The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two

by Clifford D. Simak

  “Mr. Benton sent you here?”

  “Yes. He sends a challenge.”

  “A challenge?”

  “Yes. You know, a duel.”

  “But I am unarmed.”

  “You cannot be unarmed,” said Herkimer.

  “I never fought a duel in all my life,” said Sutton. “I don’t intend to now.”

  “You are vulnerable.”

  “What do you mean, vulnerable? If I go unarmed …”

  “But you cannot go unarmed. The code was changed just a year or two ago. No man younger than a hundred years can go unarmed.”

  “But if one does?”

  “Why, then,” said Herkimer, “anyone who wants to can pot you like a rabbit.”

  “You are sure of this?”

  Herkimer dug into his pocket, brought out a tiny book. He wet his finger and fumbled at the pages.

  “It’s right here,” he said.

  “Never mind,” said Sutton. “I will take your word.”

  “You accept the challenge, then?”

  Sutton grimaced. “I suppose I have to. Mr. Benton will wait, I presume, until I buy a gun.”

  “No need of that,” Herkimer told him, brightly. “I brought one along. Mr. Benton always does that. Just a courtesy, you know. In case someone hasn’t got one.”

  He reached into his pocket and held out the weapon. Sutton took it and laid it on the table.

  “Awkward-looking thing,” he said.

  Herkimer stiffened. “It’s traditional,” he declared. “The finest weapon made. Shoots a .45-caliber slug. Handloaded ammunition. Sights are tested in for fifty feet.”

  “You pull this?” asked Sutton, pointing.

  Herkimer nodded. “It is called a trigger. And you don’t pull it. You squeeze it.”

  “Just why does Mr. Benton challenge me?” asked Sutton. “I don’t even know the man. Never even heard of him.”

  “You are famous,” said Herkimer.

  “Not that I have heard of.”

  “You are an investigator,” Herkimer pointed out. “You have just come back from a long and perilous mission. You’re carrying a mysterious-appearing attaché case. And there are reporters waiting in the lobby.”

  Sutton nodded. “I see. When Benton kills someone he likes them to be famous.”

  “It is better if they are,” said Herkimer. “More publicity.”

  “But I don’t know Mr. Benton. How will I know who I’m supposed to shoot at?”

  “I’ll show you,” said Herkimer, “on the televisor.”

  He stepped to the desk, dialed a number and stepped back.

  “That’s him,” he said.

  In the screen a man was sitting before a chess table. The pieces were in mid-game. Across the board stood a beautifully machined robotic.

  The man reached out a hand, thoughtfully played his knight. The robotic clicked and chuckled. It moved a pawn. Benton’s shoulders hunched forward and he bent above the board. One hand came around and scratched the back of his neck.

  “Oscar’s got him worried,” said Herkimer. “He always has him worried. Mr. Benton hasn’t won a single game in the last ten years.”

  “Why does he keep on playing, then?”

  “Stubborn,” said Herkimer. “But Oscar’s stubborn, too.”

  He made a motion with his hand.

  “Machines can be so much more stubborn than humans. It’s the way they’re built.”

  “But Benton must have known, when he had Oscar fabricated, that Oscar would beat him,” Sutton pointed out. “A human simply can’t beat a robotic expert.”

  “Mr. Benton knew that,” said Herkimer, “but he didn’t believe it. He wanted to prove otherwise.”

  “Egomaniac,” said Sutton.

  Herkimer stared at him calmly. “I believe that you are right, sir. I’ve sometimes thought the same myself.”

  Sutton brought his gaze back to Benton, who was still hunched above the board, the knuckles of one hand thrust hard against his mouth.

  The veined face was scrubbed and pink and chubby, and the brooding eyes, thoughtful as they were, still held a fat twinkle of culture and good-fellowship.

  “You’ll know him now?” asked Herkimer.

  Sutton nodded. “Yes, I think I can pick him out. He doesn’t look too dangerous.”

