The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two

by Clifford D. Simak

  Then there would be hunger, or at least the fear and threat of hunger. And the urge to reproduce. There would be the urgency and the happiness of life, the thrill of swiftly moving feet and the sleek contentment of the well-filled belly and the sweetness of sleep … and what else? What else might there be to fill a mouse’s life?

  He crouched in a place of safety and listened and knew that all was well. All was safe and there was food and shelter against the coming cold. For he knew about the cold, not so much from the experience of other winters as from an instinct handed down through many generations of shivering in the cold and dying of the cold.

  To his ears came the soft rustlings in the shock as others of his kind moved softly on their business. He smelled the sweetness of the sun-cured grass that had been brought in to fashion nests for warm and easy sleeping. And he smelled, as well, the grains of corn and the succulent weed seeds that would keep their bellies full.

  All is well, he thought. All is as it should be. But one must keep watch, one must never lower one’s guard, for security is a thing that can be swept away in a single instant. And we are so soft … we are so soft and frail, and we make good eating. A paw-step in the dark can spell swift and sure disaster. A whir of wings is the song of death.

  He closed his eyes and tucked his feet beneath him and wrapped his tail around him.…

  Sutton sat with his back against the tree and suddenly, without knowing how or when he had become so, he was rigid with the knowledge of what had happened to him.

  He had closed his eyes and tucked his feet beneath him and wrapped his tail about him and he had known the simple fears and the artless, ambitionless contentment of another life … of a life that hid in a corn shock from the paw-steps and the wings, that slept in sun-scented grass and felt a vague but vital happiness in the sure and fundamental knowledge that there was food and warmth and shelter.

  He had not felt it merely, or known it alone … he had been the little creature, he had been the mouse that the corn shock sheltered; and at one and the same time he had been Asher Sutton, sitting with his back against a straight-trunked shellbark hickory tree, gazing out across the autumn-painted valley.

  There were two of us, said Sutton. I, myself, and I, the mouse. There were two of us at once, each with his separate identity. The mouse, the real mouse, did not know it, for if he had known or guessed I would have known as well, for I was as much the mouse as I was myself.

  He sat quiet and still, not a muscle moving, wonder gnawing at him. Wonder and a fear, a fear of a dormant alienness that lay within his brain.

  He had brought a ship from Cygni, he had returned from death, he had rolled a six.

  Now this!

  A man is born and he has a body and a mind that have many functions, some of them complex, and it takes him years to learn those functions, more years to master them. Months before one takes a toddling step, months more before one shapes a word, years before thought and logic become polished tools … and sometimes, said Sutton, sometimes they never do.

  Even then there is a certain guidance, the guidance of experienced mentors … parents at first and teachers after that and the doctors and the churches and all the men of science and the people that one meets. All the people, all the contacts, all the forces that operate to shape one into a social being capable of using the talents that he holds for the good of himself and the society which guides him and holds him to its path.

  Heritage, too, thought Sutton … the inbred knowledge and the will to do and think certain things in a certain way. The tradition of what other men have done and the precepts that have been fashioned from the wisdom of the ages.

  The normal human has one body and one mind, and Lord knows, Sutton thought, that is enough for any man to get along with. But I, to all intents, have what amounts to a second body and perhaps even a second mind, but for that second body I have no mentors and I have no heritage. I do not know how to use it yet; I’m just taking my first toddling step, I am finding out, slowly, one by one, the things that I may do. Later on, if I live long enough, I may even learn how to do them well.

  But there are mistakes that one will make. A child will stumble when it walks at first, and its words to begin with are only the approximation of words and it does not know enough not to burn its finger with matches it has lighted.

  “Johnny,” he said. “Johnny, talk to me.”

  “Yes, Ash?”

  “Is there more, Johnny?”

  “Wait and see,” said Johnny. “I cannot tell you. You must wait and see.”

  XL

  The android investigator said, “We checked Bridgeport back to the year 2000 and we are convinced nothing ever happened there. It was a small village and it lay off the main trunk of world happenings.”

  “It wouldn’t have to be a big thing,” Eva Armour told him. “It could have been a little thing. Just some slight clue. A word out of the context of the future, perhaps. A word that Sutton might have dropped in some unguarded moment and someone else picked up and used. Within a few years a word like that would become a part of the dialect of that community.”

  “We checked for the little things, miss,” the investigator said. “We checked for any aberration, any hint that might point to Sutton’s having been in the community. We used approved methods and we covered the field. But we found nothing, absolutely nothing. The place is barren of any leads at all.”

  “He must have gone there,” said Eva. “The robot at the information center talked to him. He asked about Bridgeport. It indicated that he had some interest in the place.”

  “But it didn’t necessarily indicate that he was going there,” Herkimer pointed out.

  “He went someplace,” said Eva. “Where did he go?”

  “We threw in as large a force of investigators as was possible without arousing suspicion, both locally and in the future,” the investigator told them. “Our men practically fell over one another. We sent them out as book salesmen and scissors grinders and unemployed men looking for work. We canvassed every home for twenty miles around, first at twenty-year intervals, then, when we found nothing, at ten, and finally at five. If there had been any word or any rumor we would have run across it.”

