by Jerry
For a moment the outlaw looked surprised, then he threw back his head and laughed.
“You’ve duplicated my force weapons? That’s ridiculous, Sheldon! Don’t try to bluff me. I showed them only the effect, not the cause. And they didn’t look too intelligent to me!”
“Nonetheless,” said Sheldon softly, “they’re two of our top scientists. They’ve made an exact copy of your ship. If you’d like to be blown out of space—”
The outlaw’s face darkened as Sheldon drew out the pause.
“If there’s anything to be blown out of space,” he growled, “it’s Mare Wirtum. Enough talk, Sheldon. I’m coming down!”
Sheldon’s fingers depressed a switch.
On a smaller teleplate, a figure in a lieutenant-commander’s space suit appeared.
“Now,” Sheldon murmured. “And be sure the timing is correct. His position is four-sixteen due north of the last reading. Distance eleven hundred miles, but he’ll come in fast.”
The officer nodded. Sheldon blacked out the smaller teleplate. The larger, with its view of Hurth Lheuin’s control room, still was open, and he listened as the outlaw shouted orders in a guttural South Martian dialect at the Martian aborigine whose tentacles slid over the complex control board.
At the Wirtium base, giant cannon boomed silently, hurling huge shells that burst many miles short of the approaching ship. The outlaw vessel plunged moonward. Hurth Lheuin’s throaty laugh roared from Commander Sheldon’s teleplate.
“I come alone,” he boasted. “My fleet will follow later to occupy your base. But first, with my one invincible ship, I wipe out all resistance!”
His laugh faded a moment later when he looked forward to where the shells had burst. Silvery clouds were swelling swiftly in his path. He mouthed a thick oath, and eyed the gleaming dust distastefully.
“A smoke screen! But that won’t stop me, Sheldon. It may slow me down some, but the end will be the same.”
He moved to the gun turrets in the nose, ran his fingers caressingly over the controls of his force weapons. His eyes were narrowed, sadistic in their eagerness as they tried to pierce the thick fog that billowed between himself and Luna. When they passed into the smoke screen, his arm muscles tightened.
“Blast on,” he ordered curtly, eying the bank of meters at his left. “The base is a long way down yet. I’ll tell you when to cut acceleration.”
He passed out of the blinding cloud of silvery dust into a clearer space, then into another clouded pocket. He swore disgustedly while they cleared that, then his shocked eyes were staring straight ahead.
A space ship was coming directly toward him from the smoke screen ahead! And the other vessel was constructed like his own!
Then maybe Commander Sheldon had not lied about duplicating the force weapons!
But a moment later he was calm again.
“A nice bluff, Sheldon,” he conceded. “But it won’t work. You’ve built a copy of my ship, but it hasn’t the weapons mine has.”
“You’ll find out,” promised Sheldon’s voice, from the teleplate.
Lheuin pointed his ship directly at the other. The distance between the two lessened swiftly. The outlaw lined his sights, slid the split-field range finder carefully back until the focus was exact, and depressed the trigger of his weapon.
THE charge of energy blasted with murderous intensity past the approaching ship, but did not harm it.
Lheuin frowned, for a second wondering. But it was impossible that Sheldon could have duplicated his armor. The range was off—the charge had exploded somewhere in the smoke screen far behind the Earth ship.
He set the range again, swiftly, for the ship was only a few miles away now. His fingers squeezed down the trigger as charge after charge from his terrible weapon blasted out.
Sweat beaded his face. The other ship was still making straight for him, and matching him blast for blast! He hadn’t harmed it at all!
But neither had it harmed him. He hunched closer to his weapon. They both were misjudging speed, evidently. He jammed back the range finder.
“Straight ahead!” he roared to the being at the controls. “They can’t take much more!”
He hugged the trigger, and watched the other ship grow bigger and bigger. Suddenly he sprang to his feet and stared. His eyes bulged with sudden horror.
“We’ve been tricked! Swing away! Away!”
