The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two

by Clifford D. Simak

  For many of the lives they lived must be dull, indeed. An angleworm, for instance. Or the bloated unintelligence that crept through nauseous jungle worlds.

  But because of them someday an angleworm might be more than an angleworm … or a greater angleworm. The bloated unintelligence might be something that would reach to greater heights than Man.

  For every thing that moved, whether slow or fast, across the face of any world, was not one thing, but two. It and its own individual destiny.

  And sometimes destiny took a hold and caught … and sometimes it didn’t. But where there was destiny there was hope forever. For destiny was hope. And destiny was everywhere.

  No thing walks alone.

  Nor crawls nor hops nor swims nor flies nor shambles.

  One planet barred to every mind but one and, once that mind arrived, barred forevermore.

  One mind to tell the galaxy when the galaxy was ready. One mind to tell of destiny and hope.

  That mind, thought Sutton, is my own.

  Lord help me now.

  For if I had been the one to choose, if I had been asked, if I had had a thing to say about it, it would not have been I, but someone or something else. Some other mind in another million years. Some other thing in ten times another million years.

  It is too much to ask, he thought … too much to ask a being with a mind as frail as Man’s, to bear the weight of revelation, to bear the load of knowing.

  But destiny put the finger on me.

  Happenstance or accident or pure blind luck … it would be destiny.

  I lived with destiny, as destiny … I was a part of destiny instead of destiny being a part of me, and we came to know each other as if we were two humans … better than if we were two humans. For destiny was I and I was destiny. Destiny had no name and I called it Johnny and the fact I had to name him is a joke that destiny, my destiny, still can chuckle over.

  I lived with Johnny, the vital part of me, the spark of me that men call life and do not understand … the part of me I still do not understand … until my body had been repaired again. And then I returned to it and it was a different body and a better body, for the many destinies had been astounded and horrified at the inefficiency and the flimsy structure of the human body.

  And when they fixed it up, they made it better. They tinkered it so it had a lot of things it did not have before … many things, I suspect, I still do not know about and will not know about until it is time to use them. Some things, perhaps, I’ll never know about.

  When I went back to my body, destiny came and lived with me again, but now I knew him and recognized him and I called him Johnny and we talked together and I never failed to hear him, as I must many times have failed to hear him in the past.

  Symbiosis, Sutton told himself, a higher symbiosis than the symbiosis of heather with its fungus or the primitive animal with its alga. A mental symbiosis. I am the host and Johnny is my guest and we get along together because we understand each other. Johnny gives me an awareness of my destiny, of the operative force of destiny that shapes my hours and days, and I give Johnny the semblance of life that he could not have through his existence independently.

  “Johnny,” he called and there was no answer.

  He waited and there was no answer.

  “Johnny,” he called again and there was terror in his voice. For Johnny must be there. Destiny must be there.

  Unless … unless … the thought struck him slowly, kindly. Unless he were really dead. Unless this were dreaming, unless this were a twilight zone where knowledge and a sense of being linger for a moment between the state of life and death.

  Johnny’s voice was small, very small and very far away.

  “Ash.”

  “Yes, Johnny.”

  “The engines, Ash. The engines.”

  He fought his body out of the pilot’s chair, stood on weaving legs.

  He could scarcely see … just the faded, blurred, shifting outline of the shape of metal that enclosed him. His feet were leaden weights that he could not move … that were no part of him at all.

  He stumbled, staggered forward, fell flat upon his face.

  Shock, he thought. The shock of violence, the shock of death, the shock of draining blood, of mangled, blasted flesh.

  There had been strength, a surge of strength that had brought him, clear-eyed, clear-brained, to his feet. A strength that had been great enough to take the lives of the two men who had killed him. The strength was vengeance.

  But that strength was gone and now he knew it had been the strength of brain, the strength of will rather than of mere bone and muscle that had let him do it.

  He struggled to his hands and knees and crept. He stopped and rested and then crept a few feet more and his head hung limp between his shoulders, drooling blood and mucus and slobbered stomach slime that left a trail across the floor.

  He found the door of the engine room and by slow degrees pulled himself upward to the latch.

  His fingers found the latch and pulled it down, but they had no strength and they slipped off the metal and he fell into a huddled pile of sheer defeat against the hard coldness of the door.

  He waited for a long time and then he tried again and this time the latch clicked open even as his fingers slipped again, and as he fell, he fell across the threshold.

  Finally, after so long a wait that he thought he could never do it, he got on hands and knees again and crept forward by slow inches.

  XXX

  Asher Sutton awoke to darkness.

  To darkness and an unknowing.

  To unknowing and a slow, exploding wonder.

  He was lying on a hard, smooth surface and a roof of metal came down close above his head. And beside him was a thing that purred and rumbled. One arm was flung across the purring thing and somehow he knew that he had slept with the thing clasped in his arms, with his body pressed against it, as a child might sleep with a beloved Teddy bear.

