He sat and stared across the field, at the trapped and deserted tank, at the shining ladder of the roads.
“I hope,” he said, “they don’t do what some of the missionaries did. I hope they don’t destroy our self-respect with alien Mother Hubbards. I hope they don’t save us from ringworm and condemn us to a feeling of racial inferiority. I hope they don’t chop down the coconuts and hand us—”
But they know about us, he told himself. They know all there is to know. They’ve studied us for—how long? Squatting in a drugstore corner, masquerading as a cigarette machine. Watching us from the counter in the guise of a stamp machine.
And they wrote letters—letters to every head of state in all the world. Letters that might, when finally deciphered, explain what they were about. Or that might make certain demands. Or that might, just possibly, be no more than applications for permits to build a mission or a church or a hospital or a school.
They know us, he thought. They know, for example, that we’re suckers for anything that’s free, so they handed out free gifts—just like the quiz shows and contests run by radio and television and Chambers of Commerce, except that there was no competition and everybody won.
Throughout the afternoon, Peter and Mary watched the road and during that time small groups of soldiers had come limping down it. But now, for an hour or more, there had been no one on the road.
They started out just before dark, walking across the field, passing through the wall-that-wasn’t-there to reach the road. And they headed west along the road, going toward the purple cloud of the building that reared against the redness of the sunset.
They travelled through the night and they did not have to dodge and hide, as they had that first night, for there was no one on the road except the one lone soldier they met.
By the time they saw him, they had come far enough so that the great shaft of the building loomed halfway up the sky, a smudge of misty brightness in the bright starlight.
The soldier was sitting in the middle of the road and he’d taken off his shoes and set them neatly beside him.
“My feet are killing me,” he said by way of greeting.
So they sat down with him to keep him company and Peter took out the water bottle and the loaf of bread and the cheese and bologna and spread them on the pavement with wrapping paper as a picnic cloth.
They ate in silence for a while and finally the soldier said, “Well, this is the end of it.”
They did not ask the question, but waited patiently, eating bread and cheese.
“This is the end of soldiering,” the soldier told them. “This is the end of war.”
He gestured out toward the pens fashioned by the roads and in one nearby pen were three self-propelled artillery pieces and in another was an ammunition dump and another pen held military vehicles.
“How are you going to fight a war,” the soldier asked, “if the things back there can chop up your armies into checkerboards? A tank ain’t worth a damn guarding ten acres, not when it isn’t able to get out of those ten acres. A big gun ain’t any good to you if you can’t fire but half a mile.”
“You think they would?” asked Mary. “Anywhere, I mean?”
“They done it here. Why not somewhere else? Why not any place that they wanted to? They stopped us. They stopped us cold and they never shed a single drop of blood. Not a casualty among us.”
He swallowed the bit of bread and cheese that was in his mouth and reached for the water bottle. He drank, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.
“I’m coming back,” he said. “I’m going out and get my girl and we both are coming back. The things in that building maybe need some help and I’m going to help them if there’s a way of doing it. And if they don’t need no help, why, then I’m going to figure out some way to let them know I’m thankful that they came.”
“Things? You saw some things?”
The soldier stared at Peter. “No, I never saw anything at all.”
“But this business of going out to get your girl and both of you coming back? How did you get that idea? Why not go back right now with us?”
“It wouldn’t be right,” the soldier protested. “Or it doesn’t seem just right. I got to see her first and tell her how I feel. Besides, I got a present for her.”
“She’ll be glad to see you,” Mary told him softly. “She’ll like the present.”
“She sure will.” The soldier grinned proudly. “It was something that she wanted.”
He reached in his pocket and took out a leather box. Fumbling with the catch, he snapped it open. The starlight blazed softly on the necklace that lay inside the box.
Mary reached out her hand. “May I?” she asked.
“Sure,” the soldier said. “I want you to take a look at it. You’d know if a girl would like it.”
Mary lifted it from the box and held it in her hand, a stream of starlit fire.
“Diamonds?” asked Peter.
“I don’t know,” the soldier said. “Might be. It looks real expensive. There’s a pendant, sort of, at the bottom of it, of green stone that doesn’t sparkle much, but—”
“Peter,” Mary interrupted, “have you got a match?”
The soldier dipped his hand into a pocket. “I got a lighter, Miss. That thing gave me a lighter. A beaut!”
He snapped it open and the flame blazed out. Mary held the pendant close.
“It’s the symbol,” she said. “Just like on my bottle of perfume.”
“That carving?” asked the soldier, pointing. “It’s on the lighter, too.”
“Something gave you this?” Peter urgently wanted to know.
“A box. Except that it really was more than a box. I reached down to put my hand on it and it coughed up a lighter and when it did, I thought of Louise and the lighter she had given me. I’d lost it and I felt bad about it, and here was one just like it except for the carving on the side. And when I thought of Louise, the box made a funny noise and out popped the box with the necklace in it.”
