Our Children's Children Page 8

  The box on the President’s desk purred. “Yes?” said the President.

  “A call for Mr. Wilson, sir, an urgent call. Can he take it there?”

  The President lifted the receiver and handed to Wilson.

  “This is Henry,” said Hunt’s voice. “Sorry for breaking in, but I thought that you should know. One of the other tunnels failed out in Wisconsin. It just came in on AP.”

  “Failed, you say. Not like Virginia. Nothing came through?”

  “Apparently. The message said it failed. Blinked out. Wasn’t there anymore.”

  “Thank you, Henry. Thanks for telling me.”

  He said to the President, “Another tunnel is out. Cut off. Disappeared. I suppose the people did it at the other end. Gale told us, you remember, they had men on guard who were prepared to collapse the tunnels if anything went wrong.”

  “I do recall,” said the President. “The invaders must be getting at them. I don’t like to think about it. It must take a lot of courage to do a thing like that. The ones at the other end of the Virginia tunnel apparently didn’t have the chance to do it.”

  “About the speech, sir,” said Reynolds. “The time is getting short.”

  “All right. I suppose I have to. Do the best you can. But don’t say anything about having it tracked down and cornered.”

  “You’ll have to tell them what it is,” said Wilson. “There has to be an explanation of what the monster is. We’ll have to tell the people it’s monsters such as this the tunnel folks are fleeing.”

  “There’ll be a scream to shut down the tunnels,” Reynolds said.

  “Let them scream,” said the President. “We don’t know of any way of shutting them except firing into them. And, without reason, we can’t fire into crowds of refugees—our own refugees.”

  “In a short while,” said Howard, “there may be no need. One tunnel has shut down of itself. There will be others of them. In a few hours, maybe, all of them.”

  “I hope not,” said the President. “No matter what else happens, no matter what problems they may bring us, I can’t help but hope all the people do get through.”

  Kim stuck her head in the door. “Mr. Gale is here, sir.”

  “OK. Send him in.”

  Gale came into the room. He half-stumbled as he walked across the room, then stiffened and marched up to within a few feet of the desk. His face was haggard.

  “I am so sorry, sir,” he said. “I can’t properly express the regrets of myself or of my people. We thought we had taken safeguards.”

  “Please sit down, Mr. Gale,” said the President. “You can help us now. We need your help.”

  Gale sat carefully in the chair. “You mean about the alien. You want to know more about it. I could have told you more this afternoon, but there was so much to tell and I never thought.…”

  “I’ll accept your word for that. You did make provisions to guard against what happened. Perhaps you did the best you could. Now we need your help to find this creature. We need to know something about its habits, what we can expect. We have to hunt it down.”

  “Luckily,” said Reynolds, “there is only one of them. When we get it.…”

  “It is unfortunately,” said Gale, “not as lucky as you think. The aliens are bisexual creatures.…”

  “You mean.…”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” said Gale. “The young are hatched from eggs. Any of the adults can lay fertilized eggs. And lay them in great numbers. Once hatched, the young need no care, or at least are given no care and.…”

  “Then,” said the President, “we must find it before it starts laying eggs.”

  “That is right,” said Gale, “although I fear you may be too late already. From what we know of them, I would suspect that the creature would start laying eggs within a few hours after its emergence from the tunnel. It would recognize the crisis. You must, first of all, disabuse yourself of any thoughts you may have suggesting that the aliens are no more than monsters. They are a great deal more than that. They are highly intelligent. Their mental and physical processes are geared to a ritualistic violence—at least we think it’s ritualistic—but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid. This creature knows that it’s the sole representative of its species in this particular time, and it will realize, as well, that it may remain the only one, that the future of the species in this time bracket may rely upon it alone. This will not be an intellectual realization only, but I would suspect, from what I know of them, that its body will realize and respond to the situation as well and that all its physical resources will be aimed at producing eggs, as many eggs as it can manage. Furthermore, realizing that eventually it will be hunted down and slain and that the nests of eggs will be hunted as well, it will scatter its clutches of eggs over as much territory as it can. It will seek out desolate and uninhabited spots on which to make its nests, it will hide them carefully, it will locate them in the least accessible spots. It is fighting, you understand, not only for itself, but for the species. Perhaps not at all for itself, but only for the species.”

  The other four in the office sat in stricken silence. Finally the President stirred uneasily and spoke. “You give us no chance, then, of finding it before it has laid its eggs.”

  “I would think there is no chance at all,” said Gale. “It probably already has laid some of them. It will continue laying them. I suppose I should give you some hope, if for no other reason than to lighten my own guilt, the guilt of my people. But it would be unfair to tell you less than truth. I am very sorry, sir.”

  “I would suspect,” said the President, “that it might be heading for the mountains. But that supposition is based only on my knowledge there are mountains to the west.”

  “It would know as well,” said Gale. “It has as good a geographical knowledge of this area as any of us here. The geography is the same five hundred years into the future as it is today.”

