The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Read online

  A voice called softly. “Johnny!”

  Carolyn! Carolyn calling for him. Swiftly an answer came to his lips and then it died, for there was another sound, the sound of the men that he had forgotten. Boots coming through the grass, heading straight toward him.

  “Over this way,” said one voice and he recognized it as that of the man who had worn the blue mask back there on the road when the three had stopped him yesterday. Was it only yesterday? Enough had happened for a lifetime.

  A voice growled at the blue mask man. “You’re loco, all you heard was just the wind.”

  “It was a voice,” the man said stubbornly. “Sounded like the girl.”

  “It wasn’t Harrison,” said the other one. “Spike got him. Didn’t you, Spike?”

  “Sure,” said the third voice. “Had a feeling when I saw him coming up the road this afternoon that I’d have to shoot him. Shoot him then and save a lot of trouble.”

  Cautiously, Harrison lifted his head, saw the three bearing down upon him, saw that the tall man in the center was the blue mask man, the man who had jerked his thumb when Westman had asked him if the boss was in.

  “Nice horse you took from him,” said the second man.

  “Damn fool just picketed him out, then walked away and left him.”

  “Seems as how,” declared Spike, “a man like that don’t deserve a horse.”

  Harrison’s hands clenched into fists and his body tightened. His head was clearer, but it still was jumpy and his body was one vast dull ache.

  Nothing to fight with … and yet he had to fight. It was stark madness … one man with nothing but his hands against three armed men. His mind went back to Carolyn, crouching somewhere back there in the grass. Thank Lord, he told himself, she’s heard them, too, and is keeping quiet.

  He counted as they came, counting footsteps as they came. One, two, and one, two and one, two. They were no more than three paces away and that was close enough. Almost too close. Almost …

  He heaved himself out of the grass, rising like a fighting grizzly rearing on his legs when he finally is cornered, and from his throat ripped out an involuntary cry …

  His legs drove him forward in a surging leap and his right fist came whizzing from his boot-tops even as he sprang. A fist that was aimed with deadly accuracy at the blue-mask man.

  For an instant, in the twilight, he saw their blank stares, the jaws that dropped with astonishment, then the hurried, instinctively pistoning of hands for gunbutts.

  The blue-mask man started to duck, but he moved too late. Harrison’s fist caught him beneath the jaw, snapped back his head with its brutal power, lifted him clear off his feet.

  Like a cat, Harrison pivoted, saw Spike’s leering face before him, saw the gun come flashing up, knew that he’d never beat the bullet.

  “Got you.…” jeered Spike, and then the gurgle stopped him, the gurgle that came into his throat, the soft splat! of steel on flesh that sent him reeling back. Staggering, he dropped his gun and his hands went to his throat, grasping for the knife hilt that stood out against his neck.

  Like a plummet, Harrison dived for Spike’s dropped gun, half stumbling as he scooped it out of the grass, half by feel, half by luck.

  The one remaining man of the bandit trio was dropping the six-gun for a snap shot and in something that was almost panic, Harrison squeezed the trigger of the gun he had scooped up.

  The revolver in front of him gushed fire, but the gun in his own fist was dancing in his grasp. The man in front of him staggered back on fighting heels, gun arm coming up above his head. Back and back he stumbled and with grim ferocity, with a dull red anger, Harrison kept the trigger working, slamming bullet after bullet into the sagging body.

  “Him all over dead,” said a quiet sing-song voice out of the twilight. “No use to shoot him more.”

  Harrison let the gun drop to his side and swung around.

  “Sing Lee!” he shouted.

  “Come to pick up missy,” explained the Chinese cook. “Take along a knife just in case.”

  “Then that was you,” said Harrison. “That was you who stopped her from running back.”

  “That was me,” said Sing Lee.

  “I damn near shot you,” Harrison told him.

  He moved forward slowly. “Where is Carolyn? Where is …”

  Then he saw her, standing to one side of Sing Lee. He strode toward her, but Sing Lee put out a hand and stopped him.

  “We run like hell,” he said. “Men hear shots and come.”

  Harrison glanced quickly over his shoulder, saw that the cook was right. Men were coming … and not men on foot this time, but mounted men, sweeping in toward them with their horses at a dead run.

  “No time to run!” gasped Harrison. “We have to stand and fight. Get down! Get down in the grass and hide!”

  He leaped back toward Spike’s dead form, unfastened his cartridge belt. With trembling fingers, he fed new shells into the six-gun.

  On one knee, Harrison brought up the gun, leveled it deliberately and fired. One of the foremost riders jerked stiffly, sailed out of the saddle. Six-guns cracked and the horses swung, fighting their bits, rearing, skidding around. Bullets chunked into the ground and the air whined with their whisper overhead. Dirt struck Harrison across the face as a slug plowed ground at his very feet. Swiftly he worked the trigger.

  Out of the darkness behind him came the angry spat of a high power rifle, a hacking, angry rifle that talked in measured tones, unhurried, deliberate, vindictive.

