City

by Clifford D. Simak

  “You mean that you haven’t one of the abilities you had when you were a Loper?”

  “Not a single one.”

  “You couldn’t by chance, be able to make me understand a thing you wanted me to know. Make me feel the way you feel.”

  “Not a chance,” said Fowler.

  Webster reached out a hand, pushed the kaleidoscope gently with his finger. It rolled forward, then came to rest again.

  “What did you come back for?” asked Webster.

  “To square myself with you,” said Fowler. “To let you know I wasn’t really sore. To try to make you understand that I had a side, too. Just a difference of opinion, that’s all. I thought maybe we might shake on it.”

  “I see. And you’re still determined to go out and tell the people?”

  Fowler nodded. “I have to, Webster. You must surely know that. It’s…it’s…well, almost a religion with me. It’s something I believe in. I have to tell the rest of them that there’s a better world and a better life. I have to lead them to it.”

  “A messiah,” said Webster.

  Fowler straightened. “That’s one thing I was afraid of. Scoffing isn’t—”

  “I wasn’t scoffing,” Webster told him, almost gently.

  He picked up the kaleidoscope, polishing its tube with the palm of his hand, considering. Not yet, he thought. Not yet. Have to think it out. Do I want him to understand me as well as I understand him?

  “Look, Fowler,” he said, “lay off a day or two. Wait a bit. Just a day or two. Then let us talk again.”

  “I’ve waited long enough already.”

  “But I want you to think this over: A million years ago man first came into being—just an animal. Since that time he has inched his way up a cultural ladder. Bit by painful bit he has developed a way of life, a philosophy, a way of doing things. His progress has been geometrical. Today he does much more than he did yesterday. Tomorrow he’ll do even more than he did today. For the first time in human history, Man is really beginning to hit the ball. He’s just got a good start, the first stride, you might say. He’s going a lot farther in a lot less time than he’s come already.

  “Maybe it isn’t as pleasant as Jupiter, maybe not the same at all. Maybe humankind is drab compared with the life forms of Jupiter. But it’s a man’s life. It’s the thing he’s fought for. It’s the thing he’s made himself. It’s a destiny he has shaped.

  “I hate to think, Fowler, that just when we’re going good we’ll swap our destiny for one we don’t know about, for one we can’t be sure about.”

  “I’ll wait,” said Fowler. “Just a day or two. But I’m warning you. You can’t put me off. You can’t change my mind.”

  “That’s all I ask,” said Webster. He rose and held out his hand. “Shake on it?” he asked.

  But even as he shook Fowler’s hand, Webster knew it wasn’t any good. Juwain philosophy or not, mankind was heading for a showdown. A showdown that would be even worse because of the Juwain philosophy. For the mutants wouldn’t miss a bet. If this was to be their joke, if this was their way of getting rid of the human race, they wouldn’t overlook a thing. By tomorrow morning every man, woman and child somehow or other would have managed to look through a kaleidoscope. Or something else. Lord only knew how much other ways there were.

  He watched until Fowler had closed the door behind him, then walked to the window and stared out. Flashing on the skyline of the city was a new advertising sign—one that had not been there before. A crazy sign that made crazy colored patterns in the night. Flashing on and off as if one were turning a kaleidoscope.

  Webster stared at it, tight-lipped.

  He should have expected it.

  He thought of Joe with a flare of murderous fury surging through his brain. For that call had been a cackling chortle behind a covering hand, a smart-Aleck gesture designed to let man know what it was all about, to let him know after he was behind the eight-ball and couldn’t do a thing about it.

  We should have killed them off, thought Webster, and was surprised at the calm coldness of the thought. We should have stamped them out like we would a dangerous disease.

  But man had forsaken violence as a world and individual policy. Not for one hundred twenty-five years had one group been arrayed against another group in violence.

  When Joe had called, the Juwain philosophy had lain on the desk. I only had to reach out my hand and touch it, Webster thought.

