The Best of Clifford D. Simak

by Clifford D. Simak

  Duncan found himself on edge and cursed himself savagely for it. He'd been in tight spots before. This was nothing new to him. There was no reason to get himself tensed up. It was a deadly business, sure, but he had faced others calmly and walked away from them. It was those frontier tales he'd heard about the Cytha--the kind of superstitious chatter that one always heard on the edge of unknown land.

  He gripped the rifle tighter and went on.

  No animal, he told himself, was unkillable.

  Half an hour before sunset, he called a halt when they reached a brackish waterhole. The light soon would be getting bad for shooting. In the morning, they'd take up the trail again, and by that time the Cytha would be at an even greater disadvantage. It would be stiff and slow and weak. It might be even dead.

  Duncan gathered wood and built a fire in the lee of a thorn-bush thicket. Sipar waded out with the canteens and thrust them at arm's length beneath the surface to fill them. The water still was warm and evil-tasting, but it was fairly free of scum and a thirsty man could drink it.

  The sun went down and darkness fell quickly. They dragged more wood out of the thicket and piled it carefully close at hand.

  Duncan reached into his pocket and brought out the little bag of rockahominy.

  "Here," he said to Sipar. "Supper."

  The native held one hand cupped and Duncan poured a little mound into its palm.

  "Thank you, mister," Sipar said. "Food-giver."

  "Huh?" asked Duncan, then caught what the native meant. "Dive into it," he said, almost kindly. "It isn't much, but it gives you strength. We'll need strength tomorrow."

  * * * * *

  Food-giver, eh? Trying to butter him up, perhaps. In a little while, Sipar would start whining for him to knock off the hunt and head back for the farm.

  Although, come to think of it, he really was the food-giver to this bunch of sexless wonders. Corn, thank God, grew well on the red and stubborn soil of Layard--good old corn from North America. Fed to hogs, made into corn-pone for breakfast back on Earth, and here, on Layard, the staple food crop for a gang of shiftless varmints who still regarded, with some good solid skepticism and round-eyed wonder, this unorthodox idea that one should take the trouble to grow plants to eat rather than go out and scrounge for them.

  Corn from North America, he thought, growing side by side with the vua of Layard. And that was the way it went. Something from one planet and something from another and still something further from a third and so was built up through the wide social confederacy of space a truly cosmic culture which in the end, in another ten thousand years or so, might spell out some way of life with more sanity and understanding than was evident today.

  He poured a mound of rockahominy into his own hand and put the bag back into his pocket.

  "Sipar."

  "Yes, mister?"

  "You were not scared today when the donovan threatened to attack us."

  "No, mister. The donovan would not hurt me."

  "I see. You said the donovan was taboo to you. Could it be that you, likewise, are taboo to the donovan?"

  "Yes, mister. The donovan and I grew up together."

  "Oh, so that's it," said Duncan.

  He put a pinch of the parched and powdered corn into his mouth and took a sip of brackish water. He chewed reflectively on the resultant mash.

  He might go ahead, he knew, and ask why and how and where Sipar and the donovan had grown up together, but there was no point to it. This was exactly the kind of tangle that Shotwell was forever getting into.

  Half the time, he told himself, I'm convinced the little stinkers are doing no more than pulling our legs.

  What a fantastic bunch of jerks! Not men, not women, just things. And while there were never babies, there were children, although never less than eight or nine years old. And if there were no babies, where did the eight-and nine-year-olds come from?

  * * * * *

  "I suppose," he said, "that these other things that are your taboos, the stilt-birds and the screamers and the like, also grew up with you."

  "That is right, mister."

  "Some playground that must have been," said Duncan.

  He went on chewing, staring out into the darkness beyond the ring of firelight.

  "There's something in the thorn bush, mister."

  "I didn't hear a thing."

  "Little pattering. Something is running there."

  Duncan listened closely. What Sipar said was true. A lot of little things were running in the thicket.

  "More than likely mice," he said.

