it, I don't suppose I would have. In retrospect,
at times, it has seemed a sort of silly thing to have
done. Although I have enjoyed the months I've spent
here."
"I think it's wonderful," said Rila.
I looked at her in surprise. "You do?"
"Think of it," she said. "A spaceship from the stars."
"I can't be sure of that."
She moved closer, reached up and kissed me on the
cheek.
"It doesn't matter if it's true or not," she said. "The
point is that you can still dream, that you could con-
vince yourself it could be here."
"And you, a hard-headed business woman."
"Being a business woman was a matter of survival.
At heart, I'm still an archaeologist. And all people in
that line of work are pure romantics."
"You know," I said, "I was torn between two emo-
tions about showing this to you. I wanted to share it
with you, but I was afraid as well—afraid you'd think
me irresponsible and silly."
"How sure are you? What evidence do you have?"
"Chunks of metal. Strange alloys of some sort. I sent
some chunks to the university for testing and the re-
port shows that there are no known alloys of that sort.
The university people got uptight. Asked me where I'd
found the stuff. I told them I'd picked it up in a field
and had got curious about it. That's the way the mat-
ter stands now. It's still my show for a while. I don't
want the university horning in on it. Some of the pieces
are just chunks of metal. A few show some machining.
No sign of rust, just a faint blurring of the surface, as
if the metal is showing some slight reaction to long ex-
posure. Hard and tough. Metal almost as hard as a
diamond and still not brittle. Terrific tensile strength.
There may be other explanations, but an alien space-
ship is the best, the most sensible, that I can come up
with. I tell myself that I must be scientific and objec-
tive, that I can't go riding off on a hobbyhorse ..."
"Asa, forget it. You're not riding a hobbyhorse. It's
all hard to accept, the hypothesis that you have and
the evidence you have found, but the evidence is there.
You can't simply overlook it."
"In that case," I said, "there is something further.
On this one, there is no evidence at all. Just the evi-
dence of my eyes and the feeling that I have. A strange
neighbor—I guess that's the best way to describe him.
I've never really seen him, never got a good look at
him. But I've felt him looking at me, and I've caught
glimpses of him, not really seeing him, but a certain
outrageous configuration that makes me imagine he is
there. I say imagine because I'm still trying to be sci-
entific and objective. On a purely observational level,
I'm sure that he exists. He hangs out in the orchard,
but he's not there all the time. He wanders quite a bit,
it seems."
"Is there anyone else who has seen him?"
"Others, I would guess, have seen him. Periodically,
there is a panther scare—although why people should
be afraid of panthers, I don't know. But in rural com-
munities, bear and panther scares seem to be a favor-
ite pastime. An atavistic fear, I suppose, that still
hangs on."
"Maybe there are panthers."
"I doubt it. There has been no authentic mountain
lion sighting for forty years or more. The thing about
it is that this creature I am talking of does leave a cat
impression. There is one man who knows more about
it than anybody else. He's sort of a cross between
Daniel Boone and David Thoreau, and he's spent his
life out in the woods."
"What does he think about it?"
"Like me, he doesn't know. I've talked to him a few
times and we've agreed we don't know what it is."

"You think there is some connection between this
creature and your spaceship?"
"At times, I'm tempted. But it seems a bit far-
fetched. The implication would be that it's an alien
creature that escaped the crash. That would mean it is
impossibly long-lived. Also, it would seem unlikely any-
thing could have survived the crash, if there was a
crash."
"I'd like to see some of the metal you dug up," she
said.
"No problem," I told her. "It is in the barn. We'll
have a look when we go back."


FOUR

Hiram was perched on one of the lawn chairs
in front of the house with Bowser laid out on the grass
beside him. The front-yard robin stood impertinently
a few paces off, eyeing their intrusion of its territory
with perky belligerence.
Hiram explained, "Bowser said he didn't want to
stay in the house, so I carried him out."
"He used you," I told him. "He could have walked
himself."
Bowser beat an apologetic tail.
"The robin feels sorry for him," said Hiram.
The robin had no look of sorrow.
"I ain't got nothing to do," said Hiram. "You go
about your business. I'll watch over Bowser till he's
well. Day and night, if you want me to. If he wants
anything, he can tell me."
"All right, then, you watch over him," I said. "We
have things to do."
 At the barn, I had a hell of a time getting the sag-
ging door open again. Someday, I promised myself, I
would get it fixed. It wouldn't take more than a few
hours work, but somehow I had never quite gotten
around to it.
The interior of the barn, redolent of ancient horse
manure, had a pile of junk stacked haphazardly in one
corner, but was mostly filled by two long tables I had
set up with boards laid across sawhorses. Ranged on
the tables were all the pieces of metal I had found or
dug out of the pit. At the far end of one of the tables
lay two hollow hemispherical pieces of bright metal I
had found when I had cleaned out the barn.
Rila walked over to one of the tables and picked up



a jagged piece of metal. She turned it over and over in
her hands. She said, in some amazement, "Just as you
said, there isn't any rust. Just some slight discoloration
here and there. There's some iron in it, isn't there?"
"Quite a lot," I told her. "At least, that's what the
university people said."
"Any ferric metal rusts," she said. "Some alloys will
stand up for a long time, but they finally show some
rust. When oxygen gets to them."
"More than a hundred years," I told her. "Probably,
a great deal more than that. Willow Bend celebrated
its centenary several years ago. That crater was formed
before the town was founded. The crater has to be
much older than that. There are several feet of loam
in the bottom of it. It would have taken some time for
that loam to form. It takes a lot of leaves over many
years to form a foot of soil."
"Have you tried to fit some of these fragments to-
gether?"
"I've tried, and there are a few pieces that can be
fit together, but they don't tell you anything."
"What do you do next?"
"Probably nothing. Keep on with the digging. Keep
quiet about it. You're the only one I've told. If I said
anything to anyone else, all I'd get would be ridicule.
Suddenly there'd be all sorts of instant experts who
could explain everything away."
"I suppose so," she said, "but here you have at least
tentative evidence that there is, at least, one other
intelligence in the galaxy, and that Earth has been vis-
ited. This would seem important—important enough
to face up to some ridicule."
"But, don't you see," I argued, "that any sort of
premature announcement would blur, if not kill off,
any significance. The human race seems to have a
strange, instinctive defensiveness against admitting
there is anyone but ourselves. Maybe that's because we
are afraid, deep down inside of us. We may have a
basic fear of any other kind of intelligence. Maybe we
are afraid that another intelligence would show us up
as second rate, make us feel inferior. We talk, at times,
about the loneliness of our situation in the universe,

.voicing a fear that we are alone, but sometimes, it
seems to me that that is no more than philosophical pos-
turing."
"But if it's the truth," Rila said, "sooner or later,
we'll have to face up to it. There would be some ad-
vantage in facing facts early. Then we'd have some
time to get used to the idea, to get our feet planted
more firmly under us if the time ever comes when we
have to meet them."
"A lot of people would agree with you," I said, "but
not that faceless mob, the public. We may be intelli-
gent and fairly level-headed, but collectively we can be
pig-headed in a lot of different ways."
Rila moved down the table and stopped opposite
the two shiny hemispheres. She tapped one of them
with her fingers. "These? They came out of the dig?"
"Not out of the dig," I said. "I don't know what
they are. They fit together to form a hollow sphere.
The skin is about an eighth of an inch thick and ex-
tremely hard. At one time, I was going to send one of
them along with the metal I sent the university, then
decided not to. For one thing, I'm not sure they tie in
with any of the rest of this mystery. I found them here,
in this barn. I wanted to set up the tables, but there
was a pile of junk in the center of the floor. Old pieces
of harness, some odds and ends of lumber, a couple
of packing cases, a few worn-out tires, things like that.
I moved everything into that stall over there. That's
when I found the two hemispheres at the bottom of
the pile."
Rila lifted one of the hemispheres and fitted it over
the other, running her hand around the area where
they came together.
"They do fit," she said, "but they can't be fastened
back together. There is no thread arrangement, noth-
ing. A hollow ball that came apart somehow, some-
time. You have the slightest idea what it is?"
"Not the faintest."
"It could be something fairly simple, something in
relatively common use."
I looked at my watch. "How about some lunch?"

I asked. "There is not too bad a place about twenty
miles up the road."
"We can eat right here. I could cook up something."
"No," I said. "I want to take you out. Do you real-
ize that I never took you out to eat?"

FIVE

The manhattan tasted good. I realized that it
was the first civilized drink I had had in months; I'd
almost forgotten how a decent drink could taste. I
said as much to Rila. "At home, I guzzle beer or slop
some Scotch over a couple of ice cubes."
"You've been sticking close to the farm," she said.
"Yes, and not regretting it. It's the best money I
ever spent, buying that place. It's given me almost a
year of interesting work and a sense of peace
I've never had before. And Bowser has loved it."
"You think a lot of Bowser."
"He and I are pals. Both of us will hate going back."
"I thought you said you weren't going back. You
said when the sabbatical was up, you would resign."
"I know. I say that every now and then. It's a fan-
tasy, I guess. I have no desire to go back, but I haven't
much choice. When I think of it, I come up against the
hard fact that while I'm not exactly destitute, I'm not
in a financial situation to become a non-wage-earner
for any length of time."
"I know how you must hate the thought of leaving,"
she said. "It's not only the peace you speak of, but the
chance to continue the dig."
"That can wait. It will have to wait."
"But, Asa, it's a shame."
"Yes, I suppose so. But if it's waited for God knows
how many centuries, it can wait a little longer. I'll come
back each summer."
"It's strange," said Rila, "what long-range views
archaeologists can take. I imagine that is a viewpoint
that goes with the profession. They deal in long-time
phenomena, so time has less importance to them."

"You talk as if you never were an archaeologist."
"Well, I never really was. That summer with you in
Turkey and then, a couple of years later, a fuddy-duddy
dig in Ohio, excavating an Indian campsite. A year or
so at Chicago, mostly spent in cataloging. After that,
it was easy to decide being an archaeologist was not
what I wanted."
"So you went into the fossil-artifact business."
"Small at first," she said. "A little shop in upstate
New York. But apparently I came in at about the right
time. Collectors were beginning to get interested and
the business grew. There were more and more shops
springing up each year and I could see that the real
money was as a supplier, so I scraped together some
money and floated a loan and again started out in a
small way. I worked hard. I got a perverse satisfaction
out of it. Here I was making a living out of something
that was a rather despicable offshoot of a profession
I had failed at—perhaps, rather, had been too impa-
tient to try to succeed at."
"You said last night you are considering selling out."
"I took in a partner some years back. He wants to
buy me out. He's willing to pay more than the business
is worth. He has become somewhat upset at some of
my ideas and my methods. If he buys me out, I give
him three years before he goes broke."
"You'll miss it. You like being in business."
She shrugged. "Yes, I do. There's a ruthlessness
about it that appeals to me."
"You don't look the ruthless type to me."
"Only in business," she said. "It brings out the worst
in me."
We finished our drinks and the waiter brought the
salads.
"Another round?" I asked.
She shook her head. "I limit myself. One drink at
lunch. Long ago, I set that rule. At business lunches,
and there were a lot of them, you were expected to lap
it up, but finally I refused to do that. I'd seen what it
could do to people. But have another if you wish."
"I'll go along with you," I said. "After we finish

here, if you're willing, we'll go see our old Daniel
Boone."
"I'd like to, but it may run us late. How about
Bowser?"
"Hiram will take care of him. He'll stay with Bowser
until we get back. There's a cold roast in the refriger-
ator and he will split it with Bowser. He'll even go out
and collect the eggs. He and Bowser will talk it over
first. He'll say to Bowser, it must be time to pick up
the eggs, and Bowser will ask what time it is,
and Hiram will tell him, and then Bowser will say, yes,
let us go and get them."
"This pretense about Bowser talking. Do you think
Hiram really thinks he does or is the whole thing just
make-believe?"
"I don't honestly know," I said. "Probably, Hiram
thinks so, but what difference does it make? It's funny
with animals. They have personalities and you can set
up routines with them. When Bowser is out digging at
a woodchuck hole, I go out to get him and drag him
out of the hole, caked with mud and dirt and about
worn out. Even so, he doesn't want to go home. He is
committed to that woodchuck. But I grab him by the
tail and say, 'Git for home, Bowser,' and he goes, trot-
ting ahead of me. But I've got to grab him by the tail
and I have to say the words. Otherwise, he'd never
go home with me. I couldn't coax him home and I
couldn't chase him home. But when I go through that
silly business, he always heads for home."
She laughed. "You and Bowser! Both of you are
crazy."
"Of course we are. You can't live with a dog for
years..."
"And chickens. I remember I did see some about.
Have you pigs and horses and . .."
"No. Chickens are all. Eggs to eat and an occasional
fryer. I considered buying a cow, but a cow is
too much bother."
"Asa, I want to talk business with you. You said
you didn't want the university horning in—I think is the
way you put it—on this dig of yours. What would you
think of me horning in?"

I had a forkful of salad halfway to my mouth and
now I put it down. There was something in the way
she said it that was almost a warning. I don't know
what it was, but all at once, I was a little scared.
"Horn in?" I asked. "What do you mean?"
"Let me share your work with you."
"What a silly thing to ask," I said. "Of course you
can share it with me. Haven't I already shared my
discovery with you, telling you about it?"
"But that wasn't what I was talking about. I wasn't
asking for the sharing as a gift. I meant a partnership.
You don't want to go back to teaching. You want to
keep on with the dig and I think you should. You are
onto something important and it shouldn't be inter-
rupted. If I could help a little so you wouldn't have
to leave ..."
"No," I said harshly. "Don't go any further. No, I
wouldn't have it. You're offering to finance me and I
won't have it."
"You make it sound so terrible," she said. "As if I
had proposed something horrible. I'm not trying to
take you over, Asa. It isn't that. I have faith in you,
is all, and it's a shame that you have to . . ."
"It's big business offering to bail out the underpriv-
ileged," I said angrily. "Damn it, Rila, I will not be
patronized."
"I'm sorry, then, that I mentioned it. I had hoped
you'd understand."
"Damn it, why did you have to mention it? You
should know me better than that. It all was going so
fine and now..."
"Asa, remember the last time. The horrible fight
we had. It ruined twenty years for us. Let us not let
that happen again."
"Fight? I don't remember any fight."
"I was the one who was angry that time. You had
gone off with a couple of the men and got plastered,
neglecting me. You tried to explain, you tried to say
you were sorry, but I wouldn't listen. It was the last day
at the dig or the next to the last day and I never had
the time to get over being angry. We can't let some-

thing like that happen now. At least, I don't want it
to, How about you?"
 "No," I said, "neither do I want that to happen. But
I can't take money from you. No matter how well
off you are, how little you would miss it."
"Not well off," she said. "And, again, I'm sorry.
Can't we just forget it? And can I stay around for
another little while?"
"As long as you wish," I told her. "Forever, if you
want to."
"How about your friends and neighbors—will they
talk about us?"
"You're damn right they'll talk about us. A place
like Willow Bend hasn't much to talk about; they grab
at any little thing."
"You don't seem concerned."
"Why should I be? I'm that nutty Steele kid, who
came back to the old hometown, and they're suspicious
of me and resentful of me and the most of them don't
like me. They're friendly, certainly, but they talk about
me behind my back. They don't like anyone who isn't
bogged down in their particular brand of mediocrity.
It's defensive, I suppose. In front of anyone who left
the town and came back short of utter defeat, they
feel naked and inferior. They are acutely aware of
their provincialism. That is the way it is. So, unless
you are concerned about yourself, don't give it another
thought."
"I am not at all concerned," she said, "and if you
are thinking of making an honest woman of me ..."
 "The thought," I told her, "has not crossed my
mind."

SIX
"So you want to know about the coon that
isn't any coon," Ezra Hopkins said to Rila. "It took
me, God knows, long enough to find out that it wasn't
any coon."
"You're sure it's not a coon?"
"Miss, I'm sure of that. Trouble is, I don't know
what it is. If old Ranger here could only talk, maybe
he could tell you more than I can."
He pulled at the ears of the gaunt hound that lay
beside his chair. Ranger blinked his eyes lazily; he
liked to have his ears pulled.
"We could bring Hiram here some time," I said.
"He could talk with Ranger. He claims that he can
talk with Bowser, He talks with Bowser all the time."
"Well, now," said Ezra, "I won't argue with that.
There'd been a time I would have, but not any more."
"Let's not talk about Hiram and Bowser now," said
Rila. "Please go ahead and tell me of this coon."
"Boy and man," said Ezra, "I have ranged these
hills. For more than fifty years. There have been some
changes other places, but not many of them here.
This land isn't fit for farming. It mostly stands
on edge. Some parts of it are used to run cattle in,
but even cattle don't get no farther into the hills than
they have to go. Time to time someone tries to do
some logging, but it never amounts to much, because
they lose money trying to get the timber out of here
once it has been cut. So, all these years, these
hills have been my hills. Them and the things that are
in them. Legally, I own the few useless acres that this
shack stands on, but, in another way, I own it all."
"You love the hills," said Rila.

"Well, I suppose I do. Loving comes from knowing
and I know these hills. I could show you things you
never would believe. I know a place where the pink
lady's slippers grow and the pink ones are wild for
sure. The yellow ones will stand some tampering with,
although not very much; the pink ones won't stand
tampering at all. Turn some cattle into a place where
the pink ones bloom and in a couple of seasons, they
are gone. Pick more than a few of them and they are
gone. People say you don't find them any more, that
there are no more in these hills. But I tell you, miss,
I know where there is a patch of them. I don't
tell no one where and I don't pick them and I don't
tramp around among them. I let them strictly be. I
just stand off a ways and look at them and think of the
pity of it—that once these hills were covered by them,
but not any more. And I know where a she-fox has
her den, hidden well away. She has raised six litters
there, and once the cubs are grown a bit, they come
out and play around the den, little awkward things
that fight among themselves, play fighting, that is,
wrestling and tusseling, and I have a place where I can
sit and watch them. I think the old she-fox must know
that I am there, but she doesn't seem to mind. After
all these years, she knows I mean no harm."
The shack crouched against the steep hillside just
above a stream that dashed and chattered down its
rocky bed. Trees crowded close and a short distance
up the hill from the shack, a rocky outcropping thrust
out-of the sloping earth. The chairs in which we sat,
in front of the shack, had their back legs sawed short
to equalize the slope. A pail and washbasin stood on a
bench beside the open door. Against one wall of the
shack was ranged a pile of firewood. Smoke streamed
laxily from the chimney.
"I am comfortable here," said Ezra. "Being com-
fortable comes from not wanting much. Folks up in
town will tell you that I'm worthless and I suppose I
am, but who are they to measure worth? They say I
do some drinking and that is the honest truth. Couple
of times a year I go off on a bender, but I never hurt
no one. I never cheated anyone that I can think of.

I've never told a lie. I have one real bad failing. I talk
too much, but that comes from hardly ever seeing any-
one to talk with. When someone does come visiting,
it seems that I can't stop. But enough of that. You
came to hear about Ranger's pal."
"Asa never told me that creature was Ranger's pal."
"Oh, he's Ranger's pal all right."
"But you and Ranger hunt him."
"Maybe at one time, but not any more. In
my younger days, I was a hunter and a trapper. But
I haven't done any of either for several years. I hung
up my traps with a feeling of shame that I had ever
used them. I still knock over a squirrel every now and
then for stew and a rabbit or a grouse. I still
hunt some, but only as the Indians hunted: for meat
to fill the pot. There are times when I don't even do
that, when I stay my hand. I suppose that as a pred-
ator, I have the right to hunt—at least, that is what
I tell myself—but I do not have the license to kill,
without cause or reason, my brothers of the woods.
Of all the hunting, I liked coon hunting best. Have
you ever hunted coon?"
"No, I never have," said Rila. "I've never hunted
anything."
"You hunt coon only in the fall. The dog runs the
coon until he puts him up a tree, then you try to locate
him in the tree and shoot him. Mostly for his pelt, or,
what is worse, for the sport of it—if you can call kill-
ing sport. Although when I killed coon, I killed not for
the pelt alone, but for eating, too. There are people
who believe that coon are not fit to eat, but, I tell
you, they are wrong. It's not the hunting though; it's
the crispness of the autumn night, the sharp briskness
of the air, the smell of fallen leaves, the closeness that
you feel with nature. That and the thrill of the hunt;
for I do admit there is a thrill in hunting.
"But there finally came a time, when Ranger was a
pup—and he's an old dog now—that I quit killing
coon. I did not quit the hunting, but I quit the killing.
Ranger went out of nights and we hunted coon. When
he put one up a tree, I would hunt it out and aim the
gun at it, but I did not pull the trigger. Hunting with-


out shooting, without killing. Ranger didn't under-
stand at first, but finally he did. I thought that not
killing, I might ruin him, but he understood. Dogs can
understand a lot if you are patient with them.
"So we hunted without killing, Ranger and I, and,
in time, I became aware that there was one coon which
led us a sterner chase than any of the others. He
knew all the tricks of the hunted and many nights,
Ranger was unable to bring him to a tree. Oftener
and oftener we ran him, as if he delighted in
the chase as much as we—an old buck coon that had
become our equal or more than our equal and who
was using us as much as we were using him, laughing
at us all the while, playing games with us. I admired
him, of course. You are compelled to admire a worthy
opponent who plays the game as skillfully, or perhaps
more skillfully, than you do. But I became a bit an-
gry at him, as well. He was just too good; he was
making fools of us. So, finally, not by any conscious
decision, but by degrees, I found myself ready, in re-
gard to this particular coon, to abandon my rule to
never kill another coon. If Ranger could tree and hold
him and I could find him in the tree, I'd kill him and
prove, once and for all, which was the better, he or
us. You understand that coon hunting is done only in
the fall, but that was not true with this particu-
lar coon. Many times, in other months of the year,
Ranger ran him alone, and there were nights when
I'd go out as well. It became a never-ending game
between Ranger and the coon, and occasionally I
joined in, no matter what the season."
"How are you sure it was a coon?" asked Rila.
"Ranger might have been running something else—a
fox, a wolf."
Ezra said stiffly, "Ranger would never have hunted
anything but a coon. He's a coon hunter; he comes of
a long line of coon dogs."
I said to Rila, "Ezra's right. A coon dog is a coon
dog. If he runs a rabbit or a fox, he's worthless as a
coon dog. "
"So you never saw this coon," Rita said to Ezra,
"and you never killed him."

"But I did. See him, I mean. It was one night,
several years ago. Ranger put him up near morning,
four o'clock or so, and I finally spotted him, a shape
against the sky, crouched on a limb near the top of
the tree, making himself flat against the limb, hoping
he'd not be seen. I raised the gun, but I was breathing
so hard from my run that I couldn't take good aim.
The muzzle just kept going around and around in lit-
tle circles. So I lowered the gun and waited until I
was breathing easier and he stayed there, crouched on
his limb. He must have known that I was there, but
he never stirred. Then, finally, I raised the gun again
and the aim was steady. I had my finger on the trig-
ger, but I never pulled it. It must have been a minute
that I had him in the sights and my finger on the trig-
ger, ready to pull, but I didn't pull. I don't know what
happened. Looking back on it, I imagine I thought of
all the nights of running and how it would be all gone
if I pulled the trigger. How, instead of a respected
opponent, I'd have no more than a furry body, and
how neither one of us again could have the fun of
hunting or of being hunted. I don't remember think-
ing this, but it must have been what I thought, and
when I was at the end of thinking, I brought the gun
down. When I put the gun down, the coon up in the
tree turned his head and looked at me.
"Now, here's a funny thing. The tree was tall and
the coon was well up in its top. The night was not ex-
actly dark—the sky was brightening with the coming
dawn—but the coon was still too far away and the
night still too dark to see distinctly the face of any
coon. And yet, when he turned his head, I saw his
face and it was not a coon's face. It was more like a
cat's face, although it was not a cat's face, either. It had
whiskers like a cat and even from the distance where
I stood, I could see the whiskers. Its face was fat and
round and still—this is awful hard to tell and make
it sound reasonable—and still it was a sort of bony
face, like a skull that was fleshed out. Its eyes were
big and round, unblinking, like an owl's eyes. I should
have been scared out of my britches. But I wasn't. 1
just stood there, looking back at this catlike face, sur-

prised, of course, but not as surprised as I might have
been. I believe that all along, without admitting it to
myself, without saying it out loud, I had known this
thing we had been chasing wasn't any coon. Then it
grinned at me. Don't ask me how it grinned or how
I knew it grinned. I saw no teeth, I'm certain, but I
knew it grinned. It had the feeling of a grin. Not a
grin at having beaten me and Ranger, but a grin of
good fellowship, a grin that said, 'Haven't we been
having an awful lot of fun?' And so, I tucked my gun
underneath my arm and beaded back for home, with
Ranger following me."
"There's one thing wrong," said Rila. "You said
that Ranger is a coon dog and will hunt nothing but a
coon."
"That puzzled me, too," said Ezra. "There were
times when I wondered an awful lot about it. That's
why, I suppose, I wouldn't admit to myself that it
wasn't any coon, even when I must have known it
wasn't. But since that night I told you about, Ranger
has run him many times, and sometimes I've joined
in for the simple fun of it. I've seen old Catface
around the place, peering at me from a bush or tree,
and when he knows I see him, he always grins at me.
A grin of good fellowship; nothing mean in it. You
have seen him, Asa?"
"At times," I said. "He hangs around in my apple
orchard."
"Always just a face," said Ezra. "That grin-
ning face. If there is a body there, it is indistinct. No
sign of how big or what shape it is. There have been
times when I've come upon Ranger and this creature
—the creature peering from a bush at Ranger and
Ranger just standing there, companionable. You know
what I think?"
"What do you think?" Rila asked.
I think that Catface comes around and talks to
Ranger to set up a run that night. It says to Ranger,
"How about running me tonight? And Ranger says, it's
okay with me. And Catface asks, do you think you
can get Ezra to come along? And Ranger says, I'll
talk to him about it."

Rila laughed gaily. "How ridiculous," she cried.
"How beautifully ridiculous."
Ezra said sourly, "Maybe to you. It's not ridiculous
to me. It seems quite right to me. To me, that seems
entirely logical."
"But what is this thing? You must have some idea.
You must have thought about it."
"I've thought about it, sure. But I don't know. I've
told myself maybe it is something that has survived
out of the prehistoric past. Or the ghost of something
from a prehistoric age. Although it doesn't have a
ghostly look to it. What do you think, Asa?"
"Sometimes it appears a little faint," I said. "A little
fuzzy, maybe. But not in the same way a ghost would
be faint or fuzzy. It doesn't have a ghostly look to it."
"Why don't the two of you stay for supper," Ezra
suggested. "We could sit and talk the night away. I
ain't talked out by any means; I got a lot of things
stored up to say. I could ramble on for hours. I got
a big kettle of turtle stew on the stove, five times as
much as Ranger and I can eat. I caught a couple of
young snappers down by a little pond not far from
here. An old snapper can be moderate tough, but a
young one is downright toothsome. Couldn't offer
much else than turtle stew, but when you got turtle
stew, you don't want nothing else."
Rila looked at me. "Could we?" she asked.
I shook my head. "I'm tempted, but we should be
getting back. It's two miles out to the road where we
parked the car. I wouldn't want to try those two miles
in the dark. We better start now so we'll have some
light to follow the trail."

SEVEN




Back in the car, heading for home, Rila asked,
"Why didn't you tell me about this Catface?"
"I did mention him," I told her. "I didn't elaborate
on what kind of thing he is. You wouldn't have be-
lieved me."
"And you thought I'd believe Ezra?"
"Well, don't you?"
"I'm not sure if I do or not. It sounds like a back-
woods tall tale. And Ezra—a philosophical hermit. I
never dreamed there were people like him."
"There aren't many. He's a bitter-ender of a died-
out breed. When I was a boy, there were a few of them
around. At one time, there were a lot of them. Old
batches, my grandmother used to call them. Men who
never married, who tended to pull away from society
and live by themselves. They batched it—cooked for
themselves, washed their clothes, grew little kitchen
gardens, kept a dog or some cats for company. They
lived by hiring out, working for farmers during busy
seasons, perhaps doing some wood cutting in the
winter. Most of them did some trapping—skunks,
muskrats, things like that. To some extent, they lived
off the land, hunting, fishing, gathering wild edible
plants. Mostly they lived hand-to-mouth, but they got
along, seemed generally happy. They had few worries
because they had shucked responsibility. When they
grew feeble and were unable to fend for themselves,
they either were committed to the old-time poorhouses,
or some neighbor took them in and kept them for the
chores they could still manage to do. In other cases,
someone dropped in on their shacks and found them
dead a week. They were mostly shiftless and no ac-

count. When they got a little extra money together,
they would go out on a drunk until their money was
gone, then go back to their shacks and then, in another
few months, they'd have scraped together enough for
another drunken interlude."
"It sounds like a singularly unattractive life to me,"
said Rila.
"By modern standards," I told her, "it is. What you
are looking at is a pioneer attitude. Some of our young
people have picked up the idea. They call it living off
the land. It can't be all bad."
"Asa, you say you have seen this creature Ezra was
telling us about, and you talked about panther scares.
So other people may have seen it, too."
"That's the only way I can explain the panther
stories. It does look faintly catlike."
"But a grinning panther!"
"When people see a panther, or something they
think is a panther, they're not too likely to notice any
grin. They're scared. The grin, in their interpretation,
could become a snarl."
"I don't know," she said. "The whole thing is so
fantastic. And yet, so is your dig. And Bowser
wounded by a Folsom point. And the green dinosaur
bones."
"You're asking for an explanation," I said. "Rila,
I'm out of explanations. There is a temptation to tie
everything together. But I can't be sure all these mys-
teries tie together. I can't be sure at all. I wouldn't
blame you if you walked away. It's not a pretty thing
to face."
"Perhaps not pretty," she said, "but exciting and im-
portant. If anyone else had told me, I'd consider walk-
ing away. But I know you. You'd be honest in your
thinking if it killed you. But it is a little frightening. 1
have the feeling that I'm standing on the brink of
something I don't understand, perhaps some great
reality that will force us to take a new look at the
universe."
I laughed, but the laugh came out a little forced.
"Let's not take ourselves too seriously," I said. "Let's
go one step at a time. It's easier that way."

' "Yes, let's do that," she agreed, sounding relieved.
"I wonder how Bowser is getting along."
When we arrived home a few minutes later, it be-
came apparent that Bowser was getting along quite
well. Hiram was perched on the back stoop, with a
stretched-out Bowser plastered close against him. See-
ing us. Bowser beat his tail in welcome.
"How is he?" Rila asked Hiram.
"Bowser is okay," said Hiram. "Me and him had a
good day. We sat and watched the robin and we did
a lot of talking. I washed out the place where the
arrow hit him and it looks good. There ain't no more
bleeding and the wound is beginning to scab around
the edges. Bowser was a good dog. He lay still when
I cleaned it out. He didn't even twitch. He knew I
was helping him."
"Did you find something to eat?" I asked.
"There was a piece of roast in the refrigerator and
Bowser and me shared that. There was a little left and
I gave that to Bowser for supper and fried some eggs
for myself. We went and got the eggs out of the nests.
There were eleven of them."
Hiram got slowly to his feet, seeming to unfold as
he arose. "Since you are here," he said, "I'll go on
home. I'll be back in the morning to take care of
Bowser."
"If you have something else to do," I said, "there
isn't any need. We'll be here. We'll take care of him."
"I got things to do," Hiram said with dignity. "There
are always things to do. But I promised Bowser. I told
him I'd take care of him until he was all well."
He came down the steps and started to go around
the house, then stopped. "I forgot," he said. "I didn't
shut the chicken house. It should be shut. There are
a lot of skunks and foxes."
"You go on," I said. "I'll shut up the chickens."

EIGHT
The noise brought me straight upright in bed.
"What's the matter?" Rila asked sleepily from her
pillow.
"Something's at the chickens."
She stirred protestingly. "Don't you ever get a night's
sleep here? It was Bowser last night and now the
chickens."
"It's that damn fox," I said. "He's got three of
them so far. The chicken house isn't much better than
a sieve."
Through the night came the squalling of the
frightened birds.
I swung my feet out of bed, found the slippers on
the floor and shoved my feet into them.
Rila sat up. "What are you going to do?"
"This time, I'll get him," I said. "Don't turn on any
lights. You'll scare him off."
"It's night," said Rila. "You won't be able to see a
fox."
"There's a full Moon. If he's there, I'll see him."
In the broom closet in the kitchen, I found the
shotgun and a box of shells. I clicked two of them
into the chambers of the double-barrel. Bowser whined
from his corner.
"You stay here," I told him. "And keep quiet. I
don't want you messing around, scaring off the fox."
"You be careful, Asa," Rila cautioned, standing in
the doorway of the living room.
"Quit worrying. I'll be all right."
"You ought to put something on," she said. "You
shouldn't be running around out there, just in your
slippers and pajama pants."

