Things had changed so much.”
“You didn’t like the changes?”
“I’m not sure. I should, I know. There’s money now and there never was before. We can travel in time now and no one ever did that. I suppose it was Hiram and the realization of how thin we run. …”
She took one of my hands in hers. “I know,” she said. “I know.”
“You mean you, too?”
She shook her head. “No, Asa. No, not me. I’m the pushy bitch, remember. But you, I know how you might feel. I feel just slightly guilty. I pushed you into it.”
“1 was easy to push,” I said. “Don’t blame yourself. There is nothing against which to assess any blame. The thing is, I loved that farm. When I saw it the other day, I knew I’d lost it.”
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said.
We walked hand in hand down the ridge and all around us was the peace of Mastodonia. Off in the hills, a whippoorwill struck up his chugging cry and we stopped, enchanted. It was the first time here that we’d heard a whippoorwill. Never for a moment had I expected to hear one; I had illogically assumed there’d be no whippoorwills. But hearing the cry, I knew it as the sound of home, bringing back to me memories of years plunged deep in summer with the scent of freshly mown hay blowing from a new-cut field and the tinkling of cow bells as the herd filed out to pasture once the milking had been done. As I listened,I felt a strange contentment flooding over me.
We went back to the mobile home and called Bowser in. He went stalking into Hiram’s room. For a time we heard him pawing at the blanket on the floor, making his bed before he lay down to sleep. In the kitchen, I fixed up a pitcher of manhattans and took them into the living room. We sat drinking, relaxed and civilized.
“Do you remember that day when I appeared?”
asked Rila, “After twenty years, suddenly here I was.”
I nodded. I did remember. 1 think that I remembered every minute of it.
“I asked myself all the time I was driving to Willow Bend,” she said, “if the time might ever come when I might regret coming here. From time to time since then, I’ve asked myself the question. Asa, I want to tell you now I have never regretted it. I don’t ask the question any more. 1 don’t mean the time travel and the fun and money. I mean you. I’ve never regretted coming back to you.”
I put down my glass and went to where she was sitting on the davenport. I sat down beside her and took her in my arms. We sat for a long time, like a pair of silly kids who suddenly have discovered they love one another I was thankful she had told me, and I thought maybe I should tell her so, but there were no words that I could put together to tell her how I felt. I told her, instead, what was in my heart. “I love you, Rila.
I think I always have, from the first day that I saw you.”
The next day, shortly after noon, Courtney came driving in, with a car that Ben had loaned him. With him was Senator Abel Freemore.
“I deliver him into your hands,” said Courtney.
“The old so-and-so won’t talk with me. He has to talk with you. He must go to the horse’s mouth. Also, the IRS has come to life; they’ve been in to see me. But I don’t think the senator’s business with you has anything to do with them.”
“Not at all,” said the senator. “Like all sensible men, I keep my distance from them.”
He was a little wisp of a man with a farmer’s face.
His hair was white and skimpy; his hands and face were weather-beaten. He stood small beside the car and looked around.
“So this is Mastodonia,” he said. “Courtney has been telling me of it. When are you going to start subdividing it?”
“We aren’t going to,” said Rila sharply. “We don’t own it.”
“I should tell you,” said Courtney, speaking to us, “that Safari will be coming in tomorrow. Ben phoned several days ago to say the roads are open. I’m glad you managed it.”
“No sweat,” I said.
“I’d like to stick around and witness the first safari going in. So would the senator. Do you have the room to put us up for the night?”
“We have two rooms,” said Rila. “You are welcome.
One of you will have to let Bowser sleep in the same room with you.”
“Would there be a chance of going in with them?”
asked the senator. “Just for a look around. A quick look around, then I’d come right back.”
“That would be up to the Safari people,” I said.
“You can talk with whoever is in charge.”
The senator looked at Courtney. “How about you?”
he asked. “If they allow us, would you go along?”
“I don’t know,” said Courtney. “I saw the film.
There are bloodthirsty brutes back there. I’d have to think on it.”
The senator stalked around for a while, looking things over, then gravitated toward the table. Rila had brought out coffee. The senator, sitting down, held out a cup. “Thank you, my dear,” he said to Rila when she poured. “I’m an old farm boy. I prize a cup of coffee.”
The rest of us joined him around the table and Rila filled cups for us.
“I suppose,” said Freemore, “that I might as well get said the things I want to say. It’s not a proposition.
Nothing very weighty. Nothing to do with the Senate or the government. Just some questions that keep bouncing in my mind.”
The senator spilled a few drops of coffee on the table, then wiped it off with the palm of his hand, taking his time about it.
“I fear,” he said, “you may think me a foolish old man, jumping in fright at shadows. But there is a problem that has caused me many sleepless nights. There are two problems, actually. Now, how should I put this in the best possible light, in the least foolish way?”
He paused as if to ponder. He had no need to ponder, I was sure. It was just an oratorical trick. Through the years, he had declaimed too often on the Senate floor.
“Simply put,” he said, “we do have two overriding problems: the state of agriculture in the world and the great masses of poverty-stricken people, many of them in our own country. The disadvantaged, the unemployed, the bottom of the social heap.
“So far, we have been able to grow enough food to feed all the people of the Earth. When people starve.. it is a matter of poor distribution, not a problem of supply. But I fear the day may not be too distant when the supply, as well, will fail. Meteorologists tell us, and very convincingly, I must say, that at least the northern hemisphere and perhaps the entire world as well is entering upon a colder, drier cycle. We’ve had it good, they tell us, for sixty years or more — the most favorable weather the world has known for hundreds of years. Now we are beginning to experience droughts.
Vast areas of our productive croplands are getting little rain and the climate is growing colder. If this cold trend continues, the growing season will be shortened. All this spells less food. If food production is cut even marginally, say ten percent or so for several years, there are areas that could face mass starvation.
During our years of unparalleled growing weather, the world has made great social and economic advances, but the population has also grown, with no prospect that the growth can be slowed, so that in only a few favored areas has the economic boom operated to alleviate human misery.
“You can see, no doubt, what I am driving at. Your mind is leaping ahead of my words. With the advent of time travel, a concept I was, at first, reluctant to accept, we now have the capability of opening up vast new agricultural areas that would more than compensate for the drop in food productivity that will come about if the climate deteriorates as much as our meteorologists seem to think it will.