City (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

by Clifford D. Simak

  He shucked up his pants and spat again.

  ‘And we ain’t the only ones that feel that way,’ he declared. ‘Gramp is out there with us.’

  ‘Gramp!’

  ‘Sure, Gramp. The old guy that lives with you. He’s sort of taken over as our commanding general. Says he remembers tricks from the war them police have never heard of. He sent some of the boys over to one of them Legion halls to swipe a cannon. Says he knows where we can get some shells for it from the museum. Says we’ll get it all set up and then send word that if the police make a move we’ll shell the loop.’

  ‘Look, Levi, will you do something for me?’

  ‘Sure will, Mr. Webster.’

  ‘Will you go in and ask for a Mr. Taylor? Insist on seeing him. Tell him I’m already on the job.’

  ‘Sure will, but where are you going?’ ‘

  I’m going up to the city hall.’

  ‘Sure you don’t want me along?’

  ‘No,’ declared Webster. ‘I’ll do better alone. And, Levi—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell Gramp to hold up his artillery. Don’t shoot unless he has to – but if he has, to lay it on the line.’

  ‘The mayor is busy,’ said Raymond Brown, his secretary.

  ‘That’s what you think,’ said Webster, starting for the door.

  ‘You can’t go in there, Webster,’ yelled Brown.

  He leaped from his chair, came charging around the desk, reaching for Webster. Webster swung broadside with his arm, caught Brown across the chest, swept him back against the desk. The desk skidded and Brown waved his arms, lost his balance, thudded to the floor.

  Webster jerked open the mayor’s door.

  The mayor’s feet thumped off his desk. ‘I told Brown—’ he said.

  Webster nodded. ‘And Brown told me. What’s the matter, Carter? Afraid King might find out I was here? Afraid of being corrupted by some good ideas?’

  ‘What do you want?’ snapped Carter.

  ‘I understand the police are going to burn the houses.’

  ‘That’s right,’ declared the mayor, righteously. ‘They’re a menace to the community.’

  ‘What community?’

  ‘Look here, Webster—’

  ‘You know, there’s no community. Just a few of you lousy politicians who stick around so you can claim residence, so you can be sure of being elected every year and drag down your salaries. It’s getting to the point where all you have to do is vote for one another. The people who work in the stores and shops, even those who do the meanest jobs in the factories, don’t live inside the city limits. The businessmen quit the city long ago. They do business here, but they aren’t residents.’

  ‘But this is still a city,’ declared the mayor.

  ‘I didn’t come to argue that with you,’ said Webster. ‘I came to try to make you see that you’re doing wrong by burning those houses. Even if you don’t realize it, the houses are homes to people who have no other homes. People who have come to this city to seek sanctuary, who have found refuge with us. In a measure, they are our responsibility.’

  ‘They’re not our responsibility,’ gritted the mayor. ‘Whatever happens to them is their own hard luck. We didn’t ask them here. We don’t want them here. They contribute nothing to the community. You’re going to tell me they’re misfits. Well, can I help that? You’re going to say they can’t find jobs. And I’ll tell you they could find jobs if they tried to find them. There’s work to be done, there’s always work to be done. They’ve been filled up with this new world talk and they figure it’s up to someone to find the place that suits them and the job that suits them.’

  ‘You sound like a rugged individualist,’ said Webster.

  ‘You say that like you think it’s funny,’ yapped the mayor.

  ‘I do think it’s funny,’ said Webster. ‘Funny, and tragic, that anyone should think that way to-day.’

  ‘The world would be a lot better off with some rugged individualism,’ snapped the mayor. ‘Look at the men who have gone places—’

  ‘Meaning yourself?’ asked Webster.

  ‘You might take me, for example,’ Carter agreed. ‘I worked hard. I took advantage of opportunity. I had some foresight. I did—’

  ‘You mean you licked the correct boots and stepped in the proper faces,’ said Webster. ‘You’re the shining example of the kind of people the world doesn’t want to-day. You positively smell musty, your ideas are so old. You’re the last of the politicians, Carter, just as I was the last of the Chamber of Commerce secretaries. Only you don’t know it yet. I did. I got out. Even when it cost me something, I got out, because I had to save my self-respect. Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology. And you haven’t got mob psychology any more. You can’t have mob psychology when people don’t give a damn what happens to a thing that’s dead already – a political system that broke down under its own weight.’

