The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  And here he sat, he thought, staring at the thunderheads when there was work to do. Corn to be plowed. Hay to be gotten in. Wheat soon to put in shock.

  For, despite whatever might have happened, a man still had a life to live. Days had to be gotten through the best that one could manage. It was a lesson, he reminded himself, that he should have learned in all its fullness in the last few years. But war was somehow different than what had happened here. In war you knew it and expected it. You were ready when it happened; but this was not the war. This was the peace to which he had returned.

  A man had a right to expect that in the world of peace there really would be peace, fencing out the violence and the horror.

  Now he was alone, as he’d never been alone before. Now, if ever, could be a new beginning. Perhaps now there had to be a new beginning. But whether it was here, on the homestead acres, or in some other place, it still would be a beginning of bitterness and anguish.

  He sat on the steps, with his wrists resting on his knees, and watched the thunderheads piling in the west. It might mean rain. The land could use the rain. Or it might be nothing, for above the merging river valleys the air currents were erratic. There was no way a man could tell where those clouds might flow.

  He did not see the traveler until he turned in at the gate. He was tall and gangling, and his clothes were dusty. From the appearance of him he had walked a far way. He came up the path and Enoch sat waiting for him, watching him but not stirring from the steps.

  “Good day, sir,” Enoch finally said. “It’s a hot day to be walking. Why don’t you sit a while?”

  “Quite willingly,” said the stranger. “But first, I wonder, could I have a drink of water?”

  Enoch got up to his feet. “Come along. I’ll pump a fresh one for you.”

  He went down across the barnyard until he reached the pump. He unhooked the dipper from where it hung upon a bolt and handed it to the man. He grasped the handle of the pump and worked it up and down.

  “Let it run a while,” he said. “It takes a time for it to get real cool.”

  The water splashed out of the spout, running on the boards that formed the cover of the well. It came in spurts as Enoch worked the handle.

  “Do you think,” the stranger asked, “that it is about to rain?”

  “A man can’t tell,” said Enoch. “We have to wait and see.”

  THERE WAS something about this traveler that disturbed him. Nothing, actually, that one could put a finger on, but a certain strangeness that was vaguely disquieting. He watched him narrowly as he pumped and decided that probably this stranger’s ears were just a bit too pointed at the top. Then he put it down to his imagination, for when he looked again they seemed to be all right.

  “I think,” said Enoch, “that the water should be cold by now.”

  The traveler put down the dipper and waited for it to fill. He offered it to Enoch. Enoch shook his head.

  “You first. You need it worse than I do.”

  The stranger drank greedily and with much slobbering.

  “Another one?” asked Enoch.

  “No, thank you,” said the stranger. “But I’ll catch another dipper full for you, if you wish me to.”

  Enoch pumped and when the dipper was full, the stranger handed it to him. The water was cold. Enoch, realizing for the first time that he had been thirsty, drank it almost to the bottom.

  He hung the dipper back on its bolt and said to the man: “Now, let’s get in that sitting.”

  The stranger grinned. “I could do with some of it,” he said.

  Enoch pulled a red bandanna from his pocket and mopped his face. “The air gets close,” he said, “just before a rain.”

  And as he mopped his face, quite suddenly he knew what it was that had disturbed him about the traveler.

  Despite his bedraggled clothes and his dusty shoes, which attested to long walking, despite the heat of this time-before-a-rain, the stranger was not sweating. He appeared as fresh and cool as if he had been lying at his ease beneath a tree in springtime.

  Enoch put the bandanna back into his pocket. They walked back to the steps and sat there, side by side.

  “You’ve traveled a far way,” said Enoch, gently prying.

  “Very far, indeed,” the stranger told him. “I’m a right smart piece from home.”

  “And you have a far way yet to go?”

  “No,” the stranger said, “I believe that I have got to the place where I am going.”

  “You mean . . .” asked Enoch, and left the question hanging.

  “I mean right here,” said the stranger, “sitting on these steps. I have been looking for a man and I think that man is you. I did not know his name nor where to look for him, but yet I knew that one day I would find him, and now I have.”

  “BUT ME,” Enoch said, astonished. “Why should you look for me?”

  “I was looking for a man of many different parts. One of the things about him was that he must have looked up at the stars and wondered what they were.”

  “Yes,” said Enoch, “that is something I have done. On many nights, camping in the field, I have lain in my blankets and looked up at the sky, looking at the stars and wondering what they were and how they’d been put up there and, most important of all, why they had been put up there. I have heard some way that each of them is another sun like the sun that shines on Earth. But I don’t know about that. I guess there is no one who knows too much about them.”

  “There are some,” the stranger said, “who know a deal about them.”

  “You, perhaps,” said Enoch, mocking just a little, for the stranger did not look like a man who’d know much of anything.

  “Yes, I,” the stranger said. “Although I do not know as much as many others do.”

  Enoch said, “I’ve sometimes wondered if the stars are other suns, might there not be other planets and other people, too.”

