Our Children's Children (21 page)

“You mean that you used nails!”

“No, that's not what I mean. I mean that thongs were the way that it was done. The Romans ordinarily did not use nails.…”

“You are trying to tell me that the Gospels erred?”

“No, I'm not trying to tell you that. What I am saying is that ordinarily—ordinarily, mind you, perhaps not always—the arms were tied, not nailed. We did some research on it and.…”

“Your research is no concern of mine,” said Billings icily. “What I do care about is that you gave some smart-assed editorial writer the chance to poke fun at us. And even if that had not happened, I think the whole idea stinks. You didn't check with me. How come you didn't check with me?”

“You were busy, Jake. You told me to do my best. You told me I was the man who could come up with ideas and I did come up with ideas.”

“I had this call from Steve Wilson,” Billings said. “He chewed me out. There is no doubt that official Washington—the White House, at least—is solidly against us. When he gets around to it, Wilson will brand us as sensationalists. He brushed us off contemputuously in his press briefing this afternoon. That was before this silly crucifixion business. Next time around, he'll blast us out of the water.”

“But we have a lot of people with us. You go out to the countryside, to the little towns.…”

“Yes, I know. The rednecks. They'll be for us, sure, but how long do you think it is before redneck opinion can have any significant impact? What about the influential pastors in the big city churches? Can you imagine what the Reverend Dr. Angus Windsor will tell his congregation and the newspapers and the world? He's the one who started all of this, but he'll not go along with solemn young men packing crosses through the street and getting crucified on a public square. For years I have tried to conduct my ministry with dignity and now it's been pulled down to the level of street brawling. I have you to thank for this and.…”

“It's not too different,” protested MacDonald, “from the stunts we've used before. Good old circus stuff. Good old show biz. It's what you built the business on.”

“But with restraint.”

“Not too much restraint. Skywriting and parades and miles of billboards.…”

“Legitimate advertising,” said Billings. “Honest advertising. A great American tradition. The mistake you made was to go out in the streets. You don't know about the streets. You ran up against the experts there. These Miocene kids know about the streets. They have been there they have lived there. You had two strikes on you before you started out. What made you think you could compete with them?”

“All right, then, what shall we do? The streets are out, you say. So we pull off the streets. Then what do we do? How do we get attention?”

The Reverend Jake Billings stared at the wall with glassy eyes. “I don't know,” he said. “I purely do not know. I don't think it makes much difference what we do. I think that gurgling noise you hear is our crusade going down the drain.”

43

It was the dog that did it. Bentley Price hadn't had a drink all day. The road was a narrow, winding mountain road, and Bentley, exasperated beyond endurance at what had happened to him, was driving faster than he should. After hours of hunting for it, he had finally found the camp—a very temporary camp by the looks of it, with none of the meticulous neatness of the usual army camp, simply a stopping place in a dense patch of woods beside a stream that came brawling down the valley. Filled with a deep sense of duty done and perseverance paying off, he had slung cameras around his neck and gone plodding toward the largest of the tents and had almost reached it when the colonel had come out to stop his further progress. Who the hell are you, the colonel had asked and where do you think you're going? I am the Global News, Bentley had told him, and I am out here to take some pictures of this monster hunt. I tell the city editor it isn't worth the time, but he disagrees with me and it's no skin off my nose no matter where I'm sent, so leave us get the lead out and do some monster hunting so I can get some pictures.

You're off limits, mister, the colonel had told him. You are way off limits, in more ways than one. I don't know how you got this far. Didn't someone try to stop you? Sure, said Bentley, up the road a ways. A couple of soldier boys. But I pay no attention to them. I never pay attention to someone who tries to stop me. I got work to do and I can't fool around.

And then the colonel had thrown him out of there. He had spoken in a clipped, military voice and had been very icy-eyed. We've got trouble enough, he said, without some damn fool photographer mucking around and screwing up the detail. If you don't leave under your own power, I'll have you escorted out. While he was saying this, Bentley snapped a camera up and took a picture of him. That made the situation even worse, and Bentley, with his usual quick perception, could see his cause had worsened, so had beat a dignified retreat to avoid escort. When he had passed the soldier boys who had tried to stop him they had yelled at him and thumbed their noses. Bentley had slowed down momentarily, debating whether to go back and reason with them, then had thought better of it. They ain't worth the time, he told himself.

Now the dog.

The dog came bursting out of high weeds and brush that grew along the road. His ears were laid back, his tail tucked in and he was kiyodeling in pure, blind panic. The dog was close and the car traveling much too fast. Bentley jerked the wheel. The car veered off the road, smashed through a clump of brush. The tires screamed as Bentley hit the brakes. The nose of the car slammed hard into a huge walnut tree and stopped with a shuddering impact. The left-hand door flew open and Bentley, who held a lofty disdain for such copouts as seat belts, was thrown free. The camera which he wore on a strap around his neck, described a short arc and brought up against his ear, dealing him a blow that made his head ring as if there were a bell inside it. He landed on his back and rolled, wound up on hands and knees. He surged erect and found that he had ended up on the edge of the road.

Standing in the middle of the road was a monster. Bentley knew it was a monster; he had seen two of them only yesterday. But this one was small, no bigger than a Shetland pony. Which did not mean the horror of it was any less.

But Bentley was of different fiber from other men. He did not gulp; his gut did not turn over. His hands came up with swift precision, grabbed the camera firmly, brought it to his eye. The monster was framed in the finder and his finger pressed the button. The camera clicked and as it clicked the monster disappeared.

