The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume One

by Clifford D. Simak

A knock came at the door.

  Homer lifted his head and blinked at the knocking sound.

  “Come in,” he finally said.

  It was the robot, Hezekiah.

  “They caught Archie,” Hezekiah said.

  “Archie?”

  “Archie, the raccoon.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Homer. “He was the one that ran away.”

  “They have him out here now,” said Hezekiah. “Do you want to see him?”

  “Send them in,” said Homer.

  Hezekiah beckoned with his finger and Archie ambled through the door. His fur was matted with burs and his tail was dragging. Behind him stalked two robot wardens.

  “He tried to steal some corn,” one of the wardens said, “and we spotted him, but he led us quite a chase.”

  Homer sat up ponderously and stared at Archie. Archie stared straight back.

  “They never would have caught me,” Archie said, “if I’d still had Rufus. Rufus was my robot and he would have warned me.”

  “And where is Rufus now?”

  “He got the call today,” said Archie, “and left me for the Building.”

  “Tell me,” said Homer. “Did anything happen to Rufus before he left? Anything unusual? Out of the ordinary?”

  “Nothing,” Archie told him, “Except that he fell into an ant hill. He was a clumsy robot. A regular stumble bum … always tripping himself, getting tangled up. He wasn’t coordinated just the way he should be. He had a screw loose some place.”

  Something black and tiny jumped off of Archie’s nose, raced along the floor. Archie’s paw went out in a lightning stroke and scooped it up.

  “You better move back a ways,” Hezekiah warned Homer. “He’s simply dripping fleas.”

  “It’s not a flea,” said Archie, puffing up in anger. “It is something else. I caught it this afternoon. It ticks and it looks like an ant, but it isn’t one.”

  The thing that ticked oozed between Archie’s claws and tumbled to the floor. It landed right side up and was off again. Archie made a stab at it, but it zigzagged out of reach. Like a flash it reached Hezekiah and streaked up his leg.

  Homer came to his feet in a sudden flash of knowledge.

  “Quick!” he shouted. “Get it! Don’t let it …”

  But the thing was gone.

  Slowly Homer sat down again. His voice was quiet now, quiet and almost deadly.

  “Wardens,” he said, “take Hezekiah into custody. Don’t leave his side, don’t let him get away. Report to me everything he does.”

  Hezekiah backed away.

  “But I haven’t done a thing.”

  “No,” said Homer, softly. “No, you haven’t yet. But you will. You’ll get the Call and you’ll try to desert us for the Building. And before we let you go, we’ll find out what it is that made you do it. What it is and how it works.”

  Homer turned around, a doggish grin wrinkling up his face.

  “And, now, Archie …”

  But there was no Archie.

  There was an open window. And there was no Archie.

  Homer stirred on his bed of hay, unwilling to awake, a growl gurgling in his throat.

  Getting old, he thought. Too many years upon me, like the years upon the hills. There was a time when I’d be out of bed at the first sound of something at the door, on my feet, with hay sticking in my fur, barking my head off to let the robots know.

  The knock came again and Homer staggered to his feet.

  “Come in,” he yelled. “Cut out the racket and come in.”

  The door opened and it was a robot, but a bigger robot than Homer had ever seen before. A gleaming robot, huge and massive, with a polished body that shone like slow fire even in the dark. And riding on the robot’s shoulder was Archie, the raccoon.

  “I am Jenkins,” said the robot. “I came back tonight.”

  Homer gulped and sat down very slowly.

  “Jenkins,” he said. “There are stories … legends … from the long ago.”

  “No more than a legend?” Jenkins asked.

  “That’s all,” said Homer. “A legend of a robot that looked after us. Although Andrew spoke of Jenkins this afternoon as if he might have known him. And there is a story of how the Dogs gave you a body on your seven thousandth birthday and it was a marvelous body that …”

  His voice ran down … for the body of the robot that stood before him with the raccoon perched on his shoulder … that body could be none other than the birthday gift.

  “And Webster House?” asked Jenkins. “You still keep Webster House?”

  “We still keep Webster House,” said Homer. “We keep it as it is. It’s a thing we have to do.”

  “The websters?”

  “There aren’t any websters.”

  Jenkins nodded at that. His body’s hair-trigger sense had told him there were no websters. There were no webster vibrations. There was no thought of websters in the minds of things he’d touched.

  And that was as it should be.

  He came slowly across the room, soft-footed as a cat despite his mighty weight, and Homer felt him moving, felt the friendliness and kindness of the metal creature, the protectiveness of the ponderous strength within him.

  Jenkins squatted down beside him.

  “You are in trouble,” Jenkins said.

  Homer stared at him.

  “The ants,” said Jenkins. “Archie told me. Said you were troubled by the ants.”

  “I went to Webster House to hide,” said Archie. “I was scared you would hunt me down again and I thought that Webster House …”

  “Hush, Archie,” Jenkins told him. “You don’t know a thing about it. You told me that you didn’t. You just said the Dogs were having trouble with the ants.”

  He looked at Homer.

  “I suppose they are Joe’s ants,” he said.

  “So you know about Joe,” said Homer. “So there was a man called Joe.”

