City

by Clifford D. Simak

  But there was no bell. No buzzer. No knocker. The door was plain, with a simple latch. And that was all.

  Hesitantly, he lifted his fist and knocked and knocked again, then waited. There was no answer. The door was mute and motionless.

  He knocked again, louder this time. Still there was no answer.

  Slowly, cautiously, he put out a hand and seized the latch, pressed down with his thumb. The latch gave and the door swung open and Jenkins stepped inside.

  “You’re cracked in the brain,” said Lupus. “I’d make them come and find me. I’d give them a run they would remember. I’d make it tough for them.”

  Peter shook his head. “Maybe that’s the way you’d do it, Lupus, and maybe, it would be right for you. But it would be wrong for me. Websters never run away.”

  “How do you know?” the wolf asked pitilessly. “You’re just talking through your hair. No webster had to run away before and if no webster had to run away before, how do you know they never—”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Peter.

  They traveled in silence up the rocky path, breasting the hill.

  “There’s something trailing us,” said Lupus.

  “You’re just imagining,” said Peter. “What would be trailing us?”

  “I don’t know, but—”

  “Do you smell anything?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Did you hear anything or see anything?”

  “No, I didn’t, but—”

  “Then nothing’s following us,” Peter declared, positively. “Nothing ever, trails anything any more.”

  The moonlight filtered through the treetops, making the forest a mottled black and silver. From the river valley came the muffled sound of ducks in midnight argument. A soft breeze came blowing up the hillside, carrying with it a touch of river fog.

  Peter’s bowstring caught in a piece of brush and he stopped to untangle it. He dropped some of the arrows he was carrying and stooped to pick them up.

  “You better figure out some other way to carry them things,” Lupus growled at him. “You’re all the time getting tangled up and dropping them and—”

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” Peter told him, quietly. “Maybe a bag of some sort to hang around my shoulder.”

  They went on up the hill.

  “What are you going to do when you get to Webster House?” asked Lupus.

  “I’m going to see Jenkins,” Peter said. “I’m going to tell him what I’ve done.”

  “Fatso’s already told him.”

  “But maybe he told him wrong. Maybe he didn’t tell it right. Fatso was excited.”

  “Lame-brained, too,” said Lupus. They crossed a patch of moonlight and plunged on up the darkling path.

  “I’m getting nervous,” Lupus said. “I’m going to go back. This is a crazy thing you’re doing. I’ve come part way with you, but—”

  “Go back, then,” said Peter bitterly. “I’m not nervous, I’m—”

  He whirled around, hair rising on his scalp.

  For there was something wrong—something in the air he breathed, something in his mind—an eerie, disturbing sense of danger and, much more than danger, a loathsome feeling that clawed at his shoulder blades and crawled along his back with a million prickly feet.

  “Lupus!” he cried. “Lupus!”

  A bush stirred violently down the trail and Peter was running, pounding down the trail. He ducked around a bush and skidded to a halt. His bow came up and with one motion he picked an arrow from his left hand, nocked it to the cord.

  Lupus was stretched upon the ground, half in shade and half in moonlight. His lip was drawn back to show his fangs. One paw still faintly clawed.

  Above him crouched a shape. A shape—and nothing else. A shape that spat and snarled, a stream of angry sound that screamed in Peter’s brain. A tree branch moved in the wind and the moon showed through and Peter saw the outline of the face—a faint outline, like the half erased chalk lines upon a dusty board. A skull-like face with mewling mouth and slitted eyes and ears that were tufted with tentacles.

  The bow cord hummed and the arrow splashed into the face—splashed into it and passed through and fell upon the ground. And the face was there, still snarling.

  Another arrow nocked against the cord and back, far back, almost to the ear. An arrow driven by the snapping strength of well-seasoned straight-grained hickory—by the hate and fear and loathing of the man who pulled the cord.

  The arrow spat against the chalky outlines of the face, slowed and shivered, then fell free.

