They Walked Like Men

by Clifford D. Simak

  “Well, maybe not,” he admitted. “Maybe not exactly what I had in mind. But the result would be the same.”

  He turned back to the laboratory bench and pulled out a drawer and burrowed into it, thrusting stuff aside. Finally he came up with what he had been after, a transparent plastic bag.

  “Here,” he said, “let’s dump them into this. Then we can have a look at them.”

  He held the bag, stretching its mouth as wide as he could. With the help of the Dog, I upended the improvised sack and shook the bowling balls out of it into the plastic sack. A few scraps and pieces fell out on the floor. Without bothering to shape themselves into balls, they snaked swiftly for the sink, swarmed up its iron legs, and tumbled down into the basin.

  The Dog had started to give chase, but they were too fast for him. He came back crestfallen, his ears drooping and his tail at modified half-mast.

  “They retreated down the drain,” he told us.

  “Oh well,” said Stirling, happy and elated, “we have most of them right here.”

  He tied a good stout knot in the top of the sack and hoisted it up. He passed a hook hanging from a standard above the bench through the knot and the sack hung there, suspended in midair. The plastic was so transparent that you could see the bowling balls without any trouble, every line and shade of them.

  “You,” the Dog asked anxiously, “intend to take them apart?”

  “In time,” said Stirling. “First I’ll watch them and study them and put them through their paces.”

  “Tough paces?” the Dog asked anxiously.

  “Say, what have we here?” asked Stirling.

  “He doesn’t like our friends,” I said. “They’re cutting in on him. They’re lousing up his racket.”

  Off to one side of the room, a telephone purred quietly.

  We all stood silent, stricken.

  The telephone rang again.

  There was something horrifying in the tinkling of the bell. We had been standing there, all snug and all alone, and the bowling balls, for the moment, had been no more than academic objects of great curiosity. But the phone’s ring changed all that and the world came crashing in. There now was no aloneness and there was no snugness, for now we were not alone concerned, and the things hanging in the plastic bag were now far from academic: they were now a menace and a threat and something to be feared and hated.

  Now I saw the great black of the night outside and could sense the coldness and the arrogance that held the world entrapped. The room contracted to a cold place of gleaming light shattering on the shine of the laboratory bench and the sink and glassware, and 1 was a feebleness that stood there, and the Dog and Stirling had no more strength than I.

  “Hello,” said Stirling on the phone. And then be said, “No, I hadn’t heard it. There must be some mistake. He is here right now.”

  He listened for a moment and then cut in. “But he’s right here with me. He and a talking dog.”

  “No, he isn’t drunk. No, I tell you, he’s all right—”

  I strode forward. “Hey, give it to me!” I yelled.

  He shoved the receiver at me and I could hear Joy’s voice:

  “You, Parker—what is going on? The radio—” “Yeah, I heard it. Those radio guys are crazy.” “Why didn’t you phone me, Parker? You knew that I would hear it—”

  “No, how could I know? I was busy. I had a lot of things to do. I found Atwood and he broke up into bowling balls and I caught him in a sack and there was this dog waiting in the car—”

  “Parker, are you all right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Sure, I am all right.”

  “Parker, I’m so scared.”

  “Hell,” I said, “there’s nothing to be scared of now. It wasn’t me in the car, and I found Atwood and—”

  “That isn’t what I mean. There are things outside.”

  “There are always things outside,” I told her. “There are dogs and cats and squirrels and other people—”

  “But there are things that pad. They are all around the place and they are looking in and—please come and get me, Parker!”

  She scared me. This wasn’t just a foolish woman frightened by the darkness and her own imagination. There was something in her voice, some restrained quality fighting to hold out against hysteria, that convinced me it was not imagination.

  “All right,” I said. “Hold on. I’ll be there as soon as I can make it.”

  “Parker, please . ..”

  “Get on your coat. Stay by the door and watch for the car. But don’t come out until I come up the walk to get you.”

  “All right.” She said it almost calmly.

  I banged up the phone and swung around to Stirling.

  “The rifle,” I said.

  “Over in the corner.”

  I saw it leaning there and went to pick it up. Stirling rummaged in a drawer and came up with a box of cartridges and handed them to me. I broke the box and some of the cartridges spilled onto the floor. Stirling bent to pick them up.

  I rammed shells into the magazine, dumped the rest of them into my pocket.

  “I’m going to get Joy,” I told him. “There’s something wrong?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I said. I pounded out the door and down the steps. The Dog followed at my heels.

  XX

  Joy lived in a small house out in the northwest part of town. For years she had been talking, ever since her mother died, of selling the place and moving into an apartment building closer to the office. But she had never done it. Something held her there—perhaps the old associations and sentimental ties, perhaps the unwillingness to take the chance of moving somewhere else and then not liking it.

  I picked a street where I knew the blinking traffic lights would be to my advantage and I made good time.

  The Dog, sitting in the seat beside me, with the wind from the partly-open window plastering his whiskers smooth against his face, asked one question only.

  “This Joy,” he said, “is a good companion?”

  “The very best,” I told him.

  He sat considering that. You could almost hear him considering it. But he said no more.