  “He’s killed sixteen men,” Herkimer said, stiffly. “He plans to lay away his guns when he makes it twenty-five.”

  He looked straight at Sutton and said, “You’re the seventeenth.”

  Sutton said, meekly, “I’ll try to make it easy for him.”

  “How would you wish it, sir?” asked Herkimer. “Formal, or informal?”

  “Let’s make it catch-as-catch-can.”

  Herkimer was disapproving; “There are certain conventions.…”

  “You can tell Mr. Benton,” said Sutton, “that I don’t plan to ambush him.”

  Herkimer picked up his cap, put it on his head.

  “The best of luck, sir,” he said.

  “Why, thank you, Herkimer,” said Sutton.

  The door closed and Sutton was alone. He turned back to the screen. Benton played to double up his rooks. Oscar chuckled at him, slid a bishop three squares along the board and put Benton’s king in check.

  Sutton snapped the visor off.

  He scraped a hand across his now-shaved chin.

  Coincidence or plan? It was hard to know.

  One of the mermaids had climbed to the edge of the fountain and balanced her three-inch self precariously. She whistled at Sutton. He turned swiftly at the sound and she dived into the pool, swam in circles, mocking him with obscene signs.

  Sutton leaned forward, reached into the visor rack, brought out the INF-JAT directory, flipped the pages swiftly.

  INFORMATION-Terrestrial.

  And the headings:

  Culinary

  Culture

  Customs

  That would be it. Customs.

  He found DUELING, noted the number and put back the book. He reset the dial and snapped the tumbler for direct communication.

  A robot’s streamlined, modernistic face filled the plate.

  “At your service, sir,” it said.

  “I have been challenged to a duel,” said Sutton.

  The robot waited for the question.

  “I don’t want to fight a duel,” said Sutton. “Is there any way, legally, for me to back out? I’d like to do it gracefully, too, but I won’t insist on that.”

  “There is no way,” the robot said.

  “No way at all?”

  “You are under one hundred?” the robot asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You are sound of mind and body?”

  “I think so.”

  “You are or you aren’t. Make up your mind.”

  “I am,” said Sutton.

  “You do not belong to any bona fide religion that prohibits killing?”

  “I presume I could classify myself as a Christian,” said Sutton. “I believe there is a Commandment about killing.”

  The robot shook his head. “It doesn’t count.”

  “It is clear and specific,” Sutton argued. “It says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

  “It is all of that,” the robot told him. “But it has been discredited. You humans discredited it yourselves. You never obeyed it. You either obey or you forfeit it. You can’t forget it with one breath and invoke it with the next.”

  “I guess I’m sunk then,” said Sutton.

  “According to the revision of the year 7990,” said the robot, “arrived at by convention, any male human under the age of one hundred, sound in mind and body, and unhampered by religious bonds or belief, which are subject to a court of inquiry, must fight a duel whenever challenged.”

  “I see,” said Sutton.

  “The history of dueling,” said the robot, “is very interesting.”

  “It is barbaric,” said Sutton.

  “Perhaps so. But the humans are st
ill barbaric in many other ways as well.”

  “You’re impertinent,” Sutton told him.

  “I’m sick and tired of it,” the robot said. “Sick and tired of the smugness of you humans. You say you’ve outlawed war and you haven’t, really. You’ve just fixed it so no one dares to fight you. You say you have abolished crime and you have, except for human crime. And a lot of crime you have abolished isn’t crime at all, except by human standards.”

  “You’re taking a long chance, friend,” said Sutton, softly, “talking the way you are.”

  “You can pull the plug on me,” the robot told him, “any time you want to. Life isn’t worth it, the kind of job I have.”

  He saw the look on Sutton’s face and hurried on.

