The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two

by Clifford D. Simak

  Mary bent over and ran her fingers along its top.

  “It feels all right,” she said. “Just like porcelain or—”

  The machine clicked and a flagon lay upon the grass.

  “For you,” said Peter.

  “For me?”

  Peter picked up the tiny bottle and handed it to her. It was a triumph of glassblower’s skill and it shone with sparkling prismatic color in the summer sunlight.

  “Perfume would be my guess,” he said.

  She worked the stopper loose.

  “Lovely,” she breathed and held it out to him to smell.

  It was all of lovely.

  She corked it up again.

  “But, Mr. Chaye …”

  “I don’t know,” said Peter. “I simply do not know.”

  “Not even a guess?”

  He shook his head.

  “You just found it here.”

  “I was out for a walk—”

  “And it was waiting for you.”

  “Well, now …” Peter began to object, but now that he thought about it, that seemed exactly right—he had not found the machine; it had been waiting for him.

  “It was, wasn’t it?”

  “Now that you mention it,” said Peter, “yes, I guess it was waiting for me.”

  Not for him specifically, perhaps, but for anyone who might come along the path. It had been waiting to be found, waiting for a chance to go into its act, to do whatever it was supposed to do.

  For now it appeared, as plain as day, that someone had left it there.

  He stood in the pasture with Mary Mallet, farmer’s daughter, standing by his side—with the familiar grasses and the undergrowth and trees, with the shrill of locust screeching across the rising heat of day, with the far-off tinkle of a cowbell—and felt the chill of the thought within his brain, the cold and terrible thought backgrounded by the black of space and the dim endlessness of time. And he felt, as well, a reaching out of something, of a chilly alien thing, towards the warmth of humanity and Earth.

  “Let’s go back,” he said.

  They returned across the pasture to the house and stood for a moment at the gate.

  “Isn’t there something we should do?” asked Mary. “Someone we should tell about it?”

  He shook his head. “I want to think about it first.”

  “And do something about it?”

  “There may be nothing that anyone can or should do.”

  He watched her go walking down the road, then turned away and went back to the house.

  He got out the lawn mower and cut the grass. After the lawn was mowed, he puttered in the flowerbed. The zinnias were coming along fine, but something had gotten into the asters and they weren’t doing well. And the grass kept creeping in, he thought. No matter what he did, the grass kept creeping into the bed to strangle out the plants.

  After lunch, he thought, maybe I’ll go fishing. Maybe going fishing will do me—

  He caught the thought before he finished it.

  He squatted by the flowerbed, dabbing at the ground with the point of his gardening trowel, and thought about the machine out in the pasture.

  I want to think about it, he’d told Mary, but what was there to think about?

  Something that someone had left in his pasture—a machine that clicked and laid a gift like an egg when you patted it.

  What did that mean?

  Why was it here?

  Why did it click and hand out a gift when you patted it?

  Response? The way a dog would wag its tail?

  Gratitude? For being noticed by a human?

  Negotiation?

  Friendly gesture?

  Booby trap?

  And how had it known he would have sold his soul for a piece of jade one-half as fine as the piece it had given him?

  How had it known a girl would like perfume?

  He heard the running footsteps behind him and swung around and there was Mary, running across the lawn.

  She reached him and went down on her knees beside him and her hands clutched his arm.

  “Johnny found it, too,” she panted. “I ran all the way. Johnny and that Smith boy found it. They cut across the pasture coming home from fishing …”

  “Maybe we should have reported it,” said Peter.

  “It gave them something, too. A rod and reel to Johnny and a baseball bat and mitt to little Augie Smith.”

  “Oh, good Lord!”

  “And now they’re telling everyone.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Peter said. “At least, I don’t suppose it matters.”

  “What is that thing out there? You said you didn’t know. But you have some idea. Peter, you must have some idea.”

  “I think it’s alien,” Peter reluctantly and embarrassedly told her. “It has a funny look about it, like nothing I’ve ever seen or read about, and Earth machines don’t give away things when you lay a hand on them. You have to feed them coins first. This isn’t—isn’t from Earth.”

  “From Mars, you mean?”

  “Not from Mars,” said Peter. “Not from this solar system. We have no reason to think another race of high intelligence exists in this solar system and whoever dreamed up that machine had plenty of intelligence.”

  “But …not from this solar system …”

  “From some other star.”

  “The stars are so far away!” she protested.

  So far away, thought Peter. So far out of the reach of the human race. Within the realm of dreams, but not the reach of hands. So far away and so callous and uncaring. And the machine—

  “Like a slot machine,” he said, “except it always pays in jackpots and you don’t even need a coin. That is crazy, Mary. That’s one reason it isn’t of this Earth. No Earth machine, no Earth inventor, would do that.”

  “The neighbors will be coming,” Mary said.

  “I know they will. They’ll be coming for their handouts.”