  I cheated on the lights and went faster than the law allowed and wondered all the way what I would tell a cop if one came roaring after me. But none did and I pulled up in front of Joy’s house with the brakes full on and the tires whining on the pavement, and the Dog piled up against the windshield quite surprised by it.

  The house sat back some distance from the street and was surrounded by an ancient picket fence, which enclosed a yard half choked with trees and shrubs and zigzag, wandering flower beds. The front gate stood open, as it had stood ever since I’d known the place, sagging on its rusty hinges. I saw that the porch light was on and that there were lights in the front hall and living room.

  I jumped out of the car, dragging the rifle with me, and raced around the car. The Dog beat me to the gate and went tearing through it, plunging madly into the shrubbery jungle off the brick-paved walk. I caught one glimpse of him as he disappeared, and his ears were laid back tight against his skull, his lips were parted in a snarl, and his tail was at full mast.

  I went through the gate and pounded up the walk, while off to the left, in the direction in which the Dog had gone, there suddenly erupted a most unholy and bloodcurdling racket.

  The front door came open and Joy ran across the porch. I met her on the steps. She hesitated for a moment, looking off into the yard from where all the noise was coming.

  The racket had grown louder now. It was a hard thing to describe. It sounded something like a calliope that had gone raving mad, and intermingled with it was the undertone of something large running angrily and swiftly through a field of tall, dry grass.

  I grabbed Joy’s arm and shoved her down the walk. “Dog!” I shouted. “Dog!” The racket still kept on.

  We reached the sidewalk and I pushed Joy into the front seat and slammed the door.

  There still was no
sign of the Dog.

  Lights were going on in a few of the houses up and down the street and I heard a door bang as someone came out on a porch.

  I ran back to the gate. “Dog!” I shouted once again.

  He came charging out of the shrubbery, tail tucked tight against his rump and slobbery foam streaming from his wetted whiskers. There was something running close behind him—a black and knobby something with the entire front of it a gaping, hungry mouth.

  I had no idea what it was. I had no idea what to do. What I did I did instinctively, without any thought at all. I used the rifle like a golf club. Why I didn’t shoot, I don’t know. Perhaps there was no time to; perhaps there was another reason. Perhaps I sensed that a bullet would be useless against the charging maw.

  Before I knew what I was about, I had hands around the barrel and the butt was back behind my shoulders and was swinging forward.

  The Dog was past me and the knobby shape was coming through the gate and the rifle was a vicious club that a most whistled as it swung. Then it hit and there was no shock. The black thing spattered and the butt went though it—I mean through it, like a knife through butter—and there was a gummy mess running on the sidewa k and the pickets dripped. There was a floundering in the shrubbery and I knew that there were others coming, but I didn’t wait. I turned and ran. I ran around the car and tossed the rifle into the seat alongside Joy, then leaped in myself. I had left the motor running and I gunned the car out from the curb and went up the street with the accelerator tight against the floor. Joy was huddled in the seat, sobbing softly. “Cut it out,” I told her. She tried to but she couldn’t.

  “They always do it short,” the Dog said from the back seat. “They always do it half. They do not acquire the intestines to do it as they should.” “You mean the guts,” I told him. Joy stopped her bawling.

  “Carleton said you had a talking dog,” she said half angrily, half frightened, “and I don’t believe it. What kind of trick is this?”

  “No trick, my fair one,” said the Dog. “Do you not think I enunciate most clearly?”

  “Joy,” I told her, “drop everything you ever knew. Get rid of all convictions. Forget everything that’s right and logical and proper. Imagine yourself in a sort of ogre-land, where anything can happen, and mostly for the worst.” “But—” she said.

  “But that’s the way it is,” I said. “What you knew this morning isn’t true tonight. There are talking dogs that aren’t really dogs. And there are bowling balls that can be anything they choose. They’re buying up the Earth, and Man, perhaps, no longer owns it, and you and I, even now, may be hunted rats.”

  In the glow of the instrument panel, I could see her face, the puzzle and the wonderment and hurt, and I wanted to put my arms around “her and hold her close and try to wipe away some of the puzzlement and hurt. But I couldn’t do it. I had a car to drive and I had to try to figure out what we would do next.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, and she kept her voice calm, but there was strain and terror just beneath the calmness. “There was the car… “

  She reached out a hand and grabbed my arm. “There was the car,” she said.

  “Take it easy, gal,” I told her. “Take it very easy. All that is behind us. What worries me is what is up ahead.”

  “You were afraid to go out to the car,” she said. “You thought you were a coward. It worried you—that fear. And yet it saved your life.”

  The Dog said from the back seat: “It might interest you that there is a car behind us.”

  XXI

  I looked into the rear-vision mirror and the Dog was right. There was a car behind us. It was a one-eyed car.

  “Maybe it doesn’t mean a thing,” I said.

  I slowed down and made a left-hand turn. The car behind us also made the turn. I made another left and then a right and so did the other car.

  “Might be the police,” said Joy.

  “With just one light?” I asked. “And if it were, they’d have the siren and the red light going the speed we were hitting back there.”

