All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  "It's a lousy way to fight," the voice insisted.

  "Look," said Gary. "Who's doing the fighting here?

  You or us."

  "You, of course," the voice agreed, "but it's still no way to fight."

  They sensed the mind withdraw, grumbling to itself.

  Gary grinned at Caroline. "Not gory enough to suit him," he said.

  Caroline had sat down in a chair and was staring at him, elbow on her knee, chin cupped in her hands.

  "We haven't much to work with," she declared. "No electricity. No power. No nothing. This ship is deader than a doornail. It's lucky the lock worked manually or we'd been goners before we even started."

  Gary nodded in agreement. "That voice bothers me the most," he said. "It has power, a strange sort of power. It can stop a spaceship dead in its tracks. It can fix guns so that they won't work. It can blanket out electricity; Lord knows what else it can do."

  "It can reach into the unknown of space and time," said Caroline. "Into a place no one else could even find and it did that to bring us here."

  "It's irresponsible," said Gary. "Back on Earth we'd call it insanity but what you and I would term insanity may be normal here."

  "There's no yardstick," said Caroline. "No yardstick to measure sanity. No way in which one can establish a norm for correct behavior or a correct mentality. Maybe the voice is sane. Maybe he has a purpose and a method of arriving at that purpose we do not understand and for that we call him crazy. Every race must be different, must think differently… arrive at the same conclusion and the same result, perhaps, but arrive at them differently. You remember all those beings that came to confer with the Engineers. All of them were capable, perhaps more capable than we. Independently they might have been able to arrive at the same solution as we and perhaps much more easily and more effectively… and yet the Engineers sent them home again, because the Engineers could not work with them. Not because they were not capable, but because they thought so differently, because their mental processes ran at such divergent tangents that there was no basis for co-operation."

  "And yet we thought like the Engineers," said Gary.

  "Enough like them, at any rate, that we could work together. I wonder why that is."

  Caroline wrinkled her forehead. "Gary, you are certain these goblin things out there are the same race that came to the city of the Engineers?"

  "I would swear it," Gary told her. "I got a good look at the one that was there. It sort of… well, burned itself into my mind. I'll never quite forget it."

  "And the voice," said Caroline. "I wonder if the voice has anything to do with the goblins."

  "The goblins," said the voice, "are my pets. Like the dogs and cats you keep. A living thing to keep me from loneliness."

  It did not surprise them to hear the voice again and each of them knew then that they had been waiting for it to speak up again.

  "But," protested Caroline, "one of the goblins came to the city of the Engineers."

  The voice chuckled at them. "Of course, human thing, of course. As my representative, of course. For I must have representatives, don't you see. In a material world, I must be fronted for by something that can be seen, that can be perceived. I could not very well go to a meeting of that great importance as a disembodied voice, as a thought stalking the corridors of that empty city. So I sent a goblin and I went along with him."

  "What are you, voice?" Caroline asked. "Tell us what you are."

  "I still don't think," said the voice, "that what you are doing is a good way to fight a duel. I think you're making a great mistake."

  "What makes you think so, Butch?" asked Gary.

  "Because," the voice said, "the Hellhounds are building a fire under your ship. It will be just a matter of time until they smoke you out."

  Gary and Caroline glanced swiftly at one another, the same thought in their mind.

  "No power," said Caroline, weakly.

  "The heat absorption units," Gary cried.

  "No power," said Caroline. "The absorption cells won't work."

  Gary glanced toward the forward vision ports. Thin streamers of smoke were curling up outside the glass.

  "The mushrooms burn well," the voice told them, "when they get old and dry. There are lots of old and dry mushrooms around. They'll have no trouble in keeping up the fire."

  "Like smoking out a rabbit," said Gary, bitterly.

  "You asked for it," the voice declared.

  "Get out of here!" yelled Gary. "Get out of here and leave us alone, can't you."

  They sensed it leave, mumbling to itself.