"It's warm," I said.
"But it might be dewy. You'll get your feet wet."
"I'll be all right," I said. "I won't be out long."
The night was almost as bright as day; a great
golden Moon shone directly overhead. In the softness
of the moonlight, the yard had the haunting quality of
a Japanese print. Lilac scent hung heavy in the night
air.
Frantic squawking still came from the hen house. A
clump of cabbage roses stood at one corner of the struc-
ture, and as I went pussyfooting across the wet, cold
grass, heavy with dew, as Rila had said it would be,
I got the impression, somehow, that the fox was not in
the chicken house at all, but hiding in the rose clump.
I stalked the rose clump, gun at ready. It was silly, I
told myself. The fox either was still in the chicken
house or had left; he would not be hiding in the roses.
But the feeling persisted that he was in the roses.
Thinking this, almost knowing it, I wondered how I
knew, how I could possibly know.
And at the moment I was thinking this, all thought
and wonderment were knocked out of me. Out of
the rose clump, a face stared fixedly at me—a cat
face, the whiskers, the owl eyes, the grin. It stared at
me, unblinking, and never before had I seen it so
clearly as at that moment—so clearly or for so long a
time. Most of my sightings had been no more than
fleeting glimpses. But now the face stayed on, hanging
in the bush, the softness of the moonlight highlighting
the details of the face, making each whisker stand out
clearly. And this was the first time, I was sure, that I
had actually seen the whiskers. Previously, I had got-
ten impressions of them, but had never really seen
them.
Entranced and frightened, but more entranced than
frightened, and with all thoughts of a fox knocked out
of my mind, I moved forward slowly, the gun at ready,
although now I knew I would not use it. I was close
now, closer, something told me, than I should be, but
I took another step, and on that step I stumbled or
seemed to stumble.
When I recovered from the stumble, the rose bush

was no longer there, and neither was the hen house.
I stood on a little slope that was covered with short
grass and moss, and up the hill a ways was a clump
of birch. It was no longer night; the sun was shining,
but with little warmth. The cat face was gone.
 From behind me I heard a shuffling, thumping
sound, and I pivoted around. The thumping, shuffling
thing stood ten feet tall. It had gleaming tusks, and a
long trunk hanging down between the tusks was swing-
ing slowly from side to side like a pendulum. The
thing was only a matter of a dozen feet away and
coming straight toward me.
I ran. I went up that slope like a scared rabbit. If
I hadn't run, sure as hell that mastodon would have
run over me. He paid no attention to me; he didn't
flick a glance at me. He just went shuffling along, for
all his bulk stepping daintily and with deliberate pre-
cision.
A mastodon, I told myself. For the love of Pete,
a mastodon!
My mind seemed to catch and stay upon the word—
a mastodon, a mastodon, a mastodon—there was
room for nothing else, just that one repeating word,
Backed against the clump of birch, I stood transfixed,
the stuck needle of my mind repeating that one word,
while the beast went shuffling across the landscape,
turning now to head downhill toward the river.
First, it had been Bowser, I thought, yelping home
with a Folsom in his rump, and now it was me. I had
somehow traveled, ridiculous as it might seem, the
self-same trail as Bowser.
Here I stood, I thought, a ridiculous figure dressed
in pajama pants and a pair of worn slippers, clutching
a shotgun in my hand.
A time tunnel had brought me here—or a time
road or a time path, whatever one might call it—and
that damn Catface was mixed up in my predica-
ment somehow, as, undoubtedly, he'd been mixed up
in the time traveling that Bowser had done. The funny
thing was that there had been no sign of the time path
nothing to warn me that I was putting a foot upon it.
What kind of sign, I wondered, would a man look for
—a sort of shimmer in the air, perhaps, although I
was sure there had been no shimmer.
And while I was thinking of that, I thought of some-
thing else. When I had reached this place, I should
have marked it so that I'd have at least a fighting
chance of getting back into my own time again. Al-
though, I told myself, that probably wasn't as simple
as it sounded—just marking the place where you came
out might not mark the path. Nonetheless any chance
of marking the spot now was gone. I had run scared,
and with reason, when I'd seen the mastodon. Now
there was no way I could find the original spot.
I comforted myself by thinking that Bowser had
traveled in the past and had come back. So it was not
impossible, I told myself, for a person to get back.
If Bowser could get back, so could I. Although the
moment that I thought of that, I was not too sure.
Bowser might have a way to smell out a time tunnel
that no man could ever have.
Just standing there and worrying about it, however,
would not solve the problem, would not give the an-
swer. If I couldn't find the road back to the present, I
might have to stay a while, and I told myself I'd bet-
ter take a look around.
Looking in the direction the mastodon had gone, I
saw a herd of mastodons, a mile or so away, four
adults and a calf. The mastodon that had almost run
over me clumped steadily to join them.
Pleistocene, I told myself, but how deep into the
Pleistocene, I had no way of knowing.
While the lay of the land remained unchanged, it
had a vastly different look, for there were no forests.
Instead, there was a stretch of grassland that looked
somewhat like a tundra, dotted here and there with
clumps of birches and some evergreens, while along
the river, I could make out misty yellow willows,
The birch trees in the clump next to me were leafed
out, but the leaves were small, the immature leaves of
spring. On the ground beneath the trees was a carpet
of hepaticas, the delicate, many-hued flower that came
to bloom shortly after the snow was gone. The hepat-
icas lent an air of familiarity, almost of identity. In

my boyhood, on this very land, I had ranged the woods
to bring home in grubby hands great bouquets of the
flowers, which my mother would put in a squat brown
pitcher, setting it in the middle of the kitchen table.
Even from where I stood, it seemed to me that I could
smell the exquisite, distinctive, never-to-be-forgotten
odor of the tiny flowers.
Spring, I thought, but it was cold for spring. Despite
the sun, I was shivering. An ice age, I told myself.
Perhaps just a few miles to the north reared the shin-
ing ramparts of the glacial front. And here I was, with
no more than pajama pants and slippers, and a shot-
gun in my hand—a shotgun with two shells in its bar-
rels. That was all. That was the sum total. I had no
knife, no matches, nothing. I glanced toward the sky
and saw that the sun was edging up toward noon.
Noon and chilly as it was, it could be freezing by night-
fall. A fire, I thought, but I had no way to make a.
fire. Flint, if I could find some flint. I racked my brain
to recall if there was flint to be found in the neighbor-
hood, although even if there were, what could I do with.
it? Flint struck against flint would produce sparks, but
not hot enough to start a fire. Struck against steel, the
sparks would be hot enough to start a fire in tinder.
The gun was steel, but there wasn't any flint—for now.
I remembered that in this area there wasn't any flint,
Perhaps I could take a shell and open it, extracting
the shot charge, then pour out some of the powder to
be mixed with tinder, and fire the opened shell into
the tinder. Theoretically, the burning powder expelled
from the barrel would fire the tinder if it was mixed
with powder. But what if that didn't work, I asked
myself. And where would I look for tinder? In the
heart of a rotten log, if I could find a rotting log and
could tear it open to get at the dry, pulpy inner wood,
Or bark peeled off a birch tree and shredded finely,
Maybe that would work. I wondered whether it would.
but could not be certain.
I stood defeated, exhausted with my thinking and
the fright that was creeping in. Now, for the first time
I became aware of birds. First the flowers and now
the birds. I'd been hearing them all the time, but my

brain, roaring with its problems, had rejected them.
There was a bluebird perched on a winter-dead stalk.
A mullen stalk, perhaps. I tried to remember if the
mullen was native or had been imported, in which
case, it could not be a mullen stalk. Anyhow, the bird
clung to the swaying stalk and sang. A meadowlark
leaped from the grass and soared into the air, spraying
its trill of excited happiness behind it. In the birch
trees, little birds that must have been some sort of
sparrow hopped cheeping from branch to branch. The
place simply crawled with birds.
The lay of the land, once I had gotten myself ori-
ented, began to look more and more familiar. Naked
as it might be, it still was Willow Bend. The river
swung out of the north and curved toward the west,
then veered east again. All along the bend, the stream
was lined with yellow willow trees.
The mastodons were moving off now, down the val-
ley away from me. Other than the mastodons and
birds, I could detect no sign of life. But there could be
other life, I thought: sabertooth, dire wolf, maybe even
cave bear. I could take care of myself for a time, I
knew, but only for a time. Once the two shells had
been fired, I would be without a weapon, defenseless,
the gun no better than a club.
Watching carefully for any sign of life, I walked
down the slope toward the river, which I saw was
wider and flowing more rapidly than I had ever seen
it. Melt water from the glaciers to the north, perhaps.
The misty yellowness of the willows came from
pollen-laden pussy willows, great fluffy caterpillars cov-
ered with a golden dust. The stream was clear—so
clear that I could see the pebbles rolling on the bottom
and the flashing shadows of fleeing fish, darting schools
of them. Here was food, I told myself. Without a hook
or line, I still could weave a net of withe-like willow
branches, stripping off pieces of the willow bark to
hold the woven branches in place. It would be a crude
affair and an awkward business, but it could be done;
I could weave the net and use it to catch fish. I won-
dered how raw fish might do as a steady diet and
gagged a little at the thought.

If I had to stay here, I told myself, if there was no
way of getting back to my own time, then somehow or
other, by some hook or crook, I must rediscover fire—
fire to keep me warm, fire to cook my food.
Standing there beside the river, I tried to get the
facts sorted out. Looking at the situation realistically,
I had to reconcile myself to the idea that my chances
of getting back to Willow Bend were small. That meant
that there were a lot of things to do. First things
first, I told myself. Shelter at the moment was more
important than food. If necessary, I could starve for a
little while. But before the fall of night, I had to find
someplace where I would be sheltered from the wind,
some small hideaway that might conserve my body
heat. The important thing, I knew, was not to panic.
I had not panicked so far; I could not afford to panic.
Shelter, food and fire—those were the three things
that I needed. Shelter came first, after that, food; fire
could wait a little while. Fish, once I had rigged a net,
would supply food, but there would be other food as
well. Probably tubers and roots, even leaves and bark
although I had no way of knowing which of these would
be safe. Perhaps I could find out by watching what
bears and other animals ate, take a chance that what
they ate was safe. There would be, as well, slow game,
small game, but for these, I'd need a weapon, a club. If
I could not find another kind of club, the gun would
work, but it would be heavy and awkward to handle.
A stick would be better. Surely, somewhere, I could
find a proper stick that would fit my hand—a well-
seasoned piece that would not break at the first blow.
A bow and some arrows would be better and in time,
I probably could come up with such a weapon. I'd
have to find a sharp stone or a stone that could be
broken to form a cutting edge. With it, I could could
down and shape a sprout into a bow. When I'd been
a lad, I remembered, I'd been hell let loose with a
bow and arrow. I'd need a cord, and fine roots—fine
tough roots—would serve. Was it cedar roots that the
Indians had used to sew canoes? It had been years
since I'd read "The Song of Hiawatha" and there was
something in it, I was sure, that told about cedar root

being used to make canoes. Probably some of the ever-
greens that grew here were cedars and I could dig
down and get the roots.
While I was thinking all of this, I had turned away
from the river and was walking back toward the birch
clump. I turned to the right and climbed the small
slope above the clump, for it had occurred to me that
I had better start right now looking for someplace to
spend the night. A cave of some sort would be ideal.
If nothing else, if no cave were available, I might
make out by crawling into a grove of evergreens. The
branches of most evergreens hung close against the
ground, and while they might not afford much protec-
tion from the cold, at least they would keep out the
wind.
I reached the top of the little rise and began to
angle down it, looking for some ground formation that
might lead me to shelter. Thus it was that I was almost
on top of it before I saw it—the hole gouged in the
ground. Stopping at its edge, I looked down into it.
But it was some seconds before 1 realized what I had
found.
Then, suddenly, I knew. This was the pit where I
had been digging. It was old. There was no freshness
to it. A bit bigger than when I had first come upon it,
but still old; its walls were overgrown with grass and
a small birch tree thrust out of the far wall, the tree
tilted at a crazy angle.
I squatted down and looked at it and a curious wave
of terror came over me. A terrible sense of time. If
only the gouge could have been new and raw, I
thought, I might have derived some strange comfort
from it. But for some reason I could not understand,
the oldness of the pit stirred a deep depression in me.
A cold nose touched my naked back and, instinc-
tively, I leaped straight up, letting out a squall of
fright. I came down on the slope of the pit, rolling to
the bottom, the gun flying out of my hand.
Sprawling on my back, I stared up the slope at the
thing that had touched me with its nose. It wasn't a
sabertooth or a dire wolf. It was Bowser, looking down

at me with a silly grin on his face, his tail waving
frantically.
On hands and knees, I scrambled up the wall of the
pit, threw my arms around the dog and hugged him
while Bowser washed my face with a slobbering
tongue. I staggered to my feet and reached out to grab
his tail.
"Git for home, Bowser!" I yelled at him, and the
limping Bowser, one back leg stiffened by the Folsom
wound, headed straight for home.
NINE



I sat at the kitchen table, wrapped up in a
blanket, trying to get the frost, out of my bones. Rila
was busy at the pancake griddle.
"I hope," she said, "that you didn't catch a cold."
I shivered; I couldn't help it. "It was cold back
there," I told her.
"The idea of running out with nothing on but pa-
jama bottoms."
"There was ice north," I said. "I could practically
feel the ice. I bet I wasn't more than twenty miles from
a glacial front. This is a driftless area. The ice came
down, time after time, moving south, on each side of
us, but never crossing this area. No one quite knows
why. But twenty or thirty miles north, there could
have been ice."
"You had a gun," she said. "What happened to the
gun?"
"Well, when Bowser over there came up behind me,
he close to scared me witless. I jumped and dropped
the gun and when I saw Bowser, I never stopped to
pick it up. The only thing that I could think of was
that he could get me home."
She brought a platter stacked with cakes to the
table and sat down opposite me.
 "This is ridiculous," she said. "Here we. are, talking
about your going back in time as if doing so were an
everyday affair."
"Not to me," I said; "but it is to Bowser. The thing
about it is that he must go to many different times.
He wouldn't have been stabbed in the; rump with a
Folsom point at a time when be could have found dead
dinosaurs to drag home."

"To tangle with a Folsom point," she said, "he
couldn't have traveled back much more than twenty
thousand years. Perhaps, a great deal less than that.
You are sure you saw no signs of man?"
"What kind of signs? Footprints? Broken arrows
lying around?"
"I was thinking of smoke."
"There wasn't any smoke. The only solid time clue
that I have is a mastodon that damn near ran me
down."
"You're sure you did go back? You aren't having
fun with me? You didn't just imagine the whole thing?"
"Sure. I went out in the woods and hid the gun,
then whistled Bowser to me and grabbed him by the
tail..."
"I'm sorry, Asa. I know. Of course, you didn't. You
think that cat-faced thing has something to do with it?
Here, get started on those cakes before they get cold.
Drink some of the coffee. It is hot. It will warm you
up."
I forked cakes onto my plate, buttered them, poured
on syrup.
"You know," said Rila, "we just might have some-
thing."
"That's right. We have a place where it isn't safe to
go looking for a fox."
"I'm serious," she said. "We may have something
big. If you have discovered time travel, think of what
you could do with it."
"Not on your life," I said. "I'm not fooling around.
I've had it. When I see Catface again, I'm going to
turn around and walk rapidly away. You could get
trapped back there. I couldn't count on Bowser to
come back every time and get me."
"But supposing you could control it."
"How could you control it?"
"You could make a deal with Catface."
"Hell, I can't even talk to Catface."
"Not you. Hiram, maybe. Hiram could talk with
Catface. He talks to Bowser, doesn't he?"
"He thinks he talks with Bowser. He thinks he talks
with robins, too."

"How do you know he doesn't?"
"Now, damn it, Rila, just be sensible."
"I am being sensible. How can you be so sure he
doesn't talk with Bowser? As a scientist..."
"A scientist of sorts."
"All right, even as a scientist of sorts, you know very
well you can't take a position, either negative or posi-
tive, until you have some evidence. And remember
what Ezra said about Catface coming around and
making arrangements for Ranger to run him."
"Old Ezra is crazy. Very gently crazy. But crazy
just the same."
"And Hiram, too?"
"Hiram's not crazy. He's just a simpleton."
"Maybe it takes gently crazy people and simpletons
and dogs to do things we can't do. Maybe they have
abilities we don't have.. . ."
"Rila, we can't turn Hiram loose on Catface . .."
The screen door creaked and I swung around.
Hiram came bumbling through the door.
"I heard you," he said. "You was talking about me
and Catface."
"We were wondering," said Rila, "if you ever talked
with Catface. Like you do with Bowser.'"
"You mean that thing that hangs around the or-
chard."
"You have seen it, then."
"Lots of times. It looks something like a cat, but it
isn't any cat. It's just got a head. You don't never see
a body."
"Have you ever talked with it?"
"Times I have. But it doesn't make no sense. It
talks about things that I don't understand."
"You mean it used words that you don't know."
"Maybe. Maybe some words. Ideas mostly. Ideas
I never heard of. Funny thing, it doesn't move its
mouth and it doesn't make no sound. But I hear the
words. Come to think of it, that's the way with Bowser.
He never moves his mouth and there isn't any sound,
but I hear the words."
I said, "Hiram, pull up a chair and have some break-
fast with us."

He shuffled in embarrassment. "I don't know if I
should. I already had my breakfast."
"There's batter left," said Rila. "I can make some
hot ones."
"You never pass up breakfast with me," I said.
"No matter how many other breakfasts you have had.
Don't change because of Rila. She's a friend who
came visiting. She'll be around, so get used to her."
"Well, if it's all right," said Hiram. "I'm partial,
Miss Rila, to cakes with lots of syrup."
Rila went to the stove and poured more batter on
the griddle.
Hiram said, "Truth is, I can't feel friendly with this
cat-face thing. At times, I'm a little scared of him
He's a funny-looking jigger, with just that great big
head and no body you can see. That head of his looks
like someone had up and painted a face on a big bal-
loon. He never takes his eyes off you, and he never
blinks."
"The thing is," I told him, "that Rila thinks it might
be important for us to talk with him, but we can't
talk with him. You're the only one who can."
"You mean no one else can talk with him."
"No one but you can talk with Bowser, either."
"If you should agree to talk with Catface," said
Rila, "it must be a secret. No one but the two of us
must know that you have talked with him, or what
you talked about."
"But Bowser," protested Hiram. "I can't keep any
secrets from Bowser. He is my best friend and I
would have to tell him."
"All right, then," said Rila. "I guess it would do no
harm if you told Bowser."
"I promise you," said Hiram, "that he will never tell
a soul. If I ask him to, he'll never breathe a word of
it."
Rila looked at me, unsmiling. "Is it all right with
you," she asked, "if he lets Bowser in on it?"
"Just so long," I said, "as it is understood Bowser
will tell no one."
"Oh, he won't," Hiram promised. "I'll warn him
not to." And having said this, he turned his full atten-


tion to the stack of cakes, shoveling up great mouth-
fills of them, leaving a smear of syrup clear across his
face.
Nine cakes later, he was ready to resume the con-
versation.
"You said there was something important I should
talk to this Catface about?"
"Yes, there is," said Rila, "but it's a little hard to
explain it exactly right."
"You want me to talk to him about this thing you
have in mind, then tell it back to you. Just the four of
us will know . . ."
"The four of us?"
"Bowser," I said. "You are forgetting Bowser is the
fourth."
"Oh, yes," said Rila, "we must not forget old
Bowser."
Hiram asked, "It will be a secret just with the four
of us?"
"That is right," said Rila.
"I like secrets," Hiram said, delighted. "They make
me feel important."
"Hiram," Rila asked, "you know about time, don't
you?"
"Time is what you see," he said, "when you look
at a clock. You can tell if it's noon or three o'clock
or six."
"That's true," said Rila, "but it's more than that.
You know about us living in the present and that when
time goes by, it is known as the past."
"Like yesterday," Hiram suggested. "Yesterday is
past."
"Yes, that's right. And a hundred years is the past
and so is a million years."
   "I don't see what difference it makes," said Hiram.
"All of it is past."
"Have you ever thought how nice it would be if we
could travel to the past? Go back to the time before
the white men came, when there were only Indians.
Or back to a time before there were any men at all."
"I have never thought of it," said Hiram. "I have

never thought of it because I don't think it can be
done."
"We think Catface may know how to it. We'd
like to talk with him to find out how to do it or if he'll
help us do it."
Hiram sat silently for a moment, struggling visibly
to let it all sink in.
"You want to go into the past?" he asked. "Why
would you want to do that?"
"You know about history?"
"Sure, I know about history. They tried to teach me
it when I went to school, but I wasn't any good at it,
I never could remember all them dates. It was all
about the wars they fought and who was president and
a lot of stuff like that."
"There are people," Rila said, "called historians
who make it their business to study history. There are
a lot of things they are not sure about because people
who wrote about it wrote it wrong. But if they could
go back in time and see what happened and talk to
people who were living then, they would understand it
better and could write better histories."
"You mean we could go back and see what hap-
pened a long, long time ago? Actually go and see it?"
"That's what I mean. Would you like to do that.
Hiram?"
"Well, I don't rightly know," said Hiram. "Seems
to me you could get into a lot of trouble."
I broke in. "As a matter of fact," I said, "you
wouldn't have to go unless you wanted to. All we
want you to find out, if you can, is whether Catface
really knows how to do it and if he can show us how."
Hiram shrugged. "I'd have to prowl around at night.
Probably out there in the orchard. He shows up some-
times in the daytime, but it's mostly at night."
"Would you mind doing that?" I asked. "You could
sleep daytimes."
"Not if Bowser could go with me. Night is a lone-
some time, but if Bowser was with me, I wouldn't feel
so lonesome."
"I suppose that would be all right," I said, "if you
put a leash on Bowser and keep him close beside you.

And another thing: when you see the Catface, just
stand there talking to him. Never walk toward him."
"Mr. Steele, why shouldn't I never walk toward
him?"
"I can't tell you that," I said. "You've just got to
trust me. We know one another fairly well and you
know I'd never tell you wrong."
"I know you wouldn't," Hiram said to me. "You
don't need to tell me why. If you say so, it's all right.
Me and Bowser will never walk toward him."
"And you'll do it?" Rila asked. "You'll talk with
Catface?"
"I'll do what I can," said Hiram. "I don't rightly
know what's going to happen, but I'll do my best."

TEN


Willow Bend is a small town, its business sec-
tion no more than a block long. On one corner stands
a small supermarket, across from it a drugstore. Strag-
gling up the street are a hardware store, a barber
shop, a shoe store, a bakery, a clothing shop, a com-
bined real-estate and travel bureau, an electrical store
and repair shop, a post office, a movie house, a bank
and a beer joint.
I found a place to park the car in front of the
drugstore and went around to open the door for Rila.
Ben Page came hurrying across the street to intercept.
us.
"Asa," he said, "it's been a long time since I've seen
you. You don't get down this way too often."
He held out a hand and I took it. "As often as I
need," I said. I turned to Rila and said, "Miss Elliot,
meet Ben Page. Ben is our mayor and the banker."
Ben thrust out his hand to Rila. "Welcome to our
town," he said. "Are you staying for a while?"
"Rila is a friend," I said. "We were in the Middle
East together on a dig some years ago."
"I don't know how long I'm staying," Rila said.
"You from New York?" asked Ben. "Someone told
me you were from New York."
"How the hell could anyone know?" I asked.
"You're the first person she has met."
"Hiram, I guess," said Ben. "He said the license
plates were New York plates. He told me someone
had shot Bowser with an arrow. Is that right?"
"Someone did," said Rila.
"I tell you we got to do something with these kids,"
said Ben. "They're up to something all the time. They

have no respect for nothing. They are just running
wild."
"Maybe it wasn't a kid," I said.
"Who else would it be? It's just the kind of thing
they'd do. They're a bunch of monsters, I tell you.
Some of them let the air out of my tires the other
night. Came out of the picture show and I had four
flats."
"Now why would they do that?" asked Rila.
"I don't know. They just hate everyone, I guess.
When you and I were kids, Asa, we never did stuff
like that. We used to go fishing, remember, and hunt-
ing in the fall. And there was the time you had all of
us digging in that sinkhole."
"I am still digging in it," I said.
"I know you are. Finding anything?"
"Not much," I said.
"I got to be getting on," said Ben. "I have some
people coming in to see me. It was good to meet you,
Miss Elliot. I hope you have a pleasant visit."
We watched after him as he went bounding down
the sidewalk.
"An old pal of yours?" asked Rila. "One of the
gang?"
"One of the gang," I said.
We went across the street and into the supermarket.
I got a cart and started wheeling it down the aisle.
"We'll need potatoes and some butter," I said, "and
soap, and I guess a lot of other things."
"Don't you make out a list?"
"I'm a disorganized housekeeper," I said. "I try to
keep it in my head and I always miss an item or two."
"You know a lot of people in this town?"
"Some. Some from when I was a boy, folks
who stayed on and never left. Other new ones I have
met since I came back."
  Slowly we loaded the cart. I forgot some items and
Rila, running through a hypothetical shopping list, re-
minded me of others I would have forgotten. Finally,
I wheeled the cart up to the checkout counter. Herb
Livingston was ahead of us, putting down an armload
of purchases.

"Asa," he said, the way he always talks, as if he is
breathless with delight at seeing you. "I was going to
phone you for a news item. I heard you had com-
pany."
"Rila," I said, "meet Herb Livingston. He is another
of the old gang, and now he owns the weekly paper."
Herb beamed. "I am glad that you came to see us,"
he told Rila. "I hear you're from New York. New
York City, I mean. We don't get many people from
New York." He pulled a notebook from his jacket
pocket and a short pencil from his shirt pocket. "What
is your last name, if I may ask?"
"Elliot," said Rila. "Two l's and one t."
"And you're visiting Asa. I mean that's why you're
here."
"We are friends of long standing," said Rila shortly.
"We worked together on an archaeological dig in
Turkey back in the late fifties."
Herb made hentracks in his notebook. "And what
are you doing now?"
"I'm in the import-export business."
"I see," said Herb, scribbling furiously. "And you're
staying out on the farm with Asa."
"That's right," said Rila. "I came to be with Asa,
I am staying with him."
When we got back to the car, Rila said to me, "I'm
not sure I like your friends."
"Don't pay any attention to Herb," I said. "As a
newspaperman, he is a little short on tact."
"What I can't understand is why he should be in-
terested in me. My being here simply isn't news."
"To the Willow Bend Record, it is. Nothing ever
happens here. Herb has to fill the paper with comings
and goings. Mrs. Page holds a card party with three
tables and it's a social event. Herb writes it up in de-
tail. Tells who was there and who won the prizes."
"Asa, you don't mind? Maybe I should leave."
"Hell, no," I said. "Why should I mind? Flying in
the face of convention? You can't do anything that
doesn't fly in the face of convention in a place like
this. And with this time-travel business, with Hiram.
going after Catface, it would be plain desertion if you

left. You've got to see this thing through with me. I
need you."
She settled into the seat as I got behind the wheel.
"I hoped you would say that," she said. "I don't know
about this time-travel business, but I do want to stay.
Half of the time I believe travel in time is possible
and the rest of the time I tell myself, Rila, stop being
a fool. But I'm curious about Hiram. Nothing more
than Hiram? He must have another name."
"His name," I said, "is Hiram Biglow, but most
people have forgotten the Biglow part of it. He's just
Hiram, that's all. He was born in Willow Bend, and
at one time he had an older brother, but the brother
ran away from home and, so far as I know, has not
been heard of since. The family was an old family,
reaching back into the time the town was founded. His
father's name was Horace, an only son of a son of one
of the founders of Willow Bend. The family lived in
the old ancestral home, one of those Victorian piles
set back from the street, with an iron fence enclosing
a lawn filled with trees. I remember that I used to
hang on the fence when I was a kid and wonder what
it would be like to live in a place like that. My family
was relatively poor at the time, and we lived in just
an ordinary house, and the Biglow place seemed like
a mansion to me."
"But you told me Hiram lives in a shack down by
the river."
"He does and I am getting to that. Hiram's father
was the town banker, in partnership with Ben Page's
father..."
"I don't like Ben Page any better than I like that
Herb person."
"You and almost everyone," I said. "He's not the
sort of man who inspires a lot of confidence or admira-
tion, although in recent years, he may have changed.
There are people now who swear by him. Well, any-
how, when Hiram was ten years old or so, his father
drowned in a duck-hunting accident. By this time, theo
older brother, who was seven or eight years older than
Hiram, had lit out for parts unknown, so there was
only Hiram and his mother left. The old lady lived a

secluded life after that. She never left the house and
she discouraged friends from calling. Hiram had al-
ways been a strange kid, backward in school and not
getting along with the other kids, but no one thought
too much about it. As the years went past, I suppose,
his mother must have known that he wasn't exactly
normal, and so she hid away with him. Pride is a
dreadful thing anywhere, and in a small town,
it's deadly. The two of them just sort of withdrew
from life, and while people knew, of course, that they
were there, they were fairly well forgotten. Which, I
suppose, is what Mrs. Biglow had hoped would hap-
pen. By this time, I was long gone, of course, so what
I tell you from here on is what I've heard from people
after I came back.
"It turns out, finally, when the estate was settled,
that Hiram's father didn't have too much interest in
the bank. A few shares and his job, that was all. No
one could prove it, of course, but people I talked with
later were convinced that Ben's father had slickered
Hiram's father out of the bank. Apparently, there was
a little money left, but not much, and the old lady
and Hiram managed somehow until she died. By this
time, Hiram must have been twenty-five or so. When
it came time to settle his mother's estate, it was found
that the Biglow house was mortgaged to the bank. The
bank, pleading it had carried the family as long as it
could, foreclosed. By this time, Ben had taken over
the bank, his father retiring, and he donated some
money and got a few others in town to donate a bit
more and they built this shack down by the river and
gave it to Hiram and he's lived there ever since."
"The town adopting him," said Rila. "Taking care
of their own. Today he'd be on relief. Or in some
state institution."
"I guess you could say that," I said. "The town
looks after him, sure, but not too kindly. Some people
treat him okay, of course, but he has become a sort
of municipal scapegoat and a lot of people laugh at
him and make fun of him. They don't think that
Hiram knows; so they think it's safe to make fun of
him. But Hiram knows. He knows his friends and he

knows who laughs at him. He may be considerably
strange, of course, but he's not as stupid as a lot of
people think."
"I hope he's getting some sleep," said Rila. "This
is his first night of sitting up for Catface."
"He may have to spend several nights. Catface is
not all that regular in his habits."
"I sit and listen to us talking like this," said Rila.
"I know we are talking like this, but then I ask myself
if we are really doing it. It's not sane, Asa. This whole
thing. Most people wouldn't be thinking what we are
thinking, saying what we are saying."
"I know what you mean," I told her, "but I have
more evidence than you. I went into the Pleistocene
and almost got run over by a mastodon. Bowser did
bring home those bones."
"And yet we let ourselves think only so far," she
said. "We accept the dinosaur bones and the Folsom
point and the mastodon, but we don't allow ourselves
to go beyond that. We keep ourselves from saying out
loud that Catface is an alien creature that can engineer
time tunnels and that he somehow escaped when an
alien spaceship crashed here thousands of years ago."
"Maybe we'll come to it," I said. "We'll have to
wait and see what Hiram manages."

ELEVEN


Three nights later, a loud rapping on the bed-
room door brought me upright in bed, stupid with
sleep, wondering what the hell was going on. Beside
me, Rila stirred protestingly.
"What's going on?" I yelled. "Who's there?"
Although, if I had stopped to think of it, I'd have
known who was there.
"It's me, Hiram."
"It's Hiram," I said to Rila.
The knocking kept right on. "Cut out that damn
knocking," I yelled at Hiram. "I'm awake. I'll see you
in the kitchen."
Groping around blindly, I found my slippers,
scuffed into them, and tried to find a robe, but couldn't
locate one. I stumbled out into the kitchen in pajama
pants and slippers.
"What is it, Hiram? I hope it's important."
"It's Catface, Mr. Steele. I been talking with him.
He wants to talk with you."
"I can't talk with him," I said. "There is no way I
can. You're the only one who can."
"He says I don't make any sense," said Hiram. "He
is glad we want to talk with him, but he says he
doesn't know what I want to talk about."
"You mean he's out there now?"
"Yes, Mr. Steele. He said that he would wait while
I came to get you. He says he hopes you can make
some sense."
"Do you think he could wait until I got on some
clothes?"
"I think so, Mr, Steele. He said that he would
wait."

"You stay right here," I said. "Don't leave the house
until we can go with you."
Back in the bedroom, I fumbled for my clothes and
found them. Rila was sitting on the edge of the bed.
"It's Catface," I said. "He wants to talk with us."
"It'll take me just a minute," she said.
Hiram was waiting at the kitchen table when we
came out.
"Where's Bowser?" Rila asked.
"Out there with Catface," Hiram told her. "Them
two are good friends. I figure maybe they've been
good friends all the time without us knowing it."
"Tell me," I said. "How did it happen? Was it hard
to talk with Catface?"
"About the same as Bowser," Hiram said. "Easier
than that robin. That robin sometimes is hard to talk
with. Sometimes, he doesn't want to talk. Catface
wants to talk."
"All right, then," said Rila. "Let us go and talk with
him."
"How are we going to do that?" I asked.
"It's easy," Hiram said. "You tell me exactly what
to say and I will say it to him. Then I'll tell you what
he says. Maybe I won't understand everything he
says."
' "We'll do the best we can," said Rila.
"He's in that apple tree right around the corner.
Bowser's watching him."
I opened the back door and waited for the others
to go out.
Once around the corner, there was no trouble spot-
ting Catface, staring out at us from the middle of the
apple tree. In the light of the Moon, his face was
clear. You could even see the whiskers. Bowser, sitting
lopsided to favor his wounded ham, stared up into the
tree at Catface.
'Tell him we are here," I said to Hiram, "and are
ready to begin."
'He says he is, too," said Hiram.
. "Now, wait a minute. You didn't have time to tell
him what I said."
 "I don't need to," Hiram said. "He knows what you

say, but he can't answer back because you can't hear
what he says."
"All right, then," I said. "That makes it simpler." I
said to Catface, "Hiram says that you are willing to
talk with us about time travel."
"He's anxious to talk about time travel," Hiram
said. "He said a whole lot more I don't understand."
"Look," I said to Catface, "let us keep this simple.
One thought at a time. As simple as you can."
"He says all right," said Hiram. "He says he has
missed putting time travel to work. He says he is a
time engineer. Could that be right?"
"I suppose it could be."
"He says he is tired of making time roads for no
one but Bowser."
"He made one for me."
"That is right, he says. But you couldn't see the
road; you stumbled into it."
"Can he make roads to any place or time on this
planet?"
"He says he can."
"To ancient Greece? To Troy?"
"If you tell him where these places are, he can. He
says it is easy. On this world, anywhere."
"But how can we tell him?"
"He says to mark a map. He talks about lines on a
map. Mr. Steele, what kind of lines are there on a
map?"
"Longitude and latitude, perhaps."
"He says that is right."
"He knows how we measure time? He know's about
years? He can understand a million years, a hundred
years?"
"He says he does."
"There is one thing I want to ask him," Rila said
"He is an alien, someone from some other world?"
"Yes, from very far away."
"How long ago?"
"Almost fifty thousand years."
"And he has lived that long?"
"He says he does not die."

"He can make roads into time. He can travel those
roads himself?"
"He says yes."
"But apparently he doesn't travel them. He's here
right now. He came here fifty thousand years ago, but
apparently he lived through a normal time line. He
just settled in and lived in ordinary time. Otherwise,
he might not be here."
"Rescue, he says."
"What does he mean, rescue?"
"If he doesn't stay in a single place and ordinary
time, people who come to find him won't know where
he is."
"He still hopes for rescue?"
"Now he has little hope. He must do the best he
can. He makes a new life with us. That's why he's so
happy."
"But he must know where his home world is. If he
is able to make roads in space and time, he should
be able to go home."
"He says not. He does not know where his home
is from here. He does not know how to get from here
to there. If someone told him, he could. But on the trip
here, he did not know. Someone else knew. Now that
someone else is dead. He died when the ship fell."
"But Catface did not die because he is immortal?"
"He says an immortal can be killed in accident,
but that is the only way. He says he was lucky. He
got away before the ship hit ground."
"How did he get away?"
"Life boat, he says."
"Life boat," I said. "A sphere? A round hollow ball
that came apart so he could get out?"
"He says that is right. He asks how did you know?"
"I found the life boat," I said. "It's out in the barn."
"But now he will make time roads for us?" asked
Rila. "Anywhere on Earth? Any time on Earth? And
keep them open as long as we may need them?"
 "Catface says that is right. He can make them
where you say and keep them open. Once you no
longer need them, he will close them once again."
"How many? More than one?"

"Many as you need."
"When could he start doing this?"
"Right now. Say where you want to go, when you
want to go."
"Tell him," Rila said, "that we aren't ready yet.
It will take some time for us to get ready and we'll
need to talk to him again. Perhaps several times."
"Miss, he says anytime you want. He'll hang around
and wait to talk with you."

TWELVE


We sat at breakfast, with Hiram finishing his
second helping of ham and eggs. Bowser dozed on his
blanket in the corner.
"The one thing in question," said Rila, "is whether
we can trust Catface."
"You can trust him, ma'am," said Hiram. "I had a
long talk with him before I came in to get you. He's
nice folks. Just like you and Mr. Steele."
"Well, that is fine," said Rila, "but we must bear
in mind that he is an alien. And a most peculiar one."
"Maybe not," I said. "We don't know what aliens
would be like. Compared with other aliens, he may
not be peculiar."
"Oh, you know what I mean. All head, no body.
Or at least he hides his body. All you can see is a
face sticking out of a tree or bush."
"Ezra saw a body. That night Ranger had Catface
up a tree and Ezra drew a bead on him, but didn't
shoot."
"It was dark," said Rila. "Ezra couldn't see too
much. Just the face when it looked at him. What I
mean about not trusting him is that he may have a
different ethical code, very likely has, a different way
of looking at things. What might seem wrong to us
might not be wrong at all to him."
"He's been around ever since people settled here.
A hundred years and more. He probably had some
contact with the Indians long before then. He's been
watching all the time. He knows what humans are
like. He's astute; he'd soak up a 1ot of information.
He knows what to expect of humans, probably some-
thing of what they would expect of him."

"Asa, are you ready to trust him, just flat out?"
"No, I guess I do have some reservations."
Hiram got up from the table and put on his cap.
"Me and Bowser are going for a walk," he said.
Bowser got up stiffly.
"Don't you want to sleep?" I asked. "You've been
up all night."
"Later on, Mr. Steele."
"Remember, not a word of this to anyone."
"I'll remember," said Hiram. "I promised. I gave
my word. on it."
For a time after he left, we sat drinking second
cups of coffee. Finally Rila said, "If it all stands up,
if it really works all right, we have got it made."
"You mean we can go into time."
"Not us. Other people. People who will pay us for
being sent in time. A time-traveling service. We'll sell
trips in time."
"It could be dangerous."
"Sure, it could be dangerous. We'll draw up con-
tracts absolving us of risks. The travelers will be the
one who take the chances, not us."
"We'd need a lawyer."
"I know just the man. In Washington. He could
help us with the government."
"You think the government might want to step in?"
"You can be sure they would. Once we get going,
everyone will want to get into the act. Remember, you
were afraid of the university horning in when you dug
up all that stuff."
"Yes, I told you that."
"We can't afford to let anyone horn in on this.
This is ours."
"I suppose we could interest some universities or
museums," I said. "There are a lot of events in the
past they would want to have a look at. Be willing
to pay money to look at. But there would be problems.
There'd have to be some rules and regulations. You
couldn't go back to the siege of Troy lugging cameras.
You'd have to speak the language of the day. You'd
have to blend in. Wear the right kinds of clothes.
Know the customs. If you intruded in any way, you

could be in trouble; there would even be the chance
that you would influence the very factors you set
out to study. You might even change history."
"You have a point there," said Rila. "We'll have to
set up a body of time-traveling ethics. Where the
travelers come in contact with humans, that is. Beyond
the human era, it wouldn't matter too much what you
did."
"Like going back to hunt big game?"
"Asa, that's where the money is. Universities
couldn't pay enough to make it worth our while. They
are always strapped for funds. But big game hunters
are a different matter. It used to be that a hunter could
go on safari in Africa and bag a lot of different
heads. Or in Asia. But that is all gone now. If you
go, it's on a very limited license. They run these so-
called camera safaris, but for the dyed-in-the-wool
hunter, they can't be much fun. Imagine what a hunter
would be willing to pay for a go at a mastodon or
sabertooth."
"Or a dinosaur," I said.
"That's what I'm trying to tell you," she said. "We
have to pick our shots. Not necessarily hunting ex-
clusively. There could be a lot of other things. We
could go back or send someone back to pick up some
Attic pottery. You can't imagine what stuff like that
would sell for. A few Athenian owls for the coin
collectors. Or, more recently, some of the early stamps.
We could go to South Africa and pick diamonds off
the ground. That's how the early diamonds were found.
Just picked up off the ground."
"But not too many of them. Only a few here and
there. The Star of Africa, sure. But that was sheer
luck. You could go around for years looking at the
ground ..."
"Maybe that was the way it was, Asa, because we,
a few years from now, got there first. They only found
what we missed."
 I laughed at her. "You're money-hungry, Rila. All
you talk of is money. How to merchandise time
travel, how to sell it to the highest bidder. It seems
to me it should be used for research. There are so many

historical problems. There are geological periods about
which we know so little."
"Later on," she said. "We can do all of that later
on. But we have to make a financial success of it be-
fore we can afford to do the things you are talking
about. You say I'm money-hungry. Maybe I am. It's
been my life. I've spent my life building up a business,
seeing that it paid. And this thing, before we can even
get it started, will cost us money. The lawyer I have
in mind doesn't come cheap. We'll have to build a
fence around the property and hire guards to keep
out the hordes of visitors once the news is broken.
We'll have to put up an administration building and
staff it. We may need public relations people."
"Rila, where are we going to get the money?"
"I can get it."
"We had that out the other day. Remember?"
"But this is different. Then I was offering to help
you stay on here. This is a business venture. The two
of us together. You own the land, you laid the founda-
tion. All I do is get some money for us to begin the
operation."
She stared across the table at me. "Or don't you
want it that way? I'm horning in. Maybe you don't
want that. If that's the case, say so. It's your land,
your Catface, your Hiram. I'm just a pushy bitch."
"Maybe you're a pushy bitch," I said, "but I want
you in with me. It's not something we can throw away,
and I'd mess it up without you. It just shook me up,
you talking about nothing but how we could merchan-
dise it. I see your point, but to justify our position.
some of the time-travel schedule should be allocated
to research."
"It's strange how easily we accept the premise," she
said. "Time travel is something that one automatically
rejects as impossible. And yet, we sit here planning for
it, basing our belief on Catface and Hiram."
"We have more than that," I said. "I did travel
into time. No question about it. It couldn't be delusion.
I was there for an hour or so—well, actually, I don't
know how long I was in the Pleistocene. Long enough
to walk from here down to the river and back. And

there are Bowser's Folsom point and the fresh dino-
saur bones. Intellectually, I'm still fairly sure it's im-
possible, but actually I know it can be done."
"Our one weak link," she said, "is Hiram. If he
is not telling us the truth, if he's playing games with
us..."
"I think I can vouch for him. I've been decent to
him while many others haven't, and he worships Bow-
ser. Almost never a day went past, even before all
this, when he didn't show up here. I think, as well,
that he hasn't the intellect to lie."
"But if he talks. Before we're ready to let anyone
know."
"He won't intentionally. Someone may ask him ques-
tions and worm some of it out of him, or he may get
to talking and a slip of the tongue will give it away.
He's not all that bright."
"I suppose it is a chance we have to take. In a
little while, it won't matter what he says."
She rose from the table and began picking up the
dishes. "I'll have to make a few phone calls," she said.
"To some people in New York and the attorney in
Washington. In a day or two, I'll have to travel
east for a few days. I'd like you to come along with
me."
I shook my head. "I'll leave it to you. I'll stay
here and hold the fort. Someone should be here."

