The Big Front Yard and Other Stories (13 page)

Iron squealed against iron, an eerie sound that leaped at them from the dark.

Quinn jerked around, and for the first time his gun-muzzle lifted from Carson's body.

Carson moved like lightning, clenched fist coming up and striking down, smashing against the wrist that held the gun; striking entirely by instinct, for it was too dark to see.

Quinn cried out and the gun clanged to the floor.

The back door was open. A figure stood outlined against the lesser dark outside, a crouching figure that carried a rifle at the ready.

Shoulders hunched, head down, one foot braced hard for leverage against the whisky cases, Carson hurled himself at Quinn. He felt the man go over at the impact of the flow, knew he was falling on top of him, hauled back his arm for a blow.

But a foot came up, lashing at his stomach. He sensed its coming, twisted, caught it in the ribs instead and went reeling back against the whisky cases, limp with pain.

Quinn was crouching, springing toward him. A fist exploded in his face, thumped his head against the cases. He ducked his head, ears ringing, and bored in, fists playing a tattoo on Quinn's midriff, driving the man out into the center of the room.

A vicious punch straightened Carson, rocked him. The white blur of Quinn's face was coming toward him and he aimed at it, smashed with all his might – and the face retreated as Quinn staggered backward on his heels.

Carson stepped in, and out of the dark came piledriver blows that shook him with their viciousness.

The face was there again. Carson measured it, brought his fist up almost from the floor in a whistling, singing loop. Pain lanced down his arm as the blow connected with the whiteness of the face and then the face was gone and Quinn was on the floor.

Feet were pounding in the hallway and shouts came from the barroom. Behind him a rifle crashed, thunderous in the closeness of the room, the red breath of its muzzle lighting the place for a single instant.

The rifle crashed again and yet again and the room was full of powder-fumes that stung the nostrils.

“Jake!” yelled Carson.

“You bet your boots,” said the man with the rifle. “You didn't think I'd let you do it all alone!”

“Quick!” gasped Carson. “Get in here, back by the door. They can't reach us here!”

A sixgun blasted and bullets chunked into the cases. Glass crashed and the reek of whisky mingled with the smell of gunsmoke.

Jake came leaping across the room, crouched in the angle back of the door.

Scraping his feet along the floor, Carson located his sixgun, picked it up.

Jake's whisper was rueful. “They got us bottled like a jug of rum.”

Carson nodded in the dark. “Been all right,” he said, “If Quinn hadn't found me.”

“That Quinn you had the shindy with?”

“That's right.”

“Had a mind to step in and do some work with the gunstock,” Jake told him, “but decided it was too risky. Couldn't tell which of you was which.”

Guns thundered in the passageway, the explosions deafening. Bullets thudded into the cases, chewing up the boards, smashing the bottles.

Carson reached up and grasped a case from those stacked behind him. Jake's rifle bellowed. Carson flung the case over his head. It smashed into the doorway. He heaved another one.

Jake blasted away again. The guns in the hallway cut off.

“Keep watch,” Carson told Jake. He heaved more cases in the doorway, blocking it to shoulder-height.

From across the street came the sound of firing – the ugly snarling of a high-powered rifle.

“That's Robinson,” said Jake. “Some of them buzzards tried to sneak out the front door and come at us from behind, but Robinson was Johnny at the rat-hole.”

“Robinson can't stop them for long,” snapped Carson. “They'll get at us in a minute or two –”

A gun hammered almost in their ears and something stabbed Carson in the face. He brushed at it with his hand, pulled away a splinter. The gun roared again, as if it were just beside their heads.

“They're in the back room,” gasped Jake, “shooting at us through the partition!”

“Quick!” yelled Carson. “We got to get out of here! Here, you grab Quinn and haul him out. I'll take the other fellow.”

He grasped the man he had stuck down with the gun-barrel, started to tug him toward the door.

“Why don't we leave 'em here?” yelped Jake. “What in tarnation is the sense of luggin' 'em?”

“Don't argue with me,” yelled Carson. “Just get Quinn out of here.”

The gun in the back room was hammering, was joined by another. Through the holes already punched by the bullets, Carson could see the red flare of the blasting runs. One of the bullets brushed past Carson's face, buried itself with a thud in the stacked cases. Another flicked burning across his ribs.

Savagely he yanked the door open, hauled his man through and dumped him on the ground. Reaching in, he gave the panting, puffing Jake a hand with Quinn.

