Project Mastodon

'Well, now that this recognition thing has petered out on us,' said Adams, 'maybe we can get down to business.'

'Trouble is,' Cooper answered, 'we spent about the last of our money on the chain saw to cut this wood and on Chuck's trip to Washington. To build a stockade, we need a tractor. We'd kill ourselves if we tried to rassle that many logs bare-handed.'

'Maybe we could catch some of those horses running around out there.'

'Have you ever broken a horse?'

'No, that's one thing I never tried.'

'Me, either. How about you, Chuck?'

'Not me,' said the ex-ambassador extraordinary bluntly.

Cooper squatted down beside the coals of the cooking fire and twirled the spit. Upon the spit were three grouse and half a dozen quail. The huge coffee pot was sending out a nose-tingling aroma. Biscuits were baking in the reflector.

'We've been here six weeks,' he said, 'and we're still living in a tent and cooking on an open fire. We better get busy and get something done.'

'The stockade first,' said Adams, 'and that means a tractor.'

'We could use the helicopter.'

'Do you want to take the chance? That's our getaway. Once something happens to it....'

'I guess not,' Cooper admitted, gulping.

'We could use some of that Point Four aid right now,' commented Adams.

'They threw me out,' said Hudson. 'Everywhere I went, sooner or later they got around to throwing me out. They were real organized about it.'

'Well, we tried,' Adams said.

'And to top it off,' added Hudson, 'I had to go and lose all that film and now we'll have to waste our time taking more of it. Personally, I don't ever want to let another saber-tooth get that close to me while I hold the camera.'

'You didn't have a thing to worry about,' Adams objected. 'Johnny was right there behind you with the gun.'

'Yeah, with the muzzle about a foot from my head when he let go.'

'I stopped him, didn't I?' demanded Cooper.

'With his head right in my lap.'

'Maybe we won't have to take any more pictures,' Adams suggested.

'We'll have to,' Cooper said. 'There are sportsmen up ahead who'd fork over ten thousand bucks easy for two weeks of hunting here. But before we could sell them on it, we'd have to show them movies. That scene with the saber-tooth would cinch it.'

'If it didn't scare them off,' Hudson pointed out. 'The last few feet showed nothing but the inside of his throat.'

Ex-ambassador Hudson looked unhappy. 'I don't like the whole setup. As soon as we bring someone in, the news is sure to leak. And once the word gets out, there'll be guys lying in ambush for us—maybe even nations— scheming to steal the know-how, legally or violently. That's what scares me the most about those films I lost. Someone will find them and they may guess what it's all about, but I'm hoping they either won't believe it or can't manage to trace us.'

'We could swear the hunting parties to secrecy,' said Cooper.

'How could a sportsman keep still about the mounted head of a saber-tooth or a record piece of ivory?' And the same thing would apply to anyone we approached. Some university could raise dough to send a team of scientists back here and a movie company would cough up plenty to use this place as a location for a caveman epic. But it wouldn't be worth a thing to either of them if they couldn't tell about it.

'Now if we could have gotten recognition as a nation, we'd have been all set. We could make our own laws and regulations and be able to enforce them. We could bring in settlers and establish trade. We could exploit our natural resources. It would all be legal and aboveboard. We could tell who we were and where we were and what we had to offer.'

'We aren't licked yet,' said Adams. 'There's a lot that we can do. Those river hills are covered with ginseng. We can each dig a dozen pounds a day. There's good money in the root.'

'Ginseng root,' Cooper said, 'is peanuts. We need big money.'

'Or we could trap,' offered Adams. 'The place is alive with beaver.'

'Have you taken a good look at those beaver? They're about the size of a St. Bernard.'

'All the better. Think how much just one pelt would bring.'

'No dealer would believe that it was beaver. He'd think you were trying to pull a fast one on him. And there are only a few states that allow beaver to be trapped. To sell the pelts—even if you could—you'd have to take out licenses in each of those states.'

'Those mastodon carry a lot of ivory,' said Cooper. 'And if we wanted to go north, we'd find mammoths that would carry even more....'

'And get socked into the jug for ivory smuggling?'

They sat, all three of them, staring at the fire, not finding anything to say.

The moaning complaint of a giant hunting cat came from somewhere up the river.

IV

Hudson lay in his sleeping bag, staring at the sky. It bothered him a lot. There was not one familiar constellation, not one star that he could name with any certainty. This juggling of the stars, he thought, emphasized more than anything else in this ancient land the vast gulf of years which lay between him and the Earth where he had been—or would be—born.

A hundred and fifty thousand years, Adams had said, give or take ten thousand. There just was no way to know. Later on, there might be. A measurement of the stars and a comparison with their positions in the twentieth century might be one way of doing it. But at the moment, any figure could be no more than a guess.

The time machine was not something that could be tested for calibration or performance. As a matter of fact, there was no way to test it. They had not been certain, he remembered, the first time they had used it, that it would really work. There had been no way to find out. When it worked, you knew it worked. And if it hadn't worked, there would have been no way of knowing beforehand that it wouldn't.

Adams had been sure, of course, but that had been because he had absolute reliance in the half- mathematical, half-philosophic concepts he had worked out—concepts that neither Hudson nor Cooper could come close to understanding.

That had always been the way it had been, even when they were kids, with Wes dreaming up the deals that he and Johnny carried out. Back in those days, too, they had used time travel in their play. Out in Johnny's back yard, they had rigged up a time machine out of a wonderful collection of salvaged junk—a wooden crate, an empty five-gallon paint pail, a battered coffee maker, a bunch of discarded copper tubing, a busted steering wheel and other odds and ends. In it, they had 'traveled' back to Indian-before-the-white-man land and mammoth-land and dinosaur-land and the slaughter, he remembered, had been wonderfully appalling.

But, in reality, it had been much different. There was much more to it than gunning down the weird fauna that one found.

And they should have known there would be, for they had talked about it often.

He thought of the bull session back in university and the little, usually silent kid who sat quietly in the corner, a law-school student whose last name had been Pritchard.

And after sitting silently for some time, this Pritchard kid had spoken up: 'If you guys ever do travel in time, you'll run up against more than you bargain for. I don't mean the climate or the terrain or the fauna, but the economics and the politics.'