New Folks' Home: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 6) (26 page)

It was necessary, he told himself, that he find the nice little bear, for it was the one that slept with him and if he did not find it, he knew that it would spend a lonely and comfortless night. But at no time did he admit, even to his innermost thought, that it was he who needed the bear and not the bear who needed him.

A soaring bat swooped low and for a terrified moment, catching sight of the zooming terror, a blob of darkness in the gathering dusk, he squatted low against the ground, huddling against the sudden fear that came out of the night. Sounds of fright bubbled in his throat and now he saw the great dark garden as an unknown place, filled with lurking shadows that lay in wait for him.

He stayed cowering against the ground and tried to fight off the alien fear that growled from behind each bush and snarled in every darkened corner. But even as the fear washed over him, there was one hidden corner of his mind that knew there was no need of fear. It was as if that one area of his brain still fought against the rest of him, as if that small section of cells might know that the bat was no more than a flying bat, that the shadows in the garden were no more than absence of light.

There was a reason, he knew, why he should not be afraid—a good reason born of a certain knowledge he no longer had. And that he should have such knowledge seemed unbelievable, for he was scarcely two years old.

He tried to say it—two years old.

There was something wrong with his tongue, something the matter with the way he had to use his mouth, with the way his lips refused to shape the words he meant to say.

He tried to define the words, tried to tell himself what he meant by two years old and one moment it seemed that he knew the meaning of it and then it escaped him.

The bat came again and he huddled close against the ground, shivering as he crouched. He lifted his eyes fearfully, darting glances here and there, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the looming house and it was a place he knew as refuge.

“House,” he said, and the word was wrong, not the word itself, but the way he said it.

He ran on trembling, unsure feet and the great door loomed before him, with the latch too high to reach. But there was another way, a small swinging door built into the big door, the sort of door that is built for cats and dogs and sometimes little children. He darted through it and felt the sureness and the comfort of the house about him. The sureness and the comfort—and the loneliness.

He found his second-best teddy bear, and, picking it up, clutched it to his breast, sobbing into its scratchy back in pure relief from terror.

There is something wrong, he thought. Something dreadfully wrong. Something is as it should not be. It is not the garden or the darkened bushes or the swooping winged shape that came out of the night. It is something else, something missing, something that should be here and isn’t.

Clutching the teddy bear, he sat rigid and tried desperately to drive his mind back along the way that would tell him what was wrong. There was an answer, he was sure of that. There was an answer somewhere; at one time he had recognized the need he felt and there had been no way to supply it—and now he couldn’t even know the need, could feel it, but he could not know it.

He clutched the bear closer and huddled in the darkness, watching the moonbeam that came through a window, high above his head, and etched a square of floor in brightness.

Fascinated, he watched the moonbeam and all at once the terror faded. He dropped the bear and crawled on hands and knees, stalking the moonbeam. It did not try to get away and he reached its edge and thrust his hands into it and laughed with glee when his hands were painted by the light coming through the window.

He lifted his face and stared up at the blackness and saw the white globe of the Moon, looking at him, watching him. The Moon seemed to wink at him and he chortled joyfully.

Behind him a door creaked open and he turned clumsily around.

Someone stood in the doorway, almost filling it—a beautiful person who smiled at him. Even in the darkness he could sense the sweetness of the smile, the glory of her golden hair.

“Time to eat, Andy,” said the woman. “Eat and get a bath and then to bed.”

Andrew Young hopped joyfully on both feet, arms held out—happy and excited and contented.

“Mummy!” he cried. “Mummy … Moon!”

He swung about with a pointing finger and the woman came swiftly across the floor, knelt and put her arms around him, held him close against her. His cheek against hers, he stared up at the Moon and it was a wondrous thing, a bright and golden thing, a wonder that was shining new and fresh.

On the street outside, Stanford and Riggs stood looking up at the huge house that towered above the trees.

“She’s in there now,” said Stanford. “Everything’s quiet so it must be all right.”

Riggs said, “He was crying in the garden. He ran in terror for the house. He stopped crying about the time she must have come in.”

Stanford nodded. “I was afraid we were putting it off too long, but I don’t see now how we could have done it sooner. Any outside interference would have shattered the thing he tried to do. He had to really need her. Well, it’s all right now. The timing was just about perfect.”

“You’re sure, Stanford?”

