Without even looking back, Meek strode purposefully down the street toward the Prowler. What he meant to do he did not know. What he possibly could do he had no idea. But anything was better than standing there while the crowd screamed at him and men shook their fists at him.
Why, they might even lynch him! He shivered at the thought. But men still did things like that. Especially when someone monkeyed around with the very things they depended on for life out here in naked space. Maybe they’d turn him out on Juno with only an hour or two of oxygen. Maybe they’d …
Stiffy was yelling at him. “Come back, you danged old fool …”
Suddenly the ground leaped and bucked beneath Meek’s feet. The power reeled before his startled eyes and then, somehow, he was on his back, watching the dome wheel and weave above him.
Fighting for breath that had been knocked out of him, he clawed his way to his knees, tried to stand erect, but the ground still was crawling with motion.
It was like an earthquake, he told himself, startled that he could even think. But it couldn’t be an earthquake. Juno didn’t have earthquakes, there was no reason for Juno to have earthquakes. The little planetoid eons ago had cooled through and through, each rock, each strata had found its place. Juno was dead, dead as the reaches of space itself, and earthquakes don’t happen on dead planets.
Out of the corner of his eyes he saw the Prowler had backed out of the hole in the power plant, was standing with four legs spread wide, bracing himself. His long neck was stretched high in the air and the ugly, toothy head had the look of quick alertness.
Meek gained his feet, stood tottering, keeping upright by some fancy footwork. The Prowler started toward him, legs gathering speed, heading down the street.
With a hoarse whoop, Meek steadied himself, half crouched and held his breath. Sprawling, he leaped, leaped so hard he almost vaulted over the beast’s broad back. He scrambled into position astride the running robot, saw Stiffy leaping at him. Quickly he shot out a hand, grasped Stiffy and hauled him aboard.
Ahead of them the crowd rushed for safety, leaving a broad avenue for the storming Prowler and his two riders.
“Get the locks open,” yelled Stiffy. “Here we come!”
The crowd took up the shriek. “Get the locks open!”
The Prowler swept down the street, hoofs clattering like hammer blows. Ahead of them the inner lock swung open. As the Prowler bulleted into the entrance tunnel, the outer lock swung out and for a few wild seconds air screamed and howled, rushing from the city into the vacuum of space.
In frantic haste, Meek and Stiffy worked with their helmets, getting them clamped down. Then they were out in the open, the gleaming city behind them.
Less than half a mile away loomed a massive boulder towering a hundred feet or more above the level of the canyon floor. The Prowler made a beeline for it.
“Oliver,” yelled Stiffy, “that thing wasn’t there before. Look, it almost blocks the canyon!”
The bounder was black but it crawled with a greenish glow, a faint network of somber fire.
The breath caught in Meek’s throat.
“Stiffy,” he whispered.
Behind him, Stiffy almost sobbed in excitement. “Yeah, I know. it’s a meteor. And it’s lousy with radium.”
“If just fell,” said Meek, voice unsteady. “That’s what shook up the place. Wonder is it didn’t crack the dome wide open.”
“We better jump for it,” urged Stiffy. “If we don’t want to get plumb burned. Can’t go near that thing without lead sheathing.”
Meek flung himself sidewise, throwing up his arms to shield his helmet, struck on his shoulders and rolled. Slowly, benumbed from the fall, he crept out of the shadow of a high rock wall into the starlight.
Stiffy was sitting on the ground, rubbing his shins.
“Barked them up some,” he admitted.
Up the valley the Prowler was arching its back and rubbing against the green-glowing boulder.
“Just like a dad-blamed cat that has found some catnip,” said Stiffy. “Must sort of like that radium.”
He rose slowly, dusted off his suit.
“Well,” he suggested, “let’s you and me go into action.”
“Action?”
“Sure. Let’s go back and file us a claim on that meteor. Don’t need to worry about anybody else jumping it, cause every dad-blamed one of them is scared speechless of the Prowler. They won’t go near the meteor long as he’s around.”
Meek stared at the meteor speculatively. “That’s worth a lot of money, isn’t it, Stiffy? Filled with radium like that.”
“Bet your boots,” said Stiffy cheerfully. “We go fifty-fifty on her. Split equal ways. We’re pardners.”
“Tell you what you do,” Meek said slowly. “You take it all. Just take out enough to fix up the damage back there and call that my share.”
Stiffy’s jaw drooped. “Say, what you getting at?”
“I’m leaving,” said Meek.
“Good gravy! Leaving! And just when we made us a strike.”
“You don’t understand,” said Meek. “I didn’t come out here to find radium. Or to arrest gangs. Or even to capture an Asteroid Prowler. I just came out to look around. Nice and quiet. Didn’t want to bother anybody. Didn’t want anybody to bother me.”
“Doggone it,” said Stiffy, “and I was just figuring maybe, soon as we cleaned up the radium, we might get that Prowler to lead us to the Lost Mine.”
Meek brightened. “I have a hunch I know where that Lost Mine is, Stiffy. Remember there was a cut-back in the cliff near where we found the Prowler. Well, when I first saw him, he was in that place. Got a hunch maybe that’s the mine.”
