The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  Running hard, Enoch crossed the area covered by the ferns and came out on the sharper slope some hundred yards below the boulders. Here the cover was not so dense, spotty underbrush and a scattering of trees. The soft loam of the forest floor gave way to a footing of shattered rock which through the years had been chipped off the boulders by the winter’s frost, rolling down the slope. They lay there now, covered with thick moss, a treacherous place to walk.

  THERE WAS no sign of the alien. Then, out of the corner of his vision, he saw motion and threw himself forward to the ground. Behind a patch of hazel brush he saw the alien outlined against the sky, its head pivoting back and forth to sweep the slope below, the weapon half lifted and set for instant use.

  Enoch lay frozen, with his outstretched hand gripping the rifle. There was a slash of pain across one set of knuckles and he knew that he had skinned them on the rock as he had dived for cover.

  The alien dropped from sight behind the boulders and Enoch slowly pulled the rifle back to where he would be able to handle it should a shot present itself.

  Although, he wondered, would he dare to fire? Would he dare to kill an alien?

  The alien could have killed him back there at the station, when he had been knocked silly by the dreadful stench. But it had not killed him; it had fled instead. Was the creature so badly frightened that all that it could think of had been to get away? Or had it been as reluctant to kill a station keeper as he was to kill an alien?

  He searched the rocks above him. There was no motion and not a thing to see. He must move up that slope, and quick. Time would work to the advantage of the alien. Darkness could not be more than thirty minutes off and before dark had fallen this issue must be settled. If the alien got away, there’d be little chance to find it.

  An alien could not be allowed upon the Earth. He shuddered as he imagined some of the complications which could arise from such a situation.

  And why, asked a second self, standing to one side, should you worry about alien complications? For are you not prepared, yourself, to hand Earth as much alien lore and learning as may be within your power?

  A rustle in the bushes to his left brought him around with the rifle up and ready.

  And there was Lucy Fisher, not more than twenty feet away.

  “GET OUT of here!” he shouted, forgetting that she could not hear him.

  But she did not seem to notice. She motioned to the left and made a sweeping motion with her hand, toward the boulders.

  Go away, he said underneath his breath, and motioned her to go back.

  She shook her head and sprang away, in a running crouch, moving further to the left and up the slope.

  Enoch scrambled to his feet after her. And as he did the air behind him made a frying sound, and there was the sharp bite of ozone in the air.

  He hit the ground instinctively. Farther down the slope a square yard of ground boiled and steamed.

  A laser, Enoch thought. The alien’s weapon was a laser, packing a terrific punch in a narrow beam of light.

  He gathered himself together and made a short rush up the hillside, throwing himself prone behind a twisted birch clump.

  The air made the frying sound again and there was an instant’s blast of heat. Over on the reverse slope a patch of ground was steaming. Ash floated down and settled on Enoch’s arms. He flashed a quick glance upward and saw that the top half of the birch clump was gone, sheared off by the laser and reduced to ash. Tiny coils of smoke rose lazily from the severed stumps.

  No matter what it might have done or failed to do at the station, the alien now meant business. It knew that it was cornered.

  Enoch huddled against the ground, worried about Lucy. He hoped she was safe. The little fool should have stayed out of it. This was no place for her. She’d have Old Hank out looking for her again, thinking she was kidnaped.

  The dusk was deepening. Only the far peak of the treetops caught the last rays of the sun. A coolness came stealing up the ravine from the valley far below and there was a damp, lush smell from the ground. From some hidden hollow a whippoorwill called mournfully.

  Enoch darted out from behind the birch clump and rushed up the slope. He reached the fallen log he’d picked as a barricade and threw himself behind it. There was no sign of the alien and there was not another shot from the laser-gun.

  Enoch studied the ground ahead. Two more rushes, one to that small pile of rock and the next to the edge of the boulder area itself, and he’d be on top of the hiding alien. And once he got there, he wondered, what was he to do.

  Perhaps, here in the open air, it could not use its stench defense as effectively as it had in the confines of the station. That might make it easier. He examined the clump of boulders from one edge to the other and there was nothing that might help him to locate the alien.

  Slowly he began to snake around, getting ready for the next rush up the slope, moving carefully so that no sound would betray him.

  Out of the tail of his eye he caught the moving shadow that came flowing up the slope. Swiftly he sat up, swinging the rifle. But before he could bring the muzzle round, the shadow was upon him, bearing him back, flat upon the ground, with one great splayfingered hand clamped upon his mouth.

  “ULYSSES!” ENOCH gurgled, but the fearsome shape only hissed at him in a warning sound.

  Slowly the weight shifted off him and the hand slid from his mouth.

  Ulysses gestured toward the boulder pile and Enoch nodded.

  Ulysses crept closer and lowered his head toward Enoch’s. He whispered, with his mouth inches from the Earthman’s ear: “The Talisman! He has the Talisman!”

  “The Talisman!” Enoch cried aloud, trying to strangle off the cry even as he made it, remembering that he should make no sound to let the watcher up above know where they might be in hiding.

  From the ridge above a loose stone rattled as it was dislodged and began to roll, bouncing down the slope. Enoch hunkered closer to the ground behind the fallen log.

