Mastodonia by Clifford D. Simak Page A

he’s got some irons of his own in the fire.”
    â€œWe have to have a second man,” she said. “I have no idea what it might be like in dinosaur country, but …”
    â€œNeither do I,” I said. “It could be pretty awful. It could be fairly safe. There’d be a lot of herbivores, all fairly peaceful, I’d imagine. But there’d be some meat-eaters. I have no idea how thick they might be, nor how pugnacious.”
    â€œI’d like to get some footage of at least a couple of the more ferocious ones. That would set up the safari outfit. I have no idea what we can squeeze out of them, but I’d guess an awful lot. After all, how much would a true, red-blooded, dyed-in-the-wool sportsman be willing to pay to be the first man to shoot a ravening, bloodthirsty dinosaur?”
    We reached the escalator going down to the baggage area.
    â€œGive me your check and I’ll pick up the stuff,” I said.
    She opened her purse and took out her ticket envelope. “We’d better arrange for some help,” she said, handing it to me. “There’s more than we can carry.”
    â€œThe two guns,” I said.
    â€œAnd the movie stuff.”
    â€œI’ll get some help,” I said.
    â€œThe whole trouble,” she explained, “was that I couldn’t tell them about some machine—a time-travel machine. If I could have told them we’d developed a machine, they’d have been more able to believe me. We place so much trust in machines; they are magic to us. If I could have outlined some ridiculous theory and spouted some equations at them, they would have been impressed. But I couldn’t do that. To tell them about Catface would have only made matters worse. I simply told them that we had developed a technique for traveling in time, hoping that when I mentioned technique they would presuppose a machine. But it didn’t seem to have the right effect. They asked me about a machine anyhow, and it floored them when I had to tell them there was no machine.”
    â€œWith no machine,” I said, “that’s asking them to accept a lot on faith.”
    â€œAsa, when we go back to get our film, where shall we go?”
    â€œI’ve been thinking about that,” I said, “and I can’t be certain. The late Jurassic, maybe, or the early Cretaceous. In either of those periods, you’d be apt to find a greater diversity of forms, though we can’t be sure. The fossil record would seem to indicate those two times, but the fossil record is only what we’ve found. We’ve probably missed a lot. We make it sound as if we know much more than we do. Actually, we’ve found only bits and pieces; we have no clear picture. But if we went to the early Cretaceous, we’d probably miss the one dinosaur our white hunters are most interested in, old Tyrannosaurus rex .…”
    â€œThey mentioned him,” said Rila.
    â€œRex was a latecomer,” I said, “or we think he was. There may have been bigger and more vicious ones than him that never had the luck to have their fossils found. In any case, it would be nothing short of insanity to go up against him. Eighteen feet tall, a total length of fifty feet, weighing eight tons or more and filled with a senseless hunting instinct. We don’t know how many of him there may be. Perhaps not many. You might have to hunt to find him. Large as he was, he probably required a territory measuring many square miles to make no more than a bare living.”
    â€œWe can figure it out later,” Rila said.

FIFTEEN
    Late that afternoon, I phoned Ben.
    â€œYou want to get started on that motel?” I asked him.
    â€œYou’ve got it, then,” said Ben. “It’s all set. You’ve found what you were after.”
    â€œWe’re fairly close,” I said. “We are on the way. Rila and I would like to talk with you. Could you drop by? It would be