The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  PERHAPS, LEWIS told himself, this shed, for some baffling reason, was no more than a show place, a place staged most carefully to make one think that this was where Wallace lived. Perhaps he lived in the house after all. Although, if that were the case, why all this effort, not too successful, to make one think he didn’t?

  Lewis turned to the door and walked out of the shed. He went around the house until he reached the porch that led up to the front door. At the foot of the steps, he stopped and looked around. The place was quiet. The sun was mid-morning high and the day was warming up. This sheltered corner of the earth stood relaxed and hushed, waiting for the heat.

  He looked at his watch and he had forty minutes left, so he went up the steps and across the porch until he came to the door. Reaching out his hand, he grasped the knob and turned—except he didn’t turn it; the knob stayed exactly where it was. His clenched fingers went half around it in the motion of a turn.

  Puzzled, he tried again and still he didn’t turn the knob. It was as if the knob were covered with some hard, slick coating, like a coat of brittle ice, on which the fingers slipped without exerting any pressure on the knob.

  He bent his head close to the knob and tried to see if there were any evidence of coating. There was no evidence. The knob looked perfectly all right. Too all right, perhaps; for it was clean, as if someone had wiped and polished it. There was no dust upon it and no weather specks.

  He tried a thumbnail on it and the thumbnail slipped, but left no mark behind it. He ran his palm over the outer surface of the door and the wood was slick. The rubbing of the palm set up no friction. The palm slid along the wood as if the palm were greased, but there was no sign of grease. There was no indication of anything to account for the slickness of the door.

  Lewis moved from the door to the clapboard and the clapboard also was slick. He tried palm and thumbnail on it and the answer was the same. There was something covering this house which made it slick and smooth—so smooth that dust could not cling upon its surface nor could weather stain it.

  He moved along the porch until he came to a window. And now, as he stood facing the window, he realized something he had not noticed before, something that helped make the house seem gaunter than it really was. The windows were black.

  There were no curtains, no drapes, no shades. They were simply black rectangles, like empty eyes staring out of the bare skull of the house.

  He moved closer to the window and put his face up to it, shading the sides of his face, next to the eyes, with his upheld hands to shield out the sunlight. But even so he could not see into the room beyond. He stared, instead, into a pool of blackness, and the blackness, curiously enough, had no reflective qualities.

  He could not see himself reflected in the glass. He could see nothing but the blackness, as if the light hit the window and was absorbed by it, sucked in and held by it. There was no bouncing back of light once it had hit that window.

  He left the porch and went slowly around the house, examining it as he went. The windows were all blank, black pools that sucked in the captured light and all the exterior was slick and hard.

  HE POUNDED the clapboard with his fist. It was like pounding a rock. He examined the stone walls of the basement where they were exposed, and the walls were smooth and slick. There were mortar gaps between the stones and in the stones themselves one could see uneven surfaces. But the hand rubbed across the wall could detect no roughness.

  An invisible something had been laid over the roughness of the stone, just enough of it to fill in the pits and uneven surfaces. But one could not detect it. It was almost as if it had no substance.

  Straightening up from his examination of the wall, Lewis looked at his watch. There were only ten minutes left. He must be getting on.

  He walked down the hill toward the tangle of old orchard. At its edge, he stopped and looked back and now the house was different. It was no longer just a structure. It wore a personality, a mocking, leering look and there was a malevolent chuckle bubbling inside of it, ready to break out.

  Lewis ducked into the orchard and worked his way in among the trees. There was no path and beneath the trees the grass and weeds grew tall. He ducked the drooping branches and walked around a tree that had been uprooted in some windstorm of many years before.

  He reached up as he went along, picking an apple here and there, scrubby things and sour. He took a single bite out of each one of them, then threw them away; for there were none of them that was fit to eat, as if they might have taken from the neglected soil a certain basic bitterness.

  At the far side of the orchard he found the fence and the graves that it enclosed.

  Here the weeds and grass were not so high and the fence showed signs of repair made rather recently. At the foot of each grave, opposite the three crude native limestone headstones, was a peony bush, each of them a great straggling mass of plants that had grown undisciplined for years.

  Standing before the weathered picketing, he knew that he had stumbled on the Wallace family burial plot.

  But there should have been only the two stones. What about the third?

  He moved around the fence to the sagging gate and went into the plot. Standing at the foot of the graves, he read the legends on the stone. The carving was angular and rough, giving evidence of having been executed by unaccustomed hands. There were no pious phrases, no lines of verse, no carvings of angels or of lambs or of other symbolic figures such as had been in the vogue in the 1860s. There were just the names and dates.

  On the first stone: Amanda Wallace 1821-1863

  And on the second stone: Jedediah Wallace 1816-1866

  And on the third stone—

  III

  “GIVE ME THAT pencil, please,” said Lewis.

  Hardwicke quit rolling it between his palms and handed it across.

  “Paper, too?” he asked.

  “If you please,” said Lewis.

  He bent above the desk and drew rapidly.

  “Here,” he said, handing back the paper.

