The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories

  “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.

  “You don’t even know,” he said, “that it was a spaceship. I’ve listened to you caterwauling about this thing for weeks. I’ve never seen so damn much motion and so few results in all my born days.”

  All of them looked a little surprised. Old Doc was normally a mild man and he usually paid little attention to what was going on, bumbling around on his regular rounds to treat a smashed thumb or sore throat or some other minor ailment. All of them had wondered, with a slight sickish feeling, how Old Doc might perform if he faced a real emergency, like major surgery, say. They didn’t have much faith in him, but they liked him well enough. Probably they liked him mostly because he didn’t mix into their affairs.

  And here he was, mixing right into them truculently.

  Lang, the communications man, said, “We found the scratches, Doc. You remember that. Scratches on the rock. The kind of scratches that a spaceship could have made in landing.”

  “Could have made,” said Doc derisively.

  “Must have made!”

  Old Doc snorted and went on with his eating, holding his head down over the plate, napkin tucked beneath his chin, shoveling in the food with fork and knife impartially. Doc was noted as a messy eater.

  “I have a feeling,” Spencer said, “that we may be off the beaten track in thinking of this as a simple repair job. From the amount of parts that are down there in the junkyard, I’d say that they found it necessary to do a re
designing job, to start from the beginning and build an entirely new engine to get them out of here. I have a feeling that those engine parts out there represent the whole engine, that if we knew how, we could put those parts together and we’d have an engine.”

  “I tried it,” Pollard answered.

  “I can’t quite buy the idea that it was a complete redesigning job,” Clyne stated. “That would mean a new approach and some new ideas that would rule out the earlier design and all the parts that had been built into the original engine as it stood. The theory would explain why there are so many parts strewn around, but it’s just not possible. You don’t redesign an engine when you’re stranded on a barren planet. You stick to what you know.”

  Dyer said, “Accepting an idea like redesigning sends you back again to the problem of materials.”

  “And tools,” added Lang. “Where would they get the tools?”

  “They’d probably have a machine shop right on board the ship,” said Spencer.

  “For minor repairs,” Lang corrected. “Not the kind of equipment you would need to build a complete new engine.”

  “What worries me,” said Pollard, “is our absolute inability to understand any of it. I tried to fit those parts together, tried to figure out the relationship of the various parts – and there must be some sort of relationship, because unrelated parts would make no sense at all. Finally I was able to fit three of them together and that’s as far as I could get. When I got them together, they didn’t spell a thing. They simply weren’t going anywhere. Even with three of them together, you were no better off, no further along in understanding, than before you’d put them together. And when I tried to get them apart, I couldn’t do that, either. You’d think, once a man had got a thing together, he could take it apart again, wouldn’t you?”

  “It was an alien ship,” Spencer offered, “built by alien people, run by alien engines.”

  “Even so,” said Pollard, “there should have been some basic idea that we could recognize. In some way or other, their engine should have operated along at least one principle that would be basic with human mechanics. An engine is a piece of mechanism that takes raw power and controls it and directs it into useful energy. That would be its purpose, no matter what race built it.”