The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 26

  Grant nodded gravely. “I might have wondered that. Experimental curiosity, more than likely. Maybe compassion for a lower form of life. A feeling, perhaps, that just because man himself got the head start doesn’t give him a monopoly on advancement.”

  Joe’s eyes glittered in the sunlight. “Curiosity—maybe. I hadn’t thought of that.”

  He hunkered down beside the hill. “Ever wonder why the ant advanced so far and then stood still? Why he built a nearly perfect social organization and let it go at that? What it was that stopped him in his tracks?”

  “Hunger pressure, for one thing,” Grant said.

  “That and hibernation,” declared the lanky man. “Hibernation, you see, wiped out the memory pattern from one season to the next. Each spring they started over, began from scratch again. They never were able to benefit from past mistakes, cash in on accumulated knowledge.”

  “So you fed them—”

  “And heated the hill,” said Joe, “so they wouldn’t have to hibernate. So they wouldn’t have to start out fresh with the coming of each spring.”

  “The carts?”

  “I made a couple, left them there. It took ten years, but they finally figured out what they were for.”

  Grant nodded at the smokestacks.

  “They did that themselves,” Joe told him.

  “Anything else?”

  Joe lifted his shoulders wearily. “How should I know?”

  “But, man, you watched them. Even if you didn’t keep notes, you watched.”

  Joe shook his head. “I haven’t laid eyes on them for almost fifteen years. I only came today because I heard you here. These ants, you see, don’t amuse me any more.”

  Grant’s mouth opened, then shut tight again. Finally, he said: “So that’s the answer. That’s why you did it. Amusement.”

  There was no shame on Joe’s face, no defense, just a pained expression that said he wished they’d forget all about the ants. His mouth said: “Sure. Why else?”

  “That gun of mine. I suppose that amused you, too.”

  “Not the gun,” said Joe.

  Not the gun, Grant’s brain said. Of course, not the gun, you dumbbell, but you yourself. You’re the one that amused him. And you’re amusing him right now.

  Fixing up old Dave Baxter’s farm machinery, then walking off without a word, doubtless had been a screaming joke. And probably he’d hugged himself and rocked for days with silent mirth after that time up at the Webster house when he’d pointed out the thing that was wrong with old Thomas Webster’s space drive.

  Like a smart-Aleck playing tricks on an awkward puppy.

  Joe’s voice broke his thoughts.

  “You’re an enumerator, aren’t you? Why don’t you ask me the questions? Now that you’ve found me you can’t go off and not get it down on paper. My age especially. I’m one hundred sixty-three and I’m scarcely adolescent. Another thousand years at least.”

  He hugged his knobby knees against his chest and rocked slowly back and forth. “Another thousand years and if I take good care of myself—”

  “But that isn’t all of it,” Grant told him, trying to keep his voice calm. “There is something more. Something that you must do for us.”

  “For us?”

  “For society,” said Grant. “For the human race.”

  “Why?”

  Grant stared. “You mean that you don’t care.”

  Joe shook his head and in the gesture there was no bravado, no defiance of convention. It was just blunt statement of the fact.

  “Money?” suggested Grant.

  Joe waved his hands at the hills about them, at the spreading river valley. “I have this,” he said. “I have no need of money.”

  “Fame, perhaps?”

  Joe did not spit, but his face looked like he had.

  “The gratitude of the human race?”

  “It doesn’t last,” said Joe and the old mockery was in his words, the vast amusement just behind his lips.

  “Look, Joe,” said Grant and, hard as he tried to keep it out, there was pleading in his voice, “this thing I have for you to do is important… important to generations yet to come, important to the human race, a milestone in our destiny—”

  “And why should I,” asked Joe, “do something for someone who isn’t even born yet? Why should I look beyond the years of my own life? When I die, I die, and all the shouting and the glory, all the banners and the bugles will be nothing to me. I will not know whether I lived a great life or a very poor one.”

  “The race,” said Grant.

  Joe laughed, a shout of laughter. “Race preservation, race advancement. That’s what you’re getting at. Why should you be concerned with that? Or I?”

  The laughter lines smoothed out around his mouth and he shook a finger in mock admonishment. “Race preservation is a myth… a myth that you all have lived by—a sordid thing that has arisen out of your social structure. The race ends every day. When a man dies the race ends for him—so far as he’s concerned there is no longer any race.”

  “You just don’t care,” said Grant.

  “That,” declared Joe, “is what I’ve been telling you.”

  He squinted at the pack upon the ground and a flicker of a smile wove about his lips. “Perhaps,” he suggested, “if it interested me—”

  Grant opened up the pack, brought out the portfolio. Almost reluctantly he pulled out the thin sheaf of papers, glanced at the title:

  “Unfinished Philosophical—”

  He handed it across, sat watching as Joe read swiftly and even as he watched he felt the sickening wrench of terrible failure closing on his brain.

  Back in the Webster house he had thought of a mind that knew no groove of logic, a mind unhampered by four thousand years of moldy human thought. That, he had told himself, might do the trick.