  ‘Get out of here,’ screamed Carter. ‘Get out before I have the cops come and throw you out.’

  ‘You forget,’ said Webster, ‘that I came in to talk about the houses.’

  ‘It won’t do you any good,’ snarled Carter. ‘You can stand and talk till doomsday for all the good it does. Those houses burn. That’s final.’

  ‘How would you like to see the loop a mass of rubble?’ asked Webster.

  ‘Your comparison,’ said Carter, ‘is grotesque.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about comparisons,’ said Webster.

  ‘You weren’t—’ The mayor stared at him. ‘What were you talking about then?’

  ‘Only this,’ said Webster. ‘The second the first torch touches the houses, the first shell will land on the city hall. And the second one will hit the First National. They’ll go on down the line, the biggest targets first.’

  Carter gaped. Then a flush of anger crawled from his throat up into his face.

  ‘It won’t work, Webster,’ he snapped. ‘You can’t bluff me. Any cock-and-bull story like that—’

  ‘It’s no cock-and-bull story,’ declared Webster. ‘Those men have cannon out there. Pieces from in front of Legion halls, from the museums. And they have men who know how to work them. They wouldn’t need them, really. It’s practically pointblank range. Like shooting the broadside of a barn.’

  Carter reached for the radio, but Webster stopped him with an upraised hand.

  ‘Better think a minute, Carter, before you go flying off the handle. You’re on a spot. Go ahead with your plan and you have a battle on your hands. The houses may burn but the loop is wrecked. The business men will have your scalp for that.’

  Carter’s hand retreated from the radio.

  From far away came the sharp crack of a rifle.

  ‘Better call them off,’ warned Webster.

  Carter’s face twisted with indecision.

  Another rifle shot, another and another.

  ‘Pretty soon,’ said Webster, ‘it will have gone too far. So far that you can’t stop it.’

  A thudding blast rattled the windows of the room. Carter leaped from his chair.

  Webster felt suddenly cold and weak. But he fought to keep his face straight and his voice calm.

  Carter was staring out of the window, like a man of stone.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Webster, ‘that it’s gone too far already.’

  The radio on the desk chirped insistently, red light flashing.

  Carter reached out a trembling hand and snapped it on.

  ‘Carter,’ a voice was saying. ‘Carter. Carter.’

  Webster recognized that voice – the bull-throated tone of Police Chief Jim Maxwell.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Carter.

  ‘They had a big gun,’ said Maxwell. ‘It exploded when they tried to fire it. Ammunition no good, I guess.’

  ‘One gun?’ asked Carter. ‘Only one gun?’

  ‘I don’t see any others.’r />
  ‘I heard rifle fire,’ said Carter.

  ‘Yeah, they did some shooting at us. Wounded a couple of the boys. But they’ve pulled back now. Deeper into the brush. No shooting now.’

  ‘OK,’ said Carter, ‘go ahead and start the fires.’

  Webster started forward. ‘Ask him, ask him—’

  But Carter clicked the switch and the radio went dead.

  ‘What was it you wanted to ask?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Webster. ‘Nothing that amounted to anything.’

  He couldn’t tell Carter that Gramp had been the one who knew about firing big guns. Couldn’t tell him that when the gun exploded Gramp had been there.

  He’d have to get out of here, get over to the gun as quickly as possible.

  ‘It was a good bluff, Webster,’ Carter was saying. ‘A good bluff, but it petered out.’

  The mayor turned to the window that faced towards the houses.

  ‘No more firing,’ he said. ‘They gave up quick.’

  ‘You’ll be lucky,’ snapped Webster, ‘if six of your policemen come back alive. Those men with the rifles are out in the brush and they can pick the eye out of a squirrel at a hundred yards.’

  Feet pounded in the corridor outside, two pairs of feet racing towards the door.