“Pull them a bit farther away,” said Carson. “We don't want them to get scorched.”

“Scorched?” yipped Jake. “Now you're plumb out of your head!”

“I said scorched,” declared Carson, “and I mean scorched. Things are going to get hot in the next five minutes.”

He plunged his hand into a pocket, brought out a match, scratched it across the seat of his breeches. For a moment he held it in his cupped hand, nursing the flame, then with a flip of his fingers sent it sailing into the whisky-reeking room.

The flame sputtered for a moment on the floor, almost went out, then blazed brilliantly, eating its way along a track of liquor flowing from one of the broken cases.

Carson lit another match, hurled it into the room. The blaze puffed rapidly, leaping along the floor, climbing the cases, snapping and snarling.

Carson turned and ran, Jake pelting at his heels. In the long grass back of the North Star they flung themselves prone, and watched.

The single window in the building was an angry maw of fire, and tiny tongues of flame were pushing their way through the shingled roof.

A man leaped from one of the side windows in a shower of broken glass. Beside Carson, almost in his ear, Jake's rifle bellowed. The man's hat, still on his head despite the leap, was whipped off as if by an unseen hand.

From the
Tribune
office across the street came the flickering of blasting guns, covering the front windows and the door of the burning saloon.

“Listen!” hissed Jake. His hand reached out and grasped Carson by the shoulder. “Horses!”

It was horses – there could be no mistaking that. The thrum of hoofs along the dusty street – the whoop of a riding man, then a crash of thunder as sixguns cut loose.

Men were spilling out of the North Star now, running men with guns blazing in their hands. And down upon them swept the riders, yelling, sixguns tonguing flame.

The riders swept past the North Star, whirled and came back, and in their wake they left quiet figures lying in the dust.

Jake was on his knee, rifle at his shoulder, firing steadily at the running, dodging figures scurrying for cover.

A running man dashed around the corner of the flaming saloon, ducked into the broken, weedy ground back of the jail. For a moment the light of the fire swept across his face and in that moment, Carson recognized him.

It was Fennimore! Fennimore, making a getaway.

Carson leaped to his feet, crouched low and ran swiftly in the direction Fennimore had taken. Ahead of him a gun barked and a bullet sang like an angry bee above his head.

For an instant he saw a darting darker shape in the shadows and brought up his own gun, triggered it swiftly. Out of the darkness, Fennimore's gun answered and the bullet, traveling low, whispered wickedly in the knee-high grass.

Carson fired at the gun-flash, and at the same instant something jerked at his arm and whirled him half-around. Staggering, his boot caught in a hummock and he went down, plowing ground with his shoulder.

He tried to put out his arm to help himself up again and he found he couldn't. His right arm wouldn't move. It was a dead thing hanging on him, a dead thing that was numb, almost as if it were not a part of him.

Pawing in the grass with his left hand, he found the gun and picked it up, while dull realization beat into his brain.

Running after Fennimore, he'd been outlined against the burning North Star, had been a perfect target. Fennimore had shot him through the arm, perhaps figured he had killed him when he saw him stumble.

Crouching in the grass, he raised his head cautiously. But there was nothing but darkness.

Behind him the saloon's roof fell in with a gush of flames and for a moment the fire leaped high, twisting in the air. And in that moment he saw Fennimore on a rise of ground above him. The man was standing there, looking at the flames.

Carson surged to his feet.

“Fennimore!” he shouted.

The man spun toward him, and for an instant the two stood facing one another in the flare of the gutted building.

Then Fennimore's gun was coming up and to Carson it was almost as if he stood off to one side and watched with cold, deliberate, almost scientific interest.

But he knew his own hand was coming up, too, the left hand with the feel of the gun a bit unfamiliar in it.

Fennimore's gun drooled fire and something brushed with a blast of air past Carson's cheek. Then Carson's gun bucked against his wrist, and bucked again.

On the rise of ground, in the dying light of the sinking fire, Fennimore doubled over slowly. And across the space of the few feet that separated them, Carson heard him coughing, coughs wrenched out of his chest. The man pitched slowly forward, crashed face-first into the grass.

Slowly, Carson turned and walked down to the street, his wounded arm hanging at his side, blood dripping from his dangling fingers.

The guns were quiet. The fire was dying down. Black, grotesque figures still lay huddled in the dust. In front of the
Tribune
office the horses milled, and inside the office someone had lighted a lamp.