  Another arrow and back with the cord. Farther yet this time. Farther for more power to kill the thing that would not die when an arrow struck it. A thing that only slowed an arrow and made it shiver and then let it pass on through.

  Back and back—and back. And then it happened.

  The bow string broke.

  For an instant, Peter stood there with the useless weapon dangling in one hand, the useless arrow hanging from the other. Stood and stared across the little space that separated him from the shadow horror that crouched across the wolf’s gray body.

  And he knew no fear. No fear, even though the weapon was no more. But only flaming anger that shook him and a voice that hammered in his brain with one screaming word:

  KILL—KILL—KILL

  He threw away the bow and stepped forward, hands hooked at his side, hooked into puny claws.

  The shadow backed away—backed away in a sudden pool of fear that lapped against its brain—fear and horror at the flaming hatred that beat at it from the thing that walked toward it. Hatred that seized and twisted it. Fear and horror it had known before—fear and horror and disquieting resignation—but this was something new. This was a whiplash of torture that seared across its brain.

  This was hatred.

  The shadow whimpered to itself—whimpered and mewed and backed away and sought with frantic fingers of thought within its muddled brain for the symbols of escape.

  The room was empty—empty and old and hollow. A room that caught up the sound of the creaking door and flung it into muffled distances, then hurled it back again. A room heavy with the dust of forgetfulness, filled with the brooding silence of aimless centuries.

  Jenkins stood with the door pull in his hand, stood and flung all the sharp alertness of the new machinery that was his body into the corners and the darkened alcoves. There was nothing. Nothing but the silence and the dust and darkness. Nor anything to indicate that for many years there had been anything but silence, dust and darkness. No faintest tremor of a residuary thought, no footprints on the floor, no fingermarks scrawled across the table.

  An old song, an incredibly old song—a song that had been old when he had first been forged, crept out of some forgotten corner of his brain. And he was surprised that it still was there, surprised that he had ever known it—and knowing it, dismayed at the swirl of centuries that it conjured up, dismayed at the remembrance of the neat white houses that had stood upon a million hills, dismayed at the thought of men who had loved their acres and walked them with the calm and quiet assurance of their ownership.

  Annie doesn’t live here any more.

  Silly said Jenkins to himself. Silly that some absurdity of an all-but-vanished race should rise to haunt me now. Silly.

  Annie doesn’t live here any more.

  Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the sparrow—

  He closed the door behind him and walked across the room.

  Dust-covered furniture stood waiting for the man who had not returned. Dust-covered tools and gadgets lay on the table tops. Dust covered the titles of the rows of books that filled the massive bookcase.

  They are gone, said Jenkins, talking to himself. And no one knew the hour or the reason of their going. Nor even where they went. They slipped off in the night and told no one they were leaving. And sometimes, no doubt, they think back and chuckle—chuckle at the thought of our thinking that they still are here, chuckle at the watch we kee
p against their coming out.

  There were other doors and Jenkins strode to one. With his hand upon the latch he told himself the futility of opening it, the futility of searching any further. If this one room was old and empty, so would be all the other rooms.

  His thumb came down and the door came open and there was a blast of heat, but there was no room. There was desert—a gold and yellow desert stretching to a horizon that was dim and burnished in the heat of a great blue sun.

  A green and purple thing that might have been a lizard, but wasn’t, skittered like a flash across the sand, its tiny feet making the sound of eerie whistling.

  Jenkins slammed the door shut, stood numbed in mind and body.

  A desert. A desert and a thing that skittered. Not another room, not a hall, nor yet a porch—but a desert.

  And the sun was blue—blue and blazing hot.

  Slowly, cautiously he opened the door again, at first a crack and then a little wider.

  The desert still was there.

  Jenkins slammed the door and leaned with his back against it, as if he needed the strength of his metal body to hold out the desert, to hold out the implication of the door and desert.

