City (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

by Clifford D. Simak

  Fire, thought Jenkins. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a fire. Men used to like a fire. They used to like to sit in front of it and look into it and build pictures in the flames. And dream—

  But the dreams of men, said Jenkins, talking to himself – the dreams of men are gone. They’ve gone to Jupiter and they’re buried at Geneva and they sprout again, very feebly, in the Websters of to-day.

  The past, he said. The past is too much with me. And the past has made me useless. I have too much to remember – so much to remember that it becomes more important than the things there are to do. I’m living in the past and that is no way to live.

  For Joshua says there is no past and Joshua should know. Of all the Dogs, he’s the one to know. For he tried hard enough to find a past to travel in, to travel back in time and check up on the things I told him. He thinks my mind is failing and that I spin old robot tales, half-truth, half-fantasy, touched up for the telling.

  He wouldn’t admit it for the world, but that’s what the rascal thinks. He doesn’t think I know it, but I do.

  He can’t fool me, said Jenkins, chuckling to himself. None of them can fool me. I know them from the ground up – I know what makes them tick. I helped Bruce Webster with the first of them. I heard the first word that any of them said. And if they’ve forgotten, I haven’t – not a look or word or gesture.

  Maybe it’s only natural that they should forget. They have done great things. I have let them do them with little interference, and that was for the best. That was the way Jon Webster told me it should be, on that night of long ago. That was why Jon Webster did whatever he had to do to close off the city of Geneva. For it was Jon Webster. It had to be. It could be no one else.

  He thought he was sealing off the human race to leave the earth clear for the dogs. But he forgot one thing. Oh, yes, said Jenkins, he forgot one thing. He forgot his own son and the little band of bow and arrow faddists who had gone out that morning to play at being cavemen – and cavewomen, too.

  And what they played, thought Jenkins, became a bitter fact. A fact for almost a thousand years. A fact until we found them and brought them home again. Back to the Webster House, back to where the whole thing started.

  Jenkins folded his hands in his lap and bent his head and rocked slowly to and fro. The rocker creaked and the wind raced in the eaves and a window rattled. The fireplace talked with its sooty throat, talked of other days and other folks, of other winds that blew from out the west.

  The past, thought Jenkins. It is a footless thing. A foolish thing when there is so much to do. So many problems that the Dogs have yet to meet.

  Over-population, for example. That’s the thing we’ve thought about and talked about too long. Too many rabbits because no wolf or fox may kill them. Too many deer because the mountain lions and the wolves must eat no venison. Too many skunks, too many mice, too many wildcats. Too many squirrels, too many porcupines, too many bear.

  Forbid the one great check of killing and you have too many lives. Control disease and succour injury with quick-moving robot medical technicians and another check is gone.

  Man took care of that, said Jenkins. Yes, men took care of that. Men killed anything that stood within their path – other men as well as animals.

  Man never thought of one great animal society, never dreamed of skunk and coon and bear going down the road of life together, planning with one another, helping one another – setting aside all natural differences.

  But the Dogs had. And the Dogs had done it.

  Like a Br’er Rabbit story, thought Jenkins. Like the childhood fantasy of a long gone age. Like the story in the Good Book about the Lion and the Lamb lying down together. Like a Walt Disney cartoon except that the cartoon never had rung true, for it was based on the philosophy of mankind.

  The door creaked open and feet were on the floor. Jenkins shifted in his chair.

  ‘Hello, Joshua,’ he said. ‘Hello, Ichabod. Won’t you please come in? I was just sitting here and thinking.’

  ‘We were passing by,’ said Joshua, ‘and we saw a light.’

  ‘I was thinking about the lights,’ said Jenkins, nodding soberly. ‘I was thinking about the night five thousand years ago. Jon Webster had come out from Geneva, the first man to come here for many hundred years. And he was upstairs in bed and all the Dogs were sleeping and I stood there by the window looking out across the river. And there were no lights. No lights at all. Just one great sweep of darkness. And I stood there, remembering the day when there had been lights and wondering if there ever would be lights again.’

