Dusty Zebra: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  He was on a narrow catwalk that ran in a circle, with the wall behind him and the railing out in front. And down in the pit circled by the catwalk was something that could be only Harvey.

  …Hello, son, it said, or seemed to say, inside his brain.

  Hello, son. I’m glad that you’ve come home again.

  He stepped forward to the railing eagerly and leaned the maul against it and gripped the railing with both hands to stare down into the pit, enveloped in the feel of father-love that welled up from the thing that squatted in the pit—the old pipe-tweed coat-grizzled whisker love he’d forgotten long ago.

  A lump came in his throat and tears smarted in his eyes and he forgot the barren street outside and all the lonely years.

  The love kept welling up—the love and understanding and the faint amusement that he should have expected anything but love from an entity to which he had been tied so intimately for all of thirty years.

  You did a good job, son. I am proud of you. I’m glad that you’ve come home to me again.

  He leaned across the railing, yearning toward the father squatting in the pit, and one of the rails caught against the knotted shirt tail and shoved it hard against his belly.

  Reflexes clicked within his brain and he said, almost automatically: I tie this knot because I’m not…

  And then he was saying it consciously and with fervor, like a single chant.

  I tie this knot because I’m not the final gentleman.

  I tie this knot because I’m not…

  He was shouting now and the sweat streamed down his face and he fought like a drunken man to push back from the railing, and still he was conscious of the father, not insistent, not demanding, but somewhat hurt and puzzled by this ingratitude.

  Harrington’s hand slipped from the top rail and the fingers touched the handle of the maul and seized and closed upon it and lifted it from the floor to throw.

  But even as he lifted it, the door catch snicked behind him and he swung around.

  Cedric Madison stood just inside the door and his death-head face wore a look of utter calm.

  “Get him off my back!” yelled Harrington. “Make him let loose of me or I will let you have it.”

  And was surprised to find that he meant every word of it, that a man as mild as he could find it in his heart to kill another man without a second thought.

  “All right,” said Madison, and the father-love was gone and the world stood cold and hard and empty, with just the two of them standing face to face.

  “I’m sorry that this happened, Harrington. You are the first…”

  “You took a chance,” said Harrington. “You tried to turn me loose. What did you expect I would do—moon around and wonder what had happened to me?”

  “We’ll take you back again. It was a pleasant life. You can live it out.”

  “I have no doubt you would. You and White and all the rest of—”

  Madison sighed, a very patient sigh. “Leave White out of this,” he said. “The poor fool thinks that Harvey…”

  He stopped what he meant to say and chuckled.

  “Believe me, Harrington, it’s a slick and foolproof setup. It is even better than the oracle at Delphi.”

  He was sure of himself, so sure that it sent a thrill of apprehension deep through Harrington, a sense of being trapped, of being backed into a corner from which he never could escape.

  They had him cold, he thought, between the two of them—Madison in front and Harvey at his rear. Any second now Harvey would throw another punch at him and despite all that he had said, despite the maul he gripped, despite the knotted shirt tails and the silly rhyme, he had grave doubts that he could fight it off.

  “I am astonished that you are surprised,” Madison was saying smoothly. “For Harvey has been in fact a father to you for all these many years, or the next thing to a father, maybe better than a father. You’ve been closer to him, day and night, than you’ve ever been to any other creature. He has watched over you and watched out for you and guided you at times and the relationship between the two of you has been more real than you can ever guess.”

  “But why?” asked Harrington and he was seeking furiously for some way out of this, for some defense that might be more substantial than a knotted shirt.

  “I do not know how to say this so you will believe it,” Madison told him earnestly, “but the father-feeling was no trick at all. You are closer at this moment to Harvey and perhaps even to myself than you can ever be to any other being. No one could work with you as long as Harvey worked with you without forming deep attachments. He, and I, have no thought but good for you. Won’t you let us prove it?”

  Harrington remained silent, but he was wavering—even when he knew that he should not waver. For what Madison had said seemed to make some sense.

  “The world,” said Madison, “is cold and merciless. It has no pity for you. You’ve not built a warm and pleasant world and now that you see it as it is no doubt you are repelled by it. There is no reason you should remain in it. We can give you back the world you’ve known. We can give you security and comfort. Surely you would be happy then. You can gain nothing by remaining as you are. There is no disloyalty to the human race in going back to this world you love. Now you can neither hurt nor harm the race. Your work is done…”

  “No!” cried Harrington.

  Madison shook his head. “Your race is a queer one, Harrington.”

  “My race!” yelled Harrington. “You talk as if—”

  “There is greatness in you,” said Madison, “but you must be pushed to bring it out. You must be cheered and coddled, you must be placed in danger, you must be given problems. You are like so many children. It is my duty, Harrington, my sworn, solemn duty to bring out the greatness in you. And I will not allow you nor anyone to stand against the duty.”

  And the truth was there, screaming through the dark, dread corridors of belated recognition. It had been there all the time, Harrington told himself, and he should have seen it.

