The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 21

  “But without the garlic,” she said. So I promised to forego the garlic and she agreed to come.

  Somehow or other, we never did get that boat out of the water; there were so many other things to do.

  After dinner we built a fire in the fireplace and sat in front of it. She put her head on my shoulder and we were comfortable and cozy. “Let’s play pretend,” she said. “Let’s pretend you have that job you want. Let’s say it is in London, and this is a lodge in the English fens …”

  “A fen,” I said, “is a hell of a place to have a lodge.”

  “You always spoil things,” she complained. “Let’s start over again. Let’s pretend you have that job you want …”

  And she stuck to her fens.

  Driving back to the lake after taking her home, I wondered if I’d ever get that job. Right at the moment it didn’t look so rosy. Not that I couldn’t have handled it, for I knew I could. I had racks of books on world affairs, and I kept close track of what was going on. I had a good command of French, a working knowledge of German, and off and on I was struggling with Spanish. It was something I’d wanted all my life—to feel that I was part of that fabulous newspaper fraternity which kept check around the world.

  I overslept, and was late to work in the morning. The Barnacle took a sour view of it. “Why did you bother to come in at all?” he growled at me. “Why do you ever bother to come in? Last two days I sent you out on two assignments, and where are the stories?”

  “There weren’t any stories,” I told him, trying to keep my temper. “They were just some more pipe dreams you dug up.”

  “Some day,” he said, “when you get to be a real reporter, you’ll dig up stories for yourself. That’s what’s the matter with this staff,” he said in a sudden burst of anger. “That’s what’s wrong with you. No initiative; sit around and wait; wait until I dig up something I can send you out on. No one ever surprises me and brings in a story I haven’t sent them out on.”

  He pegged me with his eyes. “Why don’t you just once surprise me?”

  “I’ll surprise you, buster,” I said and walked over to my desk.

  I sat there thinking. I thought about old Mrs. Clayborne, who had been dying hard—and then suddenly had died easy. I remembered what the gardener had told me, and the footprint I had found underneath the window. I thought of that other old lady who had been a hundred years old, and how all her old, dead friends had come visiting. And about the physicist who had brownies in his lab. And about the boy and his successful operation.

  And I got an idea.

  I went to the files and went through them three weeks back, page by page. I took a lot of notes and got a little scared, but told myself it was nothing but coincidence.

  Then I sat down at my typewriter and made half a dozen false starts, but finally I had it.

  The brownies have come back again, I wrote.

  You know, those little people who do all sorts of good deeds for you, and expect nothing in return except that you set out a bowl of milk for them.

  At the time I didn’t realize that I was using almost the exact words the physicist had said.

  I didn’t write about Mrs. Clayborne, or the old lady with her visitors, or the physicist, or the little boy who had the operation; those weren’t things you could write about with your tongue in cheek, and that’s the way I wrote it.

  But I did write about the little two and three paragraph items I had found tucked away in the issues I had gone through—the good luck stories; the little happy stories of no consequence, except for the ones they had happened to—about people finding things they’d lost months or years ago, about stray dogs coming home, and kids winning essay contests, and neighbor helping neighbor. All the kindly little news stories that we’d thrown in just to fill up awkward holes.

  There were a lot of them—a lot more, it seemed to me, than you could normally expect to find. All these things happened in our town in the last three weeks, I wrote at the end of it.

  And I added one last line: Have you put out that bowl of milk?

  After it was finished, I sat there for a while, debating whether I should hand it in. And thinking it over, I decided that the Barnacle had it coming to him, after the way he’d shot off his mouth.

  So I threw it into the basket on the city desk and went back to write the Community Chest story.

  The Barnacle never said a thing to me and I didn’t say a thing to him; you could have knocked my eyes off with a stick when the kid brought the papers up from the pressroom, and there was my brownie story spread across the top of page one in an eight-column feature strip.

  No one mentioned it to me except Jo Ann, who came along and patted me on the head and said she was proud of me—although God knows why she should have been.

  Then the Barnacle sent me out on another one of his wild-goose chases concerning someone who was supposed to be building a homemade atomic pile in his back yard. It turned out that this fellow is an old geezer who, at one time, had built a perpetual motion machine that didn’t work. Once I found that out, I was so disgusted that I didn’t even go back to the office, but went straight home instead.

  I rigged up a block and tackle, had some trouble what with no one to help me, but I finally got the boat up on the blocks. Then I drove to a little village at the end of the lake and bought paint not only for the boat, but the cottage as well. I felt pretty good about making such a fine start on all the work I should do that fall.

  The next morning when I got to the office, I found the place in an uproar. The switchboard had been clogged all night and it still looked like a Christmas tree. One of the operators had passed out, and they were trying to bring her to.

  The Barnacle had a wild gleam in his eye, and his necktie was all askew. When he saw me, he took me firmly by the arm and led me to my desk and sat me down. “Now, damn you, get to work!” he yelled and he dumped a bale of notes down in front of me.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “It’s that brownie deal of yours,” he yelled. “Thousands of people are calling in. All of them have brownies; they’ve been helped by brownies; some of them have even seen brownies.”