Voices yelled at him as he stepped up on the board sidewalk and headed for the office. He recognized some of the voices. Owens, Kelton, Ross – the men who had ridden away the night before, afraid of what might happen to their homes.

Owens was striding down the walk to meet him. He stared at Carson's bloody arm.

“Fennimore plugged me,” Carson said.

“Fennimore got away. He isn't here.”

“He's out back of the jail,” Carson told him.

“We're glad we got here in time,” said Owens, gravely. “Glad we came to our senses. The boys feel pretty bad about last night. It took Miss Delavan to show us –”

“Miss Delavan?” asked Carson, dazed. “What did Kathryn have to do with it?”

Owens looked surprised. “I thought you knew. She rode out and told us.”

“But Fennimore had guards posted!”

“She outrode them,” Owens declared. “They didn't shoot at her. Guess even a Fennimore gunman doesn't like to gun a woman. They took out after her, but she was on that little Star horse of hers –”

“Yes, I know,” said Carson. “Star can outrun anything on four legs.”

“She told us how it was our chance to make a decent land out here, a decent place to live – a decent place for our kids.”

“Where is she now?” asked Carson. “You made her stay behind. You –”

Owens shook his head. “She wouldn't listen to us. Nothing doing but she'd ride along with us. She said her father –”

“You left her at the house?”

Owens nodded. “She said –”

But Cason wasn't listening. He wasn't even staying. He stepped down into the street and walked away, his stride changing in a moment to a run.

“Kathryn!” he cried.

She was running down the street toward him, arms outstretched.

Jake, prodding Quinn and Clay Duffy toward the
Tribune
at rifle-point, saw them when they met. He watched interestedly, and spat judiciously in the dust.

“Beats all hell,” he told Quinn, “how that feller gets along with women.”

Junkyard

Originally published in
Galaxy Science Fiction
in May 1953, “Junkyard” fits neatly inside a particular subspecies of Simak stories – those starring what we might call “freebooters.” By this I mean stories in which human exploitation of the galaxy is being carried out not by human governmental agencies, but by the agents of commercial organizations, who are generally out to make a buck. In interstellar space, there are a lot of places a story with such a background can take you …

—dww

I

They had solved the mystery – with a guess, a very erudite and educated guess – but they didn't know a thing, not a single thing, for certain. That wasn't the way a planetary survey team usually did a job. Usually they nailed it down and wrung a lot of information out of it and could parade an impressive roll of facts. But here there was no actual, concrete fact beyond the one that would have been obvious to a twelve-year-old child.

Commander Ira Warren was worried about it. He said as much to Bat Ears Brady, ship's cook and slightly disreputable pal of his younger days. The two of them had been planet-checking together for more than thirty years. While they stood at opposite poles on the table of organization, they were able to say to one another things they could not have said to any other man aboard the survey ship or have allowed another man to say to them.

“Bat Ears,” said Warren, “I'm just a little worried.”

“You're always worried,” Bat Ears retorted. “That's part of the job you have.”

“This junkyard business …”

“You wanted to get ahead,” said Bat Ears, “and I told you what would happen. I warned you you'd get yourself weighed down with worry and authority and pomp – pomp –”

“Pomposity?”

“That's the word,” said Bat Ears. “That's the word, exactly.”

“I'm not pompous,” Warren contradicted.

“No, you're worried about his junkyard business. I got a bottle stowed away. How about a little drink?”

Warren waved away the thought. “Someday I'll bust you wide open. Where you hide the stuff, I don't know, but every trip we make …”

“Now, Ira! Don't go losing your lousy temper.”

“Every trip we make, you carry enough dead weight of liquor to keep you annoyingly aglow for the entire cruise.”

“It's baggage,” Bat Ears insisted. “A man is allowed some baggage weight. I don't have hardly nothing else. I just bring along my drinking.”

“Someday,” said Warren savagely, “it's going to get you booted off the ship about five light-years from nowhere.”

The threat was an old one. It failed to dismay Bat Ears.

“This worrying you're doing,” Bat Ears said, “ain't doing you no good.”

“But the survey team didn't do the job,” objected Warren. “Don't you see what this means? For the first time in more than a hundred years of survey, we've found what appears to be evidence that some other race than Man has achieved space flight. And we don't know a thing about it. We should know. With all that junk out there, we'd ought to be able by this time to write a book about it.”

