“The other one, however, still has a head,” said Ben. “We ought to chop it off and haul it back. Just as proof.”
“We have the proof,” I said. “Rila has the proof.”
“I suppose so,” said Ben, “but it’s a shame. If you ever wanted to part with it, that head, mounted, would bring a lot of money.”
“It probably weighs several hundred pounds,” I pointed out.
“The two of us …”
“No,” I said. “We have a couple of miles or more to go to find the stakes. We’d better start getting out of here.”
“I don’t see why.”
I gestured at the two dead dinosaurs. “Fifteen tons of meat,” I said. “All the scavengers will start flocking in. Every stinking meat-eater from miles around.
By nightfall, their skeletons will be picked clean. I want to be out of here before they start arriving.”
“It would give us some good film.”
I said to Rila, “You have enough film? You are satisfied?”
She nodded. “I never missed a lick — the killing of those two beasts. If that doesn’t convince Safari, Inc., nothing ever will.”
“All right,” I said, in a tone of voice that told them I meant it, “we’re heading out for home.”
“You’re chicken,” Ben told me.
“So, I’m chicken. We have what we came for.
We’re leaving while we can.”
“I really think,” said Rila, “we should leave. I’m scared down to my toenails.”
SEVENTEEN
We had returned from the Cretaceous early Monday morning. It was Friday. A great deal had been going on in those four days. A start had been made on building the fence around the forty — high steel posts set in concrete, heavy wire fencing installed upon them and welded into place. Trenches were being dug along the interior perimeter of the fence to lay electric cable for the floodlights. Foundations had been poured for the administration building and lumber was being delivered. Ben’s motel was going up. Rila had left the day before for New York with the film that she had taken. Courtney McCallahan, the Washington attorney, was flying into New York to sit in with Safari, Inc., on the showing of the films. The films were to be developed in Safari’s laboratory, making it unnecessary to take them outside the organization.
I had worked my tail off to get things going, with a lot of help from Ben. He had made a lot of the necessary contacts, had twisted arms and pleaded, had scrounged up gangs of workmen to turn loose on the projects. A lot of the men were no more than common laborers — farm boys, mostly — but Ben had found some competent foremen to place in charge as well, and things seemed to be going well.
“The idea,” he had said, “is to get started and get the fence and administration building finished as soon as possible, before too many people begin asking questions. Once we get the fence up, they can ask all the questions that they want and, behind the fence, we can thumb our noses at them.”
“But, Ben,” I had protested, “you have things to do yourself. You have your motel to be built and the bank to run. You have no direct interest in this deal.”
“You’re borrowing a lot of money from me and the bank is earning interest,” he’d said. “You gave me an edge on starting the motel and I’ve been doing a lot of other things besides. I’ve bought up every acre around here that is loose. I picked up that farm to the east of you just the other day. Old Jake Kolb stuck me for more than he thought that it was worth, figured I was a sucker, buying it. What he doesn’t know is that it’ll be worth ten times more than I paid for it once your business here gets started. And you took me on that hunting trip after dinosaurs. I wouldn’t have missed that for the world. I would have paid you to take me on it. And I figure that before I’m through with it, you’ll let me in for a small percentage of this deal of yours.”
“Let us get the business started first,” I’d said. “The whole thing may fall into a heap.”
“Hell,” he’d said, “I don’t see how it can. This is the biggest thing that ever happened. Everyone, the whole world, will go mad over it. You’ll have more business than you can handle. You just hang loose.
You keep an eye on things. If you need help, reach for the phone. I tell you, boy, the two of us have it made.”
I was sitting in the kitchen talking with Hiram. The two of us were having a beer. It was the first sitting time I’d had since it all had started. I sat there, drinking my beer, feeling guilty at not doing anything, racking my brain to figure out if there was something that I should be doing.
“Catface,” said Hiram, “is excited about what is going on. He asked about the fence and I tried to explain it to him. I told him once it was finished, he could make a lot of time holes and he was pleased at that. He is anxious to get started.”
“But he could make time holes anytime he wanted.
He could have been doing it all along. There was not a thing to stop him.”
“It seems, Mr. Steele, that he can’t make time holes for just the fun of it. They have to be used or they aren’t any good. He made a few for Bowser, but there wasn’t much satisfaction in that.”
“No, I don’t suppose there would be. Although Bowser had a lot of fun with them. He used one of them to bring home the dinosaur bones.”
I went to the refrigerator to get another beer.
“You want one?” I asked Hiram.
“No, thank you, Mr. Steele. I don’t really like the stuff. I just drink it to be sociable.”
“I asked you to talk with Catface about how big the time holes can be made. The Safari people will probably want to take in some trucks.”
“He says it ain’t no problem. He says the holes are big enough to take anything at all.”
“Did he close the one we used? I’d hate to have some of those dinosaurs stumbling through.”
“He closed it,” Hiram said, “right after you got back. It’s been closed since then.”
“Well, that is fine,” I said and I went on drinking, beer. It was good just to be sitting there.
Footsteps sounded on the steps outside and there was a knocking at the door.
“Come on in,” I yelled.
It was Herb Livingston.
“Grab a chair,” I said. “I’ll get a beer for you.”
Hiram got up. “Me and Bowser will go and lock around outside.”
“That’s all right,” I said, “but don’t move off the place. I may need you later on.”
Bowser got up from his corner and followed Hiram out. Herb pulled the tab on the beer can and tossed it in the wastebasket.
“Asa,” he said, “you’re holding out on me.”
“Not you alone,” I said. “I’m holding out on everyone.”
“Something’s going on,” Herb said. “And I want to know about it. The Willow Bend Record may not be the world’s greatest newspaper, but it’s the only one we have here, and for fifteen years, I have told the people what is happening.”
“Now hold up, Herb,” I said. “I’m not going to tell you and you can yell at me and pound the table and I still won’t tell you.”
“Why not?” he demanded. “We were boys together. We’ve known one another for years. You and me and Ben and Larry and the rest of them. Ben knows. You have told Ben something.”
“Ask Ben, then.”
“He won’t tell me anything, either. He says any information has to come from you. He gave out to start with, about this business of the fence, that he was putting it up for someone who was going into mink farming. But I know you aren’t going into mink farming. So the reason is something else. Someone else had the idea you found a crashed spaceship in that old sinkhole. One that crashed a thousand years ago. Is that what this is all about?”