The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two
Page 19
He remembered that day of forty years before. Remembered how the sky was laced with fiery flame-ribbons and stabbing ray-beams. How ships, their guns silenced, rammed enemy craft and took them with them to the surface.
“We’ll never make it,” moaned the senator.
Gramp swung on him savagely; a steel-sheathed fist lifted menacingly.
“You stop your bawlin’,” he shouted. “You sound like a sick calf. I’ll smack you down if I hear one more peep out of you.”
“But what’s the use of fooling ourselves?” the senator cried. “Our air is nearly gone. We don’t even know if we’re going in the right direction.”
Gramp roared at him.
“Buck up, you spineless jackass. You’re a big man. A senator. Remember that. You gotta get back. Who’d they get to make all ’em speeches if you didn’t get back?”
Jurg Tec’s voice hissed in Gramp’s helmet. “Listen!”
Gramp stood still and listened.
But there was nothing to hear. Just the hiss of the snow against his suit.
“I don’t hear nothin’,” Gramp said.
And then he heard it—a weird thunder that seemed to carry with it an indefinable threat of danger. A thunder like the stamping of many feet, like the measured march of hoofs.
“Ever hear anything like that, Earthy?” asked the Martian.
“It isn’t anything,” shrieked the senator. “Nothing at all. We just imagine it. We all are going crazy.”
The thunder sounded nearer and nearer—clearer and clearer.
“There ain’t supposed to be a livin’ thing on Ganymede,” said Gramp. “But there’s somethin’ out there. Somethin’ alive.”
He felt prickles of fear run up his spine and ruffle the hair at the base of his skull.
A long line of things moved out of the horizon haze and into indistinct vision—a nightmare line of things that shone and glittered in the rays of Jupiter.
“My Lord,” said Gramp, “what are they?”
He glanced around.
To their left was a deep cut-bank, where erosion of long past ages had scooped out a deep, but narrow, depression in the hillside.
“This way,” Gramp yelled and leaped away, heading for the cut-bank.
The line of charging horrors was nearer when they reached the natural fortress.
Gramp looked at Jurg Tec.
“Marshy,” he croaked, “if you never fit before, get ready for it now.”
Jurg Tec nodded grimly, his flame pistol in his fist.
The senator whimpered.
Gramp swung on him, drew back his fist and let drive a blow that caught the senator in the center of his breast-plate and sent him sprawling.
Gramp snarled at him.
“Get out your gun, dang you,” he shrieked, “and pretend you are a man.”
The bunched monsters were closing in—a leaping, frightful mass of beasts that gleamed weirdly in the moon- and-primary light. Massive jaws and cruel, taloned claws and whipping tentacles.
Gramp leveled his flame gun.
“Now,” he shouted, “let ’em have it.” From the jaws of the cut-bank leaped a blast of withering fire that swept the monsters as they charged and seemed to melt them down. But those behind climbed over and charged through the ones the flame had stopped and came on, straight toward the men who crouched in the shadow of the hill.
Gramp’s gun was getting hot. He knew that in a moment it would be a warped and useless thing. That it might even explode in his hand and kill all three of them. For the flame gun is not built to stand continuous fire.
And still the things came on.
Before the cut-bank lay a pile of bodies that glowed metal-red where the pistol flames had raked them.
Gramp dropped his gun and backed away toward the wall of the cut-bank.
Jurg Tec still crouched and worked his pistol with short, sharp, raking jabs, trying to keep it from over-heating.
In a smaller recess crouched the whimpering senator, his gun still in its holster.
Cursing him, Gramp leaped at him, hauled out the flame gun and shoved the senator to one side.
“Let your gun cool, Marshy,” Gramp yelled.
He aimed the new weapon at a shambling thing that crawled over the barricade of bodies. Calmly he blasted it straight between the eyes.
“We’ll need your gun later,” Gramp yelled at Jurg Tec.
A shadowy something, with spines around its face and with a cruel beak just below its eyes, charged over the barricade and Gramp blasted it with one short burst.
The attack was thinning out.
Gramp held his pistol ready and waited for more. But no more came.
“What are ’em dog-gone things?” asked Gramp, jerking his pistol toward the pile of bodies.
“Don’t know,” said the Martian. “There aren’t supposed to be any beasts on Ganymede.”
“They acted dog-gone funny,” Gramp declared. “Not exactly like animals. Like something you wind up and put down on the floor. Like toys. Like the toy animals I got my grandson for Christmas a year or two ago. You wind ’em up and the little rascals run around in circles.”
Jurg Tec stepped outside the cut-bank, nearer to the pile of bodies.
“You be careful, Marshy,” Gramp called out.
“Look here, Earthy,” yelled the Martian.
Gramp strode forward and looked. And what he saw—instead of flesh and bone, instead of any animal structure—were metal plates and molten wire and cogs of many shapes and sizes.
“Robots,” he said. “I’ll be a bowlegged Marshy if that ain’t what they are. Nothin’ but dog-gone robot animals.”
The two old soldiers looked at one another.
“It was a tight squeeze at that,” said Jurg Tec.
“We sure licked hell out of ’em,” Gramp exulted.
