The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  “I’m afraid it is,” said Garrison. “Take it easy, Frank. What has you so upset?”

  “Johnny, it’s not only cars.”

  “Not only cars? What do you mean, not only cars?”

  “They’re making houses, too. Trying to make houses. Practicing at making houses.”

  “You mean houses people could live in?”

  “That’s right. Like the kind of house you live in. The kind of houses a lot of people live in.”

  “Where are they doing this?”

  “Up in the wilderness. Hid out in the wilderness. Practicing where they thought no one would see them.”

  “Take a deep breath, Frank, and tell me. Start at the beginning and tell me what you saw.”

  “Well,” said Norton, “I was canoeing up the river . . .”

  Garrison listened intently. Gold sat motionless, watching him closely. Annie picked a file out of a desk drawer and began buffing her nails.

  “Just a minute, Frank,” Garrison said, finally. “This is too good a story, too personal a story for someone else to write. What I’d like you to do is write it for us. From the personal angle, just as you told it to me. First person all the way. I saw this, I did that, I thought something else. Can you do it? Would you do it? How about your own paper?”

  “My own paper won’t be out for another three days,” said Norton. “Hell, I may even skip a week. Gone like I’ve been, I have little advertising. I have a couple cans of beans stashed on the shelf. Even if I skip a week I still can eat. . .”

  “Sit down, then,” said Garrison, “and start writing it. Three or four columns. More if you think you need it. When you’re done, pick up the phone and ask for the city desk. Dictate the story. We have people who can take it down almost as fast as you can read it. And, Frank . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Frank, don’t spare the horses. Spread your wings.”

  “But, Johnny, I didn’t tell you everything. I was just getting to it. In that last house, the one that was lighted up and had furniture . . .”

  “Yes, what about it?”

  “The house had just floated in. The visitors had just finished making it. But when I looked at it, I saw shadows in the kitchen. Moving shadows. The kind of shadows someone would make as they moved about the kitchen, taking up the dinner. I swear—I tell you, Johnny, there were people in that kitchen! For the love of Christ, are they making people, too?”

  53. DE SOTO, WISCONSIN

  The South Dakotan who had nursed his dilapidated car for more than five hundred miles, the machine rattling and banging, coughing and gasping, every wheeze threatening to be its last, pulled into the small town of De Soto, a wide place in the road hemmed in between bluff and river. He tried to find a place to park, but there was no place left in the town to park. The one long street was jammed with cars and people, and there seemed to be much angry shouting and running about, and the frightening, sobering thought crossed his mind that possibly all the people here had also come for cars.

  Finally, he was able to pull his car over to the side of an indifferent gravel road that ran eastward up a coulee Out of town. Many other cars had been pulled off the same road. He did not find a place to park until he was a good half-mile beyond the last house in the village. He got out of the car and stretched in an attempt to ease his aching muscles. Not only did his muscles ache; he was tired to the very bone, almost to exhaustion. He was tired and hungry and he needed sleep and food, but not until he got his car. Once he got his car, he could take the time to sleep and eat.

  Just how to go about getting a car he had no idea. All he knew was that there was an island across the river from this town and that the cars were on the island. Perhaps, he thought again, he should have driven to Dick’s Landing in Iowa, but the map had shown what looked to be small secondary roads leading to the landing. He had decided that he could make better time if he drove to this Wisconsin town that lay opposite Dick’s Landing. Somehow, he knew, he had to get across the river to reach the island. Perhaps he could rent a boat. He wondered how much the renting of a boat might cost and hoped it would not be too exorbitant. He was carrying little cash. Maybe, he thought, he could swim the river, although he was not too certain that he could. He was a fairly decent swimmer, but from what he had seen of the river on his long drive down the valley, the Mississippi was wide and the current was strong.

  He plodded down the road, skirting potholes, the loose gravel sliding underneath his feet. Ahead of him, several men were walking down the road, but he made no attempt to catch up with them, for now that he was here, he found himself surprisingly abashed. Maybe he shouldn’t have come, but, at the time, the idea had seemed simple and flawless. God knows, he needed a car and here was a way to get one. Not for a moment had it occurred to him that others would come up with the same idea. He could not know, of course, but he suspected that the others in the town had come on the self-same errand. There was one consolation, however: there should be plenty of cars to go around. The story he had heard on TV said that at the time the visitors on the island had been found, they had made more than a hundred cars. It was reasonable to suppose that since the report, they had kept on making them, so there would be more than the hundred now. Maybe a couple of hundred. Maybe more than that. There were a lot of people in town, but surely with more than two hundred cars sitting there and waiting, there’d be plenty to go around. The big problem would be to find how to cross the river, but he’d deal with that when the time came.

  He came to the outskirts of the village and continued trudging toward the business district, which fronted on the river. Perhaps there, he could find someone who would tell him what to do. By this time, some sort of procedure might have been worked out for picking up a car.

  A knot of people stood on the sidewalk in front of a bar and he drifted over to them. Three highway patrol cars were standing across the street, but there was no sign of the troopers who had been in them. A line of men were standing on the far side of the railroad track that arrowed between the town and river. Their backs were turned toward the town, as if they were watching something on the river.