  “Try to see it this way, sir. Through all his history, Man has been a killer. He was smart and brutal, even from the first. He was a puny thing, but he found how to use a club and rocks, and when the rocks weren’t sharp enough he chipped them so they were. There were things, at first, he should not by rights have killed. They should have killed him. But he was smart and he had the club and flints and he killed the mammoth and the saber tooth and other things he could not have faced barehanded. So he won the Earth from the animals. He wiped them out, except the ones he allowed to live for the service that they gave him. And even as he fought with the animals, he fought with others of his kind. After the animals were gone, he kept on fighting … man against man, nation against nation.”

  “But that is past,” said Sutton. “There hasn’t been a war for more than a thousand years. Humans have no need of fighting now.”

  “That is just the point,” the robot told him. “There is no more need of fighting, no more need of killing. Oh, once in a while, perhaps, on some far-off planet where a human must kill to protect his life or to uphold human dignity and power. But, by and large, there is no need of killing.

  “And yet you kill. You must kill. The old brutality is in you. You are drunk with power and killing is a sign of power. It has become a habit with you … a thing you’ve carried from the caves. There’s nothing left to kill but one another, so you kill one another and you call it dueling. You know it’s wrong and you’re hypocritical about it. You’ve set up a fine system of semantics to make it sound respectable and brave and noble. You call it traditional and chivalric … and even if you don’t call it that in so many words, that is what you think. You cloak it with the trappings of your vicious past, you dress it up with words and the words are only tinsel.”

  “Look,” said Sutton, “I don’t want to fight this duel. I don’t think it’s …”

  There was vindictive glee in the robot’s voice.

  “But you’ve got to fight it. There’s no way to back out. Maybe you would like some pointers. I have all sorts of tricks.…”

  “I thought you didn’t approve of dueling.”

  “I don’t,” the robot said. “But it’s my job. I’m stuck with it. I try to do it well. I can tell you the personal history of every man who ever fought a duel. I can talk for hours on the advantage of rapiers over pistols. Or if you’d rather I argued for pistols, I can do that, too. I can tell you about the old American West gun slicks and the Chicago gangsters and the handkerchief and dagger deals and …”

  “No, thanks,” said Sutton.

  “You aren’t interested?”

  “I haven’t got the time.”

  “But, sir,” the robot pleaded, “I don’t get a chance too often. I don’t get many calls. Just an hour or so …”

  “No,” said Sutton, firmly.

  “All right, then. Maybe you’d tell me who has challenged you.”

  “Benton. Geoffrey Benton.”

  The robot whistled.

  “Is he that good?” asked Sutton.

  “All of it,” the robot said.

  Sutton shut the visor off.

  He sat quietly in his chair, staring at the gun. Slowly he reached out a hand and picked it up. The butt fitted snuggly in his hand. His finger curled around the trigger. He lifted it and sighted at the doorknob.

  It was easy to handle. Almost as if it were a part of him. There was a feel of power within it … of power and mastery. As if he suddenly were stronger and greater … and more dangerous.

  He sighed and laid it down.

  The robot had been right.

  He reached out to the visor, pushed the signal for the lobby desk.

  Ferdinand’s face came in.

  “Anyone waiting down there for me, Ferdinand?”

  “Not a soul,” said Ferdinand.

  “Anyone asked for me?”

  “No one, Mr. Sutton.”

  “No reporters? Or photographers?”

  “No, Mr. Sutton. Were you expecting them?”

  Sutton didn’t answer.

  He cut off, feeling very silly.

  VI

  Man was spread thin throughout the galaxy. A lone man here, a handful there. Slim blobs of bone and brain and muscle to hold a galaxy in check. Slight shoulders to hold up the cloak of human greatness spread across the light-years.

  For Man had flown too fast, had driven far beyond his physical capacity. Not by strength did he hold his starry outposts, but by something else … by depth of human character, by his colossal conceit, by his ferocious conviction that Man was the greatest living thing the galaxy had spawned. All this in spite of many evidence that he was not … evidence that he took and evaluated and cast aside, scornful of any greatness that was not ruthless and aggressive.