Bat Ears spat in contempt. “You mean them scientists of ours.”

The way he said “scientist” made it a dirty word.

“They're good,” said Warren. “The very best there is.”

“Remember the old days, Ira?” asked Bat Ears. “When you was second looey and you used to come down and we'd have a drink together and …”

“That has nothing to do with it.”

“We had real men in them days. We'd get ourselves a club and go hunt us up some natives and beat a little sense into them and we'd get more facts in half a day than these scientists, with all their piddling around, will get in a month of Sundays.”

“This is slightly different,” Warren said. “There are no natives here.”

There wasn't, as a matter of fact, much of anything on this particular planet. It was strictly a low-grade affair and it wouldn't amount to much for another billion years. The survey, understandably, wasn't too interested in planets that wouldn't amount to much for another billion years.

Its surface was mostly rock outcroppings and tumbled boulder fields. In the last half million years or so, primal plants had gotten started and were doing well. Mosses and lichens crept into the crevices and crawled across the rocks, but aside from that there seemed to be no life. Although, strictly speaking, you couldn't be positive, for no one had been interested in the planet. They hadn't looked it over and they hadn't searched for life; everyone had been too interested in the junkyard.

They had never intended to land, but had circled the planet, making routine checks and entering routine data in the survey record.

Then someone at a telescope had seen the junkyard and they'd gone down to investigate and had been forthrightly pitchforked into a maddening puzzle.

They had called it the junkyard and that was what it was. Strewn about were what probably were engine parts, although no one was quite sure. Pollard, the mech engineer, had driven himself to the verge of frenzy trying to figure out how to put some of the parts together. He finally got three of them assembled, somehow, and they didn't mean a thing, so he tried to take them apart again to figure out how he'd done it. He couldn't get them apart. It was about that time that Pollard practically blew his top.

The engine parts, if that was what they were, were scattered all over the place, as if someone or something had tossed them away, not caring where they fell. But off to one side was a pile of other stuff, all neatly stacked, and it was apparent even to the casual glance that this stuff must be a pile of supplies.

There was what more than likely was food, though it was a rather strange kind of food (if that was what it was), and strangely fabricated bottles of plastic that held a poison liquid, and other stuff that was fabric and might have been clothing, although it gave one the shudders trying to figure out what sort of creatures would have worn that kind of clothing, and bundles of metallic bars, held together in the bundles by some kind of gravitational attraction instead of the wires that a human would have used to tie them in bundles. And a number of other objects for which there were no names.

“They should have found the answer,” Warren said. “They've cracked tougher nuts than this. In the month we've been here, they should have had that engine running.”

“If it is an engine,” Bat Ears pointed out.

“What else could it be?”

“You're getting so that you sound like them. Run into something that you can't explain and think up the best guess possible and when someone questions you, you ask what else it could be. And that ain't proof, Ira.”

“You're right, Bat Ears,” Warren admitted. “It certainly isn't proof and that's what worries me. We have no doubt the junk out there is a spaceship engine, but we have no proof of it.”

“Nobody's going to land a ship,” said Bat Ears testily, “and rip out the engine and just throw it away. If they'd done that, the ship would still be here.”

“But if that's not the answer,” demanded Warren, “what is all that stuff out there?”

“I wouldn't know. I'm not even curious. I ain't the one that's worrying.”

He got up from the chair and moved toward the door.

“I still got that bottle, Ira.”

“No, thanks,” Warren said.

He sat and listened to Bar Ears' feet going down the stairs.

II

Kenneth Spencer, the alien psychologist, came into the cabin and sat down in the chair across the desk from Warren.

“We're finally through,” he said.

“You aren't through,” challenged Warren. “You haven't even started.”

“We've done all we can.”

Warren grunted at him.

“We've run all sorts of tests,” said Spencer. “We've got a book full of analyses. We have a complete photographic record and everything is down on paper in diagrams and notes and –”

“Then tell me: What is that junk out there?”

“It's a spaceship engine.”

“If it's an engine,” Warren said, “let's put it together. Let's find out how it runs. Let's figure out the kind of intelligence most likely to have built it.”

“We tried,” replied Spencer. “All of us tried. Some of us didn't have applicable knowledge or training, but even so we worked; we helped the ones who had training.”

“I know how hard you worked.”

