The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  “What the hell difference does that make?”

  “I should think it would make some,” said Douglas. “I, personally, would be distrustful of building something I didn’t understand.”

  “You say it is time travel. No doubt of that? It really is time travel?”

  “No doubt at all,” said Douglas.

  “Then there’s a mint in it,” said Chapman, “and I mean to—”

  “But if it only works one way.”

  “It has to work both ways,” said Chapman. “That’s what my people tell me.”

  “It will take a lot of financing,” said Douglas.

  “I’ve talked to a lot of people,” said Chapman. “People I can trust. They are interested. They see the possibilities. There’ll be no lack of funds if we can put it through.”

  Judy Gray got on the plane and found her seat. She looked out through the window, saw the scurrying trucks mistily and quickly put up a hand to wipe her eyes.

  She said to herself, almost lovingly, through clenched teeth, “The son of a bitch. The dirty son of a bitch!”

  39. Tom Manning spoke guardedly into the phone. “Steve, I have been hearing things.”

  “Put them on the wire, Tom,” said Wilson. “That’s why you are there. Put them on the wire for the glory days of dear old Global News.”

  “Now,” said Manning, “that you’ve had occasion to show off your shallow sense of humor, shall we get down to business?”

  “If this is a ploy,” said Wilson, “to trick me into confirmation of some rumor you have heard—you know it won’t work.”

  “You know me better than that, Steve.”

  “That’s the trouble. I do know you.”

  “All right, then,” said Manning, “if that’s the way of it let’s start at the beginning. The President had the Russian ambassador in this morning—”

  “The President didn’t have him in. He came in on his own. The ambassador made a statement to the press. You know about that.”

  “Sure, we know what the ambassador said and what you said in this afternoon’s briefing, which, I might say, added very little light to the situation. But no one in town, no one in his right mind, that is, buys what either of you said.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Tom. I told all I knew.”

  “Okay,” said Manning. “I’ll take your word for that. It’s just possible that you weren’t told. But there’s a very nasty story being whispered at the U.N. in New York. At least it was whispered to our man there. I don’t know how much farther it has gone. Our man didn’t put it on the wire. He phoned me and I told him to hold it until I talked with you.”

  “I don’t have the least idea, Tom, of what you’re talking about. I had honestly assumed the ambassador told all that could be told. There have been some conversations with Moscow and it sounded reasonable. The President didn’t tell me differently. We mentioned it, I guess, but we didn’t talk about it. There were so many other things.”

  “All right, then,” said Manning, “here’s the story as I heard it. Morozov talked to Williams and the President and offered troops to help hunt down the monsters and the offer was rejected.”

  “Tom, how good is your source? How sure are you of this?”

  “Not sure at all. It’s what our man at the U.N. was told this afternoon.”

  “You’re talking about Max Hale. He’s your man up there.”

  “One of the best,” said Manning. “He’s fairly good at sorting out the truth.”

  “Yes, he is. I remember him from Chicago days.”

  “Hale’s informant told him that tomorrow the U.N. will be told of our refusal and a demand will be made that we be forced to admit troops from other nations. It’ll be said that we are negligent in not accepting them.”

  “The old squeeze play,” said Wilson.

  “And that’s not all of it. If other troops are not accepted and the aliens can’t he controlled—then, the U.N. will be told, the entire area must be nuclearly destroyed. The world can’t take chances.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Wilson, quickly. “You’re not putting this on the wires, you say?”

  “Not yet. Probably never. I hope never. That’s the reason I phoned. If Hale heard it there’s a likelihood someone else will hear it and, sure as God, it will get on a wire or be published somewhere.”

  “There’s no truth in it,” said Wilson. “I am sure of it. Christ, we’re all in this together. For the moment political power plays must be set aside. Tom, I simply can’t believe this hearsay.”

  “You know nothing of this? Of any of it? There hasn’t been a breath?”

  “Not a breath,” said Wilson. “You know,” said Manning, “I wouldn’t have your job, Steve. Not for a million dollars.”

  “You’ll hold off, Tom. You’ll give us a little time to check.”

  “Of course. Until the pressure gets too great. Until someone else . . . I’ll let you know.”

  “Thanks, Tom. Some day—”

  “Some day, when this is all over,” said Manning, “we’ll go off into some dark corner in an obscure bar where no one can possibly find us and we’ll hang one on.”

  “I’ll stand the drinks,” said Wilson.

  He sat slumped after hanging up. Just when another day was about to end, he thought. But, hell, some days never ended. They just kept on and on. Yesterday and today had not been two days, but a nightmare-haunted eternity that seemed, when one thought of it, to have no reality at all. Judy gone. Kids marching in the street. The business community bitching because it was prevented from using the economic disruption to go out and make a killing. Pulpit-thumping preachers hell-bent to make another kind of killing. Alien monsters running in the hills and the future still emptying its humanity upon this moment in the time track.

  His eyelids slid down and stuck and he forced himself erect. He had to get some sleep tonight—he had to find the time to get some sleep.

