New Folks' Home: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 6) (34 page)

As soon as the camp awoke, I went to our tent to stretch out for a moment, perhaps to catch a catnap. Worn out, I slept for hours.

Kemper woke me.

“Get up, Bob!” he said. “For the love of God, get up!”

It was late afternoon and the last rays of the sun were streaming through the tent flap. Kemper’s face was haggard. It was as if he’d suddenly grown old since I’d seen him less than twelve hours before.

“They’re encysting,” he gasped. “They’re turning into cocoons or chrysalises or …”

I sat up quickly. “That one we found out there in the field!”

He nodded.

“Fullerton?” I asked.

“We’ll go out and see, all five of us, leaving the camp and animals alone.”

We had some trouble finding it because the land was so flat and featureless that there were no landmarks.

But finally we located it, just as dusk was setting in.

The ball had split in two—not in a clean break, in a jagged one. It looked like an egg after a chicken has been hatched.

And the halves lay there in the gathering darkness, in the silence underneath the sudden glitter of the stars—a last farewell and a new beginning and a terrible alien fact.

I tried to say something, but my brain was so numb that I was not entirely sure just what I should say. Anyhow, the words died in the dryness of my mouth and the thickness of my tongue before I could get them out.

For it was not only the two halves of the cocoon—It was the marks within that hollow, the impression of what had been there, blurred and distorted by the marks of what it had become.

We fled back to camp.

Someone, I think it was Oliver, got the lantern lighted. We stood uneasily, unable to look at one another, knowing that the time was past for all dissembling, that there was no use of glossing over or denying what we’d seen in the dim light in the gully.

“Bob is the only one who has a chance,” Kemper finally said, speaking more concisely than seemed possible. “I think he should leave right now. Someone must get back to Caph. Someone has to tell them.”

He looked across the circle of lantern light at me.

“Well,” he said sharply, “get going! What’s the matter with you?”

“You were right,” I said, not much more than whispering. “Remember how you wondered about a defense mechanism?”

“They have it,” Weber agreed. “The best you can find. There’s no beating them. They don’t fight you. They absorb you. They make you into them. No wonder there are just the critters here. No wonder the planet’s ecology is simple. They have you pegged and measured from the instant you set foot on the planet. Take one drink of water. Chew a single grass stem. Take one bite of critter. Do any one of these things and they have you cold.”

Oliver came out of the dark and walked across the lantern-lighted circle. He stopped in front of me.

“Here are your diet kit and notes,” he said.

“But I can’t run out on you!”

“Forget us!” Parsons barked at me. “We aren’t human any more. In a few more days …”

He grabbed the lantern and strode down the cages and held the lantern high, so that we could see.

“Look,” he said.

There were no animals. There were just the cocoons and the little critters and the cocoons that had split in half.

I saw Kemper looking at me and there was, of all things, compassion on his face.

“You don’t want to stay,” he told me. “If you do, in a day or two, a critter will come in and drop dead for you. And you’ll go crazy all the way back home—wondering which one of us it was.”

He turned away then. They all turned away from me and suddenly it seemed I was all alone.

Weber had found an axe somewhere and he started walking down the row of cages, knocking off the bars to let the little critters out.

I walked slowly over to the ship and stood at the foot of the ladder, holding the notes and the diet kit tight against my chest.

When I got there, I turned around and looked back at them and it seemed I couldn’t leave them.

I thought of all we’d been through together and when I tried to think of specific things, the only thing I could think about was how they always kidded me about the diet kit.

And I thought of the times I had to leave and go off somewhere and eat alone so that I couldn’t smell the food. I thought of almost ten years of eating that damn goo and that I could never eat like a normal human because of my ulcerated stomach.

Maybe
they
were the lucky ones, I told myself. If a man got turned into a critter, he’d probably come out with a whole stomach and never have to worry about how much or what he ate. The critters never ate anything except the grass, but maybe, I thought, that grass tasted just as good to them as a steak or a pumpkin pie would taste to me.

