The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

Now, Blaine knew, all hope was gone. There could be no bargain made. For Lambert Finn was beyond all bargaining.

  To the very last the man had stayed in character, had remained his harsh, stern self. No easy way for him, but the toughest way of all for a man to take his life.

  But even so, Blaine thought, staring in chilled horror at the red gash in the throat, there had been no need to do the job so thoroughly, to keep on slashing with the razor even as he died.

  Only a man of hate would do that, a man insane with the hate of self—a man who despised and loathed what he had become.

  Unclean—unclean with an alien mind inside his antiseptic skull. A thing like that would drive a man like Finn to death; a fastidious fanatic who could become obsessed with his self-conceived idea of a perfect state could not live with nor survive the disorderly enigma of an alien mind.

  Blaine turned on his heel and walked out of the room. In the corridor the guard was in a corner, doubled over, retching.

  “You stay here,” Blaine told him. “I’ll call the cops.”

  The man turned around. His eyes were glazed with horror. He wiped feebly at his chin.

  “I ask you,” he said, “did you ever see a mess—”

  “Sit down,” said Blaine, “and take it easy. I’ll be right back.”

  Although he wouldn’t be. Now was the time to blow. He needed time and he’d get a little time. For the guard was too shaken to do anything for quite a little while.

  But as soon as the news was known, all hell was bound to break.

  God help the parry, Blaine thought, who is caught this night!

  He went swiftly down the corridor and ran down the stairs. The lobby still was empty and he set out across it briskly.

  As he reached the door it came open suddenly and someone came through it, walking briskly, too.

  A purse clattered to the floor and Blaine’s hands reached out to steady the woman who had come through the doorway.

  Harriet! Get out of here! Get out!

  My purse!

  He stooped to scoop it up and as he lifted it, the catch came open and something black and heavy fell. His free hand snapped at it and had it and he worked it back along his palm so that it was hidden.

  Harriet had turned around and was going out the door. Blaine hurried after her and caught her by the elbow, urging her along.

  He reached his car and stopped to open the door. He pushed her in.

  But, Shep, my car is just a block—

  No time. We’re getting out of here.

  He ran around the car and got in. He jerked it from the curb and out into the street. Moving far more slowly than he wanted, he eased it down the block, turned at the intersection, heading for the highway.

  Just ahead stood the gutted structure of the Trading Post.

  He had been holding the purse in his lap and now he gave it to her.

  “How about the gun?” he asked.

  “I was going to kill him,” she shouted. “I was going to shoot him dead.”

  “No need to do that now. He is already dead.”

  She turned toward him quickly.

  “You!”

  “Well, now, I guess that you could say so.”

  “But, Shep, you know. You either killed him or you—”

  “All right,” he said. “I killed him.”

  And it was no lie. No matter by what hand Lambert Finn had died, he, Shepherd Blaine, had killed him.

  “I had reason to,” he said. “But you?”

  “He had Godfrey killed. That itself would have been enough.”

  “You were in love with Godfrey.”

  “Yes, I suppose I was. He was such a great guy, Shep.”

  “I know how great he was. We were friends in Fishhook.”

  “It hurts,” said Harriet. “Oh. Shep, how it hurts!”

  “And that night—”

  “There was no time for tears,” she said. “There’s never time for tears.”

  “You knew about all this—”

  “For a long time. It was my job to know.”

  He reached the highway and turned down it, back toward Hamilton. The sun had set. Twilight had crept across the land and in the east one star was twinkling, just above the prairie.

  “And now?” he asked.

  “Now I have a story. As much of it as I ever can.”

  “You’re going to write it. Will your paper run it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I have to write it. You understand that I have to write it. I’m going to New York—”

  “Wrong,” he said. “You’re going to Fishhook. Not by car. From the nearest airport—”

  “But, Shep—”

  “It’s not safe,” Blaine told her. “Not for anyone who has the faintest hint of parry. Even minor telepaths, like you.”

