The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  He hauled the canoe up the shelving, pebbly beach and strode into the forest, heading for the visitors. There was, he thought, one strange thing about it—not the strangeness of finding the visitors here, but the fact that there was no racket. They were not sawing down or ingesting trees. More than likely they had processed all the cellulose they needed, had budded young and now were simply taking it easy, a time for resting once their chores were done.

  He burst into the clearing they had made and skidded to a surprised halt. In front of him stood a house. It was a somewhat lopsided house, leaning drunkenly to one side, as if the builder had done a poor job of it and it had come unstuck. Just beyond it stood a second house. This one stood foursquare, but there was still a certain wrongness to it. It was a moment before he could make out what the wrongness was, and then he knew—it hadn’t any windows.

  Beyond the houses stood the visitors, so closely ranged together that they gave the impression of a group of great buildings clustered in a city’s downtown district.

  Norton stood undecided and confused. No one in their right mind, he told himself, would have come into this wilderness, build two houses, then go away and leave them. Nor would any builder, construct a lopsided house and another without windows. And even if the hypothetical builder had wanted, for some unfathomable reason to do so, he would have had no reasonable way in which to transport his materials to the building site.

  The pines moaned softly as the wind blew through them. On the other side of the clearing in which the houses and the visitors stood, a small bright bird flickered for a moment against the green wall of the encircling conifers. Other than the sound of the wind in the pines and the bright flash of the bird, the place stood unmoving and silent. The stillness and the brooding somberness of the primeval forest overshadowed all, serving to blot out and soak up even the wonder of the houses and the visitors.

  With an effort, Norton uprooted himself and moved toward the first of the houses, the lopsided one. The front door was open, but it took him a moment to decide to enter. It was entirely possible, he thought, that the structure might collapse once he stepped inside of it. But he finally took the chance and went into the hall, which opened into a kitchen and what appeared to be a living room. He went into the kitchen, walking softly because he was afraid of jarring the house and hastening its collapse. Despite the house’s structural oddity, the kitchen seemed quite normal. An electric stove and refrigerator stood against one wall. Starting at the stove and running around another wall were cabinets, with counter top, drawers, dish cupboards and a sink.

  Norton turned a dial on the stove and held a palm above the burner. The burner heated quickly and he turned it off. At the sink, he turned a faucet and a small trickle of water ran out of the tap, then stopped. He turned the faucet further and the tap sputtered. Water finally gushed out, but again it stopped. He turned off the faucet.

  He went into the living room and everything seemed all right except that the windows were set into the wall at an unusual angle. Down the hall he found three bedrooms and they seemed to be all right, although there were certain small peculiarities in the dimensions of the rooms that puzzled him. Thinking about it, he found himself unable to say exactly what was wrong.

  It was with a sense of relief that he stepped out the front door and headed for the second house—the one that had no windows. There was something—something rather startling—that puzzled him about the lopsided house and he wondered what it was. Not the canted windows in the living room nor the odd dimensional qualities of the bedrooms, nor even the faulty faucet in the kitchen. It had been something else and it was important. Walking toward the other house and thinking about it, he suddenly knew what it was that had bothered him so. deeply—the lopsided house didn’t have a bathroom. He stopped short and pondered it. Could he be wrong? It was incomprehensible that someone should build a house and not put in a bathroom. Carefully he ran through an inventory of the rooms and was sure that he was right. He could not have overlooked a bathroom; if one had been there, he’d have seen it.

  The front door of the second house was closed, but it opened easily and smoothly when he turned the knob. Because of the lack of windows, the interior of the house was dark, but not so dark as to interfere with vision. Swiftly he checked the rooms. There were four bedrooms and a den, a kitchen, a living room and dining room—and two bathrooms, one off the master bedroom. The floor in the first house had been of wood; here all the floors were carpeted. Drapes hung on the walls where windows should have been. He tried the kitchen appliances. They worked. The stove top heated when he turned on the burners, at the sink the water ran; when he opened the door of the refrigerator a gush of cold hit him in the face. In the bathrooms, the taps ran normally and the toilets flushed.

  Everything seemed perfect. But why should someone build a perfect house and then forget the windows?

  Or had someone built it?

  Could the visitors . . .

  He gulped at the idea and suddenly went cold.

  If it were the visitors, then it did make sense. No human would have built two houses in the middle of a wilderness. To start with, it would have been all but impossible to do it.

  But the visitors? Why would the visitors be building houses? Or practicing the art of building houses? For it was quite apparent that these were practice houses, constructed by someone who was not entirely clear on the matter of how houses should be built. The lopsided house probably had been the first one to be tried. The house in which he stood most likely was the second, considerably improved over the first one, but still lacking windows.

  He stood, shaken, in the middle of the kitchen, still not certain, questioning himself. The only answer, reluctant as he might be to accept it, was that the two houses had been fabricated by the visitors. But that left a second, even more puzzling, less easily answered question; Why should the visitors be building houses?

