Mastodonia Read online

  Bowser, inviting sympathy, beat the floor feebly with his tail and lapped at Hiram’s face.

  “Especially Bowser,” said Hiram. “There ain’t no better dog than Bowser.”

  “You want some coffee, Hiram?”

  “No, you go ahead and eat. I’ll just sit here with Bowser.”

  “I could fry you up some eggs.”

  “No, thank you, Mr. Steele. I already had breakfast. I stopped at Reverend Jacobson’s and he gave me breakfast. I had cakes and sausages.”

  “All right, then,” I said. “You stay with Bowser. I’m going to show Miss Elliot around the place.”

  When we were in the yard and out of earshot, I said to her, “Don’t let Hiram bother you. He’s all right. Harmless. Wanders around. The town sort of takes care of him. Drops in and people give him food. He gets along all right.”

  “Hasn’t he anyplace to live?”

  “He has a shack down by the river, but doesn’t spend much time there. He goes around visiting friends. He and Bowser are great friends.”

  “I gathered that,” said Rila.

  “He claims he and Bowser talk together—that he talks to Bowser and Bowser talks back to him. It’s not only Bowser. He’s a friend of all the animals and birds. He sits out in the yard and talks to a crazy, cockeyed robin and the bird stands there, with its head tilted to one side, listening to him. You’d swear, at times, it understands what he is saying. He goes out into the woods to visit the rabbits and the squirrels, the chipmunks and the woodchucks. He gets after Bowser for hasseling the woodchucks. Says if Bowser let them alone, the woodchucks would come out and play with him.”

  “He sounds simpleminded.”

  “Oh, there’s no doubt of that. But there are people like him all over the world. Not just in little villages.”

  “You sound as if you like him.”

  “More accurately, I don’t mind him. There’s no harm in him. As you say, he’s a simple soul.”

  “Bowser likes him.”

  “Bowser dotes on him,” I said.

  “You said—I think you said—forty acres here. What in the world would a man like you want with forty acres?”

  “Look around you,” I told her. “Perhaps you’ll understand. Listen to the birds. Look at that old apple orchard over there. Filled with blossoms. No great shakes at producing apples. Most of them are small and wormy. I could spray them, I suppose, but that’s a lot of bother. But small and wormy as they may be, there are apples here most people have forgotten, if they ever knew. There is one old snow apple tree and a couple or three russets. You haven’t tasted anything until you bite into a russet.”

  She laughed. “You’re making fun of me,” she said. “You always made fun of me. In your nice, soft-spoken, gentle way. You’re not here for bird song or for some long-forgotten apples. That may be part of it, of course, but there is more than that. You said last night, you came here to find something, then you never told me what it was.”

  I took her by the arm. “Come along,” I said. “I’ll give you the tour.”

  The path went around the weather-beaten barn with the sagging door, across one corner of the orchard with its scraggly trees and then along the edge of a long-neglected field overgrown by weeds and bordered by woods. At the end of the field, the path stopped at the edge of a depression.

  “This is a sinkhole,” I told her. “Or, at least, it is thought of as a sinkhole.”

  “You’ve been digging here,” she said, looking at the trenches I had excavated.

  I nodded. “The natives think I’m crazy. At first, they thought I was treasure hunting. I found no treasure, so now they are agreed I’m crazy.”

  “You’re not crazy,” she said, “and that is not a sinkhole, either. Tell me what it is.”

  I took a deep breath and told her. “I think it’s a crater where a spaceship crashed God knows how long ago. I’ve been finding bits of metal. Nothing big, nothing that really tells me anything. The vehicle, if that was what it was, didn’t crash at any great speed. Not like a meteorite. Otherwise, even the kind of metal I am finding would have not survived except as molten chunks. It came in hard enough to dig a hell of a big hole, but there is no sign of plasma reaction. Down deeper, I am confident, lies the greater part of the mass of whatever it was that hit here.”

