Grotto of the Dancing Deer

by Clifford D. Simak

  “You have not dined, I take it,” Grandma said. “Of course you haven’t—there’s no place out there to dine. Elijah, get the bishop a plate of food, and hurry.”

  “I thank you, madam,” said the bishop. “I’ve had a long, hard day. I appreciate all you’re doing for me. I appreciate it more than you can ever know.”

  “This is our day,” Granther said merrily, refilling his own glass for the umpteenth time. “It is seldom that we have any guests at all and now, all of an evening, we have two of them.”

  “Two guests,” said the bishop, looking straight at Paxton. “Now that is fine, indeed.”

  He smacked his lips again and emptied the glass.

  III

  In his room, Paxton closed the door and shot the bolt full home.

  The fire had burned down to embers and cast a dull glow along the floor. The rain drummed faintly, half-heartedly, on the window pane.

  And the question and the fear raced within his brain.

  There was no question of it: The bishop was the assassin who had been set upon his trail.

  No man without a purpose, and a deadly purpose, walked these hills at night, in an autumn rain. And what was more, the bishop had been scarcely wet. He’d shaken his hat and the drops had fallen off, and he’d brushed at his cloak and after that both the hat and cloak were dry.

  The bishop had been brought here, more than likely, in a hovering flier and let down, as other assassins probably likewise had been let down this very night in all of half a dozen places where a fleeing man might have taken shelter.

  The bishop had been taken to the room just across the hall and under other circumstances, Paxton told himself, he might have sought conclusions with him there. He walked over to the fireplace and picked up the heavy poker and weighed it in his hand. One stroke of that and it would be all over.

  But he couldn’t do it. Not in this house.

  He put the poker back and walked over to the bed and picked up his cloak. Slowly he slid it on as he stood there, thinking, going over in his mind the happenings of the morning.

  He had been at home, alone, and the phone had rung and Sullivan’s face had filled the visor—a face all puffed up with fright.

  “Hunter’s out to get you,” Sullivan had said. “He’s sent men to get you.”

  “But he can’t do that!” Paxton remembered protesting.

  “Certainly he can,” said Sullivan. “It comes within the framework of the exercise. Assassination has always been a possibility…”

  “But the exercise is finished!”

  “Not so far as Hunter is concerned. You went a little far. You should have stayed within the hypothesis of the problem; there was no need to go back into Hunter’s personal affairs. You dug up things he thought no one ever knew. How did you do it, man?”

  “I have my ways,” said Paxton. “And in a deal like this, everything was fair. He didn’t handle me exactly as if I were innocent.”

  “You better get going,” Sullivan advised. “They must be almost there. I can’t get anyone there soon enough to help you.”

  And it would have been all right, Paxton thought, if the flier had only held together.

  He wondered momentarily if it had been sabotaged.

  But be that as it may, he had flown it down and had been able to walk away from it and now, finally, here he was.

  He stood irresolutely in the center of the room.

  It went against his pride to flee for a second time, but there was nothing else to do. He couldn’t let this house become involved in the tag-end rough and tumble of his exercise.

  And despite the poker, he was weaponless, for weapons on this now-peaceful planet were very few indeed—no longer household items such as once had been the case.

  He went to the window and opened it and saw that the rain had stopped and that a ragged moon was showing through a scud of racing clouds.

  Glancing down, he saw the roof of the porch beneath the window and he let his eye follow down the roof line. Not too hard, he thought, if a man were barefoot, and once he reached the edge there’d be a drop of not much more than seven feet.

  He took off his sandals and stuffed them in the pocket of his cloak and started out the window. But, halfway out, he climbed back in again and walked to the door. Quietly he slid back the bolt. It wasn’t exactly cricket to go running off and leave a room locked up.

  The roof was slippery with the rain, but he managed it without any trouble, inching his way carefully down the incline. He dropped into a shrub that scratched him up a bit, but that, he told himself, was a minor matter.

  He put on his sandals and straightened up and walked rapidly away. At the edge of the woods, he stopped and looked back at the house. It stood dark and silent.

  Once he got back home and this affair was finished, he promised himself, he’d write Nelson a long apologetic letter and explain it all.

  His feet found the path and he followed it through the sickly half-light of the cloudy moon.

  “Sir,” said a voice close beside him, “I see that you are out for a little stroll…”

  Paxton jumped in fright.

  “It’s a nice night for it, sir,” the voice went on quietly. “After a rain, everything seems so clean and cool.”

  “Who is there?” asked Paxton, with his hair standing quite on edge.

  “Why, it’s Pertwee, sir. Pertwee, the robot, sir.”

  Paxton laughed a little nervously. “Oh, yes, I remember now. You’re Graham’s enemy.”

  The robot stepped out of the woods into the path beside him.

  “It’s too much, I suppose,” Pertwee said, “to imagine that you might be coming out to look at the battlefield.”

  “Why, no,” said Paxton, grasping at a straw. “I don’t know how you guessed it, but that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’ve never heard of anything quite like it and I’m considerably intrigued.”

