The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  “But there must be books,” I said. “Once there might have been,” he told me. “I have heard of them, but I’ve never seen one. I don’t know anyone who has. We have none here; I think we never had. Exactly, can you tell me, what are books?”

  I tried to tell him and although I am sure he did not entirely understand, he seemed somewhat wonder-struck. And to mask his lack of understanding, he carefully changed the subject.

  “Your machine down there,” he said, “will be at the hoedown? It will watch and listen?”

  “Indeed it will,” I said. “It is kind of you to have us.”

  “There’ll be a lot of people, from all up and down the hollow. They’ll begin showing up as soon as the sun is set. There’ll be music and dancing and big tables will be set with many things to eat. Do you, on your Alden, have gatherings such as this?”

  “If not exactly hoedowns,” I said, “other events that are very similar.”

  We went on sitting and I got to thinking that it had been a good day. We had tramped the fields and had husked some ears out of one of the cornshocks so the old man could show me what fine corn they raised; we had leaned our arms on the pigpen fence and watched the grunting porkers, nosing through the rubble on the feeding floor for a morsel they had missed; we had stood around and watched a man work the forge until a plow blade was glowing red, then take it out with tongs and place it on an anvil, with the sparks flying when he hammered it; we had strolled through the coolness of the barn and listened to the pigeons cooing in the loft above; we had talked lazily, as unhurried men will talk and it had all been very good.

  The door of the house opened and a woman stuck her head out. “Henry,” she called. “Henry, where are you?”

  The old man climbed slowly off the fence. “That is me they want,” he grumbled. “No telling what it is. It might be anything. These women get the strangest notions about chores that they want done. You just take it easy while I go see what it is.”

  I watched him amble down the slope and go into the house. The sun was warm on my back and I knew that I should get down off the fence and move around a bit or find something I could do. I must look silly, I thought, perched upon the fence, and I felt a sense of guilt at not having anything to do nor wanting anything to do. But I felt a strange disinclination to do anything at all. It was the first time in my life I’d not had things piled up and waiting to be done. And I found, with some disgust, that I enjoyed it.

  Bronco still was planted in the barnyard, with all his sensors out, and there’d been no sign of Cynthia since she’d gone out to the swill barrel. I wondered where Elmer might be; I’d not seen him all day long. And even as I wondered, I saw him come around the barn. Apparently he saw me almost at once, for he angled up the slope toward me. He came up close before he spoke and he kept his voice low and I sensed that he was troubled.

  “I’ve been out looking at the tracks,” he said, “and there is no doubt about it. The thing last night was a war machine. I found some tread marks and there’s nothing here that leaves tread marks like that except a war machine. I followed the swath it made and I saw that it turned west. There are a lot of places back in the mountains where a war machine could hide.”

  “Why would it want to hide?”

  “I can’t imagine,” Elmer said. “There is no way of telling how a war machine would think. Human brain and machine brain and they’ve had ten thousand years to evolve into something else. Fletch, given that much time, what could a brain like that become?”

  “Maybe nothing,” I said. “Maybe something very strange. If a war machine survived destruction, what would it become? What motive would it have to stay alive? How would it view an environment so different from the one for which it had been made? One strange thing, though. The people here seem to have no fear of it. It’s just something they don’t understand and the world seems to be filled with things they don’t understand.”

  “They’re a strange lot,” Elmer said. “I don’t like the looks of them. I don’t like the feel of any part of it. It strikes me as unlikely those three young coon-hunting bucks would have come strolling in on us last night without some sort of reason. They had to cut across the track made by the war machine in order to reach us.”

  “Curiosity,” I said. “Not much happens here. When something does, like us showing up, they have to find out about it.”

  “Sure, I know,” said Elmer, “but that’s not all of it.”

  “Anything specific?”

  “No, nothing like that. Nothing that I can pin down. Just a feeling in the guts. Fletch, let’s get out of here.”