  I made a few more turns. I got on a boulevard and opened up and the car behind us matched our speed.

  “What do we do now?” I asked. “I had intended to go back to the university and up to Stirling’s lab. We need to talk with him. But we can’t do it now.”

  “How’s the gas?” asked Joy.

  “Better than a half a tank.”

  “The cabin,” Joy said.

  “You mean Stirling’s cabin?”

  She nodded. “If we could take his boat and get out in the lake.”

  “They’d turn into a Loch Ness monster.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe they have never heard of the Loch Ness monster.”

  “Then into some other aquatic monster from some other world.”

  “But we can’t stay in the city, Parker. Stay here and the police will get into the act.”

  “Maybe,” I told her, “that would be the best thing that could happen.”

  But I knew it wasn’t. The police would haul us in and we’d lose a lot of time and we could talk from now till doomsday and they’d not .believe a word we said about the bowling balls. And I shivered to think of what would happen if they found a talking dog. They’d figure I was a ventriloquist and was playing tricks on them and they’d be really sore.

  I switched over a half a dozen blocks or so until I hit a highway leading north and out of town. If I had to head for anywhere, maybe Stirling’s cabin was as good as any.

  There wasn’t any traffic, just a truck every now and then, and I really opened up. The needle hit eighty-five and hung there. I could have pushed it harder, but I was afraid to do it. There were some tricky curves up ahead and I had a hard time remembering exactly where they were. “Still following?” I asked.

  “Still following,” said the Dog, “but they have fallen off. They are not so near.”

  I knew then that we weren’t going to shake them. We could build up some distance on them, but they would still be there. Unless they missed us at the turnoff for the cabin they’d come piling in behind us—no more than two or three minutes behind us. And I couldn’t be sure we could duck them at the turnoff.

  If I was going to shake them, there was going to have to be another way to do it.

  The character of the land was changing now. We had left behind us the flat agricultural area and were entering the humpy sand hills covered by evergreens and dotted with small lakes. And it was just beyond, if my memory were not wrong, that the road began to curve—several miles of wicked curves that snaked in and out between the jagged hillocks and the swamps and lakes that lay between them. “How far are they behind us?” I asked. “A mile or so,” said Joy. “Listen.” “I am listening.”

  “I’ll stop the car when we hit the curves ahead. I’ll get out. You take the wheel. Drive on for a ways, then stop and wait. When you hear me shoot, come back.”

  “You’re crazy,” she told me angrily. “You can’t tangle with them. You don’t know what they’ll do.”

  “We’re even, then,” I said. “They don’t know what I’ll do.”

  “But you alone—”

  “Not me alone,” I told her. “I have old Betsy there. She’ll drop a moose. She’ll stop a charging grizzly.”

  We hit the first of the curve and ground around it. I had hit it too fast and I had to fight the wheel while the tires screamed in shrill protest.

  Then we hit the second, still too fast, and finally the third. I put on the brakes, hard, and the car skidded to a halt, half slewed across the road. I grabbed the rifle and, opening the door, slid out.

  “All yours,” I said to Joy.

  She didn’t argue or protest. She didn’t say a word. She had made her “protest and I had brushed it ofi and that was the end of it. She was an all-right gal.

  She slid underneath the wheel. I stepped to one side and the car gunned ofi. The taillights winked around the curve and I was alone.

  The qu
iet was frightening. There was no sound except the faint rustling of the few remaining leaves in an aspen tree that stood among the pines and the ghostly sighing of the pines themselves. The hills loomed jagged black against the paler sky. And there was the smell of wilderness and the feel of autumn.

  The gun felt gummy and I rubbed my hand along it. It was greasy, sticky greasy. And it had a smell—the shaving lotion smell I first had smelled that morning

  This morning, I thought—good God, had it only been this morning! I tried to track it back and it was a thousand years ago. It could not have been this morning.

  I moved a bit off the road and stood on the shoulder. I rubbed my hand along the rifle stock, trying to rub off the gummy grease. But it would not wipe off. My palm slid over it.

  In a few more seconds a car would come around that curve, probably traveling fast. And when I fired, the shooting would be fast and almost by instinct, for I’d be shooting in the dark.

  And what, I wondered, if it should turn out to be a regular car, a normal, human car carrying law-abiding humans? What if it were not following us at all, but by some odd happenstance had simply taken the same route that I had taken in attempting to escape it?

  I thought about it and the sweat broke out of my armpits and trickled hotly down my ribs.

  But it couldn’t be, I told myself. I had done a lot of turning and a lot of twisting, and none ef that turning and that twisting had made any sense at all. And yet the one-eyed car, had followed us on every twist and turn.

  The road curved to the top of one of the hillocks, then curled along its side. When the car came around the curve it would be silhouetted for a moment against the paler sky, and it was in that instant that I had to shoot.

  I half raised the gun and I found my hands were trembling, and that was the worst thing that could happen. I lowered the gun again and fought to get control, to stop the trembling, but it was no use.

  I made another try. I raised the gun again and, even as I did the car came around the curve, and in that single instant I saw the thing that stopped the trembling, that froze me in my tracks and turned me steady as a rock.