Stiffy grinned. “So you’re sticking with me.”
Meek shook his head. “No, I’m still leaving.”
“Just like that?” said Stiffy.
Stiffy held out his hand, “O.K., if that’s what you want to do. I’ll bank your half in the First Martian back on Earth. Leave my address there. Might want to get in touch with me some time.”
Meek gripped his hand. “You don’t need to do that. Take all of it. Just see the plant’s fixed up.”
Stiffy’s eyes shone queerly, moistly in the starlight. “Shucks, there’s enough for both of us. More than enough.” His voice was rough. “Now get along with you.”
Meek started to walk away.
“Goodbye, Stiffy,” he called.
“So long,” Stiffy shouted.
Meek hesitated. It seemed there should have been more he could have said. Some way to let Stiffy know he liked him. Some way to tell him he was a friend in a life which had known few friends.
He tried to think of ways to put what he felt in words, but there wasn’t any way, none that didn’t sound awkward and sentimental.
He wheeled about, headed for the space port. His feet went faster and faster, until finally he was running.
He had to get out of here, he told himself, before he got into another jam. His luck was stretched too thin already. A fellow just couldn’t go on having luck like that.
And besides, there was all of space to roam in, other places to see. That was what he had set out to do. To see the Solar System in his own ship, to do all the things he’d dreamed about back in the cubby hole at Lunar Exports, Inc.
And he was going to do just that, he promised himself. Although he hoped the next stop would be more peaceable.
Oliver Meek sighed happily – this was the life.
Neighbor
If one were forced to choose a single particular story that would most represent Clifford D. Simak’s best-known literary image, this would be that story: a story of the alien coming to backcountry middle America, told from the point of view of one of those country people. No one else – not even Cliff himself – ever did this better, nor
ever will.
—dww
Coon Valley is a pleasant place, but there’s no denying it’s sort of off the beaten track and it’s not a place where you can count on getting rich because the farms are small and a lot of the ground is rough. You can farm the bottomlands, but the hillsides are only good for pasture and the roads are just dirt roads, impassable at certain times of year.
The old-timers, like Bert Smith and Jingo Harris and myself, are well satisfied to stay here, for we grew up with the country and we haven’t any illusions about getting rich and we’d feel strange and out-of-place anywhere but in the valley. But there are others, newcomers, who move in and get discouraged after a while and up and move away, so there usually is a farm or two standing idle, waiting to be sold.
We are just plain dirt farmers, with emphasis on the dirt, for we can’t afford a lot of fancy machinery and we don’t go in for blooded stock – but there’s nothing wrong with us; we’re just everyday, the kind of people you meet all over these United States. Because we’re out of the way and some of the families have lived here for so long, I suppose you could say that we have gotten clannish. But that doesn’t mean we don’t like outside folks; it just means we’ve lived so long together that we’ve got to know and like one another and are satisfied with things just as they are.
We have radios, of course, and we listen to the programs and the news, and some of us take daily papers, but I’m afraid that we may be a bit provincial, for it’s fairly hard to get us stirred up much about world happenings. There’s so much of interest right here in the valley we haven’t got the time to worry about all those outside things. I imagine you’d call us conservative, for most of us vote Republican without even wondering why and there’s none of us who has much time for all this government interference in the farming business.
The valley has always been a pleasant place – not only the land, but the people in it, and we’ve always been fortunate in the new neighbors that we get. Despite new ones coming in every year or so, we’ve never had a really bad one and that means a lot to us.
But we always worry a little when one of the new ones up and moves away and we speculate among ourselves, wondering what kind of people will buy or rent the vacant farm.
The old Lewis farm had been abandoned for a long time, the buildings all run down and gone to ruin and the fields gone back to grass. A dentist over at Hopkins Corners had rented it for several years and run some cattle in it, driving out on weekends to see how they were doing. We used to wonder every now and then if anyone would ever farm the place again, but finally we quit wondering, for the buildings had fallen into such disrepair that we figured no one ever would. I went in one day and talked to the banker at Hopkins Corners, who had the renting of the place, and told him I’d like to take it over if the dentist ever gave it up. But he told me the owners, who lived in Chicago then, were anxious to sell rather than to rent it, although he didn’t seem too optimistic that anyone would buy it.
Then one spring a new family moved onto the farm and in time we learned it had been sold and that the new family’s name was Heath – Reginald Heath. And Bert Smith said to me, “Reginald! That’s a hell of a name for a farmer!” But that was all he said.
Jingo Harris stopped by one day, coming home from town, when he saw Heath out in the yard, to pass the time of day. It was a neighborly thing to do, of course, and Heath seemed glad to have him stop, although Jingo said he seemed to be a funny kind of man to be a farmer.
“He’s a foreigner,” Jingo told me. “Sort of dark. Like he might be a Spaniard or from one of those other countries. I don’t know how he got that Reginald. Reginald is English and Heath’s no Englishman.”
Later on we heard that the Heaths weren’t really Spanish, but were Rumanians or Bulgarians and that they were refugees from the Iron Curtain.