  There was no sense of time and no sense of place and no sense of any life before. As if he had sprung full-limbed by magic into life and intelligence and knowing.

  He lay still and his eyes became accustomed to the dark and he saw the open door and the dark stain, now dry, that led across the threshold into the room beyond. Something had dragged itself there, from the other room into this one, and left a trail behind it, and he lay for a long time, wondering what the thing might be, with the quesiness of terror gnawing at his mind. For the thing might still be with him and it might be dangerous.

  But he felt he was alone, sensed a loneness in the throbbing of the engine at his side … and it was thus for the first time that he knew the purring thing for what it was. Name and recognition had slipped into his consciousness without conscious effort, as if it were a thing he had known all the time, and now he knew what it was, except that it seemed to him the name had come ahead of recognition and that, he thought, was strange.

  So the thing beside him was an engine and he was lying on the floor and the metal close above his head was a roof of some sort. A narrow space, he thought. A narrow space that housed an engine and a door that opened into another room.

  A ship. That was it. He was in a ship. And the trail of dark that ran across the threshold.

  At first he thought that some other thing, some imagined thing, had crawled in slime of its own making to mark the trail, but now he remembered. It had been himself … himself crawling to the engines.

  Lying quietly, it came back to him and in wonder he tested his aliveness. He lifted a hand and felt his chest and the clothes were burned away and their scorched edges were crisp between his fingers, but his chest was whole … whole and smooth and hard. Good human flesh. No holes.

  So it was possible, he thought. I remember that I wondered if it was … if Johnny might not have some trick up his sleeve, if my body might not have some capability which I could not suspect.

  It sucked at the stars and it nibbled at the asteroid and it yearned toward the engine
s. It wanted energy. And the engines had the energy … more than the distant stars, more than the cold, frozen chunk of rock that was the asteroid.

  So I crawled to reach the engines and I left a dark death-trail behind me and I slept with the engines in my arms. And my body, my direct-intake, energy-eating body sucked the power that was needed from the flaming core of the reaction chambers.

  And I am whole again.

  I am back in my breath-and-blood body once again and I can go back to Earth.

  He crawled out of the engine room and stood on his two feet.

  Faint starlight came through the visionplates and scattered like jewel dust along the floor and walls. And there were two huddled shapes, one in the middle of the floor and another in a corner.

  His mind took them in and nosed them as a dog would nose a bone and in a little while he remembered what they were. The humanity within him shivered at the black, sprawled shapes, but another part of him, a cold, hard inner core, stood calculating and undismayed in the face of death.

  He moved forward on slow feet and slowly knelt beside one of the bodies. It must be Case, he thought, for Case was thin and tall. But he could not see the face and he did not wish to see the face, for in some dark corner of his mind he still remembered what the faces had been like.

  His hands went down and searched, minnowing through the clothing. He made a tiny pile of things he found and finally he found the thing he was looking for.

  Squatting on his heels, he opened the book to the title page and it was the same as the one he carried in his pocket. The same except for a single line of type, the tiny line at the very bottom.

  And the line said:

  Revised Edition

  So that was it. That was the meaning of the word that had puzzled him: Revisionists.

  There had been a book and it had been revised. Those who lived by the revised edition were the Revisionists. And the others? He wondered, running through the names … Fundamentalists, Primitives, Orthodox, Hard-Shell. There were others, he was sure, and it didn’t matter. It didn’t really matter what the others would be called.

  There were two blank pages and the text began:

  We are not alone.

  No one ever is alone.

  Not since the first faint stirring of the first flicker of life on the first planet in the galaxy that knew the quickening of life, has there ever been a single entity that walked or crawled or slithered down the path of life alone.*

  His eye went down the page to the first footnote.

  *This is the first of many statements which, wrongly interpreted, have caused some readers to believe that Sutton meant to say that life, regardless of its intelligence or moral precepts, is the beneficiary of destiny. His first line should refute this entire line of reasoning, for Sutton used the pronoun “we” and all students of semantics are agreed that it is a common idiom for any genus, when speaking of itself, to use such a personal pronoun. Had Sutton meant all life, he would have written “all life.” But by using the personal pronoun, he undeniably was referring to his own genus, the human race, and the human race alone. He apparently erroneously believed, a not uncommon belief of the day, that the Earth had been the first planet of the galaxy to know the quickening of life. There is no doubt that, in part, Sutton’s revelations of his great discovery of destiny have been tampered with. Assiduous research and study, however, have resulted in determining beyond reasonable doubt which portions are genuine and which are not. Those parts which patently have been altered will be noted and the reasons for this belief will be carefully and frankly pointed out.

  Sutton riffled through the pages quickly. More than half the text was taken up by the fine-print footnotes. Some of the pages had two or three lines of actual text and the rest was filled with lengthy explanation and refutation.

  He slapped the book shut, held it between his flattened palms.

  I tried so hard, he thought. I repeated and reiterated and underscored. Not human life alone, but all life. Everything that was aware.