  “Then,” said the President, “assuming that it would have headed for the mountains, we must not only head it off, but we will have to give some thought to evacuating the people from that area as well.”

  “You’re thinking nuclear,” said Wilson. “Blanketing the area with bombs. You can’t do that, sir. Only as a last resort and perhaps not even then. The tonnage would have to be massive and the fallout.…”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions, Steve. I agree with you—only as a last resort and perhaps not even then.”

  “There is one thing I must speak of,” said Gale. “Do not underestimate the enemy. Either its intelligence or its ferocity. It is a killer. Even with great odds against it, it still is a killer. Now, under these circumstances, it probably will try to avoid confrontation, will run rather than fight, will try to keep itself alive to build up whatever margin it can for the survival of the species. But get it into a corner and it will strike back. You see, it doesn’t mind dying. It has no fear of death.”

  The President nodded gravely. “I appreciate that,” he said. “But there is something else.”

  “Anything,” said Gale.

  “You told us your people could supply us with specifications for the building of the tunnels.”

  “That is true,” said Gale.

  “The point is this,” said the President. “If we are to do anything at all we should do it quickly. If we delay, a dangerous social and economic, not to say political, situation may build up. I am sure that you can understand this. And this matter of the monster has given us even less time than I thought we had. For that reason it seems to me important that we have the specifications and talk with your people who can explain them to us as soon as possible.”

  “Mr. President,” said Reynolds, “we have less than two hours to get your talk shaped up.”

  “Certainly,” said the President. “I am sorry to have held you up. Steve, you can stay a moment, please.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Howard, following Reynolds toward the door.

  “Now, where were we?”
said the President. “Oh, yes, I was saying that we need to get to work on the matter of the tunnels. I plan to have some of our physicists and engineers come in and confer with your people.…”

  “Does that mean, sir, that you will help us?”

  “I would think so, Mr. Gale, although at the moment I’m in no position to make a positive commitment. But I don’t see much else that we can do. We can’t keep you here. We can’t possibly absorb you into our population. It would wreck our economy. The first step would seem to be to talk with your physicists and find out what’s involved—what kind of fabrications we will need, what kind of engineering, how much labor. Until we know that, we can’t do any planning. And there’s the matter, as well, of selecting sites.”

  “We have that all worked out,” said Gale. “Our geologists have made a study, as well as is possible, of the Miocene terrain. It would be an easy matter to have a tunnel emerge above an oceanic arm or in the middle of a lake or a volcanic area. Stable land surfaces have been pinpointed and mapped out. We can’t be entirely sure, of course, but our people, operating within their best knowledge, have done at least the preliminary work.”

  “Then,” said the President, “we won’t have to worry about that. But we do need something to get started on.”

  “The men you want to talk with,” said Gale, “were among the first to come through the tunnel. I presume they are wherever you have been taking the people who came from the Virginia tunnel.”

  “Fort Myer,” said the President. “Or at least the most of them went there. The army set up a number of inflatable shelters.”

  “I can give you their names,” said Gale, “but I’ll have to go with whoever is sent to contact them. Without me, they’d refuse to come. You can understand our situation, sir. We could take no chances of our men or their information falling into other than official hands.”

  The President frowned. “I’m reluctant to let you leave, even for a short time. You can, of course, walk out of here any time you wish. You are in no way detained. But we may have need of your advice on a moment’s notice. Our information so far is sketchy. You have done an excellent job of supplying us with it, of course, but situations can arise.…”

  “I understand,” said Gale. “Alice, perhaps. They know her and if she carried a note from me, on a White House letterhead.…”

  “That would be fine,” said the President, “if she would be willing. Steve, I wonder if you’d undertake to accompany her.”

  “Certainly, sir. But my car’s not here. Judy drove it home.”

  “You can have a White House car and driver. Perhaps we’d better send along a Secret Service man. It may seem a silly precaution, but a lot is riding on this.”

  He put up his hand and made a gesture of wiping his face.

  “I hope to God, Mr. Gale,” he said, “that you and I, your people and our people, can work together on this. This is just the beginning of it. It’s going to get rough. There’ll be all sorts of pressure, all kinds of frenzied screaming. Have you got a good strong back and a good thick skin?”

  “I think I have,” said Gale.

  24

  The Attorney General’s visitor was an old and valued friend. They had been roommates at Harvard and in the years since then had kept in touch. Reilly Douglas knew that, in large part, he owed his cabinet appointment to the good offices and, perhaps, the political pressure that could be commanded by Clinton Chapman, a man who headed one of the nation’s most prestigious industrial complexes and a heavy contributor to the party’s funds.

  “I know this must be a busy time for you,” Chapman told Douglas, “and under the circumstances I’ll take very little of your time.”