  Like a bad dream, Gary thought. Like a Wonderland adventure, with he and Caroline the poor bewildered Alice stumbling through a world of vast incredibility.

  Listening, they could hear the crackling of the fire. Now the smoke was a dense cloud through the forward ports.

  How do you fight when you have no weapon? How do you get out of a spaceship-turned-into-an-oven? How do you think up a smart dodge when your time is numbered in hours, if not, indeed, in minutes?

  What are weapons?

  How did they start?

  What is the basic of a weapon?

  "Caroline," Gary asked, "what would you say a weapon was?"

  "Why," she told him, "that seems simple to me. An extension of your fist. An extension of your power to hurt, of your ability to kill. Men fought first with tooth and nail and fist and then with stones and clubs. The stones and clubs were extensions of man's fist, an extension of his muscles and his hate or need."

  Stones and clubs, he thought. And then a spear. And, after that, a bow,

  A bow!

  He swung on his heel, walked rapidly back along the ship, jerked open the door to the supply cabinet. Rummaging inside it, he found the things he wanted.

  He brought them out, a fistful of wooden flagpoles, each with small flags fastened to one end, the other end steel-tipped for easy sticking in the ground.

  "Explorer flags," he explained to Caroline. "You go out on an alien planet and you want to be sure that you can find your way back to the ship. You plant these things at intervals and then follow them back to the ship, picking them up as you go along. No chance of getting lost."

  "But…" said Caroline.

  "Evans figured he was going to use this ship to go to Alpha Centauri, He took some of these things along, just in case."

  He placed the steel-shod tip of one of the poles on the floor, threw his weight against the top end. It flexed. Gary grunted in satisfaction.

  "A bow?" asked Caroline.

  He nodded. "Not too good a one. Not too accurate. Maybe not too strong. When I was a kid I used to go out into the woods and whack me off a sapling. No curve, no nothing. Bigger at one end than the other. But it worked as a bow, after a fashion. Used reeds for arrows. Killed one of my mother's chickens with one once. She whaled me good and proper."

  "It's getting warm in here," Caroline told him. "We can't waste any time."

  He grinned at her, exuberant now that there was something to do.

  "Hunt up some cord," he told her. "Any kind of cord. If it's not strong enough, we'll twist several strands together."

  Whistling under his breath, he got to work, tearing the flag off the end of one of the more supple poles, notching either end to hold the cord.

  From another stick he split long wands off the straight-grained wood, fashioning them into arrows. There'd be no time for feathering… in fact, there were no feathers in the ship, but that was a refinement that would not be needed. He would be using the bow at close range.

  But he did have arrowheads. With snippers, he clipped off the sharp tips with which the poles had been shod, drove them into the head of each arrow. Testing them with a finger, he was satisfied. They were sharp enough… if he could get some power behind them.

  "Gary," said Caroline, and her voice was almost a whimper.

  He swung around.

  "There's no cord, Gary. I've looked everywhere."

>   No cord!

  "Everywhere?" he asked.

  She nodded. "There isn't any. I looked everywhere."

  Clothing, he thought, desperately. Strips torn from their clothing. But that would be worse than useless. It would unravel, come apart between his fingers when he needed it the most. Leather? Leather was too stiff to start with, and it would stretch. Wire? Too stiff and no zip to it.

  He let the bow-stick fall from his hands, reached up to wipe his face.

  "It's getting hot in here," he said.

  He twisted around and stared at the forward visors. The smoke was a cloud and there was a ruddy reflection in it, the reflection of the fire that blazed around the ship.

  How much longer, he wondered. How much longer before they'd have to open the port and make a dash for it, knowing even as they did that it was a hopeless thing to do, for the Hellhounds would be waiting just outside the port.

  The shell of the spaceship crawled with a dull, dead heat, the kind of heat that comes up off a dusty road on a still, hot day in August.

