The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  “Yes, of course, it has.”

  “I don’t see,” said the trooper, “how all these sightseers got here. There seems to be a couple hundred of them. We have all the roads blocked. But they just seep through, sort of.”

  “They park their cars short of the road blocks,” Kathy said, “and walk in through the woods. It would take a picket line to keep them out.”

  “I suppose so,” said the trooper. “They can be a nuisance.”

  “Here come Frank Norton and Chet, my photographer,” said Kathy. “As soon as they reach here, we’ll be going in.”

  The trooper shrugged. “Take it easy, now,” he said. “Something’s about to happen and I don’t like it. I can feel it in the air.”

  Kathy waited for Norton and Chet to come up and the three of them walked up the swath.

  Kathy asked Chet, “Did Jerry get on the plane all right?”

  Chet nodded. “We just made it. Only minutes to spare. I gave him the film, and he’ll deliver it. Meant to ask you—how come he showed up here? I seem to remember he turned up missing and you were hunting him.”

  “His car broke down and he walked into Lone Pine, looking for a phone. We ran into one another. It was a surprise to the both of us. Neither of us knew the other one was here.”

  “Seems to be a nice guy.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Not very talkative, though. Didn’t have much to say.”

  “He never does,” said Kathy.

  They walked up on a group of newsmen clustered to one side of the visitor.

  “Did you talk to Johnny this morning?” Kathy asked.

  “Yeah, I did. Checking on the film. He said someone delivered it, in plenty of time for the first edition, to the photo lab.”

  “He didn’t say anything about sending someone up to replace me?”

  “Not a word. Did you expect he would?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Kathy. “There are others he might think would do a better job. Jay, for instance. He only pointed the finger at me because there was almost no one else in the newsroom at the time.”

  “I don’t think you need to worry any. Johnny is a fair man. As long as you do the job, he will leave you here.”

  “If he tried to send someone else,” said Kathy, “I’d yell like hell. This is my story, Chet, and I mean to keep it that way.”

  “You’d fight for it?”

  “You’re damn right I would.”

  “Look,” said Norton, “someone has painted a number on the visitor. See it. It reads 101. On the side, up near the front of it.”

  Kathy looked and saw the number, in green paint, the numerals a foot high or so.

  “I wonder who did that,” she said. Chet snorted. “One of them jerks from Washington, most likely. One of them observers. Science types. They got to have everything numbered for the record.”

  “It seems a funny thing to do.”

  “We can’t presume to judge how the observers go about their work,” said Norton. “There probably is a valid reason for the number.”

  “I suppose so,” said Kathy.

  “You have any idea what those lumps may be?” asked Norton.

  Kathy shook her head. “I can’t imagine. It’s a shame. It was such a nice, neat thing before, so symmetrical, and now it’s got all lumpy.”

  “You sound like you thought it was pretty.”

  “Maybe not pretty. But appropriate. The kind of thing you’d expect to come from space. Nice, neat, not spectacular.”

  “Good Lord,” said Norton, “will you have a look at that!”

  One of the larger lumps that had grown on the visitor was beginning to burst open and from it was emerging a small replica of the visitor. The thing that was emerging from the lump was three or four feet long, but, except for its size and for the absence of bumps on it, it was an exact copy of the big black box. The lump lengthened and widened even as they watched and the thing that was emerging from it fought free and came tumbling to the ground. It landed and rolled and came upright. It was a shiny black, not the deep black of the visitor, but shiny as if it might be wet. For a moment it crouched on the ground, unstirring, then swiftly it wheeled about and set itself in motion, racing toward the back of the visitor, flowing smoothly and silently.

  The group of people surged back to clear the way for it. A TV cameraman was shouting savagely, “Down in front. Down in front, goddammit. Get out from in front of the camera. Give me a chance, will you?”

  Kathy, backing away with the others, was thinking furiously: That settles it! It is biological. Not a machine, but a biological being. A live creature, for it is giving birth. It is having babies!

  Another of the lumps was splitting open and another small replica of the visitor was fighting free of it. The visitor, itself, was paying no attention to what was taking place. It went on chomping trees.

  The first baby to emerge whipped around the rear of the visitor, heading for one of the bales of cellulose. It reared up and attacked the bale, tearing it apart, gulping down the cellulose in much the same manner as its “mother” was gulping down the trees.

  Chet was racing toward it, his camera lifted and ready. Sliding to a stop, he braced himself, plastered the camera to his face and began shooting pictures, sidling along after a few exposures to get shots from different angles. Other cameramen also were running frantically, joggling one another for position, forming a ragged circle around the little creature.

  “I should have guessed,” said a man standing beside Kathy. “When I saw those lumps I should have known. The thing is budding. And that answers the question all of us have been asking ourselves . . .”

  “That’s right,” said Kathy. “It’s biological.”

  He looked at her, apparently for the first time. He raised a hand and touched it to his forehead in salute.

  “Quinn,” he said. “New York Times.”

  “Foster,” said Kathy. “Minneapolis Tribune.”

