The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  An old and deserted place, he thought, abandoned long ago. Perhaps a shepherd people might have lived here in some long-gone age, when the desert had been a rich and grassy plain.

  There was a door into another room and as he stepped through it he heard the faint, far-off booming sound and something else as well – the sound of pouring rain! From the open door that led out through the back he caught a whiff of salty breeze and he stood there frozen in the center of that second room.

  Another one!

  Another house that led to another world!

  He walked slowly forward, drawn toward the outer door, and he stepped out into a cloudy, darkling day with the rain streaming down from wildly racing clouds. Half a mile away, across a field of jumbled, broken, iron-gray boulders, lay a pounding sea that raged upon the coast, throwing great spumes of angry spray high into the air.

  He walked out from the door and looked up at the sky and the rain drops pounded at his face with a stinging fury. There was a chill and a dampness in the air and the place was eldritch – a world jerked straight from some ancient Gothic tale of goblin and of sprite.

  He glanced around and there was nothing he could see, for the rain blotted out the world beyond this stretch of coast, but behind the rain he could sense or seemed to sense a presence that sent shivers down his spine. Gulping in fright, Taine turned around and stumbled back again through the door into the house.

  One world away, he thought, was far enough; two worlds away was more than one could take. He trembled at the sense of utter loneliness that tumbled in his skull and suddenly this long-forsaken house became unbearable and he dashed out of it.

  Outside the sun was bright and there was welcome warmth. His clothes were damp from rain and little beads of moisture lay on the rifle barrel.

  He looked around for Towser and there was no sign of the dog. He was not underneath the pickup; he was nowhere in sight.

  Taine called and there was no answer. His voice sounded lone and hollow in the emptiness and silence.

  He walked around the house, looking for the dog, and there was no back door to the house. The rough rock walls of the sides of the house pulled in with that funny curvature and there was no back to the house at all.

  But Taine was not interested; he had known how it would be. Right now he was looking for his dog and he felt the panic rising in him. Somehow it felt a long way from home.

  He spent three hours at it. He went back into the house and Towser was not there. He went into the other world again and searched among the tumbled rocks and Towser was not there. He went back to the desert and walked around the hillock and then he climbed to the crest of it and used the binoculars and saw nothing but the lifeless desert, stretching far in all directions.

  Dead-beat with weariness, stumbling, half asleep even as he walked, he went back to the pickup.

  He leaned against it and tried to pull his wits together.

  Continuing as he was would be a useless effort. He had to get some sleep. He had to go back to Willow Bend and fill the tank and get some extra gasoline so that he could range farther afield in his search for Towser.

  He couldn’t leave the dog out here – that was unthinkable. But he had to plan, he had to act intelligently. He would be doing Towser no good by stumbling around in his present shape.

  He pulled himself into the truck and headed back for Willow Bend, following the occasional faint impressions that his tires had made in the sandy places, fighting a half-dead drowsiness that tried to seal his eyes shut.

  Passing the higher hill on which the milk-glass things had stood, he stopped to walk around a bit so he wouldn’t fall asleep behind the wheel. And now, he saw, there were only seven of the things resting in their cradles.

  But that meant nothing to him now. All that meant anything was to hold off the fatigue that was closing down upon him, to cling to the wheel and wear off the miles, to get back to Willow Bend and get some sleep and then come back again to look for Towser.

  Slightly more than halfway home he saw the other car and watched it in numb befuddlement, for this truck that he was driving and the car at home in his garage were the only two vehicles this side of his house.

  He pulled the pickup to a halt and stumbled out of it.

  The car drew up and Henry Horton and Beasly and a man who wore a star leaped quickly out of it.

  “Thank God we found you, man!” cried Henry, striding over to him.

  “I wasn’t lost,” protested Taine. “I was coming back.”

  “He’s all beat out,” said the man who wore the star.

  “This is Sheriff Hanson,” Henry said. “We were following your tracks.”

  “I lost Towser,” Taine mumbled. “I had to go and leave him. Just leave me be and go and hunt for Towser. I can make it home.”

  He reached out and grabbed the edge of the pickup’s door to hold himself erect.

  “You broke down the door,” he said to Henry. “You broke into my house and you took my car –”

  “We had to do it, Hiram. We were afraid that something might have happened to you. The way that Beasly told it, it stood your hair on end.”

  “You better get him in the car,” the sheriff said. “I’ll drive the pickup back.”

  “But I have to hunt for Towser!”

  “You can’t do anything until you’ve had some rest.”

  Henry grabbed him by the arm and led him to the car and Beasly held the rear door open.

  “You got any idea what this place is?” Henry whispered conspiratorially.

  “I don’t positively know,” Taine mumbled. “Might be some other –”

  Henry chuckled. “Well, I guess it doesn’t really matter. Whatever it may be, it’s put us on the map. We’re in all the newscasts and the papers are plastering us in headlines and the town is swarming with reporters and cameramen and there are big officials coming. Yes, sir, I tell you, Hiram, this will be the making of us –”

  Taine heard no more. He was fast asleep before he hit the seat.

