The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  “That face of his,” said Carol. “A little spooky, maybe, but somehow fascinating. I had a hard time to keep from staring at him. Just a dark blankness folded inside his sheet which, I suppose, is not a sheet. And at times a hint of eyes. Little lights that could be eyes. Or was I imagining?”

  “No. I’ve imagined them myself.”

  “Will you,” asked Carol, “grab hold of that fool oat and pull him in a foot or so. He’s slipping out onto the faster belt. He has no sense whatever. He’ll go to sleep any time, at any place. Eat and sleep is all he thinks about.”

  Maxwell reached down and tugged Sylvester back into his original position. Sylvester growled and mumbled in his sleep.

  Maxwell straightened and leaned back into his chair, looking up into the sky.

  “Look at the stars,” he said. “There is nothing like the skies of Earth. I’m glad to be back again.”

  “And now that you’re back?”

  “After I see you safely home and pick up my luggage, I’m going back to Oop’s. He’ll have one of those fruit jars all unscrewed and we’ll do some drinking and sit and talk till dawn, then I’ll get into the bed he has for guests, and he’ll curl up on his pile of leaves. . . .”

  “I saw those leaves over in the comer and was consumed with curiosity. But I didn’t ask.”

  “He sleeps there all the time. Not comfortable in a bed. After all, when for many years a pile of leaves has been the height of luxury—”

  “You’re trying to make a fool of me again.”

  “No, I’m not,” said Maxwell. “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “I didn’t mean what will you do tonight. I mean what will you do? You are dead, remember?”

  “I’ll explain,” said Maxwell. “I’ll continually explain. Everywhere I go there’ll be people who’ll want to know what happened. There might even be an investigation of some sort. I sincerely hope there won’t, but I suppose there may have to be.”

  “I’m sorry,” Carol said, “but, then, I’m also glad. How fortunate that there were two of you.”

  “If Transport could work it out,” said Maxwell, “they might have something they could sell. All of us could keep a second one of us stashed away somewhere against emergency.”

  “But it wouldn’t work,” Carol pointed out. “Not personally. This other Peter Maxwell was a second person and—oh, I don’t know. It’s too late at night to get it figured out. But I’m sure it wouldn’t work.”

  “No,” said Maxwell. “No, I guess it wouldn’t. It was a bad idea.”

  “It was a nice evening,” said Carol. “I thank you so much for it. I had a lot of fun.”

  “And Sylvester had a lot of steak.”

  “Yes, he did. He’ll not forget you. He loves folks who give him steak. He’s nothing but a glutton.”

  “There is just one thing,” said Maxwell. “One thing you didn’t tell us. Who was it that made the offer for the Artifact?”

  “I don’t know. Just that there was an offer. Good enough, I gather, for Time to consider it. I simply overheard a snatch of conversation I was not supposed to hear. Does it make a difference?”

  “It could,” said Maxwell.

  “I remember now,” she said. “There was another name. Not the one who meant to buy it, or I don’t think it was. Just someone who was involved. It had slipped my mind till now. Someone by the name of Churchill. Does that mean anything to you?”

  IX

  Oop was sitting in front of the fireplace, paring his toenails with a large jackknife, when Maxwell returned, carrying his bag.

  Oop gestured with the knife toward the bed. “Sling it over there and then come and sit down with me. I’ve just put a couple of new logs on the fire and I have a jug half finished and a couple more hid out.”

  “Where’s Ghost?” asked Maxwell.

  “Oh, he disappeared. I don’t know where he went; he never tells me. But he’ll be back again. He never is gone long.”

  Maxwell put the bag on the bed, went over to the fireplace and sat down, leaning against its rough stone face.

  “You played the clown tonight,” he said, “somewhat better than you usually manage. What was the big idea?”

  “Those big eyes of hers,” said Oop, grinning. “And just begging to be shocked. I am sorry, Pete. I simply couldn’t help it.”

  “All that talk about cannibalism and vomiting,” said Maxwell. “That was pretty God damned low.”