  “You got here early then,” he said. “From the first, I would suppose.”

  “Late on the day it landed.”

  “Do you realize,” he asked, “that we may be covering the story of the century. If not of all time.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it,” said Kathy.

  Then, ashamed, she said, “I am sorry, Mr. Quinn. I was being flippant. Yes, I had thought of it.” There were more of the babies now, running wildly to find the bales so that they might feed. The newsmen and photographers were scattering, no longer huddled in a group.

  One of the babies had fallen and was not running. It lay jiggling and quivering, like an animal that had fallen and was struggling to get up. It lay close against the visitor, but the visitor was paying no attention.

  It’s fallen on its side, thought Kathy. The poor thing has fallen on its side and can’t get to its feet. Although how she might know this, she did not know, for, truth to tell, there was no way one could know. No one could tell which part was top or bottom.

  Quickly she stepped forward and, stooping, laid hold of it and tipped it. Swiftly, it flipped over and quickly scurried off, heading for the bales.

  Straightening, Kathy reached up a hand and patted the barn-like side of the visitor.

  “Mother,” she said, softly to herself, not really speaking to the visitor, for how was the visitor to hear? “Mother, I helped your baby to its feet.”

  Underneath her hand, the hide of the visitor twitched and then folded over to grasp her hand, still against its side, folding over gently, covering her outspread hand, to hold it for a moment. Then the hide unfolded and became hard and smooth again.

  Kathy stood stricken, shaken, not believing it had happened.

  It noticed me, she thought in a wild panic of churning emotion. It knew I was here. It knew what I had done. It tried to shake my hand. It was thanking me.

  18. WASHINGTON, D.C.

  “What do you have on this pupping business?” the President asked Porter.

  “Pupping, si
r?”

  “Yes, the visitor out in Minnesota, having pups.”

  “All that I have is on the wires,” said Porter. “Fourteen of them so far, and a few more to go.”

  “A fair litter,” said the President.

  “You probably know more than I do about it,” the press secretary said. “Dr. Allen has his men out there. He probably has reported to you.”

  “Yes, of course he has. But Allen is an old woman and those observers of his are thin-lipped science people. They won’t tell you anything until it’s all nailed down. They won’t tell you what they’re thinking because if they were wrong, their beloved fellow scientists would laugh them out of court. What they do tell you is so filled with scientific lingo and so many ifs and maybes and so much double-talk, you can’t tell what they mean.”

  “You can’t mean that Dr. Allen is incompetent,” said Hammond. “He is a top-notch man. He has the respect . . .”

  The President waved his hand. “Oh, he’s competent, of course, and his fellow scientists are filled to overflowing with their respect of him, but he’s not the kind of man I cotton to. I like straight talking men who tell you what they mean. With Allen, there’s a lot of times when I wonder what he is talking about. The two of us don’t talk the same kind of language.”

  “Barring all this,” said Hammond, “cutting through all the lingo and the double-talk, what does he think?”

  “He’s puzzled,” said the President. “A very puzzled scientist. I think he was convinced, when this first started, that the visitor was a machine and now he has to admit, at least to the probability, that it probably isn’t. This pupping business has done violence to his little scientific mind. Really, I’m not too concerned with what he is thinking of it because he’s going to change his mind a couple of more times before the week is at an end. What I’m more interested in is how the country’s taking it.”

  “It’s too soon to know,” said Porter. “There are as yet no solid indications, no way to gauge reactions. There’ve been no outbreaks of any kind. Whatever may be happening is happening underneath the people’s skins. They are still busy sorting it all out, holding in their feelings until they get it sorted out. But I have a hunch . . .”

  He broke off his words and looked at Hammond and the secretary of state.

  “Well, go ahead,” said the President. “What is this hunch of yours?”

  “It’s probably silly. Or will sound silly.”

  “Well, go ahead and be silly. I hear a hell of a lot of silly things. I’ve listened to and profited from many of them. Anyhow, it’s among us boys. John and Marcus won’t mind. They’ve said their share of silly things.”

  “The hunch is this,” said Porter, “and I’ll not guarantee it, but I have the feeling that this pupping business, as you call it, may serve to somewhat endear the visitor to the people. This country goes all soft on motherhood.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Marcus White, the secretary of state. “It scares me spitless. Not only do we have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of those creatures out in space, but the one that’s here is spawning. What happens if they all come down and spawn?”

  “The public won’t think of that,” said Porter. “Not now. Not right away. The spawning may give us a little time.”

  “Marcus,” said the President, “I know you talked with the Russian.

  What did he have to say?”

  “Not a great deal. Sounded as if he still was waiting for instructions from Moscow. Maybe Moscow doesn’t know as yet quite what line it should take. Rumbled around a lot without getting anywhere. Gave some indication that his government might demand some hand in the study of this visitor of ours. I gave him no indication of what our policy might be. For starters, I told him we still considered it an internal matter. Personally, I still think we should give some thought to inviting foreign scientists to participate. It would make for better international relations and we probably wouldn’t be hurt too much, if any.”

