The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume One

by Clifford D. Simak

  He spread the South Dakota map flat on the ground and smoothed it out, knelt to look at it. With a shaking finger he traced out the snaky trail of the mighty river. And there it was, west of the river and almost to the North Dakota line: THUNDER BUTTE, with the legend faint in the weak morning light, with the wide-spreading, close-together brown contour lines showing the shape and extent of it. Thunder Butte, at last!

  He felt the surge of elation in him and fought to hold it down. Rollo might be wrong. The old hunter who had told him might have been wrong—or worse, simply spinning out a story. Or this might be the wrong Thunder Butte; there might be many others.

  But he could not force himself to believe these cautionary doubts. This was Thunder Butte, the right Thunder Butte. It had to be.

  He rose, clutching the map in hand and faced toward the west. He was on his way. For the first time since he’d started, he knew where he was going.

  14

  A week later, they had traveled as far north as they could go. Cushing spread out the map to show them. “See, we’ve passed the lake. Big Stone Lake, it’s called. There is another lake a few miles north of here, but the water flows north from it, into the Red. Thunder Butte lies straight west from here, perhaps a little north or a little south. Two hundred miles or so. Ten days, if we are lucky. Two weeks, more than likely.” He said to Rollo, “You know this country?”

  Rollo shook his head. “Not this country. Other country like it. It can be mean. Hard going.”

  “That’s right,” said Cushing. “Water may be hard to find. No streams that we can follow. A few flowing south and that is all. We’ll have to carry water. I have this jacket and my pants. Good buckskin. There’ll be some seepage through the leather, but not too much. They’ll do for water bags.”

  “They’ll do for bags,” said Meg, “but poorly. You will die of sunburn.”

  “I worked all summer with the potatoes and no shirt. I am used to it.”

  “Your shirt only, then,” she said. “Barbaric we may be, but I’ll not have you prancing across two hundred miles without a stitch upon you.”

  “I could wear a blanket.”

  “A blanket would be poor clothing,” Rollo said, “to go through a cactus bed. And there’ll be cactus out there. There’s no missing it. Soon I will kill a bear. I’m running low on grease. When I do, we can use the bearskin to make us a bag.”

  “Lower down the river,” Cushing said, “there were a lot of bear. You could have killed any number of them.”

  “Black bear,” said Rollo, with disdain. “When there are any others, I do not kill black bear. We’ll be heading into grizzly country. Grizzly grease is better.”

  “You’re raving mad,” said Cushing. “Grizzly grease is no different from any other bear grease. One of these days, tangling with a grizzly, you’ll get your head knocked off.”

  “Mad I may be,” said Rollo, “but grizzly grease is better. And the killing of a black bear is as nothing to the killing of a grizzly.”

  “It seems to me,” said Cushing, “that for a lowly robot you’re a shade pugnacious.”

  “I have my pride,” said Rollo.

  They moved into the west, and every mile they moved, the land became bleaker. It was level land and seemed to run on forever, to a far horizon that was no more than a faint blue line against the blueness of the sky.

  There were no signs of nomads; there had been none since that morning when the war party had moved so quickly out of camp. Now there were increasingly larger herds of wild cattle, with, here and there, small herds of buffalo. Occasionally, in the distance, they sighted small bands of wild horses. The deer had vanished; there were some antelope. Prairie chickens were plentiful and they feasted on them. They came on prairie-dog towns, acres of ground hummocked by the burrows of the little rodents. A close watch was kept for rattlesnakes, smaller than the timber rattlers they’d seen farther east. Andy developed a hatred for the buzzing reptiles, killing with slashing hoofs all that came within his reach. Andy, too, became their water hunter, setting out in a purposeful fashion and leading them to pitiful little streams or stagnant potholes.

  “He can smell it out,” said Meg, triumphantly. “I told you he would be an asset on our travels.”

  The Shivering Snake stayed with them now around the clock, circling Rollo and, at various times, Meg. She took kindly to it.

  “It’s so cute,” she said.