It was too late. They crashed through the space where the other ship had been, and his shocked eyes saw the surface of Luna a scant half mile from them. Before his native at the controls could wrench them aside, the ship of Hurth Lheuin plowed deep into the soft soil of Earth’s moon.
There was a swift flash and the invulnerable ship was spread over several square miles of Luna.
Sheldon regarded the suddenly dead teleplate. He gazed from his window toward the point five miles away where the ship had crashed. He spoke into the smaller teleplate.
“Take care of the rest. Get the fleet into space and wipe out or capture the rest of that outfit. Keep me informed.”
“Immediately!”
The officer’s eyes lighted. He turned and started barking orders.
Sheldon watched him swing into action. He turned to the two lieutenants and permitted himself a grin.
“But, sir, what happened?” one of the youths wanted to know. “Did you really make a duplicate copy of his energy beam? Or—”
Sheldon chuckled and led them to the window. He indicated the film of silver dust that roofed the base.
“A few heavy charges far out into space,” he explained, “merely to confuse Lheuin, and prepare for the main show. Then our flak guns spread this layer of silver dust half a mile overhead. The Senate silver bloc will raise the dickens when they find out. But from a distance, it was a mirror, and Lheuin saw his own image. He dived at it, and through the screen when he attacked it.”
He chuckled again, as the two lieutenants looked surprised.
“If he’d looked at his instruments,” he said, “he would have realized he was near the surface. But he was too busy shooting at his own reflection!”
1944
CITY
Clifford D. Simak
A City is a place where men gather together for mutual protection, and to help each other with the ivork of living. But there’s a point at which the city ceases to servee—
Gramp Stevens sat in a lawn chair, watching the mower at work, feeling the warm, soft sunshine seep into his bones. The mower reached the edge of the lawn, clucked to itself like a contented hen, made a neat turn and trundled down another swath. The bag holding the clippings bulged.
Suddenly the mower stopped and clicked excitedly. A panel in its side snapped open and a cranelike arm reached out. Grasping steel lingers tished around in the grass, came up triumphantly with a stone clutched tightly, dropped the stone into a small container, disappeared back into the panel again. The lawn mower gurgled, purred on again, following its swath.
Gramp grumbled at it with suspicion.
“Some day,” he told himself, “that dadburned tiling is going to miss a lick and have a nervous breakdown.”
He lay back in the chair and stared up at the sun-washed sky. A helicopter skimmed far overhead. From somewhere inside the house a radio came to life and a torturing clash of music poured out. Gramp, hearing it, shivered and hunkered lower in the chair.
Young Charlie was settling down for a twitch session. Dadburn the kid.
The lawn mower chuckled past and Gramp squinted at it maliciously.
“Automatic,” he told the sky. “Ever’ blasted thing is automatic now. Getting so you just take a machine off in a corner and whisper in its ear and it scurries off to do the job.”
His daughter’s voice came to him out the window, pitched to carry above the music.
“Father!”
Gramp stirred uneasily. “Yes, Betty.”
“Now, father, you see you move when that lawn mower gets to you. Don’t try to out-stubbor
n it. After all, it’s only a machine. Last time you just sat there and made it cut around you. I never saw the beat of you.”
He didn’t answer, letting his head nod a bit, hoping she would think he was asleep and let him be.
“Father,” she shrilled, “did you hear me?”
He saw it was no good. “Sure, I heard you,” he told her. “I was just fixing to move.”
He rose slowly to his feet, leaning heavily on his cane. Might make her feel sorry for the way she treated him when she saw how old and feeble he was getting. He’d have to be careful, though. If she knew he didn’t need the cane at all, she’d be finding jobs for him to do and, on the other hand, if he laid it on too thick, she’d be having that fool doctor in to pester him again.
Grumbling, he moved the chair out into that portion of the lawn that had been cut. The mower, rolling past, chortled at him fiendishly.
“Some day,” Gramp told it, “I’m going to take a swipe at you and bust a gear or two.”
The mower hooted at him and went serenely down the lawn.
From somewhere down the grassy street came a jangling of metal, a stuttered coughing.
