Over the River and Through the Woods

by Clifford D. Simak

  Back in the ship we had to wait a while for the rolls to pick up some heat before we could handle them. Even so we had to wear gloves when we began to unroll them. Now, seeing them in good light, we realized that they were made up of many sheets rolled up together. The sheets seemed to be made of some sort of extremely thin metal or tough plastic. They were stiff from the cold and we spread them out on our lone table and weighted them down to hold them flat.

  On the first sheet were diagrams of some sort, drawings and what might have been specifications written into the diagrams and along the margins. The specifications, of course, meant nothing to us (although later some were puzzled out and mathematicians and chemists were able to figure out some of the formulas and equations).

  “Blueprints,” said Tyler. “This whole business was an engineering job.”

  “If that’s the case,” said Orson, “those strange things fastened to the structural frames could be mounts to hold engineering instruments.”

  “Could be,” said Tyler.

  “Maybe the instruments are stored in some other holes like the one where we found the blueprints,” I suggested.

  “I don’t think so,” said Tyler. “They would have taken the instruments with them when they left.”

  “Why didn’t they take the blueprints, too?”

  “The instruments would have been worthwhile to take. They could be used on another job. But the blueprints couldn’t. And there may have been many sets of prints and spec sheets. These we have may be only one of many sets of duplicates. There would have been a set of master prints and those they might have taken with them when they left.”

  “What I don’t understand,” I said, “is what they could have been building out here. What kind of construction? And why here? I suppose we could think of Pluto as a massive construction shack, but why exactly here? With all the galaxy to pick from, why this particular spot?”

  “You ask too many questions all at once,” Orson told me.

  “Let’s look,” said Tyler. “Maybe we’ll find out.”

  He peeled the first sheet off the top and let it drop to the floor. It snapped back to the rolled-up position.

  The second sheet told us nothing, nor did the third or fourth. Then came the fifth sheet.

  “Now, here is something,” said Tyler.

  We leaned closer to look.

  “It’s the solar system,” Orson said.

  I counted rapidly, “Nine planets.”

  “Where’s the tenth?” asked Orson. “There should be a tenth.”

  “Something’s wrong,” said Tyler. “I don’t know what it is.”

  I spotted it. “There’s a planet between Mars and Jupiter.”

  “That means there is no Pluto shown,” said Orson.

  “Of course not,” said Tyler. “Pluto never was a planet.”

  “Then this means there once actually was a planet between Mars and Jupiter,” said Orson.

  “Not necessarily,” Tyler told him. “It may only mean there was supposed to be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They bungled the job,” said Tyler. “They did a sloppy piece of engineering.”

  “You’re insane!” I shouted at him.

  “Your blind spot is showing, Howard. According to what we think, perhaps it is insane. According to the theories our physicists have worked out. There is a cloud of dust and gas and the cloud contracts to form a protostar. Our scientists have invoked a pretty set of physical laws to calculate what happens. Physical laws that were automatic—since no one would be mad enough to postulate a gang of cosmic engineers who went about the universe building solar systems.”

  “But the tenth planet,” persisted Orson. “There has to be a tenth planet. A big, massive—”

  “They messed up the projected fifth planet,” Tyler said. “God knows what else they messed up. Venus, maybe. Venus shouldn’t be the kind of planet it is. It should be another Earth, perhaps a slightly warmer Earth, but not the hell hole it is. And Mars. They loused that up, too. Life started there, but it never had a chance. It hung on and that was all. And Jupiter. Jupiter is a monstrosity—”

  “You think the only reason for a planet’s existence is its capability of supporting life?”

  “I don’t know, of course. But it should be in the specs. Three planets that could have been life-bearing and of these only one was successful.”

  “Then,” said Orson, “there could be a tenth planet. One that wasn’t even planned.”

  Tyler rapped his fist against the sheet. “With a gang of clowns like this anything could happen.”

  He jerked away the sheet and tossed it to the floor.

  “There!” he cried. “Look here.”

  We crowded in and looked.

  It was a cross section, or appeared to be a cross section, of a planet.

  “A central core,” said Tyler. “An atmosphere—”

  “Earth?”

  “Could be. Could be Mars or Venus.”

  The sheet was covered with what could have been spec notations.

  “It doesn’t look quite right,” I protested.

  “It wouldn’t if it were Mars or Venus. And how sure are you of Earth?”

  “Not sure at all,” I said.

  He jerked away the sheet to reveal another one.

  We puzzled over it.

  “Atmospheric profile,” I guessed half-heartedly.

  “These are just general specs,” said Tyler. “The details will be in some of the other rolls. We have a lot of them out there.”

  I tried to envision it. A construction shack set down in a cloud of dust and gas. Engineers who may have worked for millennia to put together stars and planets; to key into them certain factors that still would be at work, billions of years later.

  Tyler said they had bungled and perhaps they had. But maybe not with Venus. Maybe Venus had been built to different specifications. Maybe it had been designed to be the way it was. Perhaps, a billion years from now, when humanity might well be gone from Earth, a new life and a new intelligence would rise on Venus.

  Maybe not with Venus, maybe with none of the others, either. We could not pretend to know.