  And soon, he knew, it would be a live heat, not a dead heat any longer, but a blasting furnace heat that would pour from every angle of the steel around them, that would shrivel the leather of their shoes and scorch the clothing that they wore. But long before the leather of their shoes shriveled and curled, they would have to make their break, a hopeless dash for freedom that could end in nothing but death at the hands of the things that waited by the port.

  Like an oven, like two rabbits roasting in an oven.

  We must turn, thought Gary. We must keep turning about so that we will roast evenly on all sides.

  "Gary!" cried Caroline.

  He swung around.

  "Hair?" she asked. "I just thought of it. Would hair make you a bowstring?"

  He gasped at the thought. "Hair," he shouted. "Human hair! Why, of course… it's the best material there is."

  Caroline's hands were busy with her braids. "It's long," she said. "I was proud of it and I let it grow."

  "It'll have to be braided," said Gary. "Twisted into a cord."

  "Your knife," she said, and he handed it over.

  The knife flashed close to her head and one of the braided strands dangled in her hand.

  "We'll have to work fast," said Gary. "We haven't got much time."

  The air was dry and hard to breath. It burned one's lungs and dried out the tissues of the mouth. When he bent over and placed a hand against the steel plates of the ship's deck, the steel was warm, like the pavement on a summer's day.

  "You'll have to help," said Gary. "We have to be fast and sure. We can't afford to bungle. We won't have a second chance."

  "Tell me what to do," she said.

  Fifteen minutes later, he nodded at her.

  "Open the port," he said, "and when you do stand back against the wall. I'll need all the arm room I can get."

  He waited, bow in hand, arrow nocked against the cord.

  Not much of a bow, he thought. Nothing you would want to try against a willow at three hundred paces. But these things outside aren't willow wands. It will last for a shot or two… I hope it lasts for a shot or two.

  The port clanged open as Caroline shoved the lever over. Smoke billowed in the opening and in the smoke he saw the bulk of the ones who waited.

  He brought the bow up and the wood bent with the sudden surge of hate and triumph that coursed in his being… the hate and fear of fire, the hate of things that wait to do a man to death, the fury of a human being backed into a corner by a thing that is not human.

  The arrow made a whispering sound and was a silver streak that spurted through the smoke. The bow bent again and there was another whisper, the whisper of cord and wood and the creak of human muscles.

  On the ground outside, two dark shapes were threshing in the smoke.

  It was just like shooting rabbits.

  CHAPTER Fifteen

  "VERY ingenious," said the voice. "You won fair and square. You did much better than I thought you would."

  "And now," said Caroline, "you will send us back again. Back to the city of the Engineers."

  "Why, certainly," said the voice. "Why, of course, I will. But first, I have to clean up the place. The bodies, first of all. Cadavers are such unsightly things."

  Fire puffed briefly and the bodies of the two Hellhounds were gone. A tiny puff of yellow smoke hung over where they had been and a tiny flurry of ashes eddied in the air.

  "I asked you once before," said Caroline, "and you didn't tell me. What are you? We looked for signs of culture and…"

  "You are befuddled, young human," the voice told her. "You seek for childish things. You looked for cities and there are no cities. You looked for roads and ships and farms and there are none of these. You expected to find a civilization and there is no civilization such as you would recognize."

  "You are right," said Gary. "There are none of those."

  "I have no city," said the voice, "because I need no city. Although I could build a city at a second's notice. The mushroom forests are the only farms I need to feed my little pets. I need no roads and ships because I can go anywhere I wish without the aid of them."

  "You mean you can go in your mind," said Caroline.

  "In my mind," the voice said. "I go wherever I may wish, in either time or space, and I am there. I do not merely imagine that I am there; I am really there. Long ago my race forsook machines, knowing that in its mental ability, within the depth of its collective mind it had more potentiality than it could ever get from a clattering piece of mechanism. So the race built minds instead of machines. Minds, I say. But mind, one mind, a single mind, is the better explanation. I am that mind today. A single racial mind.

