Grotto of the Dancing Deer

by Clifford D. Simak

  On the top step, Paxton stubbed his toe and went down without a chance to catch himself, and there was a vast explosion that shook the universe and artillery fire was bursting in his brain.

  Dazed, he got to his hands and knees and crawled painfully, hurling himself desperately down the stairs—and through the crashing uproar that filled the entire world ran an urgent thought and purpose.

  I’ve got to get him out before it is too late! I can’t let him die in there! I can’t kill a man!

  He slipped on the stairs and slid until his body jammed in the narrowness and stuck.

  And there was no artillery fire, there was no crash of shells, no wicked little chitterings. The dome glittered softly in the moonlight and was as quiet as death.

  Except, he thought, a little weirdly, death’s not quiet in there. It is an inferno of destruction and a maddening place of sound and brightness and the quietness doesn’t come until afterward.

  He’d fallen and hit his head, he knew, and all he’d seen and heard had been within his brain. But Pertwee would be opening up any minute now and the quietness would be gone, and with it the opportunity to undo what he had so swiftly planned.

  And somewhere in the shadow of the dome another self stood off and argued with him, jeering at his softness, quoting logic at him.

  It was either he or you, said that other self. You fought for your life the best way you knew, the only way you knew, and whatever you may have done, no matter what you did, you were entirely justified.

  “I can’t do it!” yelled the Paxton on the stairs and yet even as he yelled he knew that he was wrong, that by logic he was wrong, that the jeering self who stood off in the shadows made more sense than he.

  He staggered to his feet. Without his conscious mind made up, he went down the stairs. Driven by some as yet unrealized and undefined instinctive prompting that was past all understanding, he stumbled down the stairs, with the throb still in his head and a choking guilt and fear rising in his throat.

  He reached the door and stabbed the button and the door slid up and he went out into the cluttered place of dying and stopped in horror at the awful loneliness and the vindictive desolation of this square mile of Earth that was shut off from all the other Earth as if it were a place of final judgment.

  And perhaps it was, he thought—the final judgment of Man.

  Of all of us, he thought, young Graham may be the only honest one; he’s the true barbarian that old Granther thinks he is; he is the throwback who looks out upon Man’s past and sees it as it is and lives it as it was.

  Paxton took a quick look back and he saw the door was closed and out ahead of him, in the plowed and jumbled sea of tortured, battered earth, he saw a moving figure that could be no one but the bishop.

  Paxton ran forward, shouting, and the bishop turned around and stood there, waiting, with the gun half lifted.

  Paxton stopped and waved his arms in frantic signaling. The bishop’s gun came up and there was a stinging slash across the side of Paxton’s neck and a sudden, gushing wetness. A small, blue puff of smoke hung on the muzzle of the distant gun.

  Paxton flung himself aside and dived for the ground. He hit and skidded on his belly and tumbled most ingloriously into a dusty crater. He lay there, at the bottom of the crater, huddled against the fear of a bullet’s impact while the rage and fury built up into white heat.

  He had come here to save a man and the man had tried to kill him!

  I should have left him here, he thought.

  I should have let him die.

  I’d kill him if I could.

  And the fact of the matter now was that he had to kill the bishop. There was no choice but to kill him or be killed himself.

  Not only did he have to kill the bishop, but he had to kill him soon. Pertwee’s fifteen minutes must be almost at an end and the bishop had to be killed and he had to be out the door before Pertwee opened fire.

  Out the door, he thought—did he have a chance? If he ran low and dodged, perhaps, would he have a chance to escape the bishop’s bullets?

  That was it, he thought. Waste no time on killing if he didn’t have to; let Pertwee do the killing. Just get out of here himself.

  He put his hand up to his neck, and when he lifted it, his fingers were covered with a sticky wetness. It was funny, he thought, that it didn’t hurt, although the hurt, no doubt, would come later.

  He crawled up the crater’s side and rolled across its lip and found himself lying in a small, massed junkyard of smashed and broken robots, sprawled grotesquely where the barrage had caught them.

  And lying there in front of him, without a scratch upon it, where it had fallen from a dying robot’s grasp, was a rifle that shone dully in the moonlight.

  He snatched it up and rose into a crouch and as he did he saw the bishop, almost on top of him; the bishop coming in to make sure that he was finished!

  There was no time to run, as he had planned to—and, curiously, no desire to run. Paxton had never known actual hate before, never had a chance to know it, but now it came and filled him full of rage and a wild and exultant will and capacity to kill without pity or remorse.

  He tilted up the rifle and his finger closed upon the trigger and the weapon danced and flashed and made a deadly chatter.

  But the bishop still came on, not rushing now, but plodding ahead with a deadly stride, leaning forward as if his body were absorbing the murderous rifle fire, absorbing it and keeping on by will power alone, holding off death until that moment when it might snuff out the thing that was killing it.

  The bishop’s gun came up and something smashed into Paxton’s chest, and smashed again and yet again, and there was a flood of wetness and a spattering and the edge of Paxton’s brain caught at the hint of something wrong.