  Tyler was still going through the sheets.

  “Look here,” he was yelling. “Look here—the bunglers—”

  The Grotto of the Dancing Deer

  Luis was playing his pipe when Boyd climbed the steep path that led up to the cave. There was no need to visit the cave again; all the work was done, mapping, measuring, photographing, extracting all possible information from the site. Not only the paintings, although the paintings were the important part of it. Also there had been the animal bones, charred, and the still remaining charcoal of the fire in which they had been charred; the small store of natural earths from which the pigments used by the painters had been compounded—a cache of valuable components, perhaps hidden by an artist who, for some reason that could not now be guessed, had been unable to use them; the atrophied human hand, severed at the wrist (why had it been severed and, once severed, left there to be found by men thirty millennia removed?); the lamp formed out of a chunk of sandstone, hollowed to accommodate a wad of moss, the hollow filled with fat, the moss serving as a wick to give light to those who painted. All these and many other things, Boyd thought with some satisfaction; Gavarnie had turned out to be, possibly because of the sophisticated scientific methods of investigation that had been brought to bear, the most significant cave painting site ever studied—perhaps not as spectacular, in some ways, as Lascaux, but far more productive in the data obtained.

  No need to visit the cave again, and yet there was a reason—the nagging feeling that he had passed something up, that in the rush and his concentration on the other work, he had forgotten something. It had made small impression on him at the time, but now, thinking back on it, he was becoming more and more inclined to believe it might have importance. The whole thing probably was a product of his imagination, he told himself. Once he saw it a
gain (if indeed he could find it again, if it were not a product of retrospective worry), it might prove to be nothing at all, simply an impression that had popped up to nag him.

  So here he was again, climbing the steep path, geologist’s hammer swinging at his belt, large flashlight clutched in hand, listening to the piping of Luis who perched on a small terrace, just below the mouth of the cave, a post he had occupied through all the time the work was going on. Luis had camped there in his tent through all kinds of weather, cooking on a camper’s stove, serving as self-appointed watch-dog, on alert against intruders, although there had been few intruders other than the occasional curious tourist who had heard of the project and tramped miles out of the way to see it. The villagers in the valley below had been no trouble; they couldn’t have cared less about what was happening on the slope above them.

  Luis was no stranger to Boyd; ten years before, he had shown up at the rock shelter project some fifty miles distant and there had stayed through two seasons of digging. The rock shelter had not proved as productive as Boyd initially had hoped, although it had shed some new light on the Azilian culture, the tag-end of the great Western European prehistoric groups. Taken on as a common laborer, Luis had proved an apt pupil and as the work went on had been given greater responsibility. A week after the work had started at Gavarnie, he had shown up again.

  “I heard you were here,” he’d said. “What do you have for me?”

  As he came around a sharp bend in the trail, Boyd saw him, sitting cross-legged in front of the weather-beaten tent, holding the primitive pipe of his to his lips, piping away.

  That was exactly what it was—piping. Whatever music came out of the pipe was primitive and elemental. Scarcely music, although Boyd would admit that he knew nothing about music. Four notes—would it be four notes? he wondered. A hollow bone with an elongated slot as a mouthpiece, two drilled holes for stops.

  Once he had asked Luis about it. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he had said. Luis had told him, “You don’t see many of them. In remote villages here and there, hidden away in the mountains.”

  Boyd left the path and walked across the grassy terrace, sat down beside Luis, who took down the pipe and laid it in his lap.

  “I thought you were gone,” Luis said. “The others left a couple of days ago.”

  “Back for one last look,” said Boyd.

  “You are reluctant to leave it?”

  “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  Below them the valley spread out in autumn browns and tans, the small river a silver ribbon in the sunlight, the red roofs of the village a splash of color beside the river.

  “It’s nice up here,” said Boyd. “Time and time again, I catch myself trying to imagine what it might have been like at the time the paintings were done. Not much different than it is now, perhaps. The mountains would be unchanged. There’d have been no fields in the valley, but it probably would have been natural pasture. A few trees here and there, but not too many of them. Good hunting. There’d have been grass for the grazing animals. I have even tried to figure out where the people would’ve camped. My guess would be where the village is now.”

  He looked around at Luis. The man still sat upon the grass, the pipe resting in his lap. He was smiling quietly, as if he might be smiling to himself. The small black beret sat squarely on his head, his tanned face was round and smooth, the black hair close-clipped, the blue shirt open at the throat. A young man, strong, not a wrinkle on his face.

  “You love your work,” said Luis.

  “I’m devoted to it. So are you, Luis,” Boyd said.

  “It’s not my work.”

  “Your work or not,” said Boyd, “you do it well. Would you like to go with me? One last look around.”

  “I need to run an errand in the village.”

  “I thought I’d find you gone,” said Boyd. “I was surprised to hear your pipe.”

  “I’ll go soon,” said Luis. “Another day or two. No reason to stay but, like you, I like this place. I have no place to go, no one needing me. Nothing’s lost by staying a few more days.”

  “As long as you like,” said Boyd. “The place is yours. Before too long, the government will be setting up a caretaker arrangement, but the government moves with due deliberation.”