  V

  He came awake and lay quietly in the bed and he saw the shades were drawn and the room was cool and peaceful.

  It was good, he thought, to wake in a room you knew – in a room that one had known for his entire life, in a house that had been the Taine house for almost a hundred years.

  Then memory clouted him and he sat bolt upright.

  And now he heard it – the insistent murmur from outside the window.

  He vaulted from the bed and pulled one shade aside. Peering out, he saw the cordon of troops that held back the crowd that overflowed his back yard and the backyards back of that.

  He let the shade drop back and started hunting for his shoes, for he was fully dressed. Probably Henry and Beasly, he told himself, had dumped him into bed and pulled off his shoes and let it go at that. But he couldn’t remember a single thing of it. He must have gone dead to the world the minute Henry had bundled him into the back seat of the car.

  He found the shoes on the floor at the end of the bed and sat down upon the bed to pull them on.

  And his mind was racing on what he had to do.

  He’d have to get some gasoline somehow and fill up the truck and stash an extra can or two into the back and he’d have to take some food and water and perhaps his sleeping bag. For he wasn’t coming back until he found his dog.

  He got on his shoes and tied them, then went out into the living room. There was no one there, but there were voices in the kitchen.

  He looked out the window and the desert lay outside, unchanged. The sun, he noticed, had climbed higher in the sky, but out in his front yard it still was forenoon.

  He looked at his watch and it was six o’clock and from the way the shadows had been falling when he’d peered out of the bedroom window, he knew that it was 6:00 p.m. He realized with a guilty start th
at he must have slept almost around the clock. He had not meant to sleep that long. He hadn’t meant to leave Towser out there that long.

  He headed for the kitchen and there were three persons there – Abbie and Henry Horton and a man in military garb.

  “There you are,” cried Abbie merrily. “We were wondering when you would wake up.”

  “You have some coffee cooking, Abbie?”

  “Yes, a whole pot full of it. And I’ll cook up something else for you.”

  “Just some toast,” said Taine. “I haven’t got much time. I have to hunt for Towser.”

  “Hiram,” said Henry, “this is Colonel Ryan. National Guard. He has his boys outside.”

  “Yes, I saw them through the window.”

  “Necessary,” said Henry. “Absolutely necessary. The sheriff couldn’t handle it. The people came rushing in and they’d have torn the place apart. So I called the governor.”

  “Taine,” the colonel said, “sit down. I want to talk with you.”

  “Certainly,” said Taine, taking a chair. “Sorry to be in such a rush, but I lost my dog out there.”

  “This business,” said the colonel, smugly, “is vastly more important than any dog could be.”

  “Well, colonel, that just goes to show that you don’t know Towser. He’s the best dog I ever had and I’ve had a lot of them. Raised him from a pup and he’s been a good friend all these years –”

  “All right,” the colonel said, “so he is a friend. But still I have to talk with you.”

  “You just sit and talk,” Abbie said to Taine. “I’ll fix up some cakes and Henry brought over some of that sausage that we get out on the farm.”

  The back door opened and Beasly staggered in to the accompaniment of a terrific metallic banging. He was carrying three empty five-gallon gas cans in one hand and two in the other hand and they were bumping and banging together as he moved.

  “Say,” yelled Taine, “what is going on here?”

  “Now, just take it easy,” Henry said. “You have no idea the problems that we have. We wanted to get a big gas tank moved through here, but we couldn’t do it. We tried to rip out the back of the kitchen to get it through, but we couldn’t –”

  “You did what!”

  “We tried to rip out the back of the kitchen,” Henry told him calmly. “You can’t get one of those big storage tanks through an ordinary door. But when we tried, we found that the entire house is boarded up inside with the same kind of material that you used down in the basement. You hit it with an axe and it blunts the steel –”

  “But, Henry, this is my house and there isn’t anyone who has the right to start tearing it apart.”

  “Fat chance,” the colonel said. “What I would like to know, Taine, what is that stuff that we couldn’t break through?”

  “Now you take it easy, Hiram,” cautioned Henry. “We have a big new world waiting for us out there –”

  “It isn’t waiting for you or anyone,” yelled Taine.

  “And we have to explore it and to explore it we need a stockpile of gasoline. So since we can’t have a storage tank, we’re getting together as many gas cans as possible and then we’ll run a hose through here –”

  “But, Henry –”

  “I wish,” said Henry sternly, “that you’d quit interrupting me and let me have my say. You can’t even imagine the logistics that we face. We’re bottlenecked by the size of a regulation door. We have to get supplies out there and we have to get transport. Cars and trucks won’t be so bad. We can disassemble them and lug them through piecemeal, but a plane will be a problem.”

  “You listen to me, Henry. There isn’t anyone going to haul a plane through here. This house has been in my family for almost a hundred years and I own it and I have a right to it and you can’t come in highhanded and start hauling stuff through it.”

  “But,” said Henry plaintively, “we need a plane real bad. You can cover so much more ground when you have a plane.”

