Except, thought Decker, on an alien planet no occurrence, no accident or incident, can be regarded as a simple things for which a simple explanation must necessarily be anticipated. For the matrix of cause and effect, the mathematics of chance, may not hold true on an alien planet as they hold true on Earth.
There was one rule, Decker thought grimly. One rule: Take no chances. That was the one safe rule to follow, the only rule to follow.
Following it, he had ordered all field parties back to base, had ordered the crew to prepare the ship for emergency take-off, had alerted the robots to be ready at an instant to get the machines aboard. Even to be prepared to desert the machines and leave without them if circumstances should dictate that this was necessary.
Having done that, there was no more to do but wait. Wait until the field parties came back from their advance camps. Wait until some reason could be assigned to the failure of the watches.
It was not a thing, he told himself, that should be allowed to panic one. It was something to recognize, not to disregard. It was a circumstance that made necessary a certain number of precautions, but it was not a situation that should make one lose all sense of proportion.
You could not go back to Earth and say, “Well, you see, our watches stopped and so …”
A footstep sounded and he swung around in his chair. It was Jackson.
“What is it, Jackson?” Decker asked.
“The camps aren’t answering, sir,” said Jackson. “The operator has been trying to raise them and there is no answer. Not a single peep.”
Decker grunted. “Take it easy,” he said. “They will answer. Give them time.”
He wished, even as he spoke, that he could feel some of the assurance that he tried to put into his voice. For a second, a rising terror mounted in his throat and he choked it back.
“Sit down,” he said. “We’ll sit here and have a beer and then we’ll go down to the radio shack and see what’s doing.”
He rapped on the table. “Beer,” he said. “Two beers.”
The robot standing by the pavilion pole did not answer.
He made his voice louder. The robot did not stir.
Decker put his clenched fists upon the table and tried to rise, but his legs were suddenly cold and had turned unaccountably to water, and he could not raise himself.
“Jackson,” he panted, “go and tap that robot on the shoulder. Tell him we want beer.”
He saw the fear that whitened Jackson’s face as he rose and moved slowly forward. Inside himself, he felt the terror start and worry at his throat.
Jackson stood beside the robot and reached out a hesitant hand, tapped him gently on the shoulder, tapped him harder—and the robot fell flat upon its face!
Feet hammered across the hard-packed ground, heading for the pavilion.
Decker jerked himself around, sat foursquare and solid in his chair, waiting for the man who ran.
It was MacDonald, the chief engineer.
He halted in front of Decker and his hands, scarred and grimy with years of fighting balky engines, reached down and gripped the boards of the table’s edge. His seamy face was twisted as if he were about to weep.
“The ship, sir. The ship …”
Decker nodded, almost idly. “I know, Mr. MacDonald. The ship won’t run.”
MacDonald gulped. “The big stuff’s all right, sir. But the little gadgets … the injector mechanism … the—”
He stopped abruptly and stared at Decker. “You knew,” he said. “How did you know?”
“I knew,” said Decker, “that someday it would come. Not like this, perhaps. But in any one of several ways. I knew that the day would come when our luck would run too thin. I talked big, like the rest of you, of course, but I knew that it would come. The day when we’d covered all the possibilities but the one that we could not suspect, and that, of course, would be the one that would ruin us.”
He was thinking, the natives had no metal. No sign of any metal in their village at /Sall. Their dishes were soapstone, and they wore no ornaments. Their implements were stone. And yet they were intelligent enough, civilized enough, cultured enough, to have fabricated metal. For there was metal here, a great deposit of it in the western mountains. They had tried perhaps, many centuries ago, had fashioned metal tools and had them go to pieces underneath their fingers in a few short weeks.
A civilization without metal. A culture without metal. It was unthinkable. Take metal from a man and he went back to the caves. Take metal from a man and he was earthbound, and his bare hands were all he had.
Waldron came into the pavilion, walking quietly in the silence. “The radio is dead,” he said, “and the robots are dying like flies. The place is littered with them, just so much scrap metal.”
Decker nodded. “The little stuff, the finely fabricated, will go first,” he said. “Like watches and radio innards and robot brains and injector mechanisms. Next, the generators will go and we will have no lights or power. Then the machines will break down and the Legion’s weapons will be no more than clubs. After that, the big stuff, probably.”
“The native told us,” Waldron said, “when you talked to him. ‘You will never leave,’ he said.”
“We didn’t understand,” said Decker. “We thought he was threatening us and we knew that we were too big, too well guarded for any threat of his to harm us. He wasn’t threatening us at all, of course. He was just telling us.”
He made a hopeless gesture with his hands. “What is it?”
“No one knows,” said Waldron quietly. “Not yet, at least. Later, we may find out, but it won’t help us any. A microbe, maybe. A virus. Something that eats iron after it has been subjected to heat or alloyed with other metals. It doesn’t go for iron ore. If it did, that deposit we found would have been gone long ago.”
“If that is true,” said Decker, “we’ve brought it the first square meal it’s had in a long, long time. A thousand years. Maybe a million years. There is no fabricated metal here. How would it survive? Without stuff to eat, how would it live?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Waldron. “It might not be a metal-eating organism at all. It might be something else. Something in the atmosphere.”
