“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 tyrannosaurs, 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 overdue.”
“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 protect 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. Expensive, 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 promised 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 blundered 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 concern 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 contractor 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 significance 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 of 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 pattern 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 headquarters. 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 surprised at nothing.
About this time, too, I realized that the little lipping 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.