“Sure? Certainly I am sure. We created the android and we trained her. We instilled a deep maternal sense into her personality. She knows what to do. She is almost human. She is as close as we could come to a human mother eighteen feet tall. We don’t know what Young’s mother looked like, but chances are he doesn’t either. Over the years his memory has idealized her. That’s what we did. We made an ideal mother.”

“If it only works,” said Riggs.

“It will work,” said Stanford, confidently. “Despite the shortcomings we may discover by trial and error, it will work. He’s been fighting himself all this time. Now he can quit fighting and shift responsibility. It’s enough to get him over the final hump, to place him safely and securely in the second childhood that he had to have. Now he can curl up, contented. There is someone to look after him and think for him and take care of him. He’ll probably go back just a little further … a little closer to the cradle. And that is good, for the further he goes, the more memories are erased.”

“And then?” asked Riggs worriedly.

“Then he can proceed to grow up again.”

They stood watching, silently.

In the enormous house, lights came on in the kitchen and the windows gleamed with a homey brightness.

I, too, Stanford was thinking. Some day, I, too. Young has pointed the way, he has blazed the path. He had shown us, all the other billions of us, here on Earth and all over the Galaxy, the way it can be done. There will be others and for them there will be more help. We’ll know then how to do it better.

Now we have something to work on.

Another thousand years or so, he thought, and I will go back, too. Back to the cradle and the dreams of childhood and the safe security of a mother’s arms.

It didn’t frighten him in the least.

Beachhead

This story originally appeared in the July 1951 issue of
Fantastic
Adventures
as “You’ll Never Go Home Again.” But the author’s journals suggest that Cliff Simak sent it to his agent under the title “Beachhead,” and that’s how it appeared in subsequent anthologies. Thus, the story was first copyrighted under the former name, but its appearance here is under that second name.

“This looks like an interesting world,” the anthropologist said.

—dww

There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could stop a human planetary survey party. It was a specialized unit created for and charged with one purpose only—to establish a bridgehead on an alien planet, to blast out the perimeters of that bridgehead and establish a base where there would be some elbow-room. Then hold that elbow-room against all comers until it was time to go.

After the base was once established, the brains of the party got to work. They turned the place inside out. They put it on tape and captured it within the chains of symbols they scribbled in their field books. They pictured it and wrote it and plotted it and reduced it to a neat assembly of keyed and symbolic facts to be inserted in the galactic files.

If there was life, and sometimes there was, they prodded it to get reaction. Sometimes the reaction was extremely violent, and other times it was much more dangerously subtle. But there were ways in which to handle both the violent and the subtle, for the legionnaires and their robots were trained to a razor’s edge and knew nearly all the answers.

There was nothing in the galaxy, so far known, that could stop a human survey party.

Tom Decker sat at ease in the empty lounge and swirled the ice in the highball glass, well contented, watching the first of the robots emerge from the bowels of the cargo space. They dragged a conveyor belt behind them as they emerged, and Decker, sitting idly, watched them drive supports into the ground and rig up the belt.

A door clicked open back of Decker and he turned his head.

“May I come in, sir?” Doug Jackson asked.

“Certainly,” said Decker.

Jackson walked to the great curving window and looked out. “What does it look like, sir?” he asked.

Decker shrugged. “Another job,” he said. “Six weeks. Six months. Depends on what we find.”

Jackson sat down beside him. “This one looks tough,” he said. “Jungle worlds always are a bit meaner than any of the others.”

Decker grunted at him. “A job. That’s all. another job to do. Another report to file. Then they’ll either send out an exploitation gang or a pitiful bunch of bleating colonists.”

“Or,” said Jackson, “they’ll file the report and let it gather dust for a thousand years or so.”

“They can do anything they want,” Decker told him. “We turn it in. What someone else does with it after that is their affair, not ours.”

They sat quietly watching the six robots roll out the first of the packing cases, rip off its cover and unpack the seventh robot, laying out his various parts neatly in a row in the tramped-down, waist-high grass. Then, working as a team, with not a single fumble, they put No. 7 together, screwed his brain case into his metal skull, flipped up his energizing switch and slapped the breastplate home.

No. 7 stood groggily for a moment. He swung his arms uncertainly, shook his head from side to side. Then, having oriented himself, he stepped briskly forward and helped the other six heave the packing box containing No. 8 off the conveyor belt.

“Takes a little time this way,” said Decker, “but it saves a lot of space. Have to cut our robot crew in half if we didn’t pack them at the end of every job. They stow away better.”

