I crouched there watching and now, for the first time, I had a chance to think about it, to try to figure out what was going on. I had come here, across more than sixty million years, to see some dinosaurs, and I sure was seeing them, but under what you might say were peculiar circumstances. The dinosaurs fit, all right. They looked mostly like the way they looked in books, but the dogs and car-men were something else again. They were distinctly out of place.
The dogs were pacing back and forth, sliding along in their sinuous fashion, and the car-men were zipping back and forth, and every once in a while one of the beasts would break out of the circle and the minute that it did, a half dozen dogs and a couple of car-men would race to intercept it and drive it back again.
The circle of beasts must have had, roughly, a diameter of a mile or more—a mile of milling, frightened creatures. A lot of paleontologists have wondered whether dinosaurs had any voice and I can tell you that they did. They were squealing and roaring and quacking and there were some of them that hooted—I think it was the duckbills hooting, but I can’t be sure.
Then, all at once, there was another sound, a sort of fluttering roar that seemed to be coming from the sky. I looked up quickly and I saw them coming down—a dozen or so spaceships, they couldn’t have been anything but spaceships. They came down rather fast and they didn’t seem too big and there were tails of thin, blue flame flickering at their bases. Not the billowing clouds of flame and smoke that our rockets have, but just a thin blue flicker.
For a minute it looked like one of them would land on top of me, but then I saw that it was too far out. It missed me, matter of fact, a good two miles or so. It and the others sat down in a ring around the milling herd out in the valley.
I should have known what would happen out there. It was the simplest explanation one could think of and it was logical. I think, maybe, way deep down, I did know, but my surface mind had pushed it away because it was too matter-of-fact and too ordinary.
Thin snouts spouted from the ships and purple fire curled mistily at the muzzle of those snouts and the dinosaurs went down in a fighting, frightened, squealing mass. Thin trickles of vapor drifted upward from the snouts and out in the center of the circle lay that heap of dead and dying dinosaurs, all those thousands of dinosaurs piled in death.
It is a simple thing to tell, of course, but it was a terrible thing to see. I crouched there behind the bush, sickened at the sight, startled by the silence when all the screaming and the squealing and the hooting ceased. And shaken, too—not by what shakes me now as I write this letter, but shaken by the knowledge that something from outside could do this to the Earth.
For they were from outside. It wasn’t just the spaceships, but those pinkish dogs and gray-green car men, which were not cars and men, but a single organism, were not things of Earth, could not be things of Earth.
I crept back from the bush, keeping low in hope that the bush would screen me from the things down in the valley until I reached the swale top. One of the dogs swung around and looked my way and I froze, and after a time he looked away.
Then I was over the top of the swale and heading back toward the time machine. But half way down the slope, I turned around and came back again, crawling on my belly, squirming to the hilltop to have another look.
It was a look I’ll not forget.
The dogs and car-men had swarmed in upon the heap of dead dinosaurs, and some of the cars already were crawling back toward the grounded spaceships, which had let down ramps. The cars were moving slowly, for they were heavily loaded and the loads they carried were neatly butchered hams and racks of ribs.
And in the sky there was a muttering and I looked up to see yet other spaceships coming down—the little transport ships that would carry this cargo of fresh meat up to another larger ship that waited overhead.
It was then I turned and ran.
I reached the top of the hill and piled into the time machine and set it at zero and came home. I didn’t even stop to hunt for the binoculars I’d dropped.
And now that I am home, I’m not going back again. I’m not going anywhere in that time machine. I’m afraid of what I might find any place I go. If Wyalusing College has any need of it, I’ll give them the time machine.
But that’s not why I wrote.
There is no doubt in my mind what happened to the dinosaurs, why they became extinct. They were killed off and butchered and hauled away, to some other planet, perhaps many light years distant, by a race which looked upon the Earth as a cattle range—a planet that could supply a vast amount of cheap protein.
But that, you say, happened more than sixty million years ago. This race did once exist. But in sixty million years it would almost certainly have changed its ways or drifted off in its hunting to some other sector of the galaxy, or, perhaps, have become extinct, like the dinosaurs.
But I don’t think so. I don’t think any of those things happened. I think they’re still around. I think Earth may be only one of many planets that supply their food.
And I’ll tell you why I think so. They were back on Earth again, I’m sure, some 10,000 or 11,000 years ago, when they killed off the mammoth and the mastodon, the giant bison, the great cave bear and the saber-tooth and a lot of other things. Oh, yes. I know they missed Africa. They never touched the big game there. Maybe, after wiping out the dinosaurs, they learned their lesson, and left Africa for breeding stock.
And now I come to the point of this letter, the thing that has me worried.
Today there are just a few less than three billion of us humans in the world. By the year 2000 there may be as many as six billion of us.
We’re pretty small, of course, and these things went in for tonnage, for dinosaurs and mastodon and such. But there are so many of us! Small as we are, we may be getting to the point where we’ll be worth their while.