  And now, out in the loneliness, they were joined by something else—gray-purple shadows that slunk along behind them and on either side. At first they could not be sure if they were really shadows or only their imagination, born of the emptiness they traveled. But, finally, there could be no question of their actuality. They had no form or shape. Never for an instant could one gain a solid glimpse of them. It was as if a tiny cloud had passed across the sun to give rise to a fleeting shadow. But there were no clouds in the sky; the sun beat down mercilessly on them out of the brassy bowl that arced above their heads.

  None of them spoke of it until one evening by a campfire located in a tiny glade, with a slowly trickling stream of reluctant water running along a pebbled creek bed, a small clump of plum bushes, heavy with ripened fruit, standing close beside the water.

  “They’re still with us,” said Meg. “You can see them out there, just beyond the firelight.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Cushing.

  “The shadows, laddie boy. Don’t pretend you haven’t seen them. They’ve been stalking us for the last two days.”

  Meg appealed to Rollo. “You have seen them, too. More than likely, you know what they are. You’ve traveled up and down this land.”

  Rollo shrugged. “They’re something no one can put a finger on. They follow people, that’s all.”

  “But what are they?”

  “Followers,” said Rollo.

  “It seems to me,” said Cushing, “that on this trip we have had more than our share of strangenesses. A living rock, Shivering Snake and, now, the Followers.”

  “You could have passed that rock a dozen times,” said Meg, “and not known what it was. It would have been just another rock to you. Andy sensed it first, then I.…”

  “Yes, I know,” said Cushing. “I could have missed the rock, but not the snake, nor the Followers.”

  “This is lonesome land,” said Rollo. “It gives rise to many strangenesses.”

  “Everywhere in the West?” asked Cushing, “or this particular area?”

  “Mostly here,” said Rollo. “There are many stories told.”

  “Would it have something to do,” asked Cushing, “with the Place of Going to the Stars?”

  “I don’t know,” the robot said. “I know nothing about this Place of Going to the Stars. I only told you what I heard.”

  “It seems to me, Sir Robot,” said Meg, “that you are full of evasiveness. Can you tell us further of the Followers?”

  “They eat you,” Rollo said.

  “Eat us?”

  “That is right. Not the flesh of you, for they have no need of flesh. The soul and mind of you.”

  “Well, that is fine,” said Meg. “So we are to be eaten, the soul and mind of us, and yet you tell us nothing of it. Not until this minute.”

  “You’ll not be harmed,” said Rollo. “You’ll still have mind and soul intact. They do not take them from you. They only savor of them.”

  “You have tried to sense them, Meg?” asked Cushing.

  She nodded. “Confusing. Hard to come to grips with. As if there were more of them than there really are, although one never knows how many of them there really are, for you cannot count them. As if there were a crowd of them. As if there were a crowd of people, very many people.”

  “That is right,” said Rollo. “Very many of them. All the people they have savored and made a part of them. For to start with, they are empty. They have nothing of their own. They’re nobody and nothing. To become somebody, perhaps many somebodies—”

  “R
ollo,” said Cushing, “do you know this for a fact, or are you only saying what you’ve heard from others?”

  “Only what I have heard from others. As I told you, of evenings filled with loneliness, I’d creep up to a campfire and listen to all the talk that went back and forth.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Cushing. “Tall tales, yarns.…”

  Later that night, when Rollo had gone out for a scout-around, Meg said to Cushing, “Laddie buck, I am afraid.”

  “Don’t let Rollo worry you,” he said. “He’s a sponge. He soaks up everything he hears. He makes no attempt to sort it out. He does not evaluate it. Truth, fiction—it is all the same to him.”

  “But there are so many strange things.”

  “And you, a witch. A frightened witch.”

  “I told you, remember, that my powers are feeble. A sensing power, a small reading of what goes through the mind. It was an act, I tell you. A way to be safe. To pretend to greater powers than I really had. A way to make the city tribes afraid to lay a hand upon me. A way to live, to be safe, to get gifts and food. A way of survival.”