  “Sir,” said the robot eagerly, “I’m entirely at your service. There is no one, I can assure you, who is better equipped to explain it to you. I’ve been in it from the very first with Master Graham and if you have any questions, I shall try to answer them.”

  “Yes, I think there is one question. What is the purpose of it all?”

  “Why, at first, of course,” said Pertwee, “it was simply an attempt to amuse a growing boy. But now, with your permission, sir. I would venture the opinion that it is a good deal more.”

  “You mean a part of Continuation?”

  “Certainly, sir. I know there is a natural reluctance among humankind to admit the fact, or to even think about it, but for a great part of Man’s history war played an important and many-sided role. Of all the arts that Man developed, there probably was none to which he devoted so much time and thought and money as he did to war.”

  The path sloped down and there before them in the pale and mottled moonlight lay the battle bowl. “That bowl,” asked Paxton, “or whatever it might be that you have tipped over it? Sometimes you can just make it out and other times you miss it…”

  “I suppose,” said Pertwee, “you’d call it a force shield, sir. A couple of the other robots worked it out. As I understand it, sir, it is nothing new—just an adaptation. There’s a time factor worked into it as an additional protection.”

  “But that sort of protection…”

  “We use TC bombs, sir—total conversion bombs. Each side gets so many of them and uses his best judgment and…”

  “But you couldn’t use nuclear stuff in there!”

  “As safe as a toy, sir,” said Pertwee gaily. “They are very small, sir. Not much larger than a pea. Critical mass, as you well understand, no longer is much of a consideration. And the yield in radiation, while it is fairly high, is extremely short-lived, so that within an hour or so…”

  “You gentlemen,” said Paxto
n grimly, “certainly try to be entirely realistic.”

  “Why, yes, of course we do. Although the operators are entirely safe. We’re in the same sort of position, you might say, as the general staff. And that is all right, of course, because the purpose of the entire business is to keep alive the art of waging war.”

  “But the art…” Paxton started to argue, then stopped.

  What could he say? If the race persisted in its purpose of keeping the old culture workable and intact in Continuation, then it must perforce accept that culture in its entirety.

  War, one must admit, was as much a part of the human culture as were all the other more or less uniquely human things that the race was conserving here as a sort of racial cushion against a future need or use.

  “There is,” confessed Pertwee, “a certain cruelty, but perhaps a cruelty that I, as a robot, am more alive to than would be the case with a human, sir. The rate of casualties among the robot troops is unbelievable. In a restricted space and with extremely high firepower, that would be the natural consequence.”

  “You mean that you use troops—that you send robots in there?”

  “Why, yes. Who else would operate the weapons? And it would be just a little silly, don’t you think, to work out a battle and then…”

  “But robots…”

  “They are very small ones, sir. They would have to be, to gain an illusion of the space which is normally covered by a full-scale battle. And the weapons likewise are scaled down, and that sort of evens things out. And the troops are very single-minded, completely obedient and dedicated to victory. We turn them out in mass production in our shops and there’s little chance to give them varying individualities and anyhow…”

  “Yes, I see,” said Paxton, a little stunned. “But now I think that I…”

  “But, sir, I have only got a start at telling you and I’ve not shown you anything at all. There are so many considerations and there were so many problems.”

  They were close to the towering, fully shimmering force field now and Pertwee pointed to a stairway that led from ground level down toward its base.

  “I’d like to show you, sir,” said Pertwee, ducking down the stairs.

  It stopped before a door.

  “This,” it said, “is the only entrance to the battlefield. We use it to send new troops and munitions during periods of truce, and at other times we use it to polish up the place a bit.”

  Its thumb stabbed out and hit a button to one side of the door and the door moved upward silently.

  “After several weeks of battle,” the robot explained, “the terrain is bound to become a little cluttered.”

  Through the door, Paxton could see the churned-up ground and the evidence of dying, and it was as if someone had pushed him in the belly. He gulped in a stricken breath and couldn’t let it out and he suddenly was giddy and nearly sick. He put out a hand to hold himself upright against the trenchlike wall beside him.

  Pertwee pushed another button and the door slid down.

  “It hits you hard the first time you see it,” Pertwee apologized, “but given time, one gets used to it.”

  Paxton let his breath out slowly and looked around. The trench with the stairway came down to the door, and the door, he saw, was wider than the trench, so that at the foot of the steps the area had been widened into a sort of letter T, with narrow embrasures scooped out to face the door.

  “You all right, sir?” asked Pertwee.

  “Perfectly all right,” Paxton told the robot stiffly.

  “And now,” said Pertwee happily, “I’ll explain the fire and tactical control.”

  It trotted up the steps and Paxton trailed behind it.

  “I’m afraid that would take too long,” said Paxton.

  But the robot brushed the words aside. “You must see it, sir,” it pleaded plaintively. “Now that you are out here, you must not miss seeing it.”

  He’d have to get away somehow, Paxton told himself. He couldn’t afford to waste much time. As soon as the house had settled down to sleep, the bishop would come hunting him, and by that time he must be gone.

