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 become 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 newsmen 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 newspapers, 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
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 mystified. 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 simplemindedness. 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 tyrannosaur, plus several triceratops, but also three crested hadrosaurs and a
It shouldn’t have been in our part of the Cretaceous; it was supposed to have died out in the early Cretaceous 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. Despite 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 remember who he was and it seemed to me I had been told that he was some aristocratic bird from somewhere 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.