Gramp, ready to sit down, straightened up and listened.
The sound came more clearly, the rumbling backfire of a balky engine, the clatter of loose metallic parts.
“An automobile!” yelped Gramp. “An automobile, by cracky!”
He started to gallop for the gate, suddenly remembered that he was feeble and subsided to a rapid hobble.
“Must be that crazy Ole Johnson,” he told himself. “He’s the only one left that’s got a car. Just too dadburned stubborn to give it up.”
It was Ole.
Gramp reached the gate in time to see the rusty, dilapidated old machine come bumping around the corner, rocking and chugging along the unused street. Steam hissed from the overheated radiator and a cloud of blue smoke issued from the exhaust, which had lost its muffler five years or more ago.
Ole sat stolidly behind the wheel, squinting his eyes, trying to duck the roughest places, although that was hard to do, for weeds and grass had overrun the streets and it was hard to see what might be underneath them.
Gramp waved his cane.
“Hi, Ole,” he shouted.
Ole pulled up, setting the emergency brake. The car gasped, shuddered, coughed, died with a horrible sigh.
“What you burning?” asked Gramp.
“Little bit of everything,” said Ole. “Kerosene, some old tractor oil I found out in a barrel, some rubbing alcohol.”
Gramp regarded the fugitive machine with forthright admiration. “Them was the days,” he said. “Had one myself used to be able to get a hundred miles an hour out of.”
“Still O. K.” said Ole, “if you only could find the stuff to run them or get the parts to fix them. Up to three, four years ago I used to be able to get enough gasoline, but ain’t seen none for a long time now. Quit making it, I guess. No use having gasoline, they tell me, when you have atomic power.”
“Sure,” said Gramp. “Guess maybe that’s right, but you can’t smell atomic power. Sweetest thing I know, the smell of burning gasoline. These here helicopters and other gadgets they got took all the romance out of traveling, somehow.”
He squinted at the barrels and baskets piled in the back seat.
“Got some vegetables?” he asked. “Yup,” said Ole. “Some sweet corn and early potatoes and a few baskets of tomatoes. Thought maybe I could sell them.”
Gramp shook his head. “You won’t, Ole. They won’t buy them. Folks has got the notion that this new hydroponics stuff is the only garden sass that’s fit to eat. Sanitary, they say, and better flavored.”
“Wouldn’t give a hoot in a tin cup for all they grow in them tanks they got,” Ole declared, belligerently. “Don’t taste right to me somehow. Like I tell Martha, food’s got to be raised in the soil to have any character.”
He reached down to turn over the ignition switch.
“Don’t know as it’s worth trying to get the stuff to town,” he said, “the way they keep the roads. Or the way they don’t keep them, rather. Twenty years ago the state highway out there was a strip of good concrete and they kept it patched and plowed it every winter. Did anything, spent any amount of money to keep it open. And now they just forgot about it. The concrete’s all broken up and some of it has washed out. Brambles are growing in it. Had to get out and cut away a tree that fell across it one place this morning.”
“Ain’t it the truth,” agreed Gramp.
The car exploded into life, coughing and choking. A cloud of dense blue smoke rolled out from under it. With a jerk it stirred to life and lumbered down the road.
Gramp clumped back to his chair and found it dripping wet. The automatic mower, having finished its cutting job, had rolled out the hose, was sprinkling the lawn.
Muttering venom, Gramp stalked around the corner of the house and sat down on the bench beside the back porch. He didn’t like to sit there, but it was the only place he was safe from the hunk of machinery out in the front.
For one thing, the view from the bench was slightly depressing, fronting as it did on street after street of vacant, deserted houses and weed-grown, unkempt yards.
It had one advantage, however. From the bench he could pretend he was slightly deaf and not hear the twitch music the radio was blaring out.
A voice called from the front yard.
“Bill! Bill, where be you?”
Gramp twisted around.
“Here I am, Mark. Back of the house. Hiding from that dadburned mower.”
