The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Read online

  The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two

  Good Night, Mr. James and Other Stories; Time and Again; and Way Station

  Clifford D. Simak

  CONTENTS

  Good Night, Mr. James and Other Stories

  Introduction: The Non-Fiction of Clifford D. Simak

  Good Night, Mr. James

  Brother

  Senior Citizen

  The Gunsmoke Drummer Sells a War

  Kindergarten

  Reunion on Ganymede

  Galactic Chest

  Death Scene

  Census

  Auk House

  Time and Again

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  XXXVII

  XXXVIII

  XXXIX

  XL

  XLI

  XLII

  XLIII

  XLIV

  XLV

  XLVI

  XLVII

  XLVIII

  XLIX

  L

  LI

  LII

  Way Station

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  About the Author

  Good Night, Mr. James

  And Other Stories

  Introduction

  The Non-Fiction of Clifford D. Simak

  “I sometimes wonder if there is any reality at all—if there is anything but thought. Whether it may not be that some gigantic intelligence has dreamed all these things we see and believe in and accept as real … if the giant intelligence may not have set mighty dream stages and peopled them with actors of his imagination. I wonder at times if all the universes may be nothing more than a shadow show.”

  —Clifford D. Simak, in Cosmic Engineers

  I’m certain no one has ever included Clifford D. Simak in any list of the writers of so-called “hard science fiction”— science fiction arising out of, or based on extrapolations from, the purported “hard sciences” (sciences heavily weighted with technology)—but Cliff was no science lightweight, by any means.

  Anyone with even a superficial knowledge of the life of Clifford D. Simak knows that, for most of the fifty-five-year period during which he was a published writer of science fiction, he was also a working journalist—a newspaperman at a time when that career carried a much higher freight of meaning and importance than it does now. And so, of course, he wrote many news stories of various sorts, but those are seldom, if ever, included in the bibliographies of his fiction (even if they can be identified).

  But newspapers frequently publish material that is different, in one way or another, from what we think of as “the news,” and for Cliff Simak, this began during his very first newspaper job, when, only a few years after coming to the Iron River Reporter (Michigan), he became the paper’s editor and, among other duties, wrote a regular column entitled “Driftwood.”

  It is now impossible to ascertain all of the sorts of things Cliff might have written during his subsequent years working on a variety of newspapers across the Upper Midwest.In those days, most of a reporter’s work went uncredited when the issue was published, making a byline a sought-after reward for good work. But at some point after 1959, during Cliff’s time with the Minneapolis Star and later with the Tribune—with which the Star eventually merged after a period during which they both continued to publish, the Tribune as the morning paper and the Star as the evening paper—Cliff became the go-to guy for the paper’s science-oriented stories, writing stories that ranged from meteorology and climate studies to space exploration (he interviewed Willy Ley), astronomy (he interviewed Harlow Shapley), anthropology, computers, geology, nuclear physics (he interviewed Edward Teller), and energy-oriented issues to hypnosis, unidentified flying objects, and matters concerning how both society and individuals dealt with death. By 1966, Cliff was identified in the paper as the Star’s “science writer” and as the “coordinator for the Science Reading Program” for the Tribune.

  Aimed at encouraging an interest in science among young people, the Science Reading Program—perhaps reflecting new national priorities arising following the shock to American complacencies caused by the USSR’s launching of the first artificial satellite—worked with schools to provide students with insights into a variety of the fields of science. It did so well, apparently, that the series was translated for use in schools in India and South America.

  Although Cliff was clearly interested in science and the development of technology for most of his life—he used to speak, with a chuckle, of the days of his youth when, on the rare occasions an automobile drove down the roads of his rural area, each resident that saw it would use the telephone to call up the neighbors to let them know it was coming so that they could step outside and see it themselves—most of his education and early career involved no technology or science beyond the typewriter, the printing press, and the telephone. The earliest of Cliff’s surviving journals contains what appears to be a list of out-of-town radio stations that he had listened to, and I wonder if that might reflect enthusiasm following his first ownership of a radio. Those entries are undated, but the first page following them, which lists a series of purchases of firewood, was headed “1932–33.”

  And yet, by the early 1960s, he became a writer of books about science—and, specifically, of books that could be called popularizations of a variety of scientific fields for the edification of younger readers. It is unfortunate that any journals he might have kept during those years have not survived to give us an insight into his thinking on such matters, but then, considering that he was still working full time at his newspaper and writing science fiction (this was the period during which he wrote the celebrated Way Station, among other things), as well as writing a series of non-fiction books, perhaps he had no time to bother with a journal.