  As they moved on, the land grew even more bleak. The horizons were far away. The sky stayed a steely blue. Strong winds blew from the north or west and they were dry winds, sucking up every drop of moisture, so that they moved through a blistering dryness. At times they ran short of water and then either Rollo would find it or Andy would sniff it from afar and they could drink again.

  Increasingly, they came to feel they were trapped in the middle of an arid, empty loneliness from which there was no hope they ever would escape. There was an everlasting sameness: the cactus beds were the same; the sun-dried grass, the same; the little animal and bird life they encountered, unchanging.

  “There are no bear,” Rollo complained one night.

  “Is that what you are doing all the time, running off?” asked Meg. “Looking for bear?”

  “I need grease,” he said. “My supply is running low. This is grizzly country.”

  “You’ll find bear,” said Cushing, “when we get across the Missouri.”

  “If we ever find the Missouri,” said Meg.

  And that was it, thought Cushing. In this place the feeling came upon you that everything you had ever known had somehow become displaced and moved; that nothing was where you had thought it was and that it probably never had been; that the one reality was this utter, everlasting emptiness that would go on forever and forever. They had walked out of old familiar Earth and, by some strange twist of fate or of circumstance, had entered this place that was not of Earth but was, perhaps, one of those far alien planets that at one time man may have visited.

  Shivering Snake had formed itself into a sparkling halo that revolved sedately in the air just above Rollo’s head, and at the edge of the farthest reach of firelight were flitting deeper shadows that were the Followers. Somewhere out there, he remembered, there was a place that he was seeking—not a place, perhaps, but a legend; and this place they traveled, as well, could be a legend. They—he and a witch and a robot, perhaps the last robot that was left; not the last left alive—for there were many of them that were still alive—but the last that was mobile, that could move about and work, the last that could see and hear and talk. And he and Meg, he thought—perhaps the only ones who knew the others were alive, prisoned in the soundless dark. A strange crew: a woods runner; a witch who might be a bogus witch, a woman who could be frightened, who had never voiced complaint at the hardship of the journey; an anachronism, a symbol of that other day when life might have been easier but had growing at its core a cancer that ate away at it until the easier life was no longer worth the living.

  Now that the other, easier, cancer-ridden life was gone, he wondered, what about the present life? For almost fifteen centuries men had fumbled through a senseless and brutal barbarism and still wallowed in the barbarism. The worst of it, he told himself, was that there seemed to be no attempt to advance beyond the barbarism. As if man, failing in the course that he had taken, no longer had the heart nor the mind, perhaps not even the wish, to try to build another life. Or was it that the human race had had its chance and had muffed it, and there would not be another chance?

  “Laddie, you are worried.”

  “No, not worried. Just thinking. Wondering. If we do find the Place of Going to the Stars, what difference will it make?”

  “We’ll know that it is there. We’ll know that, once, men traveled to the stars.”

  “But that’s not enough,” he said. “Just knowing’s not enough.”

  The next morning his depression had vanished. There was, strangely enough, something exhilarating in the emptiness, a certain crispness and clearness, a spaciousness, that made one a lord of all that one surveyed. They were still alone, but it was not a fearsome aloneness; it was as if they moved across a country that had been tailor-made for them, a country from which all others had been barred, a far-reaching and far-seeing country. The Followers were still with them, but they no longer seemed to be a threat; rather, they were companions of the journey, part of the company.

  Late in the day, they came upon two others, two human waifs as desolate as they in that vast stretch of emptiness. They saw them, when they topped a low swell, from half a mile away. The man was old; his hair and beard were gray. He was dressed in worn buckskins and stood as straight as a young oak tree, facing the west, the restless western wind tugging at his beard and hair. The woman, who appeared to be younger, was sitting to one side and behind him, her feet tucked beneath her, head and shoulders bent forward, covered by a ragged robe. They were situated beside a small patch of wild sunflowers.

