The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  He urged that his good (friend?) do likewise. He said it was a comfort and made clear the road.

  There was no further explanation, no further reference. Just the calm declaration that he had done something which he felt must be arranged about his death. As if he knew that death was near and was not only unafraid, but almost unconcerned.

  The next passage (for there were no paragraphs) told about someone he had met and how they’d talked about a certain matter which made no sense at all to Enoch, lost in a terminology he did not recognize.

  And then: I am most concerned about the mediocrity (incompetence? inability? weakness?) of the recent custodian of (and then that cryptic symbol which could be translated, roughly, as the Talisman.) For (a word, which from context, seemed to mean a great length of time), ever since the death of the last custodian, the Talisman has been but poorly served. It has been, in all reality, (another long time term), since a true (sensitive?) has been found to carry out its purpose. Many have been tested and none has qualified, and for the lack of such a one the galaxy has lost its close identification with the ruling principle of life. We here at the (temple? sanctuary?) all are greatly concerned that without a proper linkage between the people and (several words that were not decipherable) the galaxy will go down in chaos (and another line that he could not puzzle out.)

  The next sentence introduced a new subject—the plans that were going forward for some cultural festival which concerned a concept that, to Enoch, was hazy at the best.

  Enoch slowly folded up the letter and put it back into the box. He felt a faint uneasiness in reading what he had, as if he’d pried into a friendship that he had no right to know. We here at the temple, the letter had said. Perhaps the writer had been one of the Hazer mystics, writing to his old friend, the philosopher. And the other letters, quite possibly, were from that same mystic—letters that the dead old Hazer had valued so highly that he took them along with him when he went traveling.

  A slight breeze seemed to be blowing across Enoch’s shoulders; not actually a breeze, but a strange motion and a coldness to the air.

  He glanced back into the gallery and there was nothing stirring to account for it, nothing to be seen.

  The wind had quit its blowing, if it had ever blown. Here one moment, gone the next. Like a passing ghost, thought Enoch.

  Did the Hazer have a ghost?

  THE PEOPLE back on Vega XXI had known the moment he had died and all the circumstances of his death. They had known again about the body disappearing. And the letter had spoken calmly, much more calmly than would have been in the capacity of most humans, about the writer’s near approach to death.

  Was it possible that the Hazers knew more of life and death than most? Had it been spelled out in black and white in some depository in the galaxy?

  Was the answer there? he wondered.

  Squatting there, he thought that perhaps it might be, that someone already knew what life was for and what its destiny. There was a comfort in the thought, a strange sort of personal comfort in being able to believe that some intelligence might have solved the riddle of that mysterious equation of the universe.

  Ulysses, he thought, had not told him all the truth about the Talisman. He had told him that it had disappeared and that the galaxy was without it, but he had not told him that for many years its power and glory had been dimmed by the failure of its custodian to provide a proper linkage between the people and the force. And all that time the corrosion occasioned by that failure had eaten away at the bonds of the galactic confraternity. Whatever might be happening now had not happened in the last few years; it had been building up for a longer time than most aliens would admit. Although, come to thing of it, most aliens probably did not know.

  Enoch closed the box lid and put it back into the trunk. Some day, he thought, when he was in the proper frame of mind, when the pressure of events made him less emotional, when he could dull the guilt of prying, he would achieve a scholarly and conscientious translation of those letters. For in them, he felt certain, he might find further understanding of that intriguing race. He might, he thought, then be better able to gauge their humanity—not humanity in the sense of being a member of the human race of Earth, but in the sense that certain rules of conduct must underlie all racial concepts even as the thing called humanity in its narrow sense underlay the human concept.

  He reached up to close the lid of the trunk and then he hesitated.

  SOME DAY, he had said. And there might not be a some day. It was a state of mind to be always thinking some day, a state of mind made possible by the conditions inside this station. For here there were endless days to come, forever and forever there were days to come. A man’s concept of time was twisted out of shape and reason and he could look ahead complacently down a long, almost never-ending, avenue of time. But that might be all over now. Time might suddenly snap back into its rightful focus. Should he leave this station, the long procession of days to come would end.

  He pushed back the lid again until it rested against the shelves. Reaching in, he lifted out the box and set it on the floor beside him. He’d take it upstairs, he told himself, and put it with the other stuff that he must be prepared immediately to take along with him if he should leave the station.

  If? he asked himself. Was there a question any longer? Had he, somehow, made that hard decision? Had it crept upon him unaware, so that he now was committed to it?

  And if he had actually arrived at that decision, then he must, also, have arrived at the other one. If he left the station, then he could no longer be in a position to appear before Galactic Central to plead that Earth be cured of war.

  You are the representative of the Earth, Ulysses had told him. You are the only one who can represent the Earth.

  But could he, in reality, represent the Earth? Was he any longer a true representative of the human race? He was a nineteenth century man; how could he represent the twentieth? How much, he wondered, does the human character change with each generation? And not only was he of the nineteenth century, but he had, as well, lived for almost a hundred years under a separate and a special circumstance, unlike any other human.