  “I want to stay for the hoedown.

  So Bronco can get it on the tapes. Soon as it is over, we will leave.”

  IX

  The people had started coming, as the old man had said they would, shortly after sunset. They had come alone and in twos and threes and sometimes a dozen of them all together, and now the yard was full of them, crowding around the tables where the food was set. There were others in the house and some men were in the barn passing bottles back and forth.

  The tables had been set up late in the afternoon when some of the men had gotten sawhorses out of the lumber shed, setting them up in the yard and putting planks across them. A platform for the musicians had been made in the same manner and now the musicians were seated on it, tuning up their instruments, sawing at their fiddles and plunking their guitars.

  The moon hadn’t risen yet, but it was lighting the sky in the east and beyond the clearing the trees stood up dark against the lighted sky. Someone kicked a dog and the dog went yelping out into the darkness. A roar of sudden laughter came from a group of men standing to one side of a table, perhaps at the telling of a joke. Someone had started a bonfire and piled a lot of wood on it and flames, eating up through the wood, were swirling high into the air.

  Bronco was standing to one side of the clearing, close to the edge of the forest and the firelight from the bonfire seemed to make him flicker. Elmer was with one of the groups near the table where the food was laid and it seemed that he was engaged in a spirited discussion. I looked for Cynthia, but I didn’t see her.

  I felt a touch upon my arm, and when I looked around, the old man, Henry, had come up and was standing by my side. Just then the music struck up and couples began forming for a dance.

  “You’re standing by yourself,” the old man said. The little breeze that was blowing ruffled his whiskers.

  “I’ve just been standing off and looking,” I told him. “I’ve never seen the like before.” And, indeed, I never had. There was something wild and primitive and barbaric in the clearing; there was something here that should by now have been bred out of the human race. Here there still existed some of the earth-bound mysticism that extended back to the gnawed thighbone and the ax of flint.

  “You will stay with us a while,” the old man said. “You know that you’ll be welcome. You can stay here with us and carry out the work you plan to do.”

  I shook my head. “We’ll have to think about it. We’ll have to make our plans. And thank you very much.”

  They were dancing now, a set and rather savage dance, but with a certain grace and fluidity, and upon the musicians’ platform a man with leathern lungs was calling out a chant.

  The old man chuckled. “It is called a square dance. You’ve never heard of it?”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” I said.

  “I’m going to dance myself,” said the old man, “as soon as I have another drink or two to get lubricated. Come to think of it . . .”

  He took a bottle from his pocket and, pulling out the cork, handed it to me. The bottle felt cold to my hands and I put it to my lips and took a slug of it. It was better whiskey than I’d had the night before. It went down smooth and easy and it didn’t bounce when it hit the stomach.

  I handed the bottle back to him, but he pushed my hand away. “Have another one,” he said. “You are way behind.”

  So I had another on
e. It lay warm inside of me and I began feeling good.

  I handed back the bottle and the old man had a drink. “It’s Cemetery whiskey,” he said. “It’s better than what we can make ourselves. Some of the boys went up to Cemetery this morning and traded for a case.”

  The first dance had ended and another was getting under way. Cynthia was out with this new set of dancers. She was beautiful with the firelight on her and she danced with a lithesome grace that took me by surprise, although I did not know why I possibly could have thought she would not be graceful.

  The moon had risen now and was riding in the sky, and I had never felt so good before.

  “Have another one,” the old man said, handing me the bottle.

  The night was warm, the people warm, the woods were dark, the fire was bright, and Cynthia was out there dancing and I wanted to go out and dance with her.

  The set ended and I started to move forward, intending to ask Cynthia if she would dance with me. But before I had gone more than a step or two, Elmer came striding to the space that had been cleared for dancing. He came to the center of it and performed an impromptu jig and as soon as he did that one of the fiddlers on the platform stood up and began to play, if not a jig, at least a sprightly piece of music and the others all joined in.