  “You knew of this hole before, when you lived here as a boy?”

  “That is right,” I said. “This country is laced with so-called mineral holes. There is a lot of lead in this country. At one time, there were mines—nothing big, of course, but small, operating mines. In the old days, more than a hundred years ago, prospectors swarmed all over this county and the next. They dug exploratory holes all over the landscape, hoping to uncover strikes. In later years, every hole came to be regarded as a mineral hole. A lot of them, of course, weren’t. My pals and I, when I was a boy, were sure this was a mineral hole and off and on, of summers, we did some digging here. The old codger who farmed the place didn’t seem to mind. He used to joke with us about it, calling us miners. We found some’ strange metallic fragments, but they weren’t ore and were in no way spectacular. So, after a while, we lost interest. But, through the years, I kept thinking back on it and the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that what we’d found had been the debris of a spaceship. So I came back, pretending just to be coming back to the scenes of my childhood. When I found the farm had been put up for sale, I bought it, sort of on the spur of the moment. If I had taken time to think about it, I don’t suppose I would have. In retrospect, at times, it has seemed a sort of silly thing to have done. Although I have enjoyed the months I’ve spent here.”

  “I think it’s wonderful,” said Rila.

  I looked at her in surprise. “You do?”

  “Think of it,” she said. “A spaceship from the stars.”

  “I can’t be sure of that.”

  She moved closer, reached up and kissed me on the cheek.

  “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not,” she said. “The point is that you can still dream, that you could convince yourself it could be here.”

  “And you, a hard-headed business woman.”

  “Being a business woman was a matter of survival. At heart, I’m still an archaeologist. And all people in that line of work are pure romantics.”

  “You know,” I said, “I was torn between two emotions about showing this to you. I wanted to share it with you, but I was afraid as well—afraid you’d think me irresponsible and silly.”

  “How sure are you? What evidence do you have?”

  “Chunks of metal. Strange alloys of some sort. I sent some chunks to the university for testing and the report shows that there are no known alloys of that sort. The university people got uptight. Asked me where I’d found the stuff. I told them I’d picked it up in a field and had got curious about it. That’s the way the matter stands now. It’s still my show for a while. I don’t want the university horning in on it. Some of the pieces are just chunks of metal. A few show some machining. No sign of rust, just a faint blurring of the surface, as if the metal is showing some slight reaction to long exposure. Hard and tough. Metal almost as hard as a diamond and still not brittle. Terrific tensile strength. There may be other explanations, but an alien spaceship is the best, the most sensible, that I can come up with. I tell myself that I must be scientific and objective, that I can’t go riding off on a hobbyhorse …”

  “Asa, forget it. You’re not riding a hobbyhorse. It’s all hard to accept, the hypothesis that you have and the evidence you have found, but the evidence is there. You can’t simply overlook it.”

  “In that case,” I said, “there is something further. On this one, there is no evidence at all. Just the evidence of my eyes and the feeling that I have. A strange neighbor—I guess that’s the best way to describe him. I’ve never really seen him, never got a good look at him. But I’ve felt him looking at me, and I’ve caught glimpses of him, not really seeing him, but a certain out
rageous configuration that makes me imagine he is there. I say imagine because I’m still trying to be scientific and objective. On a purely observational level, I’m sure that he exists. He hangs out in the orchard, but he’s not there all the time. He wanders quite a bit, it seems.”

  “Is there anyone else who has seen him?”

  “Others, I would guess, have seen him. Periodically, there is a panther scare—although why people should be afraid of panthers, I don’t know. But in rural communities, bear and panther scares seem to be a favorite pastime. An atavistic fear, I suppose, that still hangs on.”

  “Maybe there are panthers.”

  “I doubt it. There has been no authentic mountain lion sighting for forty years or more. The thing about it is that this creature I am talking of does leave a cat impression. There is one man who knows more about it than anybody else. He’s sort of a cross between Daniel Boone and David Thoreau, and he’s spent his life out in the woods.”