  He knelt there, regarding himself with awe, and a little pity too, wondering what he was. Some strange sort of hybrid? A galactic halfbreed?

  Slowly he pulled the lid down and pushed it tight. Then he shoved the trunk back underneath the shelves.

  He tucked the box of letters underneath his arm and rose, picking up his rifle, and headed for the stairs.

  XXI

  HE FOUND some empty cartons stacked in the kitchen corner, boxes that Winslowe had used to bring out from town the supplies that he had ordered, and began to pack.

  The journals, stacked neatly in order, filled one large box and a part of another. He took a stack of old newspapers and carefully wrapped the twelve diamond bottles off the mantle and packed them in another box, thickly padded, to guard against their breakage. Out of the cabinet he got the Vegan music box and wrapped it as carefully. He pulled out of another cabinet the alien literature that he had and piled it in the fourth box. He went through his desk, but there wasn’t too much there, only odds and ends tucked here and there throughout the drawers. He found his chart and, crumpling it, threw it in the wastebasket that stood beside his desk.

  The already filled boxes he carried across the room and stacked beside the door for easy reaching. When Lewis came with the body he would have a truck. If he had the important stuff all packed he could have it waiting.

  The important stuff, he thought. Who could judge importance? It was all important; every item should be taken. And that might be possible. Given time and with no extra complications, it might be possible to haul it all away, all that was in this room and stored down in the basement. It all was his. He had a right to it, for it had been given him. But that did not mean that Galactic Central might not object most strenuously to his taking any of it.

  And if that should happen, it was vital that
he should be able to get away with those most important items.

  He stood undecided, looking all about the room. There were all the items on the coffee table and those should be taken, too, including the little flashing pyramid of globes that Lucy had set to working.

  He saw that the Pet once again had crawled off the table and fallen on the floor. He stooped and picked it up and held it in his hands. It had grown an extra knob or two since the last time he had looked at it. It was now a faint and delicate pink, whereas the last time he had noticed it had been a cobalt blue.

  HE PROBABLY was wrong, he told himself, in calling it the Pet. It might not be alive. If it were, it was a sort of life he could not even guess at. It was not metallic and it was not stone, but very close to both. A file made no impression on it and he’d been tempted a time or two to whack it with a hammer to see what that might do, although he was willing to bet it would have no effect at all. It grew slowly, and it moved, but there was no way of knowing how it moved. But leave it and come back and it would have moved—a little. It knew when it was being watched and it would not move while watched. It did not eat so far as he could see and it seemed to have no wastes. It changed colors, but entirely without season and with no visible reason for the change.

  A being from somewhere in the direction of Sagittarius had given it to him just a year or two ago. The creature had been something for the books. He probably wasn’t actually a walking plant, but that was what he’d looked like—a rather spindly plant that had been shorted on good water and cheated on good soil, but which had sprouted a crop of dime store bangles that rang like a thousand silver bells when he made any sort of motion.

  Enoch remembered that he had tried to ask the being what the gift might be, but the walking plant had simply clashed its bangles and filled the place with ringing sound and didn’t try to answer.

  So he had put the gift on one end of the desk and hours later, after the being was long gone, he found that it had moved to the other end of the desk. But it had seemed too crazy to think that a thing like that could move, so he finally convinced himself that he was mistaken as to where he’d put it. It was not until days later that he was able to convince himself it moved.

  He’d have to take it when he left and Lucy’s pyramid and the cube that showed you pictures of other worlds when you looked inside of it and a great deal of other stuff.

  He stood with the Pet held in his hand and now, for the first time, he wondered at why he might be packing.

  HE WAS acting as if he’d decided he would leave the station, as if he’d chosen Earth as against the galaxy. But when and how, he wondered, had he decided it? Decision should be based on weighing and on measuring and he had weighed and measured nothing. He had not posed the advantages and the disadvantages and tried to strike a balance. He had not thought it out. Somehow, somewhere, it had sneaked up on him—this decision which had seemed impossible, but now had been reached so easily.

  Was it, he wondered, that he had absorbed, unconsciously, such an odd mixture of alien thought and ethics that he had evolved, unknown to himself, a new way in which to think? Perhaps some subconscious way of thought that had lain inoperative until now, when it had been needed.

  There was a box or two out in the shed. He’d go and get them and finish up the packing of what he’d pick out here. Then he’d go down into the basement and start lugging up the stuff that he had tagged. He glanced toward the window and realized, with some surprise, that he would have to hurry, for the sun was close to setting. It would be evening soon.

  He remembered that he’d forgotten lunch, but he had no time to eat. He could get something later.

  He turned to put the Pet back on the table and as he did a faint sound caught his ear and froze him where he stood.

  It was the slight chuckle of a materializer operating. He could not mistake it. He had heard the sound too often to be wrong about it now.

  And it must be, he knew, the official materializer, for no one could have traveled on the other without the sending of a message.

