The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  “Take this land over across the river. Big, tall, straight trees that have been standing there since Christ was a pup. Waiting to be used. Somehow, in the early days, the loggers missed them and they’re still just standing there, like they been standing almost since creation. Thousands of acres of them, just waiting. Millions of board feet waiting to be sawed. There are lumber companies that want to go in there. They went into court to gain themselves the right to harvest them. But the judge said no. You can’t lay an axe to them, he said. They’re a primitive wilderness area and they can’t be touched. The forest service told the court those thousands of acres of trees are a national heritage and have to be saved for posterity. How come we get so hung up on heritage and posterity?”

  “I don’t know,” said Norton. “I’m not upset about it. It’s nice to stand here and look out over that primitive wilderness, nice to go out for awhile and walk in it. It’s peaceful over there across the river. Peaceful and sort of awesome. Sort of nice to have it there.”

  “I don’t give a damn,” said the barber. “I tell you it isn’t right. We’re being pushed around. Pushed around by fuzzy-headed do-gooders and simple-minded bleeding hearts who scream we got to help those poor, downtrodden redskins and we got to save the trees and we can’t pollute the air. I don’t care what those bleeding hearts may have to say, those redskins have no one but themselves to blame. They’re a lazy lot. They ain’t got an honest day of work in all of them together. They just lie around and bellyache. They always have their hands out. They’re always claiming that we owe them something—no matter how much we give them, they claim we owe them more. I tell you, we don’t owe them nothing but a good, swift kick in their lazy butts. They had their chance and they didn’t make it. They were too dumb to make it, or too lazy. They had this whole damn country before the white men came and they did nothing with it. For years, we’ve been taking care of them and the more we do for them, the more they want. Now they’re not only asking for things, they’re demanding them. That’s what everyone is doing—demanding things they haven’t got. What right have any of them to be demanding anything? Who do they think they are?

  “You mark my word. Before they are through with it, those redskins up on the reservation will be demanding that we give them back all of northern Minnesota, and maybe some of Wisconsin, too. Just like they are doing out in the Black Hills. Say the Black Hills and the Bighorn region belong to them. Something about some old treaties of a hundred years or more ago. Saying we took the land away from them when we had no right to. Got that bill in Congress and a suit in the courts demanding the Black Hills and the Bighorn. And, more than likely, some silly judge will say they have a right to it and there are eggheads in Congress who are working for them, saying they have a legal right to the land that the white men have spent years and millions of dollars making into something that is worthwhile. All it was when the Indians had it was buffalo range.”

  The barber flourished his shears. “You just wait and see,” he said. “The same thing will happen here.”

  “The trouble with you, George,” said Norton, “is that you are a bigot.”

  “You can call me any name you want to,” said the barber. “We are friends and I won’t take offense at it. But I know what is right and what is wrong. And I ain’t afraid to speak out about it. When you call a man a bigot, all that you are saying is that he doesn’t believe something that you believe in. You’ve come to the end of your argument and you call him a name instead.”

  Norton made no answer and the barber ceased his talking and got down to work.

  Outside the shop, the two blocks of stores and business places in the town of Lone Pine drowsed in the late afternoon of an early autumn day. A few cars were parked along the street. Three dogs went through elaborate, formal canine recognition rites, three old friends meeting at the northwest corner of an intersection. Stiffy Grant, tattered and disreputable man-about-town, sat on a nail keg outside the town’s one hardware store, paying close attention to the smoking of a fairly decent-sized cigar stub that he had rescued from the gutter. Sally, the waitress at the Pine Cafe, slowly swept the sidewalk in front of her place of employment, making the job last, reluctant to leave the warm autumn sunshine and go inside again. At the end of the eastern-most block, Kermit Jones, the banker, drove his car into the corner service station.

  Jerry Conklin, forestry student working for his doctorate at the University of Minnesota, parked his car at the end of the bridge that spanned the Pine River below the town and got out his cased fly rod, began assembling it. When he had stopped at the Lone Pine service station several months ago, en route to a forestry camp in the primitive wilderness area, the attendant had told him of the monster trout that lurked in the pool below the bridge. An avid fly fisherman, he had kept this piece of information in his mind ever since it had been given him but with no chance until now to act upon it. On this day, he had driven a number of miles out of his way from another forestry camp where he had spent several days studying the ecology of a mature and undisturbed white pine forest, so that he could try the pool below the bridge.

  He looked at his watch and saw that he could afford no more than thirty minutes at the pool. Kathy had a pair of tickets for the symphony—some guest conductor, whose name he had quite forgotten, would be directing the orchestra and Kathy had been wild, for weeks, to attend the concert. He didn’t care too much for that kind of music, but Kathy did and she would be sore as hell if he didn’t get back to Minneapolis on time.

  In the barber shop, George said to Norton, “You put the papers in the mail today. It must feel good not to have much to do for another week.”

  “You are dead wrong there,” said Norton. “You don’t just snap fingers and get out a paper, even a weekly paper. There are ads to be made up and sold, job printing to be done, copy to be written and a lot of other things to do to get together next week’s paper.”