  And here it was. But it still was not enough. There was something lacking—something he had never thought of, something the men in Geneva had never thought of, either. Something, a part of the human make-up that everyone, up to this moment, had taken for granted.

  A social pressure, the thing that had held the human race together through all millennia—held the human race together as a unit just as hunger pressure had held the ants enslaved to a social pattern.

  The need of one human being for the approval of his fellow humans, the need for a certain cult of fellowship—a psychological, almost physiological need for approval of one’s thought and action. A force that kept men from going off at unsocial tangents, a force that made for social security and human solidarity, for the working together of the human family.

  Men died for that approval, sacrificed for that approval, lived lives they loathed for that approval. For without it a man was on his own, an outcast, an animal that had been driven from the pack.

  It had led to terrible things, of course—to mob psychology, to racial persecution, to mass atrocities in the name of patriotism or religion. But likewise it had been the sizing that held the race together, the thing that from the very start had made human society possible.

  And Joe didn’t have it. Joe didn’t give a damn. He didn’t care what anyone thought of him. He didn’t care whether anyone approved or not.

  Grant felt the sun hot upon his back, heard the whisper of the wind that walked in the trees above him. And in some thicket a bird struck up a song.

  Was this the trend of mutancy? This sloughing off of the basic instinct that made man a member of the race?

  Had this man in front of him, reading the legacy of Juwain, found within himself, through his mutancy, a life so full that he could dispense with the necessity for the approval of his fellows? Had he, finally, after all these years, reached that stage of civilization where a man stood independent, disdaining all the artificiality of society?

  Joe loo
ked up.

  “Very interesting,” he said. “Why didn’t he go ahead and finish it?”

  “He died,” said Grant.

  Joe clucked his tongue inside his cheek. “He was wrong in one place.” He flipped the pages, jabbed with a finger. “Right here. That’s where the error cropped up. That’s what bogged him down.”

  Grant stammered. “But… but there shouldn’t be an error. He died, that’s all. He died before he finished it.”

  Joe folded the manuscript neatly, tucked it in his pocket.

  “Just as well,” he said. “He probably would have botched it, anyhow.”

  “Then you can finish it? You can—”

  There was, Grant knew, no use of going on. He read the answer in Joe’s eyes.

  “You really think,” said Joe, and his words were terse and measured, “that I’d turn this over to you squalling humans?”

  Grant shrugged in defeat. “I suppose not. I suppose I should have known. A man like you—”

  “I,” said Joe, “can use this thing myself.”

  He rose slowly, idly swung his foot, plowing a furrow through the ant hill, toppling the smoking chimneys, burying the toiling carts.

  With a cry, Grant leaped to his feet, blind anger gripping him, blind anger driving the hand that snatched out his gun.

  “Hold it!” said Joe.

  Grant’s arm halted with the gun still pointing toward the ground.

  “Take it easy, little man,” said Joe. “I know you’d like to kill me, but I can’t let you do it. For I have plans, you see. And, after all, you wouldn’t be killing me for the reason that you think.”

  “What difference would it make why I killed you?” rasped Grant. “You’d be dead, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t be loose with Juwain’s philosophy.”

  “But,” Joe told him, almost gently, “that’s not why you would kill me. You’d do it because you’re sore at me for mussing up the ant hill.”

  “That might have been the reason first,” said Grant. “But not now—”

  “Don’t try it,” said Joe. “Before you ever pressed the trigger you’d be meat yourself.”

  Grant hesitated.

  “If you think I’m bluffing,” Joe taunted him, “go ahead and call me.”

  For a long moment the two stood face to face, the gun still pointing at the ground.

  “Why can’t you throw in with us?” asked Grant. “We need a man like you. You were the one that showed old Tom Webster how to build a space drive. The work you’ve done with ants—”

  Joe was stepping forward, swiftly, and Grant heaved up the gun. He saw the fist coming at him, a hamlike, powerful fist that fairly whistled with its vicious speed.

  A fist that was faster than his finger on the trigger.

  Something wet and hot was rasping across Grant’s face and he lifted a hand and tried to brush it off.

  But it went on, licking across his face.

  He opened his eyes and Nathaniel did a jig in front of them.

  “You’re all right,” said Nathaniel. “I was so afraid—”

  “Nathaniel!” croaked Grant. “What are you doing here?”

  “I ran away,” Nathaniel told him. “I want to go with you.”

  Grant shook his head. “You can’t go with me. I have far to go. I have a job to do.”

  He got to his hands and knees and felt along the ground. When his hand touched cold metal, he picked it up and slid it in the holster.

  “I let him get away,” he said, “and I can’t let him go. I gave him something that belonged to all mankind and I can’t let him use it.”

  “I can track,” Nathaniel told him. “I track squirrels like everything.”

  “You have more important things to do than tracking,” Grant told the dog. “You see, I found out something today. Got a glimpse of a certain trend—a trend that all mankind may follow. Not today nor tomorrow, nor even a thousand years from now. Maybe never, but it’s a thing we can’t overlook. Joe may be just a little farther along the path than the rest of us and we may be following faster than we think. We may all end up like Joe. And if that is what is happening, if that is where it all will end, you dogs have a job ahead of you.”

