Grotto of the Dancing Deer

by Clifford D. Simak

  Doc let loose of my shirt. “By God, I don’t believe you are. It’s like the way they tell me? He sits and listens to their troubles, and they feel better once they’re through?”

  “That’s what the Widow Frye said. She said she told him her troubles and they seemed to go away.”

  “That’s the honest truth, Sam?”

  “The honest truth,” I swore.

  Doc Abel got excited. He grabbed me by the shirt again.

  “Don’t you see what we have?” he almost shouted at me.

  “We?” I asked.

  But he paid no attention. “The greatest psychiatrist,” said Doc, “this world has ever known. The greatest aid to psychiatry anyone ever has dredged up. You get what I am aiming at?”

  “I guess I do,” I said, not having the least idea.

  “The most urgent need of the human race,” said Doc, “is someone or something they can shift their troubles to—someone who by seeming magic can banish their anxieties. Confession is the core of it, of course—a symbolic shifting of one’s burden to someone else’s shoulders. The principle is operative in the church confessional, in the profession of psychiatry, in those deep, abiding friendships offering a shoulder that one can cry upon.”

  “Doc, you’re right,” I said, beginning to catch on.

  “The trouble always is that the agent of confession must be human, too. He has certain human limitations of which the confessor is aware. He can give no certain promise that he can assume the trouble and anxiety. But here we have something different. Here we have an alien—a being from the stars—unhampered by human limitations. By very definition, he can take anxieties and mother them in the depths of his own non-humanity …”

  “Doc,” I yelled, “if you could only get Wilbur up at the sanitorium!”

  Doc rubbed mental hands together. “The very thing that I had been thinking.”

  I could have kicked myself for my enthusiasm. I did the best I could to gain back the ground I’d lost.

  “I don’t know, Doc. Wilbur might be hard to handle.”

  “Well, let’s go back in and have a talk with him.”

  “I don’t know,” I stalled.

  “We got to get him fast. By tomorrow, the word will be out and the place will be overrun with newspapermen and TV trucks and God knows what. The scientific boys will be swarming in, and the government, and we’ll lose control.”

  “I’d better talk to him alone,” I said. “He might freeze up solid if you were around. He knows me and he might listen to me.”

  Doc hemmed and hawed, but finally he agreed.

  “I’ll wait in the car,” he said. “You call me if you need me.”

  He went crunching on down the driveway to where he had the car parked, and I went inside the house.

  “Lester,” I said to the robot, “I’ve got to talk to Wilbur. It’s important.”

  “No more sad stories,” Lester warned. “He’s had enough today.”

  “No. I got a proposition.”

  “Proposition?”

  “A deal. A business arrangement.”

  “All right,” said Lester. “I will get him up.”

  It took quite a bit of getting up, but finally we had him fought awake and sitting on the bed.

  “Wilbur, listen carefully,” I told him. “I have something right down your alley. A place where all the people have big and terrible troubles and an awful sadness. Not just some of them, but every one of them. They are so sad and troubled they can’t live with other people …”

  Wilbur struggled off the bed, stood swaying on his feet.

  “Lead me to ‘em, pal,” he said.

  I pushed him down on the bed again. “It isn’t as easy as all that. It’s a hard place to get into.”

  “I thought you said—”

  “Look, I have a friend who can arrange it for you. But it might take some money—”

  “Pal,” said Wilbur, “we got a roll of cash. How much would you need?”

  “It’s hard to say.”

  “Lester, hand it over to him so he can make this deal.”

  “Boss,” protested Lester, “I don’t know if we should.”

  “We can trust Sam,” said Wilbur. “He is not the grasping sort. He won’t spend a cent more than is necessary.”

  “Not a cent,” I promised.

  Lester opened the door in his chest and handed me the roll of hundred-dollar bills and I stuffed it in my pocket.

  “Now you will wait right here,” I told them, “and I’ll see this friend of mine. I’ll be back soon.”

  And I was doing some fast arithmetic, wondering how much I could dare gouge out of Doc. It wouldn’t hurt to start a little high so I could come down when Doc would roar and howl and scream and say what good friends we were and how he always had given me a bottle at Christmas and at Easter.

  I turned to go out into the living room and stopped dead in my tracks.

  For standing in the doorway was another Wilbur, although when I looked at him more closely I saw the differences. And before he said a single word or did a single thing, I had a sinking feeling that something had gone wrong.

  “Good evening, sir,” I said. “It’s nice of you to drop in.”

  He never turned a hair. “I see you have guests. It shall desolate me to tear them away from you.”

  Behind me, Lester was making noises as if his gears were stripping, and out of the corner of my eye I saw that Wilbur sat stiff and stricken and whiter than a fish.

  “But you can’t do that,” I said. “They only just showed up.”

  “You do not comprehend,” said the alien in the doorway. “They are breakers of the law. I have come to get them.”

  “Pal,” said Wilbur, speaking to me, “I am truly sorry. I knew all along it would not work out.”

  “By this time,” the other alien said to Wilbur, “you should be convinced of it and give up trying.”

