The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume One

by Clifford D. Simak

  Nothing seemed to happen to Pancake. He sat there cool and relaxed and Doc got to work on him at once, checking him over.

  “His pulse has slowed a little,” Doc reported, “and his heart action’s sort of feeble, but he seems to be in no danger. His breathing is a little shallow, but not enough to worry about.”

  It might not have meant a thing to Doc, but it made the rest of us uneasy. We stood around and watched and nothing happened. I don’t know what we thought might happen. Funny as it sounds, I had thought that something would.

  Doc kept close watch, but Pancake got no worse.

  We waited and we waited. The machine kept running and Pancake sat slumped in the seat. He was as limp as a dog asleep and when you picked up his hand, you’d think his bones had melted plumb away. All the time we got more nervous. Hutch wanted to jerk the helmet off Pancake, but I wouldn’t let him. No telling what might happen if we stopped the business in the middle.

  It was about an hour after dawn that the machine stopped running. Pancake began to stir and we removed the helmet.

  He yawned and rubbed his eyes and sat up straight. He looked a bit surprised when he saw us and it seemed to take a moment for him to recognize us.

  “What happened?” Hutch asked him.

  Pancake didn’t answer. You could see him pulling himself together, as if he were remembering and getting his bearings once again.

  “I went on a trip,” he said.

  “A travelogue!” said Doc, disgusted.

  “Not a travelogue. I was there. It was a planet, way out at the rim of the Galaxy, I think. There weren’t many stars at night because it was so far out—way out where the stars get thin and there aren’t many of them. There was just a thin strip of light that moved overhead.”

  “Looking at the Galaxy edge on,” said Frost, nodding. “Like you were looking at a buzz-saw’s cutting edge.”

  “How long was I under?” asked Pancake.

  “Long enough,” I told him. “Six or seven hours. We were getting nervous.”

  “That’s funny,” said Pancake. “I’ll swear I was there for a year or more.”

  “Now let’s get this straight,” Hutch said. “You say you were there. You mean you saw this place.”

  “I mean I was there!” yelled Pancake. “I lived with those people and I slept in their burrows and I talked with them and I worked with them. I got a blood blister on my hand from hoeing in a garden. I traveled from one place to another and I saw a lot of things and it was just as real as sitting here.”

  We bundled him out of there and went back to the ship. Hutch wouldn’t let Pancake get the breakfast. He threw it together himself and since Hutch is a lousy cook, it was a miserable meal. Doc dug up a bottle and gave Pancake a drink, but he wouldn’t let any of the rest of us have any of it. Said it was medicinal, not social.

  That’s the way he is at times. Downright hog-selfish.

  Pancake told us about this place he had been to. It didn’t seem to have much, if any, government, mostly because it didn’t seem to need one, but was a humble sort of planet where rather dim-witted people lived in a primitive agricultural state, They looked, he said, like a cross between a human and a groundhog, and he drew a picture of them, but it didn’t help a lot, for Pancake is no artist.

  He told us the kind of crops they raised, and there were some screwy kinds, and what kind of food they ate, and we gagged at some of it, and he even had some of the place names down pat and he remembered shreds of the language and it was outlandish-sounding.

  We asked him all sorts of questions and he had the answers to every one of them and some were the kind he could not have made up from his head. Even Doc, who had been skeptical to start with, was ready to admit that Pancake had visited the planet.

  After we ate, we hustled Pancake off to bed and Doc checked him over and he was all right.

  When Pancake and Doc had left, Hutch said to me and Frost: “I can feel those dollars clinking in my pocket right this minute.”

  We both agreed with him.

  We’d found an entertainment gadget that had anything yet known backed clear off the map.

  The sticks were recordings that packed in not only sight and sound, but stimuli for all the other senses. They did the job so well that anyone subjected to their influence felt that he was part of the environment they presented. He stepped into the picture and became a part of it. He was really there.

  Frost already was planning exactly how we’d work it.

  “We could sell the stuff,” he said, “but that would be rather foolish. We want to keep control of it. We’ll lease out the machines and we’ll rent the sticks and since we’ll have the sole supply, we can charge anything we wish.”

  “We can advertise year-long vacations that take less than half a day,” said Hutch. “They’ll be just the thing for executives and other busy people. Why, in a single weekend you could spend four or five years’ time on several different planets.”

  “Maybe it’s not only planets,” Frost went on. “There might be concerts or art galleries and museums. Maybe lectures on history and literature and such.”

  We were feeling pretty good, but we were tuckered out, so we trailed off to bed.

  I didn’t get into bed right away, however, but hauled out the log. I don’t know why I ever bothered with it. It was a hit-and- miss affair at best. There would be months I’d not even think about it and then all at once I’d get all neat and orderly and keep a faithful record for several weeks or so. There was no real reason to make an entry in it now, but I was somewhat excited and had a feeling that perhaps what had just happened should be put down in black and white.

  So I crawled under the bunk and pulled out the tin box I kept it and the other papers in, and while I was lifting it to the bunk, it slipped out of my hands. The lid flew open. The log and all the papers and the other odds and ends I kept there scattered on the floor.

