The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  Two of the robots walked a short distance from the ship and seemed to stand as sentinels, not facing in the same direction all the time, but turning occasionally as if they were studying or sensing the terrain on every side. The rest of them began unloading a large pile of boxes and what appeared to be equipment.

  My grandfather thought that he was. well hidden. He was crouching in a thicket close beside the stream and was hunkered low against the ground so that his silhouette would have been broken by the branches of the thicket and, besides, it was summertime and the shrubs had leaves.

  But in a very short time, even before the ship had been completely unloaded, one of the robots working at the unloading left the hilltop and came down the hillside, walking straight toward where my grandfather was hiding in the thicket. He thought at first that it was only a coincidence that the robot should be walking toward him and he stayed very still, even breathing as shallowly as he could.

  It was not a coincidence, however. The robot must have known exactly where he was. My grandfather always thought that one of the sentinels had somehow spotted him, perhaps by a thermal reading, and staying on post itself, had passed on the information that there was a watcher.

  Arriving at the thicket, the robot reached down, grabbed my grandfather by the arm and jerked him out of there, then marched him up the hill.

  My grandfather admitted to me that from this point onward his memory was not consecutive. While the time element of what he did remember seemed to be consecutive, not jumbled chronologically, there were gaps for which he could not account. He was convinced that before he was let go or managed to escape (although both of these, too, are conjectured—for at no time, as far as he could recall, did he have the feeling that he was being held captive) an attempt was made to erase the memories of what had happened from his mind. He believed that for a time the memory erasure was effective; it was only after he arrived on Alden that he began, in bits and pieces, to remember what had happened—as if the events had been submerged, pushed deep into his brain, and came pushing back again only after a number of years.

  He did remember talking with the man that seemed to him not to be entirely a man, and the impression that he carried with him was that this creature was soft-voiced and not at all unkind, although he could not remember a single thing that was said between them, with one exception. The man (if it were a man) told him, he recalled, that he had come from Greece (there was at that time no country that was known as Greece, but at one time there had been) where he had lived for long—my grandfather remembered clearly that phrase, “for long,” and thought it rather strange that it should be expressed that way. The man also told my grandfather that he had sought out a place where life would not be threatened and thought, from certain measurements or from certain other facts my grandfather did not comprehend, that he had found it there in that place where he had landed.

  My grandfather also recalled that some of the equipment that had been taken from the ship was employed by the robots to drive a deep shaft into the solid rock which lay beneath the hill and, once the shaft was driven, to hollow out great chambers underground. And once this had been done, a small hut—crude on the outside, constructed of timbers and made to look as if it were old and about to tumble down, but its interior well furnished to make for comfortable living—was built above the tunnel, which had steps going down to the rock-hewn chambers and a clever trapdoor fixed at the mouth of the tunnel so that, once closed, no one would suspect that it was there.

  The boxes which had been unloaded from the ship were carried down into the chambers, except for a few that held furniture and furnishings for the hut atop the tunnel.

  When one of the boxes was being carried down the steps into the chambers it slipped out of a robot’s grasp, and my grandfather who—for some reason he does not recall—was in the chamber below, saw it come tumbling down the stairs and hurriedly got out of its way. It was a heavy box; but even so, as it tumbled down the stairs, it began to come apart, to be battered apart by striking on the stones, and by the time it reached the bottom of the steps it had come apart entirely so that all that it contained was either scattered on the steps or spilled out on the chamber’s floor.

  There was a great treasure in that box, my grandfather told me—jewel-encrusted pendants and bracelets and rings, all set with shining stones; small wheels of gold with strange markings on them (my grandfather insisted that they were gold, although how he could tell a thing was gold by simply looking at it, I do not understand); figurines of animals and birds made of precious metals and set with precious stones; a half a! dozen crowns (the kind kings or queens would wear); bags that split open to loose a flood of coins, and many other things, including some vases, all of which were smashed.

  The robots came rushing down the stairs to pick up all the treasure that was scattered and behind them came their master, and when he reached the bottom of the stairs he paid no attention to all the other things, but stooped and picked up some of the pieces of a shattered vase and tried to fit them back together. But he could not fit them back together, for they had been broken into too many pieces. From the few pieces that he did fit together, trying to hold all those broken pieces in their proper places, my grandfather saw that the vase had had painted pictures on it, fired into the glaze—pictures of strange men hunting even stranger beasts, or maybe they only seemed strange because they were so badly done, with no thought of perspective and without the anatomical knowledge that is basic with an artist.

  The man (if it were a man) stood there with the broken pieces in his hands and his head was bent above them and his face was sad and a tear rolled down his cheek. My grandfather thought it strange that a man should weep over a broken vase.

  All this time the robots were picking up the stuff and putting it in a pile and one of them went and got a basket and put it all into the basket and carried it off to be stored with all the other boxes in one of the rock-hewn chambers.

  But they didn’t get it all, for my grandfather, with no one seeing him, picked up a coin and secreted it about his person; and I will now wrap this coin, which he passed on to me, and put it in this envelope . . .