THIRTEEN
I was washing the supper dishes when Ben
Page came knocking at the kitchen door.
"I see you're alone again," said Ben.
"Rila went east for a few days. She'll be back."
"You say the two of you were on a dig together,
years ago."
"That's right. Turkey. A small ruin that dated back.
to the Bronze Age. It wasn't much of a dig. Nothing
new, nothing exciting. The sponsors were disap-
pointed."
"I suppose you can do a lot of digging sometimes
and come up with nothing."
"That is true," I said. I put away the last of the
dishes, wiped my hands and sat down at the kitchen
table, across from Ben. In his corner, Bowser whim-
pered eagerly, his feet twitching as he chased dream
rabbits.
"This digging you been doing," said Ben. "Turning
up much?"
"Not yet. Nothing that amounts to much."
"But it isn't just a sinkhole."
"No, not a sinkhole. I don't know what it is. Maybe
a meteorite. Found some stray chunks of metal."
"Asa," said Ben accusingly, "you're not leveling with
me. There is something going on."
"What makes you say that, Ben?"
"Hiram. He's acting mysterious. As if you were on
to something and he was in on it. Says he can't talk
about it; that he promised not to. He makes a joke
about it. Says to ask Bowser."
"Hiram thinks he can talk with Bowser."
"I know. He talks with everything."

"Hiram's all right," I said. "But you can't depend
on him. He talks a lot of nonsense."
"I don't think so, not this time. The whole thing is
a little strange. You coming back and buying the farm
and digging in the sinkhole. Then Rila shows up and
she's an archaeologist, just like you."
"If there was anything to tell you, Ben, I would.
There's nothing now, maybe never will be."
"Look," said Ben, "as mayor of this town, I have
a right to ask. If you are up to something that might
affect the town, I should know ahead of time. So we
can get ready for it."
"Ben, I don't know what you are getting at."
"Well, for example, I own ten acres at the edge of
town. Foreclosed on it some years ago, been paying
taxes on it ever since. Good place for a motel. There
ain't but this one flytrap of a motel here. No self-
respecting person would put up in it. Money in a
motel, if it's a good one and there are people who
would want to use it. If something should happen
that would bring a lot of people here, a motel would
be a good business venture."
"What did Hiram say that made you think there
might be people coming here?"
"Well, not a great deal. He acts so damn mysterious
and important. He enjoys it so much I figure it must
be something big. He did let one thing sort of slip
without knowing it. Asa, tell me, could there be a
crashed spaceship at the bottom of the sinkhole?"
"I suppose there could be," I said. "That's one
thought I've had in mind. But nothing so far to sup-
port it. If there is, it would have to be an alien space-
ship. One operated by intelligent people from way out
in space, from another star. If you found fragments of
such a ship and could show credible evidence, it would
be an important find. It would be the first real evi-
dence that there was another thinking race in the uni-
verse and that, at some time, they had visited the
Earth."
Ben whistled softly. "That would bring a lot of peo-
ple here, wouldn't it? People to study it. A lot of curi-
osity seekers. And they'd come year after year. It

could be a tourist attraction that would last for years."
"I would imagine so," I said.
"It's slow going for you," said Ben. "Out there dig-
ging by yourself. How about me getting some of the
boys together and coming out to help you."
"I appreciate the thought, but it wouldn't work. This
kind of digging takes training. You've got to know
what to look for. You have to take it easy and plot
exactly where you found each item. You can't just
rush in there and start throwing dirt. Get a gang in
with picks and shovels and they'd destroy a lot of
evidence. Little things that wouldn't mean a thing to
them, but would to a trained digger."
Ben nodded gravely. "Yes, I can see how it would
be. It was just a thought."
"I thank you for it," I said. "And, Ben, I'd appre-
ciate it if you said nothing of it. It would be embarrass-
ing to me if the word got out I was digging for a
spaceship. The town would think I was crazy, and the
word would filter out into academic circles and there'd
be a lot of university types shooting off their faces,
and some of them would be coming out to look the
situation over, and most of them, I suspect, would
sneer at us."
"Sure," said Ben. "Not a word from me. Not a
single word from me. But do you think there could
be ..."
"I'm not sure at all. Just a hunch. Based on some
evidence that may be no evidence at all. I may be do-
ing no more than making a fool of myself. How about
a beer?"
After Ben had left, I sat at the table for a long time,
wondering if what I'd told him had been wise. it
could backfire, I knew, but probably not with Ben. He
was a grasping bastard and would probably keep his
mouth shut because he'd want to be the first to know.
so that he could rush in, ahead of all the others, and
get his motel built—and probably other things that he
had not mentioned.
I'd had to tell him something, and I'd had to throw
him slightly off the track. Just a plain denial would
not have satisfied him. Hiram's slip of the tongue and

the way that he was acting had made Ben suspicious.
And I hadn't really lied to him, I told rnyself. There
was a spaceship out there at the bottom of the sink-
hole.
I'd probably shut him up, for a time at least. And
that was important, for village gossip and speculation
had to be kept to a minimum at the moment. Once we
started building the fence, of course, there'd be no
stopping it. And Rila was right; we would need the
fence.
I went to the refrigerator and got another beer.
Goodness, I thought, sitting there drinking it, the en-
tire thing was mad. Much as I might tell myself, in
moments of clarity and right thinking, it was not pos-
sible for men to travel into time, I knew it was. Im-
printed on my mind as nothing else in my entire life,
was the memory of that big bull mastodon, with his
rapid, almost gliding tread, and his trunk swinging
like a pendulum between his tusks as he hurried to
reach the herd. And I could not forget the terror I
had felt when I realized where I was, the lostness
and displacement.
Once again, I ran through the preliminary plans
Rila and I had made, sitting at this very table. Think-
ing of the plans, I felt not only a vague unreality, but
some apprehension as well. There could be so much
that we had not been able to foresee, blind spots prone
to wrecking the best-laid plans. What, I wondered, had
we overlooked? What unsuspected circumstances would
arise to plague us in the days to come?
I was bothered by how we planned to use time
travel. If I had ever thought of it at all, I would not
have thought of it as Rila did. I found it difficult to
brush aside the conviction that time travel should be
used in the furtherance of science and of understand-
ing; that it was not something to be offered in the
Marketplace.
But Rila was undoubtedly right in saying that if
someone else had found the secret and possessed the
technique, they, for their part, would use it to their
own best advantage. In her opinion, it was silly to
throw away an opportunity to place travel into time

on a sound economic basis; for only with such a basis
could it be used consistently for research.
In his corner, the dreaming Bowser yipped wildly
as he closed in on the rabbit I finished my beer, threw
the bottle in the trash can and went off to bed;
Rila was coming home tomorrow and I'd have to
get up early to drive to Minneapolis and meet her at
the airport,

FOURTEEN


When I first caught sight of Rila as she came
up the ramp, she bore a grim, determined look, but at
the sight of me, she smiled and hurried forward. I
caught her in my arms and said, "It's good to have you
back. The last three days have been lonely ones."
She tilted up her head for a kiss, then pressed her
face against my shoulder. "It's good to see you, Asa,"
she whispered. "It's nice to be home again. What an
awful time!"
"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 could'nt
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 out-
fit. 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 cli-
ents to go hunting dinosaurs. Not mastodon, not mam-
moth, 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 manu-
factured 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 ele-
phants being shot these days. So I said, by Goodness, that
I wanted to buy those two guns, and after some back-
ing 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 un-
loading items that no one else would buy. Those ri-
fles 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 ele-
phant 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 be-
gan 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 him-
self 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 cari-
bou. 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 en-
velope. "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 tech-
nique for traveling in time, hoping that when I
mentioned technique they would presuppose a ma-
chine. 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 in-
terested 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 insan-
ity 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 busi-
ness. 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 in-
sanity 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 bot-
tle, 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 dis-
cuss."
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 busi-
ness?"
"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 some-
one 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 drink-
ing."
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, includ-
ing 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.
He shook his head. "What you're saying is mighty
hard to swallow. There ain't no way to go back into
the past."
"That's what everyone says," said Rila. "We'll have
to prove it. We'll have to go back into the past, into
the kind of past that no one's ever seen, and bring back
movies of it. There's one thing we didn't tell you,
Ben. Asa and I are going back to the time of the di-
nosaurs, and we want you to go with us."
"Me? You want me to go back with you? Back to
the dinosaurs?"
I got up from the table and went into the living
room where we'd stashed the stuff that Rila had
brought on the plane. I came back with one of the
two guns and laid it on the table in front of Ben.
"You know what that is?" I asked him.
He picked it up, hoisting it, weighing it. He swung
around in his chair, pointed the rifle at a kitchen win-
dow and broke the breech. He squinted through the
barrels.
"An elephant gun," be said. "I've heard of them,
but I've never seen one. Double-barreled. Would you
take a look at that bore! With a thing like that, you
could knock an elephant off its feet."
He looked at me inquiringly. "Would it do the same
to a dinosaur? One of the big ones?"
"No one knows," I said. "A well-placed shot should
stop one. Knocking it over, I don't know. We have

two of those rifles. When Rila and I go into dinosaur
country, I'll carry one of them. She'll be loaded down
with camera equipment. We are hoping you will carry
the other gun. Back there, we won't know what to
expect, but, in any case, two guns will be better than
one."
Ben drew in his breath. "Dinosaurs!" he said.
"You're offering me a chance to go along? With a gun
like this?"
"You have it turned around," said Rila. "We aren't
offering you a chance to go. We're begging you
to go."
"You don't have to beg," said Ben. "You'd have to
lay me out to stop me. Africa—I always wanted to
go to Africa. This will be better than Africa."
"It could be dangerous. Maybe not. As Asa says,
there's no way to know."
"But you're going?"
Rila said smugly, "I'll have to run the camera."
"Movies, yet," he yelled. "My God, the film boys
would kill one another to get hold of that footage. A
million bucks. Five million bucks. You could name
your price."
"We'll take that up later on," said Rila. "Maybe the
movie people would like to do their own shooting. A
professional job of film making."
"And you'd sell them the rights," said Ben. "At a
handsome figure."
"We'll not make it cheap," said Rila.
"And me," said Ben, "getting all excited about a
little two-by-four motel. Although, it will take a
chunk of capital to get this venture on its feet. How
are you fixed? Any chance of buying in? Not a big
slice of the action. Only a small percentage."
"We can talk about that later," said Rila. "First,
let's see what kind of proof we can get when we go
back to find the dinosaurs. If we don't get proof, then
all bets are off. There's no future in it."
"How far back are you going?"
"We'll have to take a closer look at the possibili-
ties," I said. "Seventy million years at least. Perhaps
a good bit farther."

"We're glad you're willing to go with us," Rila said.
"We need a man who can handle a gun. Someone
who has done some hunting, who can rough it and
who knows what to watch out for."
Ben looked at me. "You ever fire one of these
things?"
I shook my head.
"If you don't handle it right," he said, "this gun
could take your head off. The kick must be terrific.
We'll have to practice before we go."
"There's no place here we can try them out," I
said. "Too heavily populated. We couldn't take the
chance. The report would be too loud, and people
would begin asking questions. We can't have that. For
a while, we'll have to keep this under cover."
"You have cartridges?"
"A few. Probably enough."
"And you figure one of them could stop a dino-
saur?"
"It would depend on how big a dinosaur. Some of
them are so big, it would take a cannon. But we don't
have to worry about them if we keep out of their
way. They'll give us no trouble. The ones we worry
about are the meat-eaters."
Ben squinted through the barrels again. "In good
shape," he said. "A little haze, probably dust. No sign
of rust. Do no harm to run an oiled rag through the
barrels. Ought to break them down and oil them be-
fore we use them. In a place like that, you'd want a
smooth-working gun."
He slapped the barrels with an open hand. "Good
steel," he said. "Never saw anything like it in my
life. Must have set you back a pile."
Rila said, "I got them from the safari people at a
bargain. They want to do business with us if we have
anything. That is, once they are convinced we have
something they can use."
"There is one thing about this trip that I want to
emphasize," I said. "It is not a hunting trip. We're not
going out to bag a dinosaur. Our job is to get enough
good film to convince the safari people and Rila's law-
yer friend. We don't start any trouble. The two of us

simply stand by in case trouble comes to us. I want
you to understand that, Ben."
"Oh, sure, I understand that," he said. "Later on,
perhaps..."
"Once things have settled down," I promised, "we'll
fix it up for you to do some hunting."
"That's fair enough," he said. "But once we get
where we are going, we'll have to try out these guns.
To see how they shoot, how we can handle them. I'd
like to know what to expect of such a piece before
having to fire in earnest."
"We'll do that," said Rila. "We can't fire them
here."
He laid the gun back on the table. "What kind of
schedule have you got?" he asked.
"Soon as we can," said Rila. "In a day or two."
"This trip is just one phase of it," he said. "The be-
ginning, really. There are other things you have to
think about. Once this deal goes public, we'll have peo-
ple crowding in. You'll have to set up some sort of
security. You can't have people clogging up the place
and falling into time roads or whatever you may call
them. You have to buy yourself some elbow room."
"We plan to build a fence all around the forty,"
Rila replied. "High as we can manage. Floodlighted
at night and with guards patrolling around the clock."
Ben whistled. "That will take some money. Enclos-
ing forty acres takes a lot of fence."
"And we'll need an administration building," said
Rila, "and a staff to man it. Probably only a few to
start with."
"Tell you what," said Ben. "Why don't you let me
set up a credit line for you down at the bank? Fifty
thousand to start with, increasing if you need it. You
borrow only what you need, as you need it. You
write the checks and we'll honor them."
"Ben," I told him, "that's damn generous of you.
Where's the flint-hearted banker?"
"Well, what I mean," he said, "is that we'll do it if
this trip turns out all right. Naturally, I'd want to
know what you have."
"You still have some reservations?"

"Not really reservations. When I walk out of here
and go back to the car, I'll be wondering what I've
let myself in for. I'll spend the night telling myself that
I am a fool to listen to you, that it's impossible to
travel into time. But sitting here, lapping up your
booze and listening to you, I have no reservations. My
hands itch to have a part in it. If it were anyone but
you, Asa, I wouldn't believe a word. I remember how
it was when we were boys. I was one of the
gang, sure, but I was the banker's son, and a lot of the
other fellows resented it. They thought my folks were
better off than their folks and we really weren't, but
they thought so. They never passed up a chance to
shaft me. Nobody loves a small-town banker—well,
'I guess no one loves any kind of banker, and let us
face it, my old man didn't have a record that inspired
much confidence, and I suppose the same applies to
me. But the point is you never shafted me, you never
went along with the shafting. There were times you
even fought for me. You accepted me just like any-
body else."
"Hell," I said, "that's no great virtue. You were
like everybody else. We were just a bunch of small-
town boys and everybody was like everybody else."
"You see," Ben said to Rila. "You see why I trust
this guy."
"I'm glad you do," said Rila, "and we'll be thankful
for any help you give us. This is going to be a big job
just for the two or us."
"Why don't you let me nose around a little on this
fence deal? I can ask some questions and sort of line
up some people and no one will think a great deal
about it. I can sort of let it out that I'm doing it for
someone who is going into the mink farming business.
Nothing definite, of course, acting as if I were being
cagey about it. They'd expect that sort of foxiness in
me. I can get it all lined up so the fence can start
moving the moment you give the word. I think I could
manage to line up quite a crew of men to go to work.
The thing is that the fence has to go in fast, before
there's too much speculation about it. With the crops
in by now, there are bound to be a  bunch of farm

boys who'd be glad of a chance to earn some money. I
suppose you ought to have the land surveyed before
you slap up the fence. No sense in taking the chance
of it slopping over on someone else's land. Security
guards will be a little tougher, but I think they can be
gotten. The Minneapolis police department has been
hit by a new city budget cutback and has let twenty
or thirty of their boys go. Maybe some of them would
be available. I'll talk to the sheriff over at Lancaster
and see if he has any other ideas. Not telling him any
more than I have to. You'll need to get some good-
sized No Trespassing signs painted. I think there are
some regulations about that. They have to be a certain
size, and the law has something to say about the word-
ing on them. I'll look into that."
"You think of everything," said Rila. "You're way
ahead of us."
"When you're going to do a thing," said Ben, "you
should do it right. A little advance planning can save
a lot of trouble."
He looked at his watch. "Got to go," he said. "I'll
be late for supper and Myra will have my hide. There's
some sort of doings she is dragging me to tonight' and
she wanted to eat early."
He rose and said, "We'll be in touch. You let me
know when you plan on leaving. I'll have to figure out.
some phoney excuse for taking a few days off. A trip
or something."
"Two days might be enough to do what we want to
do," said Rila.
"I shouldn't have too much trouble arranging that,"
he said.
After he had left, Rila said, "The man's a steam-
roller."
"You heard what he said early on," I told her.
"He's planning to horn in."
"We'll sell him five percent," said Rila. "Has he any
money?"
"The first nickel he ever made," I said, "plus the
family fortune—which may not be all that great, but
it is enough."

SIXTEEN


Hiram was in charge and being important
about it.
"You see those stakes," he said, pointing to three
red-painted stakes standing in a row, one behind the
other. "Those stakes mark the time hole. You just
follow them and you'll walk into it."
  He handed me a bundle of similarly painted stakes.
 "When you get there," he said, "don't go running off
without looking. Plant these stakes in front of the other
end of the hole the way I lined up these three here.
That way you will know where the hole is when it's
time to come back."
"But you have only three stakes here," I said.
"I gave you more," said Hiram, "because you may
want to mark it better. Back there where you are going,
things might be running over the stakes, but there's
no chance of that happening here. I made the stakes
longer, too, and heavier, so you can pound them in
real good."
"Hiram," Rila asked, "did you think this up all by
yourself?"
"Sure I did. There was nothing to it. And don't you
worry none. If you're not back in a few days, I'll send
Bowser in to find you. He can lead you home. You
remember, Mr. Steele, the time he led you home."
"Indeed I do," 1 said. "And, Hiram, thank you very
much."
''You be sure you stay right here," Ben said to him.
"Don't go wandering off. Keep an eye on this place.
Asa left enough food in the refrigerator so you won't
have to leave to eat."
"Could I maybe leave long enough to go to the
bathroom?"

"Yes, of course," said Ben, "but be quick about it.
And don't tell anyone what is going on. Not even if
they come asking. Herb might come. He smells that
something's going on and he could get itchy. If anyone
comes by and asks what those stakes are, say that you
don't know."
"Once we're gone," said Rila, "he could even pull
up the stakes."
"No I can't," said Hiram. "What if I have to go
through the hole to rescue you?"
"We won't need any rescuing," said Ben. "Even if
we're a little late, don't worry. Don't send Bowser in.
Don't come in yourself."
"If I have to come," said Hiram importantly, "I'll
get together a posse."
"Damn it, no!" yelled Ben. "Don't do anything
at all. You just stay here."
"All right, Mr. Page," said Hiram.
I looked at the other two and there seemed no rea-
son that we shouldn't start. Rila was loaded down with
her camera equipment, and both Ben and I were carry-
ing backpacks as well as the big rifles. In addition,
Ben had a .30-06 slung over his shoulder. He was
taking it because he said we would need a meat gun.
"I never go on a hunting trip," he'd said, "that I -
don't shoot some meat. Living outdoors, we'll need
fresh meat."
"But there are only lizards," I'd said. "Dinosaurs
and lizards and other things like that."
"Who says lizards can't be eaten?" he'd demanded,
"Or even dinosaur. There are a lot of people who
eat lizards. I read about it somewhere. Said they taste
like chicken."
So there we were, standing in a row, with me in
the lead and Rila in the middle, Ben bringing up the
rear.
"So let's go," I said. "One thing to remember. We
may come out of the other end at night. Through mil-
lions of years, the length of the day would vary. And
anyhow, Catface can't be all that accurate. At the
distance back in time we're traveling, there'll be some
error. He's aiming at seventy million years, but there

might be an error of several years plus or minus, so you
can understand ..."
"Asa," said Ben, "cut out the lecture. Let's go."
I stepped out, and although I didn't look behind me,
I knew the other two were following. 1 went down the
line of bright red stakes, and when I passed the last
one it seemed that something tripped me, but in one
stride I caught my balance and was in a different
place.
"Stay right where you are," I told the other two.
"Keep facing in the same direction. We have to set
these stakes out and there can't be any slip-up."
It wasn't until I'd said all this that I gave myself
the time to see where we were. That was something I
should have reminded them about before we'd left,
and I was in something of a panic that somehow we'd
fouled up our direction and our placement. I was re-
membering the terror I had felt when I had had no
idea how to get out of the Pleistocene.
It wasn't night, as I had told them it might be.
Rather it was broad daylight, and even if I hadn't
known where we were going, I think I would have
recognized the late Cretaceous.
It didn't look much different than the Willow Bend
we'd left. There were more trees, of course, but they
were familiar trees: maples, birches and oaks, with a
scattering of evergreens. But directly in front of us grew
what appeared to be a huge pineapple with a multi-
tude of fern-like branches sprouting out of it. A cycad,
and a more primitive one than I would have ex-
pected to find, but the fact remained that only in the
Cretaceous, in this latitude, would one find a cycad
growing among the familiar trees of home.
"All right," said Ben. ".Let's start pounding in the
stakes."
I half turned and handed one back to him, then
unshipped my belt axe and pounded in one myself.
Then I walked out a ways and pounded in another.
By the time we finished, we had six stakes pounded
in a line. Ben walked along the row, pounding each
succeeding stake a little deeper than the preceding
one.

"There," he said, "we'll know what direction to go.
The taller stakes are nearer home."
"A cycad," Rila said to me. "They've always fas-
cinated me. I bought a bunch of fossil ones several
years ago."
"A what?" asked Ben.
"A cycad. That crazy pineapple with a topknot."
"A pineapple. Yeah, I see it. Is it really a
pineapple?"
"No, it's not," said Rila.
Ben and I shucked out of our packs and eased them
to the ground. Rila hung onto her camera junk.
"Now, look here," said Ben. "You been fooling me.
Where are all them dinosaurs?"
"They're around," said Rila. "For instance, look
over there on that ridge. There's a herd of them."
Ben squinted at the ridge. "But those are small,"
he said. "No bigger than sheep."
"Dinosaurs come in all sizes," said Rila. "From
chicken size on up. Those are herbivores. Too far
away to identify."
She and Ben must have sharper eyes than I do. I
could just barely make them out. If some of them had
not moved now and then in their grazing, I'd not have
seen them at all.
The sun stood straight overhead. The air was warm,
but not too warm, and a little breeze was blowing from
the west. It reminded me of a day in early June before
the summer heat clamped down.
First I had seen the home like trees, then the cycad.
Now I began to notice other things as well. The ground
was covered, although not entirely, by dwarf laurel,
sassafras and other little shrubs. Grass was growing in
scattered patches—rough; tough grass and not too
much of it—nothing like the grass of the Pleistocene
that tried to cover every square inch of soil. I was
surprised at the grass. There shouldn't have been.
any. According to the textbooks, grass hadn't shown
up until much later, several millions of years later.
But here it was to show us how wrong we could be.
Here and there, at a distance, between the groves of
home like trees, grew small patches of palmetto. W'e.

stood, I knew, at the transition point between the
early development of the deciduous trees and the dy-
ing out of the older, more primitive flora; the two here
intermingled. Because the ground cover was not as
extensive as it would be some millions of years into
the future, when true grasses had developed and taken
over, the ground was rough, pocked and runneled by
small channels where the soil had washed away in
sudden summer showers—if, in fact, this world had
anything but summer. It was the kind of ground that
could not be trusted. Every minute of the time that
we were here, we'd have to watch our step. The shrubs
would impede walking, and the channeled ground
 would offer unsure footing.
Ben bent and hoisted his packsack to his shoulder.
"We'd better look around for a place to camp," he
said. "Near water, if we can. Somewhere around here
we should find a spring. Back home, there used to be
a lot of springs. Remember, Asa, when we were boys.
But now, with the trees cut down and a lot of the land
turned to pasture, most of them have dried up."
I nodded. "We should find one without too much
trouble. I'm trying to get the geography straightened
out. The river is still over there, to the west and
south, but its course has changed. Look, it runs straight
now and hasn't got a bend. It runs straight through
the place where Willow Bend will stand."
"I see," said Ben. "Everything looks a little fuzzy,
but I guess the hills and swales seem pretty much the
same. We'll get it straightened out."
"This is ancient land," said Rila. "There has been
nothing to change it much between now and Willow
Bend. No epicontinental seas. No glacial action. The
Kansas Sea lies a good many miles to the west of us.
Except for possible lakes, we have no big bodies of
water in the area. For that reason, we probably won't
find sauropods."
I hoisted my pack and shrugged into it. Rila shifted
her camera equipment to a more comfortable position.
With Ben in the lead and myself taking up the rear,
We moved out. In a patch of shrubbery over to our
right, something squeaked and ran, rustling through

the underbrush. Perhaps, I thought, a small mammal.
There would be a lot of them here, mouse to rabbit
size. There probably were rabbits, certainly opossum.
Maybe even squirrels. Hiding out against the more
vicious beasts that roamed, watching to satisfy an
ever-present hunger, these little scurriers would emerge
from hiding ten million years or so from now to take
over a world left empty by the massive extinction of
the reptiles.
Ben led us toward the river, circling to the west-
The walking was hard. You had to feel your way.
There was a tendency to watch underfoot, to see where
you were walking. But if you did that, you couldn't
keep close watch, and here was a place where you
knew instinctively you had to keep close watch of
everything around you.
The gun was growing heavier and more awkward by
the minute. I couldn't find a comfortable way to carry
it, and I wondered what the hell I'd do if some slaver-
ing carnivore should hove in sight and come thunder-
ing toward us. The pack was bad enough, but the gun
was worse.
A turtle—a huge turtle—poked a head as big as a
barrel out of a small grove of birches a few hundred
feet away. The turtle poked its head out, paused,
blinking at us, then kept coming. At the sight of it
emerging from the birches, we froze. Ben brought up
his gun halfway to the shoulder.
It looked like a turtle, faintly, but it was not a turtle,
It didn't have a shell; it had armor plate. And it kept
on coming, blinking at us all the time, a nictitating.
membrane flickering over and off its eyes. It waddled
when it walked, and its short legs held it only a short
distance off the ground.
To my right I could hear Rila's camera whirring, but
I didn't look at her. I kept looking at the beast.
"It's all right," I said, hoping I was right. "It's an
ankylosaur. It's not a predator."
By now it was free of the birches—all fifteen feet
of it. Its dragging tail had a massive bony club at the
end of it.
The camera kept on with its whirring and now old


armor-plate had stopped. It grunted at us and lifted
that great club of a tail and beat it on the ground.
"I'll be damned," said Ben. "It's warning us off."
"It's not scared," I said. "Not of anything at all. Let
one of the carnosaurs have a go at it, and it would
give the carnosaur that tail right in the teeth."
Deliberately the ankylosaur swung about, away
from us, and sedately trundled off. Rila lowered her
camera. "Let's find that camping site," said Ben.
A half-hour later we found it, a spring gushing out
of a hillside, hidden by a patch of oaks and maples,
mighty trees that made me think of an artist's concep-
tion of the ancient English forests drawn to illustrate
an old edition of Tennyson.
"It's perfect," said Ben. "We have protection. None
of the big stuff can get at us easily, here among the
trees."
"Maybe we're overestimating the ferocity of the
camosaurs," I told him. "Maybe they don't go for you
on sight. We'll seem strange to them, not like their
usual prey. They might shy off from us. And another
thing—there may not be many of them about."
"Even so," insisted Ben, "we won't take any
chances. We all stick together. No one goes wandering
off. And we don't take a thing for granted. When we
get the camp set up, we'll test-fire the guns."
We quickly got the camp set up (a simple camp,
with two small tents pitched underneath the trees), a
fire pit dug, dead wood chopped, brought in and
stacked, and our kits unpacked.
"You and I will take turns standing guard tonight,"
Ben said to me. "We don't want something blundering
in on us."
With the camp all tidy, Ben and I test-fired the guns.
"The thing to do," said Ben, "is to hang in there
easy. Don't get tense, don't stiffen up. Hold the butt to
your shoulder, but don't hug it too tight. There has to
be a little play, but you have to have control of it so
the butt doesn't bounce off your shoulder and clip you
on the chin. And lean into it. Not too far, but lean
into it."
Ben had no trouble. He'd fired big-caliber before,

but none as big as the ones we carried. With me, it was
a bit different. I'd never fired anything bigger than a
.22, but I remembered what Ben had told me, and it
didn't go too badly. The first shot almost took my
shoulder off and drove me back a step or two, but it
didn't knock me over. The second shot was better.
The third seemed quite natural. The fourth and last
shot, I didn't even notice the recoil. The big lone birch
tree we had used as a target was chewed up by the
impact of the bullets.
"That's good," said Ben approvingly. "You can't let
it hurt you too much. If you let it wallop you too
hard, if you don't stand up to it, you become afraid of
it and you flinch each time you fire it. When that
happens, you might just as well throw it at whatever's
coming at you. Flinching, you can't hit the broad side
of a barn at thirty paces."
"Asa," Rila said softly, off to one side.
I turned and saw that she was sitting cross-legged on
the ground, her elbows resting on her knees to hold the
binoculars steady. "Come take a look," she said.
"There's a lot of stuff out there. Small groups and
loners, but they blend into the background and are
hard to see. Look over there, just to the left of the
little group of four trees on the ridge running back
from the river."
She handed me the binoculars, but they were so
heavy that standing, I couldn't hold them steady. I
had to sit down and use my knees to support my el-
bows, as she had been doing.
It took a while to pinpoint what she wanted me to
see, but finally I caught the thing in the field and fid-
dled with the adjustment wheels to bring it more
sharply into focus. It was in a squatting position, rest-
ing, reared back with its knees flexed so that its great
tail gave it support. The huge body was almost up-
right and the ugly head kept swinging from side to side
as if keeping watch of the countryside.
"What do you think?" asked Rila. "A tyrannosaur?"
"I don't know," I said. "I can't be sure."
The trouble, of course, was that no one could be
sure. All we had ever seen of any of the dinosaurs

were their bones, plus, in a few instances, fossil mum-
mies with part of the skin intact. Our visual impres-
sions of them came from artists' conceptions, which
were fine, so far as they went, but couldn't even pre-
tend to be sure of many details.
"Not rex," I said. "The forelegs are too big. Maybe
a trionychid. Maybe another kind of tyrannosaur
we've never found a fossil of; we can't be sure we've
found the fossils of all the different kinds of tyranno-
saurs. But whatever he is, he's a big brute. Sitting up
there resting, taking it easy, looking around for some-
thing that's worth his while to gobble up."
I kept on watching the brute. Except for his swing-
ing head, he did not stir.        
"The forelegs are too well developed," said Rila.
"That's what puzzled me. If we were a few million
years farther back, I'd be tempted to say it's an
allosaur. But up here there aren't supposed to be any
allosaurs. They died out long ago."
"Maybe not," I told her. "We're acting as if we
knew the entire history of the dinosaurs from the fossils
we have found. If we find one dinosaur in an old
stratum and find him in none after that, we're inclined
to say he became extinct. What could happen is that
we simply failed to look in the right place to find him
in the younger strata. Allosaurs could have existed up
to the very end."
I handed the glasses to Ben, pointing out the clump
of trees, "Over to the left of them," I said.
"Asa," said Rila, "I want some film of him. He's
the first big thing I've seen."
"Use the telephoto lens," I said. "That will catch
him."
"I have," she answered, "but it comes up awfully
fuzzy. At least, what I can see does. I suppose on the
film as well. To convince the safari people, to get them
all fired up, I have to have something sharp and close."
"We can try to get closer," I said. "He's a long way
from here, but we can have a try."
"The beggar's moving off," said Ben. "Going up the
ridge. He is moving fast. Maybe he spotted something
he's after."

"Damn it," said Rila bitterly. "It was you guys and
your test-firing. It made him uneasy."
"He didn't look uneasy to me," I said. "He was
just sitting there. From this distance, the firing would
not have been very loud."
"But I've got to get some big stuff," said Rila.
"We'll find it," I said, trying to comfort her.
"There is a lot of little stuff out there," she said.
"Ostrich dinosaurs and small herds of little fellows,
turkey size or so. A few ankylosaurs. A few small
horned varieties. All sorts of lizards. Some big turtles
down by the river, but who cares for big turtles? Some
flying reptiles. Pterosaurs, I suppose. Some birds. But
nothing spectacular."
"It would be senseless to go chasing after that big
fellow," Ben said. "He was traveling fast. Like he
knew where he was going. By the time we get out
there, he'll be clear out of the country, the rate that
he was going. We can take a small stroll, if that is
what you want. Maybe we can stir up something. But
we shouldn't go too far. It's getting well into the after-
noon and we should be back here well before night
sets in."
"We'll likely be safer after dark than at any other
time," I told him. "I doubt that any of the reptiles
would move around too much once the sun has set.
They get lethargic then, or are supposed to. They're
cold-blooded. Their temperature tolerance is narrow.
They take shelter at noon when the sun gets hot, and
don't move around much when the temperature falls
at night."
"You are probably right," said Ben. "Undoubtedly,
you are. You know about such things. But me, I'll
feel more comfortable at night in camp with a good
fire going."
"We can't be absolutely sure about dinosaurs not
moving around at night," said Rila. "For one thing,
we can't be sure that even with the sun gone the
temperature will fall a great deal. And another thing,
there is some evidence that dinosaurs may not be cold-
blooded. There is a fairly persuasive opinion among

some paleontologists that they were, in fact, warm-
blooded."
She was right, of course—there was some evidence
of warm bloodedness. I had read some of the argument
and had not been impressed with it. I didn't say so,
though. Apparently Rila did accept it and this was no
place to get into an academic argument.
Somewhere to the north, something began to bellow.
We stood and listened to it. It didn't get any nearer,
nor did it recede; the bellowing just kept on. Every-
thing else fell silent, and in between the bellows, there
was nothing to be heard. We had not been aware of the
background noise before, but now we noticed the ab-
sence of other sounds, of the grunting, feeble honking,
the multitude of different squeaks.
"Wonder if that's our pal from over on the ridge?"
asked Ben.
"It could be," said Rila, "It could be something
else."
"I didn't know dinosaurs made sounds."
"No one knew. The general belief, I think, has been
that they were silent creatures. Now we know they're
noisy."
"If we climb the hill," said Ben, "once we get to the
top, we may be able to spot this bellower."
We climbed the hill, but we didn't find the bellower.
The bellowing quit before we reached the hilltop. A
search with the glasses failed to pick up anything big
enough to have been making all that noise.
We didn't find the bellower, but we stirred up a lot
of life. Small bands of ostrich dinosaurs that looked for
all the world like six-foot naked birds went racing
away from us. A grunting bunch of little horned mon-
sters, two feet at the shoulder, waddled away from a
patch of ground they had torn up with their horns in
search of roots and bulbs. Snakes slithered out from
beneath our feet. We raised a flock of grotesque, awk-
ward birds, the size of grouse or maybe a little bigger,
that fluttered protestingly. They were funny-looking
things. Their feathers seemed to be put on wrong,
and they were not good at flying. A little distance off,
we saw a few iguanodons standing six feet high or so.