  I cussed a bit and got down on my hands and knees to pick up the mess. There was an awful lot of it and most of it was junk. Someday, I told myself, I’d have to throw a lot of it away. There were clearance papers from a hundred different ports and medical certificates and other papers that were long outdated. But among it I found also the title to the ship.

  I sat there thinking back almost twenty years to the day I’d bought the ship for next to nothing and towed it from the junkyard and I recalled how I’d spent a couple of years spare time and all I could earn getting it patched up so it could take to space again. No wonder, I told myself, that it was a haywire ship. It had been junk to start with, and during all those years, we’d just managed to keep it glued together. There had been many times when the only thing that got it past inspection had been a fast bribe slipped quietly to the man. No one in the Galaxy but Hutch could have kept it flying.

  I went on picking up the papers, thinking about Hutch and all the rest of them. I got a little sentimental and thought a lot of things I’d have clobbered anyone for if they had dared to say them to me. About how we had stuck together and how any one of them would have died for me and I for any one of them.

  There had been a time, of course, when it had not been that way, back in the days when they’d first signed on and had been nothing but a crew. But that day was long past; now they were more than just a crew. There had been no signing on for years, but just staying on as men who had a right to stay. And I sat there, flat on the floor, and thought how we’d finally done the thing we’d always hoped to do, how we’d caught up with the dream—us, the ragamuffin crew in the glued-together ship—and I felt proud and happy, not for myself alone, but for Hutch and Pancake and Doc and Frost and all the rest.

  Finally I got the papers all picked up and back in the box again and tried to write up the log, but was too tired to write, so I went to bed, as I should have done in the first place.

  But tired as I was, I la
y there and thought of how big the silo was and tried to estimate how many sticks might be cached away there. I got up into the trillions and I saw it was no use; there was no way to keep the figures straight.

  The whole deal was big—bigger than anything we’d ever found before. It would take a group of men like us at least five lifetimes of steady hauling to empty the silo. We’d have to set up a corporation and get a legal staff (preferably one with the lowest kind of ethics) and file a claim on this planet and go through a lot of other red tape to be sure we had it all sewed up.

  We couldn’t take a chance of letting it slip through our fingers because of any lack of foresight. We’d have to get it all doped out before we went ahead.

  I don’t know about the rest of them, but I dreamed that night of wading knee-deep through a sea of crisp, crinkly banknotes.

  When morning came, Doc failed to show up for breakfast. I went hunting him and found he hadn’t even gone to bed. He was sprawled in his rickety old chair in the dispensary and there was one empty bottle on the floor and he trailed another, almost empty, alongside the chair, keeping a rather flimsy hold upon its neck. He still was conscious, which was about the most that could be said of him.

  I was plenty sore. Doc knew the rules. He could get paralyzed as soon or as often or as long as he wanted to when we were in space, but when we were grounded and there was work to do and planet ailments to keep an eye out for, he was expected to stay sober.

  I kicked the bottle out of his fist and I took him by the collar with one hand and by the seat of his britches with the other and frog-walked him to the galley.

  Plunking him down in a chair, I yelled for Pancake to get another pot of coffee going.

  “I want you sobered up,” I told Doc, “so you can go out with us on the second trip. We need all the manpower we have.”

  Hutch had rounded up his gang and Frost had got the crew together and had rigged up a block and tackle so we could start loading. Everyone was ready to begin bringing in the cargo except Doc and I swore to myself that, before the day was over, I’d work the tail right off him.

  As soon as we had breakfast, we started out. We planned to get aboard as many of the machines as we could handle and to fill in the space between them with all the sticks we could find room for.

  We went down the corridors to the room that held the machines and we paired off, two men to the machine and started out. Everything went fine until we were more than halfway across the stretch of ground between the building and the ship.

  Hutch and I were in the lead and suddenly there was an explosion in the ground about fifty feet ahead of us.

  We skidded to a halt.

  “It’s Doc!” yelled Hutch, grabbing for his belt-gun.

  I stopped him just in time. “Take it easy, Hutch.”

  Doc stood up in the port and waved a rifle at us.

  “I could pick him off,” Hutch said.

  “Put back that gun,” I ordered.

  I walked out alone to where Doc had placed his bullet.

  He lifted his rifle and I stopped dead still. He’d probably miss, but even so, the kind of explosive charge he was firing could cut a man in two if it struck ten feet away.

  “I’m going to throw away my gun,” I called out to him. “I want to talk with you.”

  Doc hesitated for a moment. “All right. Tell the rest of them to pull back a way.”

  I spoke to Hutch over my shoulder. “Get out of here. Take the others with you.”

  “He’s crazy drunk,” said Hutch. “No telling what he’ll do.”

  “I can handle him,” I said, sounding surer than I felt.

  Doc let loose another bullet off to one side of us.

  “Get moving, Hutch.” I didn’t dare look back. I had to keep an eye on Doc.

  “All right,” Doc finally yelled at me. “They’re back. Throw away your gun.”