  VII

  I stopped reading and looked across the fire at Cynthia Lansing. “The coin?” I asked.

  She nodded. “It was in the envelope, wrapped in a piece of foil, a kind of foil that has not been used for centuries. I gave it to Professor Thorndyke and asked him if he’d keep it . . .”

  “But did he know what it was?”

  “He wasn’t sure. He took it to another man, an expert on old Earth coins and such. It was an uncirculated Athenian owl, probably minted a few years after a battle fought at a place called Marathon.”

  “Uncirculated?” Elmer asked.

  “It had not been used. There was no wear on it. When a coin is circulated it becomes smooth and dull from much handling. But aside from some deterioration due to time, this one was exactly as it had been the day that it was struck.”

  “And there can’t be any doubt?” I asked.

  “Professor Thorndyke said there could be none at all.”

  The baying of the dogs could still be heard beyond the ridge that rose above our camp. It was a lonely and a savage sound and I shivered as I listened to it and moved closer to the fire.

  “They are after something,” Elmer said. “Maybe coon or possum. The hunters are back there somewhere, listening to the dogs.”

  “But what are they hunting for?” asked Cynthia. “The men, I mean, the men who sent out the dogs.”

  “For sport and meat,” said Elmer.

  I saw her wince.

  “This is no Alden planet,” Elmer told her. “No planet soft and full of pinkness. The people who live back here in the woods are probably one-half savage.”

  We sat listening and the baying of the dogs seemed to move away.

  “On this treasure business,” Elmer said, “let us try to figure out what we have. Somewhere in this country to the west of us
someone came fleeing one of Greece and hid out a bunch of boxes, some of which probably contained treasure. We know one of them did and some of the others may have. But the location might be a little hard to come by. It’s indefinite. A river flowing from the north into the old Ohio. There might be quite a lot of streams coming from the north . . .”

  “There was a hut,” said Cynthia.

  “That was ten thousand years ago. The hut must be long gone. We’d be looking for a hole, a tunnel, and that might be covered over.”

  “What I want to know,” I said, “is why Thorney should have thought this strange character out of Greece might be Anachronian.”

  “I asked him that,” said Cynthia, “and he said that Greece or somewhere in that area of the planet would most likely be the place an alien observer would have set up his observation post. The first settled communities of the human race were established in what was once known as Turkey. An observer would not have set up a post too close to what he wished to study. He’d want to be in a position to do some observation and then get out of there. Greece would be logical, Professor Thorndyke said. Such an observer would have had some means of rather rapid transportation and the distance between the first settlements and Greece would have been no problem.”

  “It doesn’t sound logical to me,” said Elmer, bluntly. “Why Greece? Why not the Sinai? Or the Caspian? Or a dozen other places?”

  “Thorney goes on hunches as much as evidence or logic,” I told them. “He has a well-developed hunch sense. He is very often right. If he says Greece, I’d go along with him. Although it would seem this hypothetical observer of ours could have moved location time and time again.”

  “Not if he were picking up loot all the time,” said Elmer. “He’d get weighed down with it. It would be quite a job to move. He probably brought along several tons of it when he moved to the Ohio.”

  “But it wasn’t loot,” cried Cynthia. “You have to understand that it wasn’t loot. Not loot in the terms of money, or in terms of whatever value the Anachronians might employ. Whatever he picked up were cultural artifacts.”

  “Cultural artifacts,” said Elmer, “running very heavily to gold and precious stones.”

  “Let’s be fair about it,” I said to Elmer. “It might just have happened that the broken box was filled with that kind of stuff. Some of the other boxes might have been filled with arrowheads or spear points, early woven cloth, mortars and pestles.”

  “Dr. Thorndyke thought,” said Cynthia, “that the boxes my ancestor saw contained only a small fraction of what the observer had collected. Probably only a few of the more significant items. Back somewhere in Greece, perhaps in other caverns carved into the rock, there may be a hundred times as much as was in the boxes.”

  “Whatever it may be, it spells out treasure,” Elmer said. “Artifacts of any sort command a price, and I suppose they’d be worth even more if they were artifacts from Earth. But Earth or not, there is a booming trade in them. A lot of wealthy men—and they have to be wealthy to pay the prices asked—have collections of them. But aside from that, I understand it’s chic to have an artifact or two on the mantelpiece or in a display cabinet.

  I nodded, remembering Thorney, pacing up and down the room, striking his clenched fist into an open palm and fulminating. “It’s getting so,” he’d yell, “that an honest archaeologist hasn’t got a chance. Do you know how many looted sites we’ve found in the last hundred years or so—dug up and looted before we ever got to them? The various archaeological societies and some of the governments have made investigations, and there is no evidence of who is doing it or where the artifacts are taken to be hidden out. We’ve found no trace of them or whoever might be responsible. They are looted and warehoused somewhere and then they trickle back into collectors’ hands. It’s big business and it must be organized. We’ve pushed for laws to forbid private ownership of any artifact, but we get nowhere. And because of this vandalism we are losing the only chance we have to gain an understanding of the development of galactic cultures.”

