Aliens for Neighbors

by Clifford D. Simak

  "Thanks a lot," I said.

  "Any time," he told me.

  I looked straight at him, then, and said: "It sure would be fine if we could get some rain. It would mean a lot to us. A soaking rain right now would save the corn."

  "Come again," he told me. "It was good to talk with you."

  And that night it rained, all over the valley, a steady, soaking rain, and the corn was saved. And Ann got well.

  The doctor, when he finally got to Bert's, said that she had passed the crisis and was already on the mend. One of those virus things, he said. A lot of it around. Not like the old days, he said, before they got to fooling around with all their miracle drugs, mutating viruses right and left. Used to be, he said, a doctor knew what he was treating, but he don't know any more.

  I don't know if Bert or Amy told Doc about Heath, although I imagine that they didn't. After all, you don't tell a doctor that a neighbour cured your child. And there might have been someone who would have been orhery enough to try to bring a charge against Heath for practicing medicine without a licence, although that would have been pretty hard to prove. But the story got around the valley and there was a lot of talk. Heath, I heard, had been a famous doctor in Vienna before he'd made his getaway. But I didn't believe it. I don't even believe those who started the story believed it, but that's the way it goes in a neighbourhood like ours.

  That story, and others, made quite a flurry for a month or so, but then it quieted down and you could see that the Heaths had become one of us and belonged to the valley. Bert went over and had quite a talk with Heath and the women-folks took to calling Mrs. Heath on the telephone, with some of those who were listening in breaking in to say a word or two, thereby initiating Mrs. Heath into the round-robin telephone conversations that are going on all the time on our valley party line, with it getting so that you have to bust in on them and tell them to get off the line when you want to make an important call.

  We had Heath out with us on our coon hunts that fall and some of the young bloods started paying attention to Heath's daughter. It was almost as if the Heaths were old-time residents.

  As I've said before, we've always been real fortunate in getting in good neighbours.

  When things are going well, time has a way of flowing along so smoothly that you aren't conscious of its passing, and that was the way it was in the valley.

  We had good years, but none of us paid much attention to that. You don't pay much attention to the good times, you get so you take them for granted. It's only when bad times come along that you look back and realize the good times you have had.

  A year or so ago I was just finishing up the morning chores when a car with a New York licence pulled up at the barnyard gate. It isn't very often we see an out-of-state licence plate in the valley, so I figured that it probably was someone who had gotten lost and had stopped to ask directions. There was a man and woman in the front seat and three kids and a dog in the back seat and the car was new and shiny.

  I was carrying the milk up from the barn and when the man got out I put the pails down on the ground and waited for him.

  He was a youngish sort of fellow and he looked intelligent and he had good manners. He told me his name was Rickard and that he was a New York newspaperman on vacation and had dropped into the valley on his way out west to check some information.

  It was the first time, so far as I knew, that the valley had ever been of any interest news-wise and I said so. I said we never did much here to get into the news.

  "It's no scandal," Rickard told me, "if that is what you're thinking. It's just a matter of statistics."

  There are a lot of times when I don't catch a situation as quickly as I should, being a sort of deliberate type, but it seems to me now that as soon as he said statistics I could see it coming.

  "I did a series of farm articles a few months back," said Rickard, "and to get my information I had to go through a lot of government statistics. I never got so sick of anything in my entire life."

  "And?" I asked, not feeling too well myself.

  "I found some interesting things about this valley," he went on. "I remember that I didn't catch it for a while. Went on past the figures for a ways. Almost missed the significance, in fact. Then I did a doubletake and backed up and looked at them again. The full story wasn't in that report, of course. Just a hint of something. So I did some more digging and came up with other facts."

  I tried to laugh it off, but he wouldn't let me.

  "Your weather, for one thing," he said. "Do you realize you've had perfect weather for the past ten years?"

  "The weather's been pretty good," I admitted.

  "It wasn't always good. I went back to see."

  "That's right," I said. "It's been better lately."

  "Your crops have been the best they've ever been in the last ten years."

  "Better seed," I said. "Better ways of farming."

  He grinned at me. "You guys haven't changed your way of farming in the last quarter century." And he had me there, of course.

  "There was an army worm invasion two years ago," he said. "It hit all around you, but you got by scot-free."

  "We were lucky. I remember we said so at the time."

  "I checked health records," he said. "Same thing once again. For ten solid years. No measles, no chickenpox, no pneumonia. No nothing. One death in ten full years—complications attendant on old age."

  "Old Man Parks," I said. "He was going on to ninety. Fine old gentleman."

  "You see," said Rickard. I did see. The fellow had the figures. He had tracked it down, this thing we hadn't even realized, and he had us cold.

  "What do you want me to do about it?" I asked.

  "I want to talk to you about a neighbour."

  "I won't talk about any of my neighbours. Why don't you talk to him yourself?"

  "I tried to, but he wasn't home. Fellow down the road said he'd gone into town. Whole family had gone into town."

  "Reginald Heath," I said. There wasn't much sense in playing dumb with Rickard, for he knew all the angles.