  “It’s good to see a friendly face,” said Douglas. “I don’t mind telling you I don’t go along with this. Not that there’s nothing to it, for there is. But we’re rushing into it. The President has accepted at face value this story of time traveling and while I can see, at the moment, no other explanation, it seems to me there should be some further study of the matter before we commit ourselves.”

  “Well, now,” said Chapman, “I agree with you—I couldn’t agree more completely with you. I called in some of my physicists this afternoon. You know, of course, that among our several branches, we have a respectable corps of research people. Well, as I was saying, I called a few of them together earlier today and we did some brain-storming on this time tunnel business.…”

  “And they told you it was impossible.”

  “Not exactly that,” said Chapman. “Not quite that at all. Not that any of them can see quite how it’s done, but they told me, and this is something that surprised me, that the matter of the direction in which time flows and precisely why it flows that way has been a subject of some quiet study and very scholarly dispute for a number of years. They talked about a lot of things I didn’t understand and used terms I’d never heard before. Arrows of time and boundary conditions, for example, and it seems that the arrows of time they talk about can be viewed from a number of different points—statistical, biological, thermodynamical, and I suppose other terms that have slipped my mind. They talked about the principle of wave retardation and causality and there was quite a lot of discussion about time-symmetrical field equations and the upshot of it all seemed to be that while, on the basis of present knowledge and research it all seems plain impossible, there is really nothing hard and fast that says it can’t be done. The gate, it appears, is just a little bit ajar. Someone come along and give that gate a little push and it might be possible.”

  “You mean that in another hundred years or so.…”

  Chapman nodded. “I guess that’s what it means. They tried to explain some of it to me, but it didn’t take. I haven’t the background to understand what they were telling me. These people have a lingo of their own and so far as people like you and I may be concerned it’s a foreign language we never knew existed.”

  “So it could be true,” said Douglas. “On the face of what is happening, it quite clearly is true. There seems no other explanation, but my point was that we should not move until we know it’s true. And, personally, while I could think of no other explanations, I found a great deal of difficulty in believing it.”

  “Just exactly what,” asked Chapman, “is the government thinking about doing? Building new tunnels, I understand, and sending the people of the future still farther back in time. Do they have any idea of what it’s going to cost? Or how much time it might take? Or.…”

  “They have no idea,” said Douglas. “Not a single figure. No inkling of what’s involved. But if anything can be done, we will have to do it. The people from the future can’t be kept here. It would be impossible to do it. Somehow we must get rid of them.”

  “My hunch,” said Chapman, “is that it will cost a bundle. And there’ll be hell’s own uproar about the cost of it. The public is more tax-conscious than it has ever been and something like this could bring about a confiscatory tax.”

  “You’re getting at something, Clint.”

  “Yes, I suppose I am. A gamble, you might say.”

  “You always gambled well,” said Douglas. “You have a natural poker face.”

  “It’s going to cost a lot of money;” Chapman said.

  “Tax money,” Douglas said.

  “I know. Tax money. And that could mean we’d lose the election a year from now. You know I’ve always been rather generous in my campaign contributions and have very rarely asked for favors. I’m not asking for one now. But under certain circumstances, I would be willing to make what I might think of as a somewhat more substantial contribution. Not only to the party, but to the country.”

  “That would be very generous of you,” said Douglas, not entirely sure that he was happy with the turn the talk had taken.

  “I’d have to have some figures and some facts, of course,” said Chapman, “but unless the cost is higher than I could manage, I think I would be agreeable to taking over the construction of the tunnels
. That is, if the tunnels can be built.”

  “In return for which?”

  “In return for which,” said Chapman, “I should like exclusive future license for the building of tunnels and the operation of them.”

  Douglas frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t be certain of the legality of an arrangement of that sort. And there is the international angle.…”

  “If you applied yourself to it,” said Chapman, “you could figure out a way. I am sure you could. You’re a damn good lawyer, Reilly.”

  “There must be something I am missing. I don’t see why you should want the license. What good would the tunnels be?”

  “After all of this is over,” Chapman said, “people will be considerably intrigued with the idea of traveling in time. A brand new way of traveling. A way of getting places they could never get before.”

  “But that’s insane!”

  “Not as insane as you might think. Imagine what a sportsman would be willing to pay for the privilege of going back to prehistoric days for a spot of hunting. Universities would want to send teams of paleontologists back to the Age of Reptiles to study and photograph the dinosaurs. Classical historians would sell their souls to go back and learn what really happened at the siege of Troy.…”

  “And the church,” said Douglas rather acidly, “might want a first-class ticket for a seat at the Crucifixion.”

  “I suppose that, too,” Chapman agreed, “and, as you imply, there would be times when it might get slightly sticky. There’d have to be rules and regulations worked out and certain safeguards set up not to change the course of history, but.…”

  “It wouldn’t work,” said Douglas flatly. “Time traveling, we are told, works in only one direction, back toward the past. Once you go back, you can’t return. You can’t move future-ward.”