  The South Dakota man plucked apologetically at the sleeve of a man standing on the sidewalk. “Has there been an accident?” he asked, motioning at the patrol cars.

  “There ain’t been no accident,” said the man. “One earlier in the day, but not within the last few hours.”

  “Well, what are the troopers doing here?”

  “You must have just pulled in,” said the man.

  “That’s right. Drove all the way from South Dakota. Rapid City—well, not really Rapid City, but a little town just east of Rapid City. Made it all in one run; only stopped for gas.”

  “Sounds like you were in a hurry.”

  “Well, you see, I wanted to get here before all the cars were gone.”

  “There ain’t none of them gone,” said the man. “They’re all over on the island.”

  “So I’m still in time.”

  “Still in time for what?”

  “Still in time to pick up a car.”

  “You ain’t going to pick up no car. There ain’t no one going to pick up a car. State troopers, they got the river sealed off. Some word has it they may be sending in the Guard. They’re out in boats patrolling on the river so no traffic can come up or down the stream.”

  “But why? The TV said . . .”

  “We all know what the TV said. And the papers, too. Free cars for everyone. But you can’t get across the river to the island.”

  “That the island over there?”

  “Somewhere over there. I don’t know just where. There are a lot of islands over there.”

  “But what happened? Why did the troopers . . .”

  “Bunch of damn fools piled into a boat. More of them than the boat would carry, but they kept on piling in. The boat swamped out in midstream. Most of the damn fools drowned.”

  “But someone could set up some kind of system, some safe way t
o get across and. . .”

  “Sure, they could,” said the other man, “but no matter what you did, it wouldn’t work. No one here has got a lick of sense. Everyone has got his heart set on one of the cars. The police are right. They can’t let no one near the river. If they did, more people would get killed.”

  “But don’t you want a car?”

  “Sure, I want a car. But there’s no chance to get one now. Maybe, later on . . .”

  “But I have to have a car right now,” said the man from South Dakota. “I just got to have one. I don’t think that heap of mine will last to get me home.”

  He ran across the street and up the embankment to the railroad track. He reached the line of men who stood on the far edge of the track, pushing his way through them, shoving them aside. One foot hit the downslope of the embankment. Skidding on sliding gravel, he lost his balance. He fell and rolled down the slope, stopping just short of the water’s edge. Lying there, he saw a huge man in uniform towering over him.

  The trooper asked, almost gently, “Where do you think you’re going, son?”

  “I got to have a car,” said the man from South Dakota.

  The officer shook his head.

  “I can swim,” said the South Dakotan. “I can swim it easy. Let me have a chance. Let me take a chance.”

  The officer reached down a hand, jerked him to his feet.

  “Now, you listen to me,” he said. “I’m giving you a break. Get your tail up over that track. If I so much as catch sight of you again, I’ll toss you in the cage.”

  The South Dakotan hastily clambered up the embankment. The crowd jeered kindly at him.

  54. MINNEAPOLIS

  “How sure can we be of Norton?” Lathrop asked. “He’s not one of our staff.”

  “I’d stake my reputation on him,” said Garrison. “Frank and I go a long ways back. We went to school together, have been in touch ever since. He’s a dedicated newspaperman. Just because he chose to hide away up at Lone Pine doesn’t make him any less a newspaperman. We act as if we were specialists here—some of us write the news, others edit it, still others make up the pages, and there are a few who write editorials. Each one to his own task. Frank does the whole damn thing. He starts each week with nothing and he pulls the news and advertising together, he edits what he writes, he makes up the paper. If there is need for an editorial any particular week, he writes the editorial and not only that. . .”

  “No need to go on, Johnny,” Lathrop told him. “I just wanted to know how you felt about it.”

  “If Frank tells me he saw evidence the visitors are making houses,” said Garrison, “then I’ll believe they’re making houses. His story hangs together, he has a lot of detail.”

  “It seems incredible to me,” said Lathrop, “that we have this one exclusive. That makes two in a row. We had the cars and now we have the houses.”

  “There’s something I want to talk with you about,” said Garrison. “I think we should let the White House in on it before we go to press. I’ve talked to the press secretary there. He seems a decent man. I can get through to him.”

  “You mean you want to tip them off,” said Lathrop, somewhat horrified. “Tell them about the houses. Why, Johnny? Just why in hell . . .”

  “My thinking may be wrong,” said Garrison, “but it seems to me the administration is absorbing a lot of punishment and . . .”

  “It’s good for them,” said Lathrop. “The bastards have it coming. Not on this visitor matter—they’ve done fairly well on it. But they’ve been willfully wrong and pigheaded on most other things. A good dose of humility won’t do them any harm. I can’t seem to summon up much sympathy.”

  Garrison was silent for a moment, considering, trying to put his thoughts together.

  “It’s not the administration so much,” he finally said, “as it is the nation. The White House is being stiffnecked about it; they’re determined to ride the crisis out. Maybe they can do it. Maybe they had a chance of doing it before the houses came up. But the houses will wreck them. The cars are bad enough, the houses . . .”