  For two men do not—could not—stand a dozen feet apart and pour at one another a deadly blast and both stay on their feet. No matter how poor might be their aim, it simply couldn’t happen.

  He rose out of his crouch and stood at his full height and let the gun hang uselessly in his hand. Six feet away, the bishop stopped as well and flung his gun away.

  They stood looking at one another in the pale moonlight and the anger melted and ran out of them and Paxton wished that he were almost anywhere but there.

  “Paxton,” asked the bishop plaintively, “who did this to us?”

  And it was a funny thing to say, almost as if he’d said: “Who stopped us from killing one another?”

  For a fleeting moment, it almost seemed to Paxton as though it might have been a kinder thing if they had been allowed to kill. For killing was a brave thing in the annals of the race, an art of strength and a certain proof of manhood—perhaps of humanhood.

  A kinder thing to be allowed to kill. And that was it, exactly. They had not been allowed to kill.

  For you couldn’t kill with a pop-gun that shot out plastic pellets of liquid that burst on contact, with the liquid running down like blood for the sake of realism. And you couldn’t kill with a gun that went most admirably through all the motions of chattering and smoking and flashing out red fire, but with nothing lethal in it.

  And was this entire battle bowl no more than a toy set with robots that came apart at the right and most dramatic moments and then could be put back together at a later time? Were the artillery and the total-conversion bombs toy things as well, with a lot of flash and noise and perhaps a few well-placed items to plow up the battlefield, but without the power to really hurt a robot?

  The bishop said, “Paxton, I feel like an utter fool.” And he added other words which a real bishop could never bring himself to say, making very clear just what kind of obscene fool he was.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Paxton shortly, feeling like that same kind of fool himself.

  “I wonder…” said the bishop.

  “Forget ab
out it,” Paxton growled. “Let’s just get out of here. Pertwee will be opening up…”

  But he didn’t finish what he was about to say, for he realized that even if Pertwee did open up, there’d be little danger. And there wasn’t any chance that Pertwee would open up, for it would know that they were here.

  Like a metal monitor watching over a group of rebellious children—rebellious because they weren’t adult yet. Watching them and letting them go ahead and play so long as they were in no danger of drowning or of falling off a roof or some other reckless thing. And then interfering only just enough to save their silly necks. Perhaps even encouraging them to play so they’d work off their rebelliousness—joining in the game in the typically human tradition of let’s pretend.

  Like monitors watching over children, letting them develop, allowing them to express their foolish little selves, not standing in the way of whatever childish importance they could muster up, encouraging them to think they were sufficient to themselves.

  Paxton started for the door, plodding along, the bishop in his bedraggled robes stumbling along behind him.

  When they were a hundred feet away, the door started sliding up and Pertwee stood there, waiting for them, not looking any different than it had before, but somehow seeming to have a new measure of importance.

  They reached the door and sheepishly trailed through it, not looking right or left, casually and elaborately pretending that Pertwee was not there.

  “Gentlemen,” said Pertwee, “don’t you want to play?”

  “No,” Paxton said. “No, thank you. I can’t speak for both of us—”

  “Yes, you can, friend,” the bishop put in. “Go right ahead.”

  “My friend and I have done all the playing we care to do,” said Paxton. “It was good of you to make sure we didn’t get hurt.”

  Pertwee managed to look puzzled. “But why should anybody be allowed to get hurt? It was only a game.”

  “So we’ve discovered. Which way is out?”

  “Why,” said the robot, “any way but back.”

  Crying Jag

  Originally sold as “All the Sad Stories,” this story first appeared in the February 1960 issue of Galaxy Magazine. Horace Gold accepted the story for publication just eight days after Cliff Simak mailed it to him. It fits tidily into that species of Simak story that portrays an alien coming to a small town (a town, as is common in Cliff’s stories, named Millville).

  Worse than a case of the blind leading the blind is the case of the drunk leading the drunk.

  —dww

  It was Saturday evening and I was sitting on the stoop, working up a jag. I had my jug beside me, handy, and I was feeling good and fixing to feel better, when this alien and his robot came tramping up the driveway.

  I knew right off it was an alien. It looked something like a man, but there weren’t any humans got robots trailing at their heels.

  If I had been stone sober, I might have gagged a bit at the idea there was an alien coming up the driveway and done some arguing with myself. But I wasn’t sober—not entirely, that is.

  So I said good evening and asked him to sit down and he thanked me and sat.

  “You, too,” I said to the robot, moving over to make room.

  “Let him stand,” the alien said. “He cannot sit. He is a mere machine.”

  The robot clanked a gear at him, but that was all it said.

  “Have a snort,” I said, picking up the jug, but the alien shook his head.

  “I wouldn’t dare,” he said. “My metabolism.”

  That was one of the double-jointed words I had acquaintance with. From working at Doc Abel’s sanitorium, I had picked up some of the medic lingo.

  “That’s a dirty shame,” I said. “You don’t mind if I do?”

  “Not at all,” the alien said.

  So I had a long one. I felt the need of it.