  “I’ve always wondered why you stay here,” said George. “A young newspaperman like you, there are a lot of places you could go. You wouldn’t have to stay here. The papers down at Minneapolis would find a place for you, snap you up, more than likely, if you just said the word to them.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Norton. “Anyhow, I like it here. My own boss, my own business. Not much money, but enough to get along on. I’d be lost in a city. I have a friend down in Minneapolis. He’s city editor of the Tribune. Young to be a city editor, but a good one. His name is Johnny Garrison . . .”

  “I bet he’d hire you,” said George.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. It would be tough going for a time. You’d have to learn the ropes of big-city newspapering. But, as I was saying, Johnny is city editor there and makes a lot more money than I do. But he’s got his worries, too. He can’t knock off early in the afternoon and go fishing if he wants to. He can’t take it easy one day and make up lost time the next. He has a house with a big mortgage on it. He has an expensive family. He fights miles of city traffic to get to work every day and other miles of it to get home again. He’s got a hell of a lot of responsibility. He does a lot more drinking than I do. He probably has to do a lot of things that he doesn’t want to do, meet a lot of people he’d just as soon not meet. He works long hours; he carries his responsibilities home with him . . .”

  “I suppose there are drawbacks,” said George, “to every job there is.”

  A confused fly irritably, and with stupid persistence, buzzed against the plate-glass window of the shop front. The bar back of the chair was lined with ornate bottles, very seldom used, window dressing from an earlier time. Behind the bar, a .30-.30 rifle hung on pegs against the wall.

  At the corner gas station the attendant, inserting the nozzle into the tank of the banker’s car, looked upward across his shoulder.

  “Christ, Kermit, look at that, will you!”

  The banker looked up.

  The thing in the sky was big and black and very low. It made no noise. It floated there, sink
ing slowly toward the ground. It filled half the sky.

  “One of them UFOs,” the attendant said. “First one I ever saw. God, it’s big. I never thought they were that big.”

  The banker did not answer. He was too frozen to answer. He couldn’t move a muscle.

  Down the street, Sally, the waitress, The Visitors screamed. She dropped the broom and ran, blindly, aimlessly, screaming all the while.

  Stiffy Grant, startled at the screaming, lurched up from the nail keg and waddled out into the street before he saw the black bigness hanging in the sky. He tilted back so far in looking that he lost his balance, which wasn’t as good as it might have been, a result of having Finished off what was left in a bottle of rot-gut moonshine made by Abe Parker out somewhere in the bush. Stiffy went over backwards and came to a solid sitting position in the middle of the street. He scrambled frantically to regain his feet and ran. The cigar had fallen from his mouth and he did not retrace his steps to retrieve it. He had forgotten that he had it.

  In the barber shop, George ran to the window. He saw Sally and Stiffy fleeing in panic. He dropped his scissors and lunged for the wall back of the bar, clawing for the rifle. He worked the lever mechanism to jack a cartridge into the chamber and leaped for the door.

  Norton came out of the chair. “What’s the matter, George? What’s going on?”

  The barber did not answer. The door slammed behind him.

  Norton wrenched the door open, stepped out on the sidewalk. The barber was running down the street. The attendant from the gas station came running toward him.

  “Over there, George,” the attendant yelled, pointing to a vacant lot.

  “It came down near the river.”

  George plunged across the vacant lot. Norton and the attendant followed him. Kermit Jones, the banker, pelted along behind them, puffing and panting.

  Norton came out of the vacant lot onto a low gravel ridge that lay above the river. Lying across the river at the bridge, covering the bridge, was a great black box—a huge contraption, its length great enough to span the river, one end of it resting on the opposite bank, its rear end on the near bank. It was not quite as broad as it was long and it stood high into the air above the river. At first appearance, it was simply an oblong construction, with no distinguishing features one could see—a box painted the blackest black he had ever seen.

  Ahead of him the barber had stopped, was raising the rifle to his shoulder.

  “No, George, no!” Norton shouted. “Don’t do it!”

  The rifle cracked and almost at the instant of its cracking a bolt of brilliant light flashed back from the box that lay across the river. The barber flared for an instant as the bolt of brilliance struck him, then the light was gone and the man, for the moment, stood stark upright, blackened into a grotesque stump of a man, the blackness smoking. The gun in his hands turned cherry red and bent, the barrel drooping like a length of wet spaghetti. Then George, the barber, crumpled to the ground in a run-together mass that had no resemblance to a man, the black, huddled mass still smoking, little tendrils of foul-smelling smoke streaming out above it.

  2. LONE PINE

  The water boiled beneath Jerry Conklin’s fly. Conklin twitched the rod, but there was nothing there. The trout—and from the size of the boil, it had been a big one—had sheered off at the last instant of its strike.

  Conklin sucked in his breath. The big ones were there, he told himself. The attendant at the station had been right; there were big rainbow lurking in the pool.

  The sun was shining brightly through the trees that grew along the river. The dappled water danced with little glints of sunlight shining off the tiny waves on the surface of the pool, set in motion by the rapids that came down the ledges of broken rock just upstream.

