The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Read online

  There once had been a hope that Earth could be accepted as a member of the galactic family, that he might serve as the emissary to gain that recognition. But now that hope was shattered, not only by the fact that the station might be closed, but that its very closing would be based upon the barbarism of the human race. Earth was being used as a whipping boy, of course, in galactic politics, but the brand, once placed, could not soon be lifted. And in any event, even if it could be lifted, now the planet stood revealed as one against which Galactic Central, in the hope of saving it, might be willing to apply a drastic and degrading action.

  There was something he could salvage out of all of it, he knew. He could remain an Earthman and turn over to the people of the Earth the information that he had gathered through the years and written down, in meticulous detail, along with personal happenings and impressions and much other trivia, in the long rows of record books which stood on the shelves against the wall. That and the alien literature he had obtained and read and hoarded. And the gadgets and the artifacts which came from other worlds. From all of this the people of the Earth might gain something which could help them along the road that eventually would take them to the stars and to that further knowledge and that greater understanding which would be their heritage—perhaps the heritage and right of all intelligence. But the wait for that day would be long—longer now, because of what had happened on this day, than it had ever been before. And the information that he held, gathered painfully over the course of almost a century, was so inadequate compared with that more complete knowledge which he could have gathered in another century (or a thousand years) that it seemed a pitiful thing to offer to his people.

  If there could only be more time, he thought. But, of course, there never was. There was not the tune right now and there would never be. No matter how many centuries he might be able to devote, there’d always be so much more knowledge than he’d gathered at the moment that the little he had gathered would always seem a pittance.

  He sat down heavily in the chair before the desk and now, for the first time, he wondered how he’d do it—how he could leave Galactic Central, how he could trade the galaxy for a single planet, even if that planet still remained his own.

  He drove his haggard mind to find the answer and the mind could find no answer.

  One man alone, he thought.

  One man alone could not stand against both Earth and galaxy.

  24

  The sun streaming through the window woke him and he stayed where he was, not stirring for a moment, soaking in its warmth. There was a good, hard feeling to the sunlight, a reassuring touch, and for a moment he held off the worry and the questioning. But he sensed its nearness and he closed his eyes again. Perhaps if he could sleep some more it might go away and lose itself somewhere and not be there when he awakened later.

  But there was something wrong, something besides the worry and the questioning.

  His neck and shoulders ached and there was a strange stiffness in his body and the pillow was too hard.

  He opened his eyes again and pushed with his hands to sit erect and he was not in bed. He was sitting in a chair and his head, instead of resting on a pillow, had been laid upon the desk. He opened and shut his mouth to taste it, and it tasted just as bad as he knew it would.

  He got slowly to his feet, straightening and stretching, trying to work out the kinks that had tied themselves into joints and muscles. As he stood there, the worry and the trouble and the dreadful need of answers seeped back into him, from wherever they’d been hiding. But he brushed them to one side, not an entirely successful brush, but enough to make them retreat a little and crouch there, waiting to close in again.

  He went to the stove and looked for the coffeepot, then remembered that last night he’d set it on the floor beside the coffee table. He went to get it. The two cups still stood on the table, the dark brown dregs of coffee covering the bottoms of them. And in the mass of gadgets that Ulysses had pushed to one side to make room for the cups, the pyramid of spheres lay tilted on its side, but it still was sparkling and glinting, each successive sphere revolving in an opposite direction to its fellow spheres.

  Enoch reached out and picked it up. His fingers carefully explored the base upon which the spheres were set, seeking something—some lever, some indentation, some trip, some button—by which it might be turned either on or off. But there was nothing he could find. He should have known, he told himself, that there would be nothing. For he had looked before. And yet yesterday Lucy had done something that had set it operating and it still was operating. It had operated for more than twelve hours now and no results had been obtained. Check that, he thought—no results that could be recognized.

  He set it back on the table on its base and stacked the cups, one inside the other, and picked them up. He stooped to lift the coffeepot off the floor. But his eyes never left the pyramid of spheres.

  It was maddening, he told himself. There was no way to turn it on and yet, somehow, Lucy had turned it on. And now there was no way to turn it off—although it probably did not matter if it were off or on.

  He went back to the sink with the cups and coffeepot.

  The station was quiet—a heavy, oppressive quietness; although, he told himself, the impression of oppressiveness probably was no more than his imagination.

  He crossed the room to the message machine and the plate was blank. There had been no messages during the night. It was silly of him, he thought, to expect there would be, for if there were, the auditory signal would be functioning, would continue to sound off until he pushed the lever.