So I stood there for a while and I thought about it. Then I took the diet kit and flung it out into the darkness as far as I could throw it and I dropped the notes to the ground.

I walked back into the camp and the first man I saw was Parsons.

“What have you got for supper?” I asked him.

Worrywart

The title character in “Worrywart” is a copyreader for a big-city newspaper, which was Clifford Simak’s first job at the
Minneapolis Star
, and he tells us a great deal about that post in this story. And although Cliff quickly moved up to be chief of the copy desk—a position he held for years before being promoted to news editor—I think he really loved being a copyreader: It let him see all the news that came in.

Of course, the more you know, the more you find to worry about, if you are so inclined.

—dww

Charley Porter is a copyreader on the
Daily Times
and a copyreader is a funny kind of critter. He is a comma watcher and a word butcher and a mighty tide of judgment set against the news. He’s a sort of cross between a walking encyclopedia and an ambulatory index.

Occasionally you meet a reporter or an editor or you see their pictures or you hear them spoken of. But you never hear about a copyreader.

The copyreader sits with his fellow copyreaders at a horseshoe-shaped table. If he’s an old time copyreader, like Charley is, he wears a green eyeshade and rolls his shirtsleeves up above his elbows.

Inside the curve of the copydesk sits the man who directs the copyreaders. Since the inside of the desk is known as the slot, this man is called the slot man. To the slot man comes the daily flow of news; he passes the copy to the men around the desk and they edit it and write the headlines.

Because there is always copy enough to fill twenty times the allotted space, the copyreader must trim all the stories and see there is no excess wordage in them. This brings him into continuous collision with reporters, who see their ornately worded stories come out chopped and mangled, although definitely more readable.

When work slacks off in the afternoon, the copyreaders break their silence and talk among themselves. They talk about the news and debate what can be done about it. If you listened to them, not knowing who they were, you’d swear you were listening in on some world commission faced by weighty problems on which life or death depended.

For your copyreader is a worrier. He worries because each day he handles the fresh and bleeding incidents that shape the course of human destiny, and there probably is no one who knows more surely nor feels more keenly the knife-edge balance between survival and disaster.

Charley Porter worried more than most. He worried about a lot of things that didn’t seem to call for worry.

There was the matter, for instance, of those “impossible” stories happening in sequence. The other men on the copydesk took notice of them after two or three had occurred, and talked about them—among themselves, naturally, for no proper copyreader ever talks to anyone but another copyreader. But they passed them off with only casual mention.

Charley worried about the incidents, secretly, of course, since he could see that none of his fellow copyreaders felt them worthy of really serious worry. After he had done a lot of worrying, he began to see some similarity among them, and that was when he really got down on the floor and wrestled with himself.

First there had been the airliner downed out in Utah. Bad weather held up the hunt for it, but finally air searchers spotted the wreckage strewn over half a mountain peak. Airline officials said there was no hope that any had survived. But when the rescuers were halfway to the wreckage, they met the survivors walking out; every single soul had lived through the crash.

Then there was the matter of Midnight, the 64 to 1 shot, winning the Derby.

And, after that, the case of the little girl who didn’t have a chance of getting well. They held a party for her weeks ahead of time so she could have a final birthday. Her picture was published coast to coast and the stories about her made you want to cry and thousands of people sent her gifts and postcards. Then, suddenly, she got well. Not from any new wonder drug or from any new medical technique. She just got well, some time in the night.

A few days later the wires carried the story about old Pal, the coon dog down in Kentucky who got trapped inside a cave. Men dug for days and yelled encouragement. The old dog whined back at them, but finally he didn’t whine any more and the digging was getting mighty hard. So the men heaped boulders into the hole they’d dug and built a cairn. They said pious, angry, hopeless words, then went back to their cabins and their plowing.