They should have been much bigger; more than likely,
according to the fossil record, they shouldn't have been
there at all. They were flabby, evil-looking beasts, and
when they opened their mouths, they showed fine sets
of teeth. There was no question they were meat-
eaters. Those teeth were never made to deal with
vegetation. We edged up close to them, Ben and I on
the alert, rifles ready. I was braced for a charge, but
they weren't sore at anyone. They regarded us sleepily
and suspiciously for a time, then they wheeled about
and went lumbering off.
During the afternoon, Rila's camera kept up an al-
most ceaseless whirring. She used up a lot of film, hav-
ing to stop every now and then to reload. But except
for iguanodons, she wasn't getting anything big.
As we turned to go home, Ben pointed at the sky.
"Look there," he said.
He was pointing at a flock of birds far off. There
must have been a hundred of them, looking like black
gnats in the sky, flying east.
I focused the glasses on them and, although they
remained fairly small, there was no mistaking them.
"Pterosaurs," I said. "There must be big water out
there somewhere."
The sun was only an hour or so above the horizon
when we turned back for camp. Halfway there, we ran
head-on into a group of six ostrich dinosaurs. They
hesitated at the sight of us, began to turn away. Ben
thrust his elephant gun at me. "Hang onto this for a
minute," he said.
He lifted the shoulder strap of the .30-06, and as he
swung around, the ostriches were off, running fast with
their powerful, swinging stride. Ben's rifle came up
and he swung it, following them. It coughed with a flat
vicious sound, and one of the fleeing dinosaurs spun
head over heels. It landed on its back and its slender
legs stuck up in the air, kicking.
"Supper," Ben said, grinning. He slung the strap of
the smaller rifle over his shoulder and reached out for
the one I was holding for him.
"Did you get it?" he asked Rila.

"I got it," she said grimly. "It's on film. The first
dinosaur kill."
Ben grinned even more broadly. "What do you know
about that .'"he said.
We walked to the kill. Ben leaned the big gun
against it and took a knife out of the belt sheath.
"You grab hold of the leg," he told me, "and pull."
Still hanging onto my gun with one hand, I grasped
the leg with the other and pulled. Ben's knife made
quick, expert slices, cutting around the ham.
"All right," he said. He grasped the leg with both
hands and twisted savagely. It came free, but some
muscles still held. He slashed twice more and the quar-
ter was severed from the body.
"I'll carry it," I said. "You have the extra gun."
He grunted. "We could take the other leg, but this
should be enough. No use trying to get meat ahead.
It will only spoil,"
"How do you know this will be good to eat?" I
asked.
"It won't poison us," he said. "If we don't like it,
we can throw it out and fry up some bacon."
"We won't have to throw it out," said Rila. "It will
make good eating."
"How can you be so sure of that?" I asked.
"We eat chicken, don't we?"
"I may be stupid," said Ben, "but what have chick-
ens got to do with it?"
"Chickens are close to dinosaurs. The closest thing
we have today. Direct descendants, if you stretch a
point or two."
Stretch a point or two, indeed, I told myself, but I
kept my mouth shut. She was not, of course, entirely
wrong. I had kept quiet about the warm-bloodedness,
I told myself, and for the sake of harmony, I might
as well keep quiet about this one, too.
We didn't throw it out. It tasted good. It faintly re-
sembled veal, but it wasn't veal, either. It had a sweet,
succulent taste all its own. We ate a lot of it.
We built up the fire after the cooking was done and
sat beside it. Ben broke out a bottle of whiskey and
poured into our coffee cups. "A small drink," he said.

"A hunter's drink. Just enough for us to feel a little
warm and happy. Something to warm the gut."
He handed us the cups and put the bottle away.
We sat there sipping at it, and the world was good.
We were snug beside the fire and we had film and
everything was all right. We didn't do much talking.
With the tramping we had done, we were too tired to
talk.
In the underbrush around us, we heard rustlings
and squeakings.
"It's the mammals," said Rila. "Poor little scurriers,
they hide out all day."
"Don't feel pity for them," said Ben. "They'll make
out all right. They'll still be here when the dinosaurs
and all the rest of them are gone."
"That's one way to look at it," she said.
"We ought to be getting some sleep. I'll take the
first watch," he said to me. "I'll wake you at..." He
looked at his watch. "Hell, it says four o'clock. It
would. Our time is no good here. Anyhow, I'll wake
you in four hours or so."
"There are three of us," said Rila.
"You get your sleep," he said. "Asa and I can take
care of it."
We had set up the tents, but it was good weather
and we didn't use them. We spread out our bedrolls
and lay down. It took me a long time to go to sleep,
although I tried to. We had a hard day coming up.
Ben sat by the fire for a while, then picked up the
heavy gun and walked toward the edge of the grove.
All around us in the grove, the little rustlings and
squeakings continued. There must be, I thought, a lot
more little skittering mammals in this world than any-
one had suspected.
"Asa," Rila said, "are you asleep?"
"You go to sleep," I said. "It will be a rough day
tomorrow."
She didn't say any more and I lay there, drifting,
encouraging myself to drift, and, finally, I must have
gone to sleep, because the next I knew Ben was shak-
ing me by the shoulder. I threw back the blanket and
got up.


"Everything all right?" I asked.
"Nothing's happening," he said. "It'll be dawn be-
fore too long."
"You stood more than your share of the watch."
"I couldn't sleep, anyway," he said. "Too excited.
But I'm tired. Maybe I can now. If you don't mind, I'll
use your bedroll. No sense in unrolling mine."
He kicked off his boots and got into the bedroll,
pulled the blanket over him. I walked over to the fire,
which was burning briskly. Ben apparently had put a
few sticks of wood on it just before he'd wakened me.
Some of the squeaking and rustling had died down
and everything was quiet. It was still dark, but the
feel of the air said that dawn was coming. Off some-
where out beyond the grove something began cheep-
ing. I figured it was a bird—or birds, rather, for there
seemed to be a lot of cheeping, more than one thing
cheeping.
I tucked the rifle under my arm and walked out to
the edge of the grove. The surrounding countryside was
half lighted by a pale sickle Moon.
Nothing seemed to be moving and then, down in the
narrow flatness of the river valley, something did
move. I couldn't make out what it was. The move-
ment had stopped, but suddenly it moved again. In a
moment, I told myself, when my eyes became adapted
to the darkness, I would make out what it was.
Ten minutes or so later, it seemed to me that I could
make out a number of dark lumps in the valley. I
tried to concentrate to make out what they were. They
remained dark lumps, but now there seemed to be fleet-
ing reflections as well, the momentary reflection of the
thin moonlight off something that was moving. All this
time, the cheeping kept on, and it seemed to me that
it came from the valley, that there was more and more
of it, and that it was getting louder. It was a tricky
sort of sound and hard to place. But I could almost
have sworn that it was the lumps that were cheeping.
 I squatted down and watched, but I couldn't see
much—just those lumps that seemed at times to be
moving, although if they were moving, they weren't
getting anywhere.

I don't know how long I squatted there, but it was
a long time. Something held me there, watching what-
ever was moving in the valley. The eastern sky began
to lighten, and behind me, in the grove, a bird twit-
tered sleepily. I turned my head to look at the grove,
and when I looked back at the valley again, it seemed
to me that I could see those black lumps more dis-
tinctly than I had before. They were bigger than I had
thought they were at first, and they were just ambling
about, not all of them at once, but one or two of them
moving and stopping, then another one or two moving.
They looked to me like cattle grazing, and thinking
this, I knew that whatever might be down there were
doing exactly that—grazing. A herd of grazing dino-
saurs.
Whether it was thinking in this direction or because
the light of the still hidden sun had imperceptibly
intensified, I was able quite suddenly to make out
what they were: triceratops, a herd of triceratops.
Now that I knew what they were, I could make out
the flaring frills and the whiteness of the two horns that
sprouted and thrust forward just above the eyes.
I rose slowly and cautiously—perhaps more cau~
tiously than was necessary, for at my distance, there
was little chance of spooking them—and went back to
camp.
I knelt and shook Rila's shoulder and she murmured
sleepily, "What now?"
"Wake up," I said. "Easy. No noise. We've a herd
of triceratops."
She came up out of the blanket, still only half
awake.
"Triceratops," she said. "Horns and everything?"
"A herd of them. Down in the valley. Like a herd of
buffalo. I don't know how many."
Ben rose up, sitting on his bedroll, scrubbing at his
eyes with doubled fists. "What the hell is going on?"
he asked.
"Triceratops," said Rila. "Asa spotted them."
"Those are the ones with the horns growing out of
their face?"
"That is right," I said.

"Big brutes," said Ben. "They have a skeleton of
one in the Science Museum at St. Paul. I saw it sev-
eral years ago."
He stumbled to his feet and picked up the gun.
"Well, let's go get them," he said.
"It's too dark yet," I said. "We have to wait for
light. Let us have some breakfast first."
"I don't know," said Rila. "I don't want to miss
them. A herd of them? You said a herd of them, didn't
you? Regular triceratops, not some of those little
horned fellows we found yesterday?"
"Big," I said. "I couldn't make out how big, but
they are good-sized. If you two want to go out and
keep an eye on them, I'll cook some eggs and bacon.
When it's done, I'll bring it out to you."
"Be careful," warned Rila. "Don't make any noise.
Don't go banging pots."
The two of them left and I dug out the eggs and
bacon, got the coffee started and settled down to cook-
ing. When I took their plates and the coffee pot out to
them, it was beginning to get light. The triceratops
were still there, down in the river valley.
"Did you ever in your life," asked Rila, "see any-
thing so beautiful?"
For a fact, the herd was quite a sight. For a couple
of miles up and down the river, the valley was simply
covered by them. They were busy cropping at the grass
and low-growing ground cover. There were some young
ones, not much bigger than hogs, and others slightly
larger that I took to be yearlings, but there were a lot
of big ones. From where we sat, the big ones appeared
to be five feet tall or more, and including their tails,
perhaps twenty feet in length. The massive frills made
their heads appear enormous. They kept up their con-
tented cheeping.
"How do we get at them?" I asked.
"We walk toward them," said Ben. "Walking slow.
Making no sudden motions and no sound. If some
of them look up at us, we stop. When they look
away again, we move. It will take a lot of patience.
Rila in the middle, with one of us on either side. If

they should take a notion to come at us, Rila drops
back, the two of us stand firm."
We finished eating and left the plates and coffee pot
there, not bothering to take them back to camp. Then
we began our stalk, if it could be called a stalk.
"It doesn't make sense," I said, "standing up like
this in plain sight."
Ben disagreed with me. "If we hunkered down and
tried to sneak up on them, we'd panic them. This way
they can look us over and probably we don't look too
dangerous."
It was a slow business. We moved only a few steps
at a time, stopping whenever some of the brutes lifted
their heads from grazing to have a look at us. But it
seemed that Ben was right. They didn't appear to be
too concerned with us.
We stopped a couple of times to let Rila expose
some film, panning the camera up and down the val-
ley. We got to within fifty yards or so of them before
they took any serious notice of us. A couple of the big
bulls stopped their grazing and swung around to face
us, heads held high, their wicked horns aimed straight
at us. They snapped their sharp, recurved beaks at us.
We stopped. To my left, I could hear the camera run-
ning, but I kept my eyes on the bulls, rifle lifted 'to
ready. One motion would put it on my shoulder. Funny
thing about it—it had proved a heavy thing to pack,
but now it seemed to have no weight at all.
The cheeping stopped. All the cheeping stopped
Those farther back in the herd lifted their heads and
stared at us. The entire herd, somehow, had been put
on alert.
Ben spoke softly. "Start backing off. Slow. One step
at a time. Be sure of your footing. Don't stumble."
We started backing off.
One of the big bulls rushed forward a few steps. I
brought my gun to my shoulder. But after those few
quick steps, he stopped. He shook his head at us sav-
agely. We kept on backing off.
Another bull made a rush, stopped as had the other
one.

"It's bluff," said Ben. "But let's not push them. Keep
on backing off."
The camera kept on purring.
The two bulls stayed watching us. When we were a
hundred yards away, or maybe slightly more, they
swung about and trotted back to the herd. The rest of
the herd resumed its grazing.
Ben let out his breath in relief. "That was close,"
he said. "We walked a bit too close."
Rila lowered the camera. "But it made good film,"
she said. "This is what we need."
"You got enough?" I asked.
"I think I have," she said.
"Then let's get back," I said.
"Keep on backing for a while," said Ben. "Don't
turn your backs just yet."
We backed up for a while longer, then turned
around and walked toward the camp.
Behind us, the cheeping grew in volume as the herd
settled down to grazing. All was well again. The
pestiferous intruders had been driven off and the
triceratops could get back to business.
I said to Ben, "Just how did you know we could
walk up to them that way? How could you know what
dinosaurs would do?"
"I didn't," he said. "I took a chance. I figured they
wouldn't be much different than the animals of our
time."
"But in our time," I said, "you don't walk up to a
moose or mountain goat."
"No, of course you don't," he said. "Maybe you
never could walk up on a moose or mountain goat.
Now the animals know what we are and won't let us
get too close. But in the old days, before they'd met
many men, you could walk up to herd animals. In
Africa, the early ivory hunters walked up on ele-
phants. In the old American West, before the hide-
hunting days, a man could walk up on a herd of
buffalo. There was a sort of invisible line that you
couldn't cross. Most of the old hunters could calculate
the location of the line."
"And we went beyond the line?"

Ben shook his head. "I don't think we did. We
reached it and they let us know. If we'd stepped across
it, they would have charged."
Rila made a warning sound. We stopped in our
tracks.
"The cheeping," Rila said. "They have stopped the
cheeping."
We swung around and saw what had stopped the
cheeping.
Coming down the slope, a quarter-mile or so from
us, heading for the herd, was a monstrosity that made
me catch my breath: no other than old rex himself.
There was no mistaking him. He didn't look exactly
as our twentieth-century artists had depicted him, but
he was close enough that there was no mistaking him.
The pitifully shrunken, ridiculous little forelegs
dangled on his chest. The huge, muscular hind legs,
ending in wide clawed feet, moved with elaborate
deliberation, eating up the ground, driving the ponder-
ous, vicious creature forward with a grim sense of un-
stoppable power. It was the head, however, that
provided the real horror. Close to twenty feet above
the ground, it was mostly jaws, the six-inch fangs
gleaming in the early sunlight. Below the lower jaw
hung an elaborate dewlap that no artist could have
been aware of—a dewlap that displayed an awful, iri-
descent beauty. It shone in the sunlight with colors
that seemed to ripple across its surface—purple, yel-
low, blue, red and green—ever-changing colors that
reminded me momentarily of the stained glass windows
I had seen at one time in an ancient church, and, in
that moment, I was annoyed that I could not remem-
ber where I'd seen the church.
Rila's camera was making its purring noise and I
took a step or two forward so I'd be between her
and this great monstrosity. Out of the corner of my
eye, I saw that Ben also was walking forward.
"A tyrannosaur," Rila was saying to herself, speak-
ing in a prayerful whisper. "A real honest-to-God old
tyrannosaur."
Down in the valley, the triceratops had stopped
their feeding. Ringed in the forefront of the herd was

a line of big bulls, almost shoulder to shoulder, facing
the oncoming carnivore, forming a fence of flaring
bony frills and outthrust horns.
The tyrannosaur was angling toward us and by this
time was considerably less than the quarter of a mile
away he had been when we first had sighted him. He
halted and stood for a moment, hesitant. It must be
apparent to him, I thought, that he'd find no easy
picking in this herd of triceratops. While the big bulls
stood considerably less than half his height, their horns
would reach well up into his gut. While he just possibly
might be able to mangle one or two of them with his
powerful jaws, they'd have him disemboweled before
he could reach any of the others.
He stood poised on those powerful hind legs, the
massive tail sticking out behind him, barely clearing
the ground, swinging his heavy head from side to side,
as if he might be seeking a safer angle of attack.
Then he must have caught sight of us, for suddenly
he pivoted around on one of his legs, thrusting himself
around to face us with a powerful stroke of the second
leg. He started for us even as he pivoted, and with
every step he made, he was twelve feet closer. I had
the gun on my shoulder and was surprised to find that
there wasn't even a quiver in the barrels. When you
have to get a job done, you often do it better than you
think you can. I had it sighted just about the place
where those tiny forelegs sprouted from the body, and
I dropped the gun a little so it was aimed about the
point where I thought the heart should be. The gun
hammered at my shoulder, but I didn't really hear it go
off, and my finger slipped off the first trigger and found
the second one. But there was no need to fire again.
 Out in front of me, the tyrannosaur was rearing back
and falling over. At the edge of my vision, I caught
sight of Ben and saw that a small trickle of smoke
was issuing from one of the barrels of his gun. The two
of us, I knew, had fired almost simultaneously, and
two of those big bullets were more than the huge dino-
saur could take.
"Look out!" yelled Rila, and even as she yelled, I
heard a crashing to my left.



I swung in that direction and saw another tyranno-
saur bearing down upon us. He was far too close for
comfort and was coming fast. Ben's gun roared and,
for a moment, the beast was thrown off its stride,
sliding down the slope, but it recovered and came on.
And now something inside of me said, it is up to you.
Ben's gun was empty and I had just the one cartridge
left. The tyrannosaur's head was coming down and
the jaws began to open wide and there was no chance
at a decent body shot. I don't know how I did it.
There was no time to think. What I did, I'm sure,
was simple reflex, a natural and instinctive protective
action. I aimed the gun right in the middle of that
gaping mouth and pulled the trigger and out in front
of and above me, the dinosaur's head exploded and
his body went tumbling to one side. I distinctly heard
the thump and felt the vibrations in my feet when
eight tons of flesh hit the ground not more than thirty
feet away.
Ben, who had thrown himself aside to escape the
charge, was scrambling to his feet, clicking cartridges
into the barrels. Behind me, the camera was running.
"Well," said Ben, "we know something now. The
damn things hunt in pairs."
The second dinosaur was dead, its head torn from
its body. It still twitched and kicked, striking out
viciously with one clawed hind leg. The first one was
trying to get to its feet, but tipping over and falling
back each time it did. Ben walked down the slope
toward it, fired another bullet into its chest, and it
slumped into a mound of flesh.
Rila walked slowly down the hill taking close-ups
of the two dead beasts from several angles, then shut
off the camera and lowered it. I opened my gun and
reloaded, then tucked it under my arm.
Ben came up the hill toward me. "I don't mind
telling you," he said, "that I'm a bit shook up. That
second one damn near ran me down. You got him in
the head. You blew his fool head off."
"It was the only thing I could do," I said. I didn't
mean to sound smug about it, but I couldn't explain
to him that some primitive sense of self-preservation

had taken over for me—that it was not I who had
blown off the dinosaur's head, but some instinct that
took over. I couldn't explain it even to myself.
"The other one, however, still has a head," said
Ben. "We ought to chop it off and haul it back. Just
as proof."
"We have the proof," I said. "Rila has the proof."
"I suppose so," said Ben, "but it's a shame. If you
ever wanted to part with it, that head, mounted, would
bring a lot of money."
"It probably weighs several hundred pounds," I
pointed out.
"The two of us ..."
"No," I said. "We have a couple of miles or more to
go to find the stakes. We'd better start getting out of
here."
"I don't see why."
I gestured at the two dead dinosaurs. "Fifteen tons
of meat," I said. "All the scavengers will start flock-
ing in. Every stinking meat-eater from miles around.
By nightfall, their skeletons will be picked clean. I
want to be out of here before they start arriving."
"It would give us some good film."
I said to Rila, "You have enough film? You are
satisfied?"
She nodded. "I never missed a lick—the killing of
those two beasts. If that doesn't convince Safari, Inc.,
nothing ever will."
"All right," I said, in a tone of voice that told them
I meant it, "we're heading out for home."
"You're chicken," Ben told me.
"So, I'm chicken. We have what we came for.
We're leaving while we can."
"I really think," said Rila, "we should leave. I'm
scared down to my toenails."

SEVENTEEN
We had returned from the Cretaceous early
Monday morning. It was Friday. A great deal had been
going on in those four days. A start had been made on
building the fence around the forty—high steel posts
set in concrete, heavy wire fencing installed upon them
and welded into place. Trenches were being dug along
the interior perimeter of the fence to lay electric cable
for the floodlights. Foundations had been poured for
the administration building and lumber was being de-
livered. Ben's motel was going up. Rila had left the
day before for New York with the film that she had
taken. Courtney McCallahan, the Washington at-
torney, was flying into New York to sit in with Safari,
Inc., on the showing of the films. The films were to be
developed in Safari's laboratory, making it unneces-
sary to take them outside the organization.
I had worked my tail off to get things going, with
a lot of help from Ben. He had made a lot of the
necessary contacts, had twisted arms and pleaded, had
scrounged up gangs of workmen to turn loose on the
projects. A lot of the men were no more than common
laborers—farm boys, mostly—but Ben had found
some competent foremen to place in charge as well,
and things seemed to be going well.
"The idea," he had said, "is to get started and get
the fence and administration building finished as soon
as possible, before too many people begin asking ques-
tions. Once we get the fence up, they can ask all the
questions that they want and, behind the fence, we
can thumb our noses at them."
"But, Ben," I had protested, "you have things to do
yourself. You have your motel to be built and the bank
to run. You have no direct interest in this deal."

"You're borrowing a lot of money from me and the
bank is earning interest," he'd said. "You gave me
an edge on starting the motel and I've been doing a
lot of other things besides. I've bought up every acre
around here that is loose. I picked up that farm to
the east of you just the other day. Old Jake Kolb stuck
me for more than he thought that it was worth, figured
I was a sucker, buying it. What he doesn't know is
that it'll be worth ten times more than I paid for it
once your business here gets started. And you took
me on that hunting trip after dinosaurs. I wouldn't
have missed that for the world. I would have paid you
to take me on it. And I figure that before I'm through
with it, you'll let me in for a small percentage of this
deal of yours."
"Let us get the business started first," I'd said. "The
whole thing may fall into a heap."
"Hell," he'd said, "I don't see how it can. This is
the biggest thing that ever happened. Everyone, the
whole world, will go mad over it. You'll have more
business than you can handle. You just hang loose.
You keep an eye on things. If you need help, reach
for the phone. I tell you, boy, the two of us have it
made."
I was sitting in the kitchen talking with Hiram. The
two of us were having a beer. It was the first sitting
time I'd had since it all had started. I sat there, drink-
ing my beer, feeling guilty at not doing anything,
racking my brain to figure out if there was something
that I should be doing.
"Catface," said Hiram, "is excited about what is
going on. He asked about the fence and I tried to
explain it to him. I told him once it was finished, he
could make a lot of time holes and he was pleased at
that. He is anxious to get started."
"But he could make time holes anytime he wanted.
He could have been doing it all along. There was not
a thing to stop him."
"It seems, Mr. Steele, that he can't make time holes
for just the fun of it. They have to be used or they
aren't any good. He made a few for Bowser, but there
wasn't much satisfaction in that."

"No, I don't suppose there would be. Although
Bowser had a lot of fun with them. He used one of
them to bring home the dinosaur bones."
I went to the refrigerator to get another beer.
"You want one?" I asked Hiram.
"No, thank you, Mr. Steele. I don't really like the
stuff. I just drink it to be sociable."
"I asked you to talk with Catface about how big
the time holes can be made. The Safari people will
probably want to take in some trucks."
"He says it ain't no problem. He says the holes are
big enough to take anything at all."
"Did he close the one we used? I'd hate to have
some of those dinosaurs stumbling through."
"He closed it," Hiram said, "right after you got
back. It's been closed since then."
"Well, that is fine," I said and I went on drinking,
beer. It was good just to be sitting there.
Footsteps sounded on the steps outside and there
was a knocking at the door.
"Come on in," I yelled.
It was Herb Livingston.
"Grab a chair," I said. "I'll get a beer for you."
Hiram got up. "Me and Bowser will go and lock
around outside."
"That's all right," I said, "but don't move off the
place. I may need you later on."
Bowser got up from his corner and followed Hiram
out. Herb pulled the tab on the beer can and tossed
it in the wastebasket.
"Asa," he said, "you're holding out on me."
"Not you alone," I said. "I'm holding out on every-
one."
"Something's going on," Herb said. "And I want to
know about it. The Willow Bend Record may not be
the world's greatest newspaper, but it's the only one
we have here, and for fifteen years, I have told the
people what is happening."
"Now hold up, Herb," I said. "I'm not going to tell
you and you can yell at me and pound the table and
I still won't tell you."
"Why not?" he demanded. "We were boys together.

i
We've known one another for years. You and me and
Ben and Larry and the rest of them. Ben knows. You
have told Ben something."
"Ask Ben, then."
"He won't tell me anything, either. He says any
information has to come from you. He gave out to
start with, about this business of the fence, that he
was putting it up for someone who was going into mink
farming. But I know you aren't going into mink farm-
ing. So the reason is something else. Someone else had
the idea you found a crashed spaceship in that old
sinkhole. One that crashed a thousand years ago. Is
that what this is all about?"
"You're fishing now," I said, "and it won't do you
any good. I have a project underway, that's true, but
any publicity right now could raise hell with it. When
the time comes, I'll tell you."
"When you need the publicity, you mean."
"I suppose that's it."
"Look, Asa, I don't want the big city papers scoop-
ing me on this. I don't want them to write the story
before I have a crack at it. I don't want to be scooped
in my own backyard."
"Hell, you're scooped all the time," I said. "On all
the important stories. What else can you expect with
a weekly paper? News doesn't happen on a weekly
basis. Your strength isn't the big stories. They don't
come often enough. People read the Record because
you write about the little things, what people do and
the small events that happen here. Look at it this way.
If I'm able to pull off what I'm trying to do, it will put
Willow Bend on the map. It will help everyone. It will
help the businesses here, it will provide more adver-
tising dollars for you. You'll be better off because it
happened. Do you want to muff my chance and yours
by rushing into print when that rushing into print
might kill the deal?"
'But I've got to write a story of some sort. I just
can't not write anything."
"All right, then, write your story. Write about the
fence, about Ben's motel, about all the rest of it. Spec-
ulate, if you want to, on what is going on. I can't stop



you. I wouldn't want to. You have every right. Say
you talked with me and I would give you nothing. I
am sorry. Herb. That's the best that I can do."
"I suppose," said Herb, "you have the right not to
tell me. But I had to ask. I had to lean on you a little.
You understand, don't you?"
"Sure, I understand. How about another beer?"
"No, thanks. Haven't got the time. We go to press
tonight. I have to write this story."
After Herb had left, I sat there for a while, feeling
sorry about the way I'd had to treat him. But I
couldn't give him the story. I understood how he felt;
how any newspaperman might feel. The hell of it was
that he would get scooped. Before he went to press
again next week, the story probably would be out.
But there was, I told myself, no way I could help that.
I got up and threw the empty beer can into the
wastebasket, then went outdoors. It was getting into
the late afternoon, but the crews were still at work and
I was surprised to see how well the fence was progress-
ing. I looked around to see if there was any sign of
Catface. I would not have been surprised to have found
him staring at me from one of the apple trees. In the
last few days, there had been a lot of evidence of him.
Instead of hiding from us, as had been his habit, he
had begun sort of mingling with us. But at the mo-
ment there was no sign of him, nor of Hiram and
Bowser. I walked down the fence line until I reached
where the men were working. I stood around for a
while watching them, then returned to the house.
A sheriff's car was parked out in front and a man
in uniform was sitting in one of the lawn chairs. When
I came up to him, he rose and held out his hand to
me.
"I'm Sheriff Amos Redman," he said. "You must
be Asa Steele. Ben told me I'd probably find you here."
"Glad you dropped by," I said. "What do you have
in mind?"
"Ben told me a few days ago, you might need some
guards to patrol the fence. Would you mind telling
me what is happening?"
"I'll tell you one thing, sheriff, it's legal."

He chuckled faintly at the bad joke. "I never
thought it would be anything else," he said. "Seems
to me you were a Willow Bend boy some years ago.
How long have you been back?"
"A little less than a year," I said.
"It appears that you plan to stay."
"I hope so."
"About the guards," he said. "I talked with the po-
lice association in Minneapolis and they think they
can fix you up. Some of the men there have lost their
jobs because of an economy cut and should be avail-
able to you."
"I'm glad," I said, "We will need trained person-
nel."
"You having any trouble?" the sheriff asked.
"Trouble? Oh, you mean sightseers."
"That's what I mean. There've been some funny
stories going about. One of them is about a crashed
spaceship." He looked at me closely to see how I
would take it.
"Yes, sheriff," I said. "I think there might be a
spaceship. Out there in the woods, under tons of over-
lay."
''Well, I'll be damned," he said. "If there is such a
thing, you'll be swamped by crowds. I understand
why you might need a fence. I'll tell my deputies to
swing around here once in a while and keep an eye on
you. If you need any help, you know how to reach
me."
"Thanks," I said. "And I think you'll understand,
I'd just as soon no credence be given, quite yet, to that
spaceship story."
"Certainly," he said importantly. "Just between the
two of us."
The phone rang when I was coming in the door. It
was Rila.
"Where have you been?" she asked. "I've been try-
ing to get you."
"Just out for a walk. I hadn't expected to hear from
you this soon. Is everything all right?"
"Asa, it's better than all right. We ran the films
this afternoon. They are wonderful. Especially that

part with you and Ben polishing off those tyranno-
saurs. Everyone was sitting on the edge of his chair.
It was so exciting. That cheeping done by the tricera-
tops was weird, primitive. God, I don't know what.
Out of this world. Sent a funny feeling up your spine.
Safari is champing at the bit, but we won't talk with
them."
"Won't talk with them! For Pete's sake, Rila, that
was the whole idea. That's why we risked our
necks..."
"Courtney has some wild idea. He shut me up, said
we would talk later. We are coming back tomorrow."
"We?"
"Courtney and I. He wants to talk with us. He
flew back to Washington this afternoon, but will come,
back to New York in the morning and pick me up."
"Pick you up?"
"Yes, he flies his own plane. I guess I never men-
tioned that."
"That's right. You never did."
"We'll be landing at Lancaster. It's a small plane.
The field there is big enough. I'll let you know when."
"I'll pick you up."
"Probably sometime before noon. I'll let you
know."                             

EIGHTEEN
Courtney McCallahan was a somewhat younger
and bigger man than I had expected. It's strange how
one will picture someone mentally before ever meeting
him. I suppose it was his name that did it; I had pic-
tured McCallahan as a little gnome of a man, suave,
round faced, snow white hair, with an unhurried grace.
In actuality, he was a big man and no longer young,
but younger than I had pictured him. His hair was
turning and had reached the iron gray stage; his face
was cragged, like a block of rough wood that someone
had chopped into a face with a dull hatchet. His hands
were like hams. Instinctively, I liked him.
"How is the fence coming along?" he asked.
"It's going up," I told him. "We'll build right through
the weekend. No Saturday or Sunday off."
"Double-time, I suppose."
"I don't know about that," I said. "I left that up to
Ben."
"This Ben is a good man?"
"He's been my friend," I said, "for the greater part
of my life."
"If you'll allow me," he said, "I thought you and
Ben were magnificent in that tyrannosaur bit. Took a
lot of guts to stand up to those creatures. I'm afraid
I might have flunked it."
"We had big guns," I said, "and, besides, there
was no place to run."
We got into the car, with Rila next to me. She put
both hands on my arm and squeezed hard.
"The same to you;" I said.
"I forgot to tell you about the films," she said. "And
you forgot to ask. They're safe. In the vault of a New
York bank."

"As soon as this matter becomes public," said
Courtney, "we'll have distributors bidding for them,
and bidding high."
"I'm not sure," I said, "that we'll want to sell them."
"We'll sell anything," said Rila, "if the price is
right."
I backed out of the parking space. There were only
a few other cars. Courtney's plane and another were
the only ones on the strip. Over in the ramshackle
hangar, on the other side of the field, I knew, were a
few others, locally owned.
A mile or two down the road, at the edge of town,
we came to a small shopping center—a supermarket,
a hardware store, a small department store, a branch
bank, a men's clothing store, and a few other shops.
"Let's pull in here and park," said Courtney. "Away
from other cars."
"Sure, if you want to," I said, "but why?"
"Please humor me," he said.
I pulled in and found a place to park at the near
edge of the parking area. There were no other cars
nearby. I shut off the motor and sat back in the seat.
"This is a conspiracy," said Courtney. "I shudder
at the possibility of eavesdropping."
"So go ahead," I said. I looked at Rila and saw
that she was as puzzled as I was.
Courtney squirmed into a comfortable position.
"I've spent a lot of sleepless nights," he said, "con-
sidering your position, and in many respects it seems
to me you could be vulnerable. Oh, so far as I can
determine, this project of yours is entirely legal.
Unique, .of course, but legal. But the thing that worries
me is that Internal Revenue can clobber you but good-
If everything goes as well as I expect it will, you'll be
making a lot of money, and when someone makes a
lot of money, it's always been my position that as
much of it be kept as is possible within tthe framework
of the law."
"Courtney," said Rila, "I don't quite under-
stand ..."
"Do you have any idea the bite IRS can take," he
asked, "out of a million dollars?"

"I have a rough idea," I said, "but only a rough
idea."
"The trouble is," he said, "that you won't have the
opportunity of the business pattern, such as is found
in large corporations, to set up the sort of tax shelters
and loop holes that will afford some protection. We
could set you up as a corporation, of course, but it
would take a lot of time and would have a number
of built-in disadvantages. There is one possibility,
however. It looks good to me and I want to see what
you think about it. If you did not conduct your business
in the United States there'd be no problem. Income
tax does not apply to businesses outside the country."
"But we have to stay at Willow Bend," said Rila.
"That's where our business is."
"Not so fast," said Courtney. "Let's give it a little
thought. Let us say you used your time-travel capa-
bility to provide you a residence a thousand years
into the past, or a million years, or wherever was
best to go. I suppose that any time prior to the emer-
gence of the United States would do, but it might be
better to pick a time prior to any European knowledge
of North America. If you could find some desert island,
of course, unclaimed by any world power, that would
do as well, but I don't know where one is or even if
one exists. If it does, you'd still be a long ways from
Willow Bend, but if you resided in time, as I suggest,
you'd be just a short walk from the farm in Willow
Bend."
"I don't know," I said. "We'd still be living on land
that, in time, would be a part of the nation."
"Yes, I know," said Courtney, "and IRS might try
to make something of that. They might bring suit, but
if they do, I think we could prove that national sover-
eignty does not extend through time."
"But the farm in Willow Bend is really where we'd
conduct our business." Rila said.
"Not if you lived someplace else. We'd be very
sure you conducted no business in Willow Bend. Nor
provided any services there. You could get Hiram
and this Catface thing to move into time with you?"
"I don't know," I said.

"But Willow Bend would still be there," said Rila.
"Only as your American agency," said Courtney.
"You'd have to have someone to serve as your agent.
I had your friend Ben in mind. The time road or tunnel
or whatever you want to call it would simply be an
entry port to your place of residence, where you'd con-
duct your business and provide your services. The
time roads used to supply your services would be set
up from your place of residence. You'd pay your agent
a commission—perhaps one percent of all the business
that he sent you. That seems the safest way. In effect,
he'd then be the agent for a foreign firm. I think it
might be best, as well, to sell the farm to him. That
way, IRS couldn't seize it as your property for non-
payment of taxes. Ben would be paying his taxes,
of course, and that way, they'd not be able to grab
the farm, which is your port of entry. Also, it would
lend weight to his being in business for himself."
"But they still might try to seize it," I said.
"Certainly, they might try. Faced with the facts, I
don't think they would. Especially if Ben paid a fair
price for it before you went into the time business.
That's the crux of the matter. To have even a prayer
of escaping the IRS, you can't do any business in
the United States. That's why I refused yesterday to
talk business with Safari. If they want to talk business,
they have to come to your place of residence."
"But I talked to Safari originally," said Rila, "and
we showed them the film."
"That fact could make matters a little sticky," said
Courtney, "but I think I can handle that. I think I
could demonstrate to the satisfaction of the courts that
no business actually was done. As to what happened
yesterday, I could show that we refused to negotiate."
"But there'll be contracts," said Rila.
"Drawn and executed in New York or in other
cities where the party of the second part is headquar-
tered, between an American firm and a non-American
company. That is customary. It would stand in law.
No trouble there. But you'd have to have an address-
Where do you think you might like to set up resi-
dence?"