  “That’s what you said the other day,” the President told him. “Since that time, I’ve given considerable thought to your suggestion. I’m inclined to be against it.”

  “What Ivan is afraid of is that we’ll find out something from the visitor that will give us a defensive edge,” said Hammond. “That’s why the ambassador did his rumbling about being counted in. My feeling is that we should hold up until we at least have some inkling of what we might have.”

  “I talked with Mike at the U.N. just before you all came in,” said the President. “He tells me we’ll have a fight to keep the U.N. from declaring this an international situation. All our little brothers in Africa and Asia and some of our good friends in South America think, or at least are saying, that this is something that extends beyond national interest. The arrival of a visitor from space, they argue, is of international concern.”

  “Well,” said Hammond, “we can fight them off for a while. There isn’t much that they can do beyond attempting to amass worldwide opinion. They can pass resolutions in principle until they are purple in the face, but there’s not much they can do to implement the resolutions.”

  “We’ll hold the line for a time,” said the President. “If some others of the visitors drop in on us, that may be a different matter.”

  “You are saying, Mr. President,” asked White, “that you’ll not even consider my suggestion of a cooperative international study?”

  “For the time,” said the President. “Only for the time. We’ll have to think about it and await further developments. The subject is not closed.”

  “What’s vital for us to learn,” said Hammond, “is the intention of these things. What is their purpose? Why are they here? What do they expect? Are they a band of roving nomads looking to pick up whatever’s loose or are they a legitimate expedition out on an exploration flight? Do they represent a contact with some other civilization out in space or are they a pack of freebooters? How we react, what we do, must depend to a large extent on who and what they are.”

  “That might take a lot of finding out,” said Porter.

  “We’ll have to try,” said Hammond. “I don’t know how it can be done, but we’ll have to try. Allen’s boys, in the next few days may start turning up a few facts that could be significant. All we need is a little time.”

  The intercom on the desk purred and the President picked up the phone. He listened for a moment and then said, “Put him on.” Again he listened, a frown growing on his face. “Thank you,” he finally said. “Please keep in close touch with me.” He put down the phone and looked from one to the other of them.

  “We may just have run out of time,” he said. “That was Crowell at NASA. He’s had word from the station. There seems to be some indication that the swarm in orbit is beginning to break up.”

  19. LONE PINE

  “They’re cute,” said Kathy.

  “I can’t see anything cute in them,” said Chet. “They’re just little black oblong boxes scampering around.” Scampering they were, hastening from bale to bale, ingesting each bale in turn, doing it neatly and precisely, down to the last shred of cellulose. There was no scuffling or fighting among themselves for possession of a bale; they were well mannered. If one of them was working on a bale, another did not try to horn in, but found another bale. They had eaten a number of bales, but there were still plenty of bales left. The voracious youngsters had barely made a dent in them. A mile or more of bales was spread along the lane cut through the forest and the adult visitor, at the far end of the swath, still was burrowing its way into the forest, regularly ejecting bales.

  “It seems to me,” said Kathy, “that they are growing. Would that be possible? They seem bigger than they were just an hour or so ago.”

  “I can’t think so,” said Chet. “They’ve been feeding for only a few hours.”

  “It seems to me, too, that they are growing,” said Quinn, the New York Times man. “I suppose it could be possible. They may have an extremely efficient metabo
lic system. Much more efficient than any kind of life on Earth.”

  “If they are growing now,” said Kathy, “it won’t be more than a few more days before they can be cutting their own trees and extracting cellulose for themselves.”

  Norton said, “If that is the case, there goes the wilderness area.”

  “I suppose that somewhere along the line,” said Quinn, “the forestry people will have to make up their minds what they want to do about it. This thing is our guest at the moment, I would think, but how long can we put up with a guest that eats everything in sight?”

  “Or a guest that litters a brood of young on your living room floor,” said Norton.

  “The problem is,” said Chet, “what can be done about it. You can’t just shoo this thing out of the woods like you’d shoo a pig out of a potato patch.”

  “No matter what you say,” said Kathy, “I think those little things are nice. They are in such a hurry and they are so hungry.”

  She tried again, as she had tried unsuccessfully before, to pick out the one she’d helped to regain its feet. But there seemed to be no way to distinguish one from the other. They were all alike.

  And she remembered, too, that moment after she had helped the youngster to its feet and then had reached out to pat the mother. She could still feel, in the imagination of memory, the gentle twitching of the hide and then the hide folding over her hand in a soft embrace. I can’t believe, she told herself fiercely, that there can be too much wrong with a creature of any sort at all that would respond like that—a gesture of recognition? a sign of gratitude for a service rendered? the friendliness of one life to another? or an apology for subjecting another intelligence to the trouble it had brought?

  If only, she thought, she could put this in the story that in another couple of hours she’d phone into the Tribune. But there was no way that she could. If Johnny didn’t throw it out to start with, the ogres on the copy desk would not let it pass. It would be an intrusion of the reporter into the story. It was something for which there would be no kind of proof, no documentation. How, Kathy asked herself, does one document a handshake with an alien?