The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two

by Clifford D. Simak

  “To me, that’s far,” said Lambert. “In all my life I’ve never been more than twenty miles away. The spaceport across the river is as far as I’ve ever been.”

  “You visit the port quite often?”

  “At one time, I did. In my younger days. Not recently. From here, where I sit, I can see the ships come in and leave.”

  “You sit and watch for them?”

  “Once I did. Not now. I still see them now and then. I no longer watch for them.”

  “You have a brother, I understand, who is out in space.”

  “Yes, Phil. Phil is the wanderer of the family. There were just the two of us. Identical twins.”

  “You see him now and then? I mean, he comes back to visit.”

  “Occasionally. Three or four times, that is all. But not in recent years. The last time he was home was twenty years ago. He was always in a hurry. He could only stay a day or two. He had great tales to tell.”

  “But you, yourself, stayed home. Twenty miles, you said, the farthest you’ve ever been away.”

  “There was a time,” said Lambert, “when I wanted to go with him. But I couldn’t. We were born late in our parents’ life. They were old when we were still young. Someone had to stay here with them. And after they were gone, I found I couldn’t leave. These hills, these woods, the streams had become too much a part of me.”

  Anderson nodded. “I can understand that. It is reflected in your writing. You became the pastoral spokesman of the century. I am quoting others, but certainly you know that.”

  Lambert grunted. “Nature writing. At one time, it was in the great American tradition. When I first started writing it, fifty years ago, it had gone out of style. No one understood it, no one wanted it. No one saw the need for it. But now it’s back again. Every damn fool who can manage to put three words together is writing it again.”

  “But none as well as you.”

  “I’ve been at it longer. I have more practice doing it.”

  “Now,” said Anderson, “there is greater need of it. A reminder of a heritage that we almost lost.”

  “Perhaps,” said Lambert.

  “To get back to your brother …”

  “A moment, please,” said Lambert. “You have been asking me a lot of questions. No preliminaries. No easy build up. None of the usual conversational amenities. You simply came barging in and began asking questions. You tell me your name and that you are from the university, but that is all. For the record, Mr. Anderson, please tell me what you are.”

  “I am sorry,” said Anderson. “I’ll admit to little tact, despite the fact that is one of the basics of my profession. I should know its value. I’m with the psychology department and …”

  “Psychology?”

  “Yes, psychology.”

  “I would have thought,” said Lambert, “that you were in English or, perhaps, ecology or some subject dealing with the environment. How come a psychologist would drop by to talk with a nature writer?”

  “Please bear with me,” Anderson pleaded. “I went at this all wrong. Let us start again. I came, really, to talk about your brother.”

  “What about my brother? How could you know about him? Folks hereabouts know, but no one else. In my writings, I have never mentioned him.”

  “I spent a week last summer at a fishing camp only a few miles from here. I heard about him then.”

  “And some of those you talked with told you I never had a brother.”

  “That is it, exactly. You see, I have this study I have been working on for the last five years.…”

  “I don’t know how the story ever got started,” said Lambert, “that I never had a brother. I have paid no attention to it, and I don’t see why you …”

  “Mr. Lambert,” said Anderson, “please pardon me. I’ve checked the birth records at the county seat and the census …”

  “I can remember it,” said Lambert, “as if it were only yesterday, the day my brother left. We were working in the barn, there across the road. The barn is no longer used now and, as you can see, has fallen in upon itself. But then it was used. My father farmed the meadow over there that runs along the creek. That land grew, still would grow if someone used it, the most beautiful corn that you ever saw. Better corn than the Iowa prairie land. Better than any place on earth. I farmed it for years after my father died, but I no longer farm it. I went out of the farming business a good ten years ago. Sold off all the stock and machinery. Now I keep a little kitchen garden. Not too large. It needn’t be too large. There is only …”

  “You were saying about your brother?”

  “Yes, I guess I was. Phil and I were working in the barn one day. It was a rainy day—no, not really a rainy day, just drizzling. We were repairing harness. Yes, harness. My father was a strange man in many ways. Strange in reasonable sorts of ways. He didn’t believe in using machinery any more than necessary. There was never a tractor on the place. He thought horses were better. On a small place like this, they were. I used them myself until I finally had to sell them. It was an emotional wrench to sell them. The horses and I were friends. But, anyhow, the two of us were working at the harness when Phil said to me, out of the thin air, that he was going to the port and try to get a job on one of the ships. We had talked about it, off and on, before, and both of us had a hankering to go, but it was a surprise to me when Phil spoke up and said that he was going. I had no idea that he had made up his mind. There is something about this that you have to understand—the time, the circumstance, the newness and excitement of travel to the stars in that day of more than fifty years ago. There were days, far back in our history, when New England boys ran off to sea. In that time of fifty years ago, they were running off to space.…”

  Telling it, he remembered it, as he had told Anderson, as if it were only yesterday. It all came clear and real again, even to the musty scent of last year’s hay in the loft above them. Pigeons were cooing in the upper reaches of the barn, and, up in the hillside pasture, a lonesome cow was bawling. The horses stamped in their stalls and made small sounds, munching at the hay remaining in their mangers.