  Too thin, Christopher Adams told himself. Too thin and stretched too far. One man backed by a dozen androids and a hundred robots could hold a solar system. Could hold it until there were more men or until something cracked.

  In time there’d be more men, if the birthrate held. But it would be many centuries before the line would grow much thicker, for Man held only the key points … one planet in an entire system, and not in every system. Man had leap-frogged since there weren’t men enough, had set up strategic spheres of influence, had by-passed all but the richest, most influential systems.

  There was room to spread, room for a million years.

  If there were any humans left in a million years.

  If the life on those other planets let the humans live, if there never came a day when they would be willing to pay the terrible price of wiping out the race.

  The price would be high, said Adams, talking to himself. But it would be done, and it would be easy. Just a few hours’ job. Humans in the morning, no humans left by night. What if a thousand others died for every human death … or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand? Under certain circumstances, such a price might well be counted cheap.

  There were islands of resistance even now where one walked carefully … or even walked around. Like 61 Cyngi, for example.

  It took judgment … and some tolerance … and a great measure of latent brutality, but, most of all, conceit, the absolute, unshakable conviction that Man was sacrosanct, that he could not be touched, that he could scarcely die.

  But five men had died, three humans and two androids, beside a river that flowed on Aldebaran XII, just a few short miles from Andrelon, the planetary capital.

  They had died of violence, of that there was no question.

  Adams’ eyes sought out the paragraph of Thorne’s latest report:

  Force had been applied from the outside. We found a hole burned through the atomic shielding of the engine. The force must have been controlled or it would have resulted in absolute destruction. The automatics got in their work and headed off the blast, but the machine went out of control and smashed into the tree. The area was saturated with intensive radiation.

  Good man, Thorne, thought Adams. He won’t let a single thing be missed. He had those robots in there before the place was cool.

  But there wasn’t much to find … not much that gave an answer. Just a batch of question marks.

  Five men had died and when that was said that was the end of fact. For they
were burned and battered and there were no features left, no fingerprints or eyeprints to match against the records.

  A few feet away from the strewn blackness of the bodies the machine had smashed into a tree, had wrapped itself around and half sheared the trunk in two. A machine that, like the men, was without a record. A machine without a counterpart in the known galaxy and, so far at least, a machine without a purpose.

  Thorne would give it the works. He would set it up in solidographs, down to the last shattered piece of glass and plastic. He would have it analyzed and diagramed and the robots would put it in scanners that would peel it and record it molecule by molecule.

  And they might find something. Just possibly they might.

  Adams shoved the report to one side and leaned back in his chair. Idly, he spelled out his name lettered across the office door, reading backwards slowly and with exaggerated care. As if he’d never seen the name before. As if he did not know it. Puzzling it out.

  And then the line beneath it:

  SUPERVISOR, ALIEN RELATIONS BUREAU. SPACE SECTOR 16.

  And the line beneath that:

  DEPARTMENT OF GALACTIC INVESTIGATION (JUSTICE).

  Early afternoon sunlight slanted through a window and fell across his head, highlighting the clipped silver mustache, the whitening temple hair.

  Five men had died.…

  He wished that he could get it out of his mind. There was other work. This Sutton thing, for instance. The reports on that would be coming in within an hour or so.

  But there was a photograph … a photograph from Thorne, that he could not forget.

  A smashed machine and broken bodies and a great smoking gash sliced across the turf. The silver river flowed in a silence that one knew was there even in the photograph and far in the distance the spidery web of Andrelon rose against a pinkish sky.

  Adams smiled softly to himself. Aldebaran XII, he thought, must be a lovely world. He never had been there and he never would be there … for there were too many planets, too many planets for one man to even dream of seeing all.

  Someday, perhaps, when the teleports would work across light-years instead of puny miles … perhaps then a man might just step across to any planet that he wished, for a day or hour or just to say he’d been there.

  But Adams didn’t need to be there … he had eyes and ears there, as he had on every occupied planet within the entire sector.