“We tested the atmosphere.”
But, even as the words left his mouth, Decker saw how foolish they were. They had tested the atmosphere, but how could they have detected something they had never run across before? Man’s yardstick was limited—limited to the things he knew about, limited by the circle of his own experience. He guarded himself against the obvious and the imaginable. He could not guard himself against the unknowable or the unimaginable.
Decker rose and saw Jackson still standing by the pavilion pole, with the robot stretched at his feet.
“You have your answer,” he told the biochemist. “Remember that first day here? You talked with me in the lounge.”
Jackson nodded. “I remember, sir.”
And suddenly, Decker realized, the entire base was quiet.
A gust of wind came out of the jungle and rattled the canvas.
Now, for the first time since they had landed, he caught in the wind the alien smell of an alien world.
Sunspot Purge
According to his journal, Clifford D. Simak sent this story to Astounding Science Fiction in January 1940, and it was accepted less two weeks later by John W. Campbell Jr., the editor who molded that magazine into one of the great forces in science fiction. His quick reaction speaks to a ringing endorsement. Campbell sent Cliff a check for $87.50 and published the story in the November 1940 issue of his magazine. In this tale, Cliff combined his coinciding newspaper background with the time travel idea from his very first published story, “The World of the Red Sun.” But in later years, he would describe “Sunspot Purge,” along with “Madness from Mars,” as “truly horrible examples of an a
uthor’s fumbling agony in the process of finding himself.” Since both of those stories carry the effectively portrayed emotional weight that Cliff had been seeking to bring to science fiction, I find that I do not fully agree with his self-analysis; and I believe that I am only seconding Campbell’s opinion. After all, he backed up his acceptance of the story with money. Nor was Cliff’s own assessment one of unalloyed disaster. Immediately following the quoted passage, he continued with this: “It is possible the discerning reader may discover in them some of the seeds of later writing, but I cringe at their being read.”
And in the back of my mind, I wonder how much this story resulted from Cliff’s perceptions about World War II, which was more than a year old when Cliff wrote this story (although the United States had not yet been dragged into it). Many commentators have come to believe that the “City” stories, which would begin to be written only a few years after “Sunspot Purge,” owed at least a portion of their genesis to Cliff’s reactions to the war; and it seems to me that such might explain the pessimism so evident here.
—dww
I was sitting around, waiting for the boy to bring up the first batch of papers from the pressroom. I had my feet up on the desk, my hat pulled down over my eyes, feeling pretty sick.
I couldn’t get the picture of the fellow hitting the sidewalk out of my mind. Twenty stories is a long way to jump. When he’d hit he’d just sort of spattered and it was very messy.
The fool had cavorted and pranced around up on that ledge since early morning, four long hours, before he took the dive.
Herb Harding and Al Jarvey and a couple of other Globe photographers had gone out with me, and I listened to them figure out the way they’d co-operate on the shots. If the bird jumped, they knew they’d each have just time enough to expose one plate. So they got their schedules worked out beforehand.
Al would take the first shot with the telescopic lens as he made the jump. Joe would catch him halfway down. Harry would snap him just before he hit, and Herb would get the moment of impact on the sidewalk.
It gave me the creeps, listening to them.
But anyhow, it worked and the Globe had a swell sequence panel of the jump to go with my story.
We knew the Standard, even if it got that sidewalk shot, wouldn’t use it, for the Standard claimed to be a family newspaper and made a lot of being a sheet fit for anyone to read.
But the Globe would print anything—and did. We gave it to ‘em red-hot and without any fancy dressing.
“The guy was nuts,” said Herb, who had come over and sat down beside me.
“The whole damn world is nuts,” I told him. “This is the sixth bird that’s hopped off a high building in the last month. I wish they’d put me down at the obit desk, or over on the markets, or something. I’m all fed up on gore.”
“It goes like that,” said Herb. “For a long time there ain’t a thing worth shooting. Then all hell breaks loose.”
Herb was right. News runs that way—in streaks. Crime waves and traffic-accident waves and suicide waves. But this was something different. It wasn’t just screwballs jumping off high places. It was a lot of other things.
There was the guy who had massacred his family and then turned the gun on himself. There was the chap who’d butchered his bride on their honeymoon. And the fellow who had poured gasoline over himself and struck a match.
All such damn senseless things.
No newsman in his right mind objects to a little violence, for that’s what news is made of. But things were getting pretty thick; just a bit revolting and horrifying. Enough to sicken even a hard-working legman who isn’t supposed to have any feelings over things like that.
Just then the boy came up with the papers, and, if I say so myself, that story of mine read like a honey. It should have. I had been thinking it up and composing it while I watched the bird teetering around up on that ledge.
The pictures were good, too. Great street-sale stuff. I could almost see old J.R. rubbing his hands together and licking his lips and patting himself on the back for the kind of a sheet we had.
Billy Larson, the science editor, strolled over to my desk and draped himself over it. Billy was a funny guy. He wore big, horn-rimmed spectacles, and he wiggled his ears when he got excited, but he knew a lot of science. He could take a dry-as-dust scientific paper and pep it up until it made good reading.
