“Maybe,” I said. “I’m not sure.”
“There’d be advantages. Free land for the taking.
No taxes. Lots of elbow room. Good hunting and fishing.”
“I still don’t know,” I said.
“Well, we can talk about that later on.”
“How about money and banking?” asked Rila.
“How do we handle all that money you say we’re going to get? Certainly not in American banks, where the IRS can get their hands on it.”
“That’s easy,” said Courtney. “Open an account in Switzerland. Probably Zurich. Your clients can make payment to your Swiss account. They could, of course, pay you some of it in cash so you’d have funds to pay Ben his commissions and to take care of other expenses. But if you are going to do that, you should open an account right away so your record will seem a little cleaner. If you opened an account before you start transacting any time-travel business, we’d be able to pull the rug out from under anyone who tried to charge concealment of funds. The initial payment into the account should be fairly substantial so that no one can say it was only a token deposit.”
“I sold my share of the import-export business to my partner in New York the other day,” said Rila.
“His first payment, to be made in a day or two, is a hundred thousand. But we wouldn’t have to wait for it. I could assign the first check to Ben’s bank and then he could loan us the hundred thousand. We’re into him for quite an amount right now, but I think he’d do it.”
“Fine,” said Courtney. “A hundred thousand would be just fine. Before you move into Mastodonia, but giving your address for the account as Mastodonia. I take it you approve of my suggestions.”
“It seems just a little devious to me,” I said.
“Of course, the whole thing is devious. But, by and large, it’s legal. We could be challenged, of course, and probably will be, but we have solid grounds for argument.”
“Half of the business world is devious,” said Rila.
“Even if we should go to court and lose on some points,” said Courtney, “you’d be no worse off.than you are now and probably better. We’d have enough room to strike deals, if necessary. But I’d not go into it with any idea of a deal. I’d go to court to win.
We’ve only talked about the court matter. A non-American resident would have other advantages. No governmental regulations or interference, no reports to be filled out, no statements to be filed.”
“All things considered I think what you suggest is the right thing to do,” Rila said. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been worried about the tax situation.”
“You know about such things,” I said. “I don’t.”
“So, almost immediately,” said Courtney, “you’ll move into Mastodonia and set up residence. I would think, perhaps, that a mobile home …”
“I’ll take care of that,” said Rila, “while Asa is off to Zurich.” She said to me, “I seem to remember you can speak French.”
“Some,” I said. “Enough to get by fairly well. But you should be the one …”
“I don’t speak French,” she said. “Only Spanish and a little German — a very little German. That’s why you are going to Zurich. I’ll stay here and see that matters are taken care of from this end.”
“You seem to have everything in hand,” Courtney said. “So I’ll leave the rest up to you. Phone me on any little question. Don’t wait for the big one; phone on the little ones as well. I suppose you’ll want to make that Zurich account a joint one. If that’s the case, Rila, be sure Asa has a notarized copy of your signature before he leaves. And don’t make Ben your agent until you’re settled in Mastodonia.”
“One thing,” I said. “If we exasperate the government sufficiently, could they declare us personae non gratae, prevent us from moving back and forth between Mastodonia and Willow Bend, perhaps close the time road into Mastodonia?”
Courtney said, “I suppose they could try, but we’d give them a hell of a fight. Take the matter to the United Nations if we had to. I don’t think they’ll try.”
“I guess that’s it,” I said. “The decision’s been made.
Strange we could settle such a deal in so short a time.”
“The plan makes sense,” said Rila. “You don’t argue with good, sound reasoning.”
“If that’s the case,” said Courtney, “you can take me back to the airstrip.”
“You mean you’re not even coming out to the farm?” asked Rila. “I thought you wanted to meet Ben.”
“Some other time,” he said. “I’ve told you all I wanted to, where no one else could hear. These are going to be busy days and there’s no time to waste.”
He rubbed his hands together delightedly. “This is going to be more damn fun,” he said, “than I have had in years.”
NINETEEN
On the return flight from Zurich, we had a layover in London. I bought a paper and there it was — a great screaming headline: mystery americans TRAVEL IN TIME’.
I bought other papers. The sober Times treated the story sedately, all the others thundered in bold, black type.
A lot of the facts were jumbled, but the stories essentially were correct. Rila and I were represented as a mystery pair. She was not to be located; rumor had it that she was living in a place called Mastodonia, No one knew exactly where Mastodonia might be, but some speculation came close to the truth. The popular speculation was that I had gone abroad, although no one knew exactly where. But that did not stop the newsmen from making what seemed to me rather fantastic guesses. Ben had been interviewed. He had acknowledged he was our American agent, but gave them little else. Herbert Livingston, Ben’s public relations officer, was quoted as saying, rather curtly, that the announcement was premature and that he would have nothing further to say until a more appropriate time. I wondered, as I read the story, just how in hell Herb suddenly had become our PR man. The story was based on what was described as an authoritative source without any attempt to pinpoint the source. But Safari, Inc., which somehow had been tied into the story, admitted that a film did exist of a dinosaur hunt staged in an era some seventy million years in the past. One movie company executive was even quoted as being at least marginally interested. The Safari people openly admitted their interest. Courtney was not mentioned and from this omission, I was fairly certain where the leak to the press had originated.
Four noted physicists, one of them a Nobelist, had been interviewed, each of them saying with varying degrees of smugness that time travel was impossible.
Each of the stories assumed that a time machine was involved — which was understandable since only five people, perhaps six, now that Herb was involved, knew that one was not. There was considerable agonizing among the so-called science writers of the various newspapers as to what kind of form the machine would take and what principles would be involved. Only one of the stories I read failed to mention H. G. Wells.
My first sight of the first paper with its blaring headline left me all tensed up, but before too long, having read some of the other stories, I had become mush inside. As long as only a few people had known about our time-travel capability, it had been possible for me to accept the idea as a sort of silly, almost boyish, secret. But the situation was different when our secret was shared by the entire world. I found myself looking around and behind me to see if anyone might recognize me, but that was rather foolish since none of the London papers had pictures of either Rila or me. But it would not take long, I knew, until our pictures would be splashed across the tabloids. In those early stories, there was no identification of who either of us might be, but before the day was over, the newsmen would run down exactly who we were and would then find photos of us.