The Big Front Yard

by Clifford D. Simak

  And it was a good beginning—that a man and an alien creature from this other world should sit down companion ably together.

  He tried to envision the setup of these linked worlds, of which Earth now was a part, and the possibilities that lay inherent in the fact of linkage rolled thunder through his brain.

  There would be contact between the Earth and these other worlds and what would come of it?

  And come to think of it, the contact had been made already, but so naturally, so undramatically, that it failed to register as a great, important meeting. For Beasly and the chuck out there were contact and if it all should go like that, there was absolutely nothing for one to worry over.

  This was no haphazard business, he reminded himself. It had been planned and executed with the smoothness of long practice. This was not the first world to be opened and it would not be the last.

  The little ratlike things had spanned space—how many light-years of space one could not even guess—in the vehicle which he had unearthed out in the woods. They then had buried it, perhaps as a child might hide a dish by shoving it into a pile of sand. Then they had come to this very house and had set up the apparatus that had made this house a tunnel between one world and another. And once that had been done, the need of crossing space had been canceled out forever. There need be but one crossing and that one crossing would serve to link the planets.

  And once the job was done the little ratlike things had left, but not before they had made certain that this gateway to their planet would stand against no matter what assault. They had sheathed the house inside the studdings with a wonder-material that would resist an ax and that, undoubtedly, would resist much more than a simple ax.

  And they had marched in drill-order single file out to the hill where eight more of the space machines had rested in their cradles. And now there were only seven there, in their cradles on the hill, and the ratlike things were gone and, perhaps, in time to come, they’d land on another planet and another doorway would be opened, a link to yet another world.

  But more, Taine thought, than the linking of mere worlds. It would be, as well, the linking of the peoples of those worlds.

  The little ratlike creatures were the explorers and the pioneers who sought out other Earthlike planets and the creature waiting with Beasly just outside the window must also serve its purpose and perhaps in time to come there would be a purpose which man would also serve.

  He turned away from the window and looked around the room and the room was exactly as it had been ever since he could remember it. With all the change outside, with all that was happening outside, the room remained unchanged.

  This is the reality, thought Taine, this is all the reality there is. Whatever else may happen, this is where I stand—this room with its fireplace blackened by many winter fires, the bookshelves with the old thumbed volumes, the easy chair, the ancient worn carpet—worn by beloved and unforgotten feet through the many years.

  And this also, he knew, was the lull before the storm.

  In just a little while the brass would start arriving—the team of scientists, the governmental functionaries, the military, the observers from the other countries, the officials from the U.N.

  And against all these, he realized he stood weaponless and shorn of his strength. No matter what a man might say or think, he could not stand off the world.

  This was the last day that this would be the Taine house. After almost a hundred years, it would have another destiny.

  And for the first time in all those years there’d be no Taine asleep beneath its roof.

  He stood looking at the fireplace and the shelves of books and he sensed the old, pale ghosts walking in the room and he lifted a hesitant hand as if to wave farewell, not only to the ghosts but to the room as well. But before he got it up, he dropped it to his side.

  What was the use, he thought.

  He went out to the porch and sat down on the steps.

  Beasly heard him and turned around.

  “He’s nice,” he said to Taine, patting the chuck upon the back. “He’s exactly like a great big teddy bear.”

  “Yes, I see,” said Taine.

  “And best of all, I can talk with him.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Taine, remembering that Beasly could talk with Towser, too.

  He wondered what it would be like to live in the simple world of Beasly. At times, he decided, it would be comfortable.

  The ratlike things had come in the spaceship, but why had they come to Willow Bend, why had they picked this house, the only house in all the village where they would have found the equipment that they needed to build their apparatus so easily and so quickly? For there was no doubt that they had cannibalized the computer to get the equipment they needed. In that, at least, Henry had been right. Thinking back on it, Henry, after all, had played quite a part in it.

  Could they have foreseen that on this particular week in this particular house the probability of quickly and easily doing what they had come to do had stood very high?

  Did they, with all their other talents and technology, have clairvoyance as well?

  “There’s someone coming,” Beasly said.

  “I don’t see a thing.”

  “Neither do I,” said Beasly, “but Chuck told me that he saw them.”

  “Told you!”

  “I told you we been talking. There, I can see them, too.”

  They were far off, but they were coming fast—three dots that rode rapidly up out of the desert.

  He sat and watched them come and he thought of going in to get the rifle, but he didn’t stir from his seat upon the steps. The rifle would do no good, he told himself. It would be a senseless thing to get it; more than that, a senseless attitude. The least that man could do, he thought, was to meet these creatures of another world with clean and empty hands.

  They were closer now and it seemed to him that they were sitting in invisible easy chairs that traveled very fast.

  He saw that they were humanoid, to a degree at least, and there were only three of them.

  They came in with a rush and stopped very suddenly a hundred feet or so from where he sat upon the steps.

  He didn’t move or say a word—there was nothing he could say. It was too ridiculous.

  They were, perhaps, a little smaller than himself, and black as the ace of spades, and they wore skin-tight shorts and vests that were somewhat oversize and both the shorts and vests were the blue of April skies.

