Out of Their Minds

by Clifford D. Simak

  Also there may be a reluctance to admit, even by the thinking of it, that man ever will become extinct. Some men (by no means all of them) can reconcile themselves to the realization that they, personally, some day will die. A man can imagine the world with himself no longer in it; it is far more difficult to imagine an earth with no humans left. We shy away, with some strange inner fear, from the death of the species. We know, intellectually, if not emotionally, that some day we, as members of the human race, will cease to exist; it is difficult to think, however, that the human race itself is not immortal and eternal. We can say that man is the only species which has developed the means by which he can bring about his own extinction. But while we may say this, we do not, in our hearts, believe it.

  What little serious speculation there has been about this subject has not really been about it at all. There seems to be a mental block which prevents consideration of it. We almost never speculate upon what might supersede man; what we do is to conjure up a future superman—inhuman in many ways, perhaps, but still a man. Alienated from us in a mental and intellectual sense, but still, biologically, a man. Even here, in this kind of speculation, we perpetuate the stubborn belief that man will go on forever and forever.

  This, of course, is wrong. Unless the evolutionary process, in bringing forth the human race, has reached a dead end, there will be something more than man. History would seem to say that the evolutionary process has not reached a dead end. Through the ages there has been evidence that the principle of evolution is never at a loss to produce new life forms or to introduce new survival values. There is no reason to believe, on present evidence, that in man the evolutionary process has used up all its bag of tricks.

  So there will be something after man, something other than man. Not just an extension or modification of man, but something entirely different. We ask, in horror and disbelief, what could supersede man, what could beat intelligence?

  I believe I know.

  I believe the superseder is already in existence and has been for many years.

  Abstract thought is a new thing in the world. No other creature than man ever has been blessed (or cursed) with such a faculty. It took from us the old security accorded other creatures which are aware of nothing except the here and now, and in some cases aware only dimly of the here and now. It let us look into the past and, what is worse, peer darkly futureward. It made us aware of loneliness, and filled us with a hope, from which stemmed hopelessness, and it showed us how we stood alone, naked and defenseless, before the uncaring of the cosmos. That day when the first manlike creature became aware of the implications of space and time as related to himself must be classed, at once, as the most fearful and most glorious day in the history of life upon the earth.

  We used our intelligence for many practical purposes and for theoretical probing which, in turn, gave us other answers for practical application. And we used it for something else as well. We used it to fill an enigmatic world with many shadowy creatures—with gods, devils, angels, ghosts, nymphs, fairies, brownies, goblins. We created in our tribal minds a dark and warring world in which we had enemies and allies. And we created other mythical creatures which were neither dark nor fearsome, but simply pleasant products of our imagination—Santa Claus, the Easter Rabbit, Jack Frost, the Sandman, and many, many others. Not only did we create these things intellectually, but we believed in them in varying degrees. We saw them and we talked of them and they were very real to us. Why, if not for fear of meeting such things, did the peasants of medieval days in Europe bar their hovels at the fall of night and refuse to venture out? Why the fear of the dark still inherent in many modern men if it is not the fear of meeting something in the dark? Today we talk but little of these things of the dark, but that the old uneasiness and fear may still be with us is demonstrated by the wide belief today in such things as flying saucers. In this enlightened day it may be childish to talk of werewolf or of ghoul, but it is all right to believe in a technical wraith such as a flying saucer.

  What do we know of abstract thought? The answer, of course, is that we know nothing of it. There is a possibility, I understand, that it may be electrical in nature and that it is based upon some sort of energy exchange, for the physicists tell us that all processes must be based on energy. But what do we know, actually, either of electricity or of energy? What do we know, when one comes down to it, about anything at all? Do we know how the atom works or why it works or what an atom is? Can anyone explain the awareness of self and environment which distinguishes life from inorganic matter?

  We think of thought as a mental process and we do lip service to the physicists by admitting that an energy exchange must somehow be involved. But we know no more about the thought processes, perhaps even less, than the ancient Greeks knew about the atom. Democritus, who lived during the fourth century before Christ, is generally accorded the honor of being the first man to put forward the atomic theory, and this was, admittedly, an advance in thinking, but the atoms of Democritus were a far cry, indeed, from what we now think of as atoms—and, which, incidentally, we still do not understand. So we talk of thought today as the Greeks in the day of Democritus may have talked (although only briefly and without too much conviction or belief) about the atom, and with as little understanding. We are, when it comes down to the truth of it, only mouthing words.

  We do know something of the result of thought. All that mankind has today is the product of his thinking. But this is the result of the impact of the thought upon the human animal, as steam makes an impact upon a mechanism and makes an engine run.

  We might ask, once the steam has made its impact and performed its function, what happens to the steam? I think that it is as logical to ask, once thought has made its impact, what happens to the thought—to that exchange of energy which we are told is necessary to bring about and produce the thought.