  He groped his way out of the kitchen and across the living room, went into the hall and let himself out the door.

  Long shadows had crept across the clearing. The tops of the picket fence of pines to the west cut a saw-toothed pattern into the reddening sun. A chill was beginning to move in and Norton shivered at the touch of it.

  He ran his hand over the siding exterior of the house and it had a strange feel to it. Peering closely at it in the deepening dusk, he saw that it was not siding, not separate lengths of lumber, but that the exterior seemed to be moulded in a single piece, like a preformed plastic.

  Slowly he backed away from the house. Superficially, except for the lack of windows, there was nothing wrong with it. It was an almost exact copy of the kind of house that could be found in any suburb.

  He ran his gaze from the rooftop down to the basement wall—and there was no basement wall. It was a detail that had escaped him—this lack of a basement wall. The house hovered half a foot or so above the ground, suspended in the air.

  Suspended, Norton told himself, as the visitors were suspended. There was no question now—no question of how the houses had come into being.

  He walked around the corner of the house and there they stood, the visitors, clumped together, like a massed group of darkened buildings standing in the center plaza of some futuristic city, the lower half of them blotted out in the forest dusk, the upper half highlighted by the dying rays of a setting sun.

  From their direction came another house, floating along a foot or so above the ground, the whiteness of it ghostly in the twilight. As it approached, Norton backed away, apprehensively, ready to break and run. The house came up, then stopped, as if to determine its position. Then slowly, majestically, it wheeled into line with the other houses and came to a halt, the three of them standing in a row, somewhat closer together, it was true, than would be the ordinary case, but very much like three houses sitting on a street.

  Norton took a slow step toward the third house and as he did, lights came on inside of it, with the windows gleaming. Inside it he saw a table in
the dining room, set with glass and china and two candlesticks, with tall tapers in them waiting to be lighted. In the living room, the screen of a TV set glimmered and across from it stood a davenport and all about the room were chairs, with a curio cabinet, filled with dainty figurines, ranged against one wall.

  Startled, he moved to turn away and as he did, he caught the hint of shadows, as if someone were moving in the kitchen, as if there was someone there taking up the dinner to be brought to the waiting table.

  He cried out in terror and spun about, racing toward the river and the canoe that waited there.

  49. WASHINGTON, D.C.

  When Porter rang the bell, Alice came to the door. She seized him by the arm, hurried him inside and closed the door behind him.

  “I know,” he said. “It’s an ungodly hour and I haven’t got much time. But I wanted to see you and I must see the Senator.”

  “Daddy has the drinks all poured,” said Alice, “and is waiting for you. He’s all a-twitter as to why you should come running out to see us in the middle of the night. You must be knee-deep in matters of importance.”

  “A lot of motion,” Porter told her. “A lot of talk. I don’t know if we’re getting anywhere. You’ve heard about the business holiday?”

  “A late bulletin on TV. Daddy is all upset about it.”

  But the senator, when they came into the room where he was waiting for them, was not visibly upset. He was quite the genial host. He handed Porter a drink and said, “See, young man, I didn’t even have to ask. I have learned your drinking preference.”

  “Thank you, Senator,” said Porter, accepting the glass. “I stand in need of that.”

  “Did you take time to eat tonight?” asked Alice.

  He stared at her, as if astonished by the question.

  “Well, did you?”

  “I’m afraid that I forgot,” said Porter. “It did not occur to me. The kitchen did bring up something, but, at the time, I was with the press corps. It was all gone when I got back.”

  “I suspected it,” said Alice. “Soon as you called, I made some sandwiches and started up the coffee. I’ll bring in something for you.”

  “Sit down, Dave,” said the senator, “and say what you have in mind. Is there some way I can help the White House?”

  “I think there might be,” said Porter, “but it’s up to you. No one will twist your arm. What you might want to do about it is a matter for your conscience to decide.”

  “You must have had some rough hours down there,” said the senator. “I suppose it is still rough. I’m not sure I agree with the President on his financial moratorium, but I do realize there was a need of some sort of action.”

  “We were afraid of what the snap reaction might be,” said Porter. “The holiday will give some level headed men the time they’ll need to head off total panic.”

  “The dollar is going to take a beating on the foreign exchanges,” the senator told him. “No matter what we do, it will hit near bottom. By tomorrow afternoon, it might be damn near worthless.”

  “We can’t do anything about that,” Porter said. “Give us the chance to win a round or two back home and the dollar will climb back. The real danger that we face is right here—the Congress, the press, public opinion.”

  “You mean to fight it out,” said the senator. “I think that’s the only thing you can do. Not back down. Not give ground.”

  “We’re hanging in there,” said Porter, grimly. “We are not about to say that we were wrong in the handling of the visitor situation. We’ll make no apologies.” His voice was firm.

  “I like that,” said the senator. “Much as I may disapprove of some of the things that have been going on, I do like this show of strength. The way things are tonight, we need strength at the core of government.”

