He looked calmer, and his eyes shone with a hunter’s instinct. “That town, those guys with the planes and choppers and ships. We’re talking thousands of people. That would take a while, if you were doing it in secret.”
“Yah, you betcha,” Tom said, feeling his way along the implications of what he’d seen. “And that’s more evidence it’s not time travelers or aliens from another dimension—or even humans from an alternate history themselves.”
“How so?”
“They wouldn’t be talking English, or having garden parties, or using Black Hawks or any of that stuff. Well,” he conceded, “they might if they came from a history a lot like ours, branching off fairly recently—but if they have, ah, hell, call it cross-time-line travel, then they should have a technology a lot more advanced than ours, because there’s nothing in our science that more than hints at it. From the evidence, I’d say it’s some bunch of people from here, here and now, who learned how to get over there a while ago. Learned how to do it once, with only one… machine or passageway or whatever.”
Tully snapped his fingers. “Gold,” he said. Tom looked at him. “Brother, you are a pure-minded soul. What’s the first thing you think of when the words California and history come together?”
“The Gold Rush, by Jesus,” Tom said. “The days of old, the days of gold, the days of ’forty-nine.”
Tully nodded, smiling a smug smile; evidently his natural spirits were returning. “Hell, half the towns in the Mother Lode country get more gold out of the rootin’-tootin’ ’forty-niner tourist stuff than they ever got out of the ground,” he said. “So say you’re Mr. X—must have been a long time ago to build up all that stuff we saw on the disk—and you find out, somehow, that you can nip from here over to a California where ‘wealth’ means ‘acorns.’ What do you do? Call in our beloved Feds and have them take it all? You might, because you’re such a goddamned Boy Scout. Hell, I might, after wrestling with my conscience and wiping my sweaty palms. But how many would just get themselves a pan and a pick and a mule and head for the goldfields?”
Tom nodded, rubbing a big hand over his face. “And you’d want to recruit some help, too—you’d need a base over there, and support, logistics. Christ, though, what a racket, if you could keep it secret!”
Tully snapped his fingers again. “Two sets of ’em,” he said. “Not one bunch using this other universe, two—one working against the other. That’s why our busts keep getting bombed and the people we want to arrest turn up dead. What would be your priority, if you were Mr. X?”
“Keeping it secret,” Tom said. “That is, assuming I was the Mr. X sort of perp.”
“Yeah, but this operation’s big and it’s been going on for a while. At a guess, at least twenty, thirty years, maybe more. By now there’s thousands and thousands involved. From the look of it, there are tens of thousands of people living over there—you could see farming country off to the south of what should be Berkeley, and there were those fishing boats, and a couple of good-sized towns. So what happens when there are thousands involved in something like that?”
“Someone gets greedy,” Tom whispered. “Someone wants to knock over the apple cart so he can get a bigger share than the big bosses are giving him.”
“Right, partner. So we’ve got this bunch peddling stuff to the Russians, and we’ve got some sort of cleanup squad going around shooting and burning the evidence and trying to shut the whole thing down before it blows up. I’d guess the ones dealing with the Russians are doing it on the quiet, that they’re smugglers—maybe with a bigger agenda, but not out in the open over there, not now.”
“Yah,” Tom said slowly, nodding. “But there’s one thing that bothers me. The lion.”
“There were lions around here once,” Tully said. He had a fair grasp on wildlife biology and ecology, but he wasn’t as well-read in the subject as Christiansen.
“Right, but it was Felix atrox, the Plains lion—bigger than African lions, nearly as big as a horse. And those were modern bison—they evolved from a much bigger breed after the Indians got here and killed off the megafauna, the giant sloths and antelope and suchlike. And the dire wolves and saber-tooths and lions that ate ’em died off when their prey species went. Back before humans arrived, the Americas were more like Africa: lions, saber-toothed tigers, cheetahs—which is the reason pronghorn antelope are so fast; the slow ones ended up as cheetah food—and there were mammoths and mastodons in place of elephants, dozens of types of big grazing animals, you name it. That’s what condors evolved to scavenge. There was a bit of an overlap between Paleo-Indians and lions and horses, but they weren’t riding the horses or using bows or wheeled carts. They went through two continents with javelins and throwing sticks.”
Tully looked interested. “Hey, then how come we human types wiped out all that stuff here, and not in Africa?”
“Because African animals had two million years to learn how to deal with us—the usual evolutionary arms race. Places like the Americas, or Australia, got fully modern humans unleashed on animals with no genetic preparation, and back around the end of the Ice Age the humans were specialist big-game hunters. The big, tasty, easy-to-catch beasts got wiped out in a blitzkrieg of barbecues. Back to the topic, Roy.”
“OK,” Tully said, shaking his head. “So the, ummm, Mr. X gang, they must have introduced lions.”
“Probably a lot of other stuff, too, God damn them. They don’t seem to have much compunction about letting exotic species loose.”
Tully nodded. “OK, and probably they did that from somewhere around here—I mean around their Bay Area. From the look of things, that’s where this Mr. X got started, and where his operation’s still centered.”
“We can’t be sure of that—let’s not get too in love with our assumptions. But it does look that way—”
He stopped, appalled, grunting as a sudden pain twisted his gut. Tully reached out, alarmed; Tom ground his right fist into his left hand, the skin around his lips going white with the force of his anger.
“Jesus Christ, I’ve been played for a sucker. Adrienne.”
“How do you figure that?” Tully said.
“The bunch she works for, Pacific Open Landscapes League. Son of a bitch. Back in the fifties—they had a different name then—they had an arrangement for importing animals with the San Diego Zoo. Lions, tigers, elephants, rhinos, the whole menagerie. Why? Who the hell knows? Maybe Mr. X likes big-game hunting. And both those groups were—are—tied really tight with Rolfe Mining and Minerals, run by—guess who?—Adrienne Rolfe’s father and grandfather. A company that got its start in the later forties, developing gold mines in the Far East and the Congo.”
“Gold mines,” Tully said, shaking his head with the reluctant admiration a policeman develops for a really good scam. “You just mix the gold you’re bringing in from a goddamned alternate world together with what you’re getting out of the real mines here and now, in countries where you can fake invoices easily by greasing a few palms. Who’s going to notice? You’re paying your taxes on the full amount—the only thing our cops and IRS and customs inspectors look for is people reporting less than what they’re actually bringing in.”
“And with the gold you buy guns and trucks and planes—”
“And anything else you want,” Tully finished for him. “Dredges. Lions so you can go on safari… hey, that means they probably can’t get around all that much over there, or they’d just go to Africa for their big cats.”