  Ulysses, he thought. Ulysses coming back again. Or, perhaps some other member of Galactic Central. For if Ulysses had been coming, he would have sent a message.

  He took a quick step forward so he could see the corner where the materializer stood and a dark and slender figure was stepping out from the target circle.

  “Ulysses!” Enoch cried, but even as spoke he realized it was not Ulysses.

  For an instant he had the impression of a top hat, of white tie and tails, of a jauntiness, and then he saw that the creature was a rat that walked erect, with sleek, dark fur covering its body and a sharp, axe-like rodent face. For an instant, as it turned its head toward him, he caught the red glitter of its eyes. Then it turned back toward the corner and he saw that its hand was lifted, was pulling out of a harnessed holster hung about its middle something that glinted with a metallic shimmer even in the shadow.

  THERE WAS something very wrong about it. The creature should have greeted him. It should have said hello and come out to meet him. But instead it had thrown him that one red-eyed glance and then turned back to the corner.

  The metallic object came out of the holster. It could only be a weapon.

  And was this the way, thought Enoch, that they would close the station? One quick shot, without a word, and the station keeper dead upon the floor. With someone other than Ulysses, because Ulysses could not be trusted to kill a long-time friend, even for the galactic confraternity.

  The rifle was lying across the desk top and there wasn’t any time.

  But the rat-like creature was not turning toward the room. It still was facing toward the corner and its hand was coming up, with the weapon glinting in it.

  An alarm twanged within Enoch’s brain. He swung his arm and yelled, hurling the Pet toward the creature in the corner, the yell jerked out of him, involuntarily, from the bottom of his lungs.

  For the creature, he realized, had not been intent on the killing of the keeper, but the disruption of the station. The only thing there was to aim at in the corner was the control complex, the nerve center of the station’s operation. If that should be knocked out, the station would be dead. To set it in operation once again it would be necessary to send a crew of technicians out in a spaceship from the nearest station—a trip that would require many years to make.

  At Enoch’s yell, the creature jerked around, dropping toward a crouch. The flying Pet, tumbling end for end, caught it in the belly and drove it back against the wall.

  Enoch charged, arms outspread to grapple with the creature. The gun flew from the creature’s hand and pinwheeled across the floor. Then Enoch was upon the alien and even as he closed with it, his nostrils were assailed by its body stench—a sickening wave of nastiness.

  He wrapped his arms about it and heaved. It was not heavy. He jerked it from the corner and swung it around and sent it skidding out across the floor.

  It crashed against a chair and came to a stop and then like a steel coil it rose off the floor and pounced for the gun.

  Enoch took two great strides and had it by the neck, lifting it and shaking it so savagely that the recovered gun flew from its hand again. The bag it carried on a thong across its shoulder pounded like a vibrating triphammer against its hairy ribs.

  The stench was so thick that one could almost see it; Enoch gagged on it as he shook the creature. And suddenly it was worse, much worse, like a fire raging in one’s throat and a hammer in one’s head. It was like a physical blow that hit one in the belly and shoved against the chest. Enoch let go his hold upon the creature and staggered back, doubled up and retching. He lifted his hands to his face and tried to push the stench away, to clear his nostrils and his mouth, to rub it from his eyes.

  Through a haze he saw the creature rise and, snatching up the gun, rush toward the door. He did not hear the phrase that the creature spoke, but the door came open and the creature spurted forward and was gone. And the door slammed shut again.

/>   XXII

  ENOCH WOBBLED across the room to the desk and caught at it for support. The stench was diminishing and his head was clearing. He scarcely could believe that it all had happened.

  It was incredible. The creature had traveled on the official materializer, and no one but a member of Galactic Central could travel by that route. And no member of Galactic Central, he was convinced, would have acted as the rat-like creature had. Likewise, the creature had known the phrase that would operate the door. No one but himself and Galactic Central would have known that phrase.

  He reached out and picked up his rifle and hefted it in his fist.

  It was all right, he thought. There was nothing harmed. Except that there was an alien loose upon the Earth and that was something that could not be allowed. The Earth was barred to aliens. As a planet which had not been recognized by the galactic confraternity, it was off limits.

  He stood with the rifle in his hand and knew what he must do.

  He must get that alien back. He must get it off the Earth.

  He strode toward the door and out around the corner of the house.

  The alien was running across the field. It had almost reached the line of woods.

  Enoch ran desperately, but before he was halfway down the field, the rat-like quarry had plunged into the woods and disappeared.

  The woods were beginning to darken. The slanting rays of light from the setting sun still lighted the upper canopy of the foliage, but on the forest floor the shadows had begun to gather.

  As he ran into the. fringe of the woods, Enoch caught a glimpse of the creature angling down a small ravine and plunging up the other slope, racing through a heavy cover of ferns that reached almost to its middle.

  If it kept on in that direction, Enoch told himself, it might work out all right. The slope beyond the ravine ended in a clump of rocks under a cliff. It might be a little rough to dig the alien from the rocks if it took refuge there, but it could not get away. Although he could waste no time. The sun was setting; it would soon be dark.