  He finished his rockahominy and took an extra swig of water, gagging on it slightly.

  "Get your rest," he told Sipar. "I'll wake you later so I can catch a wink or two."

  "Mister," Sipar said, "I will stay with you to the end."

  "Well," said Duncan, somewhat startled, "that is decent of you."

  "I will stay to the death," Sipar promised earnestly.

  "Don't strain yourself," said Duncan.

  He picked up the rifle and walked down to the waterhole.

  The night was quiet and the land continued to have that empty feeling. Empty except for the fire and the waterhole and the little micelike animals running in the thicket.

  And Sipar--Sipar lying by the fire, curled up and sound asleep already. Naked, with not a weapon to its hand--just the naked animal, the basic humanoid, and yet with underlying purpose that at times was baffling. Scared and shivering this morning at mere mention of the Cytha, yet never faltering on the trail; in pure funk back there on the knoll where they had lost the Cytha, but now ready to go on to the death.

  Duncan went back to the fire and prodded Sipar with his toe. The native came straight up out of sleep.

  "Whose death?" asked Duncan. "Whose death were you talking of?"

  "Why, ours, of course," said Sipar, and went back to sleep.

  III

  Duncan did not see the arrow coming. He heard the swishing whistle and felt the wind of it on the right side of his throat and then it thunked into a tree behind him.

  He leaped aside and dived for the cover of a tumbled mound of boulders and almost instinctively his thumb pushed the fire control of the rifle up to automatic.

  He crouched behind the jumbled rocks and peered ahead. There was not a thing to see. The hula-trees shimmered in the blaze of sun and the thorn-bush was gray and lifeless and the only things astir were three stilt-birds walking gravely a quarter of a mile away.

  "Sipar!" he whispered.

  "Here, mister."

  "Keep low. It's still out there."

  Whatever it might be. Still out there and waiting for another shot. Duncan shivered, remembering the feel of the arrow flying past his throat. A hell of a way for a man to die--out at the tail-end of nowhere with an arrow in his throat and a scared-stiff native heading back for home as fast as it could go.

  He flicked the control on the rifle back to single fire, crawled around the rock pile and sprinted for a grove of trees that stood on higher ground. He reached them and there he flanked the spot from which the arrow must have come.

  He unlimbered the binoculars and glassed the area. He still saw no sign. Whatever had taken the pot shot at them had made its getaway.

  He walked back to the tree where the arrow still stood out, its point driven deep into the bark. He grasped the shaft and wrenched the arrow free.

  "You can come out now," he called to Sipar. "There's no one around."

  The arrow was unbelievably crude. The unfeathered shaft looked as if it had been battered off to the proper length with a jagged stone. The arrowhead was unflaked flint picked up from some outcropping or dry creek bed, and it was awkwardly bound to the shaft with the tough but pliant inner bark of the hula-tree.

  "You recognize this?" he asked Sipar.

  The native took the arrow and examined it. "Not my tribe."

  "Of course not your tribe. Yours wouldn't take a shot at us. Some other tribe, perhaps?"


  "Very poor arrow."

  "I know that. But it could kill you just as dead as if it were a good one. Do you recognize it?"

  "No tribe made this arrow," Sipar declared.

  "Child, maybe?"

  "What would child do way out here?"

  [Illustration]

  "That's what I thought, too," said Duncan.

  * * * * *

  He took the arrow back, held it between his thumbs and forefingers and twirled it slowly, with a terrifying thought nibbling at his brain. It couldn't be. It was too fantastic. He wondered if the sun was finally getting him that he had thought of it at all.

  He squatted down and dug at the ground with the makeshift arrow point. "Sipar, what do you actually know about the Cytha?"

  "Nothing, mister. Scared of it is all."

  "We aren't turning back. If there's something that you know--something that would help us...."

  It was as close as he could come to begging aid. It was further than he had meant to go. He should not have asked at all, he thought angrily.

  "I do not know," the native said.

