The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 30

  Although, if it were here, there would he carnivores as well—and, for the love of God, what had he fallen into? Why hadn’t he given more thought to the possibility that something like this might happen, that he would not, necessarily, automatically go back to present time, but might be shunted off into another time? And why, just as a matter of precaution, hadn’t he armed himself before he left? There were high-caliber guns in the library and he could have taken one of them and a few boxes of ammunition if he had just thought about it.

  He had failed to recognize the possibility of being dumped into a place like this, he admitted, because he had been thinking about what he wanted to happen, to the exclusion of all else, using shaky logic to convince himself that he was right. His wishful thinking, he now knew, had landed him in a place no sane man would choose.

  He was back in the age of dinosaurs and there wasn’t any house. He probably was the only human on the planet, and if his luck held out, he might last a day or two, but probably not much more than that. He knew he was going off the deep end again, thinking as illogically as he had been when he launched himself into the time rift. There might not be that many carnivores about, and if a man was observant and cautious and gave himself a chance to learn, he might be able to survive. Although the chances were that he was stuck here. There could be little hope that he could find another rift in time, and even if he did, there would be no assurance that it would take him to anything better than this. Perhaps, if he could find the point where he had emerged into this world, he might have a chance to locate the rift again, although there was no guarantee that the rift was a two-way rift. He stopped and looked around, but there was no way to know where he had first come upon this place. The landscape all looked very much the same.

  The ankylosaurus, he saw, had come a little out of the shrub thicket and was nibbling quite contentedly at the ground cover. Turning his back upon it, he went trudging up the hill.

  Before he reached the crest, he turned around again to have a look. The ankylosaurus was no longer around, or perhaps he did not know where to look for it. Down in the swale that had been the alder swamp where Underwood and Charlie had bagged the woodcock, a herd of small reptiles were feeding, browsing off low-growing shrubs and ground cover.

  Along the skyline of the hill beyond which the herd was feeding, a larger creature lurched along on its hind legs, its body slanted upright at an angle, the shriveled forearms dangling at its side, its massive, brutal head jerking as it walked. The herd in the swale stopped their feeding, heads swiveling to look at the lurching horror. Then they ran, racing jerkily on skinny hind legs, like a flock of outsize, featherless chickens racing for their lives.

  Latimer turned again and walked toward the top of the hill. The last slope was steep, steeper than he remembered it had been on that other, safer world. He was panting when he reached the crest, and he stopped a moment to regain his breath. Then, when he was breathing more easily, he turned to look toward the south.

  Half-turned, he halted, amazed at what he saw—the last thing in the world that he had expected to see. Sited in the valley that lay between the hill on which he stood and the next headland to the south, was a building. Not a house, but a building. It stood at least thirty stories high and looked like an office building, its windows gleaming in the sun.

  He sobbed in surprise and thankfulness, but even so, he did not begin to run toward it, but stood for a moment looking at it, as if he must look at it for a time to believe that it was there. Around it lay a park of grass and tastefully planted trees. Around the park ran a high wire fence and in the fence at the foot of the hill closest to him was a gate, beside which was a sentry box. Outside the sentry box stood two men who carried guns.

  Then he was running, racing recklessly down the hill, running with great leaps, ducking thickets of shrubs. He stubbed his toe and fell, pinwheeling down the slope. He brought up against a tree and, the breath half-knocked out of him, got to his feet, gasping and wheezing. The men at the gate had not moved, but he knew that they had seen him; they were gazing up the hill toward him.

  Moving at a careful, slower pace, he went on down the hill. The slope leveled off and he found a faint path that he followed toward the gate.

  He came up to the two guards and stopped.

  “You damn fool,” one of them said to him. “What do you think you’re doing, going out without a gun? Trying to get yourself killed?”

  “There’s been an old Tyranno messing around here for the last several days,” said the other guard. “He was seen by several people. An old bastard like that could go on the prod at the sight of you and you wouldn’t have a chance.”

  The first guard jerked his rifle toward the gate. “Get in there,” he said. “Be thankful you’re alive. If I ever catch you going out again without a gun, I’ll turn you in, so help me.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Latimer.

  He walked through the gate, following a path of crushed shells toward the front entrance of the office building. But now that he was there, safe behind the fence, the reaction began setting in. His knees were wobbly and he staggered when he walked. He sat down on a bench beneath a tree. He found that his hands were shaking and he held them hard against his thighs to stop the trembling.

  How lucky could one get? he asked himself. And what did it mean? A house in the more recent past, an office building in this place that must be millions of years into the past. There had not been dinosaurs upon the earth for at least sixty million years. And the rift? How had the rift come about? Was it something that could occur naturally, or had it come about because someone was manipulating time? Would such rifts come when someone, working deliberately, using techniques of which there was no public knowledge, was putting stress upon the web of time? Was it right to call time a web? He decided that it made no difference, that the terminology was not of great importance.