  Elmer danced. He had always seemed to me a stolid, plodding robot, but now his feet patted rapidly upon the ground and his body swayed. The people formed a ring about him and yelled and hollered at him, clapping their hands in encouragement and appreciation. Bronco moved out from his position at the edge of the woods and angled toward the circle. Someone, seeing him, cried out and the ring of people parted to let him through. He came into the circle and stood in front of .Elmer and began to shuffle and pat the ground with all eight feet.

  The musicians were playing wildly now and increased the tempo of the music and in the circle Elmer and Bronco responded to it. Bronco’s eight legs went up and down like pistons gone berserk and between the pumping, dancing legs his body bobbed and swayed. The ground beneath their feet thundered like a drum and it seemed to me that I could feel the vibrations through my soles. The people yelled and whooped. Some of them standing outside the circle had begun to dance and the others now joined in, dancing along with Bronco and with Elmer.

  I looked to one side of me and the old man was dancing, too, jigging wildly up and down, with his white hair flying and his white beard flapping and jerking with the violence of his motion. “Dance!” he yelled at me, his breath short and rasping in his throat. “What’s the matter, you ain’t dancing?”

  And as he said it he reached into his pocket and, hauling out the bottle, handed it to me. I reached out and grabbed it and began to dance. I pulled the cork out of the bottle and put it to my mouth while dancing and the glass of the bottle’s neck rattled on my teeth and some of the liquor sprayed onto my face and a good, solid slug of it went down my throat. It hit my gut and lay there warm and sloshing and I danced, waving the bottle high, and I think I did some yelling, not that there was anything to yell about, but for the pure joy of the night.

  We were, all of us, pure and simple crazy—crazy with the night and fire and music. We danced without a thought or purpose. Each of us danced because all the others danced, or because two sleek machines were out there dancing, their basic awkwardness transformed to matchless grace, or perhaps we simply danced because we were alive and deep within us knew we would not always be alive.

  The moon floated in the sky and the wood smoke from the fire trailed in a slender column of whiteness up into the sky. The screeching fiddles and the twanging guitars shrieked and sobbed and sang.

  Suddenly, as if by command (although there was no command), the music stuttered to a halt and the dancing stopped. I saw the others stop and stopped myself, with the bottle still held high.

  I felt someone pawing at my lifted arm and a voice said, “The bottle, man. For pity’s sake, the bottle.”

  It was the old man. I gave him the bottle. He used it as a pointer to indicate one side of the circle and then he tucked its neck into his whiskers and tilted back his head. The bottle gurgled and his Adam’s apple jerked in concert with the gurgling.

  Looking where he’d pointed, I saw a man standing quietly there. He wore a black robe of some sort that came down to his feet and that had a cowl on it, covering his head, so that all that showed of him was the white smear of his face.

  The old man sputtered, half strangled, and took the bottle from his face. He used it to point again.

  “The census taker,” he said.

  The people were drawing back and away from the census taker and on the platform the musicians sat limp, mopping their faces with their shirt sleeves.

  The census taker stood there for a moment, with all the people gaping at him, then he floated—he didn’t walk, he floated—to the center of the dancing circle. The man with the reed instrument lifted it to his lips and began a piping that at first was the sound of the wind moving through the grasses of a meadow, then grew louder, trilling a string of notes that one could almost see hanging in the air. The violins came in softly as a background to the piping anti as if from some distant place the guitars twanged a hollow sound and then the violins sobbed and the piping went insane and the guitars were humming like vibratory drums.

  Out in the circle, the census taker was dancing, but not with his feet—you couldn’t see his feet because of the robe he wore—but with his body swaying like a dishcloth hanging on a line and whipping in the wind, a strange, distorted, dangling dance such as a puppet would perform.