  They were smart, he told himself. Smart and fast on their mental feet. Too fast and too smart for ordinary men. We never knew just how smart they were. But now I know they were smarter than we thought.

  This room is just an anteroom to many other worlds, a key that reached across unguessable space to other planets that swing around unknown suns. A way to leave this earth without ever leaving it—a way to cross the void by stepping through a door.

  There were other doors and Jenkins stared at them, stared and shook his head.

  Slowly he walked across the room to the entrance door. Quietly, unwilling to break the hush of the dust-filled room, he lifted the latch and let himself out and the familiar world was there. The world of moon and stars, of river fog drifting up between the hills, of treetops talking to one another across the notches of the hills.

  The mice still ran along their grassy burrows with happy mouse thoughts that were scarcely thoughts. An owl sat brooding in the tree and his thoughts were murder.

  So close, thought Jenkins. So close to the surface still, the old blood-hunger, the old bone-hate. But we’re giving them a better start than Man had—although probably it would have made no difference what kind of a start mankind might have had.

  And here it is again, the old blood-lust of Man, the craving to be different and to be stronger, to impose his will by things of his devising—things that make his arm stronger than any other arm or paw, to make his teeth sink deeper than any natural fang, to reach and hurt across distances that are beyond his own arm’s reach.

  I thought I could get help. That is why I came here. And there is no help.

  No help at all. For the Mutants were the only ones who might have helped and they have gone away.

  It’s up to you, Jenkins told himself, walking down the stairs. Mankind’s up to you. You’ve got to stop them, somehow. You’ve got to change them somehow. You can’t let them turn the world again into a bow and arrow world.

  He walked through the leafy darkness of the hollow and knew the scent of moldy leaves from the autumn’s harvest beneath the new green of growing things and that was something, he told himself, he’d never known before.

  His old body had no sense of smell.

  Smell and better vision and a sense of knowing, of knowing what a thing was thinking, to read the thoughts of raccoons, to guess the thoughts of mice, to know the murder in the brains of owls and weasels.

  And something more—a faint and wind-blown hatred, an alien scream of terror.

  It flicked across his brain and stopped him in his tracks, then sent him running, plunging up the hillside, not as a man might run in darkness, but as a robot runs, seeing in the dark and with the strength of metal that has no gasping lungs or panting breath.

  Hatred—and there could be one hatred only that could be like that.

  The sense grew deeper and sharper as he went up the path in leaping strides and his mind moaned with the fear that sat upon it—the fear of what he’d find.

  He plunged around a clump of bushes and skidded to a halt.

  The man was walking forward, with his hands clenched at his side and on the grass lay the broken bow. The wolf’s gray body lay half in the moonlight, half in shadow and backing away from it was a shadowy thing that was half-light, half-shadow, almost seen but never surely, like a phantom creature that moves within one’s dream.

  “Peter!” cried Jenkins, but the words were soundless in his mouth.

  For he sensed the frenzy in the brain of the half-seen creature, a frenzy of cowering terror that cut through the hatred of the man who walked forward toward the drooling, spitting blob of shadow. Cowering terror and frantic necessity—a necessity of finding, of remembering.

  The man was almost on it, walking straight and upright—a man with puny body and ridiculous fists—and courage. Courage, thought Jenkins, courage to take on hell itself. Courage to go down into the pit and rip up the quaking flagstones and shout a lurid, obscene jest at the keeper of the damned.

  Then the creature had it—had the thing it had been groping for, knew the thing to do. Jenkins sensed the flood of relief that flashed across its being, heard the thing, part word, part symbol, part thought, that it performed. Like a piece of mumbo-jumbo, like a spoken charm, like an incantation, but not entirely that. A mental exercise, a thought that took command of the body—that must be nearer to the truth.

  For it worked.

  The creature vanished. Vanished and was gone—gone out of the world.

  There was no sign of it, no single vibration of its being. As if it had never been.

