The Ghost of a Model T: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  It was a little card, two inches by three or such a matter, and it was the color of the leaves, but its color came from what seemed to be an inner light, so that the card shone of itself rather than shining by reflected light, which was the way one saw the color of the leaves.

  He sat there looking at it, wondering how he could catch a card when no cards were falling, but only leaves dropping from the tree. But he had taken it and looked at it and it was not made of paper and it had upon its face a picture that he could not understand.

  As he stared at it his mother’s voice called him in to supper and he went. He put the card into his pocket and he went into the house.

  And under ordinary circumstances the magic would have vanished and he never would have known such an autumn day again.

  There is only one such day, thought Alden Street, for any man alive. For any man alive, with the exception of himself.

  He had put the card into his pocket and had gone into the house for supper and later on that evening he must have put it in the drawer of the dresser in his room, for that was where he’d found it in that later autumn.

  He had picked it up from its forgotten resting place and as he held it in his hand, that day of thirty years before came back to him so clearly that he could almost smell the freshness of the air as it had been that other afternoon. The butterfly was there and its blueness was so precise and faithful that he knew it had been imprinted on his brain so forcefully that he held it now forever.

  He had put the card back carefully and had walked down to the village to seek out the realtor he’d seen the day before.

  “But, Alden,” said the realtor, “with your mother gone and all, there is no reason for your staying. There is that job waiting in New York. You told me yesterday.”

  “I’ve been here too long,” said Alden. “I am tied too close. I guess I’ll have to stay. The house is not for sale.”

  “You’ll live there all alone? In that big house all alone?”

  “There’s nothing else to do,” said Alden.

  He had turned and walked away and gone back to the house to get the card out of the dresser drawer again.

  He sat and studied the drawing that was on the face of it, a funny sort of drawing, no kind of drawing he had ever seen before, not done with ink or pencil nor with brush. What, in the name of God, he thought, had been used to draw it?

  And the drawing itself? A many-pointed star? A rolled-up porcupine? Or a gooseberry, one of the prickly kind, many times enlarged?

  It did not matter, he knew, neither how the drawing had been made, or the strange kind of stiff, silken fabric that made the card itself, or what might be represented in the drawing. The important thing was that, many years before, when he had been a child, he had sat beneath the tree and held out his hand to catch a falling leaf and had caught the card instead.

  He carried the card over to a window and stared out at the garden. The great walnut tree still stood as it had stood that day, but it was not golden yet. The gold must wait for the coming of first frost and that might be any day.

  He stood at the window, wondering if there’d be a butterfly this time, or if the butterfly were only part of childhood.

  “It will be morning soon,” said Kitty. “I heard a bird. The birds are astir just before first light.”

  “Tell me about this place,” said Alden.

  “It is a sort of island,” Kitty told him. “Not much of an island. Just a foot or two above the water level. It is surrounded by water and by muck. They bring us in by heliocoptor and they let us down. They bring in food the same way. Not enough to feed us. Not enough of anything. There is no contact with them.”

  “Men or robots? In the ship, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. No one ever sees them. Robots, I’d suspect.”

  “Not enough food, you say.”

  She shook her head. “There is not supposed to be. That’s a part of Limbo. We’re not supposed to live. We fish, we gather roots and other things. We get along somehow.”

  “And we die, of course.”

  “Death comes to everyone,” she said. “To us just a little sooner.”

  She sat crouched upon one of the lengths of wood that served as a chair and as the candle guttered, shadows chased across her face so that it seemed the very flesh of it was alive and crawling.

  “You missed sleep on account of me,” he said.

  “I can sleep any time. I don’t need much sleep. And, besides, when a new one comes…”

  “There aren’t many new ones?”

  “Not as many as there were. And there always is a chance. With each new one there’s a chance.”

  “A chance of what?”

  “A chance he may have an answer for us.”

  “We can always run away.”

  “To be caught and brought back? To die out in the swamp? That, Alden, is no answer.”

  She rocked her body back and forth. “I suppose there is no answer.”

  But she still held hope, he knew. In the face of all of it, she had kept a hope alive.

  Eric once had been a huge man, but now he had shrunken in upon himself. The strength of him was there as it had always been, but the stamina was gone. You could see that, Alden told himself, just by looking at him.

  Eric sat with his back against a tree. One hand lay in his lap and the other grubbed idly, with blunt and dirty fingers, at the short ground.

  “So you’re bent on getting out?” he asked.

  “He talked of nothing else,” said Kitty.

  “You been here how long?”

  “They brought me here last night. I was out on my feet. I don’t remember it.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like.”

  Alden shook his head. “I don’t intend to find out, either. I figure if I’m going, I’d best be going now before this place wears me down.”