  An office building, he thought. What did an office building mean? Was it possible that he had stumbled on the headquarters of the project/conspiracy/program that was engaged in the trapping of selected people in the past? Thinking of it, the guess made sense. A cautious group of men could not take the chance of operating such an enterprise in present time, where it might be nosed out by an eager-beaver newsman or a governmental investigation or by some other means. Here, buried in millions of years of time, there would be little chance of someone unmasking it.

  Footsteps crunched on the path and Latimer looked up. A man in sports shirt and flannels stood in front of him.

  “Good morning, sir,” said Latimer.

  The man asked, “Could you be David Latimer, by any chance?”

  “I could be,” said Latimer.

  “I thought so. I don’t remember seeing you before. And I was sure I knew everyone. And the guards reported …”

  “I arrived only an hour or so ago.”

  “Mr. Gale wanted to see you as soon as you arrived.”

  “You mean you were expecting me?”

  “Well, we couldn’t be absolutely sure,” said the other. “We are glad you made it.”

  Latimer got off the bench and the two of them walked together to the front entrance, climbed the steps, and went through the door. They walked through a deserted lounge, then into a hallway flanked by numbered doors with no names upon them. Halfway down the hall, the man with Latimer knocked at one of the doors.

  “Come in,” a voice said.

  The man opened the door and stuck his head in. “Mr. Latimer is here,” he said. “He made it.”

  “That is fine,” said the voice. “I am glad he did. Please show him in.”

  The man stepped aside to allow Latimer to enter, then stepped back into the hall and closed the door. Latimer stood alone, facing the man across the room.

  “I’m Donovan Gale,” said the man, rising from his desk and coming across the room. He held out his hand and Latimer took it. Gal
e’s grasp was a friendly corporate handshake.

  “Let’s sit over here,” he said, indicating a davenport. “It seems to me we may have a lot to talk about.”

  “I’m interested in hearing what you have to say,” said Latimer.

  “I guess both of us are,” said Gale. “Interested in what the other has to say, I mean.”

  They sat down on opposite ends of the davenport, turning to face one another.

  “So you are David Latimer,” said Gale. “The famous painter.”

  “Not famous,” said Latimer. “Not yet. And it appears now that I may never be. But what I don’t understand is how you were expecting me.”

  “We knew you’d left Auk House.”

  “So that is what you call it. Auk House.”

  “And we suspected you would show up here. We didn’t know exactly where, although we hoped that it would be nearby. Otherwise you never would have made it. There are monsters in those hills. Although, of course, we could not be really sure that you would wind up here. Would you mind telling us how you did it?”

  Latimer shook his head. “I don’t believe I will. Not right now, at least. Maybe later on when I know more about your operation. And now a question for you. Why me? Why an inoffensive painter who was doing no more than trying to make a living and a reputation that might enable him to make a better living?”

  “I see,” said Gale, “that you have it figured out.”

  “Not all of it,” said Latimer. “And, perhaps, not all of it correctly. But I resent being treated as a bad guy, as a potential threat of some sort. I haven’t got the guts or the motive to be a bad guy. And Enid, for Christ’s sake. Enid is a poet. And Alice. All Alice does is play a good piano.”

  “You’re talking to the wrong man,” Gale told him. “Breen could tell you that, if you can get him to tell you. I’m only personnel.”

  “Who is Breen?”

  “He’s head of the evaluation team.”

  “Those are the ones who figure out who is going to be picked up and tossed into time.”

  “Yes, that is the idea, crudely. There’s a lot more to it than that. There is a lot of work done here. Thousands of newspapers and other periodicals to be read to spot potential subjects. Preliminary psychological determinations. Then it’s necessary to do further study back on prime world. Further investigation of potential subjects. But no one back there really knows what is going on. They’re just hired to do jobs now and then. The real work goes on here.”

  “Prime world is present time? Your old world and mine?”

  “Yes. If you think, however, of prime world as present time, that’s wrong. That’s not the way it is. We’re not dealing with time, but with alternate worlds. The one you just came from is a world where everything else took place exactly as it did in prime world, with one exception—man never evolved. There are no men there and never will be. Here, where we are now, something more drastic occurred. Here the reptiles did not become extinct. The Cretaceous never came to an end, the Cenozoic never got started. The reptiles are still the dominant species and the mammals still are secondary.”

  “You’re taking a chance, aren’t you, in telling me all this.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Gale. “You’re not going anywhere. There are none of us going anywhere. Once we sign up for this post, we know there’s not any going back. We’re stuck here. Unless you have a system …”

  “No system. I was just lucky.”

  “You’re something of an embarrassment to us,” said Gale. “In the years since the program has been in operation, nothing like this has happened at any of the stations. We don’t know what to make of it and we don’t quite know what to do with you. For the moment, you’ll stay on as a guest. Later on, if it is your wish, we could find a place for you. You could become a member of the team.”

  “Right at the moment,” said Latimer, “that holds no great attraction for me.”