  And it was plain as paint, once you came to think of it, and I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before. For if Earth was closed to the adventurers who’d gathered the indoctrination data …

  “Mister,” I said to the alien in the doorway, “there are factors here of which I know you ain’t aware. Couldn’t you and me talk the whole thing over alone?”

  “I should be happy,” said the alien, so polite it hurt, “but please understand that I must carry out a duty.”

  “Why, certainly,” I said.

  The alien stepped out of the doorway and made a sign behind him and two robots that had been standing in the living room just out of my line of vision came in.

  “Now all is secure,” said the alien, “and we can depart to talk. I will listen most attentively.”

  So I went out into the kitchen and he followed me. I sat down at the table and he sat across from me.

  “I must apologize,” he told me gravely. “This miscreant imposes upon you and your planet.”

  “Mister,” I told him back, “you have got it all wrong. I like this renegade of yours.”

  “Like him?” he asked, horrified. “That is impossible. He is a drunken lout and furthermore than that—”

  “And furthermore than that,” I said, grabbing the words right from his mouth, “he is doing us an awful lot of good.”

  The alien looked flabbergasted. “You do not know that which you say! He drags from you your anxieties and feasts upon them most disgustingly, and he puts them down on record so he can pull them forth again and yet again to your eternal shame, and furthermore than that—”

  “It’s not that way at all,” I shouted. “It does us a lot of good to pull out our anxieties and show them—.”

  “Disgusting! More than that, indecent!” He stopped. “What was that?”

  “Telling our anxieties does us good,” I said as solemnly
as I could. “It’s a matter of confession.”

  The alien banged an open palm against his forehead and the feathers on his catfish mouth stood straight out and quivered.

  “It could be true,” he said in horror. “Given a culture so primitive and so besodden and so shameless …”

  “Ain’t we, though?” I agreed.

  “In our world,” said the alien, “there are no anxieties—well, not many. We are most perfectly adjusted.”

  “Except for folks like Wilbur?”

  “Wilbur?”

  “Your pal in there,” I said. “I couldn’t say his name, so I call him Wilbur. By the way …”

  He rubbed his hand across his face, and no matter what he said, it was plain to see that at that moment he was loaded with anxiety. “Call me Jake. Call me anything. Just so we get this mess resolved.”

  “Nothing easier,” I said. “Let’s just keep Wilbur here. You don’t really want him, do you?”

  “Want him?” wailed Jake. “He and all the others like him are nothing but a headache. But they are our problem and our responsibility. We can’t saddle you.”

  “You mean there are more like Wilbur?”

  Jake nodded sadly.

  “We’ll take them all,” I said. “We would love to have them. Every one of them.”

  “You’re crazy!”

  “Sure we are,” I said. “That is why we need them.”

  “You are certain, without any shadow of your doubt?”

  “Absolutely certain.”

  “Pal,” said Jake, “you have made a deal.”

  I stuck out my hand to shake on it, but I don’t think he even saw my hand. He rose out of the chair and you could see a vast relief lighting up his face.

  Then he turned and stalked out of the kitchen.

  “Hey, wait a minute!” I yelled. For there were details that I felt we should work out. But he didn’t seem to hear me.

  I jumped out of the chair and raced for the living room, but by the time I got there, there was no sign of Jake. I ran into the bedroom and the two robots were gone, too. Wilbur and Lester were in there all alone.

  “I told you,” Lester said to Wilbur, “that Mr. Sam would fix it.”

  “I don’t believe it, pal,” said Wilbur. “Have they really gone? Have they gone for good? Is there any chance they will be coming back?”

  I raised my arm and wiped off my forehead with my sleeve. “They won’t bother you again. You are finally shut of them.”

  “That is excellent,” said Wilbur. “And now about this deal.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Give me just a minute. I’ll go out and see the man.”

  I stepped out on the stoop and stood there for a while to get over shaking. Jake and his two robots had come very close to spoiling everything. I needed a drink worse than I had ever needed one, but I didn’t dare take the time. I had to get Doc on the dotted line before something else turned up.

  I went out to the car.

  “It took you long enough,” Doc said irritably.

  “It took a lot of talking for Wilbur to agree,” I said.

  “But he did agree?”

  “Yeah, he agreed.”

  “Well, then,” said Doc, “what are we waiting for?”

  “Ten thousand bucks,” I said.

  “Ten thousand …”

  “That’s the price for Wilbur. I’m selling you my alien.”

  “Your alien! He is not your alien!”

  “Maybe not,” I said, “but he’s the next best thing. All I have to do is say the word and he won’t go with you.”

  “Two thousand,” declared Doc. “That’s every cent I’ll pay.”

  We got down to haggling and we would up at seven thousand dollars. If I’d been willing to spend all night at it, I would have got eighty-five hundred. But I was all fagged out and I needed a drink much worse than I needed fifteen hundred extra dollars. So we settled on the seven.

  We went back into the house and Doc wrote out a check.