  “Down!” he shouted to Ulysses. “Down! He has a gun.”

  But Ulysses’ hand gripped him by the shoulder.

  “Enoch!” he cried. “Enoch, look!”

  Enoch jerked himself erect and atop the pile of rock, dark against the skyline, were two grappling figures.

  “Lucy!” he shouted.

  For one of them was Lucy and the other was the alien.

  She sneaked up on him, he thought. The damn little fool, she sneaked up on him! While the alien had been distracted with watching the slope, she had slipped up close and then had tackled him. She had a club of some sort in her hand, an old dead branch, perhaps, and it was raised above her head, ready for a stroke, but the alien had a grip upon her arm and she could not strike.

  “Shoot,” said Ulysses, in a flat, dead voice.

  Enoch raised the rifle and had trouble with the sights because of the deepening darkness. And they were so close together! They were too close together.

  “Shoot!” yelled Ulysses.

  “I can’t,” sobbed Enoch. “It’s too dark to shoot.”

  “You have to shoot,” Ulysses said, his voice tense and hard. “You have to take the chance.” Enoch raised the rifle once again and the sights seemed clearer now and he knew the trouble was not so much the darkness as that shot which he had missed back there in the world of the honking thing that had strode its world on stilts. If he had missed then, he could as well miss now.

  The bead came to rest upon the head of the rat-like creature, and then the head bobbed away, but was bobbing back again.

  “Shoot!” Ulysses yelled.

  Enoch squeezed the trigger and the rifle coughed. Up atop the rocks the creature stood for a second with only half a head and with tattered gouts of flesh flying briefly like dark insects, zooming against the half-light of the western sky.

  ENOCH DROPPED the gun and sprawled upon the earth, clawing his fingers into the thin and mossy soil, sick with the thought of what could have happened, weak with the
thankfulness that it had not happened, that the years on that fantastic rifle range had at last paid off.

  How strange it is, he thought, how so many senseless things shape our destiny. For the rifle range had been a senseless. As senseless as a billiard table or a game of cards—designed for one thing only, to please the keeper of the station. And yet the hours he’d spent there had shaped toward this hour and end, to this single instant on this restricted slope of ground.

  The sickness drained away into the earth beneath him. Peace came stealing in upon him—the peace of trees and woodland soil and the first faint hush of nightfall. As if the sky and stars and very space itself had leaned close above him and was whispering his essential oneness with them. And it seemed for a moment that he had grasped the edge of some great truth and with this truth had come a comfort and a greatness he’d never known before.

  “Enoch,” Ulysses whispered. “Enoch, my brother . . .”

  There was something like a hidden sob in the alien’s voice and he had never, until this moment, called the Earthman brother.

  Enoch pulled himself to his knees and up on the pile of tumbled boulders was a soft and wondrous light, as if a giant firefly had turned on its lamp and had not turned it off, but had left it burning.

  The light was moving down across the rocks toward them and he could see Lucy moving with the light, as if she were walking toward them with a lantern in her hand.

  Ulysses’ hand reached out of the darkness and closed hard on Enoch’s arm.

  “Do you see?” he asked.

  “Yes, I see. What is . . .”

  “It is the Talisman,” Ulysses said, enraptured, his breath rasping in his throat. “And she is our new custodian. The one we’ve hunted through the years.”

  XXIII

  “YOU DID not become accustomed to it, Enoch told himself as they tramped up through the woods. There was not a moment you were not aware of it. It was something that you wanted to hug close against yourself and hold there forever. Even when it was gone from you, you’d not forget it, ever.

  It was something that was past all description. A mother’s love, a father’s pride, the adoration of a sweetheart, the closeness of a comrade—it was all of these, and more. It made the farthest distance near and turned the complex simple. It swept away all fear and sorrow, for all of there being a certain feeling of deep sorrow in it, as if one might feel that never in his lifetime would he know an instant like this, and that in another instant he would lose it and never would be able to hunt it out again. But that was not the way it was, for this ascendant instant kept going on and on.

  Lucy walked between them. She held the bag that contained the Talisman close against her breast, with her two arms clasped about it, and Enoch, looking at her, in the soft glow of its light, could not help but think of a little girl carrying her beloved pussy cat.

  “Never for a century,” said Ulysses, “perhaps for many centuries, perhaps never, has it glowed so well. I, myself, cannot remember when it was like this. It is wonderful, is it not?”

  “Yes,” said Enoch. “It is wonderful.”

  “Now we shall be one again,” Ulysses said. “Now we shall feel again. Now we shall be a people instead of many people.”

  “But the creature that had it . . .”

  “A clever one,” Ulysses said. “He was holding it for ransom.”

  “It had been stolen, then.”

  “We do not know all the circumstances,” Ulysses told him. “We will find out, of course.” They tramped on in silence through the woods and far in the east one could see, through the treetops, the first flush in the sky that foretold the rising moon.

  “There is something,” Enoch said.

  “Ask me anything you like,” said Ulysses.

  “How could that creature back there carry it and not feel—feel no part of it? For if he could have, he would not have stolen it.”

