The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  “That means, then,” said Lang, “that they did junk their engines. They ripped them out entire and heaved them in the junkpile. They tore them out and replaced them with the engines from this ship.”

  “But why?” asked Clyne. “Why did they have to do it?”

  “Because,” said Spencer, “they didn’t know how to operate their own engines.”

  “But if they didn’t know how to operate their engines, how could they run this one?”

  “He’s got you there,” said Dyer. “That’s one that you can’t answer.”

  “No, I can’t,” shrugged Warren. “But I wish I could, because then we’d have the answer ourselves.”

  “How long ago,” asked Spencer, “would you say this ship landed here? How long would it take for a spaceship hull to rust?”

  “It’s hard to tell,” Clyne answered. “It would depend on the kind of metal they used. But you can bet on this – any spaceship hull, no matter who might have built it, would be the toughest metal the race could fabricate.”

  “A thousand years?” Warren suggested.

  “I don’t know,” said Clyne. “Maybe a thousand years. Maybe more than that. You see this dust. That’s what’s left of whatever organic material there was in the ship. If the beings that landed here remained within the ship, they still are here in the form of dust.”

  Warren tried to think, tried to sort out the chronology of the whole thing.

  A thousand years ago, or thousands of years ago, a spaceship had landed here and had not got away.

  They another spaceship landed, a thousand or thousands of years later, and it, too, was unable to get away. But it finally escaped when the crew robbed the first ship of its engines and substituted them for the ones that had brought it here.

  Then years, or months, or days later, the Earth survey ship had landed here, and it, too, couldn’t get away – because the men who ran it couldn’t remember how to operate its engines.

  He swung around and strode from the engine room, leaving the others there, following the path in the dust back to the shattered lock.

  And just inside the port, sitting on the floor, making squiggles in the dust with an awkward finger, sat Briggs, who had gone back to the ship to get a length of rope.

  “Briggs,” said Warren sharply. “Briggs, what are you doing here?”

  Briggs looked up with vacant, laughing eyes.

  “Go away,” he said.

  Then he went back to making squiggles in the dust.

  XI

  Doc Spears said, “Briggs reverted to childhood. His mind is wiped as clean as a one-year-old’s. He can talk, which is about the only difference between a child and him. But his vocabulary is limited and what he says makes very little sense.”

  “He can be taught again?” asked Warren.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Spencer had a look at him. What does Spencer say?”

  “Spencer said a lot,” Doc told him. “It adds up, substantially, to practically total loss of memory.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Watch him. See he doesn’t get hurt. After a while we might try re-education. He may even pick up some things by himself. Something happened to him. Whether whatever it was that took his memory away also injured his brain is something I can’t say for sure. It doesn’t appear injured, but without a lot of diagnostic equipment we don’t have, you can’t be positive.”

  “There’s no sign of injury?”

  “There’s not a single mark anywhere,” said Doc. “He isn’t hurt. That is, not physically. It’s only his mind that’s been injured. Maybe not his mind, either – just his memory gone.”

  “Amnesia?”

  “Not amnesia. When you have that, you’re confused. You are haunted by the thought that you have forgotten something. You’re all tangled up. Briggs isn’t confused or tangled. He seems to be happy enough.”

  “You’ll take care of him, Doc? Kind of keep an eye on him?”

  Doc snorted and got up and left.

  Warren called after him. “If you see Bat Ears down there, tell him to come up.”

  Doc clumped down the stairs.

  Warren sat and stared at the blank wall opposite him.

  First Mac and his crew had forgotten how to run the engines. That was the first sign of what was happening – the first recognizable sign – for it had been going on long before Mac found he’d forgotten all his engine lore.

  The crew of investigators had lost some of their skills and their knowledge almost from the first. How else could one account for the terrible mess they’d made of the junkyard business? Under ordinary circumstances, they would have wrung some substantial information from the engine parts and the neatly stacked supplies. They had gotten information of a sort, of course, but it added up to nothing. Under ordinary circumstances, it should have added up to an extraordinary something.

  He heard feet coming up the stairs, but the tread was too crisp for Bat Ears.

  It was Spencer.

  Spencer flopped into one of the chairs. He sat there opening and closing his hands, looking down at them with helpless anger.

  “Well?” asked Warren. “Anything to report?”

  “Briggs got into that first tower,” said Spencer. “Apparently he came back with the rope and found us gone, so he climbed up and threw a hitch around the capstone, then climbed down again and pulled it off. The capstone is lying on the ground, at the foot of the tower, with the rope still hitched around it.”

  Warren nodded. “He could have done that. The capstone wasn’t too heavy. One man could have pulled it off.”

  “There’s something in that tower.”

  “You took a look?”

  “After what happened to Briggs? Of course not. I posted a guard to keep everyone away. We can’t go monkeying around with the tower until we’ve thought a few things through.”

  “What do you think is in there?”