  “But it isn’t very big. It could not carry enough inside it for the entire neighborhood. It does not have much more than room enough for the gifts it’s already handed out.”

  “Mary, did Johnny want a rod and reel?”

  “He’d talked of practically nothing else.”

  “And you like perfume?”

  “I’d never had any good perfume. Just cheap stuff.” She laughed a little nervously. “And you? Do you like jade?”

  “I’m what you might call a minor expert on it. It’s a passion with me.”

  “Then that machine …”

  “Gives each one the thing he wants,” Peter finished for her.

  “It’s frightening,” said Mary.

  And it seemed strange that anything at all could be frightening on such a day as this—a burnished summer day, with white clouds rimming the western horizon and the sky the color of pale blue silk, a day that had no moods, but was as commonplace as the cornfield earth.

  After Mary had left, Peter went in the house and made his lunch. He sat by the window, eating it, and watched the neighbors come. They came by twos and threes, tramping across the pasture from all directions, coming to his pasture from their own farms, leaving the haying rigs and the cultivators, abandoning their work in the middle of the day to see the strange machine. They stood around and talked, tramping down the thicket where he had found the machine, and at times their high, shrill voices drifted across to him, but he could not make out what they said, for the words were flattened and distorted by the distance.

  From the stars, he’d said. From some place among the stars.

  And if that be fantasy, he said, I have a right to it.

  First contact, he thought.

  And clever!

  Let an alien being arrive on Earth and the women would run screami
ng for their homes and the men would grab their rifles and there’d be hell to pay.

  But a machine—that was a different matter. What if it was a little different? What if it acted a little strangely? After all, it was only a machine. It was something that could be understood.

  And if it handed out free gifts, that was all the better.

  After lunch, he went out and sat on the steps and some of the neighbors came and showed him what the machine had given them. They sat around and talked, all of them excited and mystified, but not a single one of them was scared.

  Among the gifts were wrist-watches and floor lamps, typewriters and fruit juicers, sets of dishes, chests of silver, bolts of drapery materials, shoes, shotguns, carving sets, book ends, neckties, and many other items. One youngster had a dozen skunk traps and another had a bicycle.

  A modern Pandora’s box, thought Peter, made by an alien intelligence and set down upon the Earth.

  Apparently the word was spreading, for now the people came in cars. Some of them parked by the road and walked down to the pasture and others came into the barnyard and parked there, not bothering to ask for permission.

  After a time, they would come back loaded with their loot and drive away. Out in the pasture was a milling throng of people. Peter, watching it, was reminded of a county fair or a village carnival.

  By chore-time, the last of them had gone, even the neighbors who had come to say a few words with him and to show him what they’d gotten, so he left the house and walked up the pasture slope.

  The machine still was there and it was starting to build something. It had laid out around it a sort of platform of a stone that looked like marble, as if it were laying a foundation for a building. The foundation was about ten feet by twelve and was set level against the pasture’s slope, with footings of the same sort of stone going down into the ground.

  He sat down on a stump a little distance away and looked out over the peace of the countryside. It seemed more beautiful, more quiet and peaceful than it had ever seemed before, and he sat there contentedly, letting the evening soak into his soul.

  The Sun had set not more than half an hour ago. The western sky was a delicate lemon fading into green, with here and there the pink of wandering cloud, while beneath the horizon the land lay in the haze of a blue twilight, deepening at the edges. The liquid evensong of birds ran along the hedges and the thickets and the whisper of swallows’ wings came down from overhead.

  This is Earth, he thought, the peaceful, human Earth, a landscape shaped by an agricultural people. This is the Earth of plum blossom and of proud red barns and of corn rows as straight as rifle barrels.

  For millions of years, the Earth had lain thus, without interference; a land of soil and life, a local corner of the Galaxy engaged in its own small strivings.

  And now?

  Now, finally, there was interference.

  Now, finally, someone or something had come into this local corner of the Galaxy and Earth was alone no longer.

  To himself, he knew, it did not matter. Physically, there was no longer anything that possibly could matter to him. All that was left was the morning brightness and the evening peace and from each of these, from every hour of each day that was left to him, it was his purpose to extract the last bit of joy in being alive.

  But to the others it would matter—to Mary Mallet and her brother Johnny, to the little Smith boy who had gotten the baseball bat and mitt, to all the people who had visited this pasture, and to all the millions who had not visited or even heard of it.

  Here, in this lonely place in the midst of the great cornlands, had come, undramatically, a greater drama than the Earth had yet known. Here was the pivot point.

  He said to the machine: “What do you intend with us?”

  There was no answer.

  He had not expected one.

  He sat and watched the shadows deepen and the lights spring up in the farm houses that were sprinkled on the land. Dogs barked from far away and others answered them and the cowbells rang across the hills like tiny vesper notes.

  At last, when he could see no longer, he walked slowly back to the house.