  Was it possible, he wondered, that the station might already have been abandoned, that whatever traffic that happened to be moving was being detoured around it? That, however, was hardly possible, for the abandonment of Earth station would mean as well that those beyond it must also be abandoned. There were no shortcuts in the network extending out into the spiral arm to make rerouting possible. It was not unusual for many hours, even for a day, to pass without any traffic. The traffic was irregular and had no pattern to it. There were times when scheduled arrivals had to be held up until there were facilities to take care of them, and there were other times when there would be none at all, when the equipment would sit idle, as it was sitting now.

  Jumpy, he thought. I am getting jumpy.

  Before they closed the station, they would let him know. Courtesy, if nothing else, would demand that they do that.

  He went back to the stove and started the coffeepot. In the refrigerator he found a package of mush made from a cereal grown on one of the Draconian jungle worlds. He took it out, then put it back again and took out the last two eggs of the dozen that Wins, the mailman, had brought out from town a week or so ago.

  He glanced at his watch and saw that he had slept later than he thought. It was almost time for his daily walk.

  He put the skillet on the stove and spooned in a chunk of butter. He waited for the butter to melt, then broke in the eggs.

  Maybe, he thought, he’d not go on the walk today. Except for a time or two when a blizzard had been raging, it would be the first time he had ever missed his walk. But because he always did it, he told himself, contentiously, was no sufficient reason that he should always take it. He’d just skip the walk and later on go down and get the mail. He could use the time to catch up on all the things he’d failed to do yesterday. The papers still were piled upon his desk, waiting for his reading. He’d not written in his journal, and there was a lot to write, for he must record in detail exactly what had happened and there had been a good deal happening.

  It had been a rule he’d set himself from the first day that the station had begun its operation—that he never skimped the journal. He might be a little late at times in getting it all down, but the fact that he was late or that he was pressed for time had never made him put down one word less than he had felt might be required
to tell all there was to tell.

  He looked across the room at the long rows of record books that were crowded on the shelves and thought, with pride and satisfaction, of the completeness of that record. Almost a century of writing lay between the covers of those books and there was not a single day that he had ever skipped.

  Here was his legacy, he thought; here was his bequest to the world; here would be his entrance fee back into the human race; here was all he’d seen and heard and thought for almost a hundred years of association with those alien peoples of the galaxy.

  Looking at the rows of books, the questions that he had shoved aside came rushing in on him and this time there was no denying them. For a short space of time he had held them off, the little time he’d needed for his brain to clear, for his body to become alive again. He did not fight them now. He accepted them, for there was no dodging them.

  He slid the eggs out of the skillet onto the waiting plate. He got the coffeepot and sat down to his breakfast.

  He glanced at his watch again.

  There still was time to go on his daily walk.

  25

  The ginseng man was waiting at the spring.

  Enoch saw him while still some distance down the trail and wondered, with a quick flash of anger, if he might be waiting there to tell him that he could not return the body of the Hazer, that something had come up, that he had run into unexpected difficulties.

  And thinking that, Enoch remembered how he’d threatened the night before to kill anyone who held up the return of the body. Perhaps, he told himself, it had not been smart to say that. Wondering whether he could bring himself to kill a man—not that it would be the first man he had ever killed. But that had been long ago and it had been a matter then of kill or being killed.

  He shut his eyes for a second and once again could see that slope below him, with the long lines of men advancing through the drifting smoke, knowing that those men were climbing up the ridge for one purpose only, to kill himself and those others who were atop the ridge.

  And that had not been the first time nor had it been the last, but all the years of killing boiled down in essence to that single moment—not the time that came after, but that long and terrible instant when he had watched the lines of men purposefully striding up the slope to kill him.

  It had been in that moment that he had realized the insanity of war, the futile gesture that in time became all but meaningless, the unreasoning rage that must be nursed long beyond the memory of the incident that had caused the rage, the sheer illogic that one man, by death of misery, might prove a right or uphold a principle.

  Somewhere, he thought, on the long backtrack of history, the human race had accepted an insanity for a principle and had persisted in it until today that insanity-turned-principle stood ready to wipe out, if not the race itself, at least all of those things, both material and immaterial, that had been fashioned as symbols of humanity through many hard-won centuries.

  Lewis had been sitting on a fallen log and now, as Enoch neared, he rose.

  “I waited for you here,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  Enoch stepped across the spring.

  “The body will be here sometime in early evening,” Lewis said. “Washington will fly it out to Madison and truck it here from there.”

  Enoch nodded. “I am glad to hear that.”

  “They were insistent,” Lewis said, “that I should ask you once again what the body is.”

  “I told you last night,” said Enoch, “that I can’t tell you anything. I wish I could. I’ve been figuring for years how to get it told, but there’s no way of doing it.”

  “The body is something from off this Earth,” said Lewis. “We are sure of that.”

  “You think so,” Enoch said, not making it a question.

  “And the house,” said Lewis, “is something alien, too.”

  “The house,” Enoch told him, shortly, “was built by my father.”