  Then there were other rifles and the shouts of men charging in, closing upon the milling horses of the bandit band.

  The six-gun clicked on an empty shell and Harrison reached for the belt lying at his feet. A fitful flash flared through the twilit gloom … a flash that was not gunfire. Harrison jerked up his head, let the gun fall from his hands.

  Flames were curling from the houses, flames that crawled and leaped and climbed into the sky. The firing had died down and across the grassland that lay between him and the houses, Harrison could hear the crackle of the flames.

  Slowly, stiffly, he stood up, drew in a deep breath of air.

  A tall figure stalked out of the gloom toward him, rifle slung across his arm.

  “Wal,” said Trapper Bill, “I guess that polishes off the varmints. All we had to do was sort of hole up and hold out until Ma got that note.”

  Harrison gasped. “What note?”

  “Why the note that Sing Lee wrote her. Damn smart Chinaman, Sing Lee. Told you he was taking up reading and writing, didn’t I?”

  “Sure. But how did Sing Lee …”

  “Just sort of lifted that paper you was carrying in your pocket,” explained Trapper. “Figured maybe it was something I should know about. So I took it when you was a-snoozing and loped over to have Sing Lee take a look at it.”

  “But there wasn’t nothing on it.”

  “Sure, there was. Sing Lee held it up to the light. Said it was the funniest writing he ever run across.”

  “So you left a note for Ma and then came on, the two of you. That was you up on the cliff.”

  “Dang tooting,” said Trapper. “Sure kept them all denned up.”

  Grass rustled and Harrison swung about. Carolyn was running toward him with Sing Lee behind her. Swiftly, Harrison stepped forward, caught the girl close. She huddled against him for comfort.

  “All done in,” said Trapper.

  “Missy all right,” said Sing Lee. “Just happy, that’s all.”

  Horses swept toward them, pulled to a stop. Ma Elden climbed down stiffly from the saddle, waddled toward the group, fingers hauling out the makings from her shirt pocket.

  “Everybody all right?” she demanded.

  “Everybody here,” Sing Lee told her in his high sing-song. “Everybody happy.”

/>   “I’m plumb glad of that,” said Ma. “Some other folks ain’t. We got Dunham tied up and we found Haynes where he shouldn’t be, so we just gathered him in to be on the safe side. Westman got away, but the boys still are hunting for him.”

  She snapped a match across her thumb, held up the light so she could look at Harrison.

  “Well,” she asked, “ain’t you got a thing to say?”

  “Was wondering,” said Harrison, “if you’d still loan me that money to buy out the store.”

  “Bet your boots,” said Ma.

  She lit the cigarette, puffed thoughtfully.

  “Maybe,” she said, “we could make it a double wedding. Me and Hatless figure on getting hitched some time, and this is as good a time as any.”

  THE END

  Kindergarten

  “Kindergarten” was originally published in the July 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. The date is close enough to the end of World War II that I am led to wonder whether this story represents—in a different way than the City stories—a reaction to the horror and pessimism the war engendered in many for the future of the human race.

  In a number of stories written after this one, Cliff seemed to be saying that perhaps the race needs help—help from outside—to make it.

  —dww

  He went walking in the morning before the Sun was up, down past the old, dilapidated barn that was falling in upon itself, across the stream and up the slope of pasture ankle-deep with grass and summer flowers, when the world was wet with dew and the chill edge of night still lingered in the air.

  He went walking in the morning because he knew he might not have too many mornings left; any day, the pain might close down for good and he was ready for it—he’d been ready for it for a long time now.

  He was in no hurry. He took each walk as if it were his last and he did not want to miss a single thing on any of the walks—the turned-up faces of the pasture roses with the tears of dew running down their cheeks or the matins of the birds in the thickets that ran along the ditches.

  He found the machine alongside the path that ran through a thicket at the head of a ravine. At first glance, he was irritated by it, for it was not only unfamiliar, but an incongruous thing as well, and he had no room in heart or mind for anything but the commonplace. It had been the commonplace, the expected, the basic reality of Earth and the life one lived on it which he had sought in coming to this abandoned farm seeking out a place where he might stand on ground of his own choosing to meet the final day.

  He stopped in the path and stood there, looking at this strange machine, feeling the roses and the dew and the early morning bird song slip away from him, leaving him alone with this thing beside the path which looked for all the world like some fugitive from a home appliance shop. But as he looked at it, he began to see the little differences and he knew that here was nothing he’d ever seen before or heard of—that it most certainly was not a wandering automatic washer or a delinquent dehumidifier.

  For one thing, it shone—not with surface metallic luster or the gleam of sprayed-on porcelain, but with a shine that was all the way through whatever it was made of. If you looked at it just right, you got the impression that you were seeing into it, though not clearly enough to be able to make out the shape of any of its innards. It was rectangular, at a rough guess three feet by four by two, and it was without knobs for one to turn or switches to snap on or dials to set—which suggested that it was not something one was meant to operate.

