City

by Clifford D. Simak

  “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 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 point-blank 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 businessmen 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 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.”

  “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.”

  “O.K.,” 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 want 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 toward 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 toward 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 change 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.

  “Tomorrow,” 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.” explain
ed 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 stepping-stone on the way to the better, fuller life. Artists will spend their lives transferring those old houses to their canvasses. 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 today. 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 F. J.”

  “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. Daydreamed 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

  Still alien by all other standards, the second tale strikes a more familiar note than, did the first. Here, for the first time, the reader gains an impression that this tale might have been born about a Doggish campfire, a situation unthinkable so far as the first tale is concerned.

  Here is voiced some of the high moral and ethical concepts which the Dogs have come to value. Here, too, is a struggle which a Dog can understand, even though the struggle does reveal the mental and moral deterioration of its central character.

  For the first time, too, a character emerges which has a familiar ring—the robot. In the robot Jenkins, first introduced in this story, one comes to know a character which for thousands of years has been a puppish favorite. Jenkins is regarded by Tige as the real hero of the legend. In him he sees an extension of Man’s influence beyond the day of Man’s disappearance, a mechanical device by which human thought continued to guide the Dogs long after Man himself was gone.

  We still have our robots, valuable and lovable little contraptions that exist for one purpose only—to furnish us with hands. Throughout the years, however, a Dog’s robot has become so much a part of him that no Dog now regards his robot as a thing apart.

  Tige’s insistence that the robot is an invention of Man, a heritage that our race carries forward from Man, has been sturdily attacked by most other students of the legend.

  The idea that the robot may have been fashioned and given to the Dogs as an aid to the development of their culture, Bounce believes, is an idea which must be summarily ruled out by the very virtue of its romanticism. It is, he contends, a story device on the face of it and as such must necessarily be suspect from the first.

  There is no way now of knowing how the Dogs evolved a robot. Those few scholars who have given some time to a study of the development of robotry, point out that the highly specialized use to which the robot is put does indeed argue that it was invented by a Dog. To be so specialized, they argue, the robot must necessarily have been invented and developed by the race for whose particular use it is so singularly fitted. No one other than a Dog, they contend, could have done so good a job on so intricate a tool.

  To say that no Dog today could build a robot is begging the question. No Dog today could build a robot because there is no need to build one, since the robots build themselves. When there was a need, it is quite evident that a Dog did build a robot and, by building a robot endowed with the reproductive urge which resulted in his building others like himself, solved the problem in a typically Doggish manner.

  In this story likewise is introduced an idea which runs through the rest of the legend and which for long has puzzled all students and most readers. That is the idea that one may move physically off this world, out into space, crossing it to reach other worlds. While the idea in most part has been regarded as pure fantasy which, of course, has its proper place in any legend, a good deal of study has been devoted to it. Most studies have confirmed the belief that such a thing is impossible. Such a belief would argue that the stars which we see at night are mighty worlds at great distances from our wor
lds. Everyone knows, of course, that they are only lights hanging in the sky and that most of them are very near to us.

  Bounce advances what may be the best explanation for the origin of the across-space world idea. It is, he says, no more than an ancient storyteller’s twist on the cobbly worlds, the existence of which the Dogs have known since dim antiquity.

  II

  Huddling Place

  T H E drizzle sifted from the leaden skies, like smoke drifting through the bare-branched trees. It softened the hedges and hazed the outlines of the buildings and blotted out the distance. It glinted on the metallic skins of the silent robots and silvered the shoulders of the three humans listening to the intonations of the black-garbed man, who read from the book cupped between his hands.

  “For I am the Resurrection and the Life—”

  The moss-mellowed graven figure that reared above the door of the crypt seemed straining upward, every crystal of its yearning body reaching toward something that no one else could see. Straining as it had strained since that day of long ago when men had chipped it from the granite to adorn the family tomb with a symbolism that had pleased the first John J. Webster in the last years he held of life.

  “And whosoever liveth and believeth in Me—”

  Jerome A. Webster felt his son’s fingers tighten on his arm, heard the muffled sobbing of his mother, saw the lines of robots standing rigid, heads bowed in respect to the master they had served. The master who now was going home—to the final home of all.

  Numbly, Jerome A. Webster wondered if they understood—if they understood life and death—if they understood what it meant that Nelson F. Webster lay there in the casket, that a man with a book intoned words above him.

  Nelson F. Webster, fourth of the line of Websters who had lived on these acres, had lived and died here, scarcely leaving, and now was going to his final rest in that place the first of them had prepared for the rest of them—for that long line of shadowy descendants who would live here and cherish the things and the ways and the life that the first John J. Webster had established.

  Jerome A. Webster felt his jaw muscles tighten, felt a little tremor run across his body. For a moment his eyes burned and the casket blurred in his sight and the words the man in black was saying were one with the wind that whispered in the pines standing sentinel for the dead. Within his brain remembrance marched—remembrance of a gray-haired man stalking the hills and fields, sniffing the breeze of an early morning, standing, legs braced, before the flaring fireplace with a glass of brandy in his hand.