  “Let me tell you,” Eric said. “Let me tell you how it is. The swamp is big and we’re in the center of it. Doc came in from the north. He found out, some way, the location of this place, and he got hold of some old maps. Geologic survey maps that had been made years ago. He studied them and figured out the best way for getting in. He made it, partly because he was strong and healthy…but mostly it was luck. A dozen other men could try it, just as strong as he was, and all of them might be lost because they weren’t lucky. There are quicksand and alligators. There are moccasins and rattlesnakes. There is the killing heat. There are the insects and no water fit to drink.

  “Maybe if you knew exactly the way to go you might manage it, but you’d have to hunt for the way to go. You’d have to work your way through the swamp and time after time you’d run into something that you couldn’t get through or over and have to turn back and hunt another way. You’d lose a lot of time and time would work against you.”

  “How about food?”

  “If you weren’t fussy, food would be no trouble. You could find food along the way. Not the right kind. Your belly might not like it. You’d probably have dysentery. But you wouldn’t starve.”

  “This swamp,” asked Alden, “where is it?”

  “Part in Mataloosa county. Part in Fairview. It’s a local Limbo. They all are local Limbos. There aren’t any big ones. Just a lot of little ones.”

  Alden shook his head. “I can see this swamp from the windows of my house. I never heard of a Limbo being in it.”

  “It’s not advertised,” said Eric. “It’s not put on maps. It’s not something you’d hear of.”

  “How many miles? How far to the edge of it?”

  “Straight line, maybe thirty, maybe forty. You’d not be traveling a straight line.”

  “And the perimeter is guarded.”

  “Patrols flying overhead. Watching for people in the swamp. They might not spot you. You’d do your best to stay under cover. Bu
t chances are they would. And they’d be waiting for you when you reached the edge.”

  “And even if they weren’t,” Kitty said, “where would you go? A monitor would catch you. Or someone would spot you and report. No one would dare to help a refugee from Limbo.”

  The tree beneath which Eric sat was a short distance from the collection of huddled huts that served as shelter for the inhabitants of Limbo.

  Someone, Alden saw, had built up the community cooking fire and a bent and ragged man was coming up from the water’s edge, carrying a morning’s catch of fish. A man was lying in the shade of one of the huts, stretched out on a pallet. Others, both men and women, sat in listless groups.

  The sun had climbed only part way up the eastern sky, but the heat was stifling. Insects buzzed shrilly in the air and high in the light blue sky birds were swinging in great and lazy circles.

  “Doc would let us see his maps?”

  “Maybe,” Eric said. “You could ask him.”

  “I spoke to him last night,” said Alden. “He said it was insane.”

  “He is right,” said Eric.

  “Doc has funny notions,” Kitty said. “He doesn’t blame the robots. He says they’re just doing a job that men have set for them. It was men who made the laws. The robots do no more than carry out the laws.”

  And Doc, thought Alden, once again was right.

  Although it was hard to puzzle out the road by which man had finally come to his present situation. It was overemphasis again, perhaps, and that peculiar social blindness which came as the result of overemphasis.

  Certainly, when one thought of it, it made no particular sense. A man had a right to be ill. It was his own hard luck if he happened to be ill. It was no one’s business but his own. And yet it had been twisted into an action that was on a par with murder. As a result of a well-intentioned health crusade which had gotten out of hand, what at one time had been misfortune had now become a crime.

  Eric glanced at Alden. “Why are you so anxious to get out? It’ll do no good. Someone will find you, someone will turn you in. You’ll be brought back again.”

  “Maybe a gesture of defiance,” Kitty said. “Sometimes a man will do a lot to prove he isn’t licked. To show he can’t be licked.”

  “How old are you?” asked Eric.

  “Fifty four,” said Alden.

  “Too old,” said Eric. “I am only forty and I wouldn’t want to try it.”

  “Is it defiance?” Kitty asked.

  “No,” Alden told her, “not that. I wish it was. But it’s not as brave as that. There is something that’s unfinished.”

  “All of us,” said Eric, “left some unfinished things behind us.”

  The water was black as ink and seemed more like oil than water. It was lifeless; there was no sparkle in it and no glint; it soaked up the sunlight rather than reflecting it. And yet one felt that life must lurk beneath it, that it was no more than a mask to hide the life beneath it.

  It was no solid sheet of water, but an infiltrating water that snaked its way around the hummocks and the little grassy islands and the water-defying trees that stood knee-deep in it. And when one glanced into the swamp, seeking to find some pattern to it, trying to determine what kind of beast it was, the distance turned to a cruel and ugly greenness and the water, too, took on that tint of fatal green.

  Alden crouched at the water’s edge and stared into the swamp, fascinated by the rawness of the green.

  Forty miles of it, he thought. How could a man face forty miles of it? But it would be more than forty miles. For, as Eric had said, a man would run into dead-ends and would be forced to retrace his steps to find another way.

