“We have to have a second man,” she said. “I have no idea what it might be like in dinosaur country, but…”
“Neither do I,” I said. “It could be pretty awful It could be fairly safe. There’d be a lot of herbivores, all fairly peaceful, I’d imagine. But there’d be some meat-eaters. I have no idea how thick they might be, nor how pugnacious.”
“I’d like to get some footage of at least a couple of the more ferocious ones. That would set up the safari outfit. I have no idea what we can squeeze out of them, but I’d guess an awful lot. After all, how much would a true, red-blooded, dyed-in-the-wool sportsman be willing to pay to be the first man to shoot a ravening, bloodthirsty dinosaur?”
We reached the escalator going down to the baggage area.
“Give me your check and I’ll pick up the stuff,” I said.
She opened her purse and took out her ticket envelope. “We’d better arrange for some help,” she said, handing it to me. “There’s more than we can carry.”
“The two guns,” I said.
“And the movie stuff.”
“I’ll get some help,” I said.
“The whole trouble,” she explained, “was that I couldn’t tell them about some machine — a time-travel machine. If I could have told them we’d developed a machine, they’d have been more able to believe me.
We place so much trust in machines; they are magic to us. If I could have outlined some ridiculous theory and spouted some equations at them, they would have been impressed. But I couldn’t do that. To tell them about Catface would have only made matters worse.
I simply told them that we had developed a technique for traveling in time, hoping that when I mentioned technique they would presuppose a machine. But it didn’t seem to have the right effect. They asked me about a machine anyhow, and it floored them when I had to tell them there was no machine.”
“With no machine,” I said, “that’s asking them to accept a lot on faith.”
“Asa, when we go back to get our film, where shall we go?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said, “and I can’t be certain. The late Jurassic, maybe, or the early Cretaceous. In either of those periods, you’d be apt to find a greater diversity of forms, though we can’t be sure. The fossil record would seem to indicate those two times, but the fossil record is only what we’ve found. We’ve probably missed a lot. We make it sound as if we know much more than we do. Actually, we’ve found only bits and pieces; we have no clear picture.
But if we went to the early Cretaceous, we’d probably miss the one dinosaur our white hunters are most interested in, old Tyrannosaurus rex. …”
“They mentioned him,” said Rila.
“Rex was a latecomer,” I said, “or we think he was.
There may have been bigger and more vicious ones than him that never had the luck to have their fossils found. In any case, it would be nothing short of insanity to go up against him. Eighteen feet tall, a total length of fifty feet, weighing eight tons or more and filled with a senseless hunting instinct. We don’t know how many of him there may be. Perhaps not many.
You might have to hunt to find him. Large as he was, he probably required a territory measuring many square miles to make no more than a bare living.”
“We can figure it out later,” Rila said.
FIFTEEN
Late that afternoon, I phoned Ben.
“You want to get started on that motel?” I asked him.
“You’ve got it, then,” said Ben. “It’s all set.
You’ve found what you were after.”
“We’re fairly close,” I said. “We are on the way.
Rila and I would like to talk with you. Could you drop by? It would be more private that way.”
“It so happens that I’ve just finished for the day.
I’ll be right over.”
I hung up and said to Rila, “I don’t like this business. Ben probably will be all right; after all, he wants to get an early jump on this motel business, and he probably has some other deals in mind as well. But I have a queasy feeling. It’s too early to take someone into our confidence.”
“You can’t keep the thing under wraps much longer,” she said. “As soon as you start installing the fence, people will know something is going on. You don’t put a ten-foot fence around forty acres just for the fun of it. And we need Ben, or someone else, to carry that second gun. We’ve already decided it’s insanity to go back to face dinosaurs with only one gun.
You said Ben is the man you want.”
“He’s the best I know. He’s a hunter. He knows how to handle guns. He’s big and strong and tough and he wouldn’t panic in a tight situation. But this whole thing could backfire, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed.”
I opened up a cupboard door and took down a bottle, setting it on the kitchen table. I found three glasses; I made sure that there was ice.
“You’re going to entertain him out here at the kitchen table?” Rila asked.
“Hell, he wouldn’t know how to act if we sat down in the living room. It would be too formal; it would spook him. Here he’ll be comfortable.”
“If that’s the case,” she said, “I’m all for it. I like it myself. A tavern atmosphere.”
Feet thumped outside on the walk, coming up to the kitchen door.
“It didn’t take him long,” said Rila.
“Ben’s anxious,” I said. “He’s smelling money.”
I opened the door and Ben came in. He had the sort of look a dog has on its face when it smells a rabbit.
“You have it then?” he asked.
“Ben,” I said, “sit down. We have business to discuss.”
Drinks poured, we sat around the table.
“Asa, what you got in mind?” asked Ben.
“First of all,” I said, “I have a confession to make.
I lied to you the other day. Or halfway lied. I told you only part of the truth and not the important part.”
“You mean there isn’t any spaceship?”
“Oh, there’s a spaceship, all right.”
“Then what is this all about — this half-truth business?”
“What it means is that the spaceship is only part of it, a small part of it. The important thing is that we have found how to travel into time. Into the past and maybe even into the future. We never asked about the future. We were so excited about it, that we never thought to ask.”
“Ask who?” Ben had a slack-jawed look, as if someone had clobbered him with something heavy.
“Perhaps we’d better start at the beginning,” said Rila, “and tell him all of it, the way it happened.
These questions and answers aren’t getting anywhere.”
Ben emptied his glass in a gulp and reached for the bottle.
“Yeah,” he said. “You go ahead and tell me.”
He was believing none of it.
I said to Rila, “You tell him. I can’t afford to take the time. I’ve fallen a long ways behind in my drinking.”
She told the story precisely and economically, without the use of an extra word, from the time I had bought the farm up to this very moment, including her interviews in Washington and New York.
During all the time that she was talking, Ben didn’t say a word. He just sat there, glassy-eyed. Even for a time after she had finished, he still sat in silence. Then, finally, he stirred. “There’s one thing about it,” he said, “that beats me. You say Hiram can talk with this Catface thing. Does that mean he can really talk with Bowser?”
“We don’t know,” said Rila.
He shook his head. “What you’re saying is mighty hard to swallow. There ain’t no way to go back into the past.”