  “I don’t know,” said Spencer. “All I have is an idea. We know what it can do. It can strip your memory.”

  “Maybe it’s fright that did it,” Warren said. “Something down in the tower so horrible …”

  Spencer shook his head. “There is no evidence of fright in Briggs. He’s calm. Sits there happy as a clam, playing with his fingers and talking silly sentences – happy sentences. The way a kid would talk.”

  “Maybe what he’s saying will give us a hint. Keep someone listening all the time. Even if the words don’t mean much …”

  “It wouldn’t do any good. Not only is his memory gone, but even the memory of what took it away.”

  “What do you plan to do?”

  “Try to get into the tower,” said Spencer. “Try to find out what’s in there. There must be a way of getting at whatever is there and coming out okay.”

  “Look,” Warren stated, “we have enough as it is.”

  “I have a hunch.”

  “This is the first time I’ve ever heard you use that word. You gents don’t operate on hunches. You operate on fact.”

  Spencer put up an outspread hand and wiped it across his face.

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with me, Warren. I know I’ve never thought in hunches before. Perhaps because now I can’t help myself, the hunch comes in and fills the place of knowledge that I’ve lost.”

  “You admit there’s been knowledge lost?”

  “Of course I do,” said Spencer. “You were right about the junkyard. We should have done a better job.”

  “And now you have a hunch.”

  “It’s crazy,” said Spencer. “At least, it sounds crazy. That memory, that lost knowledge and lost skill went somewhere. Maybe there’s something in the tower that took it away. I have the silly feeling we might get it back again, take it back from the thing that has it.”

&n
bsp; He looked challengingly at Warren. “You think I’m cracked.”

  Warren shook his head. “No, not that. Just grasping at straws.”

  Spencer got up heavily. “I’ll do what I can. I’ll talk with the others. We’ll try to think it out before we try anything.”

  When he had gone, Warren buzzed the engine room communicator.

  Mac’s voice came reedily out of the box.

  “Having any luck, Mac?”

  “None at all,” Mac told him. “We sit and look at the engines. We are going out of our heads trying to remember.”

  “I guess that’s all you can do, Mac.”

  “We could mess around with them, but I’m afraid if we do, we’ll get something out of kilter.”

  “Keep your hands off everything,” commanded Warren in sudden alarm. “Don’t touch a single thing. God knows what you might do.”

  “We’re just sitting,” Mac said, “and looking at the engines and trying to remember.”

  Crazy, thought Warren.

  Of course it was crazy.

  Down there were men trained to operate spaceship engines, men who had lived and slept with engines for year on lonesome year. And now they sat and looked at engines and wondered how to run them.

  Warren got up from his desk and went slowly down the stairs.

  In the cook’s quarters, he found Bat Ears.

  Bat Ears had fallen off a chair and was fast asleep upon the floor, breathing heavily. The room reeked with liquor fumes. An almost empty bottle sat upon the table.

  Warren reached out a foot and prodded Bat Ears gently. Bat Ears moaned a little in his sleep.

  Warren picked up the bottle and held it to the light. There was one good, long drink.

  He tilted the bottle and took the drink, then hurled the empty bottle against the wall. The broken plastiglass sprayed in a shower down on Bat Ears’ head.

  Bat Ears raised a hand and brushed it off, as if brushing away a fly. Then he slept on, smiling, with his mind comfortably drugged against memories he no longer had.

  XII

  They covered the tower with the capstone once again and rigged a tripod and pulley above it. then they took the capstone off and used the pulley to lower an automatic camera into the pit and they got their pictures.

  There was something in the tower, all right.

  They spread the pictures out on the table in the mess room and tried to make out what they had.

  It was shaped like a watermelon or an egg stood on one end with the lower end slightly mashed so that it would stand upright. It sprouted tiny hairs all over and some of the hairs were blurred in the pictures, as if they might have been vibrating. There was tubing and what seemed to be wiring, even if it didn’t look exactly the way you thought of wiring, massed around the lower end of the egg.

  They made other tests, lowering the instruments with the pulley, and they determined that the egg was alive and that it was the equivalent of a warm-blooded animal, although they were fairly sure that its fluids would not be identical with blood.

  It was soft and unprotected by any covering shell and it pulsed and gave out some sort of vibrations. They couldn’t determine what sort of vibrations. The little hairs that covered it were continually in motion.

  They put the capstone back in place again, but left the tripod and the pulley standing.

  Howard, the biologist, said, “It’s alive and it’s an organism of some kind, but I’m not at all convinced that it’s pure animal. Those wires and that piping lead straight into it, as if, you’d almost swear, the piping and the wires were a part of it. And look at these – what would you call them? – these studs, almost like connections for other wires.”

  “It’s not conceivable,” said Spencer, “that an animal and a mechanism should be joined together. Take Man and his machines. Man and the machines work together, but Man maintains his individual identity and the machines maintain their own. In a lot of cases it would make more sense, economically, if not socially, that Man and machine should be one, that the two of them be joined together, become, in fact, one organism.”

