City (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

by Clifford D. Simak

  ‘So you fed them—’

  ‘And heated the hill,’ said Joe, ‘so they wouldn’t have to hibernate. So they wouldn’t have to start out fresh with the coming of each spring.’

  ‘The carts?’

  ‘I made a couple, left them there. It took ten years, but they finally figured out what they were for.’

  Grant nodded at the smokestacks.

  ‘They did that themselves,’ Joe told him.

  ‘Anything else?’

  Joe lifted his shoulders wearily. ‘How should I know?’

  ‘But, man, you watched them. Even if you didn’t keep notes, you watched.’

  Joe shook his head. ‘I haven’t laid eyes on them for almost fifteen years. I only came to-day because I heard you here. These ants, you see, don’t amuse me any more.’

  Grant’s mouth opened, then shut tight again. Finally, he said: ‘So that’s the answer. That’s why you did it. Amusement.’

  There was no shame on Joe’s face, no defence, just a pained expression that said he wished they’d forget all about the ants. His mouth said: ‘Sure. Why else?’

  ‘That gun of mine. I suppose that amused you, too.’

  ‘Not the gun,’ said Joe.

  Not the gun, Grant’s brain said. Of course, not the gun, you dumb-bell, but you yourself. You’re the one that amused him. And you’re amusing him right now.

  Fixing up old Dave Baxter’s farm machinery, then walking off without a word, doubtless had been a screaming joke. And probably he’d hugged himself and rocked for days with silent mirth after that time up at the Webster house when he’d pointed out the thing that was wrong with old Thomas Webster’s space drive.

  Like a smart alec playing tricks on an awkward puppy.

  Joe’s voice broke his thoughts.

  ‘You’re an enumerator, aren’t you? Why don’t you ask me the questions? Now that you’ve found me you can’t go off and not get it down on paper. My age especially. I’m one hundred and sixty-three and I’m scarcely adolescent. Another thousand years at least.’

  He hugged his knobby knees against his chest and rocked slowly back and forth. ‘Another thousand years and if I take good care of myself—’

  ‘But that isn’t all of it,’ Grant told him, trying to keep his voice calm. ‘There is something more. Something that you must do for us.’

  ‘For us?’

  ‘For society,’ said Grant. ‘For the human race.’

  ‘Why?’

  Grant stared. ‘You mean that you don’t care.’

  Joe shook his head and in the gesture there was no bravado, no defiance of convention. It was just blunt statement of the fact.

  ‘Money?’ suggested Grant.

  Joe waved his hands at the hills about them, at the spreading river valley. ‘I have this,’ he said. ‘I have no need of money.’

  ‘Fame, perhaps?’

  Joe did not spit, but his face looked like he had. ‘The gratitude of the human race?’

  ‘It doesn’t last,’ said Joe and the old mockery was in his words, the vast amusement just behind his lips.

  ‘Look, Joe,’ said Grant and, hard as he tried to keep it out, there was pleading in his voice, ‘this thing I have for you to do is important . . . important to generations yet to come, important to the human race, a milestone in our destiny—’

  ‘And why should I,’ asked Joe, ‘do something for someone who isn’t even born yet? Why should I look beyond the years of my own life? When I die, I die, and all the shouting and the glory, all the banners and the bugles will be nothing to me. I will not know whether I lived a great life or a very poor one.’

  ‘The race,’ said Grant.

  Joe laughed, a shout of laughter. ‘Race preservation, race advancement. That’s what you’re getting at. Why should you be concerned with that? Or I?’

  The laughter lines smoothed out around his mouth and he shook a finger in mock admonishment. ‘Race preservation is a myth . . . a myth that you all have lived by – a sordid thing that has arisen out of your social structure. The race ends every day. When a man dies the race ends for him – so far as he’s concerned there is no longer any race.’

  ‘You just don’t care,’ said Grant.

  ‘That,’ declared Joe, ‘is what I’ve been telling you.’