He sipped at his highball speculatively. Jackson lit a cigarette.

“Someday,” said Jackson, “we’re going to run up against something that we can’t handle.”

Decker snorted.

“Maybe here,” insisted Jackson, gesturing at the nightmare jungle world outside the great curved sweep of the vision plate.

“You’re a romanticist,” Decker told him shortly. “In love with the unexpected. Besides that, you’re new. Get a dozen trips under your belt and you won’t feel this way.”

“It could happen,” insisted Jackson.

Decker nodded, almost sleepily. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe it could, at that. It never has, but I suppose it could. And when it does, we take it on the lam. It’s no part of our job to fight a last ditch battle. When we bump up against something that’s too big to handle, we don’t stick around. We don’t take any risks.”

He took another sip.

“Not even calculated risks,” he added.

The ship rested on the top of a low hill, in a small clearing masked by tall grass, sprinkled here and there with patches of exotic flowers. Below the hill a river flowed sluggishly, a broad expanse of chocolate-colored water moving in a sleepy tide through the immense vine-entangled forest.

As far as the eye could see, the jungle stretched away, a brooding darkness that even from behind the curving quartz of the vision plate seemed to exude a heady, musty scent of danger that swept up over the grass-covered hilltop. There was no sign of life, but one knew, almost instinctively, that sentiency lurked in the buried pathways and tunnels of the great tree-land.

Robot No. 8 had been energized and now the eight split into two groups, ran out two packing cases at a time instead of one. Soon there were twelve robots, and then they formed themselves into three working groups.

“Like that,” said Decker, picking up the conversation where they had left it lying. He gestured with his glass, now empty. “No calculated risks. We send the robots first. They unpack and set up their fellows. Then the whole gang turns to and uncrates the machinery and sets it up and gets it operating. A man doesn’t even put his foot on the ground until he has a steel ring around the ship to give him protection.”

Jackson sighed. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “Nothing can happen. We don’t take any chances. Not a single one.”

“Why should we?” Decker asked. He heaved himself out of the chair, stood up and stretched. “Got a thing or two to do,” he said. “Last minute checks and so on.”

“I’ll sit here for a while,” said Jackson. “I like to watch. It’s all new to me.”

“You’ll get over it,” Decker told him. “In another twenty years.”

In his office, Decker lifted a sheaf of preliminary reports off his desk and ran through them slowly, checking each one carefully, filing away in his mind the basic facts of the world outside.

He worked stolidly, wetting a big, blunt thumb against his outthrust tongue to flip the pages off the top of the next stack and deposit them, in not so neat a pile, to his right, face downward.

Atmosphere—Pressure slightly more than Earth. High in oxygen.

Gravity—A bit more than Earth.

Temperature—Hot. Jungle worlds always were. There was a breeze outside now, he thought. Maybe there’d be a breeze most of the time. That would be a help.

Rotation—Thirty-six hour day.

Radiation—None of local origin, but some hard stuff getting through from the sun.

He made a mental note: Watch that.

Bacterial and virus count—As usual. Lots of it. Apparently not too dangerous. Not with every single soul hypoed and immunized and hormoned to his eyebrows. But you never can be sure, he thought. Not entirely sure. No calculated risks, he had told Jackson. But here was a calculated risk and one you couldn’t do a single thing about. If there was a bug that picked you for a host and you weren’t loaded for bear to fight him, you took him on and did the best you could.

Life factor—Lot of emanation. Probably the vegetation, maybe even the soil, was crawling with all sorts of loathsome life. Vicious stuff, more than likely. But that was something you took care of as a matter of routine. No use taking any chances. You went over the ground even if there was no life—just to be sure there wasn’t.

A tap came on the door and he called out for the man to enter.

It was Captain Carr, commander of the Legion unit.

Carr saluted snappily. Decker did not rise. He made his answering salute a sloppy one on purpose. No use, he told himself, letting the fellow establish any semblance of equality, for there was no such equality in fact. A captain of the Legion simply did not rank with the commandant of a galactic survey party.

“Reporting, sir,” said Carr. “We are ready for a landing.”

“Fine, Captain. Fine.”

What was the matter with the fool? The Legion always was ready, always would be ready—that was no more than tradition. Why, then, carry out such an empty, stiff formality?

But it was the nature of a man like Carr, he supposed. The Legion, with its rigid discipline, with its ancient pride of service and tradition, attracted men like Carr, was a perfect finishing school for accomplished martinets.