  “What does he think about it?”

  “Like me, he doesn’t know. I’ve talked to him a few times and we’ve agreed we don’t know what it is.”

  “You think there is some connection between this creature and your spaceship?”

  “At times, I’m tempted. But it seems a bit farfetched. The implication would be that it’s an alien creature that escaped the crash. That would mean it is impossibly long-lived. Also, it would seem unlikely anything could have survived the crash, if there was a crash.”

  “I’d like to see some of the metal you dug up,” she said.

  “No problem,” I told her. “It is in the barn. We’ll have a look when we go back.”

  FOUR

  Hiram was perched on one of the lawn chairs in front of the house with Bowser laid out on the grass beside him. The front-yard robin stood impertinently a few paces off, eyeing their intrusion of its territory with perky belligerence.

  Hiram explained, “Bowser said he didn’t want to stay in the house, so I carried him out.”

  “He used you,” I told him. “He could have walked himself.”

  Bowser beat an apologetic tail.

  “The robin feels sorry for him,” said Hiram.

  The robin had no look of sorrow.

  “I ain’t got nothing to do,” said Hiram. “You go about your business. I’ll watch over Bowser till he’s well. Day and night, if you want me to. If he wants anything, he can tell me.”

  “All right, then, you watch over him,” I said. “We have things to do.”

  At the barn, I had a hell of a time getting the sagging door open again. Someday, I promised myself, I would get it fixed. It wouldn’t take more than a few hours work, but somehow I had never quite gotten around to it.

  The interior of the barn, redolent of ancient horse manure, had a pile of junk stacked haphazardly in one corner, but was mostly filled by two long tables I had set up with boards laid across sawhorses. Ranged on the tables were all the pieces of metal I had found or dug out of the pit. At the far end of one of the tables lay two hollow hemispherical pieces of bright metal I had found when I had cleaned out the barn.

  Rila walked over to one of the tables and picked up a jagged piece of metal. She turned it over and over in her hands. She said, in some amazement, “Just as you said, there isn’t any rust. Just some slight discoloration here and there. There’s some iron in it, isn’t there?”

  “Quite a lot,” I told her. “At least, that’s what the university people said.”

  “Any ferric metal rusts,” she said. “Some alloys will stand up for a long time, but they finally show some rust. When oxygen gets to them.”

  “More than a hundred years,” I told her. “Probably, a great deal more than that. Willow Bend celebrated its centenary several years ago. That crater was formed before the town was founded. The crater has to be much older than that. There are several feet of loam in the bottom of it. It would have taken some time for that loam to form. It takes a lot of leaves over many years to form a foot of soil.”

  “Have you tried to fit some of these fragments together?”

  “I’ve tried, and there are a few pieces that can be fit together, but they don’t tell you anything.”

  “What do you do next?”

  “Probably nothing. Keep on with the digging. Keep quiet about it. You’re the only one I’ve told. If I said anything to anyone else, all I’d get would be ridicule. Suddenly there’d be all sorts of instant experts who could explain everything away.”

  “I suppose so,” she said, “but here you have at least tentative evidence that there is, at least, one other intelligence in the galaxy, and that Earth has been visited. This would seem important—important enough to face up to some ridicule.”

  “But, don’t you see,” I argued, “that any sort of premature announcement would blur, if not kill off, any significance. The human race seems to have a strange, instinctive defensiveness against admitting there is anyone but ourselves. Maybe that’s because we are afraid, deep down inside of us. We may have a basic fear of any other kind of intelligence. Maybe we are afraid that another intelligence would show us up as second rate, make us feel inferior. We talk, at times, about the loneliness of our situation in the universe, voicing a fear that we are alone, but sometimes, it seems to me that that is no more than philosophical posturing.”