  Maybe Judy had had the right idea. Just get up and walk away from it. Although, he told himself quite honestly, there still remained the question of what she’d walked away from. He missed her—she had been gone no more than an hour or two and he was missing her. Quite suddenly he realized he’d been missing her all day. Even while she still had been here, be had been missing her. Maybe, he thought, he should have asked her once again to stay, but there hadn’t been time and he hadn’t known how to do it—at least how to do it gracefully. And you did things gracefully or you did them not at all. More than likely, had he known, she wouldn’t have listened to him.

  He picked up the phone. “Kim, you still there? I’ll need to see the President. It is rather urgent. The first chance you have to squeeze me in.”

  “It may be some time, Steve,” she said. “There is a cabinet meeting.”

  40. Sergeant Gordon Fairfield Clark said to Colonel Eugene Dawson, “I had it in my sights and then it wasn’t there. It disappeared. It went away. I’m sure it didn’t move. Like a cartoonist drawing something moving fast, lettering in a swish, but this was without a swish. When it disappeared there wasn’t any motion. The first time I could see movement. But not when I had it in my sights. It didn’t move then. It didn’t blur.”

  “It saw you, Sergeant,” said the colonel.

  “I would think not, sir. I was well hidden. I kept still. I shifted the launcher barrel a couple of inches to aim it. That was all.”

  “It saw one of your men, then. It must have.”

  “Sir, I trained all those men myself. No one sees them—no one hears them.”

  “It saw something or heard something. It sensed danger and disappeared. You’re sure about this disappearance, Sergeant? Absolutely?”

  “Colonel, I am sure.”

  Dawson was, sifting on a fallen log. He reached down and picked up a small twig from the duff of the forest floor, began breaking it and rebreaking it. Clark squatted to one side, leaning on the launcher.

  “Sargent,” Dawson said, “I don’t know what the hell we’re
going to do about all this. I don’t know what the army’s going to do. You find one of these things and before you can whap it, it is gone. We can handle them. I am sure of that. Even when they get big and rough and mean, like the people from the future say they will, we still can handle them. We’ve got the firepower. We have the sophistication. If they’d line up and come at us we could clobber them. But not when they’re trying to keep clear of us and not in this kind of terrain. We could bomb ten thousand acres flat and get maybe one of them. God knows what else we’d kill, including people. We haven’t the time or manpower to evacuate the people so that we can bomb. We’ve got to hunt these damned beasts down one by one—”

  “But even when we hunt them down, sir—”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Sir,” said Sergeant Clark, “This is worse than Vietnam ever was. And Vietnam was hairy.”

  The colonel stood up. “Nothing has ever beaten us all the way. These aliens won’t either. But we have to find out how to kill them. All the firepower in the world, all the sophistication in the world is of no use until you can find something to aim at long enough to pull the trigger.”

  Sergeant Clark rose to his feet, tucked the launcher under his arm. “Well, back to work,” he said.

  “Have you seen a photographer around here?”

  “A photographer? What photographer. I ain’t seen no photographer.”

  “His name was Price. With some press association. He was messing around. I put the run on him.”

  “If I happen onto him,” Sergeant Clark said, “I’ll tie his tail in a knot.”

  41. Reverend Jake Billings was in conference with Ray MacDonald, formerly his assistant public relations manager, who had been appointed within the last twelve hours to the post of crusade operations chief.

  “I really do not think, Ray,” said Billings, “that this business of crucifixion will advance our cause. It strikes me as being rather crude and it could backlash. As one paper had to say of the attempt at Washington—”

  “You mean someone has already gotten around to editorializing about it?”

  “The reaction has not been good.” Billings spoke with unaccustomed heat. “The editorial called it a cheap trick and a panty-waisted effort. The editorial became facetious in tone as it described the use of thongs, rather than nails in fastening the young man to the cross.”

  “But they were wrong,” MacDonald said.

  “You mean that you used nails?”

  “No. What I’m saying is that ordinarily the arms are tied, not nailed to the cross. We did some research on it—”

  “Your research is no concern of mine,” said Billings icily. “What I do care about is that you gave some smart-assed editorial writer a chance to poke fun at us. And in any case, I think the whole idea of a fake crucifixion stinks. You didn’t check with me. How come you didn’t check with me?”

  “You were busy, Jake. You told me to do my best. You told me I was the man who could come up with ideas and I did come up with ideas.”

  “I also had a call from Steve Wilson,” Billings said. “He chewed me out. There is no doubt that official Washington—the White House at least—is solidly against us. When he gets around to it, Wilson will publicly brand us sensationalists. He brushed us off contemptuously in his press briefing this afternoon. That was before this silly crucifixion business. Next time around he’ll blast us.”

  “But we have a lot of people with us. You go out to the countryside, to the little towns—”

  “Yes, I know. The rednecks. They’ll be for us, sure, but how long do you think it will take before their opinion can have any impact? What about the influential pastors in the big city churches? Can you imagine what the Reverend Dr. Angus Windsor will tell his congregation and the newspapers and the world? He won’t go along with solemn young men packing crosses through the street and getting crucified on a public square. For years I have tried to conduct my ministry with dignity and now it’s been pulled down to the level of street brawling.” MacDonald protested. “We’ve used stunts before. Circus stuff. Show biz. They’re what you built the business on.”

