Our Children's Children (22 page)

Sandburg frowned. “I would say no on impulse. Time travel would have to be studied closely. It's something we've never thought seriously of before. We'd have to think it through.”

“It could have military applications,” said Williams. “I'm not just sure what they would be.”

“International agreements, with appropriate safeguards, would have to be set up to keep it from being used militarily,” said the President. “And if these agreements should fail at some time in the future, I can't see that it would make much difference who held the license for time travel. National needs would always take precedence. No matter how it goes, time travel is something that we're stuck with. It's something we have to face. We have to make the best of it.”

“You favor Clint's proposal, Mr. President?” Douglas asked in some surprise. “When I talked with you.…”

“I wouldn't go so far as to say I favored it,” said the President. “But under the situation we face, it seems to me we should consider all possibilities or proposals. We are going to be hard pressed to find the kind of money or credit that is needed to build the tunnels. Not only us, but the world. Perhaps the rest of the world even more than us.”

“That brings us to another point,” said Williams, “I would suppose Chapman and his consortium are proposing only the tunnels in the United States.”

“I can't say as to that,” said Douglas. “I would imagine that if Chapman could put his consortium together it might include some foreign money, and agreements could be made with other nations. I can't see a country like the Congo or Portugal or Indonesia turning its back on someone who wants to build its tunnels. Other nations might be hesitant, but if we went along with the plan and a couple of the other major nations joined us, say Germany or France, then most of the others, I would think, would follow. After all, if everyone else were going ahead with the plan, no nation would want to be left out in the cold without a tunnel.”

“This is going to cost a lot of money,” said Manfred Franklin, Secretary of the Treasury. “Tunnels for the entire world would run into billions.”

“There are a lot of gamblers in the financial world,” observed Ben Cunningham, of Agriculture. “But mostly it is smart gambling, smart money. Chapman must be fairly certain of himself. Do you imagine he may know something that we don't know?”

Douglas shook his head. “I am inclined to think not. He has this assurance, you see, from his research people, principally the physicists, I understand, that if time travel is possible it has to be a two-way street. By now it is apparent that it is possible. You see, this is the first new idea, the first really new idea that has real technological and engineering potential, that has come along in fifty years or more. Clint and his gang want to get in on the ground floor.”

“The question,” said Williams, “is should we let them.”

“Much as we may regret to do so,” said the President, “we may have to. If we refused, word would be leaked to the public and you can imagine what the public reaction would be. Oh, a few would oppose it, but they would be drowned out by those who would see it as allowing someone to pay a huge expenditure that otherwise would come out of the treasury and be paid by taxes. Frankly, gentlemen, we may find ourselves in a position where opposing the consortium would be political suicide.”

“You don't seem to be too upset about it,” said Williams somewhat acidly.

“When you have been in politics as long as I have been, Thornton, you don't gag too easily at anything that comes up. You learn to be practical. You weigh things in balance. I admit privately that I gag considerably at this, but I am politically practical to the point where I can recognize it may not be possible to fight it. There are times when you simply cannot take pot shots at Santa Claus.”

“I still don't like it,” said Williams.

“Nor do I,” said Sandburg.

“It would be a solution,” said Franklin. “Labor is ready to go along with us in the emergency. If the financial interests of the world would go along with us, which is actually what would happen under this consortium setup, our basic problem would be solved. We still have to feed the people from the future, but I understand we can do that longer than we had thought at first. We'll have to supply the future folks with what they'll need to establish themselves in the past, but that can be done under normal manufacturing processes and at a fraction of the tunnel cost. Someone will have to do some rather rapid planning to calculate how much of our manufacturing processes and resources will have to be converted for a time to the making of wheelbarrows, hoes, axes, plows and other similar items, but that's simply a matter of mathematics. We'll have to face up for the next few years to considerable shortages of meat and dairy products and other agricultural items, I suppose, because we'll have to send breeding stock to the Miocene, but all of this we can do. It may pinch us a bit, but it can be done. The tunnels were the big job and Chapman's consortium will do the job there, if we let them.”

“How about all those banner-carrying kids who say they want to go back in time?” asked Cunningham. “I say let them go. It would clear the streets of them and for a long time a lot of people have been yelling about population pressure. We may have the answer here.”

“You're being facetious, of course,” said the President, “but.…”

“I can assure you, sir, I'm not in the least facetious. I mean it.”

“And I agree with you,” said the President. “My reasons may not be yours, but I do think we should not try to stop anyone who wants to go. Not, perhaps, back to the era where the future people plan to go. Maybe to an era a million years later than the future people. But before we allow them to go they must have the same ecological sense and convictions the future people have. We can't send people back who'll use up the resources we already have used. That would make a paradox I don't pretend to understand, but I imagine it might be fatal to our civilization.”

“Who would teach them this ecological sense and conviction?”

“The people from the future. They don't all need to go back into the past immediately. The most of them, of course, but some can stay here until later. In fact, they have offered to leave a group of specialists with us who will teach as much of what has been—no, I guess that should be ‘will be'—learned in the next five hundred years. For one, I think this offer should be accepted.”

“So do I,” said Williams. “Some of what they teach us may upset a few economic and social applecarts, but in the long run we should be far ahead. In twenty years or less we could jump five hundred years ahead, without making the mistakes that our descendants on the old world line made.”

“I don't know about that,” said Douglas. “There's too many factors in a thing like that. I'd have to think about it for a while.”

“There's just one thing that we are forgetting,” Sandburg said. “We can go ahead and plan, of course. And we have to do it fast. We have to be well along to a working, operating solution to the crisis that we face in a month or so or time will begin running out. But the point I want to make is this—the solution, the planning may do us little good if we aren't able to wipe out, or at least control, the monsters.”

