Project Mastodon | Page 9

did in the past--or are about to do--has been done already. I've lain awake nights, mister, thinking about all these things and there is no answer, believe me, except the one I give you. The question which faces us here is an immediate one. Do we give all this up or do we keep on watching that Wisconsin farm, waiting for them to come back? Do we keep on trying to find, independently, the process or formula or method that Adams found for traveling in time?"
"We've had no luck in our research so far, General," said the quiet physicist who sat at the table's end. "If you were not so sure and if the evidence were not so convincing that it had been done by Adams, I'd say flatly that it is impossible. We have no approach which holds any hope at all. What we've done so far, you might best describe as flounder. But if Adams turned the trick, it must be possible. There may be, as a matter of fact, more ways than one. We'd like to keep on trying."
"Not one word of blame has been put on you for your failure," the chairman told the physicist. "That you could do it seems to be more than can be humanly expected. If Adams did it--if he did, I say--it must have been simply that he blundered on an avenue of research no other man has thought of."
"You will recall," said the general, "that the research program, even from the first, was thought of strictly as a gamble. Our one hope was, and must remain, that they will return."
"It would have been so much simpler all around," the state department man said, "if Adams had patented his method."
The general raged at him. "And had it published, all neat and orderly, in the patent office records so that anyone who wanted it could look it up and have it?"
"We can be most sincerely thankful," said the chairman, "that he did not patent it."

VI
The helicopter would never fly again, but the time unit was intact.
Which didn't mean that it would work.
They held a powwow at their camp site. It had been, they decided, simpler to move the camp than to remove the body of Old Buster. So they had shifted at dawn, leaving the old mastodon still sprawled across the helicopter.
In a day or two, they knew, the great bones would be cleanly picked by the carrion birds, the lesser cats, the wolves and foxes and the little skulkers.
Getting the time unit out of the helicopter had been quite a chore, but they finally had managed and now Adams sat with it cradled in his lap.
"The worst of it," he told them, "is that I can't test it. There's no way to. You turn it on and it works or it doesn't work. You can't know till you try."
"That's something we can't help," Cooper replied. "The problem, seems to me, is how we're going to use it without the whirlybird."
"We have to figure out some way to get up in the air," said Adams. "We don't want to take the chance of going up into the twentieth century and arriving there about six feet underground."
"Common sense says that we should be higher here than up ahead," Hudson pointed out. "These hills have stood here since Jurassic times. They probably were a good deal higher then and have weathered down. That weathering still should be going on. So we should be higher here than in the twentieth century--not much, perhaps, but higher."
"Did anyone ever notice what the altimeter read?" asked Cooper.
"I don't believe I did," Adams admitted.
"It wouldn't tell you, anyhow," Hudson declared. "It would just give our height then and now--and we were moving, remember--and what about air pockets and relative atmosphere density and all the rest?"
Cooper looked as discouraged as Hudson felt.
"How does this sound?" asked Adams. "We'll build a platform twelve feet high. That certainly should be enough to clear us and yet small enough to stay within the range of the unit's force-field."
"And what if we're two feet higher here?" Hudson pointed out.
"A fall of fourteen feet wouldn't kill a man unless he's plain unlucky."
"It might break some bones."
"So it might break some bones. You want to stay here or take a chance on a broken leg?"
"All right, if you put it that way. A platform, you say. A platform out of what?"
"Timber. There's lot of it. We just go out and cut some logs."
"A twelve-foot log is heavy. And how are we going to get that big a log uphill?"
"We drag it."
"We try to, you mean."
"Maybe we could fix up a cart," said Adams, after thinking a moment.
"Out of what?" Cooper asked.
"Rollers, maybe. We could cut some and roll the logs up here."
"That would work on level