  The baying of the dogs had changed to excited yapping.

  “Treed,” said Elmer. “Whatever they were running has taken to a tree.”

  I reached out to the little pile of wood Elmer had brought in, laid new sticks on the fire, used another to push the spreading coals together. Little tongues of blue-tipped flame ran up from the coals to lick against the new wood. Dry bark ignited and threw out sparks. The fresh fuel caught and the fire leaped into new life.

  “A fire is a pleasant thing,” said Cynthia.

  “Could it be,” asked Elmer, “that even such as I should be warmed by such a feeble flame? I swear that I feel warmer sitting here beside it.”

  “Could be,” I said. “You’ve had a lot of time to grow into a man.”

  “I am a man,” said Elmer. “Legally, that is. And if legally, why not otherwise?”

  “How is Bronco getting on?” I asked. “He should be here with us.”

  “He is sitting out there soaking it all up,” said Elmer. “He is weaving a woodland fantasy out of the dark shapes of the trees, the sound of nighttime wind in leaves, the chuckle of the water, the glitter of the stars and three black shapes huddled at a campfire. A campfire canvas, a nocturne, a poem, perhaps a delicate piece of sculpture—he’s putting it all together.”

  “He works all the time, poor thing,” said Cynthia.

  “It is not work for him,” said Elmer. “It is his very life. Bronco is an artist.”

  Somewhere off in the dark something made a flat cracking sound and an instant later was followed by another. The dogs, which had fallen silent, resumed excited barking.

  “The hunter shot whatever it was that the dogs had treed,” said Elmer.

  After he had spoken, no one said a word. We sat there imagining—or at least I was imagining—that scene off in the darkened woods, with the dogs jumping about the tree, excited, the level gun and the burst of muzzle flame, the dark shape falling from the tree to be worried by the dogs.

  And as I sat there listening and imagining, there was another sound, faint, far off—a rustling and a crackling. A breath of breeze came down the hollow and swept the sound away, but when the breeze died down, the sound was there again, louder now and more insistent.

  Elmer had leaped to his feet. The flicker of the fire sent ghostly metallic highlights chasing up and down his body.

  “What is it?” Cynthia asked and Elmer did not answer. The sound was closer now. Whatever it might be, it was heading toward us and was coming fast.

  “Bronco!” Elmer called. “Over here, quick. By the fire with us.”

  Bronco came spidering rapidly.

  “Miss Cynthia,” Elmer said, “get up.”

  “Get up?”

  “Get up on Bronco and hang on tight. If he has to run, stay low so a tree branch won’t knock you off.”

  “What is going on?” asked Bronco. “What is all the racket?”

  “I don’t know,” said Elmer.

  “The hell you don’t,” I said, but he didn’t hear me; if he did, he didn’t answer.

  The noise was much closer now. It was no kind of noise I had ever heard before. It sounded as if something was tearing the very woods apart. There were popping sounds and the shriek of tortured wood. The ground seemed to be vibrating as if something very heavy was striking it repeated hammer blows.

  I looked around. Cynthia was up on Bronco and Bronco was dancing away from the fire out into the dark, not running yet, but staying limber and ready to run at a second’s notice.

  The noise was almost upon us, shrieking and deafening, and the very ground was howling. I leaped to one side and crouched to run and would have run, I suppose, except I did not know where to run, and in that instant I saw the great bulk of whatever it was up on the ridge above us, a huge dark mass that blotted out the stars. The trees were shaking wildly and crashing down to earth, overridden and smashed by the black mass that charged along the ridgetop, almost brushing t
he camp, and then going away, missing us, with the noise rapidly receding down the hollow. On the ridge above, the smashed-down trees were still groaning softly as they settled into rest.

  I stood and listened as the noise moved away from us and in a little time it was entirely gone, but I still stood where I was, half hypnotized by what had happened, not knowing what had happened, wondering what had happened. Elmer, I saw, was standing, as hypnotized as I.

  I sat down limply by the fire, and Elmer turned around and walked back to the fire. Cynthia slid off Bronco.

  “What was it, Elmer,” I said. He shook his massive head. “It can’t be,” he mumbled, talking to himself rather than to me. “It would not still be there. It could not have lasted . . .”

  “A war machine?” I asked.

  He lifted his head and stared across the fire at me. “It’s crazy, Fletch,” he said.

  I picked up wood and fed the fire. I put on a lot of wood. I felt an urgent need of fire. The flames crawled up the wood, catching fast.

  Cynthia came over to the fire and sat down beside me.

  “The war machines,” said Elmer, still speaking to himself, “were built to fight. Against men, against cities, against enemy war machines. They’d fight to the very death, until the last effective ounce of energy was gone. They were not meant to last. They were not fashioned to survive. They knew that and we who built them knew it. Their only mission was destruction. We fashioned them for death, we sent them out to death . . .”

  A voice speaking from the past of ten thousand years before, speaking of the old ethics and ambitions, of ancient blood striving, of primordial hate.