  He stiffened with the realization of it. I had only to reach out my hand and touch it. And I did just that!

  Something more than telepathy, something more than guessing. Joe knew he would pick up the kaleidoscope—must have known it. Foresight—an ability to roll back the future. Just an hour or so, perhaps, but that would be enough.

  Joe—and the other mutants, of course—had known about Fowler. Their probing, telepathic minds could have told them all that they wished to know. But this was something else, something different.

  He stood at the window, staring at the sign. Thousands of people, he knew, were seeing it. Seeing it and feeling that sudden sick impact in their mind.

  Webster frowned, wondering about the shifting pattern of the lights. Some physiological impact upon a certain center of the human brain, perhaps. A portion of the brain that had not been used before—a portion of the brain that in due course of human development might naturally have come into its proper function. A function now that was being forced.

  The Juwain philosophy, at last! Something for which men had sought for centuries, now finally come to pass. Given man at a time when he’d have been better off without it.

  Fowler had written in his report: I cannot give a factual account because there are no words for the facts that I want to tell. He still didn’t have the words, of course, but he had something else that was even better—an audience that could understand the sincerity and the greatness which lay beneath the words he did have. An audience with a new-found sense which would enable them to grasp some of the mighty scope of the thing Fowler had to tell.

  Joe had planned it that way. Had waited for this moment. Had used the Juwain philosophy as a weapon against the human race.

  For with the Juwain philosophy man would go to Jupiter. Faced by all the logic in the world, he still would go to Jupiter. For better or for worse, he would go to Jupiter.

  The only chance there had ever been of winning against Fowler had been Fowler’s inability to describe what he saw, to tell what he felt, to reach the people with a clear exposition of the message that he brought. With mere human words that message would have been vague and fuzzy and while the people at first might have believed, they would have been shaky in their belief, would have listened to other argument.

  But now that chance was gone, for the words would be no longer vague and fuzzy. The people would know, as clearly and as vibrantly as Fowler knew himself, what Jupiter was like.

  The people would go to Jupiter, would enter upon a life other than the human life.

  And the Solar System, the entire Solar System, with the exception of Jupiter, would lie open for the new race of mutants to take over, to develop any kind of culture that they might wish—a culture that would scarcely follow the civilization of the parent race.

  Webster swung away from the window, strode back to the desk. He stooped and pulled out a drawer, reached inside. His hand came out clutching something that he had never dreamed of using—a relic, a museum piece he had tossed there years before.

  With a handkerchief, he polished the metal of the gun, tested its mechanism with trembling fingers.

  Fowler was the key. With Fowler dead—

  With Fowler dead and the Jupiter stations dismantled and abandoned, the mutants would be licked. Man would have the Juwain philosophy and would retain his destiny. The Centauri expedition would blast off for the stars. The life experiments would continue on Pluto. Man would march along the course that his culture plotted.

  Faster than ever before. Faster than anyone co
uld dream.

  Two great strides. The renunciation of violence as a human policy­—the understanding that came with the Juwain philosophy. The two great things that would speed man along the road to wherever he was going. The renunciation of the violence and the—

  Webster stared at the gun clutched in his hand and heard the roar of winds tumbling through his head.

  Two great strides—and he was about to toss away the first.

  For one hundred twenty-five years no man had killed another—for more than a thousand years killing had been obsolete as a factor in the determination of human affairs.

  A thousand years of peace and one death might undo the work. One shot in the night might collapse the structure, might hurl man back to the old bestial thinking.

  Webster killed—why can’t I? After all, there are some men who should be killed. Webster did right, but he shouldn’t have stopped with only one. I don’t see why they’re hanging him; he’d ought to get a medal. We ought to start on the mutants first. If it hadn’t been for them—

  That was the way they’d talk.

  That, thought Webster, is the wind that’s roaring in my brain.

  The flashing of the crazy colored sign made a ghostly flicker along the walls and floor.