  Duncan cast the arrow to one side and rose to his feet. He cradled the rifle in his arm. "Let's go."

  He watched Sipar trot ahead. Crafty little stinker, he told himself. It knows more than it's telling.

  They toiled into the afternoon. It was, if possible, hotter and drier than the day before. There was a sense of tension in the air--no, that was rot. And even if there were, a man must act as if it were not there. If he let himself fall prey to every mood out in this empty land, he only had himself to blame for whatever happened to him.

  The tracking was harder now. The day before, the Cytha had only run away, straight-line fleeing to keep ahead of them, to stay out of their reach. Now it was becoming tricky. It backtracked often in an attempt to throw them off. Twice in the afternoon, the trail blanked out entirely and it was only after long searching that Sipar picked it up again--in one instance, a mile away from where it had vanished in thin air.

  That vanishing bothered Duncan more than he would admit. Trails do not disappear entirely, not when the terrain remains the same, not when the weather is unchanged. Something was going on, something, perhaps, that Sipar knew far more about than it was willing to divulge.

  He watched the native closely and there seemed nothing suspicious. It continued at its work. It was, for all to see, the good and faithful hound.

  * * * * *

  Late in the afternoon, the plain on which they had been traveling suddenly dropped away. They stood poised on the brink of a great escarpment and looked far out to great tangled forests and a flowing river.

  It was like suddenly coming into another and beautiful room that one had not expected.

  This was new land, never seen before by any Earthman. For no one had ever mentioned that somewhere to the west a forest lay beyond the bush. Men coming in from space had seen it, probably, but only as a different color-marking on the planet. To them, it made no difference.

  But to the men who lived on Layard, to the planter and the trader, the prospector and the hunter, it was important. And I, thought Duncan with a sense of triumph, am the man who found it.

  "Mister!"

  "Now what?"

  "Out there. Skun!"

  "I don't--"

  "Out there, mister. Across the river."

  Duncan saw it then--a haze in the blueness of the rift--a puff of copper moving very fast, and as he watched, he heard the far-off keening of the storm, a shiver in the air rather than a sound.

  He watched in fascination as it moved along the river and saw the boiling fury it made out of the forest. It struck and crossed the river, and the river for a moment seemed to stand on end, with a sheet of silvery water splashed toward the sky.

  Then it was gone as quickly as it had happened, but there was a tumbled slash across the forest where the churning winds had traveled.

  Back at the farm, Zikkara had warned him of the skun. This was the season for them, it had said, and a man caught in one wouldn't have a chance.

  Duncan let his breath out slowly.

  "Bad," said Sipar.

  "Yes, very bad."

  "Hit fast. No warning."

  "What about the trail?" asked Duncan. "Did the Cytha--"

  Sipar nodded downward.

  "Can we make it before nightfall?"

  "I think so," Sipar answered.

  It was rougher than they had thought. Twice they went down blind trails that pinched off, with sheer rock faces opening out into drops of hundreds of feet, and were forced to climb again and find another way.

  They reached the bottom of the escarpment as the brief twilight closed in and they hurried to gather firewood. There was no water, but a little was still left in their canteens and they made do with that.

  * * * * *

  After their scant meal of rockahominy, Sipar rolled himself into a ball and went to sleep immediately.

  Duncan sat with his back against a boulder which one day, long ago, had fallen from the slope above them, but was now half buried in the soil that through the ages had kept sifting down.

  Two days gone, he told himself.

  Was there, after all, some truth in the whispered tales that made the rounds back at the settlements--that no one should waste his time in tracking down a Cytha, since a Cytha was unkillable?

  Nonsense, he told himself. And yet the hunt had toughened, the trail become more difficult, the Cytha a much more cunning and elusive quarry. Where it had run from them the day before, now it fought to shake them off. And if it did that the second day, why had it not tried to throw them off the first? And what about the third day--tomorrow?