  And yet they twist my words.

  They fight a war so that my words shall not be the words I wrote, so that the things I meant to say shall be misinterpreted. They scheme and fight and murder so that the great cloak of destiny shall rest on one race alone … so that the most vicious race of animals ever spawned shall steal the thing that was meant not for them alone, but for every living thing.

  And somehow I must stop it. Somehow it must be stopped. Somehow my words must stand, so that all may read and know without the smoke screen of petty theorizing and learned interpretation and weasel logic.

  For it is so simple. Such a simple thing. All life has destiny, not human life alone.

  There is one destiny creature for every other living thing. For every living thing and then to spare. They wait for life to happen and each time it occurs one of them is there and stays there until that particular life is ended. How, I do not know, nor why. I do not know if the actual Johnny is lodged within my mind and being or if he merely keeps in contact with me from Cygni. But I know that he is with me. I know that he will stay.

  And yet the Revisionists will twist my words and discredit me. They will change my book and dig up old scandals about the Suttons so that the mistakes of my forebears, magnified many times, will tend to smear my name.

  They sent back a man who talked to John H. Sutton and he told them things that they could have used. For John Sutton said that there are skeletons in every family closet and in that he spoke the truth. And, old and garrulous as he was, he talked about these skeletons.

  But those tales were not carried forward into the future to be of any use, for the man who heard them came tramping up the road with a bandage on his head and no shoes on his feet. Something happened and he could not go back.

  Something happened.

  Something …

  Sutton rose slowly.

  Something happened, he said, talking to himself, and I know what it was.

  Six thousand years ago in a place that was called Wisconsin.

  He moved forward, heading for the pilot’s chair.

  Asher Sutton was going to Wisconsin.

  XXXI

  Christopher Adams came into his office and hung up his hat and coat.

  He turned around and pulled out the chair before his desk, and in the act of sitting down he froze and listened.

  The psych-tracer burped at him.

  Ker-rup, it chuckled, ker-up, clickity, click, ker-rup.

  Christopher Adams straightened from his half-sitting, half-standing position and put on his hat and coat again.

  Going out, he slammed the door behind him.

  And in all his life, he had never slammed a door.

  XXXII

  Sutton breasted the river, swimming with slow, sure strokes. The water was warm against his body and it talked to him with a deep, important voice and Sutton thought: It is trying to tell me something, as it has tried to tell the people something all down through the ages. A mighty tongue talking down the land, gossiping to itself when there is no one else to hear, but trying, always trying to tell its people the news it has to sell. Some of them, perhaps, have grasped a certain truth and a certain philosophy from the river, but none of them have ever reached the meaning of the river’s language, for it is an unknown language.

  Like the language, Sutton thought, I used to make my notes. For they had to be in a language which no one else could read, a language that had been forgotten in the galaxy aeons before any tongue now living lisped its baby talk. Either a language that had been forgotten or one that never could be known.

  I do not know that language, Sutton told himself, the language of my notes. I do not know whence it came or when or how. I asked, but they would not tell me. Johnny tried to tell me once, but I could not grasp it, for it was a thing that the brain of Man could not accept.

  I know its symbols and the things they stand for, but I do not know the sounds that make it. My tongue might not be able to form th
e sounds that make the spoken language. For all I know it might be the language that this river talks … or the language of some race that went to disaster and to dust a million years ago.

  The black of night came down to nestle against the black of flowing river and the moon had not risen, would not rise for many hours to come. The starlight made little diamond points on the rippling waves of the pulsing river, and on the shore ahead the lights of homes made jagged patterns up and down the land.

  Herkimer has the notes, Sutton told himself, and I hope he has sense enough to hide them. For I will need them later, but not now. I would like to see Herkimer, but I can’t take the chance, for they’ll be watching him. And there’s no doubt they have a tracer on me, but if I move fast enough, I can keep out of their way.

  His feet struck gravel bottom and he let himself down, waded up the shelving shore. The night wind struck him and he shivered, for the river had been warm from a day of sun and the wind had a touch of chill.

  Herkimer, of course, would be one of those who had come back to see that he wrote the book as he would have written it if there had been no interference. Herkimer and Eva … and of the two, Sutton told himself, he could trust Herkimer the most. For an android would fight, would fight and die for the thing that the book would say. The android and the dog and horse and honeybee and ant. But the dog and horse and honeybee and ant would never know, for they could not read.

  He found a grassy bank and sat down and took off his clothes to wring them dry, then put them on again. Then he struck out across the meadow toward the highway that arrowed up the valley.

  No one would find the ship at the bottom of the river … not for a while, at least. And a few hours was all he needed. A few hours to ask a thing that he must know, a few hours to get back to the ship again.

  But he couldn’t waste any time. He had to get the information the quickest way he could. For if Adams had a tracer on him, and Adams would have a tracer on him, they would already know that he had returned to Earth.