  ‘There are lights now,’ said Joshua, speaking very softly. ‘There are lights all over the world tonight. Even in the caves and dens.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Jenkins. ‘It’s even better than it was before.’

  Ichabod clumped across the floor to the shining robot body standing in the corner, reached out one hand and stroked the metal hide, almost tenderly.

  ‘It was very nice of the Dogs,’ said Jenkins, ‘to give me the body. But they shouldn’t have. With a little patching here and there, the old one’s good enough.’

  ‘It was because we love you,’ Joshua told him. ‘It was the smallest thing the Dogs could do. We have tried to do other things for you, but you’d never let us do them. We wish that you would let us build you a new house, brand new, with all the latest things.’

  Jenkins shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t be any use, because I couldn’t live there. You see, this place is home. It has always been my home. Keep it patched up like my body and I’ll be happy in it.’

  ‘But you’re all alone.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ said Jenkins. ‘The house is simply crowded.’

  ‘Crowded?’ asked Joshua.

  ‘People that I used to know,’ said Jenkins.

  ‘Gosh,’ said Ichabod. ‘what a body! I wish I could try it on.’

  ‘Ichabod!’ yelled Joshua. ‘You come back here. Keep your hands off that body—’

  ‘Let the youngster go,’ said Jenkins. ‘If he comes over here some time when I’m not busy—’

  ‘No,’ said Joshua.

  A branch scraped against the eave and tapped with tiny fingers along the windowpane. A shingle rattled and the wind marched across the roof with tripping, dancing feet.

  ‘I’m glad you stopped by,’ said Jenkins. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  He rocked back and forth and one of the rockers creaked.

  ‘I won’t last forever,’ Jenkins said. ‘Seven thousand years is longer than I had a right to expect to hang together.’

  ‘With the new body,’ said Joshua, ‘you’ll be good for three times seven thousand more.’

  Jenkins shook his head. ‘It’s not the body I’m thinking of. It’s the brain. It’s mechanical, you see. It was made well, made to last a long time, but not to last forever. Sometime something will go wrong and the brain will quit.’

  The rocker creaked in the silent room.

  ‘That will be death,’ said Jenkins. ‘That will be the end of me.

  ‘And that’s all right. That’s the way it should be. For I’m no longer any use. Once there was a time when I was needed.’

  ‘We will always need you,’ Joshua said softly. ‘We couldn’t get along without you.’

  But Jenkins went on, as if he had not heard him.

  ‘I want to tell you about the Websters. I want to talk about them. I want you to understand.’

  ‘I will try to understand,’ said Joshua.

  You Dogs call them websters and that’s all right,’ said Jenkins. ‘It doesn’t matter what you call them, just so you know what they are.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Joshua, ‘you call them men and sometimes you call them websters. I don’t understand.’

  ‘They were men,’ said Jenkins, ‘and they ruled the earth. There was one family of them that went by the name of Webster. And they were the ones who did this great thing for you.’

  ‘What great thing?’
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  Jenkins hitched the chair around and held it steady.

  ‘I am forgetful,’ he mumbled. ‘I forget so easily. And I get mixed up.’

  ‘You were talking about a great thing the websters did for us.’

  ‘Eh,’ said Jenkins. ‘Oh, so I was. So I was. You must watch them. You must care for them and watch them. Especially you must watch them.’

  He rocked slowly to and fro and thoughts ran in his brain, thoughts spaced off by the squeaking of the rocker.

  You almost did it then, he told himself. You almost spoiled the dream.

  But I remembered in time. Yes, Jon Webster, I caught myself in time. I kept faith, Jon Webster.

  I did not tell Joshua that the Dogs once were pets of men, that men raised them to the place they hold to-day. For they must never know. They must hold up their heads. They must carry on their work. The old fireside tales are gone and they must stay gone forever.