  “Well,” said Oop, “I guess I just got carried away. That’s the way folks expect a crummy Neanderthal to act.”

  “The girl’s no fool,” said Maxwell. “She planted that story about the Artifact as neatly as I have ever seen it done.”

  “Planted it?”

  “Sure, planted it. You don’t think it just slipped out, do you, the way she pretended that it did?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” said Oop. “Maybe she did. But if she did, why do you think she did it?”

  “I would guess she doesn’t want it sold. Figured that if she told it to a blabbermouth like you it would be all over the campus before noon tomorrow. A lot of talk about it, She might figure, would help to kill the deal.”

  “But you know, Pete, that I’m no blabbermouth.”

  “I know it. But you acted like one tonight.”

  Oop closed the jackknife and slid it in his pocket, picked up the half-empty fruit jar and handed it to Maxwell. Maxwell put it to his mouth and drank. The fiery liquid slashed like a knife along his throat, and he choked. He wished, he thought, that for once he could drink the stuff without choking on it. He took it down and sat there, gasping for breath.

  “Potent stuff,” said Oop. “Best batch I’ve run off for quite a while. Did you see the bead on it?”

  Maxwell, unable to speak, nodded.

  Oop reached out and took the jar, tilted it up, lowered its level by an inch or more. He took it down and held it lovingly against his hairy chest. He let out his breath in a whoosh that made the flames in the fireplace dance. He patted the bottle with his free hand.

  “First rate stuff,” he said.

  He wiped his mouth with the the back of his hand and sat, staring at the fire.

  “She couldn’t, certainly, have taken you for a blabbermouth,” he finally said. “I notice that you did some fancy skating of your own tonight. All around the truth.”

  “Maybe because I don’t entirely know the truth myself,” said Maxwell. “Or what to do about it. You set to do some listening?”

  “Any time,” said Oop. “If that is what you want. Although you don’t need to tell me. Not out of friendship. You know we’ll still be friends if you tell me nothing. We don’t even need to talk about it. There are a lot of other things we could talk about.”

  Maxwell shook his head. “I have to tell you, Oop. I have to tell someone, and you’re the only one I would dare to tell. There’s too much of it for me to go on carrying it alone.”

  Oop handed him the fruit jar. “Take another slug of that, then start any time you want. What I can’t figure out is the goof by Transport. I don’t believe it happened. I would make a guess that it was something else.”

  “And you’d be right,” said Maxwell. There’s a planet out there somewhere. Fairly close, I’d guess. A free-wheeling planet, not tied to any sun, although I gather that it could insert itself into a solar system any time it wishes.”

  “That would take some doing. It would mess up the orbits of all the other planets.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Maxwell. “It wouldn’t have to take an orbit in the same plane as the other planets. That would hold down the effect of its being there.”

  He lifted the fruit jar, shut his eyes, and took a healthy gulp. The top of his head came off, and his stomach bounced. He lowered the jar and leaned back against the roughness of the masonry. A wind was mewing in the chimney—a lonely sound, shut outside by the rough board walls. A log fell in the fireplace and sent up a shower of sparks. The flames danced high, and f
lickering shadows chased one another all about the room.

  Oop reached out and took the jar out of Maxwell’s hands, but did not drink immediately. He held it cuddled in his lap.

  “So this other planet reached out and copied your wave pattern,” he said, “and there were two of you.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Deduction. It was the most logical way for it to happen. I know there were two of you. There was this other one who came back before you did. I talked with him, and he was you. He said there was no dragon; the Coonskin business had been a wild goose chase and so he came home ahead of his schedule.”

  “So that was it,” said Maxwell. “I had wondered why he came back early.”

  “I’m hard put to it,” said Oop, “to decide if I should rejoice or mourn. Perhaps a bit of both, leaving some room for wonderment at the strange workings of human destiny. This other man was you, and now he’s dead and I have lost a friend. For he was a human being and a personality, and that humanity and personality came to an end with death. But now there’s you. And if, before, I’d lost a friend, now I have regained that lost friend, for you are as truly Peter Maxwell as that other one.”