  The mayor whirled from his window and Webster pivoted around.

  ‘Gramp!’ he yelled.

  ‘Hi, Johnny,’ puffed Gramp, skidding to a stop.

  The man behind Gramp was a young man and he was waving something in his hand – a sheaf of papers that rustled as he waved them.

  ‘What do you want?’ asked the mayor.

  ‘Plenty,’ said Gramp.

  He stood for a moment, catching back his breath, and said between puffs:

  ‘Meet my friend, Henry Adams.’

  ‘Adams?’ asked the mayor.

  ‘Sure,’ said Gramp. ‘His granddaddy used to live here. Out on Twenty-seventh Street.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the mayor and it was as if someone had smacked him with a brick. ‘Oh, you mean F. J. Adams.’

  ‘Bet your boots,’ said Gramp. ‘Him and me, we were in the war together. Used to keep me awake nights telling me about his boy back home.’

  Carter nodded to Henry Adams. ‘As mayor of the city,’ he said, trying to regain some of his dignity, ‘I welcome you to—’

  ‘It’s not a particularly fitting welcome,’ Adams said. ‘I understand you are burning my property.’

  ‘Your property!’ The mayor choked and his eyes stared in disbelief at the sheaf of papers Adams waved at him.

  ‘Yeah, his property,’ shrilled Gramp. ‘He just bought it. We just come from the treasurer’s office. Paid all the back taxes and penalties and all the other things you legal thieves thought up to slap against them houses.’

  ‘But, but—’ the mayor was grasping for words, gasping for breath. ‘Not all of it. Perhaps just the old Adams property.’

  ‘Lock, stock and barrel,’ said Gramp triumphantly.

  ‘And now,’ said Adams to the mayor, ‘if you would kindly tell your men to stop destroying my property.’

  Carter bent over the desk and fumbled at the radio, his hands suddenly all thumbs.

  ‘Maxwell,’ he shouted. ‘Maxwell, Maxwell.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Maxwell yelled back.

  ‘Stop setting those fires,’ yelled Carter. ‘Start putting them out. Call out the fire department. Do anything. But stop those fires.’

  ‘Cripes,’ said Maxwell, ‘I wish you’d make up your mind.’

  ‘You do what I tell you,’ screamed the mayor. ‘You put out those fires.’

  ‘All right,’ said Maxwell. ‘All right. Keep your shirt on. But the boys won’t like it. They won’t like getting shot at to do something you changed your mind about.’

  Carter straightened from the radio.

  ‘Let me assure you, Mr. Adams,’ he said, ‘that this is all a big mistake.’

  ‘It is,’ Adams declared solemnly. ‘A very great mistake, mayor. The biggest one you ever made.’

  For a moment the two of them stood there, looking across the room at one another.

  ‘To-morrow,’ said Adams, ‘I shall file a petition with the courts asking dissolution of the city charter. As owner of the greatest portion of the land included in the corporate limits, both from the standpoint of area and valuation, I understand I have a perfect legal right to do that.’

  The mayor gulped, finally brought out some words:

  ‘Upon what grounds?’ he asked.

  ‘Upon the grounds,’ said Adams, ‘that there is no further need of it. I do not believe I shall have too hard a time to prove my case.’

  ‘But . . . but . . . that means . . .’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Gramp, ‘you know what it means. It means you are out right on your ear.’

  ‘A park,’ said Gramp, waving his arm over the wilderness that once had been the residential section of the city. ‘A park so that people can remember how their old folks lived.’

  The three of them stood on Tower Hill, with the rusty old water tower looming above them, its sturdy steel legs planted in a sea of waist-high grass.

  ‘Not a park, exactly,’ explained Henry Adams. ‘A memorial, rather. A memorial to an era of communal life that will be forgotten in another hundred years. A preservation of a number of peculiar types of construction that arose to suit certain conditions and each man’s particular tastes. No slavery to any architectural concepts, but an effort made to achieve better living. In another hundred years men will walk through those houses down there with the same feeling of respect and awe they have when they go into a museum today. It will be to them something out of what amounts to a primeval age, a steppingstone on the way to the better, fuller life. Artists will spend their lives transferring those old houses to their canvases. Writers of historical novels will come here for the breath of authenticity.’