  “I can’t do it, Shep. I—”

  “Listen, Harriet. Finn had set up a Halloween outbreak by the parries, a sort of counter-intelligence move. The. other parries, when they learned about it, tried to stop it. They did stop part of it, but I don’t know to what extent. Whatever happens will be happening tonight. We would have used the outbreak to step up intolerance, to trigger rigid legislation. There would have been some violence, of course, but that was not, by and large, Finn’s purpose. But now, with Finn dead—.”

  Harriet drew in her breath. “They’ll wipe us out,” she said.

  “They’ll do their best. But there is a way—”

  “Knowing this, you still killed Finn!”

  “Look, Harriet, I didn’t really kill him. I went to bargain with him. I found a way to take the parries off the Earth. I was going to promise to clean every parry off the Earth, clean out of his way, if he’d hold off his dogs for a week or two—”

  “But you said you killed him.”

  “Maybe,” said Blaine, “I better fill you in. So when you come to write your story you can write it all.”

  XXXIV

  Hamilton was silent. And so empty you could feel the emptiness.

  Blaine stopped the car in the square and got out of it.

  Not a light was showing and the soft sound of the river came clearly to his ears.

  “They are gone,” he said.

  Harriet got out of the car and came around it to stand beside him.

  “All right, pal,” she said. “Get onto your horse.”

  He shook his head.

  “But you have to go. You have to follow them. You belong with them.”

  “Some day,” said Blaine. “Some day, years from now. There’s still work to do. There’ll be pockets of parries all up and down the land. Fearful and in hiding. I have to search them out. I have to save as many as I can.”

  “You’ll never live to do it. You’ll be a special target. Finn’s men will never rest—”

  “If the pressure gets too bad, I’ll go. I’m no hero, Harriet.”

  “You’ll promise that?” she asked.

  “Of course. Cross my heart. And you’re going back to Fishhook. You’ll be safe in Fishhook. Straight to the airport up in Pierre.”

  She turned and went back to the car, started to get in, then turned back again.

  “But you’ll need the car.”

  He chuckled. “If I need one, there’s a village full of cars. I can pick the one I want. They couldn’t take their cars.”

  She got behind the wheel and turned her head to say good-by.

  “One thing,” said Blaine. “What happened to you when I was in the shed?”

  Her laughter had a sharpness to it. “When Rand drove up, I pulled out. I went to get some help. I figured I should get on the phone to Pierre. There’d been men up there who’d helped us.”

  “But?”

  “The police stopped me and threw me into jail. They let me out the morning after and I’ve been looking for you since.”

  “Stout gal,” he said, and there was a faint throbbing in the air—a noise from far away.

  Blaine stiffened, listening. The nois
e grew louder, deeper—the sound of many cars.

  “Quick,” he said. “No lights. Slant across the bluff. You’ll hit the road up north.”

  “Shep, what’s got into you?”

  “That noise you hear is cars. A posse coming here. They know that Finn is dead.”

  “You Shep?”

  “I’ll be all right. Get going.”

  She started the motor.

  “Be seeing you,” she said.

  “Get moving, Harriet! And thanks a lot. Thanks for everything. Tell Charline hello.”

  “Good-by, Shep,” she said, and the car was moving, swinging in a circle to head up a street that led toward the bluff.

  She’ll make it all right, he told himself. Anyone who could drive those blind mountains out of Fishhook would have no trouble here.

  Good-by, Harriet, he had said. Tell Charline hello. And why had he said that, he wondered. A hail and farewell to the old life, more than likely—a reaching out to touch hands with the past. Although there’d be no past in Fishhook. Charline would go on having parties and the most peculiar people would continue showing up without having been invited. For Fishhook was a glamour and a litter and a ghost. Without knowing it, Fishhook now was dead. And it was a pity. For Fishhook had been one of the greatest, one of the giddiest, one of the gladdest things that had ever happened to the human race.

