The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two

by Clifford D. Simak

  It was something that was past all description—a mother’s love, a father’s pride, the adoration of a sweetheart, the closeness of a comrade, it was all of these and more. It made the farthest distance near and turned the complex simple and it swept away all fear and sorrow, for all of there being a certain feeling of deep sorrow in it, as if one might feel that never in his lifetime would he know an instant like this, and that in another instant he would lose it and never would be able to hunt it out again. But that was not the way it was, for this ascendant instant kept going on and on.

  Lucy walked between them and she held the bag that contained the Talisman close against her breast, with her two arms clasped about it, and Enoch, looking at her, in the soft glow of its light, could not help but think of a little girl carrying her beloved pussy cat.

  “Never for a century,” said Ulysses, “perhaps for many centuries, perhaps never, has it glowed so well. I myself cannot remember when it was like this. It is wonderful, is it not?”

  “Yes,” said Enoch. “It is wonderful.”

  “Now we shall be one again,” Ulysses said. “Now we shall feel again. Now we shall be a people instead of many people.”

  “But the creature that had it …”

  “A clever one,” Ulysses said. “He was holding it for ransom.”

  “It had been stolen, then.”

  “We do not know all the circumstances,” Ulysses told him. “We will find out, of course.”

  They tramped on in silence through the woods and far in the east one could see, through the treetops, the first flush in the sky that foretold the rising moon.

  “There is something,” Enoch said.

  “Ask me,” said Ulysses.

  “How could that creature back there carry it and not feel—feel no part of it? For if he could have, he would not have stolen it.”

  “There is only one in many billions,” Ulysses said, “who can—how do you say it?—tune in on it, perhaps. To you and I it would be nothing. It would not respond to us. We could hold it in our hands forever and there would nothing happen. But let that one in many billions lay a finger on it and it becomes alive. There is a certain rapport, a sensitivity—I don’t know how to say it—that forms a bridge between this strange machine and the cosmic spiritual force. It is not the machine, itself, you understand, that reaches out and taps the spiritual force. It is the living creature’s mind, aided by the mechanism, that brings the force to us.”

  A machine, a mechanism, no more than a tool—technological brother to the hoe, the wrench, the hammer—and yet as far a cry from these as the human brain was from that first amino acid which had come into being on this planet when the Earth was very young. One was tempted, Enoch thought, to say that this was as far as a tool could go, that it was the ultimate in the ingenuity possessed by any brain. But that would be a dangerous way of thinking, for perhaps there was no limit, there might, quite likely, be no such condition as the ultimate; there might be no time when any creature or any group of creatures could stop at any certain point and say, this is as far as we can go, there is no use of trying to go farther. For each new development produced, as side effects, so many other possibilities, so many other roads to travel, that with each step one took down any given road there were more paths to follow. There’d never be an end, he thought—no end to anything.

  They reached the edge of the field and headed up across it toward the station. From its upper edge came the sound of running feet.

  “Enoch!” a voice shouted out of the darkness. “Enoch, is that you?”

  Enoch recognized the voice.

  “Yes, Winslowe. What is wrong?”

  The mailman burst out of the darkness and stopped, panting with his running, at the edge of light.

  “Enoch, they are coming! A couple of carloads of them. But I put a crimp in them. Where the road turns off into your lane—that narrow place, you know. I dumped two pounds of roofing nails along the ruts. That’ll hold them for a while.”

  “Roofing nails?” Ulysses asked.

  “It’s a mob,” Enoch told him. “They are after me. The nails …”

  “Oh, I see,” Ulysses said. “The deflation of the tires.”

  Winslowe took a slow step closer, his gaze riveted on the glow of the shielded Talisman.

  “That’s Lucy Fisher, ain’t it?”

  “Of course it is,” said Enoch.

  “Her old man came roaring into town just a while ago and said she was gone again. Up until then everything had quieted down and it was all right. But old Hank, he got them stirred up again. So I went down to the hardware store and got them roofing nails and I beat them here.”

  “This mob?” Ulysses asked. “I don’t …”

  Winslowe interrupted him, gasping in his eagerness to tell all his information. “That ginseng man is up there, waiting at the house for you. He has a panel truck.”

  “That,” said Enoch, “would be Lewis with the Hazer’s body.”

  “He is some upset,” said Winslowe. “He said you were expecting him.”

  “Perhaps,” suggested Ulysses, “we shouldn’t just be standing here. It seems to my poor intellect that many things, indeed, may be coming to a crisis.”

  “Say,” the mailman yelled, “what is going on here? What is that thing Lucy has and who’s this fellow with you?”

  “Later,” Enoch told him. “I’ll tell you later. There’s no time to tell you now.”

  “But, Enoch, there’s the mob.”

  “I’ll deal with them,” said Enoch grimly, “when I have to deal with them. Right now there’s something more important.”

  They ran up the slope, the four of them, dodging through the waist-high clumps of weeds. Ahead of them the station reared dark and angular against the evening sky.

  “They’re down there at the turnoff,” Winslowe gasped, wheezing with his running. “That flash of light down the ridge. That was the headlights of a car.”