Mark Bailey limped around the corner of the house, cigarette threatening to set fire to his bushy whiskers.
“Bit early for the game, ain’t you?” asked Gramp.
“Can’t play no game today,” said Mark.
He hobbled over and sat down beside Gramp on the bench.
“We’re leaving,” he said.
Gramp whirled on him. “You’re leaving!”
“Yeah. Moving out into the country. Lucinda finally talked Herb into it. Never gave him no peace, I guess. Said everyone was moving away to one of them nice country estates and she didn’t see no reason why we couldn’t.”
Gramp gulped. “Where to?”
“Don’t rightly know,” said Mark. “Ain’t been there myself. Up north some place. Up on one of the lakes. Got ten acres of land. Lucinda wanted a hundred, but Herb put down his foot and said ten was enough. After all, one city lot was enough for all these years.”
“Betty was pestering Johnny, too,” said Gramp, “but he’s holding out against her. Says he simply can’t do it. Says it wouldn’t look right, him the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce and all, if he went moving away from the city.”
“Folks are crazy,” Mark declared. “Plumb crazy.”
“That’s a fact,” Gramp agreed. “Country crazy, that’s what they are. Look across there.”
He waved his hand at the streets of vacant houses. “Can remember the time when those places were as pretty a bunch of homes as you ever laid your eyes on. Good neighbors, they were. Women ran across from one back door to another to trade recipes. And the men folks would go out to cut the grass and pretty soon the mowers would all be sitting idle and the men would be ganged up, chewing the fat. Friendly people, Mark. But look at it now.”
Mark stirred uneasily. “Got to be getting back, Bill. Just sneaked over to let you know we were lighting out. Lucinda’s got me packing. She’d be sore if she knew I’d run out.”
Gramp rose stiffly and held out his hand. “I’ll be seeing you again? You be over for one last game?” Mark shook his head. “Afraid not. Bill.”
They shook hands awkwardly, abashed. “Sure will miss them games,” said Mark.
“Me, too,” said Gramp, “I won’t have nobody once you’re gone.”
“So long, Bill,” said Mark.
“So long,” said Gramp.
He stood and watched his friend hobble around the h
ouse, felt the cold claw of loneliness reach out and touch him with icy fingers. A terrible loneliness. The loneliness of age—of age and the outdated. Fiercely, Gramp admitted it. He was outdated. He belonged to another age. He had outstripped his time, lived beyond his years.
Eyes misty, he fumbled for the cane that lay against the bench, slowly made his way toward the sagging gate that opened onto the deserted street back of the house.
The years had moved too fast. Years that had brought the family plane and helicopter, leaving the auto to rust in some forgotten place, the unused roads to fall into disrepair. Years that had virtually wiped out the tilling of the soil with the rise of hydroponics. Years that had brought cheap land with the disappearance of the farm as an economic unit, had sent city people scurrying out into the country where each man, for less than the price of a city lot, might own broad acres. Years that had revolutionized the construction of homes to a point where families simply walked away from their old homes to the new ones that could be bought, custom-made, for less than half the price of a prewar structure and could be changed at small cost, to accommodate need of additional space or merely a passing whim.
Gramp sniffed. Houses that could be changed each year, just like one would shift around the furniture. What kind of living was that?
He plodded slowly down the dusty path that was all that remained of what a few years before had been a busy residential street. A street of ghosts, Gramp told himself—of furtive, little ghosts that whispered in the night. Ghosts of playing children, ghosts of upset tricycles and canted coaster wagons. Ghosts of gossiping housewives. Ghosts of shouted greetings. Ghosts of flaming fireplaces and chimneys smoking of a winter night.
Little puffs of dust rose around his feet and whitened the cuffs of his trousers.
There was the old Adams place across the way. Adams had been mighty proud of it, he remembered. Gray field stone front and picture windows. Now the stone was green with creeping moss and the broken windows gaped with ghastly leer. Weeds choked the lawn and blotted out the stoop. An elm tree was pushing its branches against the gable. Gramp could remember the day Adams had planted that elm tree.