  I think I know the answer. I believe that thought, the energy of thought, whatever strange form thought itself might take, streaming unceasingly through the centuries from the minds of billions of men and women, has given rise to a group of beings which in time, perhaps a not too distant time, will supersede the human race.

  Thus the superseding species arises from that very mechanism, the mind, which has made mankind the dominant species of today. This, as I read the record, is the way that evolution works.

  Man has built with his hands, but he builds with mind as well, and I believe better and somewhat differently than he might imagine.

  One man’s thought about a vicious, ghoulish shape lurking in the dark would not bring that lurking shape into actual being. But an entire tribe, all thinking (and afraid) of this same ghoulish shape would bring it, I believe, into actual being. The shape was not there to start with. It existed only in the mind of one man, crouching frightened in the dark. And frightened of he knew not what, he felt he must give shape to this thing of fear and so he imagined it and told the others what he had imagined and they imagined it as well. And they imagined it so long and well and so believed in it that eventually they created it.

  Evolution works in many ways. It works in any way it can. That it had never operated in quite this way before may merely have been because until the human mind developed it never possessed an agency which would allow it to bring about actual entities out of the sheer force of imagination. And not out of imagination alone, not by wishful thinking, but out of the forces and energies which man as yet does not understand and may never understand.

  I believe that man, with his imagination, with his love of story telling, with his fear of time and space, of death and dark, working through millenia, has created another world of creatures which share the earth with him—hidden, invisible, I do not know, but I am sure that they are here and that some day they may come out from their concealment and enter upon their heritage.

  Scattered throughout the literature of the world and through the daily flow of news events are strange happenings too well documented to be mere illusions in
each and every case …

  6

  The writing ended in the middle of the page, but there were many other pages and when I flipped the sheet over I saw that the next page was crammed with a jumble of what appeared to be a mass of notes. Written in the crabbed calligraphy of my friend, they were jammed into the page as if the sheet of paper had been the only one he’d had and he had schemed and planned to use every inch of it to cram in his fact and observation. The notes marched in a solid phalanx down the center of the page and then the margins of the page were filled with further notes and some of the writing was so pinched and small that there would have been difficulty, in many instances, in making out the words.

  I riffled through the other pages and each one was the same, filled and crammed with notes.

  I flipped the pages back and clipped the note from Philip onto the front of the sheaf of pages.

  Later, I told myself, I would read the notes—read them and attempt to puzzle through them. But for the moment I had read enough, far more than enough.

  It was a joke, I thought—but it could not be a joke, for my old friend never joked. He did not need to joke. He was filled with gentleness and he was vastly erudite and when he talked he had more use for words than to employ them in telling stupid jokes.

  And I remembered him again as he had been that last time I had seen him, sitting like a shrunken gnome in the great lounge chair which threatened to engulf him, and how he said to me, “I think that we are haunted.” He had been about to tell me something that night, I was convinced, but he had not told it, for when he’d been about to tell it Philip had come in and we’d talked of something else.

  I felt sure, sitting there in the motel room by the river, that he had meant to tell me what I had just read—that we are haunted by all the creatures that man has ever dreamed of, that mankind’s mind has served an evolutionary function through its imagination.

  He was wrong, of course. On the face of it, his belief encompassed an impossibility. But even as I thought that he must be wrong, I knew deep inside myself that no man such as he could be lightly wrong. Before he had committed to paper what he had, if for no reason than to outline his thinking for himself, he had arrived at his conclusions only after long and thoughtful study. Those pages of appended notes were not, I was certain, the only evidence he had. Rather they would be the condensation and the summary of all the evidence he’d gathered, all the thinking he had done. He still could be wrong, of course, and very likely was, but still with enough evidence and logic that his idea could not be summarily dismissed.

  He had meant to tell me, to test out his theory on me, perhaps. But because of Philip’s showing up, he had put it off. And it was then too late, for in a day or two he’d died, his car crumpled up and the life smashed out of him by an impact with another car that had not been found.

  Thinking of it, I felt myself growing cold with a terrible kind of fear, a new kind of fear I’d never felt before—a fear that crept out of another world than this, that came from some far corner of an old ancestral mind many times removed, the cold, numbing, gut-squeezing fear of a man who crouched inside a cave and listened to the sound made by the ghoulish shape that was prowling in the outer dark.

  Could it be, I asked myself, could it be that the mind-force of this other world of prowling things has reached such a point of development and efficiency that it could assume any shape at all, a shape for any purpose? Could it become a car that smashed another car and, having smashed it, return to that other world or dimension or invisibility from which it had emerged?

  Had my old friend died because he had guessed the secret of this other world of mind-created things?

