looked around.
“So this is Mastodonia,” he said. “Courtney has been telling me of it. When are you going to start subdividing 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, taking 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 problem 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 ponder, 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 unemployed, 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 shortened. 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 alleviate 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 compensate for the drop in food productivity that will come about if the climate deteriorates as much as our meteorologists 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 themselves a better life. I am painfully aware that many of these people would not make good pioneers. Their poverty and dependence, their bitterness toward society, 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 economic 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 feeling that it should be viewed as a public utility, subject to rules and regulations. But, by operating it from your so-called Mastodonia, you appear to have effectively 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 cooperation 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 forcing 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 Associates 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 commitment.”
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 Mastodonia?”