  “Back to the year 2000, you say,” said Herkimer. “Why not to 1999 or 1950?”

  “We had to set an arbitrary date somewhere,” the investigator told him.

  “The Sutton family lived in that locality,” said Eva. “I suppose you investigated them just a bit more closely.”

  “We had men working on the Sutton farm off and on,” said the investigator. “As often as the family was in need of any help on the farm one of our men showed up to get himself the job. When the family needed no help, we had men on other farms near by. One of our men bought a tract of timber in that locality and spent ten years at woodcutting … he could have stretched it out much longer but we were afraid someone would get suspicious.

  “We did this from the year 2000 up to 3150, when the last of the family moved from the area.”

  Eva looked at Herkimer. “The family has been checked all the way?” she asked.

  Herkimer nodded. “Right to the day that Asher left for Cygni. There’s nothing that would help us.”

  Eva said, “It seems so hopeless. He is somewhere. Something happened to him. The future, perhaps.”

  “That’s what I am thinking,” Herkimer told her. “The Revisionists may have intercepted him. They may be holding him.”

  “They couldn’t hold him … not Asher Sutton,” Eva said. “They couldn’t hold him if he knew all his powers.”

  “But he doesn’t know them,” Herkimer reminded her. “And we couldn’t tell him about them or draw them to his attention. He had to find them for himself. He had to be put under pressure and suddenly discover them by natural reaction. He couldn’t be taught them, he had to evolve into them.”

  “We did so well,” said Eva. “We were doing so well. We forced Morgan into ill-considered action by condit
ioning Benton into challenging Sutton, the one quick way to get rid of Asher when Adams failed to fall in with the plan to kill him. And that Benton incident put Asher on his guard without our having to tell him that he should be careful. And now,” she said. “And now …”

  “The book was written,” Herkimer told her.

  “But it doesn’t have to be,” said Eva. “You and I may be no more than puppets in some probability world that will pinch out tomorrow.”

  “We’ll cover all key points in the future,” Herkimer told her. “We’ll redouble our espionage of the Revisionists, check back on every task force of the past. Maybe we’ll learn something.”

  “It’s the random factors,” Eva said. “You can’t be sure, ever. All of time and space for them to happen in. How can we know where to look or turn? Do we have to fight our way through every possible happening to get the thing we want?”

  “You forgot one factor,” Herkimer said calmly.

  “One factor?”

  “Yes, Sutton himself. Sutton is somewhere and I have a great faith in him. In him and his destiny. For, you see, he pays attention to his destiny and that will pay off in the end.”

  XLI

  “You are a strange man, William Jones,” John H. Sutton told him. “And a good one, too. I’ve never had a better hired hand in all the years I’ve farmed. None of the others would stay more than a year or two, always running off, always going somewhere.”

  “I have no place to go,” said Asher Sutton. “There’s no place I want to go. This is as good as any.”

  And it was better, he told himself, than he had thought it would be, for here were peace and security and a living close to nature that no man of his own age ever had experienced.

  They leaned on the pasture bars and watched the twinkling of the house and auto lights from across the river. In the darkness on the slope below them the cattle, turned out after milking, moved about with quiet, soft sounds, cropping a last few mouthfuls of grass before settling down to sleep. A breeze with a touch of coolness in it drifted up the slope and it was fine and soothing after a day of heat.

  “We alway get a cool night breeze,” said old John H. “No matter how hot the day may be we have easy sleeping.”

  He sighed. “I wonder sometimes,” he said, “how well contented a man should let himself become. I wonder if it may not be a sign of—well, almost sinfulness. For Man is not by nature a contented animal. He is restless and unhappy and it’s that same unhappiness that has driven him, like a lash across his back, to his great accomplishments.”

  “Contentedness,” said Asher Sutton, “is an indication of complete adjustment to one’s particular environment. It is a thing that is not often found … that is too seldom found. Someday Man and other things as well, will know how to achieve it and there will be peace and happiness in all the galaxy.”

  John H. chuckled. “You take in a lot of territory, William.”

  “I was taking the long-range view,” said Sutton. “Someday Man will be going to the stars.”

  John H. nodded. “Yes, I suppose they will. But they will go too soon. Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth.”

  He yawned and said, “I think I will turn in. Getting old, you know, and I need my rest.”

  “I’m going to walk around a bit, said Sutton.

  “You do a lot of walking, William.”

  “After dark,” said Sutton, “the land is different from what it is in daylight. It smells differently. Sweet and fresh and clean, as if it were just washed. You hear things in the quietness you do not hear in daylight. You walk and you are alone with the land and the land belongs to you.”

  John H. wagged his head. “It’s not the land that’s different, William. It is you. Sometimes I think you see and …” he hesitated, then went on, “almost as if you did not quite belong.”

  “Sometimes I think I don’t,” said Sutton.

  “Remember this,” John H. told him. “You are one of us … one of the family, seems like. Let me see, how many years now?”

  “Ten,” said Sutton.