The next day old Pal came home. He was a walking rack of bones, but he still could wag his tail. The way he went through a bowl of milk made a man feel good just to see him do it. Everyone agreed that old Pal must finally have found a way to get out by himself.

Except that an old dog buried in a cave for days, getting weaker all the time from lack of food and water, doesn’t find a way to get out by himself.

And little dying girls don’t get well, just like that, in the middle of the night.

And 64 to 1 shots don’t win the Derby.

And planes don’t shatter themselves among the Utah peaks with no one getting hurt at all.

A miracle, sure. Two miracles, even. But not four in a row and within a few weeks of one another.

It took Charley quite a while to establish some line of similarity. When he did, it was a fairly thin line. But thick enough at least, to justify more worry.

The line of similarity was this: All the stories were “running” or developing stories.

There had been a stretch of two days during which the world waited for the facts of the plane crash. It had been known for days before the race that Midnight would run and that he didn’t have a chance. The story of the doomed little girl had been a matter of public interest for weeks. The old coon dog had been in the cave a week or more before the men gave up and went back to their homes.

In each of the stories, the result was not known until some time after the situation itself was known. Until the final fact was actually determined, there existed an infinite number of probabilities, some more probable than others, but with each probability’s having at least a fighting chance. When you flip a dime into the air, there always exists the infinitesimal probability, from the moment you flip it until it finally lands heads or tails, that it will land on edge and stay there. Until the fact that it is heads or tails is established, the probability of its landing on edge continues to remain.

And that was exactly what had happened, Charley told himself: the doubt had been flipped four times, and four times running it had stood on edge.

There was one minor dissimilarity, of course … the plane crash. It didn’t quite fit.

Each event had been a spin of the dime, and while that dime was still in the air, and the public held its breath, a little girl had gotten well, somehow, and a dog had escaped from a cave, somehow, and a 64 to 1 shot had developed whatever short-lived properties of physique and temperament are necessary to make long shots win.

But the plane crash—there had been no thought of it until
after
the fact. By the time the crash came into the public eye, the dime was down, and what had happened on that mountain peak had already happened, and all the hopes and prayers offered for the safety of the passengers were, actually, retroactive in the face of the enormous probability that all had perished.

Please, let the dog escape. Tonight.

Let the little girl get well. Soon.

Let my long shot come in. Next week.

Let the passengers be alive.
Since yesterday.

Somehow the plane crash worried Charley most of all.

Then, to everyone’s surprise, and with no logic whatsoever, the Iranian situation cleared up, just when it began to look as if it might be another Korea.

A few days later Britain announced proudly that it had weathered its monetary storm, that all was well with the sterling bloc, and London would need no further loans.

It took a while for Charley to tie these two stories up with the plane-girl-Derby-hound-dog sequence. But then he saw that they belonged and that was when he remembered something else that might—well, not tie in, exactly—but might have something to do with this extraordinary run of impossibilities.

After work, he went down to the Associated Press office and had an office boy haul out the files, stapled books of carboned flimsies—white flimsies for the A wire, blue flimsies for the B wire, yellow for the sports wire and pink for the market wire. He knew what he was looking for hadn’t come over either the market or the sports wire, so he passed them up and went through the A and B wire sheets story by story.

He couldn’t remember the exact date the story had come over, but he knew it had been since Memorial Day, so he started with the day after Memorial Day and worked forward.

He remembered the incident clearly. Jensen, the slot man, had picked it up and read it through. Then he had laughed and put it on the spike.

One of the others asked: “What was funny, Jens?”

So Jensen took the story off the spike and threw it over to him. It had gone the rounds of the desk, with each man reading it, and finally it had got back to the spike again.

And that had been the last of it. For the story was too wacky for any newsman to give a second glance. It had all the earmarks of the phony.

Charley didn’t find what he was looking for the first day, although he worked well into the evening—so he went back the next afternoon, and found it.