  They reached the edge of the yard and ran toward the house. The black bulk of the panel truck glimmered in the glow cast by the Talisman. A figure detached itself from the shadow of the truck and hurried out toward them.

  “Is that you, Wallace?”

  “Yes,” said Enoch. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t here.”

  “I was a bit upset,” said Lewis, “when I didn’t find you waiting.”

  “Something unforeseen,” said Enoch. “Something that must be taken care of.”

  “The body of the honored one?” Ulysses asked. “It is in the truck?”

  Lewis nodded. “I am happy that we can restore it.”

  “We’ll have to carry him down to the orchard,” Enoch said. “You can’t get a car in there.”

  “The other time,” Ulysses said, “you were the one who carried him.”

  Enoch nodded.

  “My friend,” the alien said, “I wonder if on this occasion I could be allowed the honor.”

  “Why, yes, of course,” said Enoch. “He would like it that way.”

  And the words came to his tongue, but he choked them back, for it would not have done to say them—the words of thanks for lifting from him the necessity of complete recompense, for the gesture which released him from the utter letter of the law.

  At his elbow, Winslowe said: “They are coming. I can hear them down the road.”

  He was right.

  From down the road, came the soft sound of footsteps padding in the dust, not hurrying, with no need to hurry, the insulting and deliberate treading of a monster so certain of its prey that it need not hurry.

  Enoch swung around and half lifted his rifle, training it toward the padding that came out of the dark.

  Behind him, Ulysses spoke softly: “Perhaps it would be most proper to bear him to the grave in the full glory and unshielded light of our restored Talisman.”


  “She can’t hear you,” Enoch said. “You must remember she is deaf. You will have to show her.”

  But even as he said it, a blaze leaped out that was blinding in its brightness.

  With a strangled cry Enoch half turned back to face the little group that stood beside the truck, and the bag that had enclosed the Talisman, he saw, lay at Lucy’s feet and she held the glowing brightness high and proudly so that it spread its light across the yard and the ancient house, and some of it as well spilled out into the field.

  There was a quietness. As if the entire world had caught its breath and stood attentive and in awe, waiting for a sound that did not come, that would never come but would always be expected.

  And with the quietness came an abiding sense of peace that seemed to seep into the very fiber of one’s being. It was no synthetic thing—not as if someone had invoked a peace and peace then was allowed to exist by sufferance. It was a present and an actual peace, the peace of mind that came with the calmness of a sunset after a long, hot day, or the sparkling, ghost-like shimmer of a springtime dawn. You felt it inside of you and all about you, and there was the feeling that it was not only here but that the peace extended on and out in all directions, to the farthest reaches of infinity, and that it had a depth which would enable it to endure until the final gasp of all eternity.

  Slowly, remembering, Enoch turned back to face the field and the men were there, at the edge of the light cast by the Talisman, a gray, huddled group, like a pack of chastened wolves that slunk at the faint periphery of a campfire’s light.

  And as he watched, they melted back—back into the deeper dark from which they had padded in the dust track of the road.

  Except for one who turned and bolted, plunging down the hill in the darkness toward the woods, howling in maddened terror like a frightened dog.

  “There goes Hank,” said Winslowe. “That is Hank running down the hill.”

  “I am sorry that we frightened him,” said Enoch soberly. “No man should be afraid of this.”

  “It is himself that he is frightened of,” the mailman said. “He lives with a terror in him.”

  And that was true, thought Enoch. That was the way with Man; it had always been that way. He had carried terror with him. And the thing he was afraid of had always been himself.

  34

  The grave was filled and mounded and the five of them stood for a moment more, listening to the restless wind that stirred in the moon-drenched apple orchard, while from far away, down in the hollows above the river valley, the whippoorwills talked back and forth through the silver night.

  In the moonlight Enoch tried to read the graven line upon the rough-hewn tombstone, but there was not light enough. Although there was no need to read it; it was in his mind:

  Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.

  When you wrote that, the Hazer diplomat had told him, just the night before, you wrote as one of us. And he had not said so, but the Vegan had been wrong. For it was not a Vegan sentiment alone; it was human, too.

  The words were chiseled awkwardly and there was a mistake or two in spelling, for the Hazer language was not an easy one to master. The stone was softer than the marble or the granite most commonly used for gravestones and the lettering would not last. In a few more years the weathering of sun and rain and frost would blur the characters, and in some years after that they would be entirely gone, with no more than the roughness of the stone remaining to show that words had once been written there. But it did not matter, Enoch thought, for the words were graven on more than stone alone.

  He looked across the grave at Lucy. The Talisman was in its bag once more and the glow was softer. She still held it clasped tight against herself and her face was still exalted and unnoticing—as if she no longer lived in the present world, but had entered into some other place, some other far dimension where she dwelled alone and was forgetful of all past.

  “Do you think,” Ulysses asked, “that she will go with us? Do you think that we can have her? Will the Earth …”

  “The Earth,” said Enoch, “has not a thing to say. We Earth people are free agents. It is up to her.”

  “You think that she will go?”