  "I used that mind to pluck you from the space-time tunnel at the very moment you were about to emerge above the city of the Engineers. I used that mind to bring the Hellhounds here. That mind grounded your ship and blanketed your guns and that mind could kill you in a moment if I thought the thought."

  "But you," said Caroline. "The personal pronoun that you use. The «I» you speak of. What is that?"

  "I am the mind," the voice told them, "and the mind is me. I am the race. I have been the race for many million years."

  "And you play God," said Caroline. "You bring lesser things together, into the arena of this world, and you make them fight while you sit and chuckle…"

  "Why, of course," the voice said. "Because, you see, I'm crazy. I'm really, at times, quite violently insane."

  "Insane!"

  "Why, certainly," the voice told them. "It's what would be bound to happen. You can't perfect a mind, a vast communal mind, a mighty racial mind to the point that my mind is perfected and expect it to keep a perfect balance as a good watch would keep perfect time. But the mind's behavior varies. Sometimes," the voice said, quite confidentially, "I'm battier than a bedbug."

  "And how are you now?" asked Gary.

  "Why, now," the voice said, "as funny as it seems, I'm quite rational. I'm very much myself."

  "Then how about fixing it up so that we can get back?"

  "Right away," said the voice, very businesslike. "I'll just clean up a thing or two. Don't like the residue of my irrationality cluttering up the planet. That Hellhound ship over there…."

  But instead of the Hellhound ship, it was the Earth ship that went skyward in a terrific gout of flame that sent a wash of heat across the barren land.

  "Hey, there…" yelled Gary and then stood stock still as the enormity of what had happened crackled in his mind.

  "Tsk, tsk," said the voice. "How very stupid of me. How could I have done a thing like that! Now I'll never be able to send you home again."

  His cackling laughter filled the sky and beat like a mighty drum.

  "The Hellhound ship!" yelled Gary. "Run… run…"

  But even as they whirled to race toward it, it was gone in a blaze of fire, followed by a trail of smoke that hung briefly above the scorched piece of the ground where
the ship had lain.

  "You couldn't have operated it, anyhow," said the voice. "It wouldn't have done you a single bit of good."

  He laughed again and the laughter trailed off into distance, like a retreating thunderstorm.

  Gary and Caroline stood side by side and looked at the emptiness of the bog and mushroom forest. A goblin ducked out of a clump of mushrooms and hooted at them, then dashed back in again.

  "What do we do?" asked Caroline and it was a question that went echoing down the long corridor of improbability, a question for which there was, at the moment, no satisfactory answer.

  Swiftly, Gary made an inventory:

  The clothes they stood in.

  A few matches in his pocket.

  A bow and some arrows, but the bow didn't count for much.

  And that was all. There was nothing else.

  "More pets," said Caroline, bitterly.

  "What's that?" asked Gary, not sure he heard her right.

  "Let it go," she said. "Forget I ever said it."

  "There's nothing to get hold of," Gary said. "Nothing you can touch. The voice… the voice is nothing."

  "It's a horrible thing," said Caroline. "Don't you see, Gary, what a horrible thing it is. The tag end of some great race. Think of it. Millions of years, millions of years to build up a mighty mental civilization. Not a mechanical civilization, not a materialistic culture, but a mental civilization. A striving toward understanding rather than toward doing.

  "And now it's a senile thing, an insane thing that has gone back to its second childhood, but its power is too great for a child to wield and it is dangerous… dangerous…"

  Gary nodded. "It could masquerade as anything it pleased. It sent one of the goblins to the city of the Engineers and the Engineers thought the goblin was the mentality that they had contacted. But it wasn't. It was a simple, foolish puppet, but the voice moved it as it wished, talked through its flimsy mind."

  "The Engineers must have sensed the inherent insanity of that mind," said Caroline. "They may not have been sure, but they must, at least, have sensed it, for they sent it away with all the rest of them. The voice could have worked with us. You notice how it talks the way a human talks… that's because it picked our minds, because it found the thoughts and words we used, because it was able to know everything we know."