  Nathaniel stared up at him, worried wrinkles on his face.

  “I don’t understand,” he pleaded. “You use words I can’t make out.”

  “Look, Nathaniel. Men may not always be the way they are today. They may change. And, if they do, you have to carry on; you have to take the dream and keep it going. You’ll have to pretend that you are men.”

  “Us dogs,” Nathaniel pledged, “will do it.”

  “It won’t come for thousands and thousands of years,” said Grant. “You will have time to get ready. But you must know. You must pass the word along. You must not forget.”

  “I know,” said Nathaniel. “Us dogs will tell the pups and the pups will tell their pups.”

  “That’s the idea,” said Grant.

  He stooped and scratched Nathaniel’s ear and the dog, tail wagging to a stop, stood and watched him climb the hill.

  Auk House

  In the very first paragraph of this story, Clifford Simak uses the names of three towns that were part of his life—but he uses the names only, for the towns he referred to are actually located far from the East Coast.

  But that’s not important, that’s a mere detail. The fact is, this story, although clearly about the abuse of economic power by rich corporations, is really an exploration of the reactions of the victims of that abuse. And the ending to this exploration is one that led me to blink.

  “Auk House” was originally written for Judy-Lynn del Rey, editor of Stellar 3, an original anthology that was published in 1977. Judy-Lynn and her husband, Lester, were longtime friends of Cliff’s, in addition to being the editors who handled much of the work he did for Ballantine Books.

  This is a deep and thoughtful story. And it’s for adults.

  —dww

  David Latimer was lost when he found the house. He had set out for Wyalusing, a town he had only heard of but had never visited, and apparently had taken the wrong road. He had passed through two small villages, Excelsior and Navarre, and if the roadside signs were right, in another few miles he would be coming into Montfort. He hoped that someone in Montfort could set him right again.

  The road was a county highway, crooked and narrow and bearing little traffic. It twisted through the rugged headlands that ran down to the coast, flanked by birch and evergreens and rarely out of reach of the muted thunder of surf pounding on giant boulders that lay tumbled on the shore.

  The car was climbing a long, steep hill when he first saw the house, between the coast and road. It was a sprawling pile of brick and stone, flaunting massive twin chimneys at either end of it, sited in front of a grove of ancient birch and set so high upon the land that it seemed to float against the sky. He slowed the car, pulled over to the roadside, and stopped to have a better look at it.

  A semicircular brick-paved driveway curved up to the entrance of the house. A few huge oak trees grew on the well-kept lawn, and in their shade stood graceful stone benches that had the look of never being used.

  There was, it seemed to Latimer, a pleasantly haunted look to the place—a sense of privacy, of olden dignity, a withdrawal from the world. On the front lawn, marring it, desecrating it, stood a large planted sign:

  FOR RENT OR SALE

  See Campbell’s Realty—Half Mile Down the Road

  And an arrow pointing to show which way down the road.

  Latimer made no move to continue down the road. He sat quietly in the car, looking at the house. The sea, he thought, was just beyond; from a second-story window at the back, one could probably see it.

  It had been word of a similar retreat that had sent him seeking out Wyalusing—a place wher
e he could spend a quiet few months at painting. A more modest place, perhaps, than this, although the description he had been given of it had been rather sketchy.

  Too expensive, he thought, looking at the house; most likely more than he could afford, although with the last couple of sales he had made, he was momentarily flush. However, it might not be as expensive as he thought, he told himself; a place like this would have small attraction for most people. Too big, but for himself that would make no difference; he could camp out in a couple of rooms for the few months he would be there.

  Strange, he reflected, the built-in attraction the house had for him, the instinctive, spontaneous attraction, the instant knowing that this was the sort of place he had had in mind. Not knowing until now that it was the sort of place he had in mind. Old, he told himself—a century, two centuries, more than likely. Built by some now forgotten lumber baron. Not lived in, perhaps, for a number of years. There would be bats and mice. He put the car in gear and moved slowly out into the road, glancing back over his shoulder at the house. A half mile down the road, at the edge of what probably was Montfort, although there was no sign to say it was, on the right-hand side, a lopsided, sagging sign on an old, lopsided shack, announced Campbell’s Realty. Hardly intending to do it, his mind not made up as yet, he pulled the car off the road and parked in front of the shack.

  Inside, a middle-aged man dressed in slacks and turtleneck sat with his feet propped on a littered desk.

  “I dropped in,” said Latimer, “to inquire about the house down the road. The one with the brick drive.”

  “Oh, that one,” said the man. “Well, I tell you, stranger, I can’t show it to you now. I’m waiting for someone who wants to look at the Ferguson place. Tell you what, though. I could give you the key.”

  “Could you give me some idea of what the rent would be?”

  “Why don’t you look at it first. See what you think of it. Get the feel of it. See if you’d fit into it. If you like it, we can talk. Hard place to move. Doesn’t fit the needs of many people. Too big, for one thing, too old. I could get you a deal on it.”