Дэймон Найт - Orbit 8

“Nah,” said Leo. “They were smarter then, Charley; they were smarter then. Most likely that yokel would have believed that it was a little less than a furlong long, as it is. He’d have liked it, though. And there may be pieces that are five miles long or nine miles long. Why else would they have advertised them? I think I can hit the road and smell out where a lot of those pictures are. And I will call in sometimes and Ginger can tell me who have answered the advertisements. Come here again in six months, Charley, and I will have enough sections of the river for you to analyze. You won’t get lonesome in six months, will you, Ginger?”

“No. There will be the hay cutters, and the men from the cattle auctions, and the oil gangers, and Charley Longbank here when he comes out, and the men in town and the men in the Hill-Top Tavern. I won’t get lonesome.”

“She jokes, Charley,” said Leo. “She doesn’t really fool around with the fellows.”

“I do not joke,” said Ginger. “Stay gone seven months,

I don’t care.”

Leo Nation did a lot of traveling for about five months. He acquired more than fifty genuine sections of the river and he spent quite a few thousands of dollars on them. He went a couple of years into hock for them. It would have been much worse had not many people given him the things and many others sold them to him for very small amounts. But there were certain stubborn men and women who insisted on a good price. This is always the hazard of collecting, the thing that takes most of the fun out of it. All these expensively acquired sections were really prime pieces and Leo could not let himself pass them by.

How he located so many pieces is his own mystery, but Leo Nation did really have a nose for these things. He smelt them out; and all collectors of all things must have such long noses.

There was a professor man in Rolla, Missouri, who had rugged his whole house with pieces of a genuine section.

“That sure is tough stuff, Nation,” the man said. “I’ve been using it for rugs for forty years and it isn’t worn at all. See how fresh the trees still are! I had to cut it up with a chain saw, and I tell you that it’s tougher than any wood in the world for all that it’s nice and flexible.”

“How much for all the rugs, for all the pieces of pieces that you have?” Leo asked uneasily. There seemed something wrong in using the pieces for rugs, and yet this didn’t seem like a wrong man.

“Oh, I won’t sell you any of my rugs, but I will give you pieces of it, since you’re interested, and I’ll give you the big piece I have left. I never could get anyone much interested in it. We analyzed the material out at the college. It is very sophisticated plastic material. We could reproduce it, or something very like it, but it would be impossibly expensive, and plastics two-thirds as tough are quite cheap. The funny thing, though, I can trace the history of the thing back to quite a few decades before any plastic was first manufactured in the world. There is a big puzzle there, for some man with enough curiosity to latch onto it.”

“I have enough curiosity; I have already latched onto it,” Leo Nation said. “That piece you have on the wall—it looks like—if I could only see it under magnification—”

“Certainly, certainly, Nation. It looks like a swarm of bees there, and it is. I’ve a slide prepared from a fringe of it. Come and study it. I’ve shown it to lots of intelligent people and they all say ‘So what?’ It’s an attitude that I can’t understand.”

Leo Nation studied the magnification with delight. “Yeah,” he said. “I can even see the hairs on the bees’ legs. In one flaking-off piece there I can even make out the cells of a hair.” He fiddled with low and high magnification for a long while. “But the bees sure are funny ones,” he said. “My father told me about bees like that once and I thought he lied.”

“Our present honeybees are of late European origin, Nation,” the man said. “The native American bees were funny and inefficient from a human viewpoint. They are not quite extinct even yet, though. There are older-seeming creatures in some of the scenes.”

“What are the clown animals in the piece on your kitchen floor?” Leo asked. “Say, those clowns are big!”

“Ground sloths, Nation. They set things as pretty old. If they are a hoax, they are the grandest hoax I ever ran into. A man would have to have a pretty good imagination to give a peculiar hair form to an extinct animal—a hair form that living sloths in the tropics do not have ... a hair form that sloths of a colder climate just possibly might have. But how many lifetimes would it have taken to paint even a square foot of this in such microscopic detail? There is no letdown anywhere, Nation; there is prodigious detail in every square centimeter of it.”

“Why are the horses so small and the buffaloes so big?”

“I don’t know, Nation. It would take a man with a hundred sciences to figure it out, unless a man with a hundred sciences had hoaxed it. And where was such a man two hundred and fifty years ago?”

“You trace your piece that far back?”

“Yes. And the scene itself might well be fifteen thousand years old. I tell you that this is a mystery. Yes, you can carry those scraps with you if you wish, and I’ll have the bale that’s the remaining big piece freighted up to your place.”

There was a man in Arkansas who had a section of the picture stored in a cave. It was a tourist-attraction cave, but the river-shore picture had proved a sour attraction.

“The people all think it is some sort of movie projection I have set up in my cave here,” he said. “ ‘Who wants to come down in a cave to see movies,’ they say. ‘If we want to see a river shore we will go see a river shore,’ they say, ‘we won’t come down in a cave to see it.’ Well, I thought it would be a good attraction, but it wasn’t.”

“How did you ever get it in here, man?” Leo Nation asked him. “That passage just isn’t big enough to bring it in.”

“Oh, it was already here, rock rollers and all, fifteen years ago when I broke out that little section to crawl through.”

“Then it had to be here a very long time. That wall has formed since.”

“Nah, not very long,” the man said. “These limestone curtains form fast, what with all the moisture trickling down here. The thing could have been brought in here as recent as five hundred years ago. Sure, I’ll sell it. I’ll even break out a section so we can get it out. I have to make the passage big enough for people to walk in anyhow. Tourists don’t like to have to crawl on their bellies in caves. I don’t know why. I always liked to crawl on my belly in caves.”

This was one of the most expensive sections of the picture that Nation bought. It would have been even more expensive if he had shown any interest in certain things seen through trees in one sequence of the picture. Leo’s heart had come up into his mouth when he had noticed those things, and he’d had to swallow it again and maintain his wooden look. This was a section that had elephants on the Mississippi River.

The elephant (Mammut americanum) was really a mastoden, Leo had learned that much from Charles Longbank. Ah, but now he owned elephants; now he had one of the key pieces of the puzzle.

You find a lot of them in Mexico. Everything drifts down to Mexico when it gets a little age on it. Leo Nation was talking with a rich Mexican man who was as Indian as himself.

“No, I don’t know where the Long Picture first came from,” the man said, “but it did come from the North, somewhere in the region of the River itself. In the time of De Soto (a little less than five hundred years ago) there was still Indian legend of the Long Picture, which he didn’t understand. Yourselves of the North, of course, are like children. Even the remembering tribes of you like the Caddos have memories no longer than five hundred years.