Ogre
One of the earliest of many Simak stories that explore the notion of plant-based intelligence, this story, originally published in the January 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, was initially entitled “Last Concert,” which gives a better hint at the point of the story than does the title under which it was ultimately released. But while there is a great deal that could be said about numerous aspects of this story, going into such detail might spoil it for you. However, I’ll mention the rather unusual action Cliff took, more than a decade later, of using the concept of the “life blanket” in his later story “So Bright the Vision”—not the usual reuse of an idea or name from an older story, but a rare form of self-reference that implied credit to the older story for providing a concept in the newer one.
—dww
The moss brought the news. Hundreds of miles the word had gossiped its way along, through many devious ways. For the moss did not grow everywhere. It grew only where the soil was sparse and niggardly, where the larger, lustier, more vicious plant things could not grow to rob it of light, or uproot it, or crowd it out, or do it other harm.
The moss told the story to Nicodemus, life blanket of Don Mackenzie, and it all came about because Mackenzie took a bath.
Mackenzie took his time in the bathroom, wallowing around in the tub and braying out a song, while Nicodemus, feeling only half a thing, moped outside the door. Without Mackenzie, Nicodemus was, in fact, even less than half of a thing. Accepted as intelligent life, Nicodemus and others of his tribe were intelligent only when they were wrapped about their humans. Their intelligence and emotions were borrowed from the things that wore them.
For the aeons before the human beings came to this twilight world, the life blankets had dragged out a humdrum existence. Occasionally one of them allied itself with a higher form of plant life, but not often. After all, such an arrangement was very little better than staying as they were.
When the humans came, however, the blankets finally clicked. Between them and the men of Earth grew up a perfect
mutual agreement, a highly profitable and agreeable instance of symbiosis. Overnight, the blankets became one of the greatest single factors in galactic exploration.
For the man who wore one of them, like a cloak around his shoulders, need never worry where a meal was coming from; knew, furthermore, that he would be fed correctly, with a scientific precision that automatically counterbalanced any upset of metabolism that might be brought by alien conditions. For the curious plants had the ability to gather energy and convert it into food for the human body, had an uncanny instinct as to the exact needs of the body, extending, to a limited extent, to certain basic medical requirements.
But if the life blankets gave men food and warmth, served as a family doctor, man lent them something that was even more precious—the consciousness of life. The moment one of the plants wrapped itself around a man it became, in a sense, the double of that man. It shared his intelligence and emotions, was whisked from the dreary round of its own existence into a more exalted pseudo-life.
Nicodemus, at first moping outside the bathroom door, gradually grew peeved. He felt his thin veneer of human life slowly ebbing from him and he was filled with a baffling resentment.
Finally, feeling very put upon, he waddled out of the trading post upon his own high lonesome, flapping awkwardly along, like a sheet billowing in the breeze.
The dull brick-red sun that was Sigma Draco shone down upon a world that even at high noon appeared to be in twilight and Nicodemus’ bobbling shape cast squirming, unsubstantial purple shadows upon the green and crimson ground. A rifle tree took a shot at Nicodemus but missed him by a yard at least. That tree had been off the beam for weeks. It had missed everything it shot at. Its best effort had been scaring the life out of Nellie, the bookkeeping robot that never told a lie, when it banked one of its bulletlike seeds against the steel-sheeted post.
But no one had felt very badly about that, for no one cared for Nellie. With Nellie around, no one could chisel a red cent off the company. That, incidentally, was the reason she was at the post.
But for a couple of weeks now, Nellie hadn’t bothered anybody. She had taken to chumming around with Encyclopedia, who more than likely was slowly going insane trying to figure out her thoughts.
Nicodemus told the rifle tree what he thought of it, shooting at its own flesh and blood, as it were, and kept shuffling along. The tree, knowing Nicodemus for a traitor to his own, a vegetable renegade, took another shot at him, missed by two yards and gave up in disgust.
Since he had become associated with a human, Nicodemus hadn’t had much to do with other denizens of the planet—even the Encyclopedia. But when he passed a bed of moss and heard it whispering and gossiping away, he tarried for a moment, figurative ear cocked to catch some juicy morsel.
That is how he heard that Alder, a minor musician out in Melody Bowl, finally had achieved a masterpiece. Nicodemus knew it might have happened weeks before, for Melody Bowl was half a world away and the news sometimes had to travel the long way round, but just the same he scampered as fast as he could hump back toward the post.
For this was news that couldn’t wait. This was news Mackenzie had to know at once. He managed to kick up quite a cloud of dust coming down the home stretch and flapped triumphantly through the door, above which hung the crudely lettered sign:
GALACTIC TRADING CO.
Just what good the sign did, no one yet had figured out. The humans were the only living things on the planet that could read it.
Before the bathroom door, Nicodemus reared up and beat his fluttering self against it with tempestuous urgency.
“All right,” yelled Mackenzie. “All right. I know I took too long again. Just calm yourself. I’ll be right out.”
Nicodemus settled down, still wriggling with the news he had to tell, heard Mackenzie swabbing out the tub.
With Nicodemus wrapped happily about him, Mackenzie strode into the office and found Nelson Harper, the factor, with his feet up on the desk, smoking his pipe and studying the ceiling.
“Howdy, lad,” said the factor. He pointed at a bottle with his pipestem. “Grab yourself a snort.”