  In 1962, St. Martin’s Press published The Solar System: Our New Front Yard. Its subject was astronomy. From Atoms to Infinity: Readings in Modern Science was published by Harper & Row in 1965. A sort of anthology of essays, edited by Cliff, that had appeared in the Tribune’s Science Reading series in 1963 and 1964, it also included an article by Cliff, entitled “Our Place in the Galaxy,” that was in the section on astronomy, to which the great astronomer Harlow Shapley contributed three articles. Other sections touched on fields such
as mathematics (four short articles by Isaac Asimov), meteorology, archaeology, Earth, rocketry (four short articles by Willy Ley), plasma physics, the atom, and cancer. St. Martin’s Press then published Trilobite, Dinosaur, and Man: The Earth’s Story, a book on historical geology, in 1966, followed by Wonder and Glory: The Story of the Universe in 1969. In 1969, Harper & Row published The March of Science, which was an anthology of scientific articles by ten writers on such subjects as relativity, archaeology, virology, and the stars. And finally, in 1971, St. Martin’s Press published Prehistoric Man.

  It would be easy to dismiss these books as lightweight; the description “popularization” carries unappealing connotations to most educated readers, and the fact that the volumes are all now over forty-five years old strongly implies that they are certainly outdated—and, in some senses, that is true. Moreover, these books were clearly aimed at young readers.

  Nonetheless, value can be found in at least some of these books. I decided to read Wonder and Glory, for instance, simply because of the title. Having read every piece of Cliff’s fiction that I could reach multiple times, I noticed that he used the phrase “wonder and glory” on a number of occasions, generally in some context relating to outer space, and I came to the conclusion that the phrase had some particular, perhaps strongly psychological, meaning to him.

  Now over forty-seven years old, Wonder and Glory lacks the tremendous knowledge and insights that have been given the field of astronomy in those superseding years, of course, and yet the book has more value than I expected, providing a smooth, easily understood primer on the basics of that field—much of which I had once known, but had forgotten. Clearly, Cliff had a touch for explaining things; and the only things missing from the book are the things that would later be built on the matters he explained. (The contemporary reviews of the book seem to have focused on the fact that it did not bother with footnotes and citations, a short-sighted criticism given that the idea was not to drive away young readers.)

  Similarly, I decided to read Prehistoric Man largely because I had noticed that Cliff made a number of references in his fiction to, well, the images we have of prehistoric mankind (see such stories as “The Loot of Time” and “Final Gentleman,” for example). And I was charmed by the book, short though it is. Using the device of portraying the life of two prehistoric societies through the eyes of two old men—one, a member of a hunter society, at the beginning of the book, the other, a member of an early farming community, at the end—it challenges the reader to treat early men as already human rather than as vicious or animalistic. And in the midst of presenting the basic facts known by the experts (in 1970, I suppose) regarding our prehistoric ancestors (again, in smooth, easily flowing prose that eschews footnotes and citations), Cliff did not hesitate to provide some interesting opinions, such as:

  “So finally … creatures like us came to exist, evolving into a life form so competent and efficient, so brutal and so selfish and so ruthless, that it took over the entire earth.”

  And:

  “We should not fall into the error of thinking of prehistoric Man as something less than human.… We cannot divorce ourselves from any single one of them.”

  And:

  “The question … is whether man domesticated the dog or the dog domesticated man. Dogs are affable and intelligent animals and forever on the make.”

  As he did with Wonder and Glory, Cliff made his summary of the basics of anthropological knowledge easy and attractive to read; but in this case, he did not hesitate to fill in blank spots in the available knowledge with his own speculations and suggestions—whenever he did so, however, he clearly labeled his imaginings as exactly that: speculations that, although at that point unproven, were still possible—and that still had the value of being both educational and able to stretch the imaginations of the readers.

  Cliff’s daughter remembers nights when, as a child, she and her father delved into the books that reproduced cave paintings preserved from prehistory; it is significant that his interest in prehistoric people, already in existence well before his children were born, may have had some effect on his daughter’s eventual career as a museum curator.

  David W. Wixon

  Good Night, Mr. James

  “Good Night, Mr. James” was originally published in the March 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, then a very new magazine just beginning its run to a prominence—a run that would nearly eclipse that of the legendary Astounding Science Fiction. That publication date suggests that the story was written in late 1949 or early 1950, a period not represented in Cliff Simak’s surviving journals. And I regret that fact, because I would like to be able to see whether Cliff had anything to say about how he came to write this story.