  “I made up my mind last night,” said Phil, “but I didn’t tell you because I wanted to be sure. I could wait, of course, but if I wait, there’s the chance I’ll never go. I don’t want to live out my life here wishing I had gone. You’ll tell pa, won’t you? After I am gone. Sometime this afternoon, giving me a chance to get away.”

  “He wouldn’t follow you,” said Edward Lambert. “It would be best for you to tell him. He might reason with you, but he wouldn’t stop your going.”

  “If I tell him, I will never go,” said Phil. “I’ll see the look upon his face and I’ll never go. You’ll have to do this much for me, Ed. You’ll have to tell him so I won’t see the look upon his face.”

  “How can you get on a ship? They don’t want a green farm boy. They want people who are trained.”

  “There’ll be a ship,” said Phil, “that is scheduled to lift off, but with a crew member or two not there. They won’t wait for them, they won’t waste the time to hunt them down. They’ll take anyone who’s there. In a day or two, I’ll find that kind of ship.”

  Lambert remembered once again how he had stood in the barn door, watching his brother walking down the road, his boots splashing in the puddles, his figure blurred by the mist-like drizzle. For a long time after he could no longer see him, long after the grayness of the drizzle had blotted out his form, he had still imagined he would see him, an ever smaller figure trudging down the road. He recalled the tightness in his chest, the choke within his throat, the terrible, gut-twisting heaviness of grief at his brother’s leaving. As if a part of him were gone, as if he had been torn in two, as if only half of him were left.

  “We were twins,” he told Anderson. “Identical twins. We were closer than most brothers. We lived in one another’s pocke
t. We did everything together. Each of us felt the same about the other. It took a lot of courage for Phil to walk away like that.”

  “And a lot of courage and affection on your part,” said Anderson, “to let him walk away. But he did come back again?”

  “Not for a long time. Not until after both our parents were dead. Then he came walking down the road, just the way he’d left. But he didn’t stay. Only for a day or two. He was anxious to be off. As if he were being driven.”

  Although that was not exactly right, he told himself. Nervous. Jumpy. Looking back across his shoulder. As if he were being followed. Looking back to make sure the Follower was not there.

  “He came a few more times,” he said. “Years apart. He never stayed too long. He was anxious to get back.”

  “How can you explain this idea that people have that you never had a brother?” asked Anderson. “How do you explain the silence of the records?”

  “I have no explanation,” Lambert said. “People get some strange ideas. A thoughtless rumor starts—perhaps no more than a question: ‘About this brother of his? Does he really have a brother? Was there ever any brother?’ And others pick it up and build it up and it goes on from there. Out in these hills there’s not much to talk about. They grab at anything there is. It would be an intriguing thing to talk about—that old fool down in the valley who thinks he has a brother that he never had, bragging about this nonexistent brother out among the stars. Although it seems to me that I never really bragged. I never traded on him.”

  “And the records? Or the absence of the records?”

  “I just don’t know,” said Lambert. “I didn’t know about the records. I’ve never checked. There was never any reason to. You see, I know I have a brother.”

  “Do you think that you may be getting up to Madison?”

  “I know I won’t,” said Lambert. “I seldom leave this place. I no longer have a car. I catch a ride with a neighbor when I can to go to the store and get the few things that I need. I’m satisfied right here. There’s no need to go anywhere.”

  “You’ve lived here alone since your parents died?”

  “That is right,” said Lambert. “And I think this has gone far enough. I’m not sure I like you, Mr. Anderson. Or should that be Dr. Anderson? I suspect it should. I’m not going to the university to answer questions that you want me to or to submit to tests in this study of yours. I’m not sure what your interest is and I’m not even faintly interested. I have other, more important things to do.”

  Anderson rose from the chair. “I am sorry,” he said. “I had not meant …”

  “Don’t apologize,” said Lambert.

  “I wish we could part on a happier note,” said Anderson.

  “Don’t let it bother you,” said Lambert. “Just forget about it. That’s what I plan to do.”

  He continued sitting in the chair long after the visitor had left. A few cars went past, not many, for this was a lightly traveled road, one that really went nowhere, just an access for the few families that lived along the valley and back in the hills.

  The gall of the man, he thought, the arrogance of him, to come storming in and asking all those questions. That study of his—perhaps a survey of the fantasies engaged in by an aged population. Although it need not be that; it might be any one of a number of other things.

  There was, he cautioned himself, no reason to get upset by it. It was not important; bad manners never were important to anyone but those who practiced them.

  He rocked gently back and forth, the rockers complaining on the stones, and gazed across the road and valley to the place along the opposite hill where the creek ran, its waters gurgling over stony shallows and swirling in deep pools. The creek held many memories. There, in long, hot summer days, he and Phil had fished for chubs, using crooked willow branches for rods because there was no money to buy regular fishing gear—not that they would have wanted it even if there had been. In the spring great shoals of suckers had come surging up the creek from the Wisconsin River to reach their spawning areas. He and Phil would go out and seine them, with a seine rigged from a gunny sack, its open end held open by a barrel hoop.

