Chapter 12

The night editor read the bulletin just off the teletype.

“Well, what do you know!” he said. “We just recognized Mastodonia.”

He looked at the copy chief.

“Where the hell is Mastodonia?” he asked.

The copy chief shrugged. “Don’t ask me. You’re the brains in this joint.”

“Well, let’s get a map for the next edition,” said the night editor.

Tabby, the saber-tooth, dabbed playfully at Cooper with his mighty paw.

Cooper kicked him in the ribs--an equally playful gesture.

Tabby snarled at him.

“Show your teeth at me, will you!” said Cooper. “Raised you from a kitten and that’s the gratitude you show. Do it just once more and I’ll belt you in the chops.”

Tabby lay down blissfully and began to wash his face.

“Some day,” warned Hudson, “that cat will miss a meal and that’s the day you’re it.”

“Gentle as a dove,” Cooper assured him. “Wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Well, one thing about it, nothing dares to bother us with that monstrosity around.”

“Best watchdog there ever was. Got to have something to guard all this stuff we’ve got. When Wes gets back, we’ll be millionaires. All those furs and ginseng and the ivory.”

“If he gets back.”

“He’ll be back. Quit your worrying.”

“But it’s been five years,” Hudson protested.

“He’ll be back. Something happened, that’s all. He’s probably working on it right now. Could be that he messed up the time setting when he repaired the unit or it might have been knocked out of kilter when Buster hit the helicopter. That would take a while to fix. I don’t worry that he won’t come back. What I can’t figure out is why did he go and leave us?”

“I’ve told you,” Hudson said. “He was afraid it wouldn’t work.”

“There wasn’t any need to be scared of that. We never would have laughed at him.”

“No. Of course we wouldn’t.”

“Then what was he scared of?” Cooper asked.

“If the unit failed and we knew it failed, Wes was afraid we’d try to make him see how hopeless and insane it was. And he knew we’d probably convince him and then all his hope would be gone. And he wanted to hang onto that, Johnny. He wanted to hang onto his hope even when there wasn’t any left.”

“That doesn’t matter now,” said Cooper. “What counts is that he’ll come back. I can feel it in my bones.”

And here’s another case, thought Hudson, of hope begging to be allowed to go on living.

God, he thought, I wish I could be that blind!

“Wes is working on it right now,” said Cooper confidently.

He was. Not he alone, but a thousand others, working desperately, knowing that the time was short, working not alone for two men trapped in time, but for the peace they all had dreamed about--that the whole world had yearned for through the ages.

For to be of any use, it was imperative that they could zero in the time machines they meant to build as an artilleryman would zero in a battery of guns, that each time machine would take its occupants to the same instant of the past, that their operation would extend over the same period of time, to the exact second.

It was a problem of control and calibration--starting with a prototype that was calibrated, as its finest adjustment, for jumps of 50,000 years.

Project Mastodon was finally under way.