  Pertwee led the way around the curving base of the battle bowl to the observation tower which Paxton had come upon that evening.

  The robot halted at the base of the ladder.

  “After you,” it said.

  Paxton hesitated, then went swiftly up the ladder.

  Maybe this wouldn’t take too long, he thought, and then he could be off. It would be better, he realized, if he could get rid of Pertwee without being too abrupt about it.

  The robot brushed past him in the darkness and bent above the bank of controls. There was a snick and lights came on in the panels.

  “This, you see,” it said, “is the groundglass—a representation of the battlefield. It is dead now, of course, because there is nothing going on, but when there is some action certain symbols are imposed upon the field so that one can see at all times just how things are going. And this is the fire control panel and this is the troop command panel and this…”

  Pertwee went on and on with his explanations.

  Finally it turned in triumph from the instruments.

  “What do you think of it?” the robot asked, very clearly expecting praise.

  “Why, it’s wonderful,” said Paxton, willing to say anything to make an end of his visit.

  “If you are going to be around tomorrow,” Pertwee said, “you may want to watch us.”

  And it was then that Paxton got his inspiration.

  “As a matter of fact,” Paxton said, “I’d like to try it out. In my youth, I did a bit of reading on military matters, and if you’ll excuse my saying so, I have often fancied myself somewhat of an expert.” Pertwee brightened almost visibly. “You mean, sir, that you’d like to go one round with me?”

  “If you’d be so kind.”

  “You are sure you understand how to operate the board?”

  “I watched you very closely.”

  “Give me fifteen minutes to reach my tower,” said Pertwee. “When I arrive, I’ll press the ready button. After that, either of us can start hostilities any time we wish.”

  “Fifteen minutes?”

  “It may not take me that long, sir. I’ll be quick about it.”

  “And I’m not imposing on you?”

  “Sir,” Pertwee said feelingly, “it will be a pleasure. I’ve fought against young Master Graham until the novelty has worn off. We know one another’s tactics so well that there’s little chance for surprise. As you can understand, sir, that makes for a rather humdrum war.”

  “Yes,” said Paxton, “I suppose it would.”

  He watched Pertwee go down the ladder and listened to its footsteps hurrying away.

  Then he went down the ladder and stood for a moment at the foot of it.

  The clouds had thinned considerably and the moonlight was brighter now and it would be easier travelling, although it still would be dark in the denser forest.

  He swung away from the tower and headed for the path, and, as he did so, he caught a flicker of motion in a patch of brush just off the trail.

  Paxton slid into the denser shadow of a clump of trees and watched the patch of brush.

  He crouched and waited. There was another cautious movement in the brush and he saw it was the bishop. Now suddenly it seemed that there was a chance to get the bishop off his neck for good—if his inspiration would only pay off.

  The bishop had been let down by the flier in the dark of night, with the rain still pouring down and no moonlight at all. So it was unlikely that he knew about the battle bowl, although more than likely he must see it now, glittering faintly in the moonlight. But even if he saw it, there was a chance he’d not know what it was.

  Paxton thought back along the conversation there had been after the bishop h
ad arrived and no one, so far as he remembered, had mentioned a word of young Graham or the war project.

  There was, Paxton thought, nothing lost by trying. Even if it didn’t work, all he’d lose would be a little time.

  He darted from the clump of trees to reach the base of the battle bowl. He crouched against the ground and watched, and the bishop came sliding out of his clump of brush and worked his way along, closing in upon him.

  And that was fine, thought Paxton. It was working just the way he’d planned.

  He moved a little to make absolutely sure his trailer would know exactly where he was and then he dived down the stairs that led to the door.

  He reached it and thumbed the button and the door slid slowly upward without a single sound. Paxton crowded back into the embrasure and waited.

  It took a little longer than he had thought it would and he was getting slightly nervous when he heard the step upon the stairs.

  The bishop came down slowly, apparently very watchful, and then he reached the door and stood there for a moment, staring out into the churned-up battlefield. And in his hand he held an ugly gun.

  Paxton held his breath and pressed his shoulders tight against the wall of earth, but the bishop didn’t even look around. His eyes were busy taking in the ground that lay beyond the door.

  Then finally he moved, quickly, like a leopard. His silken garments made a swishing noise as he stepped through the door and out into the battle area.

  Paxton held himself motionless, watching the bishop advance cautiously out into the field, and when he was far enough, he reached out a finger and pressed the second button and the door came down, smoothly, silently.

  Paxton leaned against the door and let out in a gasp the breath he had been holding.

  It was over now, he thought.

  Hunter hadn’t been as clever as he had thought he was.

  Paxton turned from the door and went slowly up the stairs.

  Now he needn’t run away. He could stay right here and Nelson would fly him, or arrange to have him flown, to some place of safety.

  For Hunter wouldn’t know that this particular assassin had hunted down his quarry. The bishop had had no chance to communicate and probably wouldn’t have dared to even if he could.