  He swung up the maul in a simple reflex action, as a gesture of horror and revulsion, and he heard his screaming voice as if it were some other voice and not his own at all: “Why, damn you, you aren’t even human!”

  And as he brought the maul up in its arc and forward, Madison was weaving to one side so that the maul would miss, and his face and hands were changing and his body, too—although changing was perhaps not the word for it. It was a relaxing, rather, as if the body and the face and hands that had been Madison were flowing back again into their normal mould after being held and prisoned into human shape. The human clothes he wore ripped apart with the pressure of the change and hung on him in tatters.

  He was bigger, or he seemed to be, as if he had been forced to compress his bigness to conform to human standards, but he was humanoid and there was no essential change in his skull-like face beyond its taking on a faintly greenish cast.

  The maul clanged to the floor and skidded on the steel face of the catwalk and the thing that had been Madison was slouching forward with the alien sureness in it. And from Harvey poured a storm of anger and frustration—a father’s storming anger at a naughty child which must now stand in punishment. And the punishment was death, for no naughty child must bar the great and solemn duty of a sworn and dedicated task. In that storming fury, even as it rocked his mind, Harrington sensed an essential oneness between machine and alien, as if the two moved and thought in unison.

  And there was a snarling and a coughing sound of anger and Harrington found himself moving toward the alien thing with his fingers spread and his muscles tensed for the seizing and the rending of this enemy from the darkness that extended out beyond the cave. He was shambling forward on bowed and sturdy legs and there was fear deep-rooted in his mind, a terrible, shriveling fear that drove him to his work. But above and beyond that fear there was as well
the knowledge of the strength within his own brute body.

  For a moment he was aghast at the realization that the snarling and the coughing was coming from himself and that the foam of fighting anger was dripping from his jaws. Then he was aghast no longer, for he knew with surety who he was and all that he might have been or might ever have thought was submerged and swept away in sheer bestiality and the driving urge to kill.

  His hands reached out and caught the alien flesh and tore at it and broke it and ripped it from the bones, and in the wild, black job of killing scarcely felt or noticed the raking of the other’s talons or the stabbing of the beak.

  There was a screaming somewhere, a piercing sound of pain and agony from some other place, and the job was done.

  Harrington crouched above the body that lay upon the floor and wondered at the growling sounds which still rumbled in his throat.

  He stood erect and held out his hands and in the dim light saw that they were stained with sticky red, while from the pit he heard Harvey’s screams dwindle into moaning.

  He staggered forward to the railing and looked down into the pit and streams of some dark and stringy substance were pouring out of every crack and joint of Harvey—as if the life and intelligence were draining out of him.

  And somewhere a voice (a voice?) was saying: You fool! Now look at what you’ve done! What will happen to you now?

  “We’ll get along,” said Harrington—ordinary Harrington, not the final gentleman, nor yet Neanderthaler.

  There was a gash along one arm and the blood was oozing out and soaking the fabric of his torn coat and one side of his face was wet and sticky, but he was all right,

  We kept you on the road, said the dying voice, now faint and far away. We kept you on it for so many ages…

  Yes, thought Harrington. Yes, my friend, you’re right. Once the Delphian oracle and how many cons before that? And clever—once an oracle and in this day an analytical computer. And where in the years between—in monastery? in palace? in some counting house?

  Although, perhaps, the operation need not have been continuous. Perhaps it was only necessary at certain crisis points.

  And what the actual purpose? To guide the toddling footsteps of humanity, make man think as they wanted him to think? Or to shape humanity to the purpose of an alien race? And what the shape of human culture if there had been no interference?

  And he, himself, he wondered—was he the summer-up, the man who had been used to write the final verdict of the centuries of patterning? Not in his words, of course, but in the words of these other two—the one down in the pit, the other on this catwalk. Or were there two of them? Might there have been only one? Was it possible, he wondered, that they were the same—the one of them no more than an extension of the other? For when Madison had died, so had Harvey.

  “The trouble with you, friend,” he said to the thing lying on the floor, “was that you were too close to human in many ways yourself. You got too confident and you made mistakes.”

  And the worst mistake of all had been when they’d allowed him to write a Neanderthaler into that early story.

  He walked slowly toward the door and stopped at it for a moment to look back at the twisted form that lay huddled on the floor. They’d find it in an hour or two and think at first, perhaps, that it was Madison. Then they’d note the changes and know that it could not be Madison.

  And they’d be puzzled people, especially since Madison himself would have disappeared. They’d wonder, too, what had happened to Harvey, who’d never work again. And they’d find the maul!

  The maul! Good God, he thought. I almost left the maul!

  He turned back and picked it up and his mind was churning with the fear of what might have happened had he left it there. For his fingerprints would be all over it and the police would have come around to find out what he knew.

  And his fingerprints would be on the railing, too, he thought. He’d have to wipe them off.