  Although I’d like to tell them, Lord knows, I’d like to tell them. Warn them against the thing they must guard against. Tell them how we rooted out the old ideas from the cavemen we brought back from Europe. How we untaught them the many things they knew. How we left their minds blank of weapons, how we taught them love and peace.

  And how we must watch against the day when they’ll pick up those trends again – the old human way of thought.

  ‘But you said . . .’ persisted Joshua.

  Jenkins waved his hand. ‘It was nothing, Joshua. Just an old robot’s mumbling. At times my brain gets fuzzy and I say things that I don’t mean. I think so much about the past – and you say there isn’t any past.’

  Ichabod squatted on his haunches on the floor and looked up at Jenkins.

  ‘There sure ain’t none,’ he said. ‘We checked her, forty ways from Sunday, and all the factors check. They all add up. There isn’t any past.’

  ‘There isn’t any room,’ said Joshua. ‘You travel back along the line of time and you don’t find the past, but another world, another bracket of consciousness. The earth would be the same, you see, or almost the same. Same trees, same rivers, same hills, but it wouldn’t be the world we know. Because it has lived a different life, it has developed differently. The second back of us is not the second back of us at all, but another second, a totally separate sector of time. We live in the same second all the time. We move along within the bracket of that second, that tiny bit of time that has been allotted to our particular world.’

  ‘The way we keep time was to blame,’ said Ichabod. ‘It was the thing that kept us from thinking of it in the way it really was. For we thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really weren’t, when we never have. We’ve just been moving along with time. We said, there’s another second gone, there’s another minute and another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had just moved along and we had moved with it.’

  Jenkins nodded. ‘I see. Like driftwood on the river. Chips moving with the river. And the scene changes along the river bank, but the water is the same.’

  ‘That’s roughly it,’ said Joshua. ‘Except that time is a rigid stream and the different worlds are more firmly fixed in place than the driftwood on the river.’

  ‘And the cobblies live in those other worlds?’

  Joshua nodded. ‘I’m sure they must.’

  ‘And now,’ said Jenkins, ‘I suppose you are figuring out a way to travel to those other worlds.’

  Joshua scratched softly at a flea.

  ‘Sure he is,’ said Ichabod. ‘We need the space.’

  ‘But the cobblies—’

  ‘The cobblies might not be on all the worlds,’ said Joshua. ‘There might be some empty worlds. If we can find them, we need those empty worlds. If we don’t find space, we are up against it. Population pressure will bring on a wave of killing. And a wave of killing will set us back to where we started out.’

  ‘There’s already killing,’ Jenkins told him quietly.

  Joshua wrinkled his brow and laid back his ears. ‘Funny killing. Dead, but not eaten. No blood. As if they just fell over. It has our medical technicians half crazy. Nothing wrong. No reason that they should have died.’

  ‘But they did,’ said Ichabod.

  Joshua hunched himself closer, lowered his voice. ‘I’m afraid, Jenkins. I’m afraid that—’

  ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  ‘But there is. Angus told me. Angus is afraid that one of the cobblies . . . that one of the cobblies got through.’

  A gust of wind sucked at the fireplace throat and gambolled in the eaves. Another gust hooted in some near, dark corner. And fear came out and marched across the roof, marched with thumping, deadened footsteps up and down the shingles.

  Jenkins shivered and held himself tight and rigid against another shiver. His voice grated when he spoke.

  ‘No one has seen a cobbly.’

  ‘You might not see a cobbly.’

  ‘No,’ said Jenkins. ‘No. You might not see one.’

  And that is what Man had said before. You did not see a ghost and you did not see a haunt – but you sensed that one was there. For the water tap kept dripping when you had shut it tight and there were fingers scratching at the pane and the dogs would howl at something in the night and there’d be no tracks in the snow.

  And there were fingers scratching on the pane.

  Joshua came to his feet and stiffened, a statue of a dog, one paw lifted, lips curled back in the beginning of a snarl. Ichabod crouched, toes dug into the floor – listening, waiting.