  But that was not the worst of it.

  They sat on saddles, with horns in front and stirrups and a sort of a bedroll tied on the back, but they had no horses.

  The saddles floated in the air, with the stirrups about three feet above the ground and the aliens sat easily in the saddles and stared at him and he stared back at them.

  Finally he got up and moved forward a step or two and when he did that the three swung from the saddles and moved forward, too, while the saddles hung there in the air, exactly as they’d left them.

  Taine walked forward and the three walked forward until they were no more than six feet apart.

  “They say hello to you,” said Beasly. “They say welcome to you.”

  “Well, all right, then, tell them—Say, how do you know all this!”

  “Chuck tells me what they say and I tell you. You tell me and I tell him and he tells them. That’s the way it works. That is what he’s here for.”

  “Well, 111 be—” said Taine. “So you can really talk to him.”

  “I told you that I could,” stormed Beasly. “I told you that I could talk to Towser, too, but you thought that I was crazy.”

  “Telepathy!” said Taine. And it was worse than ever now. Not only had the ratlike things known all the rest of it, but they’d known of Beasly, too.

  “What was that you said, Hiram?”

  “Never mind,” said Taine. “Tell that friend of yours to tell them I’m glad to meet them and what can I do for them?”

 
He stood uncomfortably and stared at the three and he saw that their vests had many pockets and that the pockets were all crammed, probably with their equivalent of tobacco and handkerchiefs and pocketknives and such.

  “They say,” said Beasly, “that they want to dicker.”

  “Dicker?”

  “Sure, Hiram. You know, trade.”

  Beasly chuckled thinly. “Imagine them laying themselves open to a Yankee trader. That’s what Henry says you are. He says you can skin a man on the slickest—”

  “Leave Henry out of this,” snapped Taine. “Let’s leave Henry out of something.”

  He sat down on the ground and the three sat down to face him.

  “Ask them what they have in mind to trade.”

  “Ideas,” Beasly said.

  “Ideas! That’s a crazy thing—”

  And then he saw it wasn’t.

  Of all the commodities that might be exchanged by an alien peope, ideas would be the most valuable and the easiest to handle. They’d take no cargo room and they’d upset no economies—not immediately, that is—and they’d make a bigger contribution to the welfare of the cultures than trade in actual goods.

  “Ask them,” said Taine, “what they’ll take for the idea back of those saddles they are riding.”

  “They say, what have you to offer?”

  And that was the stumper. That was the one that would be hard to answer.

  Automobiles and trucks, the internal gas engine—well, probably not. Because they already had the saddles. Earth was out of date in transportation from the viewpoint of these people.

  Housing architecture—no, that was hardly an idea and, anyhow, there was that other house, so they knew of houses.

  Cloth? No, they had cloth.

  Paint, he thought. Maybe paint was it.

  “See if they are interested in paint,” Taine told Beasly.

  “They say, what is it? Please explain yourself.”

  “O.K., then. Let’s see. It’s a protective device to be spread over almost any surface. Easily packaged and easily applied. Protects against weather and corrosion. It’s decorative, too. Comes in all sorts of colors. And it’s cheap to make.”

  “They shrug in their mind,” said Beasly. “They’re just slightly interested. But they’ll listen more. Go ahead and tell them.”

  And that was more like it, thought Taine.

  That was the kind of language that he could understand.

  He settled himself more firmly on the ground and bent forward slightly, flicking his eyes across the three dead-pan, ebony faces, trying to make out what they might be thinking.

  There was no making out. Those were three of the deadest pans he had ever seen.

  It was all familiar. It made him feel at home. He was in his element.

  And in the three across from him, he felt somehow subconsciously, he had the best dickering opposition he had ever met. And that made him feel good, too.

  “Tell them,” he said, “that I’m not quite sure. I may have spoken up too hastily. Paint, after all, is a mighty valuable idea.”

  “They say, just as a favor to them, not that they’re really interested, would you tell them a little more.”

  Got them hooked, Taine told himself. If he could only play it right—

  He setded down to dickering in earnest.

  Hours later Henry Horton showed up. He was accompanied by a very urbane gentleman, who was faultlessly turned out and who carried beneath his arm an impressive attache case.

  Henry and the man stopped on the steps in sheer astonishment.

  Taine was squatted on the ground with a length of board and he was daubing paint on it while the aliens watched. From the daubs here and there upon their anatomies, it was plain to see the aliens had been doing some daubing of their own. Spread all over the ground were other lengths of half-painted boards and a couple of dozen old cans of paint.

  Taine looked up and saw Henry and the man.

  “I was hoping,” he said, “that someone would show up.”

  “Hiram,” said Henry, with more importance than usual, “may I present Mr. Lancaster. He is a special representative of the United Nations.”

  “I’m glad to meet you, sir,” said Taine. “I wonder if you would—”

  “Mr. Lancaster,” Henry explained grandly, “was having some slight difficulty getting through the lines outside, so I volunteered my services. I’ve already explained to him our joint interest in this matter.”

