Twenty percent, perhaps.”
“If you want to go that route,” said Courtney, “fifty percent of your gross. No less. We’d rather operate on a license fee. It would be a cleaner deal.”
I had been sitting there, listening to all of this, and my head was spinning just a little. You can talk about a million dollars and it doesn’t mean too much; it’s just a lot of figures. But when it’s your own million bucks, that’s a different thing.
I walked down the ridge. I’m not sure the others even knew I had left. Bowser crawled out from under the house and trailed after me. There was no sign of Hiram and I was worried about him. I had told him to come right back, and still there was no sign of him.
Stiffy was ambling slowly across the valley, heading for the river, perhaps to get a drink, but Hiram wasn’t with him. I stood on the ridge and looked everywhere.
There was no sign of him.
I heard a sound behind me. It was Ben. His boots made a hissing sound as he walked through the foot-high grass. He came and stood beside me and together we stared off across the valley. Far down it there were a lot of moving dots — perhaps mastodons or bison.
“Ben,” I asked, “how much is a million dollars?”
“It’s an awful lot of cash,” said Ben.
“I can’t get it straight in my mind,” I said, “that back there they are talking about a million and perhaps more than that.”
“Neither can I,” said Ben.
“But you’re a banker, Ben.”
“I’m still a country boy,” said Ben. “So are you.
That’s why we can’t understand.”
“Country boy,” I said, “we’ve come a long way since we roamed these hills together.”
“In just the last few weeks,” said Ben. “You’re worried, Asa. What is troubling you?”
“Hiram,” I told him. “He was supposed to come straight back once he led Stiffy out of here.”
“Stiffy?”
“Stiffy is the mastodon.”
“He’ll be back,” said Ben. “He’s just found a woodchuck.”
“Don’t you realize,” I asked him, “that if anything were to happen to Hiram, we’d be out of business?”
“Sure, I know,” said Ben, “but there’ll nothing happen to him. He’ll get along all right. He’s half wild animal himself.”
We stood and looked a while longer and saw nothing of Hiram.
Finally Ben said, “I’m going back and see how they’re coming.”
“You go along,” I said. “I’m going to find Hiram.”
An hour later I found him, coming out of the crab-apple grove below the house.
“Where the hell have you been?” I asked.
“I was having a good long talk with Catface, Mr.
Steele. With all the exploring we been doing for the last few days, I’ve been neglecting him. I was afraid he would get lonesome.”
“And had he gotten lonesome?”
“No,” said Hiram. “No, he said he hadn’t. But he’s anxious to get to work. He wants to lay out some time roads. He wonders why it’s taking us so long.”
“Hiram,” I said, “I want to talk with you. Maybe you don’t realize it, but you’re the one important person in this entire setup; you’re the only one who can talk with Catface.”
“Bowser can talk with Catface.”
“All right. Maybe he can. But that does me no good.
I can’t talk to Bowser.”
I laid out the situation for him. I explained most carefully. I practically drew him diagrams.
He promised to do better.
TWENTY-THREE
When Hiram and I got back to the house, Rila and Courtney were sitting at the table. The others were gone; so was one of the cars.
“Ben took the others for a drive,” said Rila. “We wondered what happened to you.”
“I was tracking Hiram down,” I said.
“I stayed here,” said Courtney, “because there are couple of things I want to talk about with you two.”
“The IRS?” I asked.
“No, not the IRS. They won’t start stirring around until they get wind of the deal with Safari.”
“How did the negotiations turn out?” I asked. “I suppose the deal was made.”
“It didn’t take too long,” said Courtney. “They’re hurting and we had them across the barrel.”
“A million for the license,” said Rila, “and a quarter-million for each time road. They want four time roads. That’s two million, Asa.”.
“For one year,” said Courtney. “They don’t know yet, but next year the price goes up. By that time, we’ll have them hooked.”
“And this is just a start,” said Rila.
“That’s what I wanted to talk with you about,” said Courtney. “Ben told you about the church group?”
“Yes,” I said. “Interested in the time of Mohammud.”
“A couple of them came to see me the other day,” he said. “Ben had told them to talk with me. Damned I can figure them. I don’t know what they want.
They’re interested, but they wouldn’t open up. I don’t know if we should waste time on them.”
“I don’t like it,” I said. “The whole thing could get sticky. To start with, we should stay away from anything controversial. Pay some attention to our image.
Not create an issue the country, or the world, can choose up sides on.”
“I think the same,” said Rila. “There is not apt to be too much money in it, anyhow, and it could be a headache.”
“I feel pretty much the same,” said Courtney.
“They’ll be back to see me. I’ll try to cool them off.
There’s someone else who has me worried. Senator Abel Freemore. He’s from Nebraska or Kansas, I can never remember which. He’s been trying to set up an appointment with me and my secretary has been fending him off. But you can fend off a United States senator for only so long. One of these days, I’ll have to find out what he wants.”
“You have no idea?” Rila asked.
“None at all. He’s a big agricultural man, of course.
Hell-bent for the poor down-trodden farmer. But that’s not all — he’s three kinds of bleeding heart. Whatever he has in mind, I’m afraid it’s nothing good.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Not really. It’s too early. Everyone is sitting back.
Intrigued, of course, but still filled with a natural skepticism. Waiting to see what’s going to happen.
When the first safari brings out a dinosaur, then is when everything will break. But until then, mostly all that we will get are opportunists and con artists. There’s that mining engineer who wants to go out into the Black Hills country and skim off the easy gold. No money, but he’s willing to give us half of what he finds — more likely, half of what we force him to admit to. I sort of like him. He’s an engaging sort of buccaneer. Utterly without principle and figures everyone else is the same. What was that idea you had, Rila, of going to South Africa and picking up all the easy diamonds off the ground?”
Rila said, “Yes, I admit to the idea. It probably wouldn’t work. Maybe there never were a lot of diamonds waiting to be picked up. But it had a nice sound to it.”
“This safari business,” said Courtney, “is apt to be one of the most straightforward, least complicated deals that we can make. An easy one to handle. No tricky angles. What bothers me is that none of your scientific or intellectual types have crawled out of the wood-work. Wanting to study the techniques and motives of the prehistoric cave painters or to observe the Neanderthalers at work and play or to sit in on Marathon or Waterloo.”