  Jenkins chuckled. “Yes, a troublemaker. But likeable at times. He had the devil in him.”

  Homer said: “They’re building. They get the robots to work for them and they are putting up a building.”

  “Surely,” said Jenkins, “even ants have the right to build.”

  “But they’re building too fast. They’ll push us off the Earth. Another thousand years or so and they’ll cover the whole Earth if they keep on building at the rate they’ve been.”

  “And you have no place to go? That’s what worries you.”

  “Yes, we have a place to go. Many places. All the other worlds. The cobbly worlds.”

  Jenkins nodded gravely. “I was in a cobbly world. The first world after this. I took some websters there five thousand years ago. I just came back tonight. And I know the way you feel. No other world is home. I’ve hungered for the Earth for almost every one of those five thousand years. I came back to Webster House and I found Archie there. He told me about the ants and so I came up here. I hope you do not mind.”

  “We are glad you came,” said Homer, softly.

  “Those ants,” said Jenkins. “I suppose you want to stop them.”

  Homer nodded his head.

  “There is a way,” said Jenkins. “I know there is a way. The websters had a way if I could just remember. But it’s so long ago. And it’s a simple way, I know. A very simple way.”

  His hands came up and scraped back and forth across his chin.

  “What are you doing that for?” Archie asked.

  “Eh?”

  “Rubbing your face that way. What do you do it for?”

  Jenkins dropped his hand. “Just a habit, Archie. A webster gesture! A way they had of thinking. I picked it up from them.”

  “Does it help you think?”

  “Well, maybe. Maybe not. It seemed
to help the websters. Now what would a webster do in a case like this? The websters could help us. I know they could …”

  “The websters in the cobbly world,” said Homer.

  Jenkins shook his head. “There aren’t any websters there.”

  “But you said you took some back.”

  “I know. But they aren’t there now. I’ve been alone in the cobbly world for almost four thousand years.”

  “Then there aren’t websters anywhere. The rest went to Jupiter. Andrew told me that. Jenkins, where is Jupiter?”

  “Yes, there are,” said Jenkins. “There are some websters left, I mean. Or there used to be. A few left at Geneva.”

  “It won’t be easy,” Homer said. “Not even for a Webster. Those ants are smart. Archie told you about the flea he found.”

  “It wasn’t any flea,” said Archie.

  “Yes, he told me,” Jenkins said. “Said it got into Hezekiah.”

  “Not onto,” Homer told them. “Into is the word. It wasn’t a flea … it was a robot, a tiny robot. It drilled a hole in Hezekiah’s skull and got into his brain. It sealed the hole behind it.”

  “And what is Hezekiah doing now?”

  “Nothing,” said Homer. “But we are pretty sure what he will do as soon as the ant robot gets the setup fixed. He’ll get the Call. He’ll get the call to go and work on the Building.”

  Jenkins nodded. “Taking over,” he said. “They can’t do a job like that themselves, so they take control of things that can.”

  He lifted his hand again and scraped it across his chin.

  “I wonder if Joe knew,” he mumbled. “When he played god to the ants I wonder if he knew.”

  But that was ridiculous. Joe never could have known. Even a mutation like Joe could not have looked twelve thousand years ahead.

  So long ago, thought Jenkins. So many things have happened. Bruce Webster was just starting to experiment with dogs, had no more than dreamed his dream of talking, thinking dogs that would go down the path of destiny paw in hand with Man … not knowing then that Man within a few short centuries would scatter to the four winds of eternity and leave the Earth to robot and to dog. Not knowing then that even the name of Man would be forgotten in the dust of years, that the race would come to be known by the name of a single family.

  And yet, thought Jenkins, if it was to be any family, the Websters were the ones. I can remember them as if it were yesterday. Those were the days when I thought of myself as a Webster, too.

  Lord knows, I tried to be. I did the best I could. I stood by the Webster dogs when the race of men had gone and finally I took the last bothersome survivors of that madcap race into another world to clear the way for Dogs … so that the Dogs could fashion the Earth in the way they planned.

  And now even those last bothersome survivors have gone … some place, somewhere … I wish that I could know. Escaped into some fantasy of the human mind. And the men on Jupiter are not even men, but something else. And Geneva is shut off … blocked off from the world.

  Although it can’t be farther away or blocked more tightly than the world from which I came. If only I could learn how it was I traveled from the exile cobbly world back to Webster House … then, maybe, perhaps, somehow or other, I could reach Geneva.

  A new power, he told himself. A new ability. A thing that grew upon me without my knowing that it grew. A thing that every man and every robot … and perhaps every dog … could have if he but knew the way.

  Although it may be my body that made it possible … this body that the Dogs gave me on my seven thousandth birthday. A body that has more than any body of flesh and blood has ever quite attained. A body that can know what a bear is thinking or a fox is dreaming, that can feel the happy little mouse thoughts running in the grass.

  Wish fulfillment. That might be it. The answer to the strange, illogical yearnings for things that seldom are and often cannot be. But all of which are possible if one can grow or develop or graft onto oneself the new ability that directs the mind and body to the fulfillment of the wish.