  “I think so,” Enoch said. “I think maybe this has been the moment she had sought for all her life. I wonder if she might not have sensed it, even with no Talisman.”

  For she always had been in touch with something outside of human ken. She had something in her no other human had. You sensed it, but you could not name it, for there was no name for this thing she had. And she had fumbled with it, trying to use it, not knowing how to use it, charming off the warts and healing poor hurt butterflies and only God knew what other acts that she performed unseen.

  “Her parent?” Ulysses asked. “The howling one that ran away from us?”

  “I’ll handle him,” said Lewis. “I’ll have a talk with him. I know him fairly well.”

  “You want her to go back with you to Galactic Central?” Enoch asked.

  “If she will,” Ulysses said. “Central must be told at once.”

  “And from there throughout the galaxy?”

  “Yes,” Ulysses said. “We need her very badly.”

  “Could we, I wonder, borrow her for a day or two.”

  “Borrow her?”

  “Yes,” said Enoch. “For we need her, too. We need her worst of all.”

  “Of course,” Ulysses said. “But I don’t …”

  “Lewis,” Enoch asked, “do you think our government—the Secretary of State, perhaps—might be persuaded to appoint one Lucy Fisher as a member of our peace conference delegation?”

  Lewis stammered, made a full stop, then began again: “I think it could possibly be managed.”

  “Can you imagine,” Enoch asked, “the impact of this girl and the Talisman at the conference table?”

  “I think I can,” said Lewis. “But the Secretary undoubtedly would want to talk with you before he arrived at his decision.”

  Enoch half turned toward Ulysses, but he did not need to phrase his question.

  “By all means,” Ulysses said to Lewis. “Let me know and I’ll sit in on the meeting. And you might tell the good Secretary, too, that it would not be a bad idea to begin the formation of a world committee.”

  “A world committee?”

  “To arrange,” Ulysses said, “for the Earth becoming one of us. We cannot accept a custodian, can we, from an outside planet?”

  35

  In the moonlight the tumbled boulder pile gleamed whitely, like the skeleton of some prehistoric beast. For here, near the edge of the cliff that towered above the river, the heavy trees thinned out and the rocky point stood open to the sky.

  Enoch stood beside one of the massive boulders and gazed down at the huddled figure that lay among the rocks. Poor, tattered bungler, he thought, dead so far from home and, so far as he, himself, must be concerned, to so little purpose.

  Although perhaps neither poor nor tattered, for in that brain, now broken and spattered beyond recovery, must surely have lain a scheme of greatness—the kind of scheme that the brain of an earthly Alexander or Xerxes or Napoleon may have held, a dream of some great power, cynically conceived, to be attained and held at whatever cost, the dimensions of it so grandiose that it shoved aside and canceled out all moral considerations.

  He tried momentarily to imagine what the scheme might be, but knew, even as he tested his imagination, how foolish it was to try, for there would be factors, he was sure, that he would not recognize and considerations that might lie beyond his understanding.

  But however that might be, something had gone wrong, for in the plan itself Earth could have had no place other than as a hideout which could be used if trouble struck. This creature’s lying here, then, was a part of desperati
on, a last-ditch gamble that had not worked out.

  And, Enoch thought, it was ironic that the key of failure lay in the fact that the creature, in its fleeing, had carried the Talisman into the backyard of a sensitive, and on a planet, too, where no one would have thought to look for a sensitive. For, thinking back on it, there could be little doubt that Lucy had sensed the Talisman and had been drawn to it as truly as a magnet would attract a piece of steel. She had known nothing else, perhaps, than that the Talisman had been there and was something she must have, that it was something she had waited for in all her loneliness, without knowing what it was or without hope of finding it. Like a child who sees, quite suddenly, a shiny, glorious bauble on a Christmas tree and knows that it’s the grandest thing on Earth and that it must be hers.

  This creature lying here, thought Enoch, must have been able and resourceful. For it would have taken great ability and resourcefulness to have stolen the Talisman to start with, to keep it hidden for years, to have penetrated into the secrets and the files of Galactic Central. Would it have been possible, he wondered, if the Talisman had been in effective operation? With an energetic Talisman would the moral laxity and the driving greed been possible to motivate the deed?

  But that was ended now. The Talisman had been restored and a new custodian had been found—a deaf-mute girl of Earth, the humblest of humans. And there would be peace on Earth and in time the Earth would join the cofraternity of the galaxy.

  There were no problems now, he thought. No decisions to be made. Lucy had taken the decisions from the hands of everyone.

  The station would remain and he could unpack the boxes he had packed and put the journals back on the shelves again. He could go back to the station once again and settle down and carry on his work.

  I am sorry, he told the huddled shape that lay among the boulders. I am sorry that mine was the hand that had to do it to you.

  He turned away and walked out to where the cliff dropped straight down to the river flowing at its foot. He raised the rifle and held it for a moment motionless and then he threw it out and watched it fall, spinning end for end, the moonlight glinting off the barrel, saw the tiny splash it made as it struck the water. And far below, he heard the smug, contented gurgling of the water as it flowed past this cliff and went on, to the further ends of Earth.