Bentley lowered the camera and let loose of it. His head still rang from the blow upon the ear. His clothes were torn; a gaping rent in a trouser leg revealed one knobby knee. His right hand was bloody from where his palm had scraped across some gravel. Behind him the car creaked slightly as twisted metal settled slowly into place. The motor pinged and sizzled as water from the broken radiator ran across hot metal.

Off in the distance the still-running dog was yipping frantically. In a tree up the hillside an excited squirrel chattered with machine-gun intensity. The road was empty. A monster had been there. From where he stood, Bentley could see its tracks printed in the dust. But it was no longer there.

Bentley limped out into the road, stared both up and down it. There was nothing on the road.

It was there, said Bentley stubbornly to himself. I had it in the finder. It was there when I shot the picture. It wasn't until the shutter clicked that it disappeared. Doubt assailed him. Had it been there or not when he'd shot the picture? Was it on the film? Had he been robbed of a photo by its disappearance?

Thinking about it, it seemed that it had been there, but he could not be sure.

He turned about and started limping down the road as rapidly as he could. There was one way to find out. He had to get to a phone, he had to somehow get a car. He must get back to Washington.

44

“We have made three contacts with the monsters,” Sandburg said. “There are yet to be results. No one has had a chance to fire at them. They disappear and that's the end of it.”

“You mean,” said Thorton Williams, “that they duck away.…”

“No, I don't mean that,” said the Secretary of Defense. “They just aren't there, is all. The men who saw them swore they didn't move at all. They were there and then they weren't. The observers, all reporting independently, not knowing of the other reports, have been very sure of that. One man could be wrong in his observation; it's possible that two could be. It seems impossible that three observers could err on exactly the same point.”

“Have you, has the military, any theory, any idea of what is going on?”

“None,” said Sandburg. “It must be a new defensive adaptation that they have developed. These creatures, as you all by now must understand, are very much on the defensive. They know they have to survive. For the good of the species, they can't take any chances. Cornered, I suppose that they would fight, but only if they were cornered and there was no way out. Apparently they have come up with something new under this sort of situation. We have talked with Dr. Isaac Wolfe, the refugee biologist who probably knows more about the monsters than any other man, and this business of disappearing is something he has never heard of. He suggests, simply as a guess, that it may be an ability that only the juvenile monsters have. A sort of juvenile defense mechanism. It may have gone on unobserved up in the future because the people up there had little opportunity to observe the juveniles; they had their hands full fighting off the adult monsters.”

“How are you doing with getting men into the area?” asked the President.

“I haven't any figures,” said Sandburg, “but we're piling them in as fast as we can get them there. The refugee camps have formed their own caretaking committees and that takes off some of the pressure, frees some troops. Agriculture and Welfare are taking over a lot of the transport that is needed to get food and other necessities into the camps and that, as well, has freed military personnel. We expect the first overseas transport planes to begin landing sometime tonight and that will give us more men.”

“Morozov was in this morning,” said Williams, “with an offer to supply us men. In fact, he rather insisted upon it. We, of course, rejected the offer. But it does raise a point. Should we, perhaps, ask for some assistance from Canada, perhaps Mexico, maybe Britain, France, Germany—others of our friends?”

“Possibly we could use some of their forces,” said Sandburg. “I'd like to talk with the Chiefs of Staff and get their reactions. What we need, and haven't been able to manage, are some rather substantial forces, both north and south—down in Georgia, say, and in upstate New York. We should try to seal off the monsters' spread, if they are spreading, and I suppose that is their intention. If we can contain them, we can handle them.”

“If they stand still,” said the President.

“That is right,” said Sandburg. “If they stand still.”

“Maybe we should move on to something else,” suggested the President. “Reilly, I think you have something to report.”

“I'm still not too solid on it yet,” said Reilly Douglas, “but it is a matter that should be discussed. Frankly, I am inclined to think there may be a rather tricky legal question involved and I've had no chance to go into that aspect of it. Clinton Chapman came to see me last night. I think most of you know Clint.”

He looked around the table. Many of the men nodded their heads.

“He came to me,” said Douglas, “and since then has phoned three or four times and we had lunch today. I suppose some of you know that we were roommates at Harvard and have been friends ever since. I suppose that's why he contacted me. On his first approach he proposed that he, himself, would take over the building of the tunnels, financing the cost with no federal funds involved. In return he would continue in ownership of them once the future people had been transported back to the Miocene and would be licensed to operate them. Since then.…”

“Reilly,” Williams interrupted, “I can't quite understand why anyone would want to own them. What in the world could be done with them? The time force, or whatever it is, as I understand it, operates in only one direction—into the past.”

Douglas shook his head. “Clint won't buy that. He has talked with his research men—and the research staff he has is probably one of the best in the world—and they have assured him that if there is such a thing as time travel, it can be made to operate in two directions—both into the past and futureward. As a matter of fact, they told him it would seem easier to operate it future-ward than into the past because time's natural flow is future-ward.”

Williams blew out a gusty breath. “I don't know,” he said. “It has a dirty sound to it. Could we conscientiously turn over two-way time travel, if two-way time travel is possible, to any one man or any group of men? Think of the ways it could be used.…”

“I talked to Clint about this at lunch,” said Douglas. “I explained to him that any such operation, if it were possible, would have to be very strictly controlled. Commissions would have to be set up to formulate a time travel code, Congress would have to legislate. Not only that, but the code and the legislation would have to be worldwide; there would have to be some international agreement, and you can imagine how long that might take. Clint agreed to all of this, said he realized it would be necessary. The man is quite obsessed with the idea. As an old friend, I tried to talk him out of it, but he still insists he wants to go ahead. If he is allowed to do it, that is. At first he planned to finance it on his own, but apparently is beginning to realize the kind of money that would be involved. As I understand it, he is now very quietly trying to put together a consortium to take over the project.”