45

The kids out in the street might be the ones, Wilson told himself, with the right idea. There was some well-founded fascination in starting over once again, with the slate wiped clean and the record clear. Only trouble was, he thought, that even starting over, the human race might still repeat many of its past mistakes. Although, going back, it would take some time to make them and there'd be the opportunity, if the will were there, to correct them before they got too big, too entrenched and awkward.

Alice Gale had talked about a wilderness where the White House once had stood and Dr. Osborne, on the ride from Fort Myer to the White House, had expressed his doubt that the trend which had made the White House park a wilderness could be stopped—it had gone too far, he said.' You are too top-heavy, he had said; you are off your balance.

Perhaps the trend had gone too far, Wilson admitted to himself—big government growing bigger; big business growing fatter and more arrogant; taxes steadily rising, never going down; the poor becoming ever poorer and more and more of them despite the best intentions of a welfare-conscious society; the gap between the rich and poor, the government and the public, growing wider by the year. How could it have been done differently, he wondered. Given the kind of world there was, how could circumstances have been better ordered?

He shook his head. He had no idea. There might be men who could go back and chart the political, economic and social growth and show where the errors had been made, putting their fingers on certain actions in a certain year and saying here is where we made one error. But the men who could do this would be theorists, working on the basis of many theories which in practice would not stand the test.

The phone on his desk rang and he picked it up.

“Mr. Wilson?”

“Yes.”

“This is the guard at the southwest gate. There is a gentleman here who says that he must see you on a matter of importance. Mr. Thomas Manning. Mr. Bentley Price is with him. Do you know them, sir?”

“Yes. Please send them in.”

“I'll send an escort with them, sir. You'll be in your office?”

“Yes. I'll wait here for them.”

Wilson put the receiver back into its cradle. What could bring Manning here, he wondered. Why should he have to come in person? A matter of importance, he had said. And Bentley—for the love of God, why Bentley?

Was it, he wondered, something further about the UN business?

He looked at his watch. The cabinet meeting was taking longer than he'd thought. Maybe it was over and the President had gotten busy with some other matters. Although that would be strange—Kim ordinarily would have squeezed him in.

Manning and Bentley came into the room. The guard stopped at the door. Wilson nodded at him. “It's all right. You can wait outside.”

“This is an unexpected pleasure,” he said to the two, shaking their hands. “I seldom see you, Tom. And Bentley. I almost never see you.”

“I got business elsewhere,” Bentley said. “I get my legs run off. I'm running all the time.”

“Bentley just got in from West Virginia,” Manning said. “That's what this visit is about.”

“There was this dog in the the road,” said Bentley, “and then a tree came up and hit me.”

“Bentley took a picture of a monster standing in the road,” said Manning, “just as it disappeared.”

“I got her figured now,” said Bentley. “It saw the camera pointed at it and it heard it click. Them monsters don't stay around when they see something pointed at them.”

“There was another report or two of one disappearing,” Wilson said. “A defense mechanism of some sort, perhaps. It's making it tough for the boys out hunting them.”

“I don't think so,” said Manning. “Forcing them to disappear may be as good as hunting them.”

He unzipped a thin briefcase he was carrying and took out a sheaf of photos. “Look at this,” he said.

He slid the top photo across the desk to Wilson.

Wilson took a quick look, then fixed his gaze on Bentley. “What kind of trick photography is this?” he asked.

“There ain't no tricks,” said Bentley. “A camera never lies. It always tells the truth. It shows you what is there. That's what really happens when a monster disappears. I was using a fast film.…”

“But dinosaurs!” yelled Wilson.

Bentley's hand dipped into his pocket and brought out an object. He handed it to Wilson. “A glass,” he said. “Take a look with it. There are herds of them, off in the distance. You can't do tricks of that sort.”

The monster was hazed, a sort of shadow monster, but substantial enough that there could be no doubt it was a monster. Back of it, the dinosaurs, three of them, were in sharp focus.

“Duckbills,” said Manning. “If you showed that photograph to a paleontologist, I have every expectation he could give you an exact identification.”

The trees were strange. They looked like palm trees, others like gigantic ferns.

Wilson unfolded the magnifier, bent his head close above the photo, shifted the glass about. Bentley had been right. There were other strange creatures spread across the landscape, herds of them, singles, pairs. A small mammal of some sort cowered in hiding underneath a shrub.

“We have some blowups,” Manning said, “of the background. Want to look at them?”

Wilson shook his head. “No, I'm satisfied.”

“We looked it up in a geology book,” said Bentley. “That there is a Cretaceous landscape.”

“Yes, I know,” said Wilson.

He reached for the phone. “Kim,” he said, “is Mr. Gale in his room? Thank you. Please ask him to step down.”

Manning laid the rest of the photos on the desk. “They are yours,” he said. “We'll be putting them on the wire. We wanted you to know first. You thinking the same thing that I am?”

Wilson nodded. “I suppose I am,” he said, “but no quotation, please.”

“We don't need quotes,” said Manning. “The picture tells the story. The monster, the mother monster, I would suppose you'd call it, was exposed to the time travel principle when it came through the tunnel. The principle was imprinted on its mind, its instinct, whatever you may call it. It transmitted knowledge of the principle to the young—a hereditary instinct.”

“But it took time tunnels, mechanical contraptions, for the humans to do it,” Wilson objected. “It took technology and engineering.…”

Manning shrugged. “Hell, Steve, I don't know. I don't pretend to know. But the photo says the monsters are escaping to another time. Maybe they'll all escape to another time, probably to the same time. The escape time bracket may be implanted on their instinct. Maybe the Cretaceous is a better place for them. Maybe they have found this era too tough for them to crack, the odds too great.”