Clifford Simak - Our Children's Children

"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 awhile."

"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."

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 the 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…"