Our Children's Children by Clifford D. Simak Page A

fence sticking from the ground that you stub your toe upon. There isn’t any park and there aren’t any flower beds. Now can you understand? Can you know what all this means to me?”
    â€œBut how? When?”
    â€œNot right away,” she said. “Not for a century or more. And now it may never happen. You’re on a different time track now.”
    She stood there, a thin slip of a girl, in her chaste white robe, belted at the waist, talking of different time tracks and of a future when there would be no White House. He shook his head, bewildered. “How much do you understand?” he asked. “Of this time track business? I know your father mentioned it, but there was so much else.…”
    â€œThere are equations that you have to know to understand it all,” she said. “There are, I suppose, only a few men who really understand it. But basically it’s quite simple. It’s a cause-and-effect situation and once you change the cause or, more likely, many causes, as we must have done in coming here.…”
    He made a motion of futility with his hand. “I still can’t believe it,” he said. “Not just the time track, but all the rest of it. I woke up this morning and I was going on a picnic. You know what a picnic is?”
    â€œNo,” she said, “I don’t know what a picnic is. So we are even now.”
    â€œSomeday I’ll take you on a picnic.”
    â€œI wish you would,” she said, “Is it something nice?”

20
    Bentley Price came home a bit befuddled, but somewhat triumphant, for he had talked his way past a roadblock set up by the military, had yelled a jeep off the road, and honked his way through two blocks clotted by refugees and spectators who had stayed in the area despite all efforts by the MPs to move them out. The driveway was half-blocked by a car, but he made his way around it, clipping a rose bush in the process.
    Night had fallen and it had been a busy day and all that Bentley wanted was to get into the house and collapse upon a bed, but before he did he must clear the car of cameras and other equipment, for it would never do, with so many strangers in the neighborhood, to leave it locked in the car, as had been his habit. A locked car would be no deterrent to someone really bent on thievery. He hung three cameras by their straps around his neck and was hauling a heavy accessories bag out of the car when he saw, with outrage, what had happened to Edna’s flower bed.
    A gun stood in the center of it, its wheels sunk deep into the soil, and around it stood the gun crew. The gun site was brightly lighted by a large spotlight that had been hung high in the branches of a tree and there could be no doubt of the havoc that had been wrought upon the flowers.
    Bentley charged purposefully upon the gun, brushing aside one astounded cannoneer, to square off, like an embattled bantam rooster, before a young man who had bars upon his shoulder straps.
    â€œYou have your nerve,” said Bentley. “Coming here when the owner happens to be gone.…”
    â€œAre you the owner, sir?” asked the captain of the gun crew.
    â€œNo,” said Bentley, “I am not, but I am responsible. I was left here to look out for the joint and.…”
    â€œWe are sorry, sir,” said the officer, “if we have displeased you, but we had our orders, sir.”
    Bentley shrilled at him. “You had orders to set up this contraption in the middle of Edna’s flower bed? I suppose the orders said to set up in the middle of a flower bed, not a few feet forward or a few feet back, but in the middle of a bed which a devoted woman has slaved to bring up to perfection.…”
    â€œNo, not precisely that,” said the officer. “We were ordered to cover the mouth of the time tunnel and to do that we needed a clear line of fire.”
    â€œThat don’t make no sense,” said Bentley.