  He stood lonely in the square and listened to the furious sound of the coming cars. Far to the west he saw the flashing of their lights. A chill breeze came off the river and tugged at his trouser legs and jacket sleeves.

  All over the world, he thought. All over the world tonight there’d be screaming cars and the slavering mobs and the running people.

  He put his hand into a jacket pocket and felt the shape and the weight of the gun that had fallen from Harriet’s purse. His fingers closed around it—but that, he thought, was not the way to fight them.

  There was another way to fight them, a long-range way to fight them. Isolate them and strangle them in their own mediocrity. Give them what they wanted—a planet full of people who were merely normal. A planet full of people who could huddle here and for—never knowing space, never getting to the stars, never going any place or doing anything. Like a man who rocked away his life sitting in a rocking chair on a porch of some little dying town.

  Without recruits from outside, Fishhook itself would falter in another hundred years, come to a dead stop within still another hundred. For the parries on the other planets would recruit from Fishhook even as they winnowed through the world to rescue their own kind.

  But it wouldn’t matter in another hundred years, for the human race would then be safe on the other planets, building the kind of life and the kind of culture they’d been denied upon the Earth.

  He started to move across the square, heading toward the bluffs. For he must be out of town, or nearly out of town, before the cars came in.

  And he was, he knew, on a lonely path once more. But not so lonely now, for now he had a purpose. A purpose, he told himself with a sudden flickering of pride, he had hewn out himself.

  He straightened his shoulders against the chillness of the wind and moved a bit more briskly. For there was work to do. A lot of work to do.

  Something moved in the shadow of the trees off to the left and Blaine, catching the movement with one corner of his mind, wheeled swiftly.

  The movement came toward him, slowly, just a bit uncertainly.

  “Shep?”

  “Anita!” he cried. “You little fool!

  Anita!”

  She came running from the darkness and was in his arms.

  “I wouldn’t go,” she said. “I wouldn’t go without you. I knew you would come back.”

  He crushed her to him and bent to kiss her and there was nothing in the world, nothing in the universe, but the two of them. There was blood and lilacs and the shining stars and the wind upon the hilltop and the two of them and that was all there was.

  Except the screaming of the cars as they came tearing down the road.

  Blaine jerked away from her. “Run!” he cried. “You must, Anita!”

  “Like the wind,” she said.

  They ran.

  “Up the bluff,” she said. “There’s a car up there. I took it up as soon as it got dark.”

  Halfway up the bluff they stopped and looked back.

  The first flames were beginning to run in the huddled blackness of the village and screams of futile rage came drifting up the slope. Gunfire rattled hollowly, torn by the wind.

  “They’re shooting at shadows,” said Anita. “There is nothing down there. Not even dogs or cats. The kids took them along.”

  But in many other villages, thought Blaine, any many other places there would be more than shadows. There would be fire and gunsmoke and the knotted rope and the bloody knife. And there might be as well the pattering of rapid feet and the dark shape in the sky and a howling on the hills.

  “Anita,” he asked, “are there really werewolves?”

  “Yes,” she told him. “Your werewolves are down there.”

  And that was right, he thought. The darkness of the mind, the bleakness of the thought, the shallowness of purpose. These were the werewolves of the world.

  The two of them turned their backs upon the village and headed up the slope.

  Behind them the flames of ancient hate grew taller.

  THE END

  HERE GATHER THE STARS

  FIRST OF TWO PARTS

  It began on a battlefield a century ago—and it ends tomorrow, with all the galaxy’s stars locked in a great clash of conflicting, alien creeds!

  I

  THE NOISE was ended now.

  The smoke drifted like thin, gray wisps of fog, above the tortured earth and the shattered fences, and the peach trees that had been whittled into toothpicks by cannon fire. For a moment silence, if not peace, fell upon those few square miles of ground where men had fought.