  Hardwicke wrinkled his brow.

  “But it makes no sense,” he said. “Except for that figure underneath.”

  “The figure eight, lying on its side. Yes, I know. The symbol for infinity.”

  “But the rest of it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lewis. “It is the inscription on the tombstone. I copied it . . .”

  “And you know it now by heart.”

  “I should. I’ve studied it enough.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” said Hardwicke. “Not that I’m an authority. I really know little at all in this field.”

  “You can put your mind at rest. It’s nothing that anyone knows anything about. It bears no resemblance, not even the remotest, to any language or any known inscription. I checked with men who know. Not one, but a dozen of them. I told them I’d found it on a rocky cliff. I am sure that most of them think I am a crackpot. One of those people who are trying to prove that the Romans or the Phoenicians or the Irish or whatnot had pre-Columbian settlements in America.”

  Hardwicke put down the sheet of paper.

  “I can see what you mean,” he said, “when you say you have more questions now than when you started. Not only the question of a young man more than a century old, but likewise the matter of the slickness of the house and the third gravestone with the undecipherable inscription. You say you’ve never talked with Wallace?”

  “No one talks to him except the mailman. He goes out on his daily walks and he packs this gun.”

  “People are afraid to talk with him?”

  “Because of the gun, you mean?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose that was in the back of my mind. I wondered why he carried it.”

  LEWIS SHOOK his head. “I don’t know. I’ve tried to tie it in, to find some reason he always has it with him. He has never fired the rifle so far as I can find. But I don’t think the rifle is the reason no one talks with him. He’s an anachron
ism, something living from another age. No one fears him, I am sure of that. He’s been around too long for anyone to fear him. Too familiar. He’s a fixture of the land, like a tree or boulder. And yet no one feels quite comfortable with him, either, I would imagine that most of them, if they should come face to face with him, would feel uncomfortable. For he’s something they are not. Something greater than they are, and at the same time a good deal less. As if he were a man who had walked away from his own humanity. I think that secretly many of his neighbors may be a bit shamed by him, shamed because he has, somehow, perhaps ignobly, sidestepped growing old—one of the penalties, but perhaps also one of the rights of all humankind. And perhaps this secret shame may contribute in some part to their unwillingness to talk about him to strangers like us.”

  “You spent a good deal of time watching him?”

  “There was a time I did. But now I have a crew. They watch on regular shifts. We have a dozen spots we watch from and we keep shifting them around. There isn’t an hour, day in, day out, that the Wallace house isn’t under observation.”

  “This business really has you people bugged.”

  “I think with reason,” Lewis said. “There is still one other thing.”

  He bent over and picked up the briefcase he had placed beside his chair. Unsnapping it, he took out a sheaf of photographs and handed them to Hardwicke.

  “What do you make of these?” he asked.

  Hardwicke picked them up. Suddenly he froze. The color drained out of his face. His hands began to tremble and he laid the pictures carefully on the desk. He had looked at only the top one; not any of the others.

  Lewis saw the question in his face.

  “In the grave,” he said. “The one beneath the headstone with the funny writing.”

  THE MESSAGE machine whistled shrilly. Enoch Wallace put away the book in which he had been writing and got up from his desk.

  He walked across the room to the whistling machine. He punched a button and shoved a key and the whistling stopped.

  The machine built up its hum and the message began to form on the plate, faint at first and then becoming darker until to stood out clearly. It read:

  NO. 406301 TO STATION 18327. TRAVELER AT 16097. 38. NATIVE THUBAN VI. NO BAGGAGE. NO. 3 LIQUID TANK. SOLUTION 27. DEPART FOR STATION 12892 AT 16439.16. CONFIRM.

  Enoch glanced up at the great galactic chronometer hanging on the wall. There was almost three hours to go.

  He touched a button and a thin sheet of metal, bearing the message, protruded from the side of the machine. Beneath it, the duplicate fed itself into the record file. The machine chuckled and the message plate was clear once more and waiting.

  Enoch pulled out the metal plate, threaded the holes in it through the double filing spindle and then dropped his fingers to the keyboard and typed: NO. 406301 RECEIVED. CONFIRM MOMENTARILY. The message came into being on the plate and he left it there.

  Thuban VI? Had there been, he wondered, one of them before? As soon as he got his chores done, he would go to the filing cabinet and check.

  It was a liquid-tank case and those, as a rule, were the most uninteresting of all. They usually were hard ones to strike up a conversation with, because too often their concept of language was too difficult to handle. And, as often, too, their very thinking processes proved too divergent to provide much common ground for communication.

  Although, he recalled, that was not always true. There had been that tank traveler several years ago, from somewhere in Hydra (or had it been the Hyades?) he’d sat up the whole night with and almost failed of sending off on time, yarning through the hours, their communication (you couldn’t call it words) tumbling over one another as they packed into the little time they had a lot of fellowship and, perhaps, some brotherhood.

  He, or she, or it—they’d never got around to that—had not come back again. And that was the way it was, thought Enoch. Very few came back. By far the greater part of them were just passing through.