  Beasly went banging through the kitchen with his cans and out into the living room.

  The colonel sighed. “I had hoped, Mr. Taine, that you would understand how the matter stood. To me it seems very plain that it’s your patriotic duty to co-operate with us in this. The government, of course, could exercise the right of eminent domain and start condemnation action, but it would rather not do that. I’m speaking unofficially, of course, but I think it’s safe to say the government would much prefer to arrive at an amicable agreement.”

  “I doubt,” Taine said, bluffing, not knowing anything about it, “that the right of eminent domain would be applicable. As I understand it, it applies to buildings and to roads –”

  “This is a road,” the colonel told him flatly. “A road right through your house to another world.”

  “First,” Taine declared, “the government would have to show it was in the public interest and that refusal of the owner to relinquish title amounted to an interference in government procedure and –”

  “I think,” the colonel said, “that the government can prove it is in the public interest.”

  “I think,” Taine said angrily, “I better get a lawyer.”

  “If you really mean that,” Henry offered, ever helpful, “and you want to get a good one – and I presume you do – I would be pleased to recommend a firm that I am sure would represent your interests most ably and be, at the same time, fairly reasonable in cost.”

  The colonel stood up, seething. “You’ll have a lot to answer, Taine. There’ll be a lot of things the government will want to know. First of all, they’ll want to know just how you engineered this. Are you ready to tell that?”

  “No,” said Taine, “I don’t believe I am.”

  And he thought with some alarm: They think that I’m the one who did it and they’ll be down on me like a pack of wolves to find out just how I did it. He had visions of the FBI and the state department and the Pentagon and, even sitting down, he felt shaky in the knees.

  The colonel turned around and marched stiffly from the kitchen. He went out the back and slammed the door behind him.

  Henry looked at Taine speculatively.

  “Do you really mean it?” he demanded. “Do you intend to stand up to them?”

  “I’m getting sore,” said Taine. “They can’t come in here and take over without even asking me. I don’t care what anyone may think, this is my house. I was born here and I’ve lived here all my life and I like the place and –”

  “Sure,” said Henry. “I know just how you feel.”

  “I suppose it’s childish of me, but I wouldn’t mind so much if they showed a willingness to sit down and talk about what they meant to do once they’d taken over. But there seems no disposition to even ask me what I think about it. And I tell you, Henry, this is different than it seems. This is not a place where we can walk in and take over, no matter what Washington may think. There is something out there and we better watch our step –”

  “I was thinking,” Henry interrupted, “as I was sitting here, that your attitude is most commendable and deserving of support. It has occurred to me that it would be most unneighborly of me to go on sitting here and leave you in the fight alone. We could hire ourselves a fine array of legal talent and we could fight the case and in the meantime we could form a land and development company and that way we could make sure that this new world of yours is used the way it should be used.

  “It stands to reason, Hiram, that I am the one to stand beside you, shoulder to shoulder, in this business since we’re already partners in this TV deal.”

  “What’s this about TV?” shrilled Abbie, slapping a plate of cakes down in front of Taine.

  “Now, Abbie,” Henry said patiently, “I have explained to you already that your TV set is back of that partition down in the basement and there isn’t any telling when we can get i
t out.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Abbie, bringing a platter of sausages and pouring a cup of coffee.

  Beasly came in from the living room and went bumbling out the back.

  “After all,” said Henry, pressing his advantage, “I would suppose I had some hand in it. I doubt you could have done much without the computer I sent over.”

  And there it was again, thought Taine. Even Henry thought he’d been the one who did it.

  “But didn’t Beasly tell you?”

  “Beasly said a lot, but you know how Beasly is.”

  And that was it, of course. To the villagers it would be no more than another Beasly story – another whopper that Beasly had dreamed up. There was no one who believed a word that Beasly said.

  Taine picked up the cup and drank his coffee, gaining time to shape an answer and there wasn’t any answer. If he told the truth, it would sound far less believable than any lie he’d tell.

  “You can tell me, Hiram. After all, we’re partners.”

  He’s playing me for a fool, thought Taine. Henry thinks he can play anyone he wants for a fool and sucker.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, Henry.”

  “Well,” Henry said, resignedly, getting to his feet, “I guess that part of it can wait.”

  Beasly came tramping and banging through the kitchen with another load of cans.

  “I’ll have to have some gasoline,” said Taine, “if I’m going out for Towser.”

  “I’ll take care of that right away,” Henry promised smoothly. “I’ll send Ernie over with his tank wagon and we can run a hose through here and fill up those cans. And I’ll see if I can find someone who’ll go along with you.”

  “That’s not necessary. I can go alone.”

  “If we had a radio transmitter. Then you could keep in touch.”

  “But we haven’t any. And, Henry, I can’t wait. Towser’s out there somewhere –”

  “Sure, I know how much you thought of him. You go out and look for him if you think you have to and I’ll get started on this other business. I’ll get some lawyers lined up and we’ll draw up some sort of corporate papers for our land development –”