  “I was told an accident.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Oop.

  “I’ve been doing some thinking about it. Since you came back, I’m not so sure at all. He was getting off a roadway and he tripped and fell, hit his head.

  “You don’t trip when you’re getting off a roadway. Unless you’re drunk or crippled up or awkward. That outside belt is barely crawling.”

  “I know,” said Oop. “That’s what the police thought, too. But there was no other explanation, and the police, as you well know, require some sort of explanation, so they can close the file. It was in a lonely place. About halfway between here and no one saw it. Must have happened when there was almost no one traveling, maybe at night. He was found about ten o’clock in the morning. There would have been people traveling from six o’clock on, but probably they’d have been on the inner, faster belts. They wouldn’t have seen too much on the outside of the belt. The body could have been lying there for a long time before it was found.”

  “You think it wasn’t an accident? It may have been murder?”

  “I don’t know. The thought has occurred to me. There was one funny thing about it—something that never was explained. There was a funny smell about the body and the area. A strange sort of odor, like nothing no one had ever smelled before. Maybe someone found out that there were two of you. For some reason, someone may not have wanted two of you. . . .”

  “But who could have known there were two of me?”

  “The people on that other planet. If there were people.”

  “There were people,” Maxwell said. “It was a most amazing place.”

  It all came back as he sat there talking, almost as if he were there again. A crystal place—or that had been what it had looked to be when he first had seen it. An extensive crystal plain that ran on and on and a crystal sky with pillars reaching from the plain and upward, apparently to the sky, although the tops of them were lost in the milkiness of sky—pillars soaring upward to hold the sky in place. An empty place, to make one think of a deserted ballroom of extensive size, all cleaned and polished for a ball, waiting for the music and the dancers who had never come and now would never come, leaving the ballroom empty through all eternity, shining in all its polished glitter and its wasted graciousness.

  A ballroom, but a ballroom without any walls, running on and on, not to a horizon, for there seemed to be no horizon, but to a point where that strange, milk glass sky came down to meet the crystal floor.

  He stood astounded in the vast immensity, an immensity not of boundless sky, for the sky was far from boundless, nor from great distances, for the distances were not great, but immensity that was measured as a room would be, as if one were in a giant’s house and lost and were looking for a door, and without a clue as to where a door might be. A place with no distinguishing features, with each pillar like the next, with no cloud in the sky (if it were a sky), with each foot, each mile like every other foot and mile, level and paved with a crystal paving that stretched out in all directions.

  He wanted to cry out, to ask if anyone were there, but was afraid to cry out—perhaps in the fear, although he did not realize it then and only thought it later, that a single sound would send all this cold and shining splendor shimmering into a cloud of frosty dust. For the place was silent, with no slightest whisper of a sound. Silent and cold and lonely, all its splendor and its whiteness lost in the loneliness.

  Slowly, carefully, fearing that the scuff of his moving feet might bring this whole world into dust, he pivoted, and out of the comer of his eye he caught a glimpse—not of motion, but the flickering sense of motion, as if something had been there, but had moved so fast that his eyes had failed to catch it. He halted, the short hairs prickling on the back of his neck, engulfed by the sense of utter strangeness rather than of actual danger, apprehensive of a strangeness so distorted and so twisted out of the normal human context that a man gazing at it might go mad before he had a chance to jerk his eyes away.

  Nothing happened.

  He moved again, pivoting inch by cautious inch, and now he saw that he had been standing with his back turned on what appeared to be an assemblage of some sort—an engine? An instrument? A machine?

  And all at once he knew. Here was the strange contraption that had brought him here, this crazy crystal world’s equivalent of matter transmitter and receiver.

  But this, he knew at once, was not the Coonskin system. It was no place he had ever heard of.