  For although Cliff frequently commented that there was “little violence in [his] work,” he would later describe “Good Night, Mr. James” as “vicious.” In fact, it was so vicious, he said, that “it is the only one of [his] stories adapted to television. It is so unlike anything [he had] ever written that at times [he found himself] wondering how [he] came to do it.”

  Me, too.

  —dww

  I

  He came alive from nothing. He became aware from unawareness.

  He smelled the air of the night and heard the trees whispering on the embankment above him and the breeze that had set the trees to whispering came down to him and felt him over with soft and tender fingers, for all the world as if it were examining him for broken bones or contusions and abrasions.

  He sat up and put both his palms down upon the ground beside him to help him sit erect and stared into the darkness. Memory came slowly and when it came it was incomplete and answered nothing.

  His name was Henderson James and he was a human being and he was sitting somewhere on a planet that was called the Earth. He was thirty-six years old and he was, in his own way, famous, and comfortably well-off. He lived in an old ancestral home on Summit Avenue, which was a respectable address even if it had lost some of its smartness in the last twenty years or so.

  On the road above the slope of the embankment a car went past with its tires whining on the pavement and for a moment its headlights made the treetops glow. Far away, muted by the distance, a whistle cried out. And somewhere else a dog was barking with a flat viciousness.

  His name was Henderson James and if that were true, why was he here? Why should Henderson James be sitting on the slope of an embankment, listening to the wind in the trees and to a wailing whistle and a barking dog? Something had gone wrong, some incident that, if he could but remember it, might answer all his questions.

  There was a job to do.

  He sat and stared into the night and found that he was shivering, although there was no reason why he should, for the night was not that cold. Beyond the embankment he heard the sounds of a city late at night, the distant whine of the speeding car and the far-off wind-broken screaming of a siren. Once a man walked along a street close by and James sat listening to his footsteps until they faded out of hearing.

  Something had happened and there was a job to do, a job that he had been doing, a job that somehow had been strangely interrupted by the inexplicable incident which had left him lying here on this embankment.

  He checked himself. Clothing … shorts and shirt, strong shoes, his wristwatch and the gun in the holster at his side.

  A gun?

  The job involved a gun.

  He had been hunting in the city, hunting something that required a gun. Something that was prowling in the night and a thing that must be killed.

  Then he knew the answer, but even as he knew it he sat for a moment wondering at the strange, methodical, step-by-step progression of reasoning that had brought him to the memory. First his name and the basic facts pertaining to himself, then the realization of where he was and the problem of why he happened to be there and finally the realization that he had a gun a
nd that it was meant to be used. It was a logical way to think, a primer schoolbook way to work it out:

  I am a man named Henderson James.

  I live in a house on Summit Avenue.

  Am I in the house on Summit Avenue?

  No, I am not in the house on Summit Avenue.

  I am on an embankment somewhere.

  Why am I on the embankment?

  But it wasn’t the way a man thought, at least not the normal way a normal man would think. Man thought in shortcuts. He cut across the block and did not go all the way around.

  It was a frightening thing, he told himself, this clear-around-the-block thinking. It wasn’t normal and it wasn’t right and it made no sense at all … no more sense than did the fact that he should find himself in a place with no memory of getting there.

  He rose to his feet and ran his hands up and down his body. His clothes were neat, not rumpled. He hadn’t been beaten up and he hadn’t been thrown from a speeding car. There were no sore places on his body and his face was unbloody and whole and he felt all right.

  He hooked his fingers in the holster belt and shucked it up so that it rode tightly on his hips. He pulled out the gun and checked it with expert and familiar fingers and the gun was ready.

  He walked up the embankment and reached the road, went across it with a swinging stride to reach the sidewalk that fronted the row of new bungalows. He heard a car coming and stepped off the sidewalk to crouch in a clump of evergreens that landscaped one corner of a lawn. The move was instinctive and he crouched there, feeling just a little foolish at the thing he’d done.

  The car went past and no one saw him. They would not, he now realized, have noticed him even if he had remained out on the sidewalk.

  He was unsure of himself; that must be the reason for his fear. There was a blank spot in his life, some mysterious incident that he did not know and the unknowing of it had undermined the sure and solid foundation of his own existence, had wrecked the basis of his motive and had turned him, momentarily, into a furtive animal that darted and hid at the approach of his fellow men.

  That and something that had happened to him that made him think clear around the block.