  In the kitchen, he found a lamp and lit it. He saw by the kitchen clock that it was almost nine o’clock—time for the evening news.

  He went into the living room and turned on the radio. Sitting in the dark, he listened to it.

  There was good news.

  There had been no polio deaths in the state that day and only one new case had been reported.

  “It is too soon to hope, of course,” the newscaster said, “but it definitely is the first break in the epidemic. Up to the time of broadcast, there have been no new cases for more than twenty hours. The state health director said …”

  He went on to read what the health director said, which wasn’t much of anything, just one of those public statements which pretty generally add up to nothing tangible.

  It was the first day in almost three weeks, the newscaster had said, during which no polio deaths had been reported. But despite the development, he said, there still was need of nurses. If you are a nurse, he added, won’t you please call this number? You are badly needed.

  He went on to warm over a grand jury report, without adding anything really new. He gave the weather broadcast. He said the Emmett murder trial had been postponed another month.

  Then he said: “Someone has just handed me a bulletin. Now let me see …”

  You could hear the paper rustling as he held it to read it through, could hear him gasp a little.

  “It says here,” he said, “that Sheriff Joe Burns has just now been notified that a Flying Saucer has landed on the Peter Chaye farm out near Mallet Corners. No one seems to know too much about it. One report is that it was found this morning, but no one thought to notify the sheriff. Let me repeat—this is just a report. We don’t know any more than what we’ve told you. We don’t know if it is true or not. The sheriff is on his way there now. We’ll let you know as soon as we learn anything. Keep tuned to this …”

  Peter got up and turned off the radio. Then he went into the kitchen to bring in the lamp. He set the lamp on a table and sat down again to wait for Sheriff Burns.

  He didn’t have long to wait.

  “Folks tell me,” said the sheriff, “this here Flying Saucer landed on your farm.”

  “I don’t know if it’s a Flying Saucer, Sheriff.”

  “Well, what is it, then?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Peter.

  “Folks tell me it was giving away things.”

  “It was doing that, all right.”

  “If this is some cockeyed advertising stunt,” the sheriff said, “I’ll have someone’s neck for it.”

  “I’m sure it’s not an advertising stunt.”

  “Why didn’t you notify me right off? What you mean by holding out on a thing like this?”

  “I didn’t think of notifying you,” Peter told him. “I wasn’t trying to hold out on anything.”

  You new around here, ain’t you?” asked the sheriff. “I don’t recollect seeing you before. Thought I knew everyone.”

  “I’ve been here three months.”

  “Folks tell me you ain’t farming the place. Tell me you ain’t got no family. Live here all by yourself, just doing nothing.”

  “That’s correct,” said Peter.

  The sheriff waited for the explanation, but Peter offered none. The sheriff looked at him suspiciously in the smoky lamplight.

  “Can you show us this here Flying Saucer?”

  By now Peter was a little weary of the sheriff, so he said, “I can tell you how to find it. You go down past the barn and cross the brook …”

  “Why don’t you come with us, Chaye?”

  “Look, Sheriff, I was telling you how to find it. Do you want me to continue?�
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  “Why, sure,” the sheriff said. “Of course I do. But why can’t you …”

  “I’ve seen it twice,” said Peter. “I’ve been overrun by people all the afternoon.”

  “All right, all right,” the sheriff said. “Tell me how to find it.”

  He told him and the sheriff left, followed by his two deputies.

  The telephone rang.

  Peter answered it. It was the radio station he’d been listening to.

  “Say,” asked the radio reporter, “you got a Saucer out there?”

  “I don’t think so,” Peter said. “I do have something out here, though. The sheriff is going to take a look at it.”

  “We want to send out our mobile TV unit, but we wanted to be sure there was something there. It be all right with you if we send it out?”

  “No objections. Send it along.”

  “You sure you got something there?”

  “I told you that I had.”

  “Well, then, suppose you tell me …”

  Fifteen minutes later, he hung up.

  The phone rang again.

  It was the Associated Press. The man at the other end of the wire was wary and skeptical.

  “What’s this I hear about a Saucer out there?”

  Ten minutes later, Peter hung up.

  The phone rang almost immediately.

  “McClelland of the Tribune,” said a bored voice. “I heard a screwball story …”

  Five minutes.

  The phone rang again.

  It was the United Press.

  “Hear you got a Saucer. Any little men in it?”

  Fifteen minutes.

  The phone rang.

  It was an irate citizen.

  “I just heard on the radio you got a Flying Saucer. What kind of gag you trying to pull? You know there ain’t any Flying Saucers …”

  “Just a moment, sir,” said Peter.

  He let the receiver hang by its cord and went out to the kitchen. He found a pair of clippers and came back. He could hear the irate citizen still chewing him out, the voice coming ghostlike out of the dangling receiver.

  He went outside and found the wire and clipped it. When he came back in again, the receiver was silent. He hung it carefully on the hook.