  I walked the hill each day, he remembered. Walked there because I could not stay away, because the longing was so strong, steeling myself against looking too closely, for there were differences I did not wish to see.

  I walked there a million times and it took that many times before the power within me was strong enough to take me back.

  For I was trapped. The word, the thought, the concept that took me into the cobbly world was a one way ticket and while it took me there it could not take me back. But there was another way, a way I did not know. That even now I do not know.

  “You said there was a way,” urged Homer.

  “A way?”

  “Yes, a way to stop the ants.”

  Jenkins nodded. “I am going to find out. I’m going to Geneva.”

  Jon Webster awoke.

  And this is strange, he thought, for I said eternity.

  I was to sleep forever and forever has no end.

  All else was mist and the grayness of sleep forgetfulness, but this much stood out with mind-sharp clarity. Eternity, and this was not eternity.

  A word ticked at his mind, like feeble tapping on a door that was far away.

  He lay and listened to the tapping and the word became two words … words that spoke his name:

  “Jon Webster. Jon Webster.” On and on, on and on. Two words tapping at his brain.

  “Jon Webster.”

  “Jon Webster.”

  “Yes,” said Webster’s brain and the words stopped and did not come again.

  Silence and the thinning of the mists of forgetfulness. And the trickling back of memory. One thing at a time.

  There was a city and the name of the city was Geneva.

  Men lived in the city, but men without a purpose.

  The Dogs lived outside the city … in the whole world outside the city. The Dogs had purpose and a dream.

  Sara climbed the hill to take a century of dreams.

  And I … I, thought Jon Webster, climbed the hill and asked for eternity. This is not eternity.

  “This is Jenkins, Jon Webster.”

  “Yes, Jenkins,” said Jon Webster, and yet he did not say it, not with lip and tongue and throat, for he felt the fluid that pressed around his body inside its cylinder, fluid that fed him and kept him from dehydrating. Fluid that sealed his lips and eyes and ears.

  “Yes, Jenkins,” said Webster, speaking with his mind. “I remember you. I remember you now. You were with the family from the very first. You helped us teach the Dogs. You stayed with them when the family was no more.”

  “I am still with them,” said Jenkins.

  “I sought eternity,” said Webster. “I closed the city and sought eternity.”

  “We often wondered,” Jenkins told him. “Why did you close the city?”

  “The Dogs,” said Webster’s mind. “The Dogs had to have their chance. Man would have spoiled their chance.”

  “The dogs are doing well,” said Jenkins.

  “But the city is open now?”

  “No, the city still is closed.”

  “But you are here.”

  “Yes, but I’m the only one who knows the way. And there will be no others. Not for a long time, anyway.”

  “Time,” said Webster. “I had forgotten time. How long is it, Jenkins.”

  “Since you closed the city? Ten thousand years or so.”

  “And there are others?”

  “Yes, but they are sleeping,”

  “And the robots? The robots still keep watch?”

  “The robots still keep watch.”

  Webster lay quietly and a peace came upon his mind. The city still was closed and the last of men were sleeping. The Dogs were doing well and the robots stayed on watch.

  “You shou
ld not have wakened me,” he said. “You should have let me sleep.”

  “There was a thing I had to know. I knew it once, but I have forgotten and it is very simple. Simple and yet terribly important.”

  Webster chuckled in his brain. “What is it, Jenkins?”

  “It’s about ants,” said Jenkins. “Ants used to trouble men. What did you do about it?”

  “Why, we poisoned them,” said Webster.

  Jenkins gasped. “Poisoned them!”

  “Yes,” said Webster. “A very simple thing. We used a base of syrup, sweet, to attract the ants. And we put poison in it, a poison that was deadly to ants. But we did not put in enough of it to kill them right away. A slow poison, you see, so they would have time to carry it to the nest. That way we killed many instead of just two or three.”

  Silence hummed in Webster’s head … the silence of no thought, no word.

  “Jenkins,” he said. “Jenkins, are you …”

  “Yes, Jon Webster, I am here.”

  “That is all you want?”

  “That is all I want.”

  “I can go to sleep again.”

  “Yes, Jon Webster. Go to sleep again.”

  Jenkins stood upon the hilltop and felt the first rough fore-running wind of winter whine across the land. Below him the slope that ran down to the river was etched in black and gray with the leafless skeletons of trees.

  To the northeast rose the shadow-shape, the cloud of evil omen that was called the Building. A growing thing spawned in the mind of ants, built for what purpose and to what end no thing but an ant could even closely guess.

  But there was a way to deal with ants.

  The human way.

  The way Jon Webster had told him after ten thousand years of sleep. A simple way and a fundamental way, a brutal, but efficient way. You took some syrup, sweet, so the ants would like it, and you put some poison in it … slow poison so it wouldn’t work too fast.

  The simple way of poison, Jenkins said. The very simple way.

  Except it called for chemistry and the Dogs knew no chemistry.

  Except it called for killing and there was no killing.

  Not even fleas, and the Dogs were pestered plenty by the fleas. Not even ants … and the ants threatened to dispossess the animals of the world they called their birthplace.