  Twenty-four hours ago, he thought, he had not been here. Twenty four hours ago or a little more he had left the house and gone down into the village to buy some groceries. And when he neared the bank corner he had remembered that he had not brushed his teeth—for how long had it been?—and that he had not bathed for days. He should have taken a bath and brushed his teeth and done all the other things that were needful before he had come downtown, as he always had before—or almost every time before, for there had been a time or two as he passed the bank that the hidden monitor had come to sudden life and bawled in metallic tones that echoed up and down the street: “Alden Street did not brush his teeth today! Shame on Alden Street, he did not brush his teeth (or take a bath, or clean his fingernails, or wash his hands and face, or whatever it might be.)” Keeping up the clatter and the clamor, with the ringing of alarm bells and the sound of booming rockets interspersed between each shaming accusation, until one ran off home in shame to do the things he’d failed.

  In a small village, he thought, you could get along all right. At least you could until the medics got around to installing home monitors as they had in some of the larger cities. And that might take them years.

  But in Willow Bend it was not so hard to get along. If you just remembered to comply with all the regulations you would be all right. And even if you didn’t, you knew the locations of the monitors, one at the bank and the other at the drugstore corner, and you could keep out of their way. They couldn’t spot your shortcomings more than a block away.

  Although generally it was safer to comply with the regulations before you went downtown. And this, as a rule, he’d done, although there had been a time or two when he had forgotten and had been forced to go running home with people standing in the street and snickering and small boys catcalling after him while the monitor kept up its unholy din. And later on that day, or maybe in the evening, the local committee would come calling and would collect the fine that was set out in the book for minor misdemeanors.

  But on this morning he had not thought to take a bath, to brush his teeth, to clean his fingernails, to make certain that his toenails were trimmed properly and neat. He had worked too hard and for too long a time and had missed a lot of sleep (which, also, was a thing over which the monitor could work itself into a lather) and, remembering back, he could recall that he seemed to move in a hot, dense fog and that he was weak from hunger and there was a busy, perhaps angry fly buzzing in his head.

  But he did remember the monitor at the bank in time and detoured a block out of his way to miss it. But as he came up to the grocery store (a safe distance from the bank and the drugstore monitors), he had heard that hateful metallic voice break out in a scream of fright and indignation.

  “Alden Street is ill!” it screamed. “Everybody stay away from Alden Street. He is ill—don’t anyone go near him!”

  The bells had rung and the siren blown and the rockets been shot off, and from atop the grocery store a great red light was flashing.

  He had turned to run, knowing the dirty trick that had been played upon him. They had switched one of the monitors to the grocery, or they had installed a third.

  “Stay where you are!” the monitor had shouted after him. “Go out into the middle of the street away from everyone.”

  And he had gone. He had quit his running and had gone out into the middle of the street and stayed there, while from the windows of the business houses white and frightened faces had stared out at him. Had stared out at him—a sick man and a criminal.

  The monitor had kept on with its awful crying and he had cringed out there while the white and frightened faces watched and in time (perhaps a very short time, although it had seemed long), the disciplinary robots on the medic corps had arrived from the county seat.

  Things had moved swiftly then. The whole story had come out. Of how he had neglected to have his physicals. Of how he had been fined for several misdemeanors. Of how he had not contributed to the little league programs. Of how he had not taken part in any of the various community health and sports programs.

  They had told him then, in wrath, that he was nothing but a dirty slob, and the wheels of justice had moved with sure and swift precision. And finally
he had stood and stared up at the high and mighty man who had pronounced his doom. Although he could not recall that he had heard the doom. There had been a blackness and that was all that he could remember until he had awakened into a continuation of the blackness and had seen two balloon-like faces leaning over him.

  He had been apprehended and judged and sentenced within a few short hours. And it was all for the good of men—to prove to other men that they could not get away with the flouting of the law which said that one must maintain his fitness and his health. For one’s health, said the law, was the most precious thing one had and it was criminal to endanger it or waste it. The national health must be viewed as a vital natural resource and, once again, it was criminal to endanger it or waste it.

  So he had been made into a horrible example and the story of what had happened to him would have appeared on the front pages of every paper that was published and the populace thus would be admonished that they must obey, that the health laws were not namby-pamby laws.

  He squatted by the water’s edge and stared off across the swamp and behind him he heard the muted sounds which came from that huddled camp just a short ways down the island—the clang of the skillet or the pot, the thudding of an axe as someone chopped up firewood, the rustle of the breeze that flapped a piece of canvas stretched as a door across a hut, the quiet murmur of voices in low and resigned talks.

  The swamp had a deadly look about it—and it waited. Confident and assured, certain that no one could cross it. All its traps were set and all its nets were spread and it had a patience that no man could match.

  Perhaps, he thought, it did not really wait. Maybe it was just a little silly to imagine that it waited. Rather, perhaps, it was simply an entity that did not care. A human life to it was nothing. To it a human life was no more precious than a snake’s life, or the life of a dragonfly, or of a tiny fish. It would not help and it would not warn and it had no kindness.

  He shivered, thinking of this great uncaring. An uncaring that was even worse than if it waited with malignant forethought. For if it waited, at least it was aware of you. At least it paid you the compliment of some slight importance.