  The creek held many memories for him and so did all the land, the towering hills, the little hidden valleys, the heavy hardwood forest that covered all except those few level areas that had been cleared for farming. He knew every path and byway of it. He knew what grew on and lived there and where it grew or lived. He knew of the secrets of the few surrounding square miles of countryside, but not all the secrets; no man was born who could know all the secrets.

  He had, he told himself, the best of two worlds. Of two worlds, for he had not told Anderson, he had not told anyone, of that secret link that tied him to Phil. It was a link that never had seemed strange because it was something they had known from the time when they were small. Even apart, they had known what the other might be doing. It was no wondrous thing to them; it was something they had taken very much for granted. Years later, he had read in learned journals the studies that had been made of identical twins, with the academic speculation that in some strange manner they seemed to hold telepathic powers which operated only between the two of them—as if they were, in fact, one person in two different bodies.

  That was the way of it, most certainly, with him and Phil, although whether it might be telepathy, he had never even wondered until he stumbled on the journals. It did not seem, he thought, rocking in the chair, much like telepathy, for telepathy, as he understood it, was the deliberate sending and receiving of mental messages; it had simply been a knowing, of where the other was and what he might be doing. It had been that way when they were youngsters and that way ever since. Not a continued knowing, not continued contact, if it was contact. Through the years, however, it happened fairly often. He had known through all the years since Phil had gone walking down the road the many planets that Phil had visited, the ships he’d traveled on—had seen it all with Phil’s eyes, had understood it with Phil’s brain, had known the names of the places Phil had seen and understood, as Phil had understood, what had happened in each place. It had not been a conversation; they had not talked with one another; there had been no need to talk. And although Phil had never told him, he was certain Phil had known what he was doing and where he was and what he might be seeing. Even on the few occasions that Phil had come to visit, they had not talked about it; it was no subject for discussion since both accepted it.

  In the middle of the afternoon, a beat-up car pulled up before the gate, the motor coughing to a stuttering halt. Jake Hopkins, one of his neighbors up the creek, climbed out, carrying a small basket. He came up on the patio and, setting the basket down, sat down in the other chair.

  “Katie sent along a loaf of bread and a blackberry pie,” he said. “This is about the last of the blackberries. Poor crop this year. The summer was too dry.”

  “Didn’t do much blackberrying myself this year,” said Lambert. “Just out a time or two. The best ones are on that ridge over yonder, and I swear that hill gets steeper year by year.”

  “It gets steeper for all of us,” said Hopkins. “You and I, we’ve been here a long time, Ed.”

  “Tell Katie thanks,” said Lambert. “There ain’t no one can make a better pie than she. Pies, I never bother with them, although I purely love them. I do some cooking, of course, but pies take too much time and fuss.”

  “Hear anything about this new critter in the hills?” asked Hopkins.

  Lambert chuckled. “Another one of those wild talks, Jake. Every so often, a couple of times a year, someone starts a story. Remember that one about the swamp beast down at Millville? Papers over in Milwaukee got hold of it, and a sportsman down in Texas read about it and came up with a pack of dogs. He spent three days at Millville, floundering around in the swamps, lost one dog to a rattler, and, so I was told, you never saw a madder white man in your life. He felt tha
t he had been took, and I suppose he was, for there was never any beast. We get bear and panther stories, and there hasn’t been a bear or panther in these parts for more than forty years. Once, some years ago some damn fool started a story about a big snake. Big around as a nail keg and thirty feet long. Half the county was out hunting it.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Hopkins. “There’s nothing to most of the stories, but Caleb Jones told me one of his boys saw this thing, whatever it may be. Like an ape, or a bear that isn’t quite a bear. All over furry, naked. A snowman, Caleb thinks.”

  “Well, at least,” said Lambert, “that is something new. There hasn’t been anyone, to my knowledge, claimed to see a snowman here. There have been a lot of reports, however, from the West Coast. It just took a little time to transfer a snowman here.”

  “One could have wandered east.”

  “I suppose so. If there are any of them out there, that is. I’m not too sure there are.”

  “Well, anyhow,” said Hopkins, “I thought I’d let you know. You are kind of isolated here. No telephone or nothing. You never even run in electricity.”

  “I don’t need either a telephone or electricity,” said Lambert. “The only thing about electricity that would tempt me would be a refrigerator. And I don’t need that. I got the springhouse over there. It’s as good as any refrigerator. Keeps butter sweet for weeks. And a telephone. I don’t need a telephone. I have no one to talk to.”

  “I’ll say this,” said Hopkins. “You get along all right. Even without a telephone or the electric. Better than most folks.”

  “I never wanted much,” said Lambert. “That’s the secret of it—I never wanted much.”

  “You working on another book?”

  “Jake, I’m always working on another book. Writing down the things I see and hear and the way I feel about them. I’d do it even if no one was interested in them. I’d write it down even if there were no books.”

  “You read a lot,” said Hopkins. “More than most of us.”