  And the rattlesnakes, I wondered. No, not the rattlesnakes, for I was sure that they had been real. But had the Triceratops, the house and the other buildings, the jacked-up car beside the woodpile, Snuffy Smith and his wife not been real? Was this the answer that I needed? Could all of these things have been made up of a masquerading mind-force that lay in ambush for me, that fooled me into accepting the improbable even when I had felt it was all improbable, that had escorted me, not to the couch in the living room, but to the rocky floor of a snake-infested cave?

  And if so, why? Because this hypothetical mind-force knew that the manila envelope from Philip awaited my arrival at George Duncan’s store?

  It was insanity, I told myself. But so had missing the turn in the road been insanity, so had been the Triceratops, so had been the house where there was no house, so had been the rattlesnakes. But not the snakes, I said, for the snakes were real. And what was real? I asked. How could one know that anything was real? At this late day, if my old friend had been right, was anything for real?

  I was shaken deeper than I knew. I sat in the chair and stared at the wall, and the sheaf of papers fell from my hand and I did not move to pick them up. If this were so, I thought, our old and trustworthy world had been jerked from beneath our feet, and the goblins and the ghouls were no longer something for mere chimney-corner tales, but existed in the very solid flesh—well, not perhaps in solid flesh, but they anyhow existed; they were not illusions. A product of imagination, we had said of them, and we had been entirely right without our knowing it. And again, if this were so, Nature, in the process of evolution, had made a long, long jump ahead, from living matter to intelligence and from intelligence to abstract thought and from abstract thought to some form of life at once shadowy and real, a life, perhaps, that could take its choice of being either shadowy or real.

  I tried to imagine what sort of life it might be, what might be its joys and its sorrows, what could be its motives; I could not imagine any of it My blood and bone and flesh would not allow me to. For it would have to be another form of life and the gap was much too great. As well, or better, to ask a trilobite to imagine the world of the dinosaurs. If Nature were seeking for survival values in its continual winnowing of species, here finally it should have found a creature (if it could be called a creature) with a fantastically high survival value, for there would be nothing, absolutely nothing, in the physical world that could get at it.

  I sat there, thinking of it, and the thoughts bounced in my skull like the mutterings of distant thunder and I was getting nowhere in my thinking. I wasn’t even going around in circles. I was just bouncing back and forth, like a half-demented Yo-Yo.

  With an effort I jerked myself out of all this crazy thinking and once again I heard the gurgle and the laughter and the chuckling of the river as it went running down the land in the splendor of its magic.

  There was unpacking to be done, getting all the bags and boxes out of the car and hauled into the room; there was fishing waiting for me, with the canoe at the dock and the big bass lurking in the reeds and among the lily pads. And after that, getting settled down, a book that must be written.

  And there was, as well, I recalled, the program and the basket social at the school tonight. I would have to be there.

  7

  Linda Bailey spotted me as soon as I walked through the school house door and came bustling over to me like a self-important hen. She was one of the few people there that I remembered and there was no way one could fail to remember her. She and her husband and her brood of grubby children had lived on the farm next door to ours and there had been few days during the entire time that we were there that Linda Bailey had not come traipsing up the road or across the fields to borrow a cup of sugar or a dab of butter or any one of a dozen other items of which she continually found herself short and which, incidentally, she never seemed to get around to paying back. She was a large, raw-boned, horsey woman and she had aged, it seemed to me, but little.

  “Horace Smith!” she trumpeted. “Little Horace Smith. I’d knowed you anywhere.”.

  She flung her arms about me and she pounded me on the back with resounding thumps while, embarrassed, I struggled to remember just what bond of affection there had been between my family and the Bailey family to justify this kind of greeting.


  “So you came back again,” she yelped. “You couldn’t stay away. Once Pilot Knob gets into your blood, there can’t no one stay away. And after being to all those places, too. To all them heathen countries. You were in Rome, weren’t you?”

  “I spent some time in Rome,” I told her. “It’s not a heathen country.”

  “The purple iris that I have down against the pigpen,” she declared, “is from the Pope’s own garden. It’s not so much to look at. I’ve seen lots better iris—a whole lot prettier. Any other kind of iris no better than that I’d dug up and throwed out long ago. But I kept it because of the place it come from. It ain’t everybody, I can tell you, that has iris from the Pope’s own garden. Not that I hold with the Pope and all that foolishness, but it does make the iris sort of distinctive, don’t you think it does?”

  “Very much,” I said.

  She grabbed me by the arm. “For goodness’ sake,” she said, “let’s go over and sit down. We have so much to talk about.”

  She dragged me to a row of chairs and we sat down together.

  “You said Rome wasn’t no heathen country,” she said, “but you been in heathen countries. What about them Russians? You spent a lot of time in Russia.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Some of the Russian people still believe in God. It’s the government …”

  “Land sakes alive,” she said, “you sound as if you liked them Russians.”