  He remembered sitting around the campfire of a night, jawing with the other fellows to pass away the time. And once he’d mentioned this idea of maybe other people on other planets circling other suns. And the fellows all had jeered him and for days afterwards had made fun of him, so he had never mentioned it again. Not that it mattered much, for he had no real belief in it himself. It had never been more than campfire speculation.

  And now he’d mentioned it again and to an utter stranger. He wondered why he had.

  “You believe that?” asked the stranger.

  Enoch said: “It was just an idle notion.”

  “Not so idle,” said the stranger. “There are other planets and there are other people. I am one of them.”

  “But you . . .” cried Enoch, then was stricken into silence.

  For the stranger’s face had split and began to fall away and beneath it he caught the glimpse of another face that was not a human face.

  And even as the false human face sloughed off that other face, a great sheet of lightning went crackling across the sky and the heavy crash of thunder seemed to shake the land, and from far off he heard the rushing of the rain as it charged across the hills.

  V

  THAT WAS how it started, Enoch though, almost a hundred years ago. The campfire fantasy had turned into solid fact.

  The Earth now was on galactic charts, a way station for many different peoples traveling star to star. Strangers once, but now there were no strangers. There were no such things as strangers. In whatever form, with whatever purpose, all of them were people.

  He looked back at the entry for Oct. 16, 1931 and ran through it swiftly. There, near the end of it was the sentence: Ulysses says the Thubans from planet VI are perhaps the greatest mathematicians in the galaxy. It seems they have developed a numeration system superior to any in existence, especially valuable in the handling of statistics.

  He closed the book and sat quietly in the chair, wondering if the statisticians of Mizar X knew of the Thubans’ work. Perhaps they did, he thought. Certainly some of the math they used w
as unconventional.

  He pushed the record book to one side and dug into a desk drawer, bringing out his chart. He spread it flat on the desk before him and puzzled over it. If he could be sure, he thought. If he only knew the Mizar statistics better. For the last ten years or more he had labored at the chart, checking and rechecking all the factors against the Mizar system, testing again and again to determine whether the factors he was using were the ones he should be using.

  He raised a clenched fist and hammered at the desk. If he only could be certain! If he could only talk with someone.

  But that had been something that he had shrank from doing, for it would be equivalent to showing the very nakedness of the human race.

  He still was human. Funny, he thought, that he should stay human, that in a century of association with these beings from the many stars he should have, through it all, remained a man of Earth.

  For in many ways, his ties with Earth were cut. Old Winslowe Grant was the only human he ever talked with now. His neighbors shunned him. There were no others, unless one could count the watchers, and those he seldom saw—only glimpses of them, only the places they had been.

  Only old Winslowe Grant and Mary and the other people from the shadow who came occasionally to spend lonely hours with him.

  That was all of Earth he had. Old Winslowe and the shadow people and the homestead acres that lay outside the house—but not the house itself, for the house was alien now.

  HE SHUT his eyes and remembered how the house had been in the olden days.

  There had been a kitchen, in this same area where he was sitting, with the iron cook stove, black and monstrous, in its corner, showing its row of fiery teeth along the slit made by the grate. Pushed against the wall had been the table where the three of them used to eat. He could remember how that table looked, with the vinegar cruet and the glass that held the spoons and the lazy Susan with the mustard, horseradish and chili sauce sitting in a group, a sort of centerpiece in the middle of the red checkered cloth that the table wore.

  There had been a winter night when he had been, it seemed, no more than three or four. His mother was busy at the stove with supper. He was sitting on the floor in the center of the kitchen, playing with some blocks, and outside he could hear the muffled howling of the wind as it prowled along the eaves. His father had come in from milking at the barn, and a gust of wind and a swirl of snow had come into room with him. Then he’d shut the door and the wind and snow were gone, shut outside this house, condemned to the outer darkness and the wilderness of night. His father had set the pail of milk that he had been carrying on the kitchen sink and Enoch saw that his beard and eyebrows were coated with snow and there was frost on the whiskers all around his mouth.

  He held that picture still, the three of them like historic mannikins posed in a cabinet in a museum—his father with the frost upon his whiskers and the great felt boots that came up to his knees; his mother with her face flushed from working at the stove and the lace cap upon her head; and himself upon the floor, playing with the blocks.

  There was one other thing that he remembered, perhaps more clearly than all the rest of it. There was a great lamp sitting on the table. On the wall behind it hung a calendar and the glow of the lamp fell like a spotlight upon the picture on the calendar.

  There was Old Santa Claus, riding in his sleigh through a woodland track and all the little woodland people had turned out to watch him pass. A great moon hung above the trees and there was thick snow on the ground. A pair of rabbits sat there, gazing soulfully at Santa, and a deer beside the rabbits, with a raccoon just a little distance off, ringed tail wrapped about his feet, and a squirrel and chickadee side by side upon an overhanging branch. Old Santa had his whip raised high in greeting. His cheeks were red and his smile was merry, and the reindeer hitched to his sled were fresh and spirited and proud.