"In one of the more recent interglacial periods," I
said. "Probably the Sangamon. The climate would be
good, the environment more homelike."
"Dangerous?"
"Mastodons," I said. "Sabertooths. Some bears. Dire
wolves. But we could manage. They probably sound
worse than they are."
"We could call our new home Mastodonia," said
Rila.
"Perfect," Courtney said. "That name carries with
it the implications of another time and place."
"But would we have to stay there all the time?"
asked Rila. "I don't think I would like that."
"Not all the time," said Courtney, "but enough of
the time so you could honestly call it home. You
could visit Willow Bend frequently, travel otherwise
as you wished. But all your business would have to be
conducted from Mastodonia. I had even toyed with the
idea that you could proclaim yourself a nation and
apply to the State Department, and to other countries,
of course, for recognition. But with only two or three
residents, that might be hard to do. I'm not sure it
would be of any advantage, either. If doing so eventu-
ally became advisable, could you get some of your
Willow Bend neighbors to move there?"
"Maybe," I said. "I'm not sure."
"There'd be advantages. Free land for the taking.
No taxes. Lots of elbow room. Good hunting and
fishing."
"I still don't know," I said.
"Well, we can talk about that later on."
"How about money and banking?" asked Rila.
"How do we handle all that money you say we're go-
ing to get? Certainly not in American banks, where the
IRS can get their hands on it."
"That's easy," said Courtney. "Open an account in
Switzerland. Probably Zurich. Your clients can make
payment to your Swiss account. They could, of course,
pay you some of it in cash so you'd have funds to
pay Ben his commissions and to take care of other
expenses. But if you are going to do that, you should
open an account right away so your record will seem a

little cleaner. If you opened an account before you
start transacting any time-travel business, we'd be able
to pull the rug out from under anyone who tried to
charge concealment of funds. The initial payment into
the account should be fairly substantial so that no one
can say it was only a token deposit."
"I sold my share of the import-export business to
my partner in New York the other day," said Rila.
"His first payment, to be made in a day or two, is a
hundred thousand. But we wouldn't have to wait for
it. I could assign the first check to Ben's bank and then
he could loan us the hundred thousand. We're into him
for quite an amount right now, but I think he'd do it."
"Fine," said Courtney. "A hundred thousand would
be just fine. Before you move into Mastodonia, but
giving your address for the account as Mastodonia. I
take it you approve of my suggestions."
"It seems just a little devious to me," I said.
"Of course, the whole thing is devious. But, by and
large, it's legal. We could be challenged, of course,
and probably will be, but we have solid grounds for
argument."
"Half of the business world is devious," said Rila.
"Even if we should go to court and lose on some
points," said Courtney, "you'd be no worse off .than
you are now and probably better. We'd have enough
room to strike deals, if necessary. But I'd not go into
it with any idea of a deal. I'd go to court to win.
We've only talked about the court matter. A non-
American resident would have other advantages. No
governmental regulations or interference, no reports
to be filled out, no statements to be filed."
"All things considered I think what you suggest is
the right thing to do," Rila said. "To tell you the truth,
I've been worried about the tax situation."
"You know about such things," I said. "I don't.''
"So, almost immediately," said Courtney, "you'll
move into Mastodonia and set up residence. I would
think, perhaps, that a mobile home ..."
"I'll take care of that," said Rila, "while Asa is off to
Zurich." She said to me, "I seem to remember you can
speak French."

"Some," I said. "Enough to get by fairly well. But
you should be the one . . ."
"I don't speak French," she said. "Only Spanish and
a little German—a very little German. That's why you
are going to Zurich. I'll stay here and see that matters
are taken care of from this end."
"You seem to have everything in hand," Courtney
said. "So I'll leave the rest up to you. Phone me on
any little question. Don't wait for the big one; phone
on the little ones as well. I suppose you'll want to make
that Zurich account a joint one. If that's the case,
Rila, be sure Asa has a notarized copy of your signa-
ture before he leaves. And don't make Ben your agent
until you're settled in Mastodonia."
"One thing," I said. "If we exasperate the govern-
ment sufficiently, could they declare us personae non
gratae, prevent us from moving back and forth be-
tween Mastodonia and Willow Bend, perhaps close
the time road into Mastodonia?"
Courtney said, "I suppose they could try, but we'd
give them a hell of a fight. Take the matter to the
United Nations if we had to. I don't think they'll try."
"I guess that's it," I said. "The decision's been made.
Strange we could settle such a deal in so short a time."
"The plan makes sense," said Rila. "You don't
argue with good, sound reasoning."
"If that's the case," said Courtney, "you can take
me back to the airstrip."
"You mean you're not even coming out to the
farm?" asked Rila. "I thought you wanted to meet
Ben."
"Some other time," he said. "I've told you all I
wanted to, where no one else could hear. These are
going to be busy days and there's no time to waste."
He rubbed his hands together delightedly. "This is
going to be more damn fun," he said, "than I have
had in years."

NINETEEN


On the return flight from Zurich, we had a
layover in London. I bought a paper and there it
was—a great screaming headline: mystery ameri-
cans TRAVEL IN TIME'.
I bought other papers. The sober Times treated the
story sedately, all the others thundered in bold, black
type.
A lot of the facts were jumbled, but the stories
essentially were correct. Rila and I were represented
as a mystery pair. She was not to be located; rumor
had it that she was living in a place called Mastodonia,
No one knew exactly where Mastodonia might be, but
some speculation came close to the truth. The popular
speculation was that I had gone abroad, although no
one knew exactly where. But that did not stop the
newsmen from making what seemed to me rather fan-
tastic guesses. Ben had been interviewed. He had ac-
knowledged he was our American agent, but gave
them little else. Herbert Livingston, Ben's public re-
lations officer, was quoted as saying, rather curtly, that
the announcement was premature and that he would
have nothing further to say until a more appropriate
time. I wondered, as I read the story, just how in hell
Herb suddenly had become our PR man. The story
was based on what was described as an authoritative
source without any attempt to pinpoint the source. But
Safari, Inc., which somehow had been tied into the
story, admitted that a film did exist of a dinosaur
hunt staged in an era some seventy million years in
the past. One movie company executive was even
quoted as being at least marginally interested. The
Safari people openly admitted their interest. Courtney

was not mentioned and from this omission, I was
fairly certain where the leak to the press had origi-
nated.
Four noted physicists, one of them a Nobelist, had
been interviewed, each of them saying with varying
degrees of smugness that time travel was impossible.
Each of the stories assumed that a time machine was
involved—which was understandable since only five
people, perhaps six, now that Herb was involved, knew
that one was not. There was considerable agonizing
among the so-called science writers of the various
newspapers as to what kind of form the machine would
take and what principles would be involved. Only one
of the stories I read failed to mention H. G. Wells.
My first sight of the first paper with its blaring head-
line left me all tensed up, but before too long, having
read some of the other stories, I had become mush
inside. As long as only a few people had known about
our time-travel capability, it had been possible for me
to accept the idea as a sort of silly, almost boyish,
secret. But the situation was different when our secret
was shared by the entire world. I found myself looking
around and behind me to see if anyone might recog-
nize me, but that was rather foolish since none of the
London papers had pictures of either Rila or me. But
it would not take long, I knew, until our pictures would
be splashed across the tabloids. In those early stories,
there was no identification of who either of us might
be, but before the day was over, the newsmen would
run down exactly who we were and would then find
photos of us.
I found myself wild with the wish to be in Willow
Bend again, where I felt I would be relatively safe
from the outside world. I regarded with something
close to terror the prospect of those hours of travel still
ahead. Foolishly, I suppose, I found a shop in the air-
port where I could buy a pair of dark glasses. I felt
silly wearing them, for I never had before, even in
the field. But they were something to hide behind, at
least symbolically, and I put them on.
At first, I was going to leave the papers I had bought,
having no wish even marginally to advertise the fact

I might have some interest in the story. Then thinking
of the kick Rila and Ben would get out of the stories,
I bundled all the papers together and carried them
underneath an arm.
My seat partner, a stuffy, middle-aged American I
pegged as being a banker—although perhaps he was
not—had a paper stuck in his jacket pocket, but
seemed to have no wish to talk with me, for which I
was extremely thankful. But after the steward brought
us our evening meal, he loosened up and paid me the
courtesy of acknowledging my presence.
"You read this rot," he asked, "about someone
traveling in time?"
"I noticed it," I said.
"You know, that can't be done," he said. "I wonder
how the papers fell for stuff like that. Newspapermen,
you know, aren't stupid people. They should have
known better."
"Sensationalism," I said. "They'll do anything to sell
their papers."
He didn't answer me and I thought the conversa-
tion was at an end, but a few minutes later he said,
not as if he were talking to me exactly, but more as
if he were addressing the world in general: "Dangerous
business, you know. Messing around in time could
cause a lot of trouble. It could change history, even,
and we can't be doing that. Hard enough as it is
without someone messing everything up."
The rest of the way he said nothing further. He
turned out to be a good seat partner.
I settled down to some steady worrying, which did
me no good at all, but I couldn't help myself. I won-
dered if the fence was up, if the floodlights were in-
stalled and working, if we had plenty of guards to
patrol the fence. Courtney McCallahan, if he, in fact,
had been the one who had tipped off the reporters,
would certainly have checked to see that everything
was ready at Willow Bend before giving out the story.
The hours spun out and finally I fell asleep and did
not wake until we were coming down at Kennedy.
I half expected, illogically, of course, that I might
find newspapermen waiting for me at Kennedy, but

apparently no one had any idea I'd be on the plane.
I grabbed a New York Times as fast as I could and
there were our pictures, Rila's and mine, on the front
page. Both were photos that had been taken some
years ago, but I suppose we could have been recognized
by them.
I debated whether I should phone Rila or Ben or
maybe even Courtney in Washington, then decided
not to. If there were no newsmen waiting in New
York, there'd probably be none at Minneapolis. Rila
and Ben knew what plane I would be on and one of
them would be at the airport waiting for me.
Neither one of them was. Waiting for me instead was
EIrod Anderson, manager of Willow Bend's one super-
market. I would have passed right by him, for I didn't
know him that well, but he grabbed me by the arm
and told me who he was. Then I recognized him.
"Ben couldn't get away and neither could Rila," he
said. "There are newspapermen hip deep in Willow
Bend and if either Ben or Rila had driven off, they
would have followed them. Ben phoned me and asked
me to pick you up. He said this way you may have a
chance of sneaking in without anyone knowing who
you are. I brought along some clothes you can change
into and some false whiskers."
"I don't know if I'll go for the whiskers," I said.
"I thought maybe you wouldn't," said EIrod, "but
I brought them anyhow. They're real good. Look like
the real thing. There is a big crowd gathering and
more coming all the time. I don't know what they
expect to see. Some of them are already disappointed
because there really isn't much to see. A few of them
came in campers, as if they were planning to stay
for a while. Ben is renting out space for the campers
on that farm be bought just east of you, and he has
a big parking lot there, too, for the other cars. I don't
mean Ben is doing the work himself. He is hiring
people to do it. Old Limpy Jones is in charge of the
parking lot and Limpy hasn't worked for almost thirty
years. Best man at ducking a job I ever saw. But
Limpy is working now. Likes all the excitement, he
says. Probably raking something off the top of the

money he takes in. But he won't get away with that.
Ben will catch him, sure as shooting. Ben is about the
sharpest operator I have ever seen."
"I suppose the fence is finished," I said.
"Yup," said Elrod, "a couple of days ago. And the
building is up, too. It has a big sign across the front
that says Ben Page, Agent for Time Associates. What
is that all about? I thought it was you that figured
out how to go skating around in time. How come Ben
has such a big hand in it?"
"Ben is our agent," I said. "For the United States,
maybe even North America."
"But you are there, too. Or, at least, in a little while
you will be. And this woman of yours, Rila, she is
there. Why ain't you two handling it?"
"Fact is we don't live there any more," I said.
"The hell you don't. Where do you live?"
"In Mastodonia."
"My goodness," he said, "I did hear something about
that. Where at is this Mastodonia?"
"It's back in time. About one hundred fifty thousand
years back in time. Mastodons live there. That's how
come the name."
"Is it a nice place?"
"It should be," I said. "I've never seen it."
"You're living there. How come you've never seen
it?"
"Rila and Hiram set it up and moved there after I
left for Europe."
"What has Hiram got to do with all this?" Elrod
asked. "He's a trifling sort of fellow and never seemed
too bright."
"He has an awful lot to do with it," I said.
The morning sun was shining brightly out in the
parking lot. It was a beautiful day. Not a cloud in
sight.
Elrod settled behind the wheel and backed out of
his space.
"Ben told me to drop you off at the parking lot at
home," he said. "Said for you to get into the crowd of
tourists and wander up to the gate. The sheriff has
some deputies guarding it and sort of keeping order.

Tell them who you are. They'll be expecting you and
will let you in. I have an old pair of work pants and
a denim jacket and an old felt hat. You can put them
on before you get there. If you don't waste any time,
no one will recognize you. They'll think you're just
another country boy come to see what is going on. I
think you should wear them whiskers, too."
Five miles or so out of town, we pulled into a town-
ship road and parked while I got into the clothes. But
I didn't put on the whiskers. I couldn't bring myself
to do so.

TWENTY
Rila and Ben were waiting for me, with Herb
Livingston hovering in the background. In the front
room of the new office building, which smelled of fresh
sawdust, half a dozen people sat at desks, not doing
much of anything.
Rila rushed forward and I caught her in my arms
and held her tight. I'd never been so glad to see anyone.
What I had seen outside had been frightening—parked
cars lining the road, others ranked in Ben's parking
lot, hot dog, hamburger and souvenir stands, men sell-
ing balloons. And people everywhere, mostly standing
in groups and gawking, but with a strange sense of
excitement. The whole thing was a cross between a
county fair and a carnival.
"I worried about you," said Rila. "And look at the
get-up you have on. Where are your other clothes?"
"In Elrod's car," I said. "He supplied these.",
Ben shook hands gravely. "There've been changes
since you left," he said.
Herb came up to shake hands. "How's the PR
business?" I asked. "I read about you in the London
papers."
"Well, hell," said Ben, "we needed someone real
fast to handle those news jockeys out there when they
came swarming in and Herb seemed to be the man.
He's getting along all right."
"They're yelling for a press conference," said Herb,
"but I haven't had the guts to go out and face them.
We didn't want to do anything until you got back. I've
been handing out little press releases. Not really telling
them anything, but giving them some small things for

new stories. What shall I tell them about you being
back?"
"Tell them," said Ben, "that he returned and imme-
diately left for Mastodonia. That's something we
should always emphasize. He and Rila aren't here;
they live in Mastodonia."
"Just wait until you see Mastodonia," said Rila.
"It's beautiful. So wild and beautiful. We drove in a
mobile home the day before yesterday and are all
settled in there. We have a couple of four-wheel drives,
as well."
"Hiram?" I asked.
"Hiram and Bowser are there."
"And Catface?"
"Catface moved along with them. There's a cluster
of wild crab-apple trees just down the ridge and he's
taken up residence in them. Hiram says he likes the
place. Says he wonders why he stuck around here so
long and never went time-traveling on his own."
"Let's get back into my office," said Ben. "I got
some comfortable chairs there and a bottle to break
open. We ought to have a drink on this."
We settled down in the chairs, which were com-
fortable, and Ben poured the drinks.
"You have a good trip?" Herb asked me.
"I guess it was," I said. "My French turned out to
be a little rusty, but I managed. I had no trouble in
Zurich. I'm not used to such things, but everything
went all right."
"Those Swiss," said Ben, "will always take your
money."
"What I've been wanting to ask," I said, "is who
tipped off the press. The news break came a whole
lot sooner than I had thought it would."
"Courtney did," said Rila. "Really not Courtney
himself, but someone he knows who is an expert at
leaking news. Really, it was Safari. They put pressure
on Courtney. They are anxious to find what the pros-
pects are in the dinosaur-hunting business. They want
to know before they talk with us. It makes sense that
sportsmen would jump at a chance to bag a dinosaur,
but Safari wants to be dead certain sure. They want

to get some prospective clients lined up before they
start negotiating for our license."
"It's too early yet to know, I suppose."
"We haven't heard from Courtney in a day or two.
They'll be in touch with him."
"There has been a feeler or two here already," said
Ben. "A man was in this morning to see if we could
put him into Inca territory before the conquistadors
arrived. He wanted to study the ancient Incan culture,
he said, but it quickly became apparent that what he
was interested in was Incan treasure. I told him to get
lost. A mining engineer came in with the idea that
maybe we'd be willing to send him back to the Black
Hills of South Dakota prior to the gold strike there.
He was quite above board about his intentions. He
wanted to skim the cream of the gold locations. Said
he had no money, but he'd go shares with us. I liked
the man and put him on hold. Said all I could do was
pass on the word to you. 
I shook my head. "I don't know about that. That
is the kind of sticky business I had hoped we could
avoid. When anyone travels into any sort of historical
situation, a lot of care must be taken or you'll wind up
with a mess on your hands."
"But you must have known," said Herb, "that the
problem would come up. 
"But that's the point," said Rila. "Almost no one
could afford to at the rates we'll ask. Tourism should
be discouraged even if people are willing to pay.
Tourists would be trouble."
"I think," said Ben, "we should take business as it
comes. Weed out the phonies, like our Inca character,
but take a hard look at all legitimate proposals."
We talked then, idly, easily about other matters,
paying attention to our drinks. Ben's motel was up

and a few of the units were ready for occupancy. The
building was larger than he originally had intended
and he was considering constructing a second one. The
parking lot was making money. A lot of people in the
village were offering rooms for rent. We were having
trouble getting enough guards to patrol the fence and
guard the gate; for the moment, the sheriff had
assigned deputies to the gate until we could find men
to replace them. Herb had turned the operation of his
paper over to his former assistant and was planning to
print daily free advertising sheets of four to six pages,
to start with, to be handed out to the flood of visitors
who were anticipated, the first surge of them already in
evidence. Some village people were upset by the public
influx, which they thought would change the easy life
the town had known before, but various or-
ganizations, particularly the women's groups, were
planning chicken suppers, strawberry ice cream
festivals and other fund-raising schemes.
We finished the drinks and Rila said to me, "And,
now, Mastodonia. I'm dying to show it to you."

TWENTY-ONE
It was spring in Mastodonia and everything was
beautiful. The mobile home stood on top of a little
ridge no more than a half-mile or so from where the
time road brought us through. Just down the slope
from the home, a grove of wild crab-apple trees was
ablaze with pink blossoms, and the long valley that
lay below the ridge was dotted with clumps and
groves of crab apples and other flowering trees. The
open places were a sea of spring flowers, and the en-
tire area was swarming with songbirds.
Two four-wheel drives were parked to one side of
the mobile home. From the front entrance, an awning
extended outward, and just beyond the awning was a
large lawn table, a gaily striped umbrella sprouting
from the center of it.
Overall, our new home had a distinctly festive look.
"We bought a big one," said Rila. "Sleeps six, has
a nice living area and the kitchen has everything you'd
want."
"You like it?" I asked.
"Like it? Asa, can't you see? It's the kind of hide-
away that everyone dreams about—the cabin by the
lake, the mountain hunting lodge. Except that this is
even better. You can practically feel the freedom
There's no one here. You understand? Absolutely no
one here. The first men to reach North America
won't cross from Asia for a thousand centuries. There
are people in the world, of course, but not on this
continent. Here you are as alone as anyone can man-
age."
"You done any exploring?"

"No, not by myself. I think I'd be afraid alone. I
was waiting for you. And how about you? Don't you
like it here?"
"Yes, of course," I said. That was the truth; I did
like Mastodonia. But the concept of aloneness, of
personal independence, I knew, was something to
which one would have to become accustomed. You'd
have to let it grow upon you.
Ahead of us, someone shouted and it took a mo-
ment to locate the place where the shout had come
from. Then I saw them, the two of them, Hiram and
Bowser, rounding the slope just above the grove of
blooming crab-apple trees. They were running, Hiram
with an awkward, loping gallop, Bowser bouncing
joyously, every now and then letting out a welcoming
bark as he bounced along.
Forgetting any dignity—and in this world there was
no need for dignity—we ran to meet them. Bowser,
running ahead, leaped up to lick my face, gamboling
around in doggish raptures. Hiram came up panting.
"We've been watching for you, Mr. Steele," he said,
gasping for breath. "We just took a little walk and
missed you. We went down the hill to see one of the
elephants."
"Elephants? You mean mastodons."
"I guess that's right," Hiram said. "I guess that's
the name for them creatures. I tried to remember the
name, but I forgot. But anyhow, we saw a real nice
mastodon. It let us get up real close. I think it likes
us."
"Look, Hiram," I said, "you don't go up real close
to a mastodon. It's probably peaceful enough, but if
you get too close to it, you can never know what it
might do. That goes for big pussycats, as well—espe-
cially those that have long teeth sticking out of their
mouths."
"But this mastodon is nice, Mr. Steele. It moves so
slow and it looks so sad. We call it Stiffy because it
moves so slow. It just shuffles along."
"For goodness sake," I said, "an old beat-up bull that
has been run out of the herd is nothing to fool around
with. It probably has a nasty temper."

"That's right, Hiram," Rila agreed. "You steer clear
of that animal. Or any animal you find here. Don't go
making friends with them."
"Not even with a woodchuck, Miss Rila?"
"Well, I guess a woodchuck would be safe enough,"
she said.
The four of us went up to the mobile home.
"I have a room all my own," Hiram said to me.
''Miss Rila said it is my room and no one else's. She
said Bowser could sleep in it with me."
"Come on in," said Rila, "and see what we have
here. Then you can go out in the yard ..."
"The yard?"
"The place with the lawn table; I call that the yard.
Once you look around inside, go out in the yard and
look around. I'll make lunch. Will sandwiches be all
right?"
"They'll be fine."
"We'll eat outside," said Rila. "I just want to sit and
look at this country. I can't seem to get enough of it."
I looked through our new home. It was the first
time I'd ever been inside one of them, although I had
known a number of people who had lived in them
and seemed well satisfied. I particularly liked the liv-
ing area—seemingly plenty of space, comfortable fur-
niture, large windows, thick carpeting on the floor, a
bookcase filled with books Rila had taken from my
small library, a gun rack beside the door. The whole
thing was a lot more luxurious, I had to admit, than
the house back on the farm.
Going outside, I walked down the ridge, with
Hiram striding along beside me and Bowser bouncing
ahead.
The ridge was not particularly high, but high
enough to give a good view of the surrounding coun-
tryside. There below us to the right flowed the stream,
the small river which had flowed in the Cretaceous and
still flowed in the twentieth century through Willow
Bend. Through millions of years, the land had changed
but little. It seemed to me that the ridge was some-
what higher than it had been in the Cretaceous, per-


haps higher than it would be in the twentieth century,
but I could not be certain.
The river valley was fairly open, broken only by
the scattered clumps of flowering shrubs and smaller
trees, but the ridges other than the one we stood on
were heavily timbered. I kept an eye out for game
herds, but there seemed to be none. Except for a couple
of large birds, probably eagles, flying high in the sky,
there was no other sign of life.
"There he is," Hiram called, excited, "There is
Stiffy. Do you see him, Mr. Steele?"
I looked in the direction of Hiram's pointing finger
and made out the mastodon in the valley just below
the ridge. He was standing at the edge of a clump of
small trees, stripping leaves off them with his trunk
and stuffing them into his mouth. Even from the dis-
tance at which we stood, he had a faintly moth-eaten
appearance. He seemed to be alone; at least no other
mastodons were in sight.
When Rila called to us, we went back down the
ridge. Plates piled high with sandwiches and cakes
were set on the lawn table. There were dishes of
pickles and a jar of olives and a large carafe of coffee.
For Bowser there was a large plate of roast, cut up
in small pieces that would be easy for him to chew.
"I put down the umbrella," said Rila, "so the sun
can shine on us. The sun seems so nice here."
I looked at my watch. It said five o'clock, but the
sun said noon. Rila laughed at me. "Just forget the
watch," she said. "There are no watches here. I left
mine on the bedside table the first day that I was
here. By now, it's probably run down."
I nodded, pleased with the idea. It was good
enough for me. There were not many places where a
man could cut free of the tyranny of timepieces.
We ate in the sunshine, unhurriedly, and lazed away
the afternoon watching the shadow from the western
hills creep across the river and the valley.
I nodded at the river. "There should be good fishing
there."
"Tomorrow," Rila said, "Tomorrow we'll go fish-

ing. Take one of the cars and go exploring. There is
so much to see."
Late in the afternoon, we heard far-off trumpeting
that could have been mastodons. In the middle of the
night, I was wakened by a sound. Lying tensed in bed,
I waited for it to come again, a vicious but muted
squalling from a northern ridge. A cat, no doubt of
that. A sabertooth, perhaps, or some other cat. I told
myself that I was hung up on sabertooths, fascinated
with them, curious about them. I had to get the idea
of them out of my head; there must be cats of many
other kinds in this world of the Sangamon. The crying
in and of itself was a chilling sound, but I felt little
actual fear of it. I was safe. Beside me Rila slept, un-
disturbed by the squalling from the north.
After breakfast, we packed a lunch, put two 7 mm.
rifles and some fishing gear in the car and set out to
explore, Rila and I in the front seat, Hiram and
Bowser in the back. Several miles down the valley, we
came upon and circled a herd of about a dozen mas-
todon. They lifted their heads to look at us, napping
their ears, seeking our scent with upraised trunks, but
made no move toward us. At noon, we parked beside
the river and I went fishing for not more than five
minutes, coming back with three good-sized trout,
which we cooked over a driftwood fire. While we ate,
a half-dozen wolves trotted out on a bald bluff that
rose across the river and watched us. They seemed to
me larger than the usual wolf and I wondered if they
might be dire wolves. We flushed deer, which went
bounding off ahead of us. We sighted a tawny cat on
a rocky hillside, but it was cougar-like and was no
sabertooth.
We returned home well before sundown, tired out
and delighted. It was the best vacation that 1 had ever
had.
Over the next two days we made other trips, setting
off in different directions. We saw a number of mas-
todons, one small herd of giant bison, much larger
than the buffalo of the historic western plains, with
great spreading horns. We found a marsh where
ducks and geese rose in clouds at our approach, and

a bit beyond the marsh came upon our greatest dis-
covery, a colony of beavers that were as large as
bears. They were working on a dam that had created
the marsh that was home for the ducks and geese. We
watched them from afar, in fascination.
"One beaver, one fur coat," Rila observed.
I lost all track of time. I forgot everything. I en-
visioned endless days of wondrous exploring, gor-
geous loafing stretching out ahead of us.
But the idyll came to an end when we returned on
the third day. Ben was waiting for us, sitting at the
lawn table. He had glasses and a bottle waiting for us.
"Here, drink up," he said. "We're going into busi-
ness. Courtney is flying in the Safari bunch tomorrow.
They're ready to talk. Courtney says they're eager.
Pretending not to be, but eager."

TWENTY-TWO
I woke the following morning feeling vaguely
apprehensive, not knowing why I should feel that way.
It was just one of those feelings that you sometimes get,
without any reason. So I crawled out of bed, careful
not to wake Rila. But I failed to accomplish that, for
as I was sneaking out the door, she asked, "What's the
matter, Asa?"
"Probably nothing at all," I said. "Just going out
to have a look."
"Not in your pajamas," she said. "Get back here
and put on some clothes. The Safari people are com-
ing today and they may arrive early. Their clocks are
running some five hours earlier than ours."
So I got dressed, with the horrible feeling that I
was wasting time. Then I went out as quickly as I
could without seeming to be in too much of a hurry.
But once I had opened the door and had a look,
I ducked back in again and grabbed one of the
7 mm. rifles from the rack beside the door. Just down
the ridge, not more than five hundred feet away,
stood this old mastodon that Hiram had named Stiffy.
There was no mistaking him, for he had that moth-
eaten look about him, more apparent now than the
other day, when he'd been much farther off.
He was standing in a sort of woebegone manner,
with his trunk hanging listlessly between his two great
tusks, and in spite of the fact that he stood nine feet
tall or so, he was not particularly prepossessing.
Standing in front of him, not more than fifty feet
separating them, stood Hiram. Standing beside Hiram,
wagging his tail with all the good nature in the world,
was Bowser. Hiram was talking to this great beast,

who was waggling in reply the one ear that I could
see—not the great flapping ear one would find in an
African elephant, but still an ear that had some size
to it.
I stood petrified, grasping the rifle in my hands. I
didn't dare to yell at Hiram nor to call Bowser back.
All I could do was stand and hold the rifle ready.
In the back of my mind, I was remembering
that many years in the future, in the nineteenth cen-
tury, old Karamojo Bell had killed hundreds of Afri-
can elephants for their ivory with a gun no bigger than
the one I had in hand. Even so, I hoped I wouldn't
have to try it, for most of Karamojo's shots had been
to the brain, and I was not absolutely sure where to
aim to hit the brain.
Stiffy was just standing there and then he made a
move. I thought he was going to come at Hiram and I
brought the rifle up. But he really wasn't going any-
where; he didn't move forward at all. He just lifted
up first one foot, then another, in a ragged sort of se-
quence; then he put them down again, as if they hurt
and he was trying, one after the other, to get his
weight off them. This business of lifting up his feet and
then putting them down again rather tenderly imparted
a slight rocking motion to his body, and it was the
silliest thing I ever saw—this stupid elephant standing
in front of Hiram and rocking gently back and forth.
I took a quick step forward, then thought better of
it before I took a second step. So far, everything
seemed to be all right, although perhaps a trifle
touchy, and I didn't want to do anything that would
change it.
Out in front of me, Hiram took a short step forward
and then another. I wanted to yell at him. but held it
back somehow, for I knew I had better not. If any-
thing happened, I had the rifle and I could put three
or four slugs into old Stiffy so fast you couldn't count
them. I kept hoping, though, that I wouldn't have to.
Hiram was still inching forward, step by careful step,
but Bowser didn't move. I swear to goodness that Bowser
had more sense than Hiram had. Once this thing was
over, I told myself, 1 way going to kick hell right out

of Hiram. I had told him and told him to leave that
mastodon alone, and here he had sneaked out in the
morning before I was out of bed and was cuddling up
to it. But that, I knew, was the way that Hiram was.
Back home, he had talked with woodchucks and rob-
ins, and had a grizzly bear come along, he would have
talked with it. Take him back to the Cretaceous and
he'd get chummy with the dinosaurs.
By now, Hiram was a lot closer and was holding out
his hand to the beast, which had quit its rocking.
Bowser stayed where he was, but no longer wagged
his tail. Apparently, he was as worried about all this
as I was. I held my breath and watched, wondering if,
maybe, after all, I should have yelled at Hiram to
get back. But it was too late. If the mastodon made a
single lunge, that would be the end of Hiram.
The mastodon put out its trunk, sort of leaning for-
ward on its toes, and Hiram stopped dead still. The
mastodon sniffed at Hiram, running the tip of its trunk
up and down his body, from his head down to his
feet. It made a gentle snuffling sound as it smelled
him. Then Hiram put out his hand and stroked the
inquisitive trunk, rubbing back and forth and making
scratching motions. That great silly beast made a sort
of moaning sound as if it liked the scratching, so
Hiram took another step and then another one until
he was standing underneath Stiffy's head, which bent
forward. Hiram ran his hands up and down the trunk
and reached one hand high to scratch underneath the
ridiculously small lower lip of his mighty friend. Stiffy
groaned with pleasure. That damn mastodon was
as crazy as Hiram could ever hope to be.
I heaved a sigh of relief, hoping that it was not
premature. It didn't seem to be. Stiffy kept on standing
there and Hiram kept on scratching him. Bowser, with
some disgust, turned around and trotted back to sit
beside me.
"Hiram," I said, as quietly as I could. "Hiram, lis-
ten to me."
"You don't need to worry, Mr. Steele," said Hiram.
"Stiffy is my friend."
I'd heard that ever since I'd returned to Willow

Bend and renewed my acquaintance with Hiram.
Everything was Hiram's friend; he had no enemies.
"You better be sure of that," I said. "He's a wild
animal and he is awful big."
"He's talking to me," said Hiram. "We talk with
each other. I know that we are friends."
"Then tell him to get out of here. Tell him to keep
his distance, to stay off this ridge. First thing you
know, he'll be butting at our home and tipping it over.
Tell him that if that ever happens, I'll take a two-by-
four to him."
"I'll take him down to the valley," said Hiram, "and
tell him that he has to stay there. I'll tell him that I'll
come and visit him."
"You do that," I said, "and then get back here as
fast as you can. There'll be things for you to do."
He put out his hands and pushed on Stiffy's shoul-
der and Stiffy set himself in motion, shuffling around,
taking mincing steps, heading down the slope, Hiram
walking beside him.
"Asa," Rila called from the door, "what is going
on?"
"Stiffy wandered up here," I said, "and Hiram's
taking him back where he belongs."
"But Stiffy is a mastodon."
"Yeah, I know," I said. "He's also Hiram's friend."
"You better get in here and shave," she said. "And,
for goodness sakes, comb your hair. We have com-
pany."
I looked down the ridge. Five figures were walking
in line, one behind the other. Ben was leading. He
wore boots, khaki pants, and a hunting coat, and car-
ried a rifle. The others were dressed in business suits
and either were carrying briefcases or had portfolios
tucked beneath their arms. One of them was Court-
ney. The other three, I figured, must be the Safari
people. It struck me as hilarious—these staid business
types carrying their badges of office through this howl-
ing wilderness.
"Asa," said Rila sharply.
"It's too late," 1 said. "They'll be on us in a mo-

ment. This is the new frontier. They'll have to take
me as I am."
I ran a palm across my chin and the whiskers
rasped. I had a fairly heavy and untidy growth.
Ben came up to us and said good morning. The
others ranged themselves in line expectantly. Courtney
stepped forward and said, "Rila, you know these gen-
tlemen."
"Yes, of course," said Rila. "But none of you have
met my partner, Asa Steele. You'll pardon his appear-
ance. There was some mastodon trouble this morning
and..."
The military-looking old gentleman at the end of
the line said, "You'll excuse me, madam, but am I
seeing right? It appears to me there's a man and mas-
todon going down the ridge together. The man has
hold of the mastodon's trunk, as if he were leading
it."
"That's only Hiram," Rila said. "He has a way with
animals. He claims to talk with them."
"So Hiram's already at it," said Ben. "It didn't take
him long."
"He's had a few days here," I said. "That is all he
needs."
"Never saw anything like it," said the old military
gent. "Can't believe my eyes. Quite impossible." .
"Asa," said Rila, "our disbelieving friend is Major
Hennessey. Major, my partner, Asa Steele."
"Pleased, I'm sure," said Hennessey. "I must say,
you have quite a setup here."
"We like it," I said. "Later on, we'll take you on a
tour, if you have the time."
"Unbelievable," said Hennessey. "Absolutely unbe-
lievable."
"Mr. Stuart," said Rila. "Mr. Stuart is chief coun-
sel of Safari, Inc., and Mr. Boyle. If I remember cor-
rectly, Mr. Boyle, you are general manager ..."
"In charge of travel arrangements," said Boyle. "I'm
looking forward to safaris after dinosaurs. It should be
quite challenging."
In more ways than you are thinking, I told myself.
Just by the sight of him, I didn't like the little punk.

"Since we all know one another," said Stuart, "why
not get down to business. I would like it if we could
stay out here. It's very stimulating."
Hennessey thumped his chest. "Smell that air," he
said. "Absolutely clean. No pollution here. I've not
breathed air like this for years."
"Please find chairs," said Rila. "I'll bring out some
coffee."
"You need not bother, really," said Boyle. "We have
had our breakfast. Mr. Page gave us coffee, also, just
before we left."
"I want some," said Rila tartly, "and I suppose
Asa does as well. I'd hoped that you would join us."
"Why, of course," said the major. "We would be
most happy to. And thank you very much."
They found chairs around the table and set their
briefcases down beside them, all except Stuart, who
put his on the table and began taking papers out of it.
"You'll have to keep a close watch on Hiram," Ben
said to me. "Maybe a mastodon's all right, but there
are other animals ..."
"I've talked with him about it," I said. "I'll talk to
him again."
Rila brought out a tray with cups and I went into
the house to bring out the coffee. Sitting on the work-
table was a sliced coffee cake and I brought that out
as well.
By the time I got back, everyone was seated around
the table and seemed about ready to get down to talk-
ing. The table was full so I took a chair and sat off to
one side.
The major said to me, "So this is Mastodonia.
Pleasant, I must say. Would you tell me how you
managed to pick such a delightful place?"
"Hunch, mostly," I said. "From what we guessed
about this time. Not us, of course, but the geologists.
This is the Sangamon, the intergiacial period that lies
between the Illinoisian and the Wisconsin glacial pe-
riods. We picked it because we felt it would be the
most familiar of the various periods that we might
have chosen and because the climate should be ideal.