But Spanish, or Rumanian, or Bulgarian, the Heaths were workers. There was Heath and his wife and a half-grown girl and all three of them worked all the blessed time. They paid attention to their business and didn’t bother anyone and because of this we liked them, although we didn’t have much to do with them. Not that we didn’t want to or that they didn’t want us to; it’s just that in a community like ours new folks sort of have to grow in instead of being taken in.
Heath had an old beaten-up, wired-together tractor that made a lot of noise, and as soon as the soil was dry enough to plow he started out to turn over the fields that through the years had grown up to grass. I used to wonder if he worked all night long, for many times when I went to bed I heard the tractor running. Although that may not be as late as it sounds to city dwellers, for here in the valley we go to bed early – and get up early, too.
One night after dark I set out to hunt some cows, a couple of fence-jumping heifers that gave me lots of trouble. Just let a man come in late from work and tired and maybe it’s raining a little and dark as the inside of a cat and those two heifers would turn up missing and I’d have to go and hunt them. I tried all the different kinds of pokes and none of them did any good. When a heifer gets to fence-jumping there isn’t much that can be done with her.
So I lit a lantern and set out to hunt for them, but I hunted for two hours and didn’t find a trace of them. I had just about decided to give up and go back home when I heard the sound of a tractor running and realized that I was just above the west field of the old Lewis place. To get home I’d have to go right past the field and I figured it might be as well to wait when I reached the field until the tractor came around and ask Heath if he had seen the heifers.
It was a dark night, with thin clouds hiding the stars and a wind blowing high in the treetops and there was a smell of rain in the air. Heath, I figured, probably was staying out extra late to finish up the field ahead of the coming rain, although I remember that I thought he was pushing things just a little hard. Already he was far ahead of all the others in the valley with his plowing.
So I made my way down the steep hillside and waded the creek at a shallow place I knew and while I was doing this I heard the tractor make a complete round of the field. I look for the headlight, but I didn’t see it and I thought probably the trees had hidden it from me.
I reached the edge of the field and climbed through the fence, walking out across the furrows to intercept the tractor. I heard it make the turn to the east of me and start down the field toward me and although I could hear the noise of it, there wasn’t any light.
I found the last furrow and stood there waiting, sort of wondering, not too alarmed as yet, how Heath managed to drive the rig without any light. I thought that maybe he had cat’s eyes and could see in the dark and although it seemed funny later when I remembered it, the idea that a man might have cat’s eyes did not seem funny then.
The noise kept getting louder and it seemed to be coming pretty close, when all at once the tractor rushed out of the dark and seemed to leap at me. I guess I must have been afraid that it would run over me, for I jumped back a yard or two, with my heart up in my neck. But I needn’t have bothered, for I was out of the way to start with.
The tractor went on past me and I waved the lantern and yelled for Heath to stop and as I waved the lantern the light was thrown onto the rear of the tractor and I saw there was no one on it.
A hundred things went through my mind, but the one idea that stuck was that Heath had fallen off the tractor and might be lying injured, somewhere in the field.
I ran after the tractor, thinking to shut it down before it got loose and ran into a tree or something, but by the time I reached it, it had reached a turn and it was making that turn as neatly as if it had been broad daylight and someone had been driving it.
I jumped up on the drawbar and grabbed the seat, hauling myself up. I reached out a hand, grabbing for the throttle, but with my hand upon the metal I didn’t pull it back. The tractor had completed the turn now and was going down the furrow – and there was something el
se.
Take an old tractor, now – one that wheezed and coughed and hammered and kept threatening to fall apart, like this one did – and you are bound to get a lot of engine vibration. But in this tractor there was no vibration. It ran along as smooth as a high-priced car and the only jolts you got were when the wheels hit a bump or slight gully in the field.
I stood there, hanging onto the lantern with one hand and clutching the throttle with the other, and I didn’t do a thing. I just rode down to the point where the tractor started to make another turn. Then I stepped off and went on home. I didn’t hunt for Heath lying in the field, for I knew he wasn’t there.
I suppose I wondered how it was possible, but I didn’t really fret myself too much trying to figure it all out. I imagine, in the first place, I was just too numb. You may worry a lot about little things that don’t seem quite right, but when you run into a big thing, like that self-operating tractor, you sort of give up automatically, knowing that it’s too big for your brain to handle, that it’s something you haven’t got a chance of solving. And after a while you forget it because it’s something you can’t live with. So your mind rejects it.
I got home and stood out in the barnyard for a moment, listening. The wind was blowing fairly hard by then and the first drops of rain were falling, but every now and then, when the wind would quiet down, I could hear the tractor.
I went inside the house and Helen and the kids were all in bed and sound asleep, so I didn’t say anything about it that night. And the next morning, when I had a chance to think about it, I didn’t say anything at all. Mostly, I suppose, because I knew no one would believe me and that I’d have to take a lot of kidding about automatic tractors.
Heath got his plowing done and his crops in, well ahead of everyone in the valley. The crops came up in good shape and we had good growing weather; then along in June we got a spell of wet, and everyone got behind with corn plowing because you can’t go out in the field when the ground is soggy. All of us chored around our places, fixing fences and doing other odd jobs, cussing out the rain and watching the weeds grow like mad in the unplowed field.
The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories Page 20