  He shook his head. It seemed incredible that an animal would become more formidable as the hunt progressed. But that seemed to be exactly what had happened. More spooked, perhaps, more frightened--only the Cytha did not act like a frightened beast. It was acting like an animal that was gaining savvy and determination, and that was somehow frightening.

  From far off to the west, toward the forest and the river, came the laughter and the howling of a pack of screamers. Duncan leaned his rifle against the boulder and got up to pile more wood on the fire. He stared out into the western darkness, listening to the racket. He made a wry face and pushed a hand absent-mindedly through his hair. He put out a silent hope that the screamers would decide to keep their distance. They were something a man could do without.

  Behind him, a pebble came bumping down the slope. It thudded to a rest just short of the fire.

  Duncan spun around. Foolish thing to do, he thought, to camp so near the slope. If something big should start to move, they'd be out of luck.

  He stood and listened. The night was quiet. Even the screamers had shut up for the moment. Just one rolling rock and he had his hackles up. He'd have to get himself in hand.

  He went back to the boulder, and as he stooped to pick up the rifle, he heard the faint beginning of a rumble. He straightened swiftly to face the scarp that blotted out the star-strewn sky--and the rumble grew!

  * * * * *

  In one leap, he was at Sipar's side. He reached down and grasped the native by an arm, jerked it erect, held it on its feet. Sipar's eyes snapped open, blinking in the firelight.

  The rumble had grown to a roar and there were thumping noises, as of heavy boulders bouncing, and beneath the roar the silky, ominous rustle of sliding soil and rock.

  Sipar jerked its arm free of Duncan's grip and plunged into the darkness. Duncan whirled and followed.

  They ran, stumbling in the dark, and behind them the roar of the sliding, bouncing rock became a throaty roll of thunder that filled the night from brim to brim. As he ran, Duncan could feel, in dread anticipation, the gusty breath of hurtling debris blowing on his neck, the crushing impact of a boulder smashing into him, the engulfing flood of tumbling talus snatching at his legs.

  A puff of billowing dust came out and caught them and they ran choking as well as stumbling. Off t
o the left of them, a mighty chunk of rock chugged along the ground in jerky, almost reluctant fashion.

  Then the thunder stopped and all one could hear was the small slitherings of the lesser debris as it trickled down the slope.

  Duncan stopped running and slowly turned around. The campfire was gone, buried, no doubt, beneath tons of overlay, and the stars had paled because of the great cloud of dust which still billowed up into the sky.

  He heard Sipar moving near him and reached out a hand, searching for the tracker, not knowing exactly where it was. He found the native, grasped it by the shoulder and pulled it up beside him.

  Sipar was shivering.

  "It's all right," said Duncan.

  And it was all right, he reassured himself. He still had the rifle. The extra drum of ammunition and the knife were on his belt, the bag of rockahominy in his pocket. The canteens were all they had lost--the canteens and the fire.

  "We'll have to hole up somewhere for the night," Duncan said. "There are screamers on the loose."

  * * * * *

  He didn't like what he was thinking, nor the sharp edge of fear that was beginning to crowd in upon him. He tried to shrug it off, but it still stayed with him, just out of reach.

  Sipar plucked at his elbow.

  "Thorn thicket, mister. Over there. We could crawl inside. We would be safe from screamers."

  It was torture, but they made it.

  "Screamers and you are taboo," said Duncan, suddenly remembering. "How come you are afraid of them?"

  "Afraid for you, mister, mostly. Afraid for myself just a little. Screamers could forget. They might not recognize me until too late. Safer here."

  "I agree with you," said Duncan.

  The screamers came and padded all about the thicket. The beasts sniffed and clawed at the thorns to reach them, but finally went away.

  When morning came, Duncan and Sipar climbed the scarp, clambering over the boulders and the tons of soil and rock that covered their camping place. Following the gash cut by the slide, they clambered up the slope and finally reached the point of the slide's beginning.

  There they found the depression in which the poised slab of rock had rested and where the supporting soil had been dug away so that it could be started, with a push, down the slope above the campfire.