“Say,” said Jurg Tec, “they were supposed to have a robot wild-animal fight at Satellite City. You don’t suppose these things were the robots? Got loose some way?”
“By cracky,” said Gramp, “maybe that explains it.”
He straightened from his examination of the heap of twisted, flame-scarred metal and looked at the sky. Jupiter was almost gone.
“We better get goin’,” Gramp decided.
VI
“That must be them,” said the pilot.
He pointed downward and Izzy Newman looked where he pointed.
He saw two figures.
One of them was erect, but staggering as it marched along. Beside it limped another, with its arm thrown across the shoulders of the first to keep from falling.
“But there’s only two,” said Izzy.
“No, there’s three,” declared the pilot. “That one fellow is holding the second one up and he’s dragging the third fellow along by his arm. Look at him. Just skidding along the ground like a sled.”
The pilot dove the plane, struck the ground and taxied close.
Gramp, seeing the plane, halted. He let go of the senator’s arm and eased Jurg Tec to the ground. Then, tottering on his feet, gasping for what little air remained within his oxygen tank, he waited.
Two men came out of the plane. Gramp staggered to meet them.
They helped him in and brought in the other two.
Gramp tore off his helmet and breathed deeply. He helped Jurg Tec to remove his helmet. The senator, he saw, was coming around.
“Dog-gone,” said Gramp, “I did somethin’ today I swore I’d never do.”
“What’s that?” asked Jurg Tec.
“I swore,” said Gramp, “that if I ever had a chance to help a Marshy, I wouldn’t lift a finger. I’d just stand by and watch him kick the bucket.”
Jurg Tec smiled.
“You must have forgot yourself,” he said.
The reunion was drawing to a close. Meeting in extraordinary convention, the veterans had voted to form an Earth-Mars Veterans’ Association. All that remained was to elect the officers.
Jurg Tec had the floor.
“Mr. Chairman,” he said, “I won’t make a speech. I’m just going to move a nomination for commander. No speech is necessary.”
He paused dramatically and the hall was silent.
“I nominate,” said Jurg Tec, “Captain Johnny Parker, better known as Gramp.”
The hall exploded in an uproar. The chairman pounded for order, but the thumping of his gavel was scarcely a whisper in the waves of riotous sound that swept and reverberated in the room.
“Gramp!” howled ten thousand throats. “We want Gramp.”
Hands lifted a protesting Gramp and bore him to the platform.
“Cut it out, dog-gone you,” yelled Gramp, but they only pounded him on the back and yelled at him and left him standing there, all alone beside the chairman’s table.
Before him the convention hall rocketed and weaved in uproar. Bands played and their music did no more than form a background for the boisterous cheering. Newsmen popped up and down, taking pictures. The man beside the microphone crooked a finger at the old man and Gramp, hardly knowing why he did it, stumbled forward, to stand before the mike.
He couldn’t see the crowd so well. There was something the matter with his eyes. Sort of misted up. Funny way for them to act. And his heart was pounding. Too much excitement. Bad for the heart.
“Speech!” roared the ten thousand down below. “Speech! Speech!”
They wanted him to make a speech! They wanted old Gramp Parker to talk into the mike so they could hear what he had to say. He’d never made a speech before in all his life. He didn’t know how to make a speech and he was scared.
Gramp wondered, dimly, what Celia would think of all these goings-on. Hoppin’ mad, probably. And little Harry. But Harry would think his grandpa was a hero. And the bunch down at Grocer White’s store.
“Speech,” thundered the convention hall.
Out of the mist of faces Gramp picked one face—one he could see as plain as day. Jurg Tec, smiling at him, smiling that crooked way the Martians smile. Jurg Tec, his friend. A dog-gone Marshy. A Marshy who had stood shoulder to shoulder with him out on the surface. A Marshy who had stood with him against the metal beasts. A Marshy who had slogged those bitter miles beside him.
There was a word for it. Gramp knew there was a word. He groped madly in his brain for the single word that would tell the story.
And then he had it. It was a funny word. Gramp whispered it. It didn’t sound right. Not the kind of word he’d say. Not what anyone would expect old Gramp Parker to say. A word that would fit better in the mouth of Senator Sherman Brown.
Maybe they’d laugh at him for saying it. Maybe they’d think he was just a damn old fool.
He moved closer to the mike and the uproar quieted, waiting.
“Comrades—” Gramp began and then he stopped.
That was the word. They were comrades now. Marshies and Earthies. They’d fought in bitter hatred, each for what he thought was right. Maybe they had to fight. Maybe that war was something that was needed. But it was forty years ago and all its violence was a whisper in the wind—a dim, old memory blowing from a battlefield where hatred and violence had burned itself out in one lurid blast of strength.
But they were waiting. And they hadn’t laughed.
Galactic Chest
Perhaps providing us with a satirical portrait of the workings of a big-city newspaper of six decades ago, this story was rejected by editors H. F. Gold, John W. Campbell Jr., Anthony Boucher, and Leo Margulies before finally being purchased by Robert A. W. Lowndes more than a year later after it was first submitted in January 1955. It then saw its first publication in the September 1956 issue of Science Fiction Stories.