  He squinted at the pack upon the ground and a flicker of a smile wove about his lips. ‘Perhaps,’ he suggested, ‘if it interested me—’

  Grant opened up the pack, brought out the portfolio. Almost reluctantly he pulled out the thin sheaf of papers, glanced at the title:

  ‘Unfinished Philosophical—’

  He handed it across, sat watching as Joe read swiftly and even as he watched he felt the sickening wrench of terrible failure closing on his brain.

  Back in the Webster house he had thought of a mind that knew no groove of logic, a mind unhampered by four thousand years of mouldy human thought. That, he had told himself, might do the trick.

  And here it was. But it still was not enough. There was something lacking – something he had never thought of, something the men in Geneva had never thought of, either. Something, a part of the human make-up that everyone, up to this moment, had taken for granted.

  Social pressure was the thing that had held the human race together through all millennia – held the human race together as a unit just as hunger pressure had held the ants enslaved to a social pattern.

  The need of one human being for the approval of his fellow humans, the need for a certain cult of fellowship – a psychological, almost physiological need for approval of one’s thought and action. A force that kept men from going off at unsocial tangents, a force that made for social security and human solidarity, for the working together of the human family.

  Men died for that approval, sacrificed for that approval, lived lives they loathed for that approval. For without it a man was on his own, an outcast, an animal that had been driven from the pack.

  It had led to terrible things, of course – to mob psychology, to racial persecution, to mass atrocities in the name of patriotism or religion. But likewise it had been the sizing that held the race together, the thing that from the very start had made human society possible.

  And Joe didn’t have it. Joe didn’t give a damn. He didn’t care what anyone thought of him. He didn’t care whether anyone approved or not.

  Grant felt the sun hot upon his back, heard the whisper of the wind that walked in the trees above him. And in some thicket a bird struck up a song.

  Was this the trend of mutancy? This sloughing off of the basic instinct that made man a member of the race?

  Had this man in front of him, reading the legacy of Juwain, found within himself, through his mutancy, a life so full that he could dispense with the necessity for the approval of his fellows? Had he, finally, after all these years, reached that stage of civilization where a man stood independent, disdaining all the artificiality of society?

  Joe looked up.

  ‘Very interesting,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t he go ahead and finish it?’

  ‘He died,’ said Grant.

  Joe clucked his tongue inside his cheek. ‘He was wrong in one place.’ He flipped the pages, jabbed with a finger. ‘Right here. That’s where the error cropped up. That’s what bogged him down.’

  Grant stammered. ‘But . . . but there shouldn’t be an error. He died, that’s all. He died before he finished it.’

  Joe folded the manuscript neatly, tucked it in his pocket.

  ‘Just as well,’ he said. ‘He probably would have botched it.’

  ‘Then you can finish it? You can—’

  There was, Grant knew, no use of going on. He read the answer in Joe’s eyes.

  ‘You really think,’ said Joe and his words were terse and measured, ‘that I’d turn this over to you squalling humans?’

  Grant shrugged in defeat. ‘I suppose not. I suppose I should have known. A man like you—’

  ‘I,’ said Joe, ‘can use this thing m
yself.’

  He rose slowly, idly swung his foot, ploughing a furrow through the ant hill, toppling the smoking chimneys, burying the toiling carts.

  With a cry, Grant leaped to his feet, blind anger gripping him, blind anger driving the hand that snatched out his gun.

  ‘Hold it!’ said Joe.

  Grant’s arm halted with the gun still pointing towards the ground.

  ‘Take it easy, little man,’ said Joe. ‘I know you’d like to kill me, but I can’t let you do it. For I have plans, you see. And, after all, you wouldn’t be killing me for the reason that you think.’

  ‘What difference would it make why I killed you?’ rasped Grant. ‘You’d be dead, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t be loose with Juwain’s philosophy.’

  ‘But,’ Joe told him, almost gently, ‘that’s not why you would kill me. You’d do it because you’re sore at me for mussing up the ant hill.’

  ‘That might have been the reason first,’ said Grant. ‘But not now—’

  ‘Don’t try it,’ said Joe. ‘Before you ever pressed the trigger you’d be meat yourself.’