  Carefully, Conklin retrieved his fly, lifted the rod to cast again, aiming at a spot just beyond where he had missed the strike.

  In mid-cast, the sun went out. A sudden shadow engulfed the pool, as if some object had interposed itself between the sun and pool.

  Instinctively, Conklin ducked. Something struck the upraised fly rod and he felt the tremor of it transmitted to his hand, heard the sickening splinter of bamboo.

  He looked over his shoulder and saw the square of blackness coming down upon him. The blackness struck the bank behind him and he heard, as if from far off, the crunch of tortured metal as it came down upon his car.

  He tried to turn toward the bank and stumbled, going to his knees. He shipped water in his waders. He dropped the rod. Then, without knowing how he did it, not even intending to do it, he was running down the stream along the edge of the pool, slipping and sliding as his feet came down on the small, water-polished stones at the pool’s edge, the shipped water sloshing in his waders.

  The far end of the square of blackness, tipping forward, came down on the far river bank. Timbers squealed and howled and there was the rasping of drawn nails and bolts as the bridge came apart. Looking back, he saw timbers and planks floating in the pool.

  He had no wonder of what had happened. In the confused turmoil of his mind, in his mad, instinctive rush to get away, there was no room for wonder. It was not until he reached sunlight again that he realized he was safe. The high banks of the river had protected him from harm. The blackness lay across the river, resting on the banks, not blocking the stream.

  The pool ended and he strode out into the shallow stretch of fastrunning water below it. Glancing up, he saw for the first time the true dimensions of the structure that had fallen. It towered far above him, like a building. Forty feet, he thought—maybe fifty feet—up into the air, more than four times that long.

  From some distance off he heard a vicious, flat crack that sounded like a rifle going off and in the same instance a single spot in that great mass of blackness flashed with a blinding brilliance, then winked out.

  My God, he thought, the rod busted, the car smashed, and I am stranded here—and Kathy! I better get out of here and phone her.

  He turned about and started to scramble up the steep river bank. It was hard going. He was hampered by his waders, but he couldn’t take them off, for his shoes were in the car and the car now lay, squashed flat more than likely, beneath the massive thing that had fallen on the bridge.

  With a swishing sound, something lashed out of nowhere and went around his chest—thin, flexible something like a piece of wire or rope. He lifted his hands in panic to snatch at it, but before his hands could reach it, he was jerked upward. In a blurred instant, he saw the swiftly flowing water of the river under him, the long extent of greenery that lined the river’s banks. He opened his mouth to yell, but the constriction of the wire or rope or whatever it might be had driven. much of the air out of his lungs and he had no breath to yell.

  Then he was in darkness and whatever it was that jerked him there was gone from about his chest. He was on his hands and knees. The platform on which he found himself was solid—solid, but not hard, as if he had come to rest on top of thick, yielding carpeting.

  He stayed on his hands and knees, crouching, trying to fight off the engulfing terror. The bitter taste of gall surged into his mouth and he forced it back. His gut had entwined itself into a hard, round ball and he consciously fought to relax the hardness and the tightness.

  At first it had seemed dark, but now he realized there was a faint, uncanny sort of light, a pale blue light that had a spooky tone to it. It was not the best of light; there was a haze in it and he had to squint to see. But at least this place where he found himself was no longer dark and he was not blind.

  He rose to his knees and tried to make out where he was, although that was hard to do, for intermixed with the blue light were flares of other light, flaring and flickering so swiftly that he could not make them out, not quite sure of the color of them nor where they might be coming from. The Bickerings revealed momentarily strange shapes such as he could not remember ever having seen before and that was strange, he thought, for a shape, no matter what
its configuration, was no more than a shape and should not cause confusion. Even between the flashes, there was one shape that he could recognize, rows of circular objects that he had thought at first were eyes, all of them swivelling to stare at him with a phosphorescent glare, like the eyes of animals at night when a beam of light caught them by surprise. He sensed, however, that what he was seeing really weren’t eyes, nor were they the source of the faint, blue, persistent light that filled the place. But, eyes or not, they stayed watching him.

  The air was dry and hot, but there was, unexplainably, a feeling of dank mustiness in it, a sense of mustiness imparted, perhaps, by the odor that filled the place. A strange odor—not an overpowering smell, not a gagging smell, but uncomfortable in a way he could not determine, as if the smell could somehow penetrate his skin and fasten to him, become a part of him. He tried to characterize the odor and failed. It was not perfume, nor yet the smell of rot. It was unlike anything he had ever smelled before.

  The air, he told himself, while it was breathable, probably was deficient in oxygen. He found himself gasping, drawing in great rasping breaths of it to satisfy his body’s needs.

  At first, he had thought he was in a tunnel and why he should have imagined that he did not know, for as he looked further he could see that he was in some great space that reminded him of a dismal cave. He tried to penetrate the depth of the space, but was unable to, for the blue light was too dim and the flickering of the place made it difficult to see.

  Slowly and carefully, he levered himself to his feet, half expecting his head would bump against a ceiling. But he was able to rise to his full height; there was sufficient head-room.