  “THERE IS only one in many billions,” Ulysses said, “who can—how do you say it?—tune in on it, perhaps. To you and me it would be nothing. It would not respond to us. We could hold it in our hands forever and nothing would happen. But let that one in many billions lay a finger on it and it becomes alive. There is a certain rapport, a sensitivity—I don’t know how to say it—that forms a bridge between this strange machine and the cosmic spiritual force. It is not the machine itself, you understand, that reaches out and taps the spiritual force. It is the living creature’s mind, aided by the mechanism, that brings the force to us.”

  A machine, a mechanism, no more than a tool—technological brother to the hoe, the wrench, the hammer—and yet as far a cry from these as the human brain was from that first amino acid which had come into being on this planet when the Earth was very young. One was tempted, Enoch thought, to say that this was as far as a tool could go, that it was the ultimate in the ingenuity possessed by any brain.

  But that would be a dangerous way of thinking. Perhaps there was no limit. There might quite likely be no such condition as the ultimate; there might be no time when any creature or any group of creatures could stop at any certain point and say this is as far as we can go, there is no use trying to go further. For each new development produced, as side effects, so many other possibilities, so many other roads to travel, that with each step one took down any given road there were more paths to follow. There’d never be an end, he thought—no end to anything.

  They reached the edge of the field and headed up across it toward the station. From its upper edge came the sound of running feet.

  “Enoch!” a voice shouted out of the darkness. “Enoch, is that you?”

  Enoch recognized the voice.

  “Yes, Winslowe. What is wrong?”

  The mailman burst out of the darkness and stopped, panting with his running, at the edge of light.

  “Enoch, they are coming! A couple of carloads of them. But I put a crimp in them. Where the road turns off into your lane—that narrow place, you know. I dumped two pounds of roofing nails along the ruts. That’ll hold them for a while. But not for long, Enoch!”

  “Roofing nails?” Ulysses asked. “It’s a mob,” Enoch told him. “They are after me. The nails . . .”

  “Oh, I see,” Ulysses said. “The deflation of the tires.”

  Winslowe took a slow step closer, his gaze riveted on the glow of the shielded Talisman. “That’s Lucy Fisher, ain’t it?”

  “Of course it is,” said Enoch. “Her old man came roaring into town just a while ago and said she was gone again. Up until then everything had quieted down and it was all right. But old Hank, he got them stirred up again. So I went down to the hardware store and got them roofing nails and I beat them here.”

  “This mob?” Ulysses asked. “I don’t . . .”

  WINSLOWE interrupted him,” gasping in his eagerness to to tell all his information. “That ginseng man is up there, waiting at the house for you. He has a panel truck.”

  “That,” said Enoch, “would be Lewis with the Hazer’s body.”

  “He is some upset,” said Winslowe. “He said you were expecting him.”

  “Perhaps,” suggested Ulysses, “we shouldn’t just be standing here. It seems to my poor intellect that many things may be coming to a crisis.”

  “Say,” the mailman yelled. “What is going on here? What is that thing Lucy has and who’s this fellow with you?”

  “Later,” Enoch told him. “I’ll tell you later. There’s no time to tell you now.”

  “But, Enoch, there’s the mob.”

  “I’ll deal with them,” said Enoch, grimly, “when I have to deal with them. Right now, there’s something more important.”

  They ran up the slope, the four of them, dodging through the waist-high clumps of weeds. Ahead of them the station reared dark and angular against the evening sky.

  “They’re down there at the turn-off,” Winslowe gasped, wheezing with his running. “That flash of light down the ridge. That was the headlights of a car.” They reached the edge of the
yard and ran toward the house. The black bulk of the panel truck glimmered in the glow cast by the Talisman. A figure detached itself from the shadow of the truck and hurried out toward them.

  “Is that you, Wallace?”

  “Yes,” said Enoch. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t here.”

  “I was a bit upset,” said Lewis, “when I didn’t find you waiting.”

  “Something unforeseen,” said Enoch. “Something that must be taken care of.”

  “The body of the honored one?”

  Ulysses asked. “It is in the truck?”

  Lewis nodded. “I am happy that we can restore it. I’m sorry we caused a fuss.”

  “We’ll have to carry him down to the orchard,” Enoch said. “You can’t get a car in there.”

  “The other time,” Ulysses said, “you were the one who carried him.”

  Enoch nodded.

  “My friend,” the alien said, “I wonder if on this occasion I could be allowed the honor.”

  “Why, yes, of course,” said Enoch. “He would like it that way.”

  And the words came to his tongue, but he choked them back, for it would not have done to say them—the words of thanks for lifting from him the necessity of complete recompense, for the gesture which released him from the utter letter of the law.

  At his elbow, Winslowe said: “They are coming. I can hear them down the road.”

  He was right.

  From down the road came the soft sound of footsteps padding in the dust, not hurrying, with no need to hurry, the insulting and deliberate treading of a monster so certain of its prey that it need not hurry.

  Enoch swung around and half lifted his rifle, training it toward the padding that came out of the dark.

  BEHIND HIM, Ulysses spoke softly: “Perhaps it would be most proper to bear him to the grave in the full glory and unshielded light of our restored Talisman.”