  “That’s right,” said John H. “I can well recall the day you came, but sometimes I forget. Sometimes it seems that you were always here. Sometimes I catch myself thinking you’re a Sutton.”

  He hacked and cleared his throat, spitting in the dust. “I borrowed your typewriter the other day, William,” he said. “I had a letter I had to write. It was an important letter and I wanted it done right.”

  “It’s all right,” said Sutton. “I’m glad it was some use to you.”

  “Getting any writing done these days, William?”

  “No,” said Sutton, “I gave up. I couldn’t do it. I lost my notes, you see. I had it all figured out and I had it down on paper, and I thought maybe I could remember it, but I found I couldn’t. It’s no use trying.”

  John H.’s voice was a soft, low growl in the darkness. “You in any kind of trouble, William?”

  “No,” said Sutton. “Not exactly trouble.”

  “Anything I can do to help?”

  “Not a thing,” said Sutton.

  “Let me know if there is,” said the old man. “We’d do anything for you.”

  “Someday I may go away,” said Sutton. “Maybe suddenly. If I do I wish you would forget me, forget I was ever here.”

  “That’s what you wish, lad?”

  “Yes, it is,” said Sutton.

  “We can’t forget you, William,” said old John H. “We never could do that. But we won’t talk about you. If someone comes and asks about you we’ll act as if you were never here.”

  He paused. “Is that the way you want it, William?”

  “Yes,” said Sutton. “If you don’t mind, that’s the way I want it.”

  They stood silent for a moment, facing one another in the dark, then the old man turned around and clumped toward the lighted windows of the house, and Sutton, turning too, leaned his arms on the pasture bars and stared across the river where the faërie lights were blinking in a land of never-never.

  Ten years, thought Sutton, and the letter’s written. Ten years and the conditions of the past are met. Now the past can get along without me, for I was only staying so that John H. could write the letter … so that he could write it and I could find it in an old trunk six thousand years from now and read it on a nameless asteroid I won by killing a man in a place that will be called the Zag House.

  The Zag House, he thought, will be over there across the river, far up the prairie above the ancient town of Prairie du Chien, and the University of North America, with its matchless towers of beauty, will be set on the hills there to the north and Adams’ house will be near the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers. Great ships will climb into the sky from the Iowa prairies and head out for the stars that even now are twinkling overhead … and other stars that no man’s eye can see unaided.

  The Zag House will be over there, far across the river. And that is where someday, six thousand years from now, I will meet a little girl in a checkered apron. As in a storybook, he thought. Boy meets girl and the boy is tow-headed with a cowlick and he’s barefooted and the girl twists her apron in her hands and tells him what her name is.…

  He straightened and gripped the top bar of the pasture gate.

  “Eva,” he said, “where are you?”

  Her hair was copper and her eyes … what color were her eyes? I have studied you for twenty years, she had said, and he had kissed her for it, not believing the words she spoke, but ready to believe the unspoken word that lay upon her face and body.

  Somewhere she still existed, somewhere in time and space. Somewhere she might be thinking of him as even now he thought of her. If he tried hard enough, he might contact her. Might drive his hunger for her through the folds of space and time and let her know that he still remembered, let her know that somehow, sometime he would come back to her.

  But even as he thought of it, he knew that it was hopeless, that he flo
undered in the grasp of forgotten time as a man may flounder in a running sea. It was not he who would reach out for her, but she or Herkimer or someone else who would reach out to him … if anyone ever did.

  Ten years, he thought, and they have forgotten me. And is it because they cannot find me, or having found me, cannot reach me; or is it for a purpose, and if that is it, what can the purpose be?

  There had been times when he had felt that he was being watched, that nasty touch of cold between the shoulder blades. And there had been the time when someone had run from him when he had been in the woods late of a summer evening hunting for the fence-jumping, cross-eyed heifer that was forever getting lost.

  He turned from the pasture bars and crossed the barnyard, making his way in the darkness as a man will walk in a well-remembered room. From the barn came the scent of freshly mown hay and in the row of chicken coops one of the young birds was cheeping sleepily.

  Even as he walked, his mind flicked out and touched the disturbed chicken’s mind.

  Fluttering apprehension of an unknown thing … there had been a sound coming on the edge of sleep. And a sound was danger … a signal of an unknown danger. Sound and nowhere to go. Darkness and sound. Insecurity.

  Sutton pulled back his mind and walked on. Not much stability in a chicken, he thought. A cow was contented and its thought and purpose as slow-moving as its feeding. A dog was alive and friendly, and a cat, no matter how well tamed it might be, still walked the jungle’s edge.

  I know them all, he thought. I have been each one of them. And there are some that are not quite pleasant. A rat, for example, or a weasel or a bass lying in wait beneath the lily pads. But the skunk … the skunk was a pleasant fellow. One could enjoy living as a skunk.

  Curiosity or practice? Perhaps curiosity, he admitted, the human penchant for prying into things that were hung with signs: No Trespassing. Keep Out. Private. Do Not Disturb. But practice as well, learning one of the tools of the second body. Learning how to move into another mind and share its every shade of intellectual and emotional reaction.