  “What about the milk?” I asked.

  “Milk? What milk?”

  “Why, the milk they should set out for them.”

  “How do I know?” he said. “Why don’t you call up some of the milk companies and find out?”

  That is just what I did—and, so help me Hannah, the milk companies were slowly going crazy. Every driver had come racing back to get extra milk, because most of their customers were ordering an extra quart or so. They were lined up for blocks outside the stations waiting for new loads and the milk supply was running low.

  There weren’t any of us in the newsroom that morning who did anything but write brownie copy. We filled the paper with it—all sorts of stories about how the brownies had been helping people. Except, of course, they hadn’t known it was brownies helping them until they read my story. They’d just thought that it was good luck.

  When the first edition was in, we sat back and sort of caught our breath—although the calls still were coming in—and I swear my typewriter still was hot from the copy I’d turned out.

  The papers came up, and each of us took our copy and started to go through it, when we heard a roar from J. H.’s office. A second later, J. H. came out himself, waving a paper in his fist, his face three shades redder than a brand-new fire truck.

  He practically galloped to the city desk and he flung the paper down in front of the Barnacle and hit it with his fist. “What do you mean?” he shouted. “Explain yourself. Making us ridiculous!”

  “But, J. H., I thought it was a good gag and—”

  “Brownies!” J. H. snorted.

  “We got all those calls,” said Barnacle Bill. “They still are coming in. And—”

>   “That’s enough,” J. H. thundered. “You’re fired!”

  He swung around from the city desk and looked straight at me. “You’re the one who started it,” he said. “You’re fired, too.”

  I got up from my chair and moved over to the city desk. “We’ll be back a little later,” I told J. H., “to collect our severance pay.”

  He flinched a little at that, but he didn’t back up any.

  The Barnacle picked up an ash tray off his desk and let it fall. It hit the floor and broke. He dusted off his hands. “Come on, Mark,” he said; “I’ll buy you a drink.”

  We went over to the corner. Joe brought us a bottle and a couple of glasses, and we settled down to business.

  Pretty soon some of the other boys started dropping in. They’d have a drink or two with us and then go back to work. It was their way of showing us they were sorry the way things had turned out. They didn’t say anything, but they kept dropping in. There never was a time during the entire afternoon when there wasn’t someone drinking with us. The Barnacle and I took on quite a load.

  We talked over this brownie business and at first we were a little skeptical about it, laying the situation more or less to public gullibility. But the more we thought about it, and the more we drank, the more we began to believe there might really be brownies. For one thing, good luck just doesn’t come in hunks the way it appeared to have come to this town of ours in the last few weeks. Good luck is apt to scatter itself around a bit—and while it may run in streaks, it’s usually pretty thin. But here it seemed that hundreds—if not thousands—of persons had been visited by good luck.

  By the middle of the afternoon, we were fairly well agreed there might be something to this brownie business. Then, of course, we tried to figure out who the brownies were, and why they were helping people.

  “You know what I think,” said Barnacle. “I think they’re aliens. People from the stars. Maybe they’re the ones who have been flying all these saucers.”

  “But why would aliens want to help us?” I objected. “Sure, they’d want to watch us and find out all they could; and after a while, they might try to make contact with us. They might even be willing to help us, but if they were they’d want to help us as a race, not as individuals.”

  “Maybe,” the Barnacle suggested, “they’re just busybodies. There are humans like that. Psychopathic do-gooders, always sticking in their noses, never letting well enough alone.”

  “I don’t think so,” I argued back at him. “If they are trying to help us, I’d guess it’s a religion with them. Like the old friars who wandered all over Europe in the early days. Like the Good Samaritan. Like the Salvation Army.”

  But he wouldn’t have it that way. “They’re busybodies,” he insisted. “Maybe they come from a surplus economy, a planet where all the work is done by machines and there is more than enough of everything for everyone. Maybe there isn’t anything left for anyone to do—and you know yourself that a man has to have something to keep him occupied, something to do so he can think that he is important.”

  Then along about five o’clock Jo Ann came in. It had been her day off and she hadn’t known what had happened until someone from the office phoned her. So she’d come right over.

  She was plenty sore at me, and she wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to explain that at a time like this a man had to have a drink or two. She got me out of there and out back to my car and drove me to her place. She fed me black coffee and finally gave me something to eat and along about eight o’clock or so she figured I’d sobered up enough to try driving home.

  I took it easy and I made it, but I had an awful head and I remembered that I didn’t have a job. Worst of all, I was probably tagged for life as the man who had dreamed up the brownie hoax. There was no doubt that the wire services had picked up the story, and that it had made front page in most of the papers coast to coast. No doubt, the radio and television commentators were doing a lot of chuckling at it.

  My cottage stands up on a sharp little rise above the lake, a sort of hog’s back between the lake and road, and there’s no road up to it. I had to leave my car alongside the road at the foot of the rise, and walk up to the place.