  Fowler is seeing that, thought Webster. He is looking at it and, even if he isn’t, I still have the kaleidoscope.

  He tossed the gun back into the drawer, walked toward the door.

  Notes on the Sixth Tale

  If there has been any doubt concerning the origin of the other tales in the legend, there can be no doubt in this. Here, in the sixth tale, we have unmistakably the hallmarks of Doggish story telling. It has the deeper emotional value, the closer attention to ethical matters which are stressed in all other Doggish myths.

  And yet, strangely enough, it is in this particular tale that Tige finds his weightiest evidence of the actuality of the human race. Here, he points out, we have evidence that the Dogs told these self-same tales before the blazing fire when they sat and talked of Man buried in Geneva or gone to Jupiter. Here, he says, we are given an account of the Dogs’ first probing into the cobbly worlds, their first step toward the development of an animal brotherhood.

  Here, too, he thinks we have evidence that Man was another contemporary race which went part way down the path of culture with the Dogs. Whether or not the disaster which is portrayed in this tale is the one which actually overwhelmed Man, Tige says, we cannot be sure. He admits that through the centuries the tale as we know it today has been embellished and embroidered. But it does provide, he contends, good and substantial evidence that some disaster was visited upon the human race.

  Rover, who does not admit to the factual evidence seen by Tige, believes that the storyteller in this tale brings to a logical conclusion a culture such as Man developed. Without at least broad purpose, without certain implanted stability, no culture can survive, and this is the lesson, Rover believes, the tale is meant to spell.

  Man, in this story, is treated with a certain tenderness which is not accorded him in any of the other tales. He is at once a lonely and pitiful creature, and yet somehow glorious. It is entirely typical of him that in the end he should make a grand gesture, that he should purchase godhood by self-immolation.

  Yet the worship which is accorded him by Ebenezer has certain disturbing overtones which have become the source of particularly bitter dispute among the legend’s students.

  Bounce, in his book, “The Myth of Man,” asks this question: If Man had taken a different path, might, he not, in time to come, have been as great as Dog?

  It is a question, perhaps, that many readers of the legend have stopped to ask themselves.

  VI

  Hobbies

  T H E rabbit ducked around a bush and the little black dog zipped after him, then dug in his heels and skidded. In the pathway stood a wolf, the rabbit’s twitching, bloody body hanging from his jaws.

  Ebenezer stood very still and panted, red rag of a tongue lolling out, a little faint and sick at the sight before him.

  It had been such a nice rabbit!

  Feet pattered on the trail behind him and Shadow whizzed around the bush, slid to a stop alongside Ebenezer.

  The wolf flicked his glare from the dog to the pint-size robot, then back to the dog again. The yellow light of wildness slowly faded from his eyes.

  “You shouldn’t have done that, Wolf,” said Ebenezer, softly. “The rabbit knew I wouldn’t hurt him and it was all in fun. But he ran straight into you and you snapped him up.”

  “There’s no use talking to him,” Shadow hissed out of the corner of his mouth. “He doesn’t know a word you’re saying. Next thing you know, he’ll be gulping you.”

  “Not with you around, he won’t,” said Ebenezer. “And, anyhow, he knows me. He remembers last winter. He was one of the pack we fed.”

  The wolf paced forward slowly, step by cautious step, until less than two feet separated him from the little dog. Then, very slowly, very carefully, he laid the rabbit on the ground, nudged it forward with his nose.

  Shadow made a tiny sound that was almost a gasp. “He’s giving it to you!”

  “I know,” said Ebenezer calmly. “I told you he remembered. He’s the one that had a frozen ear and Jenkins fixed it up.”

  The dog advanced a step, tail wagging, nose outstretched. The wolf stiffened momentarily, then lowered his ugly head and sniffed. For a second the two noses almost rubbed together, then the wolf stepped back.