And they had worked hard, only snatching stolen hours to sleep, eating on the run.

“We are dealing with alien mechanics,” Spencer said.

“We've dealt with other alien concepts,” Warren reminded him. “Alien economics and alien religions and alien psychology …”

“But this is different.”

“Not so different. Take Pollard, now. He is the key man in this situation. Wouldn't you have said that Pollard should have cracked it?”

“If it can be cracked, Pollard is your man. He has everything – the theory, the experience, the imagination.”

“You think we should leave?” asked Warren. “That's what you came in here to tell me? You think there is no further use of staying here?”

“That's about it,” Spencer admitted.

“All right,” Warren told him. “If you say so, I'll take your word for it. We'll blast off right after supper. I'll tell Bat Ears to fix us up a spread. A sort of achievement dinner.”

“Don't rub it in so hard,” protested Spencer. “We're not proud of what we've done.”

Warren heaved himself out of the chair.

“I'll go down and tell Mac to get the engines ready. On the way down, I'll stop in on Bar Ears and tell him.”

Spencer said, “I'm worried, Warren.”

“So am I. What is worrying you?”

“Who are these things, these other people, who had the other spaceship? They're the first, you know, the first evidence we've ever run across of another race that had discovered space flight. And what happened to them here?”

“Scared?”

“Yes. Aren't you?”

“Not yet,” said Warren. “I probably will be when I have the time to think it over.”

He went down the stairs to talk to Mac about the engines.

III

He found Mac sitting in his cubby hole, smoking his blackened pipe and reading his thumb-marked Bible.

“Good news,” Warren said to him.

Mac laid down the book and took off his glasses.

“There's but one thing you could tell me that would be good news,” he said.

“This is it. Get the engines ready. We'll be blasting off.”

“When, sir? Not that it can be too soon.”

“In a couple of hours or so,” said Warren. “We'll eat and get settled in. I'll give you the word.”

The engineer folded the spectacles and slid them in his pocket. He tapped the pipe out in his hand and tossed away the ashes and put the dead pipe back between his teeth.

“I've never liked this place,” he said.

“You never like any place.”

“I don't like them towers.”

“You're crazy, Mac. There aren't any towers.”

“The boys and me went walking,” said the engineer. “We found a bunch of towers.”

“Rock formations, probably.”

“Towers,” insisted the engineer doggedly.

“If you found some towers,” Warren demanded, “why didn't you report them?”

“And have them science beagles go baying after them and have to stay another month?”

“It doesn't matter,” Warren said. “They probably aren't towers. Who would mess around building towers on this backwash of a planet?”

“They were scary,” Mac told him. “They had that black look about them. And the smell of death.”

“It's the Celt in you. The big, superstitious Celt you are, rocketing through space from world to world – and still believing in banshees and spooks. The medieval mind in the age of science.”

Mac said, “They fair give a man the shivers.”

They stood facing one another for a long moment. Then Warren put out a hand and tapped the other gently on the shoulder.

“I won't say a word about them,” he said. “Now get those engines rolling.”

IV

Warren sat in silence at the table's head, listening to the others talk.

“It was a jury-rigged job,” said Clyne, the physicist. “They tore out a lot of stuff and rebuilt the engine for some reason or other and there was a lot of the stuff they tore out that they didn't use again. For some reason, they had to rebuild the engine and they rebuilt it simpler than it was before. Went back to basic principles and cut out the fancy stuff – automatics and other gadgets like that – but the one they rebuilt must have been larger and more unwieldy, less compact, than the one that they ripped down. That would explain why they left some of their supplies behind.”

“But,” said Dyer, the chemist, “what did they jury-rig it with? Where did they get the material?”

Briggs, the metallurgist, said, “This place crawls with ore. If it wasn't so far out, it would be a gold mine.”

“We saw no signs of mining,” Dyer objected. “No signs of mining or smelting and refining or of fabrication.”

“We didn't go exploring,” Clyne pointed out. “They might have done some mining a few miles away from here and we'd have never known it.”

Spencer said, “That's the trouble with us on this whole project. We've adopted suppositions and let them stand as fact. If they had to do some fabrication, it might be important to know a little more about it.”

“What difference does it make?” asked Clyne. “We know the basic facts – a spaceship landed here in trouble, they finally repaired their engines, and they took off once again.”

Old Doc Spears, down at the table's end, slammed his fork on his plate.