It was out of a little resort town up in Wisconsin, and it told about an invalid named Cooper Jackson who had been bedridden since he was two or three years old. The story said that Cooper’s old man claimed that Cooper could foresee things, that he would think of something or imagine something during the evening and the next day it would happen. Things like Linc Abrams’ driving his car into the culvert at Trout Run and coming out all right himself, but with the car all smashed to flinders, and like the Reverend Amos Tucker’s getting a letter from a brother he hadn’t heard from in more than twenty years.

The next day Charley spoke to Jensen.

“I got a few days coming,” he said, “from that time I worked six-day weeks last fall, and I still got a week of last year’s vacation you couldn’t find the room for …”

“Sure, Charley,” Jensen said. “We’re in good shape right now.”

Two days later Charley stepped off the milk-run train in the little resort town in Wisconsin. He went to one of the several cabin camps down on the lake that fronted the town and got himself a small, miserable cabin for which he paid an exorbitant price. And it wasn’t until then that he dared let himself think—
really
think—of the reason he had come there.

In the evening he went uptown and spent an hour or two standing around in the general store and the pool room. He came back with the information that he had set out for, and another piece of information he had not been prepared to hear.

The first piece of information, the one he had gone out to get, was that Dr. Erik Ames was the man to see. Doc Ames, it appeared, was not only the doctor and the mayor of the town, but the acknowledged civic leader, sage and father confessor of the whole community.

The second piece of information, one which had served the town as a conversation piece for the last two months, was that Cooper Jackson, after years of keeping to his bed as a helpless invalid, now was on his feet. He had to use a cane, of course, but he got around real well and every day he took a walk down by the lake.

They hadn’t said what time of day, so Charley was up early in the morning and started walking up and down the lakeshore, keeping a good lookout. He talked with the tourists who occupied the other cabins and he talked with men who were setting out for a day of fishing. He spent considerable time observing a yellow-winged blackbird that had its nest somewhere in a bunch of rushes on a marshy spit.

Cooper Jackson finally came early in the afternoon, hobbling along on his cane, with a peaked look about him. He walked along the shore for a ways; then sat down to rest on a length of old dead tree that had been tossed up by a storm.

Charley ambled over. “Do you mind?” he asked, sitting down beside him.

“Not at all,” said Cooper Jackson. “I’m glad to have you.”

They talked. Charley told him that he was a newspaperman up there for a short vacation and how it was good to get away from the kind of news that came over the teletypes, and how he envied the people who could live in this country all the year around.

When he heard Charley was a newspaperman, Cooper’s interest picked up like a hound dog cocking its ears. He began to ask all sorts of questions, the kind of questions that everyone asks a newspaperman whenever he can corner one.

What do you think of the situation and what can be done about it and is there any chance of preventing war and what should we do to prevent a war … and so on until you think you’ll scream.

Except that it seemed to Charley that Cooper’s questions were a bit more incisive, backed by a bit more information than were the questions of the ordinary person. He seemed to display more insistence and urgency than the ordinary person, who always asked his questions in a rather detached, academic way.

Charley told him, honestly enough, that he didn’t know what could be done to prevent a war, although he said that the quieting of the Iranian situation and the British monetary announcement might go a long way toward keeping war from happening.

“You know,” said Cooper Jackson, “I felt the same way, too. That is, after I read the news, I felt that those were two good things to happen.”

At this point, perhaps, a couple of things should be considered.

If Charley Porter had been a regular newspaperman instead of copyreader, he might have mentioned the plane wreck and the little girl who hadn’t died, and how it was a funny thing about that coon dog getting out of the cave and how he knew of a man who’d made a mint of money riding in on Midnight.

But Charley didn’t say these things.

If Charley had been a regular newspaperman, he might have said to Cooper Jackson: “Look here, kid, I’m on to you. I know what you’re doing. I got it figured out. Maybe you better straighten me out on a point or two, so I’ll have the story right.”