  Moving slow so he wouldn’t think I was trying to draw on him, I unfastened the buckle of the gunbelt and let it fall to the ground. I walked forward, keeping my eyes on Doc, and all the time my skin kept trying to crawl up my back.

  “That’s far enough,” Doc said when I’d almost reached the ship. “We can talk from here.”

  “You’re drunk,” I told him. “I don’t know what this is all about, but I know you’re drunk.”

  “Not nearly drunk enough. Not drunk enough by half. If I were drunk enough, I simply wouldn’t care.”

  “What’s eating you?”

  “Decency,” said Doc, in that hammy way of his. “I’ve told you many times that I can stomach looting when it involves no more than uranium and gems and other trash like that. I can even shut my eyes when you gut a culture, because you can’t steal a culture—even when you get through looting it, the culture still is there and can build back again. But I balk at robbing knowledge. I will not let you do it, Captain.”

  “I still say you’re drunk.”

  “You don’t even know what you’ve found. You are so blind and greedy that you don’t recognize it.”

  “Okay, Doc,” I said, trying to smooth his feathers, “tell me what we’ve found.”

  “A library. Perhaps the greatest, most comprehensive library in all the Galaxy. Some race spent untold years compiling the knowledge that is in that building and you plan to take it and sell it and scatter it. If that happens, in time it will be lost and what little of it may be left will be so out of context that half its meaning will be lost. It doesn’t belong to us. It doesn’t even belong to the human race alone. A library like that can belong only to all the peoples of the Galaxy.”

  “Look, Doc,” I pleaded, “we’ve worked for years, you and I and all the rest of them. We’ve bled and sweated and been disappointed time and time again. This is our chance to make a killing. And that means you as well as the rest of us. Think of it, Doc—more money than you can ever spend—enough to keep you drunk the rest of your life!”

  Doc swung the rifle around at me and I thought my goose was cooked. But I never moved a muscle.

  I stood and bluffed it out.

  At last he lowered the gun. “We’re barbarians. History is full of the likes of us. Back on Earth, the barbarians stalled human progress for a thousand years when they burned and scattered the libraries and the learning of the Greeks and Romans. To them, books were just something to start a fire with or wipe their weapons on. To you, this great cache of accumulated knowledge means nothing more than something to make a quick buck on. You’ll take a scholarly study of a vital social problem and retail it as a year’s vacation that can be experienced in six hours’ time and you’ll take—”

  “Spare me the lecture, Doc,” I said wearily. “Tell me what you want.”

  “Go back and report this find to the Galactic Commission. It will help wipe out a lot of things we’ve done.”

  “So help me, Doc, you’ve gone religious on us.”

  “Not religious. Just decent.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “I’ve got the ship,” said Doc. “I have the food and water.”

  “You’ll have to sleep.”

  “I’ll close the port. Just try getting in.” He had us and he knew he did. Unless we could figure out a way to grab him, he had us good and proper.

  I was scared, but mostly I was burned. For years, we’d listened to him run off at the mouth and never for a moment had any of us thought he meant a word of it. And now suddenly he did—he meant every word of it.

  I knew there was no way to talk him out of it. And there was no compromise. When it came right down to it, there was no agreement possible, for any agreement or compromise would have to be based on honor and we had no honor—not a one of us, not even among ourselves. It was stalemate, but Doc didn’t know that yet. He’d realize it once he got a little sober and thought about it some. What he had done had been done on alcoh
olic impulse, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t see it through.

  One thing was certain: As it stood, he could outlast us.

  “Let me go back,” I said. “I’ll have to talk this over with the others.”

  I think that Doc right then began to suspect how deeply he had become committed, began to see for the first time the impossibility of us trusting one another.

  “When you come back,” he told me, “have it all thought out. I’ll want some guarantees.”

  “Sure, Doc,” I said.

  “I mean this, Captain. I’m in deadly earnest. I’m not just fooling.”

  “I know you aren’t, Doc.”

  I went back to where the others were clustered just a short distance from the building. I explained what was up.

  “We’ll have to spread out and charge him,” Hutch decided. “He may get one or two of us, but we can pick him off.”

  “He’ll simply close the port,” I said. “He can starve us out. In a pinch, he could try to take the ship up. If he ever managed to get sober, he could probably do it.”

  “He’s crazy,” said Pancake. “Just plain drunken crazy.”

  “Sure he is,” I said, “and that makes him twice as deadly. He’s been brooding on this business for a long, long time. He built up a guilt complex that is three miles high. And worst of all, he’s got himself out on a limb and he can’t back down.”

  “We haven’t got much time,” said Frost. “We’ve got to think of something. A man can die of thirst. You can get awfully hungry in just a little while.”

  The three of them got to squabbling about what was best to do and I sat down on the sand and leaned back against one of the machines and tried to figure Doc.

  Doc was a failure as a medic; otherwise he’d not have tied up with us. More than likely, he had joined us as a gesture of defiance or despair—perhaps a bit of both. And besides being a failure, he was an idealist. He was out of place with us, but there’d been nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. For years, it had eaten at him and his values got all warped and there’s no place better than deep space to get your values warped.