It’s a lightweight story, no doubt, but there is value to be found in it, not least in its evocation of Cold War–era America (something Cliff viewed with regret, even alarm, in a number of stories written during that period). But I always chuckle a little as Cliff—as he did in several earlier stories—reprises a journalistic tradition of giving the nickname “Lightning” to the paper’s copy boy.
—dww
I had just finished writing the daily Community Chest story, and each day I wrote that story I was sore about it; there were plenty of punks in the office who could have ground out that kind of copy. Even the copy boys could have written it and no one would have known the difference; no one ever read it—except maybe some of the drive chairmen, and I’m not even sure about them reading it.
I had protested to Barnacle Bill about my handling the Community Chest for another year. I had protested loud. I had said: “Now, you know, Barnacle, I been writing that thing for three or four years. I write it with my eyes shut. You ought to get some new blood into it. Give one of the cubs a chance; they can breathe some life into it. Me, I’m all written out on it.”
But it didn’t do a bit of good. The Barnacle had me down on the assignment book for the Community Chest, and he never changed a thing once he put it in the book.
I wish I knew the real reason for that name of his. I’ve heard a lot of stories about how it was hung on him, but I don’t think there’s any truth in them. I think he got it simply from the way he can hang on to a bar.
I had just finished writing the Community Chest story and was sitting there, killing time and hating myself, when along came Jo Ann. Jo Ann was the sob sister on the paper; she got some lousy yarns to write, and that’s a somber fact. I guess it was because I am of a sympathetic nature, and took pity on her, and let her cry upon my shoulder that we got to know each other so well. By now, of course, we figure we’re in love; off and on we talk about getting married, as soon as I snag that foreign correspondent job I’ve been angling for.
“Hi, kid,” I said.
And she says, “Do you know, Mark, what the Barnacle has me down for today?”
“He’s finally ferreted out a one-armed paperhanger,” I guessed, “and he wants you to do a feature.…”
“It’s worse than that,” she moans. “It’s an old lady who is celebrating her one hundredth birthday.”
“Maybe,” I said, “she will give you a piece of her birthday cake.”
“I don’t see how even you can joke about a thing like this,” Jo Ann told me. “It’s positively ghastly.”
Just then the Barnacle let out a bellow for me. So I picked up the Community Chest story and went over to the city desk.
Barnacle Bill is up to his elbows in copy; the phone is ringing and he’s ignoring it, and for this early in the morning he has worked himself into more than a customary lather. “You remember old Mrs. Clayborne?”
“Sure, she’s dead. I wrote the obit on her ten days or so ago.”
“Well, I want you to go over to the house and snoop around a bit.”
“What for?” I asked. “She hasn’t come back, has she?”
“No, but there’s some funny business over there. I got a tip that someone might have hurried her a little.”
“This time,” I told him, “you’ve outdone yourself. You’ve been watching too many television thrillers.”
“I got it on good authority,” he said and turned back to his work.
So I went and got my hat and told myself it was no skin off my nose how I spent the day; I’d get paid just the same!
But I was getting a little fed up with some of the wild-goose chases to which the Barnacle was assigning not only me, but the rest of the staff as well. Sometimes they paid off; usually, they didn’t. And when they didn’t, Barnacle had the nasty habit of making it appear that the man he ha
d sent out, not he himself, had dreamed up the chase. His “good authority” probably was no more than some casual chatter of someone next to him at the latest bar he’d honored with his cash.
Old Mrs. Clayborne had been one of the last of the faded gentility which at one time had graced Douglas Avenue. The family had petered out, and she was the last of them; she had died in a big and lonely house with only a few servants, and a nurse in attendance on her, and no kin close enough to wait out her final hours in person.
It was unlikely, I told myself, that anyone could have profited by giving her an overdose of drugs, or otherwise hurrying her death. And even if it was true, there’d be little chance that it could be proved; and that was the kind of story you didn’t run unless you had it down in black and white.
I went to the house on Douglas Avenue. It was a quiet and lovely place, standing in its fenced-in yard among the autumn-colored trees.
There was an old gardener raking leaves, and he didn’t notice me when I went up the walk. He was an old man, pottering away and more than likely mumbling to himself, and I found out later that he was a little deaf.
I went up the steps, rang the bell and stood waiting, feeling cold at heart and wondering what I’d say once I got inside. I couldn’t say what I had in mind; somehow or other I’d have to go about it by devious indirection.
A maid came to the door.
“Good morning, ma’am,” I said. “I am from the Tribune. May I come in and talk?”
She didn’t even answer; she looked at me for a moment and then slammed the door. I told myself I might have known that was the way it would be.
I turned around, went down the steps, and cut across the grounds to where the gardener was working. He didn’t notice me until I was almost upon him; when he did see me, his face sort of lit up. He dropped the rake, and sat down on the wheelbarrow. I suppose I was as good an excuse as any for him to take a breather.
“Hello,” I said to him.
“Nice day,” he said to me.
“Indeed it is.”
“You’ll have to speak up louder,” he told me; “I can’t hear a thing you say.”
“Too bad about Mrs. Clayborne,” I told him.