  And the thing it had said, the thing that it had thought? It went like this. Like this—

  Jenkins jerked himself up short. It was printed on his brain and he knew it, knew the word and thought and the right inflection—but he must not use it, he must forget about it, he must keep it hidden.

  For it had worked on the cobbly. And it would work on him. He knew that it would work.

  The man had swung around and now he stood limp, hands dangling at his side, staring at Jenkins.

  His lips moved in the white blur of his face. “You…you—”

  “I am Jenkins,” Jenkins told him. “This is my new body.”

  “There was something here,” said Peter.

  “It was a cobbly,” said Jenkins. “Joshua told me one had gotten through.”

  “It killed Lupus,” said Peter.

  Jenkins nodded. “Yes, it killed Lupus. And it killed many others. It was the thing that has been killing.”

  “And I killed it,” said Peter. “I killed it…or drove it away…or something.”

  “You frightened it away,” said Jenkins. “You were stronger than it was. It was afraid of you. You frightened it back to the world it came from.”

  “I could have killed it,” Peter boasted, “but the cord broke—”

  “Next time,” said Jenkins quietly, “you must make stronger cords. I will show you how it’s done. And a steel tip for your arrow—”

  “For my what?”

  “For your arrow. The throwing stick is an arrow. The stick and cord you throw it with is called a bow. All together, it’s called a bow and arrow.”

  Peter’s shoulders sagged. “It was done before, then. I was not the first?”

  Jenkins shook his head. “No, you were not the first.”

  Jenkins walked across the grass and lay his hand upon Peter’s shoulder.

  “Come home with me, Peter.”

  Peter shook his head. “No. I’ll sit here with Lupus until the morning comes. And then I’ll call in his friends and we will bury him.”

  He lifted his head to look into Jenkins’ face. “Lupus was a friend of mine. A great friend, Jenkins.”

  “I know he must have been,” said Jenkins. “But I’ll be seeing yo
u?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Peter. “I’m coming to the picnic. The Webster picnic. It’s in a week or so.”

  “So it is,” said Jenkins, speaking very slowly, thinking as he spoke. “So it is. And I will see you then.”

  He turned around and walked slowly up the hill.

  Peter sat down beside the dead wolf, waiting for the dawn. Once or twice, he lifted his hand to brush at his cheeks.

  They sat in a semicircle facing Jenkins and listened to him closely.

  “Now, you must pay attention,” Jenkins said. “That is most important. You must pay attention and you must think real hard and you must hang very tightly to the things you have—to the lunch baskets and the bows and arrows and the other things.”

  One of the girls giggled. “Is this a new game, Jenkins?”

  “Yes,” said Jenkins, “sort of. I guess that is what it is—a new game. And an exciting one. A most exciting one.”

  Someone said: “Jenkins always thinks up a new game for the Webster picnic.”

  “And now,” said Jenkins, “you must pay attention. You must look at me and try to figure out the thing I’m thinking—”

  “It’s a guessing game,” shrieked the giggling girl. “I love guessing games.”

  Jenkins made his mouth into a smile. “You’re right,” he said. “That’s exactly what it is—a guessing game. And now if you will pay attention and look at me—”

  “I want to try out these bows and arrows,” said one of the men. “After this is over, we can try them out, can’t we, Jenkins?”

  “Yes,” said Jenkins patiently, “after this is over you can try them out.”

  He closed his eyes and made his brain reach out for each of them, ticking them off individually, sensing the thrilled expectancy of the minds that yearned toward his, felt the little probing fingers of thought that were dabbing at his brain.

  “Harder,” Jenkins thought. “Harder! Harder!”

  A quiver went across his mind and he brushed it away. Not hypnotism—nor yet telepathy, but the best that he could do. A drawing together, a huddling together of minds—and it was all a game.

  Slowly, carefully, he brought out the hidden symbol—the words, the thought and the inflection. Easily he slid them into his brain, one by one, like one would speak to a child, trying to teach it the exact tone, the way to hold its lips, the way to move its tongue.