  Grant hesitated.

  ‘If you think I’m bluffing,’ Joe taunted him, ‘go ahead and call me.’

  For a long moment the two stood face to face, the gun still pointing at the ground.

  ‘Why can’t you throw in with us?’ asked Grant. ‘We need a man like you. You were the one that showed old Tom Webster how to build a space drive. The work you’ve done with ants—’

  Joe was stepping forward, swiftly, and Grant heaved up the gun. He saw the fist coming at him, a hamlike, powerful fist that fairly whistled with its vicious speed.

  A fist that was faster than his finger on the trigger.

  Something wet and hot was rasping across Grant’s face and he lifted a hand and tried to brush it off.

  But it went on, licking across his face.

  He opened his eyes and Nathaniel did a jig in front of them.

  ‘You’re all right,’ said Nathaniel ‘I was so afraid—’

  ‘Nathaniel!’ croaked Grant. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I ran away,’ Nathaniel told him. ‘I want to go with you.’

  Grant shook his head. ‘You can’t go with me. I have far to go. I have a job to do.’

  He got to his hands and knees and felt along the ground. When his hand touched cold metal, he picked it up and slid it in the holster.

  ‘I let him get away,’ he said, ‘and I can’t let him go. I gave him something that belonged to all mankind and I can’t let him use it.’

  ‘I can track,’ Nathaniel told him. ‘I track squirrels like everything.’

  ‘You have more important things to do than tracking,’ Grant told the dog. ‘You see, I found out something to-day. Got a glimpse of a certain trend – a trend that all mankind may follow. Not to-day nor to-morrow, nor even a thousand years from now. Maybe never, but it’s a thing we can’t overlook. Joe may be just a little farther along the path than the rest of us and we may be following faster than we think. We may all end up like Joe. And if that is what is happening, if that is where it all will end, you dogs have a job ahead of you.’

  Nathaniel stared up at him, worried wrinkles on his face.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he pleaded. ‘You use words I can’t make out.’

  ‘Look, Nathaniel. Men may not always be the way they are to-day. They may change. And, if they do, you have to carry on; you have to take the dream and keep it going. You’ll have to pretend that you are men.’

  ‘Us dogs,’ Nathaniel pledged, ‘will do it.’

  ‘It won’t come for thousands and thousands of years,’ said Grant. ‘You will have time to get ready. But you must know. You must pass the word along. You must not forget.’

  ‘I know,’ said Nathaniel. ‘Us dogs will tell the pups and the pups will tell their pups.’

  ‘That’s the idea,’ said Grant.

  He stooped and scratched Nathaniel’s ear and the dog, tail wagging to a stop, stood and watched him climb the hill.

  NOTES ON THE FOURTH TALE

  Of all the tales this is the one which has occasioned the most anguish on the part of those who would seek some explanation and significance in the legend.

  That it must be entirely myth and nothing else even Tige will admit. But if it is myth, what does it mean? If this tale is myth, are not all the others myth as well?

  Jupiter, where the action takes place, is supposed to be one of the other worlds which may be found by crossing space. The scientific impossibility of the existence of such worlds has been noted elsewhere. And, if we are to accept Bounce’s theory that the other worlds dealt with in the legend are none other than our own multiple worlds, it seems reasonable to suppose that such a world as the one described would have been located by this date. That there are certain of the cobbly worlds which are closed is common knowledge, but the reason for their closure is well known and none of them is closed because of conditions such as those described in this fourth tale.

  Some scholars believe that the fourth tale is an interloper, that it has no business in the legend, that it is something which was picked up and inserted bodily. It is hard to accept this conclusion since the tale does tie in with the legend, furnishing one of the principal story pivots upon which the legend turns.

  The character of Towser in this tale has been cited on many occasions as inconsistent with the essential dignity of our race.

  Yet, while Towser may be distasteful to certain squeamish readers, he serves well as a foil for the human in the story. It is Towser, not the human, who is first ready to accept the situation which develops; Towser, not the human, who is the first to understand. And Towser’s mind, once it is freed from human domination, is shown to be at least the equal of the human’s.