  “You know you’re fired, of course,” he said, handing it to me.

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” I told him, and I hadn’t. The check for seven thousand in my hand and that roll of hundred-dollar bills bulging out my pocket added up to a lot of drinking money.

  I went to the bedroom door and called out Wilbur and Lester and I said to them: “Old Doc here has made up his mind to take you.”

  And Wilbur said, “I am so happy and so thankful. Was it hard, perhaps, to get him to agree to take us?”

  “Not too hard,” I said. “He was reasonable.”

  “Hey,” yelled Doc, with murder in his eyes, “what is going on here?”

  “Not a thing,” I said.

  “Well, it sounds to me …”

  “There’s your boy,” I said. “Take him if you want him. If it should happen you don’t want him, I’ll be glad to keep him. There’ll be someone else along.”

  And I held out the check to give it back to him. It was a risky thing to do, but I was in a spot where I had to bluff.

  Doc waved the check away, but he was still suspicious that he was being taken, although he wasn’t sure exactly how. But he couldn’t take the chance of losing out on Wilbur. I could see that he had it all figured out—how he’d become world famous with the only alien psychiatrist in captivity.

  Except there was one thing that he didn’t know. He had no idea that in just a little while there would be other Wilburs. And I stood there, laughing at him without showing it, while he herded Wilbur and Lester out the door.

  Before he left, he turned back to me.

  “There is something going on,” he said, “and when I find out about it, I am going to come back and take you apart for it.”

  I never said a word, but just stood there listening to the three of them crunching down the driveway. When I heard the car leave, I went out into the kitchen and took down the bottle.

  I had a half a dozen fast ones. Then I sat down in a chair at the kitchen table and practiced some restraint. I had a half a dozen slow ones.

  I got to wondering about the other Wilburs that Jake had agreed to send to Earth and I wished I’d been able to pin him down a bit. But I had had no chance, for he had jumped up and disappeared just when I was ready to get down to business.

  All I could do was hope he’d deliver them to me—either in the front yard or out in the driveway—but he’d never said he would. A fat lot of good it would do me if he just dropped them anywhere.

  And I wondered when he would deliver them and how many there might be. It might take a bit of time, for more than likely he would indoctrinate them before they were dropped on Earth, and as to number, I had not the least idea. From the way he talked, there might even be a couple of dozen of them. With that many, a man could make a roll of cash if he handled the situation right.

  Although, it seemed to me, I had a right smart amount of money now.

  I dug the roll of hundred-dollar bills out of my pocket and made a stab at counting them, but for the life of me I couldn’t keep the figures straight.

  Here I was drunk and it wasn’t even Saturday, but Sunday. I didn’t have a job and now I could get drunk any time I wanted.

  So I sat there working on the jug and finally passed out.

  There was an awful racket and I came awake and wondered where I was. In a little while I got it figured out that I’d been sleeping at the kitchen table and I had a terrible crick in my neck and a hangover that was even worse.

  I stumbled to my feet and looked at the clock. It was ten minutes after nine.

  The racket kept right on.

  I made it out to the living room and opened the front door. The Widow Frye almost fell into the room, she had been hammering on the door so hard.

  “Samuel,” she gasped, “have you hea
rd about it?”

  “I ain’t heard a thing,” I told her, “except you pounding on the door.”

  “It’s on the radio.”

  “You know darn well I ain’t got no radio nor no telephone nor no TV set. I ain’t got no time for modern trash like that.”

  “It’s about the aliens,” she said. “Like the one you have. The nice, kind, understanding alien people. They are everywhere. Everywhere on Earth. There are a lot of them all over. Thousands of them. Maybe millions …”

  I pushed past her out the door.

  They were sitting on front steps all up and down the street, and they were walking up and down the road, and there were a bunch of them playing, chasing one another, in a vacant lot.

  “It’s like that everywhere!” cried the Widow Frye. “The radio just said so. There are enough of them so that everyone on Earth can have one of their very own. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  That dirty, doublecrossing Jake, I told myself. Talking like there weren’t many of them, pretending that his culture was so civilized and so well adjusted that there were almost no psychopaths.

  Although, to be fair about it, he hadn’t said how many there might be of them—not in numbers, that is. And even all he had dumped on Earth might be a few in relation to the total population of his particular culture.

  And then, suddenly, I thought of something else.

  I hauled out my watch and looked at it. It was only a quarter after nine.

  “Widow Frye,” I said, “excuse me. I got an errand to run.”

  I legged it down the street as fast as I could.

  One of the Wilburs detached himself from a group of them and loped along with me.

  “Mister,” he said, “have you got some troubles to tell me?”

  “Naw,” I said. “I never have no troubles.”

  “Not even any worries?”

  “No worries, either.”

  Then it occurred to me that there was a worry—not for me alone, but for the entire world.

  For with all the Wilburs that Jake had dumped on Earth, there would in a little while be no human psychopaths. There wouldn’t be a human with a worry or a trouble. God, would it be dull!

  But I didn’t worry none.

  I just loped along as fast as I could go.