The soldier leaned forward, his young face solemn in the glow from the lighter’s flame.
“You know what I think?” he said. “I think that box was one of them. There are stories, but you can’t believe everything you hear …”
He looked from one to the other of them. “You don’t laugh at me,” he remarked wonderingly.
Peter shook his head. “That’s about the last thing we’d do, Soldier.”
Mary handed back the necklace and the lighter. The soldier put them in his pocket and began putting on his shoes.
“I got to get on,” he said. “Thanks for the chow.”
“We’ll be seeing you,” said Peter.
“I hope so.”
“I know we will,” Mary stated positively.
They watched him trudge away, then walked on in the other direction.
Mary said to Peter, “The symbol is the mark of them. The ones who get the symbol are the ones who will go back. It’s a passport, a seal of approval.”
“Or,” Peter amended, “the brand of ownership.”
“They’d be looking for certain kinds of people. They wouldn’t want anybody who was afraid of them. They’d want people who had some faith in them.”
“What do they want us for?” Peter fretted. “That’s what bothers me. What use can we be to them? The soldier wants to help them, but they don’t need help from us. They don’t need help from anyone.”
“We’ve never seen one of them,” said Mary. “Unless the box was one of them.”
And the cigarette machines, thought Peter. The cigarette machines and God knows what else.
“And yet,” said Mary, “they know about us. They’ve watched us and studied us. They know us inside out. They can reach deep within us and know what each of us might want and then give it to us. A rod and reel f
or Johnny and a piece of jade for you. And the rod and reel were a human rod and reel and the jade was Earth jade. They even know about the soldier’s girl. They knew she would like a shiny necklace and they knew she was the kind of person that they wanted to come back again and …”
“The Saucers,” Peter said. “I wonder if it was the Saucers, after all, watching us for years, learning all about us.”
How many years would it take, he wondered, from a standing start, to learn all there was to know about the human race? For it would be from a standing start; to them, all of humanity would have been a complex alien race and they would have had to feel their way along, learning one fact here and another there. And they would make mistakes; at times their deductions would be wrong, and that would set them back.
“I don’t know,” said Peter. “I can’t figure it out at all.”
They walked down the shiny metal road that glimmered in the starlight, with the building growing from a misty phantom to a gigantic wall that rose against the sky to blot out the stars. A thousand stories high and covering more than a hundred acres, it was a structure that craned your head and set your neck to aching and made your brain spin with its glory and its majesty.
And even when you drew near it, you could not see the dropped and cradled bomb, resting in the emptiness above it, for the bomb was too far away for seeing.
But you could see the little cubicles sliced off by the roads and, within the cubicles, the destructive toys of a violent race, deserted now, just idle hunks of fashioned metal.
They came at last, just before dawn, to the great stairs that ran up to the central door. As they moved across the flat stone approach to the stairs, they felt the hush and the deepness of the peace that lay in the building’s shadow.
Hand in hand, they went up the stairs and came to the great bronze door and there they stopped. Turning around, they looked back in silence.
The roads spun out like wheel spokes from the building’s hub as far as they could see, and the crossing roads ran in concentric circles so that it seemed they stood in the center of a spider’s web.
Deserted farm houses, with their groups of buildings—barns, granaries, garages, silos, hog pens, machine sheds—stood in the sectors marked off by the roads, and in other sectors lay the machines of war, fit now for little more than birds’ nests or a hiding place for rabbits. Bird songs came trilling up from the pastures and the fields and you could smell the freshness and the coolness of the countryside.
“It’s good,” said Mary. “It’s our country, Peter.”
“It was our country,” Peter corrected her. “Nothing will ever be quite the same again.”
“You aren’t afraid, Peter?”
“Not a bit. Just baffled.”
“But you seemed so sure before.”
“I still am sure,” he said. “Emotionally, I am as sure as ever that everything’s all right.”
“Of course everything’s all right. There was a polio epidemic and now it has died out. An army has been routed without a single death. An atomic bomb was caught and halted before it could go off. Can’t you see, Peter, they’re already making this a better world. Cancer and polio gone—two things that Man had fought for years and was far from conquering. War stopped, disease stopped, atomic bombs stopped—things we couldn’t solve for ourselves that were solved for us.”
“I know all that,” said Peter. “They’ll undoubtedly also put an end to crime and graft and violence and everything else that has been tormenting and degrading mankind since it climbed down out of the trees.”
“What more do you want?”
“Nothing more, I guess—it’s just that it’s circumstantial. It’s not real evidence. All that we know, or think we know, we’ve learned from inference. We have no proof—no actual, solid proof.”
“We have faith. We must have faith. If you can’t believe in someone or something that wipes out disease and war, what can you believe in?”