  Dyer said, “I think that may be what we have here.”

  “Those other towers?” asked Ellis.

  “They could be connected,” Spencer suggested, “associated in some way. All eight of them could be, as a matter of principle, one complex organism.”

  “We don’t know what’s in those other towers,” said Ellis.

  “We could find out,” Howard answered.

  “No, we can’t,” objected Spencer. “We don’t dare. We’ve fooled around with them more than was safe. Mac and his crew went for a walk and found the towers and examined them, just casually, you understand, and they came back not knowing how to operate the engines. We can’t take the chance of fooling around with them a minute longer than is necessary. Already we may have lost more than we suspect.”

  “You mean,” said Clyne, “that the loss of memory we may have experienced will show up later? That we may not know now we’ve lost it, but will find later that we did?”

  Spencer nodded. “That’s what happened to Mac. He or any member of his crew would have sworn, up to the minute that they tried to start the engines, that they could start them. They took it for granted, just as we take our knowledge for granted. Until we come to use the specific knowledge we have lost, we won’t realize we’ve lost it.”

  “It scares you just to think about it,” Howard said.

  Lang said, “It’s some sort of communications system.”

  “Naturally you’d think so. You’re a communications man.”

  “Those wires.”

  “And what about the pipes?” asked Howard.

  “I have a theory on that one,” Spencer told them. “The pipes supply the food.”

  “Attached to some food supply,” said Clyne. “A tank of food buried in the ground.”

  “More likely roots,” Howard put in. “To talk of tanks of food would mean these are transplanted things. They could just as easily be native to this planet.”

  “They couldn’t have built those towers,” said Ellis. “If they were native, they’d have had to build those towers themselves. Something or someone else built the towers, like a farmer builds a barn to protect his cattle. I’d vote for tanks of food.”

  Warren spoke for the first time. “What makes you think it’s a communications set up?”

  Lang shrugged. “Nothing specific. Those wires, I guess, and the studs. It looks like a communications rig.”

  “Communications might fill the bill,” Spencer nodded. “But a communications machine built to take in information rather than to pass information along or disseminate it.”

  “What are you getting at?” demanded Lang. “How would that be communication?”

  “I mean,” said Spencer, “that something has been robbing us of our memory. It stole our ability to run the engines and it took enough knowledge away from us so we bungled the junkyard job.”

  “It couldn’t be that,” said Dyer.

  “Why couldn’t it?” asked Clyne.

  “It’s just too damn fantastic.”

  “No more fantastic,” Spencer told him, “than a lot of other things we’ve found. Say that egg is a device for gathering knowledge …”

  “But there’s no knowledge to gather here,” protested Dyer. “Thousands of years ago, there was knowledge to gather from the rusted ship out there. And then, just a while ago, there was knowledge to gather from the junkyard ship. And now there’s us. But the next shipload of knowledge won’t come along for maybe uncounted thousands of years. It’s too long to wait, too big a gamble. Three ships we know of have come here; it would be just as reasonable to suppose that no ship would ever come here. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Who said that the knowledge had to be collected here? Even back on
Earth we forget, don’t we?”

  “Good Lord!” gasped Clyne, but Spencer rushed ahead.

  “If you were some race setting out fish traps for knowledge and had plenty of time to gather it, where would you put your traps? On a planet that swarmed with sentient beings, where the traps might be found and destroyed or their secrets snatched away? Or would you put them on some uninhabited, out-of-the-way planet, some second-rate world that won’t be worth a tinker’s damn to anyone for another billion years?”

  Warren said, “I’d put them on a planet just like this.”

  “Let me give you the picture,” Spencer continued. “Some race is bent on trapping knowledge throughout the Galaxy. So they hunt up the little, insignificant, good-for-nothing planets where they can hide their traps. That way, with traps planted on strategically spaced planets, they sweep all space and there’s little chance that their knowledge traps ever will be found.”

  “You think that’s what we’ve found here?” asked Clyne.

  “I’m tossing you the idea,” said Spencer, “to see what you think of it. Now let’s hear your comments.”

  “Well, the distance, for one thing –”

  “What we have here,” said Spencer, “is mechanical telepathy hooked up with a recording device. We know that distance has little to do with the speed of thought waves.”

  “There’s no other basis for this belief beyond speculation?” asked Warren.

  “What else can there be? You certainly can’t expect proof. We don’t dare to get close enough to find out what this egg is. And maybe, even if we could, we haven’t got enough knowledge left in us to make an intelligent decision or a correct deduction.”

  “So we guess again,” said Warren.

  “Have you some better method?”

  Warren shook his head. “No, I don’t think I have.”

  XIII

  Dyer put on a spacesuit, with a rope running from it to the pulley in the tripod set above the tower. He carried wires to connect to the studs. The other ends of the wires were connected to a dozen different instruments to see what might come over them – if anything.