  He walked over to it and bent down and ran his hand along its top, without thinking why he should reach out and touch it, knowing when it was too late that probably he should have left it alone. But it seemed to be all right to touch it, for nothing happened—not right away, at least. The metal, or whatever it was made of, was smooth to the hand and beneath the sleekness of its surface he seemed to sense a terrible hardness and a frightening strength.

  He took his hand away and straightened up, stepped back.

  The machine clicked, just once, and he had the distinct impression that it clicked not because it had to click to operate, not because it was turning itself on, but to attract attention, to let him know that it was an operating machine and that it had a function and was ready to perform it. And he got the impression that for whatever purpose it might operate, it would do so with high efficiency and a minimum of noise.

  Then it laid an egg.

  Why he thought of it in just that way, he never was able to explain, even later when he had thought about it.

  But, anyhow, it laid an egg, and the egg was a piece of jade, green with milky whiteness running through it, and exquisitely carved with what appeared to be outré symbolism.

  He stood there in the path, looking at the jade, for a moment forgetting in his excitement how it had materialized, caught up by the beauty of the jade itself and the superb workmanship that had wrought it into shape. It was, he told himself, the finest piece that he had ever seen and he knew exactly how its texture would feel beneath his fingers and just how expertly, upon close examination, he would find the carving had been done.

  He bent and picked it up and held it lovingly between his hands, comparing it with the pieces he had known and handled for years in the museum. But now, even with the jade between his hands, the museum was a misty place, far back along the corridors of time, although it had been less than three months since he had walked away from it.

  “Thank you,” he said to the machine and an instant later thought what a silly thing to do, talking to a machine as if it were a person.

  The machine just sat there. It did not click again and it did not move.

  So finally he left, walking back to the old farmhouse on the slope above the barn.

  In the kitchen, he placed the jade in the center of the table, where he could see it while he worked. He kindled a fire in the stove and fed in split sticks of wood, not too large, to make quick heat. He put the kettle on to warm and got dishes from the pantry and set his place. He fried bacon and drained it on paper toweling and cracked the last of the eggs into the skillet.

  He ate, staring at the jade that stood in front of him, admiring once again its texture, trying to puzzle out the symbolism of its carving and finally wondering what it might be worth. Plenty, he thought—although, of all considerations, that was the least important.

  The carving puzzled him. It was in no tradition that he had ever seen or of which he had ever read. What it was meant to represent, he could not imagine. And yet it had a beauty and a force, a certain character, that tagged it as no haphazard doodling, but as the product of a highly developed culture.

  He did not hear the young woman come up the steps and walk across the porch, but first knew that she was there when she rapped upon the door frame. He looked up from the jade and saw her standing in the open kitchen doorway and at first sight of her he found himself, ridiculously, thinking of her in the same terms he had been thinking of the jade.

  The jade was cool and green and she was crisp and white, but her eyes, he thought, had the soft look of this wondrous piece of jade about them, except that they were blue.

  “Hello, Mr. Chaye,” she said.

  “Good morning,” he replied.

  She was Mary Mallet, Johnny’s sister.

  “Johnny wanted to go fishing,” Mary told him. “He and the little Smith boy. So I brought the milk and eggs.”

  “I am pleased you did,” said Peter, “although you should not have bothered. I could have walked over later. It would have done me good.”

  He immediately regretted that last sentence, for it was something he was thinking too much lately—that such and such an act or the refraining from an act would do him good when, as a matter of plain fact, there was nothing that would help him at all. The doctors had made at least that much clear to him.

  He took the eggs and milk and asked her in and w
ent to place the milk in the cooler, for he had no electricity for a refrigerator.

  “Have you had breakfast?” he asked.

  Mary said she had.

  “It’s just as well,” he said wryly. “My cooking’s pretty bad. I’m just camping out, you know.”

  And regretted that one, too.

  Chaye, he told himself, quit being so damn maudlin.

  “What a pretty thing!” exclaimed Mary. “Wherever did you get it?”

  “The jade? Now, that’s a funny thing. I found it.”

  She reached a hand out for it.

  “May I?”

  “Certainly,” said Peter.

  He watched her face as she picked it up and held it in both hands, carefully, as he had held it.

  “You found this?”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly find it, Mary. It was given to me.”

  “A friend?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s a funny thing to say.”

  “Not so funny. I’d like to show you the—well, the character who gave it to me. Have you got a minute?”

  “Of course I have,” said Mary, “although I’ll have to hurry. Mother’s canning peaches.”

  They went down the slope together, past the barn, and crossed the creek to come into the pasture. As they walked up the pasture, he wondered if they would find it there, if it still was there—or ever had been there.

  It was.

  “What an outlandish thing!” said Mary.

  “That’s the word exactly,” Peter agreed.

  “What is it, Mr. Chaye?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You said you were given the jade. You don’t mean …”

  “But I do,” said Peter.

  They moved closer to the machine and stood watching it. Peter noticed once again the shine of it and the queer sensation of being able to see into it—not very far, just part way, and not very well at that. But still the metal or whatever it was could be seen into, and that was somehow uncomfortable.