  Towser, flea-bitten as he may be, is a character one need not be ashamed of.

  Short as it is, this fourth tale probably is the most rewarding of the eight. It is one that recommends itself for thoughtful, careful reading.

  IV

  Desertion

  Four men, two by two, had gone into the howling maelstrom that was Jupiter and had not returned. They had walked into the keening gale – or rather, they had loped, bellies low against the ground, wet sides gleaming in the rain.

  For they did not go in the shape of men.

  Now the fifth man stood before the desk of Kent Fowler, head of Dome No. 3, Jovian Survey Commission.

  Under Fowler’s desk, old Towser scratched a flea, then settled down to sleep again.

  Harold Allen, Fowler saw with a sudden pang, was young – too young. He had the easy confidence of youth, the face of one who never had known fear. And that was strange. For men in the domes of Jupiter did know fear – fear and humility. It was hard for Man to reconcile his puny self with the mighty forces of the monstrous planet.

  ‘You understand,’ said Fowler, ‘that you need not do this. You understand that you need not go.’

  It was formula, of course. The other four had been told the same thing, but they had gone. This fifth one, Fowler knew, would go as well. But suddenly he felt a dull hope stir within him that Allen wouldn’t go.

  ‘When do I start?’ asked Allen.

  There had been a time when Fowler might have taken quiet pride in that answer, but not now. He frowned briefly.

  ‘Within the hour,’ he said.

  Allen stood waiting, quietly.

  ‘Four other men have gone out and have not returned,’ said Fowler. ‘You know that, of course. We want you to return. We don’t want you going off on any heroic rescue expedition. The main thing, the only thing, is that you come back, that you prove Man can live in a Jovian form. Go to the first survey stake, no farther, then come back. Don’t take any chances. Don’t investigate anything. Just come back.’

  Allen nodded. ‘I understand all that.’

  ‘Miss Stanley will operate the converter,’ Fowler went on. ‘You need have no fear on that particular score. The
other men were converted without mishap. They left the converter in apparently perfect condition. You will be in thoroughly competent hands. Miss Stanley is the best qualified conversion operator in the Solar System. She has had experience on most of the other planets. That is why she’s here.’

  Allen grinned at the woman and Fowler saw something flicker across Miss Stanley’s face – something that might have been pity, or rage – or just plain fear. But it was gone again and she was smiling back at the youth who stood before the desk. Smiling in that prim, school-teacherish way she had of smiling, almost as if she hated herself for doing it.

  ‘I shall be looking forward,’ said Allen, ‘to my conversion.’

  And the way he said it, he made it all a joke, a vast ironic joke.

  But it was no joke.

  It was serious business, deadly serious. Upon these tests, Fowler knew, depended the fate of men on Jupiter. If the tests succeeded, the resources of the giant planet would be thrown open. Man would take over Jupiter as he already had taken over the other smaller planets. And if they failed—

  If they failed, Man would continue to be chained and hampered by the terrific pressure, the greater force of gravity, the weird chemistry of the planet. He would continue to be shut within the domes, unable to set actual foot upon the planet, unable to see it with direct, unaided vision, forced to rely upon the awkward tractors and the televisor, forced to work with clumsy tools and mechanisms or through the medium of robots that themselves were clumsy.

  For Man, unprotected and in his natural form, would be blotted out by Jupiter’s terrific pressure of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch, pressure that made terrestrial sea bottoms seem a vacuum by comparison.

  Even the strongest metal Earthmen could devise couldn’t exist under pressure such as that, under the pressure and the alkaline rains that forever swept the planet. It grew brittle and flaky, crumbling like clay, or it ran away in little streams and puddles of ammonia salts. Only by stepping up the toughness and strength of that metal, by increasing its electronic tension, could it be made to withstand the weight of thousands of miles of swirling, choking gases that made up the atmosphere. And even when that was done, everything had to be coated with tough quartz to keep away the rain – the liquid ammonia that fell as bitter rain.