  He took out his handkerchief and began to wipe the railing, wondering as he did it why he went to all the trouble, for there would be no guilt associated with this thing he’d done.

  No guilt? he asked himself.

  How could he be sure?

  Had Madison been a villain or a benefactor?

  There was no way, he knew, that anyone could be sure.

  Not yet, at least. Not so shortly after. And now perhaps there’d never be any way to know. For the human race had been set so firmly in the track that had been engineered for it, it might never deviate. For the rest of his days he’d wonder about the rightness and the wrongness of this deed he’d done.

  He’d watch for signs and portents. He’d wonder if every piece of disturbing news he read might have been averted by this alien that now lay upon the floor. He’d come fighting out of sleep at night, chased by nightmares of an idiot doom that his hand had brought about.

  He finished polishing the railing and walked to the door. He polished the knob most carefully and shut the door behind him. And, as a final gesture, he untied the shirt tails.

  There was no one in the lobby and no one in the street, and he stood looking up and down the street in the pale cold light of morning.

  He cringed against it—against the morning light and against this street that was a symbol of the world. For there seemed to him to be a crying in the street, a crying of his guilt.

  There was a way, he knew, that he could forget all this—could wipe it from his mind and leave it all behind him. There was a path that even at this hour led to comfort and security and even, yes, to smugness, and he was tempted by it. For there was no reason that he shouldn’t. There was no point in not doing it. No one except himself stood either to gain or to lose.

  But he shook his head stubbornly, as if to scare the thought away.

  He shifted the maul from one hand to the other and stepped out to cross the street. He reached the car and opened the back door and threw the maul in on the floor.

  And he stood there, empty-handed now, and felt the silence beating in long rolls, like relentless surf pounding through his head.

  He put up his hands to keep his head from bursting and he felt a terrible weakness in him. He knew it was reaction—nerves suddenly letting go after being taut too long.

  Then the stifling silence was no more than an overriding quietness. He dropped his hands.

  A car was coming down the street, and he watched it as it parked across from him a short distance up the street.

  From it came the shrilling voice of a radio tuned high:

  “… In his note to the President, refusing the appointment, Enright said that after some soul-searching he was convinced it would be better for the country and the world if he did not accept the post. In Washington, foreign policy observers and the diplomatic corps are reported in a dither. What, after all, they ask, could soul-searching have to do with the state department?

  “And here is another piece of news this morning that is likewise difficult to assess. Peking announces a reshuffling of its government, with known moderates taking over. While it is too early yet to say, the shift could result in a complete reversal of Red China’s policies—”

  The radio shut off abruptly and the man got out from the car. He slammed the door behind him and went striding down the street.

  Harrington opened the front door and climbed behind the wheel. He had the strangest sense that he had forgotten something. He tried to remember what it was, but it was gone entirely.

  He sat with his hands clutched upon the wheel and he felt a little shiver running through his body. Like a shiver of relief, although he could not imagine why he should feel relief.

  Perhaps over that news about Enright. he told himself. For it was very good news. Not that Enright was the wrong man for the post, for he surely was the right one. But there came a time when a man had the right and duty to b
e himself entirely.

  And the human race, he told himself, had that same right.

  And the shift of government in China was a most amazing thing. As if, he thought, evil geniuses throughout the world might be disappearing with the coming of the dawn.

  And there was something about geniuses, he told himself, that he should remember. Something about how a genius came about.

  But he could not recall it.

  He rolled down the window of the car and sniffed the brisk, fresh breeze of morning. Sniffing it, he consciously straightened his body and lifted up his chin. A man should do a thing like this more often, he told himself contentedly. There was something in the beginning of a day that sharpened up one’s soul.

  He put the car in gear and wheeled it out into the street.

  Too bad about Madison, he thought. He was really, after all, a very decent fellow.

  Hollis Harrington, final gentleman, drove down the morning street.

  Project Mastodon

  Originally published in the March 1955 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, this story comes from the time of the Cold War, when the looming threat of nuclear war was oppressing many, including newspapermen—and so represents another variation on Cliff Simak’s occasional theme of the use of time travel to find sanctuary. But those purported historians of science fiction who state that this story was later expanded to create the novel Mastodonia clearly have never read both.

  —dww

  The chief of protocol said, “Mr. Hudson of—ah—Mastodonia.”

  The secretary of state held out his hand. “I’m glad to see you, Mr. Hudson. I understand you’ve been here several times.”

  “That’s right,” said Hudson. “I had a hard time making your people believe I was in earnest.”

  “And are you, Mr. Hudson?”

  “Believe me, sir, I would not try to fool you.”

  “And this Mastodonia,” said the secretary, reaching down to tap the document upon the desk. “You will pardon me, but I’ve never heard of it.”

  “It’s a new nation,” Hudson explained, “but quite legitimate. We have a constitution, a democratic form of government, duly elected officials and a code of laws. We are a free, peace-loving people and we are possessed of a vast amount of natural resources and—”