  Nowhere in the known universe was there a place like this. Something had gone wrong. He had been hurled, not to the Coonskin planet which had been his destination, but to some far, forgotten corner of the universe, to some area, perhaps, where man would not penetrate for another million years, so far away from Earth that the distances involved became unimaginable.

  Now again there were flickering motions, as if living shadows moved against the crystal background. As he watched, the flickering flowed into shifting shape and form, and he could see that there were many moving shapes, all of them, strangely, separate entities that seemed to hold, within the flicker of them, individual personalities. As if, he thought in horror, they were things that had once been people. As if they might be alien ghosts.

  “And I accepted them,” he said to Oop. “I accepted them—on faith, perhaps. It was either that, or reject them and be left there, standing all alone upon that crystal plain. A man of a century ago, perhaps, would not have accepted them. He would have been inclined to sweep them out of his mind as pure imagination. But I had spent too many hours with Ghost to gag at the thought of ghosts. I had worked too long with supernatural phenomena to quibble at the idea of creatures and of events beyond the human pale.

  “And the strange thing about it, the comforting thing about it, is that they sensed that I accepted them.”

  “And that is it?” asked Oop. “A planet full of ghosts?”

  Maxwell nodded, “Perhaps that’s one way of looking at it. But let me ask you—what really is a ghost?”

  “A spook,” said Oop. “A spirit.”

  “I know,” said Oop, regretfully. “I was being a bit facetious, and there was no excuse for it. We don’t know what a ghost is. Even Ghost doesn’t know exactly what he is. He simply knows that he exists—and if anyone should know, he should. He has mulled over it a lot. He’s thought about it deeply. He has communed with fellow ghosts, and there is no evidence. So you fall back upon the supernatural—”

  “Which is not understood,” said Maxwell.

  “A mutation of some sort,” suggested Oop.

  “Collins thought so,” said Maxwell. “But he stood alone. I know I didn’t agree with him, but that was before I was on the crystal planet. Now I’m not so sure. What happens when a race reaches an end, when, as a race, it has passed through childh
ood and middle age and now has reached old age? A race dying as a man does, dying of old age. What does it do, then? It could die, of course. That’s what one would expect of it. But suppose there was a reason that it couldn’t die, suppose it had to hang on, had to stay alive for some overriding reason, that it could not allow itself to die?”

  “If ghostliness really is a mutation,” said Oop, “if they knew it was a mutation, if they were so far advanced they could control mutation. . . .”

  He stopped and looked at Maxwell. “You think that’s what might have happened?”

  “I think it might,” said Maxwell. “I am beginning to think very much it might.”

  Oop handed across the fruit jar. “You need a drink,” he said. “And when you’re through with it, I’ll have one myself.”

  X

  Maxwell took the jar, holding it, not drinking right away. Oop reached out to the stack of wood, lifted a chunk in one massive fist and threw it on the fire. A spray of sparks gushed up the chimney. Outside the night wind moaned along the eaves.

  Maxwell lifted the jar and drank. He choked, wishing that he could drink the stuff, just once, without choking on it. He handed the jar back to Oop. Oop lifted it, then took it down again without drinking. He squinted across its rim at Maxwell.

  “You said something to live for. Some reason that they couldn’t die—that they had to keep on existing, any way they could.”

  “That’s right,” said Maxwell. “Information. Knowledge. A planet crammed with knowledge.

  A storehouse of knowledge—and I would doubt that a tenth of it duplicates our own. The rest of it is new, unknown. Some of it material we have never dreamed of. Knowledge that we may not ferret out short of a million years, if we ever ferret it. It is stored electronically, I suppose—arranging atoms in such a manner that each atom carries a bit of information. Stored in metal sheets, like the pages of a book, stacked in great heaps and piles, and each layer of atoms—yes, they are arranged in layers—carries separate information. You read the first layer and then go down to the second layer. Again, like pages in a book, each layer of atoms a page, one stacked atop the other. Each sheet of metal—don’t ask me, I can’t even guess, how many layers of atoms in each metal sheet. Hundreds of thousands, I would suspect.”