  Through all the years this midnineteenth century Santa had ridden down the snowy aisles of time, with his whip uplifted in happy greeting to the woodland creatures. And the golden lamplight had ridden with him, still bright upon the wall and the checkered table cloth.

  So, thought Enoch, some things do endure—the memory of the snug warmness of a childhood kitchen on a stormy winter night.

  BUT THE endurance was of the spirit and the mind, for nothing else endured. There was no kitchen now, nor no sitting room with its old-fashioned sofa and the rocking chair; no back parlor with its stuffy elegance of brocade and silk, no guest bedroom on the first and no family bedrooms on the second floor.

  It all was gone. Only one room remained.

  The second story floor and all partitions had been stripped away. Now the house was one great room. One side of it was the galactic station. The other side the living space for the keeper of the station. There was a bed over in one corner, and a stove that worked on no principle known on Earth, and a refrigerator that was of alien make. The walls were lined with cabinets and shelves, stacked with magazines and books and journals.

  There was just one thing left from the early days, the one thing Enoch had not allowed the alien crew that had set up the station to strip away—the massive old fireplace of brick and native stone that had stood against one wall of the sitting room. It still stood there, the one reminder of the days of old; the one thing left of Earth, with its great, scarred oak mantle that his father had carved out with a broadaxe from a massive log and smoothed by hand with plane and draw-shave.

  On the fireplace mantle and strewn on shelf and table were articles and artifacts that had no earthly origin and some no earthly names—the steady accumulation through the years of the gifts from friendly travelers.

  Some of them were functional. Others were to look at only. And there were other things that were entirely useless, because they had little application to a member of the human race or were inoperable on Earth, and many others of the purpose of which he had no idea, accepting them, embarrassed, with many stumbling thanks, from the well-meaning folks who had brought them to him.

  And on the other side of the room stood the intricate mass of machinery, reaching well up into the open second story, that wafted passengers through the space that stretched from star to star.

  An inn, he thought. A stopping place. A galactic crossroads.

  He rolled up the chart and put it back into the desk. The record book he put away in its proper place among all the other record books upon the shelf.

  He glanced at the galactic clock upon the wall, and it was time to go.

  HE PUSHED the chair tight against the desk and shrugged into the jacket that hung upon the chair back. He picked the rifle off the supports that held it on the wall. Then he faced the wall itself and said the single word that he had to say.

  The wall slid silently back. He stepped through it into the little shed with its sparse furnishings. Behind him the section of the wall slid closed and there was nothing there to indicate it was anything but a solid wall.

  Enoch stepped out of the shed. It was a beautiful late summer day. In a few weeks now, he thought, there’d be the signs of autumn and a strange chill in the air. The first goldenrods were blooming now, and he’d noticed, just the day before, that some of the early asters down in the ancient fence row had started to show color.

  He went around the corner of the house and headed toward the river, striding down the long deserted field that was overrun with hazel brush and occasional clumps of trees.

  This was the Earth, he thought—a planet made for Man. But not for Man alone, for it was as well a planet for the fox and owl and weasel, for the snake, the katydid, the fish, for all the other teeming life that filled the air and earth and water. And not these natives alone, but for other beings that called other earths their home, other planets that, far light-years distant, were basically the same as Earth. For Ulysses and the Hazers and all the rest of them who could live upon this planet, if need be, if they wished, with no discomfort and no artificial aids, as readily as they had been born here.

&n
bsp; Our horizons are so far, he thought, and we see so little of them. Even now, with flaming rockets striving from Canaveral to break the ancient bonds, we dream so little of them.

  The ache was there. The ache that had been growing, the ache to tell all mankind those things that he had learned. Not so much the specific things, although there were some of them that mankind well could use, but the general things—the unspecific, central fact that there was intelligence throughout the universe. That Man was not alone; that if he only found the way he need never be alone again.

  He went down across the field and through the strip of woods and came out on the great out-thrust of rock that stood atop the cliff that faced the river. He stood there, as he had stood on thousands of other mornings, and stared out at the river, sweeping in majestic blue and silver through the wooded bottom-land.

  Old, ancient water, he said, talking silently to the river, you have seen it happen—the mile-high faces of the glaciers that came and stayed and left, creeping back toward the pole inch by stubborn inch, carrying the melting water from those very glaciers in a flood that filled this valley with a tide such as now is never known; the mastodon and the sabre-tooth and the bearsized beaver that ranged these olden hills and made the night clamorous with trumpeting and screaming; the silent little bands of men who trotted in the woods or clambered up the cliffs or paddled on your surface, woods-wise and water-wise, weak in body, strong in purpose, and persistent in a way no other thing ever was persistent, and just a little time ago that other breed of men who carried dreams within their skulls and cruelty in their hands and the awful sureness of an even greater purpose in their hearts. And before that, for this is ancient country beyond what is often found, the other kinds of life and the many turns of climate and the changes that came upon the Earth itself. And what think you of it? he asked the river. For yours is the memory and the perspective and the time. By now you should have the answers. Or at least some of the answers.