  “But if it’s the truth,” Rila said, “sooner or later, we’ll have to face up to it. There would be some advantage in facing facts early. Then we’d have some time to get used to the idea, to get our feet planted more firmly under us if the time ever comes when we have to meet them.”

  “A lot of people would agree with you,” I said, “but not that faceless mob, the public. We may be intelligent and fairly level-headed, but collectively we can be pig-headed in a lot of different ways.”

  Rila moved down the table and stopped opposite the two shiny hemispheres. She tapped one of them with her fingers. “These? They came out of the dig?”

  “Not out of the dig,” I said. “I don’t know what they are. They fit together to form a hollow sphere. The skin is about an eighth of an inch thick and extremely hard. At one time, I was going to send one of them along with the metal I sent the university, then decided not to. For one thing, I’m not sure they tie in with any of the rest of this mystery. I found them here, in this barn. I wanted to set up the tables, but there was a pile of junk in the center of the floor. Old pieces of harness, some odds and ends of lumber, a couple of packing cases, a few worn-out tires, things like that. I moved everything into that stall over there. That’s when I found the two hemispheres at the bottom of the pile.”

  Rila lifted one of the hemispheres and fitted it over the other, running her hand around the area where they came together.

  “They do fit,” she said, “but they can’t be fastened back together. There is no thread arrangement, nothing. A hollow ball that came apart somehow, sometime. You have the slightest idea what it is?”

  “Not the faintest.”

  “It could be something fairly simple, something in relatively common use.”

  I looked at my watch. “How about some lunch?” I asked. “There is not too bad a place about twenty miles up the road.”

  “We can eat right here. I could cook up something.”

  “No,” I said. “I want to take you out. Do you realize that I never took you out to eat?”

  FIVE

  The Manhattan tasted good. I realized that it was the first civilized drink I had had in months; I’d almost forgotten how a decent drink could taste. I said as much to Rila. “At home, I guzzle beer or slop some Scotch over a couple of ice cubes.”

  “You’ve been sticking close to the farm,” she said.

  “Yes, and not regretting it. It’s the best money I ever spent, buying that place. It’s given me almost a year of interesting work and a sense of peace I’ve never had before. And Bowser has loved it.”

  “You think a lot of Bowser.”

  “He and I are pals. Both of
us will hate going back.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t going back. You said when the sabbatical was up, you would resign.”

  “I know. I say that every now and then. It’s a fantasy, I guess. I have no desire to go back, but I haven’t much choice. When I think of it, I come up against the hard fact that while I’m not exactly destitute, I’m not in a financial situation to become a non-wage-earner for any length of time.”

  “I know how you must hate the thought of leaving,” she said. “It’s not only the peace you speak of, but the chance to continue the dig.”

  “That can wait. It will have to wait.”

  “But, Asa, it’s a shame.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. But if it’s waited for God knows how many centuries, it can wait a little longer. I’ll come back each summer.”

  “It’s strange,” said Rila, “what long-range views archaeologists can take. I imagine that is a viewpoint that goes with the profession. They deal in long-time phenomena, so time has less importance to them.”

  “You talk as if you never were an archaeologist.”

  “Well, I never really was. That summer with you in Turkey and then, a couple of years later, a fuddy-duddy dig in Ohio, excavating an Indian campsite. A year or so at Chicago, mostly spent in cataloging. After that, it was easy to decide being an archaeologist was not what I wanted.”

  “So you went into the fossil-artifact business.”

  “Small at first,” she said. “A little shop in upstate New York. But apparently I came in at about the right time. Collectors were beginning to get interested and the business grew. There were more and more shops springing up each year and I could see that the real money was as a supplier, so I scraped together some money and floated a loan and again started out in a small way. I worked hard. I got a perverse satisfaction out of it. Here I was making a living out of something that was a rather despicable offshoot of a profession I had failed at—perhaps, rather, had been too impatient to try to succeed at.”

  “You said last night you are considering selling out.”