“That’s what bothers me.”
“The world is built on faith,” said Mary. “Faith in God and in ourselves and in the decency of mankind.”
“You’re wonderful,” exclaimed Peter.
He caught her tight and kissed her and she clung against him and when finally they let each other go, the great bronze door was opening.
Silently, they walked across the threshold with arms around each other, into a foyer that arched high overhead. There were murals on the high arched ceiling, and others paneled in the walls, and four great flights of stairs led upward.
But the stairways were roped off by heavy velvet cords. Another cord, hooked into gleaming standards, and signs with pointing arrows showed them which way to go.
Obediently, walking in the hush that came close to reverence, they went across the foyer to the single open door.
They stepped into a large room, with great, tall, slender windows that let in the morning sunlight, and it fell across the satiny newness of the blackboards, the big-armed class chairs, the heavy reading tables, case after case of books, and the lectern on the lecture platform.
They stood and looked at it and Mary said to Peter: “I was right. They were school bells, after all. We’ve come to school, Peter. The first day we ever went to school.”
“Kindergarten,” Peter said, and his voice choked as he pronounced the word.
It was just right, he thought, so humanly right: the sunlight and the shadow, the rich bindings of the books, the dark patina of the wood, the heavy silence over everything. It was an Earthly classroom in the most scholarly tradition. It was Cambridge and Oxford and the Sorbonne and an Eastern ivy college all rolled into one.
The aliens hadn’t missed a bet—not a single bet.
“I have to go,” said Mary. “You wait right here for me.”
“I’ll wait right here,” he promised.
He watched her cross the room and open a door. Through it, he saw a corridor that went on for what seemed miles and miles. Then she shut the door and he was alone.
He stood there for a moment, then swung swiftly around. Almost running across the foyer, he reached the great bronze door. But there was no door, or none that he could see. There was not even a crack where a door should be. He went over the wall inch by inch and he found no door.
He turned away from the wall and stood in the foyer, naked of soul, and felt the vast emptiness of the building thunder in his brain.
Up there, he thought, up there for a thousand stories, the building stretched into the sky. And down here was kindergarten and up on the second floor, no doubt, first grade, and you’d go up and up and what would be the end—and the purpose of that end?
When did you graduate?
Or did you ever graduate?
And when you graduated, what would you be?
What would you be? he asked.
Would you be human still?
They would be coming to school for days, the ones who had been picked, the ones who had passed the strange entrance examination that was necessary to attend this school. They’d come down the metal roads and climb the steps and the great bronze door would open and they would enter. And others would come, too, out of curiosity, but if they did not have the symbol, the doors would not open for them.
And those who did come in, when and if they felt the urge to flee, would find there were no doors.
He went back into the classroom and stood where he had stood before.
Those books, he wondered. What was in them? In just a little while, he’d have the courage to pick one out and see. And the lectern? What would stand behind the lectern?
What, not who.
The door opened and Mary came across the room to him.
“There are apartments out there,” she said. “The cutest apartments you have ever seen. And one of them has our names on it and there are others that have other names an
d some that have no names at all. There are other people coming, Peter. We were just a little early. We were the ones who started first. We got here before the school bell rang.”
Peter nodded. “Let’s sit down and wait,” he said.
Side by side, they sat down, waiting for the Teacher.
Reunion on Ganymede
Written as part of the first wave of stories that Clifford D. Simak wrote for Astounding Science Fiction after John W. Campbell Jr. was appointed that magazine’s new editor, “Reunion on Ganymede” represents Cliff’s desire to write science fiction stories that featured ordinary people—in this case, an elderly veteran with striking similarities to Gramp Stevens, the first character to appear in “City,” written just a short time after this story.
This story was first published in the November 1938 issue of Campbell’s magazine.
—dww
I
“By cracky,” shouted Gramp Parker, “you’re tryin’ to mess up all my plans. You’re tryin’ to keep me from goin’ to this reunion.”
“You know that isn’t true, pa,” protested his daughter, Celia. “But I declare, you are a caution. I’ll worry every minute you are gone.”
“Who ever heard of a soldier goin’ any place without his side arms?” stormed Gramp. “If I can’t wear those side arms I’m not goin’. All the other boys will have ’em.”
His daughter argued. “You know what happened when you tried to show Harry how that old flame pistol worked,” she reminded him. “It’s a wonder both of you weren’t killed.”
“I ain’t goin’ to do no shootin’ with ’em,” declared Gramp. “I just want to wear ’em with my uniform. Don’t feel dressed without ’em.”
His daughter gave up. She knew the argument might go on all day. “All right, pa,” she said, “but you be careful.”
She got up and went into the house. Gramp stretched his old bones in the sun. It was pleasant here of a June morning on a bench in front of the house.
The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 16