  I put down the jug and wiped my mouth and asked him if there was something I could get him. It seemed plain inhospitable for me to be sitting there, lapping up that liquor, and him not having any.

  “You can tell me about this town,” the alien said. “I think you call it Millville.”

  “That’s the name, all right. What you want to know about it?”

  “All the sad stories,” said the robot, finally speaking up.

  “He is correct,” the alien said, settling down in an attitude of pleasurable anticipation. “Tell me about the troubles and the tribulations.”

  “Starting where?” I asked.

  “How about yourself?”

  “Me? I never have no troubles. I janitor all week at the sanitorium and I get drunk on Saturday. Then I sober up on Sunday so I can janitor another week. Believe me, mister,” I told him, “I haven’t got no troubles. I am sitting pretty. I have got it made.”

  “But there must be people …”

  “Oh, there are. You never saw so much complaining as there is in Millville. There ain’t nobody here except myself but has got a load of trouble. And it wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t talk about it.”

  “Tell me,” said the alien.

  So I had another snort and then I told him about the Widow Frye, who lives just up the street. I told him how her life had been just one long suffering, with her husband running out on her when their boy was only three years old, and how she took in washing and worked her fingers to the bone to support the two of them, and the kid ain’t more than thirteen or fourteen when he steals this car and gets sent up for two years to the boys’ school over at Glen Lake.

  “And that is all of it?” asked the alien.

  “Well, in rough outline,” I said. “I didn’t put in none of the flourishes nor the grimy details, the way the widow would. You should hear her tell it.”

  “Could you arrange it?”

  “Arrange what?”

  “To have her tell it to me.”

  “I wouldn’t promise you,” I told him honestly. “The widow has a low opinion of me. She never speaks to me.”

  “But I can’t understand.”

  “She is a decent, church-going woman,” I explained, “and I am just a crummy bum. And I drink.”

  “She doesn’t like drinking?”

  “She thinks it is a sin.”

  The alien sort of shivered. “I know. I guess all places are pretty much alike.”

  “You have people like the Widow Frye?”

  “Not exactly, but the attitude’s the same.”

  “Well,” I said, after another snort, “I figure there is nothing else to do but bear up under it.”

  “Would it be too much bother,” asked the alien, “to tell me another one?”

  “None at all,” I said.

  So I told him about Elmer Trotter, who worked his way through law school up at Madison, doing all kinds of odd jobs to earn his way, since he had no folks, and how he finally got through and passed the bar examination, then came back to Millville to set up an office.

  I couldn’t tell him how it happened or why, although I had always figured that Elmer had got a belly full of poverty and grabbed this chance to earn a lot of money fast. No one should have known better than he did that it was dishonest, being he was a lawyer. But he went ahead and did it and he got caught.

  “And what happened then?” asked the alien breathlessly. “Was he punished?”

  I told him how Elmer got disbarred and how Eliza Jenkins gave him back his ring and how Elmer went into insurance and just scraped along in a hand-to-mouth existence, eating out his heart to be a lawyer once again, but he never could.

  “You got all this down?” the alien asked the robot.

  “All down,” the robot said.

  “What fine nuances!” exclaimed the alien, who seemed to be much pleased. “What stark, overpowering reality!”

  I did
n’t know what he was talking about, so I had another drink instead.

  Then I went ahead, without being asked, and I told him about Amanda Robinson and her unhappy love affair and how she turned into Millville’s most genteel and sorriest old maid. And about Abner Jones and his endless disappointments, but his refusal to give up the idea that he was a great inventor, and how his family went in rags and hungry while he spent all his time inventing.

  “Such sadness!” said the alien. “What a lovely planet!”

  “You better taper off,” the robot warned him. “You know what happens to you.”

  “Just one more,” the alien begged. “I’m all right. Just one more.”

  “Now, look here,” I told him, “I don’t mind telling them, if that is what you want. But maybe first you better tell me a bit about yourself. I take it you’re an alien.”

  “Naturally,” said the alien.

  “And you came here in a spaceship.”

  “Well, not exactly a spaceship.”

  “Then, if you’re an alien, how come you talk so good?”

  “Now, that,” the alien said, “is something that still is tender to me.”

  The robot said scornfully: “They took him good and proper.”

  “You mean you paid for it.”

  “Too much,” the robot said. “They saw that he was eager, so they hiked the price on him.”

  “But I’ll get even with them,” the alien cut in. “If I don’t turn a profit on it, my name isn’t ——.”

  And he said a word that was long and twisted and didn’t make no sense.

  “That your name?” I asked.

  “Yeah, sure. But you can call me Wilbur. And the robot, you may call him Lester.”

  “Well, boys,” I said, “I’m mighty glad to know you. You can call me Sam.”

  And I had another drink.

  We sat there on the stoop and the moon was coming up and the fireflies were flickering in the lilac hedge and the world had an edge on it. I’d never felt so good.

  “Just one more,” said Wilbur pleadingly.

  So I told him about some of the mental cases up at the sanitorium and I picked the bad ones and alongside of me Wilbur started blubbering and the robot said: “Now see what you’ve done. He’s got a crying jag.”