  “But with restraint.”

  “Not too much restraint. Skywriting and parades and miles of billboards—”

  “Legitimate advertising,” said Billings. “Honest advertising. A great American tradition. The mistake you made was to go out in the streets. You don’t know about the streets. You ran up against the experts there. These Miocene kids know about the streets. They have been there—and have lived there. You had two strikes on you before you started out. What made you think you could compete with them?”

  “All right, then—what are we going to do? The streets are out, you say. So we pull off the streets. Then what do we do? How do we get attention?”

  Reverend Jake Billings stared at the wall through glassy eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I purely do not know. I don’t think it makes much difference what we do. I think that gurgling noise you hear is our crusade going down the drain.”

  42. It was the dog that did it. Bentley Price hadn’t had a drink all day. The road was narrow, winding across the mountain, and Bentley, exasperated beyond endurance at what had happened to him, was driving faster than he should. After hours of hunting for it, he had finally found the army camp—a temporary stopping point by the looks of it, with none of the meticulous neatness of the military. It huddled in a dense patch of woods beside a stream that came brawling down the valley. Filled with a deep sense of duty done and perseverance paying off, Bentley had slung cameras around his neck and plodded toward the largest of the tents. The colonel had come out to stop his further progress. Who the hell are you, the colonel had asked, and where do you think you’re going? I’m from Global News. Bentley had told him, and I am out here to take some pictures of this monster hunt. I tell the city editor it isn’t worth the time, but he disagrees with me and it’s no skin off my nose no matter where I’m sent, so leave us get the lead out and do some monster hunting so I can get some pictures.

  You’re off limits, mister, the colonel had told him. You are way off limits, in more ways than one. I don’t know how you got this far. Didn’t someone try to stop you? Sure, said Bentley, up the road a ways. A couple of soldier boys. But I pay no attention to them. I never pay attention to someone who tries to stop me. I got work to do and I can’t fool around.

  And then the colonel had thrown him out of there. He had spoken in a clipped, military voice and had been very icy-eyed. We’ve got trouble enough, he said, without some damn fool photographer mucking around and screwing up the detail. If you don’t leave under your own power I’ll have you escorted out. While he was saying this, Bentley snapped up a camera and took a picture of him. That made the situation even worse and Bentley, with his usual quick perception, could see his cause had failed. He had beaten a dignified retreat to avoid escort. Some of the soldiers had called out to him derisively. Bentley had slowed down momentarily, debating whether to go back and reason with them, then had thought better of it. They ain’t worth the time, he had told himself.

  Now the dog.

  The dog came bursting out of high weeds and brush that grew along the road. Its ears were laid back. Its tail was tucked in and it was yodeling in pure, blind panic. The dog was close and Bentley was traveling much too fast. He jerked the wheel. The car veered off the road, smashed through a clump of brush. The tires screamed as Bentley hit the brakes. The nose of the car slammed hard into a huge walnut tree and stopped with a shuddering impact. The left-hand door flew open and Bentley, who held a lofty disdain for such copouts as seat belts, was thrown free. The camera he wore on a strap around his neck described a short arc and brought up against his ear, dealing him a blow that made his head ring as if there were a bell inside it. He landed on his back and rolled, wound up on hands and knees. He surged erect and found that he had ended up on the berm of the road.

  Standing in the middle of the road was a monster. Bentley recognized it—he had seen tw
o of them only yesterday. But this one was small, no bigger than a Shetland pony. Which did not mean the horror of it was any less.

  But Bentley was of different fiber than were other men. He did not gulp. His gut did not turn over. His hands came up with swift precision, grabbed the camera firmly, brought it to his eye. The monster was framed in the finder and his finger pressed the button. The camera clicked and as it clicked the monster disappeared.

  Bentley lowered the camera and let loose of it. His head still rang from the blow upon the ear. His clothes were torn—a gaping rent in a trouser leg revealed one knobby knee. His right hand was bloody from where his palm had scraped across some gravel. Behind him the car creaked slightly as twisted metal settled slowly into place. The motor pinged and sizzled as water from the broken radiator ran across hot metal.

  Off in the distance the still-running dog was yipping frantically. In a tree up the hillside an excited squirrel chattered with machine-gun intensity. The road was empty. A monster had been there. From where he stood Bentley could see its tracks printed in the dust. But it was no longer there.

  He limped out into the road, stared up and down it. There was nothing on the road.

  It was there, Bentley said stubbornly to himself. I had it in the finder. It was there when I shot the picture. It wasn’t until the shutter clicked that it disappeared. Doubt assailed him. Had the beast been there or not when he’d shot the picture? Was it on the film? Had he been robbed of a photo by the animal’s disappearance?

  Thinking about it, it seemed to him that the monster had been in his viewfinder when he triggered the camera, but suddenly he could not be sure.

  He turned about and started limping down the road as rapidly as he could. There was one way to find out. He had to get to a phone, get another car. He must get back to Washington.

  43. “We have made three contacts with the monsters,” Sandburg said. “There are yet to be results. No one has had a chance to fire at them. They simply vanish.”