  He was not alone. There were others with him, many shadowy shapes that had come from nowhere and were dancing with him, the firelight shimng through the unsubstantial shimmer of their ghostly bodies. They were simply shapes at first, but as it stared at them astonished, they began to take on more definite form and feature, although they did not gain in substantiality. They were still nebulous and hazy, but now they were people rather than just shapes, and I saw with horror that they wore the costumes of many different races from far among the stars. There a bewhiskered brigand in the kilt and cape of that distant planet that was called, curiously enough, End of Nothing; there the jolly merchant with his stately toga from the planet Cash; and between them, dancing with abandon, in her tattered gown and a rope of gems about her neck, a girl who could have been from nowhere else but the pleasure planet Vegas.

  She didn’t touch me and I didn’t hear her come, but with some sense I did not know I had, I became aware that Cynthia was beside me. I looked down at her and she was staring up at me, with mingled fear and wonder on her face. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear her because of the loudness of the music.

  “What did you say?” I asked, but she had no time to answer, for in that instant that I spoke, a concussion slapped me over and I went down on the ground so hard that the breath was knocked out of me. I landed on my side and rolled over on my back and I saw, with some surprise, Bronco flying through the air, with all eight legs spraddled out grotesquely, while all around burning logs and brands were flying and a puff of smoke floated up to dim the brilliance of the moon.

  I tried to breathe and couldn’t and a sudden panic hit me—that I’d never breathe again, that I was done with breathing. Then I did breathe, taking in great gulps of air and each gulp was so agonizing that I tried to stop, but couldn’t.

  All over the clearing, I saw, people had been thrown to the ground. Some of them were getting up and others were trying to get up and there were many others who were just lying there.

  I struggled to my knees and saw that Cynthia, beside me, was also trying to get up and I put out a hand to help her. Bronco was sprawled out on the ground and as I watched, he finally gained his feet, but two of his legs, both on the same side, dangled, and he stood there unsteadily on the other six.

  A thunder of feet went past me and Elmer was at Bronco’s side, holding him erect, propping him, helping him to move. I got to my feet and pulled Cynthia up
beside me. Elmer and Bronco were coming toward us and Elmer yelled at us, “Get out of here! Up across the hill!”

  We turned and ran, coming to the fence on which the old man, Henry, and myself had squatted half the afternoon. And coming to it, I knew that the crippled Bronco could never make his way across it. I grabbed a post with both my hands and tried to pull it loose and force it down. It wiggled back and forth, but I could not topple it.

  “Let me,” said Elmer, close beside me. He lifted a foot and kicked and the boards splintered and came loose. Cynthia had crawled through the fence and was running up the hill. I ran after her.

  I took one quick look behind me as I ran and saw that one of the haystacks close beside the barn was burning—set afire, most likely, by one of the flaming brands sent flying through the air by the explosion that had crippled Bronco. People were running aimlessly in the light of the burning stack.

  Looking back, not watching where I was going, I ran into a corn shock and, toppling it, went down on top of it.

  By the time I disentangled myself and was on my feet again, Elmer and Bronco had gone on past me and were disappearing over the brow of the moonlit hill. I sprinted after them. My face and hands smarted and burned from their forcible contact with the sun-dried corn leaves and when I put my hand up to my face it came away wet and sticky with blood oozing from the cuts the dry, sharp leaves had inflicted on the skin.

  I went plunging down the hill below the brow and far ahead of me saw the whiteness of Cynthia’s jacket, almost at the woods that ran below the field. Not far behind her were Bronco and Elmer. Bronco had caught the hang of being helped along by Elmer and they were moving rapidly.

  The stubs of the cut corn and the autumn-dried weeds that had grown between the rows rasped against my trousers as I ran and behind me I heard the shouts and bellows from the clearing beyond the field.

  I reached the fence that ran between the field and woods and there was a gateway through it where Elmer had kicked the boards loose. I plunged through the opening and in among the trees, and here, while there was still moonlight shining through the branches, I had to slow my pace for fear of crashing headlong into one of the trees.