  “Then I may not see you again,” said Luis.

  “I took a couple of days to drive to Roncesvalles,” said Boyd. “That’s the place where the Gascons slaughtered Charlemagne’s rearguard in 778.”

  “I’ve heard of the place,” said Luis.

  “I’d always wanted to see it. Never had the time. The Charlemagne chapel is in ruins, but I am told masses are still said in the village chapel for the dead paladins. When I returned from the trip, I couldn’t resist the urge to see the cave again.”

  “I am glad of that,” said Luis. “May I be impertinent?”

  “You’re never impertinent,” said Boyd.

  “Before you go, could we break bread once more together? Tonight, perhaps, I’ll prepare an omelet.”

  Boyd hesitated, gagging down a suggestion that Luis dine with him. Then he said, “I’d be delighted, Luis. I’ll bring a bottle of good wine.”

  Holding the flashlight centered on the rock wall, Boyd bent to examine the rock more closely. He had not imagined it; he had been right. Here, in this particular spot, the rock was not solid. It was broken into several pieces, but with the several pieces flush with the rest of the wall. Only by chance could the break have been spotted. Had he not been looking directly at it, watching for it as he swept the light across the wall, he would have missed it. It was strange, he thought, that someone else, during the time they had been working in the cave, had not found it. There’d not been much that they’d missed.

  He held his breath, feeling a little foolish at the holding of it, for, after all, it might mean nothing. Frost cracks, perhaps, although he knew that he was wrong. It would be unusual to find frost cracks here.

  He took the hammer out of his belt and, holding the flashlight in one hand, trained on the spot, he forced the chisel end of the hammer into one of the cracks. The edge went in easily. He pried gently and the crack widened. Under more pressure, the piece of rock moved out. He laid down the hammer and flash, seized the slab of rock and pulled it free. Beneath it were two other slabs and they both came free as easily as the first. There were others as well and he also took them out. Kneeling on the floor of the cave, he directed the light into the fissure that he had uncovered.

  Big enough for a man to crawl into, but at the prospect he remained for the moment undecided. Alone, he’d be taking a chance to do it. If something happened, if he should get stuck, if a fragment of rock should shift and pin him or fall upon him, there’d be no rescue. Or probably no rescue in time to save him. Luis would come back to the camp and wait for him, but should he fail to make an appearance, Luis more than likely would take it as a rebuke for impertinence or an American’s callous disregard of him. It would never occur to him that Boyd might be trapped in the cave.

  Still, it was his last chance. Tomorrow he’d have to drive to Paris to catch his plane. And this whole thing was intriguing; it was not something to be ignored. The fissure must have some significance; otherwise, why should it have been walled up so carefully? Who, he wondered, would have walled it up? No one, certainly, in recent times. Anyone, finding the hidden entrance to the cave, almost immediately would have seen the paintings and would have spread the word. So the entrance to the fissure must have been blocked by one who would have been unfamiliar with the significance of the paintings or by one to whom they could have been commonplace.

  It was something, he decided, that could not be passed up. He would have to go in. He secured the hammer to his belt, picked up the flashlight and began to crawl.

  The fissure ran straight and easy for a hundred feet or more. It offered barely room enough for crawling, but other than that, no great difficulties. Then, without warning, it came to an end. Boyd lay in
it, directing the flash beam ahead of him, staring in consternation at the smooth wall of rock that came down to cut the fissure off.

  It made no sense. Why should someone go to the trouble of walling off an empty fissure? He could have missed something on the way, but thinking of it, he was fairly sure he hadn’t. His progress had been slow and he had kept the flash directed ahead of him every inch of the way. Certainly if there had been anything out of the ordinary, he would have seen it.

  Then a thought came to him and slowly, with some effort, he began to turn himself around, so that his back rather than his front, lay on the fissure floor. Directing the beam upward, he had his answer. In the roof of the fissure gaped a hole.

  Cautiously, he raised himself into a sitting position. Reaching up, he found handholds on the projecting rock and pulled himself erect. Swinging the flash around, he saw that the hole opened, not into another fissure, but into a bubblelike cavity—small, no more than six feet in any dimension. The walls and ceiling of the cavity were smooth, as if a bubble of plastic rock had existed here for a moment at some time in the distant geologic past when the mountains had been heaving upward leaving behind it as it drained away a bubble forever frozen into smooth and solid stone.

  As he swung the flash across the bubble, he gasped in astonishment. Colorful animals capered around the entire expanse of stone. Bison played leapfrog. Horses cantered in a chorus line. Mammoths turned somersaults. All around the bottom perimeter, just above the floor, dancing deer, standing on their hind legs, joined hands and jigged, antlers swaying gracefully.

  “For the love of Christ!” said Boyd.

  Here was Stone Age Disney.

  If it was the Stone Age. Could some jokester have crawled into the area in fairly recent times to paint the animals in this grotto? Thinking it over, he rejected the idea. So far as he had been able to ascertain, no one in the valley, nor in the entire region, for that matter, had known of the cave until a shepherd had found it several years before when a lamb had blundered into it. The entrance was small and apparently for centuries had been masked by a heavy growth of brush and bracken.