“I got an idea,” he announced.
“So have I,” I answered. “I’m going down to the Dutchman’s and take me on a beer. Maybe two or three.”
“I hope,” piped Herb, “that it ain’t something else about old Doc Ackerman and his time machine.”
“Nope,” said Billy, “it’s something else. Doc’s time machine isn’t so hot any more. People got tired of reading about it. I guess the old boy has plenty on the ball, but what of it? Who will ever use the thing? Everyone is scared of it.”
“What’s it this time?” I asked.
“Sunspots,” he said.
I tried to brush him off, because I wanted that beer so bad I could almost taste it, but Billy had an idea, and he wasn’t going to let me get away before he told me all about it.
“It’s pretty well recognized,” he told me, “that sunspots do affect human lives. Lots of sunspots and we have good times. Stocks and bonds are up, prices are high. Trade is good. But likewise, we have an increased nervous tension. We have violence. People get excited.”
“Hell starts to pop,” said Herb.
“That’s exactly it,” agreed Billy. “Tchijevsky, the Russian scientist, pointed it out thirty years ago. I believe he’s the one that noted increased activity on battle fronts during the first World War occurring simultaneously with the appearance of large spots on the Sun. Back in 1937, the sit-down strikes were ushered in by one of the most rapid rises in the sunspot curve in twenty years.”
I couldn’t get excited. But Billy was all worked up about it. That’s the way he is—enthusiastic about his work.
“People have their ups and downs,” he said, a fanatic light creeping into his eyes, the way it does when he’s on the trail of some idea to make Globe readers gasp.
“Not only people, but peoples—nations, cultures, civilizations. Go back through history and you can point out a parallelism in the cycles of sunspots and significant events. Take 1937, for example, the year they had the sit-down strikes. In July of that year the sunspot cycle hits its maximum with a Wolfer index of 137.
“Scientists are pretty sure periods of excitement are explained by acute changes in the nervous and psychic characters of humanity which take place at sunspot maxima, but they aren’t sure of the reasons for those changes.”
“Ultraviolet light,” I yawned, remembering something I had read in a magazine about it.
Billy wiggled his ears and went on: “Most likely ultraviolet has a lot to do with it. The spots themselves aren’t strong emission centers for ultraviolet. But it may be the very changes in the Sun’s atmosphere which produce the spots also result in the production of more ultraviolet.
“Most of the ultraviolet reaching Earth’s atmosphere is used up converting oxygen into ozone, but changes of as much as twenty percent in its intensity are possible at the surface.
“And ultraviolet produces definite reaction in human glands, largely in the endocrine glands.”
“I don’t believe a damn word of it,” Herb declared flatly, but there was no stopping Billy.
He clinched his argument: “Let’s say, then, that changes in sunshine, such as occur during sunspot periods, affect the physiological character and mental outlook of all the people on Earth. In other words, human behavior corresponds to sunspot cycles.
“Compare Dow Jones averages with sunspots and you will find they show a marked sympathy with the cycles—the market rising with sunspot activity. Sunspots were riding high in 1928 and 1929. In the aut
umn of 1929 there was an abrupt break in sunspot activity and the market crashed. It hit bedrock in 1932 and 1933, and so did the sunspots. Wall Street follows the sunspot cycle.”
“Keep those old sunspots rolling,” I jeered at him, “and we’ll have everlasting prosperity. We’ll simply wallow in wealth.”
“Sure,” said Herb, “and the damn fools will keep jumping off the buildings.”
“But what would happen if we reversed things—made a law against sunspots?” I asked.
“Why, then,” said Billy, solemn as an owl, “we’d have terrible depressions.”
I got up and walked away from him. I had got to thinking about what I had seen on the sidewalk after the fellow jumped, and I needed that beer.
Jake, one of the copy boys, yelled at me just as I was going out the door.
“J.R. wants to see you, Mike.”
So I turned around and walked toward the door behind which J.R. sat rubbing his hands and figuring out some new stunts to shock the public into buying the Globe.
“Mike,” said J.R. when I stepped into his office, “I want to congratulate you on the splendid job you did this morning. Mighty fine story, my boy, mighty fine.”
“Thanks, J.R.,” I said, knowing the old rascal didn’t mean a word of it.
Then J.R. got down to business.
“Mike,” he said, “I suppose you’ve been reading this stuff about Dr. Ackerman’s time machine.”
“Yeah,” I told him, “but if you think you’re going to send me out to interview that old publicity grabber, you’re all wrong. I saw a guy spatter himself all over Fifth Street this morning, and I been listening to Billy Larson telling about sunspots, and I can’t stand much more. Not in one day, anyhow.”
Then J.R. dropped the bombshell on me.
“The Globe,” he announced, “has bought a time machine.”
That took me clear off my feet.
The Globe, in my time, had done a lot of wacky things, but this was the worst.
“What for?” I asked weakly, and J.R. looked shocked; but he recovered in a minute and leaned across the desk.
New Folks' Home: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 6) Page 25