Our Children's Children by Clifford D. Simak Read Free Book Online Page B

lot of nonsense.”
    â€œBelieve me,” said Gale, “it is not willing nonsense. The men who worked it out, who thought it through, are honorable and accomplished scholars.”
    â€œThis is nothing,” said the President, “that we can resolve at the moment. Since it is done, we can safely put it off until another day. After all, what’s done is done and we have to live with it. There is one thing else that puzzles me.”
    â€œPlease say it, sir,” said Gale.
    â€œWhy go back twenty million years? Why so far?”
    â€œWe want to go back far enough so that our occupation of that segment of Earth’s time cannot possibly have any impact on the rise of mankind. We probably will not be there too long. Our historians tell us that man, in his present state of technology, cannot look forward to more than a million years on Earth, perhaps much less than that. In a million years, in far less than a million years, we’ll all be gone from Earth. We are right now, I mean we were up in our own time, if we had been left undisturbed, only a few centuries from true spaceship capability. Given a few thousand years we will have developed deep space capability and probably will be gone from Earth. Once man can leave the Earth, he probably will leave it. Give him a million years and he surely will be gone.”
    â€œBut you will have impact back there,” Williams pointed out. “You’ll use up natural resources. You’ll use coal and iron, you’ll tap oil and gas. You will.…”
    â€œSome iron. Not enough that it will be noticed. With so little left up there five hundred years from now, we’ve learned to be very frugal. And no fossil fuel at all.”
    â€œYou’ll need energy.”
    â€œWe have fusion power,” said Gale. “Our economy would be a great shock to you. We now make things to last. Not ten years, or twenty, but for centuries. Obsolescence no longer is a factor in our economy. As a result, our manufacturing up in 2498, is less than one percent of what yours is today.”
    â€œThat’s impossible,” said Sandburg.
    â€œBy your present standards, perhaps,” admitted Gale. “Not by ours. We had to change our life-style. We simply had no choice. Centuries of overuse of natural resources left us impoverished. We had to do with what we had. We had to find ways in which to do it.”
    â€œIf what you say about man remaining on the Earth for no longer than another million years is true,” said the President, “I don’t quite understand why you have to travel back the twenty million. You could go back only five and it would be quite all right.”
    Gale shook his head. “We’d be getting too close, then, to the forerunners of mankind. True, man as we can recognize him, rose no more than two million years ago, but the first primates came into being some seventy million years ago. We’ll be intruding on those first primates, of course, but perhaps with no great impact, and it would be impossible for us to miss them, for to go beyond them would place us in the era of the dinosaurs, which would not be a comfortable time period. Not just the dinosaurs alone, but a number of other things. The critical period for mankind, the appearance of the forerunners of the australopithecines, could not have been later than fifteen million years ago. We can’t be certain of these figures. Most of our anthropologists believe that if we went back only ten million it probably would be safe enough. But we want to be sure. And there is no reason why we can’t go deeper into time. So the twenty million. And there is another thing, as well. We want to leave room enough for you.”
    Douglas leaped to his feet. “For us!” he yelled.
    The President raised a restraining hand. “Wait a minute, Reilly. Let’s have the rest of it.”
    â€œIt makes good sense,” said Gale, “or we think it