Tin soldiers, Decker thought, but accomplished ones. As hard-bitten a gang of fighting men as the galaxy had ever known. They were drilled and disciplined to a razor’s edge, serum- and hormone-injected against all known diseases of an alien world, trained and educated in alien psychology and strictly indoctrinated with high survival characteristics which stood up under even the most adverse circumstances.

“We shall not be ready for some time, Captain,” Decker said. “The robots have just started their uncrating.”

“Very well,” said Carr. “We await your orders, sir.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Decker told him, making it quite clear that he wished he would get out. But when Carr turned to go, Decker called him back.

“What is it, sir?” asked Carr.

“I’ve been wondering,” said Decker. “Just wondering, you understand. Can you imagine any circumstances which might arise that the Legion could not handle?”

Carr’s expression was a pure delight to see. “I’m afraid, sir, that I don’t understand your question.”

Decker sighed. “I didn’t think you would,” he said.

Before nightfall, the full working force of robots had been uncrated and had set up some of the machines, enough to establish a small circle of alarm posts around the ship.

A flame thrower burned a barren circle on the hilltop, stretching five hundred feet around the ship. A hard-radiations generator took up its painstaking task, pouring pure death into the soil. The toll must have been terrific. In some spots the ground virtually boiled as the dying life forms fought momentarily and fruitlessly to escape the death that cut them down.

The robots rigged up huge batteries of lamps that set the hilltop ablaze with a light as bright as day, and the work went on.

As yet, no human had set foot outside the ship.

Inside the ship, the robot stewards set up a table in the lounge so that the human diners might see what was going on outside the ship.

The entire company, except for the legionnaires, who stayed in quarters, had gathered for the meal when Decker came into the room.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said.

He strode to the table’s head and the others ranged themselves along the sides. He sat down and there was a scraping of drawn chairs as the others took their places.

He clasped his hands in front of him and bowed his head and parted his lips to say the customary words. He halted even as he was about to speak, and when the words did come they were different from the ones he had said by rote a thousand times before.

“Dear Father, we are Thy servants in an unknown land and there is a deadly pride upon us. Teach us humility and lead us to the knowledge, before it is too late, that men, despite their far traveling and their mighty works, still are as children in Thy sight. Bless the bread we are about to break, we beg Thee, and keep us forever in Thy compassion. Amen.”

He lifted his head and looked down the table. Some of them, he saw, were startled. The others were amused.

They wonder if I’m cracking, he thought. They think the Old Man is breaking up. And that may be true, for all I know. Although I was all right until this afternoon. All right until young Doug Jackson …

“Those were fine words, lad,” said Old MacDonald, the chief engineer. “I thank you for them, sir, and there is them among us who would do well to take some heed upon them.”

Platters and plates were being passed up and down the table’s length and there was the commonplace, homely clatter of silverware and china.

“This looks like an interesting world,” said Waldron, the anthropologist. “Dickson and I were up in observation just before the sun set. We thought we saw something down by the river. Some sort of life.”

Decker grunted, scooping fried potatoes out of a bowl onto his plate. “Funny if we don’t run across a lot of life here. The radiation wagon stirred up a lot of it when it went over the field today.”

“What Waldron and I saw,” said Dickson, “looked humanoid.”

Decker squinted at the biologist. “Sure of that?” he asked.

Dickson shook his head. “The seeing was poor. Couldn’t be absolutely sure. Seemed to me there were two or three of them. Matchstick men.”

Waldron nodded. “Like a picture a kid would draw,” he said. “One stroke for the body. Two strokes each for arms and legs. A circle for a head. Angular. Ungraceful. Skinny.”

“Graceful enough in motion, though,” said Dickson. “When they moved, they went like cats. Flowed, sort of.”

“We’ll know plenty soon enough,” Decker told them mildly. “In a day or two we’ll flush them.”

Funny, he thought. On almost every job someone popped up to report he had spotted humanoids. Usually there weren’t any. Usually it was just imagination. Probably wishful thinking, he told himself, the yen of men far away from their fellow men to find in an alien place a type of life that somehow seemed familiar.

Although the usual humanoid, once you met him in the flesh, turned out to be so repulsively alien that alongside him an octopus would seem positively human.

Franey, the senior geologist, said, “I’ve been thinking about those mountains to the west of us, the ones we caught sight of when we were coming in. Had a new look about them. New mountains are good to work in. They haven’t worn down. Easier to get at whatever’s in them.”