Mastodonia (2 page)

“That may be true,” I said, “but I gather you have little use for archaeologists or paleontologists.”

“On the contrary,” she said, “I have high regard for them. I would like to be one of them, but I never had a chance. I could have gone on for years, the way you and I went out into that godforsaken dig in Turkey. I could have spent all summer digging and classifying and cataloging, and when the dig closed down, I could have spent more months in classifying and cataloging. And in between times, I could have taught moronic sophomores. But did I ever get my name on a paper? You bet your life I didn't. To amount to anything in that racket, you had to be at Yale or Harvard or Chicago or some such place as that and even then, you could spend years before anyone took any notice of you. There's no room at the top, no matter how hard you work, or how you scratch and fight. A few fat cats and glory-grabbers have it all nailed down and they hang on forever.”

“It worked out pretty much that way for me as well,” I told her. “Teaching in a small university. Never a chance to do any research. No funds for even small-time digs. Now and then, a chance to get in on a big one if you applied early and were willing to do the donkey work of digging. Although I'm not really complaining. For a time, I didn't really care too much. The campus was safe and comfortable and I felt secure. After Alice left me—you knew about Alice?”

“Yes,” she said, “I knew.”

“I don't think I even minded that much,” I said. “Her leaving me, I mean. But my pride was hurt and, for a time, I felt I had to hide away. Not here, I don't mean that, and now I'm over it.”

“You had a son.”

“Yes, Robert. With his mother in Vienna, I believe. At least, somewhere in Europe. The man she left me for is a diplomat—a professional diplomat, not a political appointee.”

“But the boy, Robert.”

“At first, he was with me. Then he wanted to be with his mother, so I let him go.”

“I never married,” she said. “At first, I was too busy, then, later, it didn't seem important.”

We sat silently for a moment as the dusk crept across the land. There was the scent of lilacs from the misshapen, twisted clump of trees that sprawled in one corner of the yard. A self-important robin hopped sedately about, stopping every now and then to regard us fixedly with one beady eye.

I don't know why I said it. I hadn't meant to say it. It just came out of me.

“Rila,” I said, “we were a pair of fools. We had something long ago and we didn't know we had it.”

“That is why I'm here,” she said.

“You'll stay a while? We have a lot to talk about. I can phone the motel. It's not a very good one, but …”

“No,” she said. “If you don't mind, I'm staying here with you.”

“That's okay,” I said. “I can sleep on the davenport.”

“Asa,” she said, “quit being a gentleman. I don't want you to be a gentleman. I said stay with you, remember.”

THREE

Bowser lay quietly in his corner, regarding us with accusing, doleful eyes as we sat at the breakfast table.

“He seems to have recovered,” said Rila.

“Oh, he'll be all right,” I told her. “He'll heal up fast.”

“How long have you had him?”

“Bowser has been with me for years. A sedate city dog to start with, very correct and pontifical. Chased a bird sedately every now and then when we went out for a walk. But once we came here, he changed. He became a roustabout and developed a mania for woodchucks. Tries to dig them out. Almost every evening, I have to go hunting him and haul him out of the hole he's dug, with the woodchuck chittering and daring him from deep inside his burrow. That's what I thought Bowser was doing last night.”

“And see what happened when you didn't go to find him.”

“Well, I had more important things to do, and I thought it might do him good to leave him out all night.”

“But, Asa, it was a Folsom point. I can't be mistaken. I've seen too many of them and they are distinctive. You said some kid might have got hold of it, but I know no kid could mount it on the shaft the way that it is mounted. And you said something about dinosaur bones.”

“I told you he was a time-traveling dog,” I said. “Impossible as that sounds.”

“Asa Steele, you know that's impossible. No one can travel in time, least of all a dog.”

“All right. Explain fresh dinosaur bones.”

“Maybe they weren't dinosaur bones.”

“Lady, I know dinosaur bones. I taught paleontology at the college and dinosaurs became a sort of hobby for me. I read all the papers I could lay my hands on and one year we picked up some dino bones for the museum. I mounted the damn things. I spent one entire winter stringing all those bones together and making artificial skeletal details that were lacking, coloring them white so no one could accuse us of faking anything.”

“But, fresh!”

“Shreds of flesh still clinging to them. Some gristle and tendons. The meat was getting high. So was Bowser. Apparently, he had found a decaying carcass and had rolled in it, picking up all that lovely scent. It took three days of scrubbing him to get the stench out of him. He was so high there was no living with him.”

“All right, then, if you say so. How do you explain it?”

“I don't. I've gotten so I don't even try. For a time, just to show you, I toyed with the idea that maybe a few smallish dinosaurs had survived into modern times and that Bowser had somehow found one that had died. But that doesn't make any more sense than a time-traveling dog.”

There was a knock on the door.

“Who is there?” I yelled.

“It's Hiram, Mr. Steele. I came to see Bowser.”

“Come on in, Hiram,” I said. “Bowser's in here. He had an accident.”

Hiram stepped inside, but when he saw Rila at the table, he started to back out. “I can come back later, Mr. Steele,” he said. “It was just that I didn't see Bowser outside.”

“It's all right, Hiram,” I told him. “The lady is Miss Elliot, a friend of mine I haven't seen for a long time.”

He shuffled in, snatching off his cap, clutching it with both hands to his chest.

“Pleased to meet you, miss,” he said. “Is that your car outside?”

“Yes, it is,” said Rila.

“It's big,” said Hiram. “I never saw as big a car. And you can see your face in it, it shines so nice.”

He caught sight of Bowser in the corner and hurried around the table to kneel beside him.

“What's the matter with him?” he asked. “He's got all the hair off one of his hams.”

“I cut it off,” I told him. “I had to. Someone shot him with an arrow.”

The explanation wasn't exactly correct, but it was simple enough for Hiram to understand and not start asking questions. Arrows he knew about. A lot of kids in town still had bows and arrows.

“Is he bad hurt?”

“I don't think so.”

Hiram bent and wrapped an arm around Bowser's shoulders. “That ain't right,” he said. “Going around and shooting dogs. There ain't no one should shoot a dog.”

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 …”