  The scratching came again.

  ‘Open the door,’ Jenkins said to Ichabod. ‘There is something out there wanting to get in.’

  Ichabod moved through the hushed silence of the room. The door creaked beneath his hand. As he opened it, the squirrel came bounding in, a grey streak that leaped for Jenkins and landed in his lap.

  ‘Why, Fatso,’ Jenkins said.

  Joshua sat down again and his lips uncurled, slid down to hide his fangs, Ichabod wore a silly metal grin.

  ‘I saw him do it,’ screamed Fatso. ‘I saw him kill the robin. He did it with a throwing stick. And the feathers flew. And there was blood upon the leaf.’

  ‘Quiet,’ said Jenkins gently. ‘Take your time and tell me. You are too excited. You saw someone kill a robin.’

  Fatso sucked in a breath and his teeth were chattering.

  ‘It was Peter,’ he said.

  ‘Peter?’

  ‘Peter, the webster.’

  ‘You said he threw a stick?’

  ‘He threw it with another stick. He had the two ends tied together with a cord and he pulled on the cord and the stick bent—’

  ‘I know,’ said Jenkins. ‘I know.’

  ‘You know! You know all about it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jenkins, ‘I know all about it. It was a bow and arrow.’

  And there was something in the way he said it that held the other three to silence, making the room seem big and empty and the tapping of the branch against the pane a sound from far away, a hollow, ticking voice that kept on complaining without the hope of aid.

  ‘A bow and arrow?’ Joshua finally asked. ‘What is a bow and arrow?’

  And what was it, thought Jenkins.

  What is a bow and arrow?

  It is the beginning of the end. It is the winding path that grows to the roaring road of war.

  It is a plaything and a weapon and a triumph in human engineering.

  It is the first faint stirring of an atom bomb.

  It is a symbol of a way of life.

  And it’s a line in a nursery rhyme.

  Who killed Cock Robin

  I, said the sparrow.

  With my bow and arrow,

  I killed Cock Robin.

  And it was a thing forgotten. And a thing relearned.

  It is the thing that I’ve been afraid of.

  He str
aightened in his chair, came slowly to his feet.

  ‘Ichabod,’ he said, ‘I will need your help.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Ichabod. ‘Anything you like.’

  ‘The body,’ said Jenkins. ‘I want to wear my new body. You’ll have to unseat my brain case—’

  Ichabod nodded. ‘I know how to do it, Jenkins.’

  Joshua’s voice had a sudden edge of fear. ‘What is it, Jenkins? What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to the Mutants,’ Jenkins said, speaking very slowly. ‘After all these years, I’m going to ask their help.’

  The shadow slithered down the hill, skirting the places where the moonlight flooded through forest openings. He glimmered in the moonlight – and he must not be seen. He must not spoil the hunting of the others that came after.

  There would be others. Not in a flood, of course, but carefully controlled. A few at a time and well spread out so that the life of this wondrous world would not take alarm.

  Once it did take alarm, the end would be in sight.

  The shadow crouched in the darkness, low against the ground, and tested the night with twitching, high-strung nerves. He separated out the impulses that he knew, cataloguing them in his knife-sharp brain, filing them neatly away as a check against his knowledge.

  And some he knew and some were mystery and others he would guess at. But there was one that held a hint of horror.

  He pressed himself close against the ground and held his ugly head out straight and flat and closed his perceptions against the throbbing of the night, concentrating on the thing that was coming up the hill.

  There were two of them and the two were different. A snarl rose in his mind and bubbled in his throat and his tenuous body tensed into something that was half slavering expectancy and half cringing outland terror.

  He rose from the ground, still crouched, and flowed down the hill, angling to cut the path of the two who were coming up.

  Jenkins was young again, young and strong and swift – swift of brain and body. Swift to stride along the wind-swept, moon-drenched hills. Swift to hear the talking of the leaves and the sleepy chirp of birds – and more than that.

  Yes, much more than that, he admitted to himself.