  "That's the man. I talked to folks in town. Found out he'd never had to have any repair work done on any of his machinery or his car. Has the same machinery he had when he started farming. And it was worn out then."

  "He takes good care of it," I told him. "He keeps it tinkered up."

  "Another thing," said Rickard. "Since he's been here he hasn't bought a drop of gasoline."

  I'd know the rest of it, of course, although I'd never stopped to think about it. But I didn't know about the gasoline. I must have shown my surprise, for Rickard grinned at me.

  "What do you want?" I asked.

  "A story."

  "Heath's the man to talk to. I don't know a thing to help you."

  And even when I said it I felt easy in my mind. I seemed to have an instinctive faith that Heath could handle the situation, that he'd know just what to do.

  But after breakfast I couldn't settle down to work. I was pruning the orchard, a job I'd been putting off for a year or two and that badly needed doing. I kept thinking of that business of Heath not buying gasoline and that night I'd found the tractor ploughing by itself and how smooth both the car and tractor ran despite all the noise they made.

  So I laid down my pruning hook and shears and struck out across the fields. I knew the Heath family was in town, but I don't think it would have made any difference to me if they'd been at home. I think I would have gone just the same. For more than ten years now, I realized, I'd been wondering about that tractor and it was time that I found out.

  I found the tractor in the machine shed and I thought maybe I'd have some trouble getting into it. But I didn't have a bit. I slipped the catches and the hood lifted up and I found exactly what I had thought I'd find, except that I hadn't actually worked out in my mind the picture of what I'd find underneath that hood.

  It was just a block of some sort of shining metal that looked almost like a cube of heavy glass. It wasn'
t very big, but it had a massive look about it, as if it might have been a heavy thing to lift. You could see the old bolt holes where the original internal combustion engine had been mounted and a heavy piece of some sort of metal had been fused across the frame to seat that little power plant. And up above the shiny cube was an apparatus of some sort. I didn't take the time to find out how it worked, but I could see that it was connected to the exhaust and I knew it was a dingus that disguised the power plant. You know how in electric trains they have it fixed up so that the locomotive goes chuff-chuff and throws out a stream of smoke. Well, that was what that contraption was. It threw out little puffs of smoke and made a tractor noise.

  I stood there looking at it and I wondered why it was, if Heath had an engine that worked better than an internal combustion engine, he should have gone to so much trouble to hide the fact he had it. If I'd had a thing like that, I knew, I'd make the most of it. I'd get someone to back me and go into production and in no time at all I'd be stinking rich. And there'd been nothing in the world to prevent Heath from doing that. But instead he'd fixed the tractor so it looked and sounded like an ordinary tractor and he'd fixed his car to make so much noise that it hid the fact it had a new type motor. Only he had overdone it. He'd made both the car and tractor make more noise than they should. And he'd missed an important bet in not buying gasoline. In his place I'd bought the stuff, just the way you should, and thrown it away or burned it to get rid of it.

  It almost seemed to me that Heath might have had something he was hiding all these years, that he'd tried deliberately to keep himself unnoticed. As if he might really have been a refugee from the Iron Curtain—or from somewhere else.

  I put the hood back in place again and snapped the catches shut and when I went out I was very careful to shut the machine shed door securely.

  I went back to my pruning and I did quite a bit of thinking and while I was doing it I realized that I'd been doing this same thinking, piecemeal, ever since that night I'd found the tractor running by itself. Thinking of it in snatches and not trying to correlate all my thinking and that way it hadn't added up to much, but now it did and I suppose I should have been a little scared.

  But I wasn't scared. Reginald Heath was a neighbour, and a good one, and we'd gone hunting and fishing together and we'd helped one another with haying and threshing and one thing and another and I liked the man as well as anyone I had ever known. Sure, he was a little different and he had a funny kind of tractor and a funny kind of car and he might even have a way of stretching time and since he'd come into the valley we'd been fortunate in weather and in health. All true, of course, but nothing to be scared of. Nothing to be scared of, once you knew the man.

  For some reason or other I remembered the time several years before when I'd dropped by of a summer evening. It was hot and the Heath family had brought chairs out on the lawn because it was cooler there. Heath got me a chair and we sat and talked, not about anything in particular, but whatever came into our heads.

  There was no moon, but there were a lot of stars and they were the prettiest I have ever seen them. I called Heath's attention to them and, just shooting off my mouth, I told him what little I'd picked up about astronomy.

  "They're a long ways off," I said. "So far off that their light takes years to reach us. And all of them are suns. A lot of them bigger than our sun." Which was about all I knew about the stars.

  Heath nodded gravely. "There's one up there", he said, "that I watch a lot. That blue one, over there. Well, sort of blue, anyhow. See it? See how it twinkles. Like it might be winking at us. A friendly sort of star."

  I pretended that I saw the one he was pointing at, although I wasn't sure I did, there were so many of them and a lot of them were twinkling.

  Then we got to talking about something else and forgot about the stars. Or at least I did.

  Right after supper, Bert Smith came over and said that Rickard had been around asking him some questions and that he'd been down to Jingo's place and that he'd said he'd see Heath just as soon as Heath got back from town.

