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 possible 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 Catface. “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 exploratory 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, putting out his trunk to sniff in our direction, flapping his ears at us. I knew something had to be done; otherwise, he’d be right in our laps. While Rila held a rife covering me, I walked up to him, going slowly, shaking 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 companionably. 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 matter 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 yourself. 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 listened,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, relaxed 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 remembered 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 sitting 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 anything 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