  When Cushing and the others came up to the two, they could see that the man was standing in two shallow holes that had been clawed out of the prairie sod, standing in them barefooted, with a pair of worn moccasins lying to one side. Neither he nor the woman seemed to notice their coming. The man stood straight and unmoving. His arms were folded across his chest; his chin tilted up and his eyes were shut. There was about him a sense of fine-edged alertness, as if he might be listening to something that no one else could hear. There was nothing to hear but the faint hollow booming of the wind as it raced across the land and an occasional rustle as it stirred the sunflower patch.

  The woman, sitting cross-legged in the grass, did not stir. It was as if neither of them was aware they were no longer alone. The woman’s head was bowed above her lap, in which her hands were loosely folded. Looking down at her, Cushing saw that she was young.

  The three of them—Rollo, Meg, and Cushing—stood in a row, puzzled, slightly outraged, awaiting recognition. Andy switched flies and munched grass. The Followers circled warily.

  It was ridiculous, Cushing told himself, that the three of them should be standing there like little naughty children who had intruded where they were not wanted and, for their trespass, were being studiously ignored. Yet there was an aura about the other two that prevented one from breaking in upon them.

  While Cushing was debating whether he should be angry or abashed, the old man moved, slowly coming to life. First his arms unfolded and fell slowly, almost gracefully, to his sides. His head, which had been tilted back, inclined forward, into a more normal position. His feet lifted, one by one, out of the holes in which he had been standing. He turned his body, with a strange deliberation, so that he faced Cushing. His face was not the stern, harsh, patriarchal face that one might have assumed from watching him in his seeming trance but a kind, although sober, face—the face of a kindly man who had come to peace after years of hardship. Above his grizzled beard, which covered a good part of his face, a pair of ice-blue eyes, set off by masses of crow’s feet, beamed out at the world.

  “Welcome, strangers,” he said, “to our few feet of ground. Would you have, I wonder, a cup of water for my granddaughter and myself?”

  The woman still sat cross-legged on the grass, but now she raised her head and the robe that had covered it fell off, bunching at her bac
k. Her face held a terrible sweetness and a horrible innocence and her eyes were blank. She was a prim-faced, pretty doll filled with emptiness.

  “My granddaughter, if you failed to notice,” said the old man, “is doubly blessed. She lives in another place. This world cannot touch her. Bespeak her gently, please, and have no concern about her. She is a gentle creature and there is nothing to be feared. She is happier than I am, happier than any one of us. Most of all, I ask you, do not pity her. It is the other way around. She, by all rights, could hold pity for the rest of us.”

  Meg stepped forward to offer him a cup of water, but he waved it away. “Elayne first,” he said. “She is always first. And you may be wondering what I was doing, standing here in the holes I dug, and shut within myself. I was not as shut in as you might have thought. I was talking with the flowers. They are such pretty flowers and so sentient and well-mannered.… I almost said ‘intelligent,’ and that would not have been quite right, for their intelligence, if that is what you can call it, is not our intelligence, although, perhaps, in a way, better than our intelligence. A different kind of intelligence, although, come to think of it, ‘intelligence’ may not be the word at all.”

  “Is this a recent accomplishment,” asked Cushing, with some disbelief, “or have you always talked with flowers?”

  “More so now than was the case at one time,” the old man told him. “I have always had the gift. Not only flowers, but trees and all other kinds of plants—grasses, mosses, vines, weeds, if any plant can rightly be called a weed. It’s not so much that I talk with them, although at times I do. What I mostly do is listen. There are occasions when I am sure they know that I am there. When this happens, I try to talk with them. Mostly I think they understand me, although I am not certain they are able to identify me, to know with any certainty what it is that is talking with them. It is possible their perceptions are not of an order that permits them to identify other forms of life. Largely, I am certain, they exist in a world of their own which is as blind to us as we are blind to them. Not blind in that we are unaware of them, for, to their sorrow, we are very much aware of them. What we are entirely blind to is the fact that they have a consciousness even as we have a consciousness.”