We can't be sure of that yet since we haven't been
here long enough."
"Amazing," said the major.
"Mr. McCallahan," Stuart said, "are you ready to
begin?"
"Certainly," said Courtney. "What do you have in
mind?"
"You understand," said Stuart, "what we want. We'd
like to arrange the rights for our safaris to be intro-
duced into the Cretaceous."
"Not the rights," said Courtney. "We won't give you
rights. We keep those for ourselves. For a considera-
tion, we'll grant you a limited license."
"What the hell do you mean, Courtney? Limited?"
"I've been thinking in terms of a year," said
Courtney. "Renewable, of course."
"But such an arrangement would not be worth our
while. We'd have to commit a lot of capital. We'd have
to set up a staff ..."
"A year," said Courtney. "To start with."
"You'd give us all counsel and consideration ..."
"That's how you have it written out?" asked
Courtney, gesturing at the papers Stuart had spread
out in front of him.
"That's the way we'd thought of it. We're new to
this business of the Cretaceous and ..."
"All we give you," said Courtney, "is the license.
Once you have that, the rest is up to you. That doesn't
mean that we won't give whatever counsel and assist-
ance we can offer, but as a matter of good will, not by
contract."
"Let's quit this haggling," said the major. "We want
to send in safaris. Not one safari, but a lot of them.
A lot of them early on before the novelty wears off.
If I know sportsmen, and I do, it would be important
for any one of them to be among the first to bring out
a dinosaur. And we don't want to pile one safari on
the other. We want to keep the hunting areas as clear
as we can manage. We'll need more than one time
road."
Courtney looked at me, questioning.
"It would be possible," I told him. "As many as

they want, each separated by, say, ten thousand
years. We could cut it finer and make the interval
less than that."
"You realize, of course," Courtney said to Hen-
nessey, "that each time road will cost you."
"We'd be willing," said Stuart, "to pay you as much
as a million dollars for three time roads."
Courtney shook his head. "A million for the license
for one year. Let's say a half-million for each time
road after the first."
"But, my God, man, we'd be losing money!"
"I don't think you would," said Courtney. "Are
you willing to tell me what you'd charge for a two-
week safari?"
"We haven't gotten around to discussing that," said
Stuart.
"The hell you haven't. You've had a couple of weeks
to consider it. With all the publicity, you must have
a waiting list."
"You're talking economic nonsense," said Stuart.
"Don't talk to me like that," Courtney replied.
"You're on your last legs and you know it. Up in the
twentieth century, the hunting's gone. What have you
got left—a few limited big-game trips, camera safaris?
Here you have a chance to get back in business. An
unlimited chance. Hundreds of years of hunting. New
and fascinating game animals. If some of your clients
would rather have a go at titanotheres or mammoth or
a dozen other kinds of big and dangerous game, all
you have to do is say the word; we'll take you there.
And we're the only ones who can take you there."
"I'm not so sure," said Stuart. "If Miss Elliot and
Mr. Steele can develop a time machine ..."
"That's something I tried to tell you," said Rila.
"You wouldn't listen or you didn't believe. You just
glossed over it. There is no machine."
"No machine? What, then?"
"That," said Courtney smoothly, "is a trade secret
that we're not divulging."
"They've got us, Stuart," said Major Hennessey.
"There's no ducking it. They are right. No one else
can get us there. Miss Elliot did say no machine. From

the very start, she said it. So why don't we sharpen up
our pencils and get down to figuring. Perhaps our
friends would be willing to take a cut of our net.
Twenty percent, perhaps."
"If you want to go that route," said Courtney, "fifty
percent of your gross. No less. We'd rather operate on
a license fee. It would be a cleaner deal."
I had been sitting there, listening to all of this, and
my head was spinning just a little. You can talk about
a million dollars and it doesn't mean too much; it's just
a lot of figures. But when it's your own million bucks,
that's a different thing.
I walked down the ridge. I'm not sure the others
even knew I had left. Bowser crawled out from under
the house and trailed after me. There was no sign of
Hiram and I was worried about him. I had told him
to come right back, and still there was no sign of him.
Stiffy was ambling slowly across the valley, heading
for the river, perhaps to get a drink, but Hiram wasn't
with him. I stood on the ridge and looked everywhere.
There was no sign of him.
I heard a sound behind me. It was Ben. His boots
made a hissing sound as he walked through the foot-
high grass. He came and stood beside me and together
we stared off across the valley. Far down it there were
a lot of moving dots—perhaps mastodons or bison.
"Ben," I asked, "how much is a million dollars?"
"It's an awful lot of cash," said Ben.
"I can't get it straight in my mind," I said, "that
back there they are talking about a million and per-
haps more than that."
"Neither can I," said Ben.
"But you're a banker, Ben."
"I'm still a country boy," said Ben. "So are you.
That's why we can't understand."
"Country boy," I said, "we've come a long way
since we roamed these hills together."
"In just the last few weeks," said Ben. "You're
worried, Asa. What is troubling you?"
"Hiram," I told him. "He was supposed to come
straight back once he led Stiffy out of here."
"Stiffy?"

"Stiffy is the mastodon."
"He'll be back," said Ben. "He's just found a wood-
chuck."
"Don't you realize," I asked him, "that if anything
were to happen to Hiram, we'd be out of business?"
"Sure, I know," said Ben, "but there'll nothing hap-
pen to him. He'll get along all right. He's half wild
animal himself."
We stood and looked a while longer and saw noth-
ing of Hiram.
Finally Ben said, "I'm going back and see how
they're coming."
"You go along," I said. "I'm going to find Hiram."
An hour later I found him, coming out of the crab-
apple grove below the house.
"Where the hell have you been?" I asked.
"I was having a good long talk with Catface, Mr.
Steele. With all the exploring we been doing for the
last few days, I've been neglecting him. I was afraid
he would get lonesome."
"And had he gotten lonesome?"
"No," said Hiram. "No, he said he hadn't. But
he's anxious to get to work. He wants to lay out some
time roads. He wonders why it's taking us so long."
"Hiram," I said, "I want to talk with you. Maybe
you don't realize it, but you're the one important per-
son in this entire setup; you're the only one who can
talk with Catface."
"Bowser can talk with Catface."
"All right. Maybe he can. But that does me no good.
I can't talk to Bowser."
I laid out the situation for him. I explained most
carefully. I practically drew him diagrams.
He promised to do better.

TWENTY-THREE
When Hiram and I got back to the house, Rila
and Courtney were sitting at the table. The others
were gone; so was one of the cars.
"Ben took the others for a drive," said Rila. "We
wondered what happened to you."
"I was tracking Hiram down," I said.
"I stayed here," said Courtney, "because there are
couple of things I want to talk about with you two."
"The IRS?" I asked.
"No, not the IRS. They won't start stirring around
until they get wind of the deal with Safari."
"How did the negotiations turn out?" I asked. "I
suppose the deal was made."
"It didn't take too long," said Courtney. "They're
hurting and we had them across the barrel."
"A million for the license," said Rila, "and a
quarter-million for each time road. They want four
time roads. That's two million, Asa."             .
"For one year," said Courtney. "They don't know
yet, but next year the price goes up. By that time,
we'll have them hooked."
"And this is just a start," said Rila.
"That's what I wanted to talk with you about," said
Courtney. "Ben told you about the church group?"
"Yes," I said. "Interested in the time of Mohammud."
"A couple of them came to see me the other day,"
he said. "Ben had told them to talk with me. Damned
I can figure them. I don't know what they want.
They're interested, but they wouldn't open up. I don't
know if we should waste time on them."
"I don't like it," I said. "The whole thing could get
sticky. To start with, we should stay away from any-


thing controversial. Pay some attention to our image.
Not create an issue the country, or the world, can
choose up sides on."
"I think the same," said Rila. "There is not apt to
be too much money in it, anyhow, and it could be a
headache."
"I feel pretty much the same," said Courtney.
"They'll be back to see me. I'll try to cool them off.
There's someone else who has me worried. Senator
Abel Freemore. He's from Nebraska or Kansas, I can
never remember which. He's been trying to set up an
appointment with me and my secretary has been fend-
ing him off. But you can fend off a United States
senator for only so long. One of these days, I'll have
to find out what he wants."
"You have no idea?" Rila asked.
"None at all. He's a big agricultural man, of course.
Hell-bent for the poor down-trodden farmer. But that's
not all—he's three kinds of bleeding heart. Whatever
he has in mind, I'm afraid it's nothing good."
"Anything else?" I asked.
"Not really. It's too early. Everyone is sitting back.
Intrigued, of course, but still filled with a natural
skepticism. Waiting to see what's going to happen.
When the first safari brings out a dinosaur, then is
when everything will break. But until then, mostly all
that we will get are opportunists and con artists. There's
that mining engineer who wants to go out into the
Black Hills country and skim off the easy gold. No
money, but he's willing to give us half of what he
finds—more likely, half of what we force him to ad-
mit to. I sort of like him. He's an engaging sort of
buccaneer. Utterly without principle and figures every-
one else is the same. What was that idea you had, Rila,
of going to South Africa and picking up all the easy
diamonds off the ground?"
Rila said, "Yes, I admit to the idea. It probably
wouldn't work. Maybe there never were a lot of dia-
monds waiting to be picked up. But it had a nice
sound to it."
"This safari business," said Courtney, "is apt to be

one of the most straightforward, least complicated deals
that we can make. An easy one to handle. No tricky
angles. What bothers me is that none of your scien-
tific or intellectual types have crawled out of the wood-
work. Wanting to study the techniques and motives of
the prehistoric cave painters or to observe the Nean-
derthalers at work and play or to sit in on Marathon
or Waterloo."
"They have to be convinced first," said Rila. "They
are sitting in the smug composure of their academic
retreats, telling one another that it can't be done."
"There is another outfit that has been sniffing
around," said Courtney. "I almost forgot them. Gene-
alogists—those people who, for a price, will trace back
the family tree. Seems now they have the idea of pro-
viding a more personal, and, of course, a more expen-
sive service. Not just tracing back the record, but
actually going back to talk with and, possibly, to sneak
pictures of someone's ancient forebears. Great-great-
great-uncle Jake being hung for horse thievery—things
like that. They're being fairly cagey in their approach
to us, but they'll be around again.
"There will be others. Or I think there'll be. With
a thing like this, you can never be sure. Can't foresee
how time travel will strike the general public and those
you might suspect would be interested in using it. It
would seem to me that as time went on, we ought to
be hearing from the petrochemical people and the coal
and iron interests. There are a lot of natural resources
back in time."
"I've thought of that," said Rila. "It worries me.
What I don't understand is this: The natural resources
are back there, sure, and there is nothing to stop us
from grubbing them out. There is no question they're
there for the taking. But if we take them, then what
happens in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?
Will those essential minerals still be there to take, and
the answer seems they will be because we have, in-
deed, taken them. If you're worried about paradoxes,
there's a classic one for you to mumble over."
"Rila," said Courtney, "I just don't know. I suspect

we're just not thinking right, that our thinking on things
like that will have to be readjusted. At the moment,
there are other things to do; I'm not going to worry
about it."        


TWENTY-FOUR


TWENTY-FOUR


So began a period of waiting. Safari had said it
might be ten days or two weeks before the first of
their parties arrived. We went on a few trips into the
surrounding country. We saw a number of mastodons
and bisons. We found another colony of giant beavers.
We sighted a number of bears and a few cats, but
none of the cats was a sabertooth. I began to wonder
if the sabertooths might be thinning out or be already
extinct, although that seemed unlikely. Once Rila
thought she glimpsed a glyptodont, one of the prehis-
toric giant armadillos, but when we arrived at the
place where she had thought she'd seen it, we were
unable to find any trace of it. We kept a lookout for
horses, but saw none. There were a lot of wolves and
foxes.
We selected a spot for a garden—Rila said we
should put the virgin soil to use—but we never got
around to doing anything about it. One thing we did
do was lay in a telephone line from Ben's office so that
someone wouldn't have to come trotting into Masto-
donia each time they wanted to talk with us. We got
the line in, but it wouldn't work; a signal would not
pass through whatever it was that separated Masto-
donia from the twentieth century. I had Ben get me a
number of steel rods. I painted their tops red and
hammered them into line to serve as guides into the
time roads that Catface would be setting up into the
Cretaceous. Hiram's wooden stakes had been all right
but the steel rods were more permanent; they could
not be broken off as could the wooden stakes. I laid
out lines for four time roads, and still had plenty of

rods remaining to mark the other ends once we had the
time roads.
Between Catface and Stiffy, Hiram was kept busy.
Whenever he wasn't visiting one of them, he was with
the other. Bowser usually was with him. I did some
worrying about this loose-footedness of Hiram's, en-
visioning all the different kinds of trouble he could get
into, but nothing happened and I told myself that it
was foolish of me to worry so much, but I somehow
couldn't stop it.
Early one afternoon, I was sitting at the lawn table
having a can of beer. Rila had gone into the house to
make a salad she had planned for dinner. The place
was peaceful, as it always seemed to be. On the slope
below me, I saw Hiram coming up the hill. I watched
him idly, looking for Bowser. Then I saw the dog, a
little way from Hiram, nosing at the grass as if he
might have picked up something interesting.
Suddenly, Hiram let out a frightened bellow and
bent forward, seeming to stumble. He went down on
his knees, then got up again, thrashing around as if
his foot was trapped in something. Bowser was run-
ning toward him, ears laid back. I jumped up and
started running down the hill, yelling for Rila, but not
looking back to see if she had heard.
Hiram began screaming, one ragged scream and
then another, never letting up. He was sitting down
and bending forward, holding his left leg with both his
hands. Off to one side of him, Bowser pounced on
something in the grass, then jerked his head up and
shook it savagely. He had something in his jaws and
was shaking it. One look at it told me what it was.
I reached Hiram and grabbed him by the shoulders,
forcing him back.
"Let go of that leg," I yelled. "Lay back."
Hiram quit his senseless screaming, but he bawled
at me, "It bit me, Mr. Steele. It bit me!"
"Lie back," I said. "Be quiet."
He did lie back the way I told him, but he wasn't
quiet. He was doing a lot of moaning.            
I pulled my jackknife out of mv pocket and ripped
his left pant leg open. When I pulled it back, I saw

the darkening bruise and the two punctures, with a
bright drop of blood glistening on each of them. I
used the knife to rip the pant leg lengthwise, then
hauled the pants up so much of the thigh was exposed.
"Asa," said Rila behind me. "Asa. Asa. Asa."
"Find a stick," I told her. "Any kind of stick. We'll
have to put on a tourniquet."
I unfastened my belt and stripped it from the loops,
then wound it around his leg above the wound. Rila
crouched on the other side of him, facing me. She
thrust a stick at me, a dry branch. I looped it through
the belt and twisted.
"Here, hold this," I said. "Keep it tight."
"I know," she said. "It was a rattler. Bowser killed
it."
I nodded. The wound had told me that much. No
other North American snake in these latitudes could
inflict such a wound.
Hiram had quieted down somewhat, but was still
moaning.
"Hang on," I told him. "This will hurt."
I gave him no chance to protest. In telling him, I
was only being fair, giving him fair warning.
I sliced a deep gash in his leg, connecting the two
puncture marks. Hiram howled and tried to sit up.
Rila, using her free hand, pushed him back.
I bent my mouth to the cut and sucked, tasting
the warm saltiness of blood. I sucked and spat, sucked
and spat. I hoped to goodness there were no broken tissues
in my mouth. But it was no good thinking of that now.
Even had I known there were, I would have done the
same thing.
"He's fainted," Rila said.
I sucked and spat, sucked and spat. Bowser came
up to us, sat down ponderously, watching us.
Hiram moaned. "He's coming to," said Rila.
I rested for a moment, then went back to the suck-
ing. Finally, I quit. I'd pumped out at least some of
the venom; I was sure of that. I sat back on my heels
and reached for the stick. I loosened the tourniquet'
for a few seconds, then tightened it again.
"Get one of the cars turned around and headed for

Willow Bend," I told Rila. "We've got to get help for
him. I'll carry him up."
"Can you handle the tourniquet and still carry him?"
"I think so." I said to Hiram, "Put your arms around
my neck. Tight as you can. And hang on hard. I have
only one arm to carry you."
He locked his arms around me and I managed to
get him lifted and started staggering up the slope. He
was heavier than I'd thought he'd be. Ahead of me,
Rila was running for one of the cars. She had it turned
around and waiting for me when I got there. I hoisted
Hiram into the back, got in beside him. "Come on,
Bowser," I said. Bowser leaped aboard. The car was
already moving.
People came tumbling out of the rear door of the
office building when Rila pulled up and leaned on
the horn. I lifted Hiram from the car. Herb was the
first to reach us. "Snake bite," I told him. "Rattler.
Get an ambulance."
"Here, let me have him," said Ben. "There's a
bottle of whiskey in my lower left desk drawer. I don't
suppose you gave him any."
"I'm not sure ..."
"Damn it, I am. If it doesn't help, it won't
hurt. I've always been told it helps."
I went for the whiskey and brought it back to the
front office, where Hiram was stretched out on a sofa.
Herb turned from the phone. "The ambulance is on its
way," he said. "There'll be a paramedic with it. He'll
take over. I talked with a doctor. He said no whiskey."
I put the bottle on a desk. "How are you, Hiram?"
I asked.
"It hurts," said Hiram. "I hurt all over. I hurt
terrible."
"We'll get you to a hospital," I said. "They'll take
care of you there. I'll go with you."
 Herb grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to one
side. "I don't want you to go," he said.
''But I have to. Hiram is my friend. He'll want me."
"Not with those newsmen out there. They'll follow
the ambulance, in the hospital, you'll be fair game to
them."

"The hell with them. Hiram is my friend."
"Be reasonable, Asa," Herb pleaded. "I've built you
and Rila up as mysteries. Recluses. Publicity shy.
Exclusive people. We need that image. For a while
longer, at least."
"We don't need an image. Hiram needs help."
"How can you help him? Hold his hand? Wait
while the doctors work on him?"
"That's part of it," I said. "Just being there."
Ben joined us. "Herb's right," he said. "I'll go along
with Hiram."
"There has to be one of us. Myself or Rila. It
should be me."
"Rila," said Herb. "She'll be upset, hysterical."
"Rila hysterical?"
"The newsmen won't press her as hard as they
would you," said Ben. "If she says she won't talk,
she'll have to say it fewer times than you would. She
could build up her exclusiveness, while you . . ."
"You're bastards!" I shouted. "Both of you are
bastards!"
It did me no good. In the end, Ben and Rila rode
the ambulance and I stayed. I felt horrible. I felt I'd
lost control, that I was no longer my own man, and
I felt a terrible rage and fear. But I stayed behind. On
this end of the operation, Ben and Herb were, calling
the shots.
"This will give us a fresh headline," said Herb.
I told him what he could do with his fresh headline
I called him a ghoul, I rescued the bottle we hadn't
used for Hiram and went into Ben's office, where I
worked on the bottle morosely. The drinking didn't
help. I didn't even get a buzz on.
I phoned Courtney and told him what had hap-
pened. For a long time after I had finished, there was
a silence on his end of the line. Then he asked, "He's
going to be all right, isn't he?"
"I don't know," I said. "I'm waiting to hear."
"Hiram is the one who talks to Catface, isn't he?"
"That's right."
"Look, Asa, in a few days, Safari will be there to

go into the Cretaceous. Is there anything that can be
done? The time roads, I suppose, aren't open yet."
"I'll try to talk with Catface," I said. "He can hear
what I say, but I can't hear what he says. He can't
answer back."
"But you'll try?"
"I'll try," I told him.
"I'll be seeing you in a few days. That senator I was
telling you about—he wants to talk with you. Not
with me, with you. I'll bring him out."
I didn't ask him if he had any idea what the senator
wanted. I didn't give a damn.
"If Hiram doesn't make it," I said, "there's no use
bringing anyone. If that happens, we're dead. You
know that, don't you?"
"I understand," he said.
He sounded sad about it.
Herb brought me some sandwiches and coffee.
There had been no word from Rila or Ben. We talked
for a while and then I went out the back door. Bowser
was waiting for me and we walked across the lawn to
the house. We sat on the back steps, Bowser close
beside me. He knew there was something wrong and
was trying to comfort me.
The barn still stood, the lopsided door hanging
crookedly on its hinges. The chicken house was the
same as ever and the hens were still there, clucking and
scratching about the yard. The rosebush stood at the
corner of the chicken house—the rosebush where I had
seen Catface looking out at me when I had gone out
to get the fox and, instead, had walked into the
Pleistocene.
That much was familiar, but little else was. The
strangeness of the rest of it seemed to make the barn,
the chicken house, the rosebush unfamiliar, too. The
fence stood high and spidery and inside the fence
humped the strangeness of the floodlights. Guards
walked along the fence and outside of it were clustered
knots of people. They were still coming to stand and
gawk at us. I wondered why they continued to come.
Certainly, there was nothing to be seen.
I stroked Bowser's head, talking to him. "You

remember what it was like, Bowser, don't you? How
you'd go to dig out a woodchuck and I had to bring
you home. How we'd go in the evening to shut the
chicken house. How Hiram would come to visit you
almost every day. That front lawn robin."
I wondered if the robin was still there, but didn't go
to look. I was afraid I wouldn't find him.
I got up from the steps and went into the house,
holding the door so Bowser could go in with me. I sat
down in a chair at the kitchen table. I had intended
to walk through the rest of the house, but I didn't. The
house was too quiet and empty. The kitchen was too,
but I stayed. It had a bit of home still left in it. It had
been my favorite room, a sort of living room, and I'd
spent a lot of time there.
The sun went down and dusk crept in. Outside, the
floodlights went on. Bowser and I went out and sat on
the steps again. In daylight, the place had looked
strange and foreign. With the coming of night and the
flaring of floodlights, it was a bad dream.
Rila found us sitting on the steps. "Hiram will be
all right," she said, "but he'll have to stay in the hospital
for quite a while."

TWENTY-FIVE


The next morning, I went looking for Catface.
I didn't find him. I walked through the crab-apple patch
below the mobile home, crisscrossing it in several di-
rections, calling him softly, looking everywhere for
him. He did not appear. After several hours of this, I
wandered to other groves of trees and looked.
Back at the house, Rila said to me, "I should have
gone to help you, but I was afraid I might scare him
off. He's known you for a long time. I'm a newcomer."
We sat at the lawn table, despondent. "What if we
don't find him?" Rila asked. "Maybe he knows what
has happened to Hiram and is hiding, unwilling to
show himself until Hiram's here."
"If we don't find him, we don't find him," I said.
"But Safari..."
"Safari will have to wait," I said. "Even if we find
him, I don't know if he will work with me."
"Is it possible he went back to Willow Bend?" she
asked. "To the orchard on the farm. That was his
favorite hangout, wasn't it? Maybe if he knows about
Hiram, he'd feel closer to him there."
In the Willow Bend orchard, I found him almost
immediately. He was in one of the trees close to the
house. He looked out of it at me with those great cat
eyes. He even grinned at me.
"Catface," I said, "Hiram has been hurt, but he'll
be all right. He'll be back in a few more days. Cat-
face, can you blink? Can you shut your eyes?"
He shut his eyes and opened them again, then closed
them and opened them again.
"All right," I said, "I want to talk with you. You
can hear me, but I can't hear you. Maybe we can
work out a way. I'll ask you questions. If your answer

is yes, close your eyes once. If your answer is no,
close them twice. Do you understand?"
He closed his eyes once, then opened them.
"That is fine," I said, "You understand what I
told you about Hiram?"
He closed his eyes once.
"You understand that he'll be back in a few days?"
Catface signaled yes.
"And you're willing to talk with me this way? Work
with me this way, by closing your eyes?"
Yes, indicated Catface.
"It's not a very satisfactory way to talk, is it?"
Catface blinked twice.
"All right, then, in Mastodonia—you know where
Mastodonia is, don't you?"
Yes, indicated Catface.
"Back in Mastodonia, we need four time roads laid
out. I have set out four lines of stakes, painted red.
with a red flag at the end of each line, the red flag
marking the point where we want to go into time. Do
you understand?"
Catface signaled that he did.
"You have seen the stakes and flags?"
Catface said he had.
"Then, Catface, listen closely now. The first time
road should go back seventy million years. And the
next one ten thousand years less than that—ten thou-
sand years less than seventy million years."
Catface didn't wait for me to ask him if he under-
stood; he signaled yes.
"The third one," I said, "ten thousand years less
than the second and the fourth one, ten thousand years
less than the third."
Yes, said Catface.
We went through it all again to be sure he under-
stood.
"Will you do it now?" I asked.
He said he would and then he disappeared. I stood
there, staring stupidly at where he'd been. I suspected
that he had taken me at my word, that he was now
back in Mastodonia setting up the roads. At least, I
hoped he was.

I found Ben in his office with his feet cocked up on
the desk.
"You know, Asa," he said, "this is the best job I
ever had. I like it."
"But you also have a bank to run."
"I'll tell you something I shouldn't tell anyone; the
bank runs itself. Of course, I'm still in charge, but now
I do barely any work. Only some of the tough decisions
and a few papers that I have to sign."
"In that case, how about getting off your big fat butt
and going into the Cretaceous with me?"
"The Cretaceous? You mean you did it, Asa?"
"I think so. I'm not sure. We ought to check it out.
I'd like company. I'm too chicken to do it alone."
"You still have the elephant guns at your place?"
I nodded. "No hunting, though. Not this time. We
just check out the roads."
Rila went along with us. We debated taking a car,
but decided to go on foot. I was quite prepared, as we
walked down the first line of stakes, to have nothing
happen. But it did. We walked straight into the
Cretaceous. It was raining there, a steady downpour.
We set the stakes we carried and walked out a ways,
far enough to pick up a clue as to where we were—a
bunch of silly ostrich dinosaurs that went skittering
away at our approach.
The other three roads were there as well. It was not
raining at the ends of any of them. So far as I could
see, all the places looked fairly much alike. There'd not
be much change in forty thousand years—not at first
glance, that is. If we'd spent some time, I suppose we
could have detected a number of changes. But we
spent almost no time at all. We pounded in the stakes
and left. In the fourth time road, however, Ben
knocked over a small ankylosaur, six or seven feet
long, probably a yearling. The big bullet from his gun
almost took its head off.
"Dinosaur steaks tonight," said Ben.
It took the three of us to haul it back to Mastodonia.
There we. used an axe to cut through the armor. Once
we had a cut down the length of the body, it was pos-
sible to peel off the armor, but it wasn't easy. Ben cut

off the clublike tail as a trophy. I hauled the broiler
out from under the mobile home and got a fire going.
While Ben was broiling thick slabs of meat, I went
down the hill to the crab-apple grove and found Cat-
face. "I just want to say thank you," I told him. "The
roads are magnificent." He blinked his eyes at me,
four or five times, grinning all the while.
"Is there anything I can do for you?" I asked.
He blinked his eyes twice, saying no.
The ostrich dinosaur that we had eaten on our ex-
ploratory trip into the Cretaceous had been tasty, but
I figured the anky steak might be a disappointment.
Ankylosaurs are such crazy-looking beasts. There was
no disappointment, however. I wolfed down the
steaks, faintly ashamed of how much I ate.
Later on, we cut up the rest of the carcass, putting a
few cuts in our refrigerator and wrapping up the rest
of it for Ben to take back home.
"We'll have a dinosaur cookout tomorrow night," he
said. "Maybe I'll invite those news jockeys in to have
a taste of it. It'll give them something to write about."
We hauled the rest of the carcass down the hill and
buried it. Left where it was, it would have stunk up
the place in a few days. Two days later, walking down
that way, I found that something, probably wolves or
foxes, had dug out the remains and performed a re-
markable scavenging job. There were only a few pieces
of armor plate scattered about.
With Ben gone, Rila and I took it easy, sleeping late.
doing a lot of sitting at the lawn table, looking out over
our domain. I took a shotgun and set out with Bowser
to hunt for rattlesnakes. We found none. Stiffy came
up the hill to visit us. He kept shuffling in closer, put-
ting out his trunk to sniff in our direction, flapping his
ears at us. I knew something had to be done; other-
wise, he'd be right in our laps. While Rila held a rife
covering me, I walked up to him, going slowly, shak-
ing in my boots. He smelled me over and I scratched
his trunk. He rumbled and groaned in ecstasy. I moved
in closer, reached up to scratch his lower lip. He liked
that; he did his best to tell me that he liked me. I led
him down into the valley and told him to stay there,

to keep the hell away from us. He grunted companion-
ably. I was afraid he'd try to follow me back home, but
he didn't.
That evening as we sat watching dusk come across
the land, Rila said to me, "Something is bothering
you, Asa."
"Hiram upset me," I said.
."But he's going to be all right. Just a few more days
and he'll be back here with us."
"It made me realize how shaky we are," I said.
"The time business is based on Hiram and Catface.
Let something happen to either one of them ..."
"But you did all right with Catface. You got the
time roads open. Even if everything went sour right
now, we'd have them, and it is this deal with Safari
that will be the backbone of our business. There'll be
other things, of course, as time goes on, but it's the
big-game hunting..."
"Rila, would you be satisfied with that?"
"Well, no, I suppose not satisfied, but it would be
more than we had before."
"I wonder," I said.
"You wonder what?"
"Please try to understand," I said. "Bear with me a
moment. The other day, the day you took Hiram to
the hospital, I was at the farm. Me and Bowser. We
walked around a bit and sat on the back steps the way
we used to. We even went into the house, but I didn't
go farther than the kitchen. I sat at the kitchen table
and thought how it once had been. I felt lost. No mat-
ter what I did, no matter where I went, I was lost.
Things had changed so much."
"You didn't like the changes?"
"I'm not sure. I should, I know. There's money now
and there never was before. We can travel in time now
and no one ever did that. I suppose it was Hiram and
the realization of how thin we run. ..."
She took one of my hands in hers. "I know," she
said. "I know."
"You mean you, too?"
She shook her head. "No, Asa. No, not me. I'm the
pushy bitch, remember. But you, I know how you

might feel. I feel just slightly guilty. I pushed you into
it."
"1 was easy to push," I said. "Don't blame your-
self. There is nothing against which to assess any
blame. The thing is, I loved that farm. When I saw it
the other day, I knew I'd lost it."
"Let's go for a walk," she said.
We walked hand in hand down the ridge and all
around us was the peace of Mastodonia. Off in the
hills, a whippoorwill struck up his chugging cry and we
stopped, enchanted. It was the first time here that
we'd heard a whippoorwill. Never for a moment had
I expected to hear one; I had illogically assumed
there'd be no whippoorwills. But hearing the cry, I
knew it as the sound of home, bringing back to me
memories of years plunged deep in summer with the
scent of freshly mown hay blowing from a new-cut
field and the tinkling of cow bells as the herd filed out
to pasture once the milking had been done. As I lis-
tened,.I felt a strange contentment flooding over me.
We went back to the mobile home and called
Bowser in. He went stalking into Hiram's room. For
a time we heard him pawing at the blanket on the
floor, making his bed before he lay down to sleep. In
the kitchen, I fixed up a pitcher of manhattans and
took them into the living room. We sat drinking, re-
laxed and civilized.
"Do you remember that day when I appeared?"
asked Rila, "After twenty years, suddenly here I was."
I nodded. I did remember. 1 think that I remem-
bered every minute of it.
"I asked myself all the time I was driving to Willow
Bend," she said, "if the time might ever come when I
might regret coming here. From time to time since
then, I've asked myself the question. Asa, I want to
tell you now I have never regretted it. I don't ask the
question any more. 1 don't mean the time travel and
the fun and money. I mean you. I've never regretted
coming back to you."
I put down my glass and went to where she was sit-
ting on the davenport. I sat down beside her and took
her in my arms. We sat for a long time, like a pair of

silly kids who suddenly have discovered they love one
another I was thankful she had told me, and I thought
maybe I should tell her so, but there were no words
that I could put together to tell her how I felt. I told
her, instead, what was in my heart. "I love you, Rila.
I think I always have, from the first day that I saw
you."
The next day, shortly after noon, Courtney came
driving in, with a car that Ben had loaned him. With
him was Senator Abel Freemore.
"I deliver him into your hands," said Courtney.
"The old so-and-so won't talk with me. He has to talk
with you. He must go to the horse's mouth. Also, the
IRS has come to life; they've been in to see me. But
I don't think the senator's business with you has any-
thing to do with them."
"Not at all," said the senator. "Like all sensible
men, I keep my distance from them."
He was a little wisp of a man with a farmer's face.
His hair was white and skimpy; his hands and face
were weather-beaten. He stood small beside the car
and looked around.
"So this is Mastodonia," he said. "Courtney has been
telling me of it. When are you going to start subdivid-
ing it?"
"We aren't going to," said Rila sharply. "We don't
own it."
"I should tell you," said Courtney, speaking to us,
"that Safari will be coming in tomorrow. Ben phoned
several days ago to say the roads are open. I'm glad
you managed it."
"No sweat," I said.
"I'd like to stick around and witness the first safari
going in. So would the senator. Do you have the room
to put us up for the night?"
"We have two rooms," said Rila. "You are welcome.
One of you will have to let Bowser sleep in the same
room with you."
"Would there be a chance of going in with them?"
asked the senator. "Just for a look around. A quick
look around, then I'd come right back."

"That would be up to the Safari people," I said.
"You can talk with whoever is in charge."
The senator looked at Courtney. "How about you?"
he asked. "If they allow us, would you go along?"
"I don't know," said Courtney. "I saw the film.
There are bloodthirsty brutes back there. I'd have to
think on it."
The senator stalked around for a while, looking
things over, then gravitated toward the table. Rila had
brought out coffee. The senator, sitting down, held out
a cup. "Thank you, my dear," he said to Rila when she
poured. "I'm an old farm boy. I prize a cup of coffee."
The rest of us joined him around the table and Rila
filled cups for us.
"I suppose," said Freemore, "that I might as well
get said the things I want to say. It's not a proposition.
Nothing very weighty. Nothing to do with the Senate
or the government. Just some questions that keep
bouncing in my mind."
The senator spilled a few drops of coffee on the
table, then wiped it off with the palm of his hand, tak-
ing his time about it.
"I fear," he said, "you may think me a foolish old
man, jumping in fright at shadows. But there is a prob-
lem that has caused me many sleepless nights. There
are two problems, actually. Now, how should I put
this in the best possible light, in the least foolish way?"
He paused as if to ponder. He had no need to pon-
der, I was sure. It was just an oratorical trick. Through
the years, he had declaimed too often on the Senate
floor.
"Simply put," he said, "we do have two overriding
problems: the state of agriculture in the world and the
great masses of poverty-stricken people, many of them
in our own country. The disadvantaged, the unem-
ployed, the bottom of the social heap.
"So far, we have been able to grow enough food to
feed all the people of the Earth. When people starve..
it is a matter of poor distribution, not a problem of
supply. But I fear the day may not be too distant
when the supply, as well, will fail. Meteorologists tell
us, and very convincingly, I must say, that at least the

northern hemisphere and perhaps the entire world as
well is entering upon a colder, drier cycle. We've had
it good, they tell us, for sixty years or more—the most
favorable weather the world has known for hundreds
of years. Now we are beginning to experience droughts.
Vast areas of our productive croplands are getting
little rain and the climate is growing colder. If this
cold trend continues, the growing season will be short-
ened. All this spells less food. If food production is cut
even marginally, say ten percent or so for several
years, there are areas that could face mass starvation.
During our years of unparalleled growing weather, the
world has made great social and economic advances,
but the population has also grown, with no prospect
that the growth can be slowed, so that in only a few
favored areas has the economic boom operated to al-
leviate human misery.
"You can see, no doubt, what I am driving at. Your
mind is leaping ahead of my words. With the advent
of time travel, a concept I was, at first, reluctant to
accept, we now have the capability of opening up vast
new agricultural areas that would more than compen-
sate for the drop in food productivity that will come
about if the climate deteriorates as much as our mete-
orologists seem to think it will.
"That is one of the problems. You remember I said
there were two problems. The other problem is that
there exist vast segments of our population who face
no future other than lifelong privation. You find great
masses of these unfortunates in the ghettos of the
larger cities and other pockets of them scattered
throughout rural areas, and still others, single examples
of bad fortune, almost everywhere. It has seemed to
me that some of these people could be sent by time
travel to certain virgin areas of the past where they
would have a chance to help themselves. So far as my 
thinking has gone, I see them as a new generation
of pioneers transported to a new land where, with some
land to call their own, with the natural resources
undestroyed, they might be able to fashion for them-
selves a better life. I am painfully aware that many
of these people would not make good pioneers. Their

poverty and dependence, their bitterness toward soci-
ety, their self-pity may have robbed them of any
possibility of standing on their feet. Perhaps, no matter
where you put them, they'd be no better off than they
are now ..."
"But at least," I said, "you'd be getting them out
of our hair."
The senator glanced sharply at me. "Young man,"
he said, "that was unfair and perhaps unworthy of
you."
Courtney said, "You make it all sound easy, but it
wouldn't be. It would cost a lot of money. You couldn't
just tuck these people out of the way somewhere in
another time and say to them, now you're on your
own. Government and society would still have to bear
some responsibility. You'd have to see to it that they
had a decent start. And I would suspect a lot of them
would not want to go, many of them would refuse to
go. There'd be some advantages, of course. You'd
reduce the welfare load and I wonder if that is not
what you're counting on for support when you get,
around to announcing your plan. But in all conscience,
you can't reduce welfare costs simply by throwing
people into a howling wilderness and telling them
you've washed your hands of them."
The senator nodded. "Courtney, you're making me
sound like an ogre. You can't believe I failed to have
these factors you have mentioned very much in mind
The program, if there were to be such a program,
would have to be carefully worked out. The initial
cost probably would exceed any savings in welfare
by several times over. The humanitarian aspects of the
move would have to be of equal weight with the eco-
nomic aspect. I have talked with no one yet—no one,.
except you three. Before I move, I need some answers
from you. It seems me that by certain astute moves
you people have this time-travel business sewn up
neatly. You are offering it as a service. You have
made a business of it. I have the strong personal feel-
ing that it should be viewed as a public utility, sub-
ject to rules and regulations. But, by operating it from
your so-called Mastodonia, you appear to have effec-


tively removed any such possibility. I have no idea
if the concept of Mastodonia would stand up in
court..."
"We are convinced it would," said Courtney. "My
feeling is, it will never be contested."
"You're bluffing now," said the senator. "You are
making lawyer talk. I have a feeling that it will. But
that matters neither here nor there. What I seek
from you is some indication of how sympathetically
you would view such a program and how much co-
operation we could expect from you."
"We can't give you an answer," said Courtney in
his best grave, gray lawyer tone. "We would have to
see some concrete proposals and have a chance to
study them. You realize that you would be asking us
to commit to your purposes vast time areas, thus forc-
ing us to give up our option of granting licenses for
their use by others."
"I realize that," said Freemore. "When one comes
down to it, that is the nub of the situation. Could you
possibly view going along with my proposed program
as a public contribution, a gift to society? Needless to
say, if you demanded the kind of fees I suppose you
could ask of others, the program would be doomed.
It would never get off the ground. My proposal would
cost enough without piling license fees to Time Asso-
ciates atop the budget."
"If you are asking us to search our consciences,"
said Courtney, "that we are quite willing to do. But
at this juncture, we're not prepared to give you a com-
mitment."
The senator turned to me. "If such a program were
decided upon," he said, "where in the past would be
the best place to site it? Right here? Right in Masto-
donia?"
Rila beat me to it. "Not Mastodonia," she said.
We're homesteading it. We will not give up this
place,"

TWENTY-SIX 

The first safari group arrived shortly after noon.
It was made up of two heavy trucks, three four-wheel
drives and a crew of perhaps twenty-five men. The
equipment had been flown into Minneapolis on a
cargo plane, with some of the crew riding along. A
company plane had flown in those not on the cargo
flight, including the three clients. From Minneapolis
the safari had driven to Willow Bend. At the front
gate, they had been besieged by newspapermen and
camera crews.
"The press conference, if that is what it could be
called, delayed us a full hour and was exasperating,"
said Percy Aspinwall, the man in charge. "However,
I couldn't cut it short and had to be as gracious as pos-
sible. The folks back in New York want maximum
publicity."
"What you went through today," I told him, "will
be nothing to what will happen when you come out;
especially if you bring out a few good heads."
"Steele, I'm glad of this chance to talk with you,"
he said. "I'd hoped we could get together for a while.
You can tell me something of what to expect when
we go in. You are one of the three people who have
been in the Cretaceous."
"I was there scarcely more than a day," I told. him.
"We saw a lot of fauna. The place crawls with strange
animals, and not all look the way our paleontologists 
have said they did. You saw the film Rila made?"'
"Yes. Good job. In ways, a little terrifying."
"Then you've seen most of what we saw. You're
carrying big rifles?"
"Six hundreds. The same as you."