  “Let’s get out of here,” urged Shadow. “You high-tail it down the trail and I’ll bring up the rear. If he tries anything—”

  “He won’t try anything,” snapped Ebenezer. “He’s a friend of ours. It’s not his fault about the rabbit. He doesn’t understand. It’s the way he lives. To him a rabbit is just a piece of meat.”

  Even, he thought, as it once was for us. As it was for us before the first dog came to sit with a man before a cave-mouth fire—and for a long time after that. Even now a rabbit sometimes—

  Moving slowly, almost apologetically, the wolf reached forward, gathered up the rabbit in his gaping jaws. His tail moved—not quite a wag, but almost.

  “You see!” cried Ebenezer and the wolf was gone. His feet moved and there was a blur of gray fading through the trees—a shadow drifting in the forest.

  “He took it back,” fumed Shadow. “Why, the dirty—”

  “But he gave it to me,” said Ebenezer, triumphantly. “Only he was so hungry he couldn’t make it stick. He did something a wolf has never done before. For a moment he was more than an animal.”

  “Indian giver,” snapped Shadow.

  Ebenezer shook his head. “He was ashamed when he took it back. You saw him wag his tail. That was explaining to me—explaining he was hungry and he needed it. Worse than I needed it.”

  The dog stared down the green aisles of the fairy forest, smelled the scent of decaying leaves, the heady perfume of hepatica and bloodroot and spidery windflower, the quick, sharp odor of the new leaf, of the woods in early spring.

  “Maybe some day—” he said.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Shadow. “Maybe some day the wolves will be civilized, too. And the rabbits and squirrels and all the other wild things. The way you dogs go mooning around—”

  “It isn’t mooning,” Ebenezer told him. “Dreaming, maybe. Men used to dream. They used to sit around and think up things. That’s how we happened. A man named Webster thought us up. He messed around with us. He fixed up our throats so we could talk. He rigged up contact lenses so that we could read. He—”

  “A lot of good it did men for all their dreaming,” said Shadow, peevishly.

  And that, thought Ebenezer, is the solemn truth. Not many men left now. Just the mutants squatting in their towers and doing no one knows what and the little colony of real men still living in Geneva. The others, long ago, had gone to Jupiter. Had gone to Jupiter and changed themselves into things that were not human.


  Slowly, tail drooping, Ebenezer swung around, clumped slowly up the path.

  Too bad about the rabbit, he thought. It had been such a nice rabbit. It had run so well. And it really wasn’t scared. He had chased it lots of times and it knew he wouldn’t catch it.

  But even at that, Ebenezer couldn’t bring himself to blame the wolf. To a wolf a rabbit wasn’t just something that was fun to chase. For the wolf had no herds for meat and milk, no fields of grain for meal to make dog biscuits.

  “What I ought to do,” grumbled the remorseless Shadow, treading at his heels, “is tell Jenkins that you ran out. You know that you should be listening.”

  Ebenezer did not answer, kept on trudging up the trail. For what Shadow said was true. Instead of rabbit-chasing, he should have been sitting up at Webster House listening—listening for the things that came to one—sounds and scents and awareness of something that was near. Like listening on one side of a wall to the things that were happening on the other, only they were faint and sometimes far away and hard to catch. Even harder, most times, to understand.

  It’s the animal in me, thought Ebenezer. The old flea-scratching, bone-chewing, gopher-digging dog that will not let me be—that sends me sneaking out to chase a rabbit when I should be listening, out prowling the forest when I should be reading the old books from the shelves that line the study wall.

  Too fast, he told himself. We came up too fast. Had to come up too fast.

  It took Man thousands of years to turn his grunts into the rudiments of speech. Thousands of years to discover fire and thousands more of years to invent the bow and arrow—thousands of years to learn to till the soil and harvest food, thousands of years to forsake the cave for a house he built himself.

  But in a little more than a thousand years from the day we learned to talk we were on our own—our own, that is, except for Jenkins.

  The forest thinned out into gnarled, scattered oaks that straggled up the hill, like hobbling old men who had wandered off the path.