  “Yes, I can see that,” said Lathrop. “The implication is there. Houses as well as cars. First the automotive business, now the housing industry. The dollar will be worthless. Our credit will be gone. But still we have to run the story. Even if we wanted to, and we don’t, it’s something that can’t be covered up.”

  “There’s no question about publishing,” said Garrison. “We have to do that. The question is: Do we give our own government a chance to react to it before we let them have it straight between the eyes? Maybe, if they knew, they would have the time to shift their stance, stand on more solid ground to deal with it when it broke.”

  “The whole idea,” said Lathrop, “is that we should go international on it. I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do. After all, we have taken the brunt of this alien invasion. If there are to be any benefits or advantages because of it, they should go to us. The visitors chose us; we didn’t invite them in, we didn’t lure them in. Why they chose us, I don’t know. I don’t know why they didn’t land in Europe or in Africa. But the U.N. has been yelling ever since it happened . . .”

  “I don’t know about that, either,” said Garrison. “It would gall me to see it go international, but international or not, however we may go, I think the administration should be given a few hours to reconsider on the basis of new developments. They’ll handle it better if they have some advance warning. They may elect to stand pat, tough it out. I don’t know. You and I don’t have to decide that. Our problem is a different one. We talk about our responsibility in dealing with the news. We think of ourselves as a public service institution. We do nothing willingly to harm or debase our cultural system. We talk a lot about digging out the truth and reporting the truth and that’s an easy one in those cases where we can determine truth. But there is something else that goes beyond mere truth. And that’s the power we hold. We have to use that power as wisely as we can. If we keep this bottled up for the sake of another scoop . . .”

  “Dammit, Johnny, I want another scoop,” said Lathrop. “I love them. You can’t get too many for me. I roll in them with great delight. How can we be sure the White House wouldn’t leak it? There are no secrets in Washington unless someone has slapped a confidential stamp on it.”

  “They would be unlikely to leak it,” said Garrison. “They’d want to keep it quiet until they could figure out what to do, what action they should take. As soon as it is known, there’ll be hell let loose. They’ll need all the time we can give them. They’ll be no more anxious to leak it than we are.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Lathrop. “About letting Washington in on it, I don’t really know. Let me think about it, talk with the publisher.”

  55. ABOARD PLANE APPROACHING MINNEAPOLIS

  “Everyone is determined to make them ogres,” Kathy said to Jerry. “Nasty little ogres that came down out of the sky to do mischief to us. But I know they aren’t. I touched 101—I don’t mean touched just her hide, but the inside of her, the living spirit of her. It wasn’t just a touch; it was a contact. And when I told the President about this, he was interested—most interesting, he said. But he wasn’t interested, nor were any of the others. All they can think of is their precious economy. Sure, they want to know if there is some way they can talk with the visitors. But the only reason they want to talk to them is to tell them to stop what they are doing.”

  “You have to understand the President’s position,” Jerry told her. “You have to realize what the administration is facing . . .”

  “Has it ever occurred to you, or to anyone,” she asked, “that the President could be wrong, that all of us are wrong. That the way we live is wrong and has been wrong for a long, long time.”

  “Well, certainly,” said Jerry. “All of us, everyone. We all make mistakes.”

  “I don’t mean that,” said Kathy. “It’s not being wrong right now, but wrong from a long way back. Maybe if
we could go back far enough in time, we might be able to pinpoint where we started going wrong. I don’t know enough history to even guess where that particular time of going wrong might be, but somewhere along the time track, we took the wrong turning, started going down the wrong road and there was no way of going back.

  “Just a few weeks ago, I interviewed a bunch of crazy kids at the university, real far-out freaks who called themselves Lovers. They told me love was everything, the be-all and the end-all, that there was nothing else that counted. They looked at me out of wide, round innocent eyes with their naked souls shining through their eyes and I felt sick inside. I felt as naked as their souls were naked. I felt pity for them and was enraged at them, both at the same time. I went back and wrote the story and I felt sicker and sicker all the time I was writing it, for they were wrong, disturbingly wrong. They were far off the beaten track, so far out there was a sense that they were forever lost. But, maybe, they are no more wrong than we are. The thing is that we’ve gotten so accustomed to our wrongness that we think it’s right. All-love may be wrong, but so is all-money, all-greed wrong. I tell you, Jerry . . .”

  “You think the visitors may be trying to kick us back on the right track?”

  “No, I guess not. No, I never really thought that. They wouldn’t know what is wrong with us. Maybe if they did know, they wouldn’t care; maybe they’d think it was our business to be wrong. They themselves may be wrong in what they are doing. Most likely they are. But what they are doing, wrong or right, may be showing up our wrongness.”

  “I think,” said Jerry, “that, in any case, under any circumstance, it might be impossible to say what is wrong and what is right. We and the visitors are far separated. They came from God knows where. Their standard of behavior—and surely they must have such a standard—would be different from ours. When two cultures with differing standards collide head-on, one of them, or perhaps the both of them, will get roughed up. With the best intentions on both their parts, there will be some roughing up.”