"One thing," I said. "Don't wait too long to allow
your clients to make the kill. If there's something com-
ing at you and you can't be sure, clobber it. What
kind of clients do you have?"
"Steady people," said Aspinwall. "Getting a bit
older than I'd like, but all of them have hunted be-
fore. In Africa, before the game fields there went
sour. They have field experience, they won't get rat-
tled, they'll-perform. Jonathon Fridley and his wife,
Jessica. She brought down one of the biggest tuskers
I have ever seen. Fridley is chairman of a steel com-
pany. The third one is Horace Bridges. President of a
chemical conglomerate. Solid people. All three of
them."
"Then you shouldn't have too much of a problem."
"No. If I have to get in on a kill, they'll under-
stand."
"Senator Freemore wants to go along. Has he talked
with you?"
"He collared me almost immediately. I told him no
way. I can't take the responsibility. I'd like to accom-
modate him, but I can't stick my neck out. He didn't
like it. He got a little nasty. But I can't take along
hitch-hikers. However, if you'd like to go ..."
"No, thanks," I said. "There'll be other safaris
coming along. I should stay here. Besides, I've been
there."
"They're getting the rigs lined up," he said. "I have
to leave. Nice talking with you."
I stuck out my hand, "Aspinwall," I said, "good
luck."
I stood and watched them go, the vehicles moving
along, one behind another, each one in turn blanking
out as they hit the time road. Rila drove Courtney
and the senator back to Willow Bend. The senator was
pouting. I went down to the crab-apple grove looking
for Catface; found him roosting in a tree at the
west end of the grove. I told him one of his time roads
was being used and that in the next few days, the
others would be put to use. I asked if that pleased
him and he said it did. It was a little awkward talking
with him. The only way I could do it was to ask him

questions that he answered yes or no by blinking. So
after a time, I quit trying to carry on a conversation and
just stood there, looking at him and feeling friendly
toward him. He looked back at me, half grinning in
what I suppose was a friendly fashion.
I tried to figure out exactly what he was and some-
how or other, I began building an impression that
he was not an actual creature—that he did not actually
have a body, that he was not made of flesh and bone,
although if that ,was true, I was unable to figure out
exactly what he was.
I found out something else. Up until now, I had
regarded him simply as an alien, an inexplicable being
that could not be understood. But now I began to
think of him as a personality, as another person, as
someone I knew and thought of, just possibly, as a
friend. I wondered about those fifty thousand years
that he'd been here and I tried to imagine what they
may have been like for him. I tried to imagine how it
would have been for me (if I could have existed for
fifty thousand years, which was impossible, of course)
and then I knew that this was a wrong way of thinking,
that I could not equate myself with Catface, since we
were two entirely different life forms. I brought to
mind the things that he had done, the contacts that he'd
made in the last few years—playing a senseless game
of hunter and hunted with Ezra and Ranger, making
time roads for Bowser to use (I wondered how many
trips Bowser may have made into the past), talking
occasionally with Hiram, or trying to talk with him,
for Hiram had not understood what Catface had been
saying and, in consequence, had not liked him. But
all that was only now, in the last few years. Other
people, apparently, had seen him (or he had shown
himself to them) and they had been frightened. In
ages past, I wondered, had he at times been in con-
tact with the Indians and earlier than that, with the
proto-lndians? Might he not have been considered a
god or spirit by some of these wandering tribesmen?
Could he have been known to the mammoth, the
mastodon and the ancient bison?
I had quit standing and had sat down at the foot

of a tree. Catface had slithered lower down his tree
so that we were opposite one another, face to face.
I heard Rila drive back up the ridge, coming home
from Willow Bend. I got up and said to Catface, "I'll
visit you again in a day or two and we can talk some
more."
Rila brought word from the hospital, she said, that Hiram
could not be released for a while. Ben had driven to
Lancaster to see him a few days before and said he'd
not found him looking well. He had asked after Bow-
ser and the two of us and Catface; he'd asked how
Stiffy was getting along. But other than that, he had
done little talking.



Two more safaris arrived and went into the
Cretaceous. The fourth arrived a few days later.
Stiffy came shambling up the hill to visit us. Rila
fed him some lettuce and a few carrots she found in
the refrigerator. He chomped down the carrots, but
after sampling it, rejected the lettuce. I guided him
back to the valley, with him grunting and mumbling at
me all the way.
I went to see Catface again. Not finding him in
Mastodonia, I ran him to earth in the orchard on the
farm. We did little talking, for talking was difficult,
but we did sit together, feeling friendly toward one
another, and that seemed to satisfy Catface. Strangely,
it satisfied me as well. Contact with him somehow
made me feel good. I got the funny feeling that Catface

was trying to talk with me. I don't know what made
me think this, but I did get the impression that he was
trying to communicate.
I remembered how, as a boy, I used to go swim-
ming in Trout Creek—which was a funny name for it,
for it had no trout. Maybe in the pioneer days, when
white men first came to the area, there might have
been some trout. The creek flowed into the river just
above Willow Bend, and it wasn't much of a stream—
in some places, just a trickle—but there was one place,
just before it joined the river, where there was a pool.
When my pals and I were small, before we got big
enough for our parents to let us go swimming in the
river, we used the pool as a swimming hole. It wasn't
more than three feet deep and there was no current;
a boy would have had to make a determined effort
to drown in it. We used to have a lot of fun there in
the lazy summer days, but the thing that I remembered
best about it was that when I had got tired of horsing
around in the deeper water, I would lie at the shallow
edge of the pool, with my head resting on the gravel
shore, the rest of me extending out into the water,
but barely covered by it. It was good to lie there, for
at times you could forget you had a body. The water
was just deep enough to buoy up your body so that
you became unaware of it. There were a lot of min-
nows in the pool, little fellows two or three inches
long, and if you lay there long enough and were quiet
enough, they would come up to you and nibble at your
toes, just sort of lipping you with their tiny mouths. I
suppose they found dried flakes of skin and maybe
tiny scabs—most of us had scabs on our feet because
we went barefoot and always had some cuts and
bruises—and I suppose these little minnows found the
flakes of dried skin and the tiny bloody scabs a very
welcome fare. But anyhow, I'd lie there and feel them
at my feet, and especially at my toes, bumping against
me very gently and lipping at my flesh. Inside of me,
there'd be a quiet and bubbling laughter, a bubbling
happiness that I could be so intimate with minnows.
That was the way with Catface. I could feel his
thoughts bumping in my brain, lipping at my brain.

cells, exactly as those minnows in that time of long
ago had bumped against my toes. It was a sort of
eerie feeling, but it was not disquieting and I felt, much
as I had with the minnows, a sense of bubbling
laughter that Catface and I could be so close together.
Later on, I told myself that it must have been my
imagination, but at the time, I seemed to feel those
bumping thoughts quite clearly.
Once I left the orchard, I went to the office to see
Ben. When I came in, he was just hanging up the
phone. He turned to me with a broad smile on his
face.
"That was Courtney," he said. "There's a movie
outfit on the Coast that is getting serious. They want
to make a film showing the history of the Earth, going
back to the Precambrian and jumping up the ages."
"That's quite a project," I said. "Do they realize
how long it might take?"
"It seems they do," said Ben. "They seem to be sold
on the idea. They want to do a decent job. They're
prepared to take the time."
"Do they realize that in the earlier periods they'd
have to carry oxygen? There can't have been much free
oxygen in the atmosphere until the Silurian, some four
hundred million years ago. Perhaps even later."
"Yes, I think they do. They mentioned it to
Courtney. It seems they've done their homework.."
"Does Courtney feel their interest is genuine? I would
suppose that a movie outfit would have the tendency,
at first, to make a cheap, run-of-the-mill movie using
one of the prehistoric periods as a background. Not
something as ambitious as this. It would cost billions,
They'd have to have a scientific staff, people who could
interpret what they put on film."
Ben said, "You're right about the cost. Courtney
seems to think that we will be able to collect a good
slice of the budget."
This was good news, of course, and I was glad to
hear it, for we had really made only one deal—Ac-
one with Safari, Inc.

Four days later, safari number three, the first group
to return, came out several days ahead of the
scheduled time. They had had a good hunt: a half-
dozen huge triceratops, three tyrannosaur heads, a
gaggle of other trophies. They would have stayed out
the allotted two weeks, but the hunter-client had be-
come ill and wanted to return.
"Sheer funk," the white hunter told me. "It's hairy
back there. He shot well, but it got to him. Goodness, it
got to me. Look up and see a monster with a mouthful
of teeth coming at you out of nowhere and your guts
just turn to water. He's perked up now that we are
out. He'll be the great, hunter, fearless, intrepid, nerves
of iron, when we go through the gates and the news-
men start closing in."
He grinned. "We'll not stop him. Let him play the
role to the hilt. It is good for business."
Rila and I stood and watched the safari outfit go
rolling down the ridge and disappear into Willow
Bend.
"That does it," Rila said. "Once the pictures of those
trophies are shown on television and appear in news-
papers, there'll be no doubt, any longer, that traveling
in time is possible. We no longer have to prove it."
The next morning, before we were up. Herb was
pounding at the door. I went out in robe and slippers.
"What the hell?" I asked.
Herb waved a copy of the Minneapolis Tribune at
me.
I grabbed the paper from him. There, on page one,
Was the picture of our client-hunter, posing beside the
propped-up head of a tyrannosaur. A six-column
headline trumpeted the story about the return of the
first safari. 




TWENTY-SEVEN
Hiram was still in the hospital and, once again,
I hunted up Catface and found him in the orchard. I
told myself I only wanted to keep contact with him to
keep him from getting lonely. Hiram had talked with
him almost every day, and since Hiram wasn't here,
I thought that someone should make a point of seeing
him. But in the back of my mind were those little
minnows that had been nibbling at my brain, and I
couldn't help but wonder if, when I saw him again, the
minnows would resume their nibbling. I had a queasy
feeling about it, but was nevertheless somewhat mysti-
fied. Maybe, I told myself, this was Catface's way of
talking, although if it was, I was certainly badly in
need of an interpreter. I wondered if the nibbling had
been what Hiram had felt and, through some strange
quirk in his mind, had been able to understand the
language. Maybe this was the ability that enabled
Hiram to talk with Bowser and the robin, if he did
actually talk with either one of them.
Once I found Catface, I didn't have to wait long to
have my question answered; almost immediately the
minnows were in there, nibbling away at me,
"Catface," I asked him, "are you trying to talk
with me?"
He blinked his eyes for yes.
"Tell me, do you think that you can do it?"
He blinked three times, very rapidly, which amazed
me somewhat as to meaning, but, after a bit of
thought, I decided that it meant he didn't know.
"I hope you can," I said. "I'd like to talk with you."
He blinked his eyes for yes, which I imagine meant
that he would, too.

But we weren't able to talk. It seemed to me that
while the minnows were more persistent than they
had been before, we were getting nowhere. For a time,
I tried to open my mind to the minnows, but that
didn't seem to help. Perhaps nothing I could do, I
told myself, could help. Whatever was to be done, if
anything was to be done, was strictly up to Catface.
I had the feeling that he must have thought he had a
chance, or he never would have tried. But once I
thought that over, I detected a lot of wishful thinking
in it.
When the session came to an end, it didn't seem to
me we were at all ahead of what the situation had
been when it had first started.
"I'll be back tomorrow," I told Catface. "You can
try again."
I didn't tell Rila about it because I was afraid she
might laugh at my simple-mindedness. To me, of
course, in a sort of sneaking way, it was no simple-
mindedness. If Catface could fix it so we could talk
together, I sure as hell was willing to give him a
chance to do it.
I had told him I'd be back the next day, but I
wasn't. In the morning, another of the safaris, number
two, returned. They brought back only one tyranno-
saur, plus several triceratops, but also three crested
hadrosaurs and a Polacanthus, an armored dinosaur
with a ridiculously small, tapering head and big horn-
like spikes sticking out of its back the entire length
of its body. Polacanthus was distinctly out of place.
It shouldn't have been in our part of the Cretaceous;
it was supposed to have died out in the early Cretace-
ous and should not have been in North America at
all. But, there it was, in all its grotesque ugliness.
The safari had brought back the entire body. De-
spite being dressed out, its body cavity scraped and
cleaned as well as possible, the carcass was beginning
to get a little high.
"Be sure to call this one to the attention of the
paleontologists," I told the hunter-client. "It will drive
them up the wall."
He grinned a toothy and satisfied grin at me. He

was a little squirt and I wondered how a man of his
size could stand up to a dinosaur gun. I tried to re-
member who he was and it seemed to me I had been
told that he was some aristocratic bird from some-
where in England, one of the few who had somehow
managed to keep a tight grip on the family fortune in
the face of the British economy.
"What's so special about this one?" he asked.
"There were quite a few of them. I picked out the
biggest one. How would you, sir, go about mounting
such a specimen? It's a sort of unwieldy creature."
I told him what was so special about it, and he liked
the idea of confounding the paleontologists.
"Some of these learned types," he told me, "put on
too many airs."
The safari had barely disappeared into Willow Bend
when number four came back. It had four tyranno-
saurs, two triceratops and a bunch of other stuff. It
was lacking one truck, however, and two men were
on stretchers.
The white hunter took off his hat and wiped his
brow. "It was those damn things with horns," he
said. "The ones with parrot beaks. Triceratops, is that
what you call them? Something scared them and they
came at us, a dozen or more of the big bulls. They hit
the truck broadside and made kindling out of it. We
were lucky no one was killed. We had a hell's own
time rescuing the men who were in the truck. We
had to stand off the bulls. I don't know how many we
put down. They were milling all around us and had
their dander up. Maybe we should have gone back
and picked up some of the heads. But when we finally
fought our way free, we sort of voted against it."
"It was rough," I said.
"Rough, sure. But when you go into new country,
before you know what to expect, it can get rough. I
learned one thing: Never press in too close to a herd
of triceratops. They're short-tempered, ugly brutes."
After the day's second safari was gone, Rila said to
me, "I'm worried about number one. They are over-
due."
"Only by a day," I said. "They all set two weeks

as the time they would be out, but a couple of days
one way or the other doesn't matter."
"The one that just left got into trouble."
"They made a mistake. That is all. Remember how
Ben stopped us when we walked up too close to the
triceratops? He said there was an invisible line that
you don't cross over. These folks walked over that
line. They'll know better next time."
I saw Stiffy shuffling up the hill. "We've got to get
him out of here," I said.
"Yes, but be nice about it," Rila said. "He's such a
lovable old guy."
She went into the house and got a couple of bunches
of carrots. Stiffy shuffled up and accepted the carrots
very gracefully, grunting and mumbling at us. After a
while, I led him off the ridge, back into the valley.
"We'll have to take it easy on the handouts," I warned
Rila. "If we don't, we'll have him up here all the
time."
"You know, Asa," she said, paying no attention to
what I had said, "I've decided where we'll build the
house. Down there by that patch of crab apples. We
can pipe water from the spring and the ridge will pro-
tect us from the northwest wind."
It was the first time I had heard about the house,
but I didn't make a point of that. It was a good idea,
actually. We couldn't go on living in a mobile home.
"I suppose you've decided what kind of house you
want," I said.
"Well, not entirely. Not the floor plan. No detailed
plan. Just in general. One story, low against the ground.
Fieldstone, I suppose. That's a little old-fashioned, but
it seems the kind of house that would fit in here. Ex-
pensive, too, but we should be able to afford it."
"Water from the spring," I said, "but what about
the heating? After the telephone line that didn't work,
I'm fairly sure we can't pipe in gas."
"I've thought about that. Build it tight and solid,
well insulated, then use wood. A lot of fireplaces. We
could get in men to cut and haul the wood. There's a
lot of it in these hills. Off somewhere where we
couldn't see the cutting. We wouldn't cut it nearby

It would be a shame to spoil the woods we can see."
We talked about the house through supper. The more
I thought about the idea, the better I liked it. I was
glad Rila had thought of it.
"I believe I'll go over to Lancaster tomorrow and
talk to a contractor," she said. "Ben should know a
good one."
"The newsmen outside the gate will gobble you up,"
I said. "Herb still wants you to remain a mystery
woman."
"Look, Asa, if need be, I can handle them. I handled
them at the hospital that night we took Hiram in. At
worst, I could hunker down in the back of the car,
cover myself with a blanket or something. Ben would
drive me out. Why don't you come along? We could
go to the hospital and see Hiram."
"No," I said. "One of us should stay here. I prom-
ised Catface I'd see him today and didn't get around
to it. I'll hunt him up tomorrow."
"What's this with you and Catface?" she demanded.
"He gets lonesome," I said.
The next morning, Catface was in the crab-apple
patch, not in the old home orchard.
I squatted down and said to him, half joking, "Well,
let's get on with it."
He took me at my word. Immediately, the minnows
began bumping at my mind, lipping it, sucking away
at it, but this time there seemed to be more of them
and smaller—small, tiny slivers of minnows that could
drive and wriggle themselves deeper and deeper into
my mind. I could feel them wriggling deeply into the
crevices of it.
A strange, dreamy lassitude was creeping over me
and I fought against it. I was being plunged into a soft
grayness that entangled me as the gossamer of a finely
knit spiderweb might entrap an insect that had blun-
dered into it.
I tried to break the web, to stagger to my feet, but
found, with a queer not-caring, that I had no idea
where I was. Found, as well, that I really had no con-
cern as to where I might be. I knew, vaguely, that
this was Mastodonia and that Catface was with me

and that Rila had gone to Lancaster to see a con-
tractor about building a fieldstone house and that we'd
have to get men to bring in a winter's supply of wood
for us, but this was all background material, all of it
segregated from what was happening. I knew that, for
a moment, I need not be concerned with it.
Then I saw it—the city, if it was a city. It seemed
that I was sitting atop a high hill, beneath a lordly
tree. The weather was fair and warm and the sky
was the softest blue that I had ever seen.
Spread out in front of me was the city, and when
I looked to either side, I saw that it was everywhere,
that it went all around me and spread to the far-off
horizon in all directions. The hill stood alone in the
midst of the city, a fair hill, its slopes covered by a
dark green grass and lovely flowers, blowing in a
gentle breeze, and atop it, this one lordly tree beneath
which I sat.
I had no idea of how I'd gotten there; I did not
even wonder how I'd gotten there. It seemed quite
natural that I should be there and it seemed as well
that I should recognize the place, but, for the life of
me, I couldn't. I had wondered on first seeing it if it
was a city and now I knew it was, but I knew as well
that it was something else as well, that it had a signifi-
cance and that a knowledge of this significance was
simply something I had forgotten, but would recall any
minute now.
It was like no city I had ever seen before. There
were parks and esplanades and wide, gracious streets
and these all seemed familiar, although they were
very splendid. But the buildings were not the kind uf
buildings one would have expected anywhere. They
had no mass and even little form; rather, they were
spiderwebby, lacy, filmy, foamy, insubstantial. Yet,
when I looked more carefully at them, I could see
that they were not as insubstantial as I had thought,
that once I'd looked at them for a time, I began seeing
them better, that when I first had looked at them,
I had not seen them in their entirety, had been seeing
only a part of them and that behind this facade of
first seeing, the structures took on a more substantial

form. But there was still something about it all that
bothered me, and in time I realized it was the pat-
tern of the city. The buildings did not stand in the
massive rectangles dictated by street patterns, as was
the case with cities on the Earth. That was it, I
thought: This was not an Earth city, although why this
surprised me I don't know, for I must have known
from the very beginning that it was no city of the
Earth—that it was Catface's city.
"It is headquarters," said Catface. "Galactic head-
quarters. I thought that to understand it, you should
see it."
"Thank you for showing it to me," I said. "It does
help me understand."
I was not surprised at all that Catface had spoken
to me. I was in that state where I'd have been sur-
prised at nothing.
About this time, too, I realized that the little lip-
ping minnows were no longer bumping against my
mind. Apparently, they had finished their job, gotten
all there was to be gotten, all the flaky skin, all the
little bloody scabs, and had gone away.
"This is where you were born?" I asked.
"No," said Catface. "Not where I began. I began
on another planet, very far from here. I will show it
to you some day if you have the time to look."
"But you were here," I said.
"I came as a volunteer," he said. "Or rather, I was
summoned as a volunteer."
"Summoned? How summoned? Who would sum-
mon you? If you're summoned, you're not a volun-
teer."
I tried to figure out if Catface and I were actually
speaking words, and it seemed to me we weren't, al-
though it made no difference, for we were under-
standing one another just as well as if we had been
speaking words.
"You have the concept of a god," said Catface.
"Through the history of your race, men have wor-
shipped many gods."
"I understand the concept," I said. "I'm not sure I

worship any god. Not the way most men would mean
if they said they worshipped a god."
"Nor I," said Catface. "But if you saw who sum-
moned me, and not only me, but many other creatures;
you'd be convinced that they are gods. Which they
are not, of course, although there are those who think
they are. They are simply a life form, biological or
otherwise—of that I can't be certain—that got an early
start at intelligence and over millions of years were
wise enough or lucky enough to avoid those cata-
strophic events that so often cause the downfall and
decay of intelligence. They may have been biological
at one time; certainly, they must have been. I'm not
certain what they are now; over the long millennia,
they may have changed themselves. . . ."
"Then you have seen them? Met them?"
"No one ever meets them. They are above all min-
gling with other creatures. They disdain us, or they
may fear us, an unworthy thought that I had at one
time. I must have been the only one, for no other has
ever spoken to me of such a thing. But I saw one
once, or think I saw one once, although I could not
see him clearly. To impress the volunteers, they af-
ford them all this glimpse—although care is taken
not to let volunteers see too clearly—either through a
veil of some sort or a shadow of one of them, I have
no idea which."
"And you were not impressed?"
"At the time, I may have been. It was so long ago,
it is difficult to remember. In your numerology, per-
haps a million years ago. But I have thought about it
since and have concluded that if I was impressed,
I should not have been."
"This is their city? The so-called gods' city?"
"If you want to think of it that way. It was planned
by them, although it was not built by them. It is not
a city, really. It is a planet covered by buildings and
installations. If that's a city, then it is a city."
"You said a galactic headquarters."
"That is right. A galactic headquarters, not the
galactic headquarters. There may be others we do not
know about. Other gods we do not know about. It

seems credible to me that there may be other galactic
groups that function exactly as this city does, but with-
out the benefit of a central headquarters. Nothing
nearly so formal as a headquarters, but perhaps some
other plan that may perform much better."
"You're just guessing there may be another head-
quarters. You don't know."
"A galaxy is large. I don't know."
"These people, these gods, take over planets and
exploit them?"
"Exploit? I snare the meaning, but the concept is
hazy. You mean own? Use?"
"Yes."
"Not that," said Catface. "Information only. The
knowing, that's the thing."
"Gathering knowledge, you mean?"
"That is right. Your comprehension amazes me.
They send out ships, with many study groups. Drop
one study group here, another there. Later, another
ship comes and picks them up, each one in turn. I was
of one study group, the last one. We had dropped four
others."
"Then your ship crashed?"
"Yes. I do not understand how it could have hap-
pened. Each of us is a specialist. Knows his job, noth-
ing else. The creatures that operated the ship were
also specialists. They should have known, should have
foreseen. The crash should not have happened."
"You told Hiram, or was it Rila, you told one of
them that you do not know the location of this planet
that you came from. That's why you don't know; it
was not your specialty to know. Only the pilot or the
pilots knew."                       
"My specialty was only to go into time. To observe
and record the past of the planet under study."
"You mean your planetary surveys not only in-
cluded what the planet was at the present moment,
but what it, had been in the past. You studied each
planet's evolution."
"Must do so. The present is only a part of it. How
the present came to be is important, too."

"The others were killed when the ship crashed. But
you ..."
"I was lucky," said Catface.
"But once you got here, you did not study the past.
You stayed in Willow Bend, or what was about to
become Willow Bend."
"I made a few excursions only. My observations
alone would have been worthless. I made the way for
others. And something else—I knew another ship
would come to pick us up. They would not know of
the crash; they would come expecting to find us. And
I told myself if the ship should come, I must be here
to meet it. I could not leave. If I went into the past,
there would not be others here to call me if the ship
should come. The ship would have found evidence of
the crash, would assume that all were dead, would
not wait. To be picked up, to be rescued as you call it,
I knew I must stay close to the crash site so I could
be found."
"But you opened roads for Bowser, roads for us."
"If I cannot use roads myself, why not let others
use them? Why not let my friends use them?"
"You thought of us as friends?"
"Bowser first," he said, "then the rest of you."
"Now you are concerned there'll be no ship to pick
you up."
"Long," said Catface. "Too long. And yet, they may
look. Not many of my kind. We are valuable. They
would not lightly give us up."
"You still have hope?"
"Very feeble hope."
"That is why you spend so much time in the old
home orchard? So you will be there if they come to
pick you up."
"That is why," said Catface.
"You are happy here?"
"What is happy? Yes, I suppose I'm happy."
What is happy? he had asked, making out that he
did not know what happiness might be. But he knew
all right. At one time, he had been happy, exalted,
overawed—on that day, when on summons, he had
come to that great galactic headquarters, joining the

elite company that was legend through those parts of
the star system touched by the great confederation.
Unquestionably, not asking how it could be so, I
moved with him through that fantastic city, fresh
from a backwoods planet, agape at all I saw, filled
with wonderment not only at what I saw, but at the
fact I should be there at all. And I went with him to
other planets as well, catching only glimpses of them,
burrowing briefly into the kinds of places they had
been in ages past. I stood before glories that put a
pang into my heart, glimpsed miseries that engulfed
my soul in sadness, worried over mysteries as a dog
would worry an ancient bone, grasped frantically at
sciences and cultures that were beyond my capacity
to understand.
Then, quite suddenly, it was all gone, and I was
back in the crab-apple patch, face to face with
Catface. My mind still seethed with wonder and I had
lost all track of time.
"Hiram?" I asked. "Did Hiram ..."
"No," said Catface. "Hiram could not understand."
And that was right, of course. Hiram could not
have understood. He had complained, I remembered,
that Catface had said many things he could not under-
stand.
"No one else," said Catface. "No one else but you."
"But I'm confused," I said. "Many things I do not
understand."
"Your understanding," he said, "is greater than you
know."
"I'll be back again," I said. "We will talk again."
I went up the hillside, and when I got back to the
mobile home, there was no one there. I wondered if
that last safari might have come out while I had been
With Catface. I had not worried about it when I'd left
because I felt that if they came out, most certainly
I'd hear them. But during my conversation with
Catface, I doubted I'd have heard anything at all. So
I went down to the mouth of time road number one
and there were no tracks coming out. That meant they
were two days overdue. If they didn't come out to-
morrow, I told myself, Ben and I probably should go

in to see what was delaying them. Not that I was
worried. Percy Aspinwall had struck me as a man
who was entirely competent. Yet I found myself un-
easy.
I went back to the mobile home and sat on the
steps. Bowser crawled from underneath the house and
clambered up the steps to sit beside me, plastered
close against me. It was almost like the old days, before
Rila had arrived and all this business of time travel
had started.
I had been half numbed at first after what had hap-
pened with Catface, but now I could begin to think
about it. At first, while it had been happening, the
whole thing had seemed almost routine, nothing to be
greatly astounded at, the sort of circumstance that
one could confidently have anticipated. But now, with
time to think about it, I began to feel cold spider
feet walking up and down my spine, and while I knew
that it had really happened, I began to feel a flood of
denial welling up in me. The old human game of say-
ing that something had not happened so that it would
not have happened.
But despite the automatic denial, I knew damn well
that it had happened, and I sat there on the steps try-
ing to get it straight in my mind. But I didn't have the
chance to do much straightening out because just
when I had got settled down to it, Rila, came driving
up the ridge and beside her sat Hiram.
Hiram leaped down as soon as the car had stopped
and made straight for Bowser. He didn't waste any
words on me; I'm not sure he even saw me. Bowser
came down off the steps at the sight of him and Hiram
went down on his knees, throwing his arms around
the dog, while Bowser, whimpering and whining in his
happiness, washed Hiram's face with a busy tongue.
Rila rushed up to me and threw her arms around
me and there were the four of us, Hiram hugging
Bowser and Rila hugging me.
"Isn't it nice to have Hiram back?" she asked. "The
hospital said it was all right for him to leave, but that
he had to take it easy and build up his strength. It

seems he lost a lot of strength. He's not to do much
work and he ..."
"That's all right," I said. "Hiram never was what
you might call addicted to work."
"He should take some exercise every day," she said.
"Walking is the best. And he should have a high-
protein diet and there is some medicine that he has to
take. He doesn't like the medicine. Says it tastes aw-
ful bad. But he promised to take it if they let him
leave. And, oh, Asa, you should see the kind of house
we're going to build. I haven't got the plans as yet, but
I can draw you a rough sketch of it. All fieldstone and
lots of big chimneys—there'll be fireplaces in almost
every room. And a lot of glass. Entire walls of
thermoglass so that we can look out on this world of
ours. Just like we were sitting outdoors. There will be
a patio and an outdoor broiler, built of stone just like
the house and a stone chimney to carry off the smoke
and a swimming pool if it's something that you'd like.
I think that I would like it. Water from the spring to
fill it and that water's awfully cold, but the contractor
said that in a day or two, the sun will warm it and
then there's ..."
I saw Hiram and Bowser walking off, heading
down the ridge, and they either didn't hear me shout
at them or paid no attention, so I went running after
them.
I caught Hiram by the shoulder and turned him
around.
"Where do you think you're going?" I asked. "Rila
says you have to take it easy, not too much exertion."
"But Mr. Steele," said Hiram, in all reasonableness,
"I just have to see how Stiffy is getting along. I have
to let him know I'm back."
"Not today," I said. "Tomorrow, maybe. We'll
take a car and see if we can find him."
I herded the two of them back, Hiram protesting
all the way.
"And you," said Rila, "how did you spend your
day?"
"Talking with Catface," I said.

She laughed gaily. "What did you find to talk
about?"
"Quite a lot," I said.
Then she was off on the matter of the house and
I never got a word in edgewise. She talked about it
until we went to bed. I'd never seen her so happy
and excited.
I told myself that I'd tell her about Catface in the
morning, but it didn't work out that way. Ben got me
out of bed, pounding on the door and yelling for me
to get out of there.
I staggered out bias-eyed, not dressed.
"What the hell is going on?" I asked. "What is it
that can't wait?"
"The Safari bunch is on the prod," he said. "They
are getting nervous. They want us to go in and see
what is holding up Aspinwall and his outfit."

TWENTY-EIGHT
Ben had more to worry about than the overdue
safari. He told me about it as we got ready for the
trip.
They don't know if we're part of the USA or not."
"We can make as good an argument against being
part of the country," I said, "as anyone can claiming
we are."
"I know," said Ben, but if that gets to be a part of
general argument it is going to
strike pretty close to home. I don't like it, Asa. I don't
like any of it."
I didn't like it either, but right at the time, I wasn't
as upset about it as he was.

Rila was determined to go into the Cretaceous with
us, and it took us quite a while to convince her she'd
better stay behind. She was all burned up at not being
allowed to go along. She was outraged; she said she
had the right to go.
"Not a chance," I told her. "You risked your neck
once and that's enough. That time we had to go for
broke, but this time, it's different. We'll be back in a
little while."
It developed that during all the ruckus, Hiram had
sneaked off to go hunting Stiffy. Rila wanted me to go
after him, but I said to hell with him; I said that if,
right at that moment, I did go after him, I'd most likely
shoot him and have it over with.
So Ben and I started out in something of a foul
mood. When we hit the Cretaceous, the local weather
didn't help us any. It was hot and stormy and the land-
scape steamed. A high, hot wind was blowing; the
touch of it almost burned you. Great cloud masses, torn
apart, raced across the sky, and every once in a while
one of the clouds would pull itself together and deliver
a five-minute downpour of rain so warm that it seemed
to be scalding. Underfoot, the ground was greasy from
being soaked by the intermittent downpours, but Ben's
four-wheel drive was a good mudder and we didn't
have too much trouble with it.
The vile weather apparently had tamed down the
fauna. Most of them, perhaps, were hiding out in
groves of trees. Those that we did disturb went racing
away from us, including one small tyrannosaur. We
had to drive around a herd of triceratops, who stood
with their heads drooping, not bothering to graze,
just waiting for the weather to get decent.
The track made by the safari was fairly easy to fol-
low, the wheels of the heavy trucks leaving deep
depressions in the soil. In a few places, recent rains
had either filled the tracks or washed them out, but
where they were missing, it was no great problem to
pick them up again.
We found the first campsite about five miles down
the river valley. It seemed the safari had stayed there
for several days. The campfire locations were thick

with ash and there had been a lot of traffic out and
back. After some looking, we found the trail the out-
fit had made in moving out: west over the ridge across
the river, then across a prairie for twenty miles or so.
At the end of that twenty miles, the country broke
suddenly, plunging down into the valley of the Raccoon
River. The trail that we were following snaked crook-
edly down the hills. As we rounded the sharp angle
of a ridge, we came upon the camp. Ben braked the
car to a halt and for a moment we sat there, saying
nothing. Tents, many of them down, fluttered in the
wind. One truck was tipped over on its side. The other
was in a ditch, one of those deep gullies so characteris-
tic of the Cretaceous, its nose buried against one wall
of the gully, its back canted up at a steep angle.
Nothing moved except the fluttering fabric of the
tents. There was no smoke; the campfires had burned
out. Here and there were clutters of scattered white-
ness lying on the ground.
"For the love of mercy!" said Ben.
Slowly, he took his foot off the brake and let the
car ease forward. We crept down the slope and into
the camp. The place was littered with debris. Cooking
utensils were scattered about the dead fires. Torn
clothing was tramped into the ground. Dropped rifles
lay here and there. The scattered whitenesses were
bones—human bones polished clean by scavengers.
Ben braked the car to a halt and I got out, cradling
the heavy rifle in the crook of my arm. For a long
time I stood there, looking around, trying to absorb
the enormity of what 1 saw, my mind stubbornly refus-
ing to accept the full impact of the evidence. I heard
Ben get out on the other side of the car. His feet
crunched as he walked around the vehicle to stand
beside me.
He spoke harshly, as if he were fighting to keep his
voice level. "It must have happened a week or more
ago. Probably only a day or so after their arrival here.
Look at those bones. Stripped clean. It took a while
to do that."
I tried to answer, but I couldn't. I found that I had
my teeth clenched hard to keep them from chattering.