  “That’s because you aren’t aware of the facts, nor of the dangers. Under the economic and social systems that have been developed in prime world, the great mass of mankind has never had it so good. There are ideological differences, of course, but there is some hope that they eventually can be ironed out. There are underprivileged areas; this cannot be denied. But one must also concede that their only hope lies in their development by free-world business interests. So-called big-business interests are the world’s one hope. With the present economic structure gone, the entire world would go down into another Dark Age, from which it would require a thousand years or more to recover, if recovery, in fact, were possible at all.”

  “So to protect your precious economic structure, you place a painter, a poet, a musician into limbo.”

  Gale made a despairing gesture with his hands. “I have told you I can’t supply the rationale on that. You’ll have to see Breen if he has the time to see you. He’s a very busy man.”

  “I would imagine that he might be.”

  “He might even dig out the files and tell you,” said Gale. “As I say, you’re not going anywhere. You can pose no problem now. You are stuck with us and we with you. I suppose that we could send you back to Auk House, but that would be undesirable, I think. It would only upset the people who are there. As it is, they’ll probably figure that you simply wandered off and got killed by a bear or bitten by a rattlesnake, or drowned in a swamp. They’ll look for you and when they don’t find you, that will be it. You only got lost; they’ll never consider for a moment that you escaped. I think we had better leave it at that. Since you are here and, given time, would nose out the greater part of our operation, we have no choice but to be frank with you. Understandably, however, we’d prefer that no one outside this headquarters knew.”

  “Back at Auk House, there was a painting of mine hanging in my room.”

  “We thought it was a nice touch,” said Gale. “A sort of friendly thing to do. We could bring it here.”

  “That wasn’t why I asked,” said Latimer. “I was wondering—did the painting’s subject have something to do with what you did to me? Were you afraid that I would go on painting pictures pointing up the failures of your precious economic structure?”

  Gale was uncomfortable. “I couldn’t say,” he said.

  “I was about to say that if such is the case, you stand on very flimsy ground and carry a deep guilt complex.”

  “Such things are beyond me,” said Gale. “I can’t even make a comment.”

  “And this is all you want of me? To stand in place? To simply be a guest of all these big-hearted corporations?”

  “Unless you want to tell us how you got here.”

  “I have told you that I won’t do that. Not now. I suppose if you put me to the torture …”

  “We wouldn’t torture you,” said Gale. “We are civilized. We regret some of the things that we must do, but we do not flinch from duty. And not the duty to what you call big-hearted corporations, but to all humankind. Man has a good thing going; we can’t allow it to be undermined. We’re not taking any chances. And now, perhaps I should call someone to show you to your room. I take it you got little sleep last night.”

  Latimer’s room was on one of the topmost floors and was larger and somewhat more tastefully furnished than the room at Auk House. From a window, he saw that the conformation of the coastline was much the same as it had been at Auk House. The dirty gray of the ocean stretched off to the east and the surf still came rolling in to break upon the boulders. Some distance off shore, a school of long-necked creatures were cavorting in the water. Watching them more closely, Latimer made out that they were catching fish. Scattered reptilian monstrosities moved about in the hills that ran back from the sea, some of them in small herds, some of them alone. Dwarfed by distance, none of them seemed unusually large. The trees, he saw, were not a great deal different from the ones he had known. The one thing that was wrong w
as the lack of grass.

  He had been a victim of simplistic thinking in believing, he told himself, that when he threw himself into the rift he would be carried to present time or prime world or whatever one might call it. In the back of his mind, as well, although he had not really dared to think it, had been the idea that if he could get back to the real world, he could track down the people who were involved and put a stop to it.

  There was no chance of that now, he knew, and there never had been. Back on prime world, there would be no evidence that would stand up, only highly paid lackeys who performed necessary chores. Private investigators, shady operators like the Boston realtor and the Campbell who had listed Auk House for sale or rent. Undoubtedly, the sign announcing the house was available was posted only when a potential so-called customer would be driving past. Campbell would have been paid well, perhaps in funds that could not be traced, for the part he played, offering the house and then, perhaps, driving off the car left behind by the customer. He took some risks, certainly, but they were minimal. Even should he have been apprehended, there would be no way in which he could be tied into the project. He, himself, would have had no inkling of the project. A few men in prime world would have to know, of course, for some sort of communications had to be maintained between this operations center and prime world. But the prime-world men, undoubtedly, would be solid citizens, not too well known, all beyond suspicion or reproach. They would be very careful against the least suspicion, and the communications between them and this place must be of a kind that could not be traced and would have no record.

  Those few upright men, perhaps a number of hired hands who had no idea of what was being done, would be the only ones in prime world who would play any part in the project. The heart of the operation was in this building. Here the operations were safe. There was no way to get at them. Gale had not even bothered to deny what was being done, had merely referred him to Breen for any further explanation. And Breen, should he talk with him, probably would make no denial, either.

  And here he stood, David Latimer, artist, the one man outside the organization who, while perhaps not realizing the full scope of the project, still knew what was happening. Knew and could do nothing about it. He ran the facts he had so far acquired back and forth across his mind, seeking some chink of weakness, and there seemed to be none.