  For endless time there had been belching thunder, rolling from horizon to horizon. The gouted earth spouted in the sky. Horses screamed, mixed with the hoarse bellowing of men; the whistling of metal and the thud when the whistle ended; the flash of searing fire and the brightness of the steel; the bravery of the colors snapping in the wind.

  Then it all had ended. There was a silence.

  But silence was an alien note upon this field, on this day. It was broken by the whimper of pain, the cry for water and the prayer for death—the crying and the calling and the whimpering that would go on for hours beneath the summer sun. Later the huddled shapes would grow quiet and still and there would be an odor that would sicken all who passed and the graves would be shallow graves.

  There was wheat that never would be harvested. There were trees that would not bloom when spring came round again. On the slope of land that ran up to the ridge were the words unspoken and the deeds undone, and the sodden bundles that cried aloud the empty waste of death.

  There were proud names that were the prouder now, but now no more than names to echo down the ages—the Iron Brigade, the 5th New Hampshire, the 1st Minnesota, the 2nd Massachusetts, the 16th Maine.

  And there was Enoch Wallace.

  He still held the shattered musket and there were blisters on his hands. His face was smudged with powder. His shoes were caked with dust and blood.

  He was still alive.

  DR. ERWIN HARDWICKE rolled the pencil back and forth between his palms, an irritating business. He eyed the man across the desk from him with some calculation.

  “What I can’t figure out,” said Hardwicke, “is why you should come to us.”

  “Well, you’re the National Academy and I thought—”

  “And you’re Intelligence.”

  “Look, doctor, if it suits you better, let’s call this visit unofficial. Say I’m a puzzled citizen who dropped in to see if you could help.”

  “It’s not that I wouldn’t like to help. I don’t see how I can. The whole thing is so ha
zy and so hypothetical.”

  “Damn it, man,” Claude Lewis said, “you can’t deny the proof—the little that I have been able to put my hands on.”

  “All right, then,” said Hardwicke, “let’s start over once again and take it piece by piece. You say you have this man.”

  “His name,” said Lewis, “is Enoch Wallace. Chronologically, he is 124 years old. He was born on a farm a few miles from the town of Millville in Wisconsin, April 22, 1840, and he is the only child of Jedediah and Amanda Wallace. He enlisted among the first when Abe Lincoln called for volunteers. He was with the Iron Brigade, which was virtually wiped out at Gettysburg in 1863. But Wallace somehow managed to get transferred to another fighting outfit and fought down across Virginia under Grant. He was in on the end of it at Appomattox.”

  “You’ve run a check on him?”

  “I’ve looked up his records. The record of enlistment at the state capitol in Madison. The rest of it, including discharge, here in Washington.”

  “You say he looks like thirty.”

  “Not a day beyond it. Maybe even less.”

  “But you haven’t talked with him.”

  Lewis shook his head.

  “He may not be the man. If you had fingerprints . . .”

  “At the time of the Civil war,” said Lewis, “they’d not thought of fingerprints.”

  “The last of the veterans of the Civil war,” said Hardwicke, “died several years ago. A Confederate drummer boy, I think. There must be some mistake.” Lewis shook his head. “I thought so myself, when I was assigned to it.”

  “How come you were assigned? How does Intelligence get involved in a deal like this?”

  “I’ll admit,” said Lewis, “that it’s a bit unusual. But there were so many implications . . .”

  “Immortality, you mean.”

  “IT CROSSED our mind, perhaps. But only incidentally. There were other considerations. It was a strange setup that bore looking into.”

  “But Intelligence . . .”

  Lewis grinned. “You are thinking, why not a scientific outfit? Logically, I suppose it should have been. But one of our men ran afoul of it. He was on vacation. Had relatives in Wisconsin. He heard a rumor—just the vaguest casual gossip. So he nosed around a bit. He didn’t find out too much, but enough to make him think there might be something to it.”