  “It was very kind of Mr. Horton,” Lancaster said. “There was this stupid sergeant—”

  “It’s all in knowing,” Henry said, “how to handle people.”

  The remark, Taine noticed, was not appreciated by the man from the U.N.

  “May I inquire, Mr. Taine,” asked Lancaster, “exactly what you’re doing?”

  “I’m dickering,” said Taine.

  “Dickering. What a quaint way of expressing—”

  “An old Yankee word,” said Henry quickly, “with certain connotations of its own. When you trade with someone you are exchanging goods, but if you’re dickering with him you’re out to get his hide.”

  “Interesting,” said Lancaster. “And I suppose you’re out to skin these gentlemen in the sky-blue vests—”

  “Hiram,” said Henry, proudly, “is the sharpest dickerer in these parts. He runs an antique business and he has to dicker hard—”

  “And may I ask,” said Lancaster, ignoring Henry finally, “what you might be doing with these cans of paint? Are these gentlemen potential customers for paint or—”

  Taine threw down the board and rose angrily to his feet.

  “If you’d both shut up!” he shouted. “I’ve been trying to say something ever since you got here and I can’t get in a word. And I tell you, it’s important—”

  “Hiram!” Henry exclaimed in horror.

  “It’s quite all right,” said the U.N. man. “We have been jabbering. And now, Mr. Taine?”

  “I’m backed into a corner,” Taine told him, “and I need some help. I’ve sold these fellows on the idea of paint, but I don’t know a thing about it—the principle back of it or how it’s made or what goes into it or—”

  “But, Mr. Taine, if you’re selling them the paint, what difference does it make—”

  “I’m not selling them the paint,” yelled Taine. “Can’t you understand that? They don’t want the paint. They want the idea of paint, the principle of paint. It’s something that they never thought of and they’re interested. I offered them the paint idea for the idea of their saddles and I’ve almost got it—”

  “Saddles? You mean those things over there, hanging in the air?”

  “That is right. Beasly, would you ask one of our friends to demonstrate a saddle?”

  “You bet I will,” said Beasly.

  “What,” demanded Henry, “has Beasly got to do with this?”

  “Beasly is an interpreter. I guess you’d call him a telepath. You remember how he always claimed he could talk with Towser?”

  “Beasly was always claiming things.”

  “But this time he was right. He tells Chuck, that funny-looking monster, what I want to say and Chuck tells these aliens. And these aliens tell Chuck and Chuck Beasly and Beasly tells me.”

  “Ridiculous!” snorted Henry. “Beasly hasn’t got the sense to be… what did you say he was?”

  “A telepath,” said Taine.

  One of the aliens had gotten up and climbed into a saddle. He rode it forth and back. Then he swung out of it and sat down again.

  “Remarkable,” said the U.N. man. “Some sort of antigravity unit, with complete control. We could make use of that, indeed.”

  He scraped his hand across his chin.

  “And you’re going to exchange the idea of paint for the idea of that saddle?”

  “That’s exactly it,” said Taine, “but I need some help. I need a chemist or a paint manufacturer or someone to explain how paint is made. And I need some professor or o
ther who’ll understand what they’re talking about when they tell me the idea of the saddle.”

  “I see,” said Lancaster. “Yes, indeed, you have a problem. Mr. Taine, you seem to me a man of some discernment—”

  “Oh, he’s all of that,” interrupted Henry. “Hiram’s quite astute.”

  “So I suppose you’ll understand,” said the U.N. man, “that this whole procedure is quite irregular—”

  “But it’s not,” exploded Taine. “That’s the way they operate. They open up a planet and then they exchange ideas. They’ve been doing that with other planets for a long, long time. And ideas are all they want, just the new ideas, because that is the way to keep on building a technology and culture. And they have a lot of ideas, sir, that the human race can use.”

  “That is just the point,” said Lancaster. “This is perhaps the most important thing that has ever happened to us humans. In just a short year’s time we can obtain data and ideas that will put us ahead— theoretically, at least—by a thousand years. And in a thing that is so important, we should have experts on the job—”

  “But,” protested Henry, “you can’t find a man who’ll do a better dickering job than Hiram. When you dicker with him your back teeth aren’t safe. Why don’t you leave him be? Hell do a job for you. You can get your experts and your planning groups together and let Hiram front for you. These folks have accepted him and have proved they’ll do business with him and what more do you want? All he needs is a little help.”

  Beasly came over and faced the U.N. man.

  “I won’t work with no one else,” he said. “If you kick Hiram out of here, then I go along with him. Hiram’s the only person who ever treated me like a human—”

  “There, you see!” Henry said, triumphantly.

  “Now, wait a second, Beasly,” said the U.N. man. “We could make it worth your while. I should imagine that an interpreter in a situation such as this could command a handsome salary.”

  “Money don’t mean a thing to me,” said Beasly. “It won’t buy me friends. People still will laugh at me.”

  “He means it, mister,” Henry warned. “There isn’t anyone who can be as stubborn as Beasly. I know; he used to work for us.”