  ‘But you said you meant to restore all the houses, make the lawns and gardens exactly like they were before,’ said Webster. ‘That will take a fortune. And, after that, another fortune to keep them in shape.’

  ‘I have too much money,’ said Adams. ‘Entirely too much money. Remember, my grandfather and father got into atomics on the ground floor.’

  ‘Best crap player I ever knew, your granddaddy was,’ said Gramp. ‘Used to take me for a cleaning every pay day.’

  ‘In the old days,’ said Adams, ‘when a man had too much money, there were other things he could do with it. Organized charities, for example. Or medical research or something like that. But there are no organized charities to-day. Not enough business to keep them going. And since the World Committee has hit its stride, there is ample money for all the research, medical or otherwise, anyone might wish to do.

  ‘I didn’t plan this thing when I came back to see my grandfather’s old house. Just wanted to see it, that was all. He’d told me so much about it. How he planted the tree in the front lawn. And the rose garden he had out back.

  ‘And then I saw it. And it was a mocking ghost. It was something that had been left behind. Something that had meant a lot to someone and had been left behind. Standing there in front of that house with Gramp that day, it came to me that I could do nothing better than preserve for posterity a cross-section of the life their ancestors lived.’

  A thin blue thread of smoke rose above the trees far below.

  Webster pointed to it. ‘What about them?’

  ‘The Squatters stay,’ said Adams, ‘if they want to. There will be plenty of work for them to do. And there’ll always be a house or two that they can have to live in.

  ‘There’s just one thing that bothers me. I can’t be here all the time myself. I’ll need someone to manage the project. It’ll be a lifelong job.’

  He looked at Webster.

  ‘Go ahead, Johnny,’ said Gramp.

  Webster shook his head. ‘Betty’s got her heart set on that place out in the country.’

  �
�You wouldn’t have to stay here,’ said Adams. ‘You could fly in every day.’

  From the foot of the hill came a hail.

  ‘It’s Ole,’ yelled Gramp.

  He waved his cane. ‘Hi, Ole. Come on up.’

  They watched Ole striding up the hill, waiting for him, silently.

  ‘Wanted to talk to you, Johnny,’ said Ole. ‘Got an idea. Waked me out of a sound sleep last night.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Webster.

  Ole glanced at Adams. ‘He’s all right,’ said Webster. ‘He’s Henry Adams. Maybe you remember his grandfather, old FJ.’

  ‘I remember him,’ said Ole. ‘Nuts about atomic power, he was. How did he make out?’

  ‘He made out rather well,’ said Adams.

  ‘Glad to hear that,’ Ole said. ‘Guess I was wrong. Said he never would amount to nothing. Day-dreamed all the time.’

  ‘How about that idea?’ Webster asked.

  ‘You heard about dude ranches, ain’t you?’ Ole asked.

  Webster nodded.

  ‘Place,’ said Ole, ‘where people used to go and pretend they were cowboys. Pleased them because they really didn’t know all the hard work there was in ranching and figured it was romantic-like to ride horses and—’

  ‘Look,’ asked Webster, ‘you aren’t figuring on turning your farm into a dude ranch, are you?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Ole. ‘Not a dude ranch. Dude farm, maybe. Folks don’t know too much about farms any more, since there ain’t hardly no farms. And they’ll read about the frost being on the pumpkin and how pretty a—’

  Webster stared at Ole. ‘They’d go for it, Ole,’ he declared. ‘They’d kill one another in the rush to spend their vacation on a real, honest-to-God, old-time farm.’

  Out of a clump of bushes down the hillside burst a shining thing that chattered and gurgled and screeched, blades flashing, a cranelike arm waving.

  ‘What the—’ asked Adams.

  ‘It’s that dadburned lawn mower!’ yelped Gramp. ‘I always knew the day would come when it would strip a gear and go completely off its nut!’

  NOTES ON THE SECOND TALE