"None got away," said Ben. "How come none got
away?"
I forced myself to speak. "Maybe some of them
did. Out in the hills."
Ben shook his head. "If they had been able, they
would have tried to follow the trail back home. We
would have found them coming in. A man alone, or an
injured man, would have no chance. If something
didn't snap him up on the first day, they would have
on the next, certainly the next after that."
Ben left me and walked out into the campsite. After
a minute or so, I trailed after him.
"Asa," Ben said. He had stopped and was staring
at something on the ground. "Look at that. Look at
that track."
It had been blurred by rain. Little pools of water
stood in the deep imprints left by the claws. It was
huge. The blurring might have enlarged it or given
the impression that it was larger than it actually was,
but the print appeared to measure two feet or more
across at its breadth. Beyond it and slightly to the
left was another similar footprint.
"Not rex," said Ben. "Bigger than rex. Bigger than
anything we know. And look over there. There are
more tracks."
Now that Ben had found the first track, we could
see that the area was covered with them.
"Three-toed," said Ben. "Reptilian. Two-legged, I'd
guess."
"From the looks of the evidence," I said, "a pack
of them. One, or even two, couldn't make that many
tracks. Remember our pair of tyrannosaurs? We
thought they hunted in pairs. Before that, the impres-
sion was they hunted alone. Maybe they hunt in
packs. Sweeping across the country like a pack of
wolves, grabbing everything they can find. A pack
would pick up more prey than a lone hunter or even a
pair of them."
"If that is the case," said Ben, "if they hunt in packs,
Aspinwall and the others didn't have a prayer."
We walked across the campsite, trying hard not to
look too closely at some of the things we saw. The

four-wheel drives, curiously, stood where they had
been parked. Only one of them had been knocked over.
Cartridge cases gleamed dully in the half-light of the
cloudy day. Rifles lay here and there. And everywhere,
the marks of those huge, three-clawed footprints.
The wind whined and moaned in the hollows and
across the ridges that ran down to the river valley.
The sky of torn and racing clouds boiled like a caul-
dron. From far off came the rumble of thunder.
Leering out of a small thicket at me was a skull,
tattered bits of hairy scalp still clinging to it, a patch of
beard adhering to the jawbone. Gagging, I turned back
to the car. I'd had enough.
Ben's bellow stopped me. When I looked back, I
saw him standing at the edge of a deep gully that ran
down the southern edge of the campsite.
"Asa, over here!" he yelled.
I staggered back to where he stood. In the gully lay
a pile of massive bones. Bits of scaly hide fluttered
from some of them. A rib cage lay gaping, a clawed
foot thrust upward, a skull with the jawbone still at-
tached had the look of being interrupted in executing
a mangling snap.
"That foot," said Ben. "The one sticking up. That's
a forefoot. Well developed, strong, not like the forelimb
of a rex."
"An allosaur," I told him. "It has to be an allosaur.
One grown to gigantic size, its fossilized bones never
found by anyone."
"Well, at least we know our people got one of
them."                
"They may have gotten others. If we looked
around ..."
"No," said Ben. "I've seen enough. Let's get out of
here."

TWENTY-NINE
Ben phoned Courtney, while Rila and I listened
in on other phones. We were a fairly sober lot.
"Court, we have bad news," said Ben when Court-
ney came on the line. You know one of the
safaris is overdue."
"Yes, a couple of days or so. Nothing to worry
about. Found better hunting than they expected. Or
drove farther than they realized. Maybe vehicle break-
down."
"We thought the same," said Ben, "but this morning
I got a call from Safari in New York. They were a
little nervous. Asked if we could check. So Asa and I
went in. Asa's on the phone with me now. So is Rila."
Suddenly, Courtney's voice took on a note of worry.
"You found everything all right, of course."
"No, we didn't," said Ben. "The expedition was
wiped out. All of them dead. . . ."
"Dead? All of them?"
"Asa and I found no survivors. We didn't try to
count the bodies. Not bodies, really—skeletons. It was
pretty horrible. We got out of there."
"But dead! What could ..."
"Courtney," I said, "the evidence is they were at-
tacked by a pack of carnosaurs."
"I didn't know carnosaurs ran in packs."
"Neither did I. Neither did anyone. But the evi-


dence is they do. More footprints than would be made
by just two or three ..."
"Footprints?"
"Not only footprints. We found the skeleton of a
large carnosaur. Not a tyrannosaur. An allosaur, more
than likely. Quite a bit bigger than rex."
"You talk about skeletons. Not bodies, but skele-
tons."
"Court, it must have happened quite a while ago,"
said Ben. "Maybe shortly after they went in. Looks
as if the scavengers had a while to work on them."
"What we want to know," said Rila, "is where we
stand legally. And what do we do next?"
There was a long silence on the other end, then
Courtney said, "Legally, we are blameless. Safari
signed a waiver to cover each group that went in. The
contract also makes it clear we are not responsible for
anything that happens. If you're wondering if they
can sue us, I don't think they can. There are no
grounds."
"How about the clients they took along?"
"Same thing. Safari is responsible if anyone is. I
suppose the clients also signed waivers, holding Safari
blameless. I would think it would be regular procedure.
What we have to worry about is the impact on Safari's
business. Once this is known, will clients cancel out?
What will be the impact on public opinion? Will some
damn fool come out screaming that safaris into the
past must be stopped? You must remember, too, that
Safari has paid only half of the contract fee. The
other half is due in six months. They could hold up
payment, or refuse payment on the second half."
"It all depends," said Ben, "on how Safari takes
this news."
"They're hard-headed businessmen," said Courtney.
"Sure, this is a tragic thing, but tragedies do hap-
pen. Miners are killed in mines, but mining still goes
on. If too many clients cancel, if others don't come
in and sign up for the hunts, then they will be con-
cerned."
"Some may cancel," said Ben. "Not many. I know
the breed. This will only make it more zestful. Some-

thing big back there, something dangerous, let us go
and get it. A bigger trophy than anyone has ever
dreamed."
"I hope you're right," said Courtney. "Safari is the-
only deal, so far, that we have going for us. It does
beat hell. We thought there'd be other big deals
knocking at our door, but they're slow developing.
The same with things we worried about. We figured
the IRS would hassle us. They did come sniffing
around, but that is all, so far."
"Maybe they're lying low," said Ben, "trying to
figure out a line of approach."
"Maybe so," said Courtney.
"How about the movie people?" Rila asked. "Is
this lost safari going to scare them off?"
"I doubt it," Courtney said. "All of the periods are
not as dangerous as the Cretaceous, are they, Asa?"
"The Jurassic could be hairy," I told him. "Those
two would be the worst. Every period would have its
dangers if you don't watch your step. It's all unknown
country."
"The immediate question is how to let Safari
know," said Ben. "I can phone them. But I thought we
should fill you in before we did anything."
"Why don't you let me phone them, Ben? I know
them a little better than the rest of you. Except Rila,
perhaps. How about it, Rila?"
"You go ahead," said Rila. "You'll do a good job
of it. Better than any of the rest of us."
"They may want to call you back. Will you be
there?"
"I'll be here," said Ben.

THIRTY
Late in the afternoon, Safari phoned Ben. They
would send in an expedition, they said, to visit
the scene of the disaster and bring out what remained
of the victims.
Rila and I went back to Mastodonia. Neither of us
had much to say on the trip; both of us were depressed.
Hiram and Bowser were waiting for us, perched on
the steps. Hiram was bubbling with talk. He had found
Stiffy and had a good talk with him; he had hunted
up Catface and talked with him as well. Both had been
glad to see him, and he had told them all about his
stay in the hospital. Bowser, he said, had found a wood-
chuck, run him into a hole and tried to dig him out.
Hiram had hauled him from the hole and rebuked him.
Bowser, he said, was ashamed of himself. Hiram had
fried some eggs for lunch, but Bowser, he reminded us
severely, did not care for eggs. We should always plan
to leave some cold roast for Bowser.
After dinner, Rila and I sat out on the patio. Bow-
ser and Hiram, tired out with their day, went to bed.
"I'm worried, Asa," Rila said. "If' Safari has paid
us only half of the contract, we may be running low
on funds. We gave Ben his commission on the Safari
deal even though he had nothing to do with it."
"He had it coming," I said. ''Maybe he had nothing
to do with the Safari contract, but he worked his tail
off for us."
 "I'm not complaining about it," said Rila. "I don't
begrudge it to him. But it all adds up. The fence cost
us a fortune and the office building didn't come cheap.
The salaries for the guards run to several hundred
dollars a day. We still have money, but it's being eaten

up. If Safari should pull out, if the movie people decide
to wait, we could be in trouble."
"Safari won't pull out," I said. "They may mark
time for a while until this blows over. But Ben is right.
The more dangerous the situation, the more anxious
your hunting type will be to have a shot at it. The
movie company I don't know about, but they had
dollar signs in their eyes. They won't pass it by."
"Another thing," said Rila. "Courtney doesn't work
cheap. God knows what kind of bill he is piling up."
"Let's not get upset right yet," I said. "It will all
work out."
"You think I'm greedy, don't you, Asa?"
"Greedy? I don't know. You're a businesswoman.
You spent all those years in business."
"It's not business," she said. "It's not greed. It's secu-
rity. Even more than a man, a woman needs to feel
secure. Most women can feel secure in a family, but
I didn't have a family. I had to look for some other
basis for security and I came up with money. Money
seemed the answer. If I could pile up enough
money, then I'd be secure. That's why I am so grabby.
That's why I latched onto the time-travel idea so fast.
I saw big possibilities in it."
"There are still big possibilities."
"There are also headaches. And our base is so slight.
Catface and Hiram. If either of them fails us ..."
"We managed without Hiram."
"Yes, I suppose so. But it was awfully awkward."
"Not any more," I said. "I've been trying to tell
you for a couple of days, but I never had the chance.
First, there was the house, then Hiram coming back,
and after that, what happened to the Safari people.
What I wanted to tell you is that I can talk with Cat-
face."
She looked at me in surprise. "You mean, really
talk to him? Just like Hiram?"
"Better than Hiram," I said. Then I went ahead and
told her, while she watched me closely, with a faint
tinge of disbelief.
"What a spooky business," she said. "I would have
been scared."

"I wasn't scared. I was too numb to be scared."
"Why do you think he tried so hard? To fix it so he
could talk with you?"
"He ached to talk to someone."
"But he could talk with Hiram."
"Hiram wasn't here, remember? He hadn't been
for days. I don't think Catface understood what had
happened to him. And Hiram would not have been
the most satisfactory person to talk to. He would have
understood very little of what Catface showed to me.
Catface is a human sort of being."
"Human?"
"Yes, human. An alien, sure. But with certain
human characteristics you'd not expect to find. Perhaps
he hid his alien characteristics from me, accentuated
what you might call his human streak. ..."
"In which case," said Rila, "he is a very clever
creature. And sophisticated."
"Anything that has lived for a million years would
have to be sophisticated."
"Once he told us he was immortal."
"We didn't talk about that. Not a great deal,
actually, about himself."
"You're fascinated by him," Rila said.
"Yes, I suppose I am. Funny thing about it is that
I have talked with an alien intelligence. That's the
kind of thing a newspaper would blow into big head-
lines. A sensational story. Rightly sensational, I
suppose, for it is something that has been written
about and talked about for years. Are there other
intelligences in the universe? What would happen if a
human met an alien? All the wonder about that first
contact. But to me it doesn't seem sensational at all. ''
It all seems friendly and quite ordinary."
"You're a strange man, Asa," Rila said. "You always
were a strange man. I think that's why I love you.
What other people think makes no mark upon you.
You think for yourself alone."
"Thank you, my dear," I said.
And I sat there, thinking about Catface, wondering
about him. He was out there now in the gathering
dusk, perhaps in the crab-apple patch, perhaps in the

old home orchard. And I found, as I thought about
him, that I knew much more about him than he had
told me. The knowledge, for example, that he was not
biological, but some strange combination of electronic-
molecular life that I could not understand. Perhaps, I
thought, an electronics engineer might be able to
understand it, but not in its entirety. The knowledge,
too, that he thought of time not as a part of the space-
time continuum, not as a glue that held the universe
together, but as an independent factor that could be
explained by certain equations, which I could neither
recognize nor make any sense of (for no equation
made any sense to me) and that it could be regulated
or manipulated if one had an understanding of the
equations. And the knowledge that while he had said
he was immortal, he still held a faith and a hope of
afterlife—which seemed to be an extremely strange
idea, for to an immortal, there should be no need of
such faith or hope.
How was it, I asked myself, that I should know
such things about him? I was certain he had not told
me, but it was, I admitted, possible that he had, for
during much of the time that he had talked to me, I
had been confused and perhaps not as sharp as I
should have been.
Rila got up. "Let's be off to bed," she said. "Maybe
tomorrow will be a better day."
It turned out to be not a bad day, not a good day;
actually, nothing much happened.
Late in the morning, Rila and I drove to Willow
Bend. Hiram had already disappeared somewhere,
leaving with Bowser shortly after breakfast. We didn't
try to hunt them down and herd them home. We
couldn't spend all our spare time playing nursemaid
to Hiram. He'd been told at the hospital to take it easy,
but the only way to make him take it easy was to
hogtie him.
Ben had got word that the Safari people would
arrive the next day. There were no indications, how-
ever, when, or if, other safaris would be coming in.
The newspapers had given a lot of space to the
Cretaceous disaster. According to the stories, Safari,

Inc., had made an almost immediate disclosure of the
incident. There had been no attempt to soft-pedal the
horror of it, but Safari officials were quoted as saying
that over the years many people had died while on
safari—that this was different only in that the entire
party had been wiped out,
Rila stayed at the office to talk with Ben and Herb,
but I cut out, after a short time, to see if Catface might
be in the orchard. He did happen to be there.
I didn't tell him anything of what had happened. I
was not sure he'd be much interested and, besides,
there were a lot of other matters we could talk about.
We settled down to talk and spent a couple of hours
at it. It was not so much talking as showing. As had
happened before, I found myself sort of tucked into
Catface, as if I were part of him, seeing through his
eyes.
He showed me more of the headquarters city and
some of the specialists who worked there: the insect-
like race that were trained historians, paying atten-
tion not so much to the events of history as to trends
and development, treating history as a science rather
than a mere progression of happenings; the globe-
shaped creatures who specialized as sociologists,
working to identify the racial characteristics and the
historical trends that made intelligent beings what they
were; the snaky whitherers, who dealt not so much in
prediction as in scientifically attempting to extrap-
olate the future trends of civilization, trying in the
course of their studies to pinpoint possible future crisis
points.
He also tried to show me how he employed certain
equations and manipulated certain forces (all or

which were beyond my understanding) to construct
the time roads. I asked him a lot of questions, but it
appeared that my questions were so wide of the mark
that they did no more than confuse him. When he
did try to explain, his explanations confused me more
than ever.
Knowing that Rila probably was wondering where
I'd gone, I broke off the talk and went back to the
office. Rila, Ben and Herb were still deep in conver-
sation and seemed not to have noticed my absence.
Early the next morning, the Safari expedition
showed up. Ben and I went into the Cretaceous with
them and this time, Rila went along.
It was a grisly business. I did none of the work,
but only stood around and watched. The crew put the
stripped human skeletons into plastic bags, making the
best guesses they could as to which bones belonged to
which skeletons. In some cases, however, the bones
had been dragged around a bit and I'm not sure the
effort was successful. In a few instances, where ID
bracelets or chains were still in place, some identi-
fication was possible, but most of the bags were
anonymous.
The skeleton of the huge allosaur, if that was what
it was, also was loaded on one of the trucks. A
Harvard paleontologist had asked that it be brought
back.
In a couple or three hours time, the campsite was
cleared of all bones, guns, ammunition, tents and
other supplies, and we returned. I don't mind admit-
ting I was glad once we were back in Mastodonia.
Ten days went past. The newspapers were hammer-
ing away at the Cretaceous disaster.
A couple of suits were filed
against Safari. Several members of Congress made
speeches calling for governmental regulation of time
travel. The Justice Department called a press confer-
ence to explain that regulation would be difficult since
Time Associates were operating in what amounted
to a foreign nation, although it was stressed that the
status of Mastodonia under international law was far
from clear. The number of newsmen and camera

crews who had been standing watch at the gate in
Willow Bend shrank considerably.
Stiffy came up the ridge several times to visit us,
and after paying him off with carrots, we shagged
him out of there. Hiram was outraged that we didn't
want him around. Bowser got into a fight with a
badger and was soundly whipped. Hiram spent two
days holding his paw until his lacerations began to
heal. The crowd of tourists fell off slightly, but Ben's
parking lot and motel were still doing a good business.
Ben drove Rila to Lancaster; she hid in the back of
the car until they were out of Willow Bend. She talked
with the contractor and came home with a set of
preliminary blueprints. We spent several nights with
the plans spread out on the kitchen table, talking over
what we wanted modified or changed.
"It will cost us a lot," she told me. "Twice as much
as I had expected. But I think, even at the worst,
there'll be enough money to build it. And I want it so
badly, Asa. I want to live in Mastodonia and have a
good house to live in."
"So do I," I said. "One of the nice things about it is
that we won't have to pay taxes on it."
I had several conversations with Catface. When
Hiram found out that I could talk with Catface, his
nose got slightly out of joint, but in a day or two, he
got over it.
Ben had some good news. Courtney phoned to say
the movie people were negotiating again. Safari an-
nounced that it would be sending out more safaris in
a week or ten days.
Then the bottom fell out of everything.
Courtney phoned Ben to say that he was flying to
Lancaster, asking to be picked up there. "I'll tell you
what it's all about," he had said, "when I get there."
Herb drove in to tell us and we were waiting in Ben's
office when Courtney af d Ben arrived.
Ben got out a bottle and paper cups.
"That's a good idea," Courtney said. ''We all better
have a stiff drink to brace ourselves. This time we
really are in trouble."
We sat and waited for the word.

"I don't know all the details yet," said Courtney,
"but I wanted to talk with you to get an idea of what
you may want to do. You've been placed under quar-
antine. The State Department issued an order this
morning barring American citizens from entering Mas-
todonia."
"But they can't do that," said Rila.
"I'm not sure whether they can or not," said
Courtney. "I think, perhaps, they can. The fact is that
they have. No reason given. I assume they might not
have to cite a reason. As a matter of fact, it is within
their power to do this anywhere in the world simply
by specifying countries to which a citizen may not
travel."
"Why should they want to do it?" asked Ben.
"I'm not sure. The Cretaceous disaster may have something to do with it; Mastodonia opens the gate to places where it
isn't safe for a citizen to travel. It is causing worldwide ruckuses. It is tearing this country apart. There was a lot of wail-
ing in Congress that the issue was ever allowed to arise.
Terrific pressure groups are developing. It is the hottest
potato Washington has ever fielded, or tried to field.
The answer, of course, is to strike at Mastodonia and
time travel. If you can't get to Mastodonia, you can't
travel in time. And if you can't travel in time, the issue becomes moot."
"This means that Safari can't use the time roads,"
said Ben. "That nobody can use the time roads. This
probably kills the talks with the movie people. This
action could put us out of business."
"At the moment, it does," said Courtney. "We can
move for a temporary injunction. If the injunction is
granted by the court, then we'll be back in business
until the merits of the case can be adjudicated. The
court then could make the injunction permanent,
which would mean we'd be back in business for good,
or it could deny the injunction, which would mean that
the order would stand and we'd be out of business for
good."

"Or we could move the operation to some other
country," said Rila.
"I suppose that could be done," Courtney told her.
"But it would involve negotiations with the country
you wanted to move to and that might take consid-
erable time. I wouldn't be surprised if it also would
require substantial payments of monies."
"Bribes," said Ben.
"They'd probably call it something else. Most na-
tions, in the face of what our government has done,
would be reluctant to let us in. First, you'd have to
find a country. I warn you it would not be one of the
better countries, probably a dictatorship. Once you
were there, you might find the officials difficult to get
along with. There is one good thing about the State
Department order. It tacitly admits that Mastodonia is
another country and that spikes the guns of the IRS."
"You'll file for the injunction soon," said Ben.
"Immediately," said Courtney. "I think it likely I
can convince Safari and the movie people to join us in
the action. They can claim unfair restraint of trade.
There probably are a lot of other arguments we can
cite. I'll have to think about that."
"It looks as if we'll just have to hunker down and
weather the storm," said Ben. "How certain are you
that you will get an injunction?"
"I honestly don't know. Ordinarily, it's no great
problem to get a temporary injunction. But in this
case, we are bucking the State Department. That
could be heavy."
He hesitated for a moment and then said, "I don't
know if I should mention this right now, but I suppose
I may as well. There may be another out. I'm not
sure. I may have my signals wrong. But the CIA has
been in to talk with me. Hinting about cooperation and
our patriotic duties. Trying to make it off the record,
but I never told them it was off the record—although
if I were you, I'd not talk about it. I gained the im-
pression they'd like to use time travel to get some of
their men into position ahead of time in some sticky
situations. They didn't say so, but that's one way they

could use time travel. I played stupid, but I don't
think I fooled them."
"You mean that if we'd let them use time travel,"
said, Ben, "the State Department might lift the order.
That the order may be no more than a pressure
tactic."
"I can't be sure," said Courtney. "The signal's not
strong enough. If I signaled back to the CIA we
were willing, there might suddenly be a lot of pres-
sure on the State Department."
"Well, why don't we try it," said Ben. "It's no skin
off our noses who uses time travel, or for what."
"No," said Rila.
"Why not?" asked Ben.
"Once you give the government a foot in the door,
they begin taking over," she said.
"I'm inclined to agree," said Courtney. "My advice,
for what it's worth, is to save the CIA for future con-
sideration. We might want to make that last desperate
deal to save ourselves."
"Okay," said Ben. "I guess that makes sense."
"Understand, I'm not even sure how the CIA ties
into this," said Courtney. "I'm just guessing."
He rose and said, "Ben, if you'd drive me back. I
have work to do."
Rila and I headed for home. As we drove into Mas-
todonia, we saw at once something was wrong. .The
mobile home had been tipped over. Standing beside it
was Stiffy. Bowser stood a little way off, barking
fiercely. Hiram was belaboring Stiffy with a stick, but
the old mastodon was paying no attention to him.
I speeded up the car.
"He's after those damn carrots," I said. "We
never should have fed them to him."
I saw as we drove nearer that he was not only after
the carrots; he already had them. He had smashed the
kitchen end of the home, had somehow gotten the re-
frigerator open, and was contentedly munching carrots.
I skidded the car to a halt and the two of us jumped
out. I started forward, but Rila grabbed me and held
on.

"What are you going to do?" she asked. "If you try
to drive him off ..."
"Drive him off, hell," I yelled. "I'm going to get a
rifle and shoot the son-of-a-bitch. I should have done
it long ago."
"No," she shouted. "No, not Stiffy. He is such a
nice old guy."
Hiram was yelling at him, one word over and over:
"Naughty, naughty, naughty."
And, as he yelled at Stiffy, he beat him with the
stick. Stiffy went on eating carrots.
"You can't get a gun, anyhow," said Rila.
"If I can clamber up there and get the door open, I
can. The rack is just inside."
Hiram yelled and beat at Stiffy. Stiffy switched his
tail, leisurely and happily. He. was having a good time.
As I stood there, I found the anger draining out of
me and I began to laugh. It was ridiculous—Hiram
yelling and wailing away at Stiffy and Stifiy paying no
attention whatsoever.
Rila was weeping. She had let go of me and her
arms hung at her side. She stood erect, too stiffly erect,
while she was racked by sobs. Tears ran down her
cheeks. In a few more minutes, I realized, she could
become hysterical.
I put an arm around her and got her turned around
and urged her back toward the car.
"Asa," she gasped between her sobs, "it's awful.
Nothing has gone right today."
I got her in the car, then went back to collect
Hiram. I grabbed him by the arm that held the stick
and took it away from him.
"Cut out that yelling," I toid him sternly. "It's not
doing any good."
He looked at me, blinking, surprised to see me
there.
 "But, Mr. Steele," he said, "I told him and I told
him. I told him not to do it, but he did it just the
same."   
"Get in the car," I said.
Obediently, he shuffled toward the car.
"Come on," I said to Bowser. Bowser, no fool, glad

to get off the hook, stopped his barking and trotted at
my heels.
"In the car," I told him and he jumped in back with
Hiram.
"What are we going to do?" asked Rila wildly.
"What can we do?"
"We're going back to the farm," I told her. "We
can stay there for a while."
That night, in my arms, she cried herself to sleep.
"Asa," she said, "I love Mastodonia. I want to
have a house there."
"You will," I said. "You will. One too big and
strong for Stiffy to tip over."
"And, Asa, I so wanted to be rich."
I had no assurances on that.

THIRTY-ONE


Ben and Herb went back to Mastodonia with
us. We used a block and tackle to tip the home upright.
It took us the better part of the day, once that was
done, to repair the structural damage. Once we were
through, the place was livable. Despite Stiffy's messing
around to get it open, the refrigerator had not been
damaged.
The next day, over the protests of both Hiram and
Rila, we took two four-wheel drives and went looking
for Stiffy. We found him in the valley and herded him
down it. He got irate at the treatment and several
times threatened to charge. We made discreet use of
shotguns loaded with birdshot, which would sting but
do no damage, to keep him on the move. He pro-
tested, grumbling and groaning every foot of the way.
We shagged him about twenty miles before we turned
back home.
A few days later, he was back in his old stamping
ground, but from then on, despite whatever mem-
ory he might have had of carrots, he did not bother
us. I gave Hiram strict orders to leave him alone and,
for once, Hiram paid some attention to what I told
him.
We had not heard from Courtney for several days.
When he finally got in touch with us, I was in the of-
fice talking with Ben. Ben signaled me to pick up an-
other phone.
Courtney said he had moved for a temporary in-
junction, joined by Safari and the movie people. But
the proceedings, he said, were going to take longer
than he had thought because of the number of complex

arguments cited by both sides. He was particularly in-
censed by one allegation put forth in defense of the
State Department ban—that traveling into time pre-
sented a health hazard. He would, he said, be quite
willing to agree that travel into more recent, historic
times might present such a danger, but the government
brief had extended the claim to include time brack-
ets millions of years into the past, postulating that bac-
teria and viruses that had existed in those times might
be able to adapt to the human organism and bring
about plagues that could become pandemic.
There had been, Courtney reported, no further
word from the CIA.
"Maybe State has called them off," he said.
Senator Freemore had been in to tell him that bills
would be introduced in both houses of Congress to
implement emigration of the disadvantaged population
(or such of them as might want to go) into prehistoric
periods. Freemore, he said, wanted to know what pe-
riod would be best.
"Asa is on the line with us," said Ben. "He can tell
you about that."
"Okay," said Courtney. "How about it, Asa?"
"The Miocene," I said.
"What about Mastodonia? It would seem ideal to
me."
"There's not enough time span," I told him. "If you
are going to establish a human population sometime in
the past, you have to be sure there is enough time
margin so it doesn't collide with the rise of the human
race."
"Mastodonia is pretty far back, isn't it?"
"No, it's not. We're only a little more than one
hundred fifty thousand years back in time. You could
go back three hundred thousand and still be in the
Sangamon, but even that's not far enough. There were
men on Earth then, primitive men, but still men. We
can't afford a collision with them."
"But you and Rila?"
"Just the two of us. We're not going to introduce
anyone else into the era. Just transitory people who
come in to use the time roads. And there will be no

men in America for at least a hundred thousand
years."
"I see. And the Miocene? How far back is that?"
"Twenty-five million years."
"You judge that's deep enough into the past?"
"It gives us better than twenty million years before
there could be anything even resembling man. Twenty
million years from now, when the first possible collision
could take place, there probably will be no humans
left on Earth. Either in our present time span or twenty
million years into our past."
"You mean we'll be extinct by that time."
"Extinct or gone somewhere else."
"Yes," said Courtney, "I suppose so."
He waited for a moment, then asked, "Asa, why
the Miocene? Why not earlier? Why not a little later?"
"There'll be grass in the Miocene. Grass like we
have now, very similar to it. Grass is necessary if
you are going to raise livestock. Also, grass makes
possible the existence of wild game herds. It would
be important for settlers to have game herds; in the
early days of settlement, they would supply food. And
in the Miocene, the climate would be better."
"How so?"
"A long rain cycle would be coming to an end.
The climate would be drier, but probably still suffi-
ciently rainy for agriculture. The big forests that cov-
ered most of the land area would be dying out, giving
way to grassland. Settlers wouldn't have to clear for-
ests to make farmland, but there'd still be plenty of
wood for them to use. No really vicious animal life,
or, at least, none that we know of. Nothing like the
dinosaurs in the Cretaceous. Some titanotheres, giant
pigs, early elephants, but nothing that a big rifle
couldn't handle."
"Okay, you've sold me. I'll tell the senator. And
Asa ... "
"Yes?"
"What do you think of the idea? Of sending these
people back?"
"It wouldn't work," I said. "Not many of them

would want to go. They're not pioneers; they don't
want to be."
"You figure they'd rather stay right here, on wel-
fare the rest of their lives? For that is what it amounts
to. They're in a poverty trap and they can't get out."
"I think most of them would stay right here," I
said. "They know what they're facing here. Back there,
they wouldn't know."
Courtney said, "I'm afraid you're right. I was in
hopes that if our injunction move fails, Freemore's
plan might bail us out—if it passes, that is."
"Don't count on it," I said.
Courtney and Ben talked only a short time longer.
There wasn't much to talk about.
As I sat there, listening to Ben's parting words,
I thought about the brightness of the promise that had
so quickly darkened. A few weeks ago, it had seemed
that nothing could interfere with us; we had the Safari
contract, the movie deal was moving forward, and we
were confident that other business would be shaping
up. But now, unless Courtney could prevail against
the State Department's order, we were out of business.
Personally, I did not mind too much—oh, of course,
I wouldn't have minded becoming a millionaire, but
money and success in business never had mattered too
much to me. For Rila, however, it was quite a differ-
ent story, and while Ben said but little about it, I
knew that it meant a lot to him as well. My disappoint-
ment, I realized, was not so much for what I had lost
as for what the other two had lost.
When I left Ben's office, I went out into the or-
chard and found Catface there. We settled down to
talk. He did most of the talking. This time, he told
me about and showed me his home planet. It was an
entirely different place than the headquarters planet,
an outback world that had a poor economic basis.
Its land was thin for farming, it had few natural re-
sources, no great cities had arisen. Its people dragged
out a dismal existence and they were different from
Catface—definitely biological, although there was
about them a puzzling ephemeral tendency, as if they
hovered indecisively between groundlings and sprites.

Catface must have sensed my surprise at this, for he
said to me, "I was a freak. What would you call it?
Perhaps a mutant. I was unlike the rest of them. I
changed and they were puzzled at me and ashamed of
me and perhaps even a little frightened of me. My
beginning was unhappy."
His beginning—not his childhood, not his boyhood.
I pondered over that.
"But headquarters took you," I said. "Perhaps that's
why they took you. They were on the lookout, proba-
bly, for people just like you—people who could
change."
"I'm sure of it," said Catface.
"You say you are immortal. Were the other people
of your home planet immortal as well?"
"No, they were not. That is one of the measures
of the differentness in me."
"Tell me, Catface, how do you know? How can you
be sure that you are immortal?"
"I know, that's all," said Catface. "I know inside of
me."
Which was good enough, I thought. If he knew in-
side of him, he probably was right.
I left him more puzzled than I had ever been be-
fore. Each time I talked with him, it seemed I grew
more puzzled. For while I felt, for some strange rea-
son, that I knew him more thoroughly than I'd ever
known any other being, increasingly I sensed depths
in him that seemed forever out of reach. I was puz-
zled, too, by the illogical feeling that I knew him well.
I had talked with him, really talked with him, not
more than a dozen times, and yet I had the impression
that he was a lifelong friend. I knew things about him,
I felt sure, that we had never talked about. I wondered
if this could be attributed to the fact that on many
occasions he had taken me inside of him, had made
me, for a moment, one with him, in order that I
might see with him certain concepts that he could not
put in words I would understand. Was it possible that
in these times of oneness with him I had absorbed
some of his personality, becoming privy to thoughts

and purposes that he may not have intended to con-
vey?
By now, most of the newspapermen and camera
crews had deserted Willow Bend. Some days, therc
were none at all, then at times a few would show up
and stay for a day or two. We were still occasionally
in the news, but the magic had left us. Our story had
run out.
The tourists fell off. Usually, there were a few cars
in Ben's parking lot, but nothing like the number
that once had been there. Ben's motel now had vacan-
cies—at times, a number of vacancies. Unless there
was a turn in events, Ben stood to lose a lot of money.
We still maintained the guards and turned on the flood-
lights at night, but this began to seem a little foolish.
We were guarding something that perhaps no longer
needed guarding. It was costing us a pile of money
and we talked, off and on, of dismissing the guards
and not turning on the lights. But we hesitated to do
it—principally, I think, because doing it would seem
an admission of defeat. As yet, we were not ready to
give up.
The debate on the emigration issue raged on in
Congress. One side charged the proposal meant aban-
donment of the disadvantaged; the other side claimed
it was a move to offer them the advantages of a fresh
start in a new environment not subject to all the
stresses of their present one. Arguments thundered
over the economics of the issue—the cost of giving the
emigrants a fresh start in a new and virgin land as
opposed to the yearly cost of welfare. Welfare recipi-
ents now and then raised voices that were submerged
in the din; no one listened to them. Newspapers pub-
lished Sunday features and TV networks staged specials
explaining and illustrating the situation that would be
found in the Miocene. The capitol was picketed by
contending groups of citizens.
At Willow Bend, a few bands of cultists showed up.
They carried banners and made speeches that favorered
abandonment of the present society and a retreat
into the Miocene, or if not into the Miocene, into any
place at all to get away from the callous injustices

and inequities of the present system. They paraded
back and forth in front of the gate and set up camp
in Ben's parking lot. Herb went out to talk with them.
They didn't stay long. There were no newspapermen
to interview them, no photographers to take their pic-
tures, no crowds to jeer them, no police to hassle
them. So they went away.
The two houses of Congress passed the emigration
bill. The president vetoed it; it was passed over
his veto. But the State Department ban still held.
Then, the next day, the court made its decision.
The ruling went against us. The injunction was denied;
the ban on travel to Mastodonia stood and we were
out of business.

THIRTY-TWO
A day later, the riots broke out. As if on signal
(and perhaps on signal, for we never knew how they
came about), the ghettos flared—in Washington, New
York, Baltimore, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis,
the West Coast, everywhere. Mobs invaded the glitter-
ing downtown business areas and now, unlike the sit-
uation in 1968, it was not the ghettos that burned.
The great plate-glass windows of the downtown stores
were shattered, the stores were looted and fires were
set. Police and, in some cases, the National Guard,
fired on the rioters; the rioters fired back. The placards
that said: give us the miocene; that said: let us
go; that said: we want another chance, lay scat-
tered in the streets, soaked in rain and, at times;
stained with blood.
It went on for five days. The dead, on both sides,
ran into the thousands, and business came to a stand-
still. Then, at the end of the fifth day, the violence
dwindled to a halt. The two sides, the side of law and
order and the side of outraged protest, drew apart.
Slowly, haltingly, fumblingly, the talks began.
At Willow Bend, we were isolated. For the most
part, intercontinental phone lines were out of order.
The television stations, as a rule, continued in opera-
tion, although in a few instances, they, too, were si-
lenced. We had one phone call from Courtney, but
after that we heard nothing more from him. Attempts
to reach him failed. In his one call, he had said that he
was considering the possibility of appealing the court's
action, but there were some situations he would have
to study first.
Night after night, sometimes during the day, we
gathered in Ben's office and watched the television

screen. At all times of the day or night, whenever
there was a new bit of news about the riots, reports
were put out, so that, in effect, television became an
almost continuous news program.
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. Per-
sonally, 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 espe-
cially remiss on this, for I had been the one, from the
very first, who had said the entire proposal was sense-
less. 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 prob-
ably 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 concentrat-

ing 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 net-
works 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.
Goodness, 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 docu-
ments 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 pro-
gram 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 recogni-
tion as an independent state."
I looked across the room at Rila and she was smil-
ing—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, any-
how, 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 chang-
ing once again. I told you how 1 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 sud-
denly, 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, Cat-
face."
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 min-
ute now, the floodlights would turn on automatically

and the homestead would change into a garish night-
mare, 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 wood-
chucks. 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 good-
bye. 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,
damn 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 some-
thing 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 masto-
dons 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 govern-
ment 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 chim-
neys, 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 in-
side 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 con-
scious 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 damn 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 ridicu-
lous 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 engi-
neer 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.