  I walked along, my head bent a little so I could see the path in the moonlight, and I was almost to the cottage before I heard a sound that made me raise my head.

  And there they were.

  They had rigged up a scaffold and there were four of them on it, painting the cottage madly. Three of them were up on the roof replacing the bricks that had been knocked out of the chimney. They had storm windows scattered all over the place and were furiously applying putty to them. And you could scarcely see the boat, there were so many of them slapping paint on it.

  I stood there staring at them, with my jaw hanging on my breastbone, when I heard a sudden swish and stepped quickly to one side. About a dozen of them rushed by, reeling out the hose, running down the hill with it. Almost in a shorter time than it takes to tell it, they were washing the car.

  They didn’t seem to notice me. Maybe it was because they were so busy they didn’t have the time to—or it might have been just that it wasn’t proper etiquette to take notice of someone when they were helping him.

  They looked a lot like the brownies that you see pictured in the children’s books, but there were differences. They wore pointed caps, all right, but when I got close to one of them who was busy puttying, I could see that it was no cap at all. His head ran up to a point, and the tassle on the top of it was no tassle of a cap, but a tuft of hair or feathers—I couldn’t make out which. They wore coats with big fancy buttons on them, but I got the impression—I don’t know how—that they weren’t buttons, but something else entirely. And instead of the big sloppy clown-type shoes they’re usually shown as wearing, they had nothing on their feet.

  They worked hard and fast; they didn’t waste a minute. They didn’t walk, but ran. And there were so many of them.

  Suddenly they were finished. The boat was painted, and so was the cottage. The puttied, painted storm windows were leaned against the trees. The hose was dragged up the hill and neatly coiled again.

  I saw that they were finishing and I tried to call them all together so that I could thank them, but they paid no attention to me. And when they were finished, they were gone. I was left standing, all alone—with the newly painted cottage shining in the moonlight and the smell of paint heavy in the air.

  I suppose I wasn’t exactly sober, despite the night air and all the coffee Jo Ann had poured into me. If I had been cold, stone sober I might have done it better; I might have thought of something. As it was, I’m afraid I bungled it.

  I staggered into the house, and the outside door seemed a little hard to shut. When I looked for the reason, I saw it had been weather-stripped.

  With the lights on, I looked around—and in all the time I’d been there the place had never been so neat. There wasn’t a speck of dust on anything and all the metal shone. All the pots and pans were neatly stacked in place; all the clothing I had left strewn around had been put away; all the books were lined straight within the shelves, and the magazines were where they should be instead of just thrown anywhere.

  I managed to get into bed, and I tried to think about it; but someone came along with a heavy mallet and hit me on the head and that was the last I knew until I was awakened by a terrible racket.

  I got to it as fast as I could.

  “What is it now?” I snarled, which is no way to answer a phone, but was the way I felt.

  It was J. H. “What’s the matter with you?” he yelled. “Why aren’t you at the office? What do you mean by …”

  “Just a minute, J. H.; don’t you remember? You canned me yesterday.”

  “Now, Mark,” he said, “you wouldn’t hold that against me, would you? We were all excited …”

  “I wasn’t excited,”
I told him.

  “Look,” he said, “I need you. There’s someone here to see you.”

  “All right,” I said and hung up.

  I didn’t hurry any; I took my time. If J. H. needed me, if there was someone there to see me, both of them could wait. I turned on the coffee maker and took a shower; after the shower and coffee, I felt almost human.

  I was crossing the yard, heading for the path down to the car, when I saw something that stopped me like a shot.

  There were tracks in the dust, tracks all over the place—exactly the kind of tracks I’d seen in the flower bed underneath the window at the Clayborne estate. I squatted down and looked closely at them to make sure there was no mistake and there couldn’t be. They were the self-same tracks.

  They were brownie tracks!

  I stayed there for a long time, squatting beside the tracks and thinking that now it was all believable because there was no longer any room for disbelief.

  The nurse had been right; there had been something in the room that night Mrs. Clayborne died. It was a mercy, the old gardener said, his thoughts and speech all fuzzed with the weariness and the basic simplicity of the very old. An act of mercy, a good deed, for the old lady had been dying hard, no hope for her.

  And if there were good deeds in death, there were as well in life. In an operation such as this, the surgeon had told me, there are so many factors that no one can take the credit. It was a miracle, he’d said, but don’t you quote me on it.

  And someone—no cleaning woman, but someone or something else—had messed up the notes of the physicist and in the messing of them had put together two pages out of several hundred—two pages that tied together and made sense.

  Coincidence? I asked myself. Coincidence that a woman died and that a boy lived, and that a researcher got a clue he’d otherwise have missed? No, not coincidence when there was a track beneath a window and papers scattered from beneath a paperweight.

  And—I’d almost forgotten—Jo Ann’s old lady who sat rocking happily because all her old dead friends had come to visit her. There were even times when senility might become a very kindness.