  BUT ENOCH had him, or her, or it (whichever it might be) down in black and white. In fact he had all of them, every single blessed one of them, down in black and white. It had taken him, he remembered, almost the entire following day, crouched above his desk, to get it written down; all the stories he’d been told, all the glimpses he had caught of a far and beautiful and tantalizing land (tantalizing because there was so much of it he could not understand), all the warmth and comradeship that had flowed between himself and this misshapen, twisted, ugly living being from another world. And any time he wished, any day he wished, he could take down the journal from the row of journals and relive that night again. Although he never had. It was strange, he thought, how there was never time, or never seemed to be the time, to thumb through and re-read in part what he’d recorded through the years.

  He turned from the message machine and rolled a No. 3 liquid tank into place beneath the materializer, positioning it exactly and locking it in place. Then he pulled out the retracting hose and thumbed the selector over to No. 27. He filled the tank and let the hose slide back into the wall.

  Back at the machine, he cleared the plate and sent off his confirmation that all was ready for the traveler from Thuban. He got back re-confirmation from the other end, then threw the machine to neutral, ready to receive again.

  He went from the machine to the filing cabinet that stood next to his desk and pulled out a drawer jammed with filing cards. He looked and Thuban VI was there, keyed to August 22, 1931. He walked across the room to the wall filled with books and rows of magazines and journals, filled from floor to ceiling, and found the record book he wanted. Carrying it, he walked back to his desk.

  August 22, 1931, he found, when he located the entry, had been one of his lighter days. There had been one traveler only, the one from Thuban VI. And although the entry for the day filled almost a page in his small, crabbed writing, he had devoted no more than one paragraph to the visitor.

  Came today, it read, a blob from Thuban VI. There is no other way in which one might describe it. It is simply a mass of matter, presumably of flesh, and this mass seems to go through some sort of rhythmic change in shape, for periodically it is globular, then begins to flatten out until it lies in the bottom of the tank, somewhat like a pancake. Then it begins to contract and to pull in upon itself, until finally it is a ball again. This change is rather slow and definitely rhythmic, but only in the sense that it follows the same pattern. It seems to have no relation to time. I tried timing it and could detect no time pattern. The shortest period needed to complete the cycle was seven minutes and the longest was eighteen. Perhaps over a longer period one might be able to detect a time rhythm, but I didn’t have the time. The semantic translator did not work with it, but it did emit for me a series of sharp clicks, as if it might be clicking claws together, although it had no claws that I could see. When I looked this up in the pasimology manual I learned that what it was trying to say was that it was all right, that it needed no attention, and please leave it alone. Which I did thereafter.

  And at the end of the paragraph, jammed into the little space that had been left, was the notation: See Oct. 16, 1931.

  HE TURNED the pages until he came to October 16 and that had been one of the days, he saw, that Ulysses had arrived to inspect the station.

  His name, of course, was not Ulysses. As a matter of fact, he had no name at all. Among his people there was no need of names; there was other identifying terminology which was far more expressive than mere names. But this terminology, even the very concept of it, was such that it could not be grasped, much less put to use, by human beings.

  “I shall call you Ulysses,” Enoch recalled telling him, that first time they had met. “I need to call you something.”

  “It is agreeable,” said the then strange being (but no longer strange). “Might one ask why the name Ulysses?”

  “Because it is the name of a great man of my race.”

  “I am glad you chose it,” said the newly-christen
ed being. “To my hearing it has a dignified and noble sound and, between the two of us, I shall be glad to bear it. And I shall call you Enoch, for the two of us shall work together for many of your years.” And it had been many years, thought Wallace, with the record book open to that October entry of more than thirty years ago. Years that had been satisfying and enriching in a way that one could not have imagined until it had all been laid out before him.

  And it would go on, he thought, much longer than it already had gone on. For many centuries more. For a thousand years, perhaps. And at the end of that thousand years, what would he know then?

  Although, perhaps, he thought, the knowing was not the most important part of it.

  And none of it, he knew, might come to pass, for there was interference now. There were watchers, or at least a watcher. The fellow who posed as a ginseng hunter. Before too long whoever it might be might start closing in. What he’d do or how he’d meet the threat, he had no idea until that moment came. It was something that had been bound to happen. It was something he had been prepared to have happen all these years. There was reason to wonder that it had not happened sooner.

  He had told Ulysses of the danger of it that first day they’d met. He’d been sitting on the steps that led up to the porch, and thinking of it now, he could remember it as clearly as if it had been only yesterday.

  IV

  HE WAS sitting on the steps and it was late afternoon. He was watching the great, white thunderheads that were piling up across the river beyond the Iowa hills.

  The day was hot and sultry, without a breath of moving air. Out in the barnyard a half a dozen bedraggled chickens scratched listlessly, for the sake of going through the motions, it seemed, rather than from any hope of finding food. The sound of the sparrows’ wings, as they flew between the gable of the barn and the hedge of honeysuckle that bordered the field beyond the road, was harsh and dry sound, as if their feathers had grown stiff in the heat.