  Alice brought in a plate of sandwiches and a cup of coffee, set them on a table beside Porter’s chair.

  “You go ahead and eat,” she said. “Don’t even try to talk. Daddy and I will do the talking. We are full of talk.”

  “Especially my daughter,” said the senator. “She is fairly bursting with it. To her this business is not, as it may be to the rest of us, a great calamity. She sees it as a chance at a new beginning. I don’t think I need to say I am not in agreement with her.”

  “You are wrong,” she told her father. “And you,” she said to Porter, “probably think the same as he. The both of you are wrong. This may be the best thing that ever happened to us. It may shake some sense into our national consciousness. Shake us loose of the technological syndrome that has ruled our lives for the past hundred years or so. Show us that our economic system is too sensitive and shaky, built on a foundation that basically is treacherous. It may demonstrate to us that there are other values than the smooth operation of machines . . .”

  “And if it did turn us around,” the senator interrupted, “if we are freed from what you like to call the tyranny of technology, if you had a chance for a new beginning, what would you do with it?”

  “We’d end the rat race,” she said. “The social and economic rat race. We’d work together for mutual goals. We’d bring an end to the intensely personal competition that is killing us. Without the opportunities for the personal advancement that our technology and the economic system on which it is based encourages, there’d be slight incentive to cut the throat of another person to advance ourselves. That is what the President is doing, although he may not know he’s doing it, by calling for the holiday for business. He’ll give the business world and the public a breathing spell to grope their way back to sanity. Just a little way back to sanity. If they could have a longer time. . .”

  “Let’s not you and I argue about it now,” said the senator. “At some later time, I will discuss it with you.”

  “With all your pompous smugness,” said Alice. “With your ingrained conviction . . .”

  “Dave must get back,” said the senator. “He’s needed at the White House. He has something weighing on his mind.”

  “I’m sorry, dear,” she said to Porter. “I should not have intruded. Can I listen to what you have to say to the Senator?”

  “You never intrude,” said Porter, finishing his second sandwich. “And, yes, I wish you would listen to what I have to say. Don’t hate me too much for it. I might as well be frank. The White House wants to use the Senator.”

  “I don’t like the sound of it,” said the senator. “I dislike being used, although I suppose it is a part of politics—to use and to be used. What is it, specifically?”

  “We can survive,” said Porter, “or we think we can, if we can keep the Hill off our backs for a little time. Time is all we ask. No great accomplishment. Just a few days time.”

  “You have your own people up there,” said the senator. “Why should you come to me? You know that it has been seldom I’ve played ball with you.”

  “Our people,” said Porter, “will do what they can. But this particular piece of business would smell of dirty politics. With you handling it, it won’t.”

  “And why should I help you? I’ve fought you down the line on almost every piece of legislation that you have sent up. There have been times the White House has been moved to speak most harshly of me. I can’t see how there can be any common interest.”

  “There is the interest of the nation to consider,” Porter told him. “One of the outcomes of what has happened will be an increasing pressure on us to call for outside help. On the grounds that the situation is not solely national, but international, and that the rest of the world should be in there working with us. The U.N. has been screaming about this from the very start.”

  “Yes, I know,” said the senator. “I disagree with the U.N. It’s none of their damn business.”

  “We have too much at stake,” said Porter, “to let that come about. I’d like to make an allusion to something that is confidential, top secret. Do you want to hear it?”

  “I’m not sure I do. Why should you want to tel
l me?”

  “We need a rumor started.”

  “I think that’s despicable,” said Alice.

  “I wouldn’t go quite as far in my reaction as does my daughter,” said the senator, “but I feel somewhat the same. Although I do not in the slightest blame you personally. I take it you’re not talking for yourself.”

  “You must know I’m not,” said Porter. “Not exclusively for myself. Although I would take it kindly . . .”

  “You want to feed me something so that I can leak it—a very careful leak in exactly the right places, knowing full well that I’m the one who’d know where such a leak would have maximum impact.”

  “That’s a rather crude way of saying it,” said Porter.

  “Dave,” said the senator. “This discussion essentially is crude.”

  “I have no objection to the words you use,” said Porter. “I would not have you soften them. You can say no and I’ll get up and leave. I’ll not argue with you. On my part, there’ll be no ill will involved. I’m instructed specifically not to argue with you, not to urge you to any action. We have no pressure we can put on you. Even if we had it, it would not be used.”

  “Daddy,” said Alice, “despicable as it all may be, he’s being honest with you. He’s playing dirty politics in a very forthright manner.”

  “We were talking a few nights ago,” the senator said, “about the advantages we might glean from the visitors. I admitted to some enthusiasm over the possibilities of gravity control. I said if we could get that . . .”

  Porter shook his head. “It’s not that, Senator. I don’t want to mislead you. Nor to trap you. I’ve tried to be aboveboard with you. I’ve confessed that we want to use you for a leak. A word from you to certain people on the Hill, just a casual word is all . . .”