Mackenzie grabbed one.
“Nicodemus has been out chewing fat with the moss,” he said. “Tells me a conductor by the name of Alder has composed a symphony. Moss says it’s a masterpiece.”
Harper took his feet off the desk. “Never heard of this chap, Alder,” he said.
“Never heard of Kadmar, either,” Mackenzie reminded him, “until he produced the Red Sun symphony. Now everyone is batty over him. If Alder has anything at all, we ought to get it down. Even a mediocre piece pays out. People back on Earth are plain wacky over this tree music of ours. Like that one fellow … that composer—”
“Wade,” Harper filled in. “J. Edgerton Wade. One of the greatest composers Earth had ever known. Quit in mortification after he heard the Red Sun piece. Later disappeared. No one knows where he went.”
The factor nursed his pipe between his palms. “Funny thing. Came out here figuring our best trading bet would be new drugs or maybe some new kind of food. Something for the high-class restaurants to feature, charge ten bucks a plate for. Maybe even a new mineral. Like out on Eta Cassiop. But it wasn’t any of those things. It was music. Symphony stuff. High-brow racket.”
Mackenzie took another shot at the bottle, put it back and wiped his mouth. “I’m not so sure I like this music angle,” he declared. “I don’t know much about music. But it sounds funny to me, what I’ve heard of it. Brain-twisting stuff.”
Harper grunted. “You’re O.K. as long as you have plenty of serum along. If you can’t take the music, just keep yourself shot full of serum. That way it can’t touch you.”
Mackenzie nodded. “It almost got Alexander that time, remember? Ran short of serum while he was down in the Bowl trying to dicker with the trees. Music seemed to have a hold on him. He didn’t want to leave. He fought and screeched and yelled around. … I felt like a heel, taking him away. He never has been quite the same since then. Doctors back on Earth finally were able to get him straightened out, but warned him never to come back.”
“Alexander’s back again,” said Harper. “Grant spotted him over at the Groombridge post. Throwing in with the Groomies, I guess. Just a yellow-bellied renegade. Going against his own race. You boys shouldn’t have saved him that time. Should have let the music get him.”
“What are you going to do about it?” demanded Mackenzie.
Harper shrugged his shoulders. “What can I do about it? Unless I want to declare war on the Groombridge post. And that is out. Haven’t you heard it’s all sweetness and light between Earth and Groombridge 34? That’s the reason the two posts are stuck away from Melody Bowl. So each one of us will have a fair shot at the music. All according to some pact the two companies rigged up. Galactic’s got so pure they wouldn’t even like it if they knew we had a spy planted on the Groomie post.”
“But they got one planted on us,” declared Mackenzie. “We haven’t been able to find him, of course, but we know there is one. He’s out there in the woods somewhere, watching every move we make.”
Harper nodded his head. “You can’t trust a Groomie. The lousy little insects will stoop to anything. They don’t want that music, can’t use it. Probably don’t even know what music is. Haven’t any hearing. But they know Earth wants it, will pay any price to get it, so they are out here to beat us to it. They work through birds like Alexander. They get the stuff, Alexander peddles it.”
“What if we run across Alexander, chief?”
Harper clicked his pipestem across his teeth. “Depends on circumstances. Try to hire him, maybe. Get him away from the Groomies. He’s a good trader. The company would do right by him.”
Mackenzie shook his head. “No soap. He hates Galactic. Something that happened years ago. He’d rather make us trouble than turn a good deal for himself.�
��
“Maybe he’s changed,” suggested Harper. “Maybe you boys saving him changed his mind.”
“I don’t think it did,” persisted Mackenzie.
The factor reached across the desk and drew a humidor in front of him, began to refill his pipe.
“Been trying to study out something else, too,” he said. “Wondering what to do with the Encyclopedia. He wants to go to Earth. Seems he’s found out just enough from us to whet his appetite for knowledge. Says he wants to go to Earth and study our civilization.”
Mackenzie grimaced. “That baby’s gone through our minds with a fine-toothed comb. He knows some of the things we’ve forgotten we ever knew. I guess it’s just the nature of him, but it gets my wind up when I think of it.”
“He’s after Nellie now,” said Harper. “Trying to untangle what she knows.”
“It would serve him right if he found out.”
“I’ve been trying to figure it out,” said Harper. “I don’t like this brain-picking of his any more than you do, but if we took him to Earth, away from his own stamping grounds, we might be able to soften him up. He certainly knows a lot about this planet that would be of value to us. He’s told me a little—”
“Don’t fool yourself,” said Mackenzie. “He hasn’t told you a thing more than he’s had to tell to make you believe it wasn’t a one-way deal. Whatever he has told you has no vital significance. Don’t kid yourself he’ll exchange information for information. That cookie’s out to get everything he can get for nothing.”
The factor regarded Mackenzie narrowly. “I’m not sure but I should put you in for an Earth vacation,” he declared. “You’re letting things upset you. You’re losing your perspective. Alien planets aren’t Earth, you know. You have to expect wacky things, get along with them, accept them on the basis of the logic that makes them the way they are.”
I Am Crying All Inside and Other Stories Page 11