  “But something changed it,” Lewis said. “It is not the way he built it.”

  “The years change things,” said Enoch.

  “Everything but you.”

  Enoch grinned at him. “So it bothers you,” he said. “You figure it’s indecent.”

  Lewis shook his head. “No, not indecent. Not really anything. After watching you for years, I’ve come to an acceptance of you and everything about you. No understanding, naturally, but complete acceptance. Sometimes I tell myself I’m crazy, but that’s only momentary. I’ve tried not to bother you. I’ve worked to keep everything exactly as it was. And now that I’ve met you, I am glad that is the way it was. But we’re going at this wrong. We’re acting as if we were enemies, as if we were strange dogs—and that’s not the way to do it. I think that the two of us may have a lot in common. There’s something going on and I don’t want to do a thing that will interfere with it.”

  “But you did,” said Enoch. “You did the worst thing that you could when you took the body. If you’d sat down and planned how to do me harm, you couldn’t have done worse. And not only me. Not really me, at all. It was the human race you harmed.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Lewis, “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. There was the writing on the stone …”

  “That was my fault,” said Enoch. “I should never have put up that stone. But at the time it seemed the thing to do. I didn’t think that anyone would come snooping around and …”

  “It was a friend of yours?”

  “A friend of mine? Oh, you mean the body. Well, not actually. Not that particular person.”

  “Now that it’s done,” Lewis said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry doesn’t help,” said Enoch.

  “But isn’t there something—isn’t there anything that can be done about it? More than just bringing back the body?”

  “Yes,” Enoch told him, “there might be something. I might need some help.”

  “Tell me,” Lewis said quickly. “If it can be done …”

  “I might need a truck,” said Enoch. “To haul away some stuff. Records and other things like that. I might need it fast.”

  “I can have a truck,” said Lewis. “I can have it waiting. And men to help you load.”

  “I might want to talk to someone in authority. High authority. The President. Secretary of State. Maybe the U.N. I don’t know. I have to think it out. And not only would I need a way to talk to them, but some measure of assurance that they would listen to what I had to say.”

  “I’ll arrange,” said Lewis, “for mobile short-wave equipment. I’ll have it standing by.”

  “And someone who will listen?”

  “That’s right,” said Lewis. “Anyone you say.”

  “And one thing more.”

  “Anything,” said Lewis.

  “Forgetfulness,” said Enoch. “Maybe I won’t need any of these things. Not the truck or any of the rest of it. Maybe I’ll have to let things go just as they’re going now. And if that should be the case, could you and everyone else concerned forget I ever asked?”

  “I think we could,” said Lewis. “But I would keep on watching.”

  “I wish you would,” said Enoch. “Later on I might need some help. But no further interference.”

  “Are you sure,” asked Lewis, “that there is nothing else?”

  Enoch shook his head. “Nothing else. All the rest of it I must do myself.”

  Perhaps, he thought, he’d already talked too much. For how could he be sure that he could trust this man? How could he be sure he could trust anyone?

  And yet, if he decided to leave Galactic Central and cast his lot with Earth, he might need some help. There might be some objection by the aliens to his taking along his records and the alien gadgets. If he wanted to get away with them, he might have to make it fast.

  But di
d he want to leave Galactic Central? Could he give up the galaxy? Could he turn down the offer to become the keeper of another station on some other planet? When the time should come, could he cut his tie with all the other races and all the mysteries of the other stars?

  Already he had taken steps to do those very things. Here, in the last few moments, without too much thought about it, almost as if he already had reached his decision, he had arranged a setup that would turn him back to Earth.

  He stood there, thinking, puzzled at the steps he’d taken.

  “There’ll be someone here,” said Lewis. “Someone at this spring. If not myself, then someone else who can get in touch with me.”

  Enoch nodded absent-mindedly.

  “Someone will see you every morning when you take your walk,” said Lewis. “Or you can reach us here any time you wish.”

  Like a conspiracy, thought Enoch. Like a bunch of kids playing cops and robbers.

  “I have to be getting on,” he said. “It’s almost time for mail. Wins will be wondering what has happened to me.”

  He started up the hill.

  “Be seeing you,” said Lewis.

  “Yeah,” said Enoch. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  He was surprised to find the warm glow spreading in him—as if there had been something wrong and now it was all right, as if there had been something lost that now had been recovered.

  26

  Enoch met the mailman halfway down the road that led into the station. The old jalopy was traveling fast, bumping over the grassy ruts, swishing through the overhanging bushes that grew along the track.

  Wins braked to a halt when he caught sight of Enoch and sat waiting for him.

  “You got on a detour,” Enoch said, coming up to him. “Or have you changed your route?”

  “You weren’t waiting at the box,” said Wins, “and I had to see you.”