  Bert was a bit upset about it, so I tried to calm him down. "These city folks get excited easy," I told him. "There's nothing to it."

  I didn't worry much about it because I felt sure that Heath could handle things and even if Rickard did write a story for the New York papers it wouldn't bother us. Coon Valley is a long piece from New York.

  I figured we'd probably seen and heard the last from Rickard.

  But in all my life, I've never been more wrong.

  About midnight or so I woke up with Helen shaking me. "There's someone at the door," she said. "Go see who it is." So I shucked into my overalls and shoes and lit the lamp and went downstairs to see.

  While I'd been getting dressed there'd been some knocking at the door, but as soon as I lit the lamp it quit. I went to the door and opened it and there stood Rickard and he wasn't near as chipper as he'd been in the morning. "Sorry to get you up," he said, "but it seems that I'm lost."

  "You can't be lost," I told him. "There isn't but one road through the valley. One end of it ties up to Sixty and the other to Eighty-five. You follow the valley road and you're bound to hit one or the other of them."

  "I've been driving", he told me, "for the last four hours and I can't find either of them."

  "Look," I said, "all you do is drive one way or the other. You can't get off the road. Fifteen minutes either way and you're on a state highway." I was exasperated with him, for it seemed a silly thing to do. And I don't take kindly to being routed out at midnight.

  "But I tell you I'm lost," he said in a sort of desperation and I could see that he was close to panic. "The wife is getting scared and the kids are dead on their feet…"

  "All right," I told him. "Let me get on my shirt and tie my shoes. I'll get you out of here."

  He told me he wanted to get to Sixty, so I got out my car and told him to follow me. I was pretty sore about it, but I figured the only thing to do was to help him out. He'd upset the valley and the sooner out the better.

  I drove for thirty minutes before I began to get confused myself. That was twice as long as it should have taken to get out to the highway. But the road looked all right and there seemed to be nothing wrong, except for the time it took. So I kept on going. At the end of forty-five minutes we were back in front of my place again. I couldn't figure it out for the life of me. I got out of my car and went back to Rickard's car.

  "You see what I mean," he said.

  "We must have got turned around," I said.

  His wife was almost hysterical. "What's going on?" she asked me in a high, shrill voice. "What is going on around here?"

  "We'll try again," I said. "We'll drive slower this time so we don't make the same mistake."

  I drove slower and this time it took an hour to get back to the farm. So we tried for Eighty-five and forty minutes later were right back where we started.

  "I give up," I told them. "Get out and come in. We'll fix up some beds. You can spend the night and we'll get you out come light."

  I cooked up some coffee and found stuff to make sandwiches while Helen fixed up beds to take care of the five of them. "The dog can sleep out here in the kitchen," she said.

  I got an apple box and quilt and fixed the dog a bed. The dog was a nice little fellow, a wirehair who was full of fun, and the Rickard kids were about as fine a bunch of kids as you'd find anywhere.

  Mrs. Rickard was all set to have hysterics, but Helen got her to drink some coffee and I wouldn't let them talk about not being able to get out. "Come daylight," I told them, "and there'll be nothing to it."

  After breakfast they were considerably calmed down and seemed to have no doubt they could find Number Sixty. So they started out alone, but in an hour were back again. I took my car and started out ahead of them and I don't mind admitting I could feel bare feet walking up and down my spine.

  I watched closely and all at once I realized that somehow we were headed back int
o the valley instead of heading out of it. So I stopped the car and we turned our cars around and headed back in the right direction. But in ten minutes we were turned around again. We tried again and this time we fairly crawled, trying to spot the place where we got turned around.

  But we could never spot it.

  We went back to my place and I called up Bert and Jingo and asked them to come over.

  Both of them tried to lead the Rickards out, one at a time then the two of them together, but they were no better at it than I was. Then I tried it alone, without the Rickards following me and I had no trouble at all. I was out to highway Sixty and back in half an hour. So we thought maybe the jinx was broken and I tried to lead out the Rickard car, but it was no soap.

  By mid-afternoon we knew the answer. Any of the natives could get out of the valley, but the Rickards couldn't.

  Helen put Mrs. Rickard to bed and fed her some sedative and I went over to see Heath.

  He was glad to see me and he listened to me, but all the time I was talking to him I kept remembering how one time I had wondered if maybe he could stretch out time. When I had finished he was silent for a while, as if he might have been going over some decision just to be certain that it was right.

  "It's a strange business, Calvin," he said finally, "and it doesn't seem right the Rickards should be trapped in this valley if they don't want to stay here.

  "Yet, it's a fortunate thing for us, actually. Rickard was planning on writing a story about us and if he'd written as he planned to, there'd been a lot of attention paid us. There would have been a crowd of people coming in—other newspapermen and government men and people from the universities and the idly curious. They'd have upset our lives and some of them taking it somewhat better and the Rickard kids were happy with the outdoor life and the Rickard dog was busily engaged in running all the valley rabbits down to skin and bones.

  "There's the old Chandler place up at the head of the valley," said Jingo. "No one's been living there for quite a while, but it's in good shape. It could be fixed up so it was comfortable."

  "But I can't stay here," protested Rickard. "I can't settle down here."