The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories

  “The metal,” said Briggs, “is an alien alloy, totally unlike anything we have ever run across. You can identify the components, all right, but the formula, when you get it down, reads like a metallic nightmare. It shouldn’t work. By Earth standards, it wouldn’t work. There’s some secret in the combination that I can’t even guess at.”

  Old Doc said, from the table’s end, “You’re to be congratulated, Mr. Briggs, upon your fine sense of restraint.”

  “Cut it out, Doc,” Warren ordered sharply, speaking for the first time.

  “All right,” said Doc. “If that’s the way you want it, Ira, I will cut it out.”

  V

  Standing outside the ship, Warren looked across the planet. Evening was fading into night and the junkyard was no more than a grotesque blotch of deeper shadow on the hillside.

  Once, not long ago, another ship had rested here, just a little way from where they rested now. Another ship – another race.

  And something had happened to that ship, something that his survey party had tried to ferret out and had failed to discover.

  It had not been a simple repair job; he was sure of that. No matter what any of them might say, it had been considerably more than routine repair.

  There had been some sort of emergency, a situation with a strange urgency about it. They had left in such a hurry that they had abandoned some of their supplies. No commander of any spaceship, be he human or alien, would leave supplies behind except when life or death was involved in his escape.

  There was what appeared to be food in the stack of supplies – at least, Dyer had said that it was food, although it didn’t look edible. And there were the plastic-like bottles filled with a poison that might be, as like as not, the equivalent of an alien whisky. And no man, Warren said, leaves food and whisky behind except in the direst emergency.

  He walked slowly down the trail they’d beaten between the ship’s lock and the junkyard and it struck him that he walked in a silence that was as deep as the awful stillness of far space. There was nothing here to make any sound at all. There was no life except the mosses and the lichens and the other primal plants that crept among the rocks. In time there would be other life, for the planet had the air and water and the basic ingredients for soil and here, in another billion years or so, there might arise a life economy as complex as that of Earth.

  But a billion years, he thought, is a long, long time.

  He reached the junkyard and walked its familiar ground, dodging the larger pieces of machinery that lay all about, stumbling on one or two of the smaller pieces that lay unseen in the darkness.

  The second time he stumbled, he stooped and picked up the thing he had stumbled on and it was, he knew, one of the tools that the alien race had left behind them when they fled. He could picture them, dropping their tools and fleeing, but the picture was not clear. He could not decide what these aliens might have looked like or what they might have fled from.

  He tossed the tool up and down, catching it in his hand. It was light and handy and undoubtedly there was some use for it, but he did not know the use nor did any of the others up there in the ship. Hand or tentacle, claw or paw – what appendage had it been that had grasped the tool? What mind lay behind the hand or tentacle, claw or paw that had grasped and used it?

  He stood and threw back his head and looked at the stars that shone above the planet and they were not the familiar stars he had known when he was a child.

  Far out, he thought, far out. The farthest out that Man had ever been.

  A sound jerked him around, the sound of running feet coming down the trail.

  “Warren!” cried a voice. “Warren! Where are you?”

  There was fright in that voice, the frantic note of panic that one hears in the screaming of a terrified child.

  “Warren!”

  “Here!” shouted Warren. “Over here. I’m coming.”

  He swung around and hurried to meet the man who was running in the dark.

  The runner would have charged on past him if he had not put out a hand and gripped him by the shoulder and pulled him to a halt.

  “Warren! Is that you?”

  “What’s the matter, Mac?” asked Warren.

  “I can’t … I can’t … I …”

  “What’s wrong? Speak up? You can’t what, Mac?”

  He felt the engineer’s fumbling hands reaching out for him, grasping at his coat lapels, hanging onto him as if the engineer were a drowning man.

  “Come on, come on,” Warren urged with the impatience of alarm.

  “I can’t start the engines, sir,” said Mac.

  “Can’t start the …”

  “I can’t start them, sir. And neither can the others. None of us can start them, sir.”

  “The engines!” said Warren, terror rising swiftly. “What’s the matter with the engines?”

  “There’s nothing the matter with the engines. It’s us, sir. We can’t start them.”

  “Talk sense, man. Why can’t you?”

  “We can’t remember how. We’ve forgotten how to start the engines!”

  VI

  Warren switched on the light above the desk and straightened, seeking out the book among the others on the shelf.

  “It’s right here, Mac,” he said. “I knew I had it here.”

  He found it and took it down and opened it beneath the light. He leafed the pages rapidly. Behind him he could hear the tense, almost terrified breathing of the engineer.

  “It’s all right, Mac. It’s all here in the book.”

  He leafed too far ahead and had to back up a page or two and reached the place and spread the book wide beneath the lamp.

  “Now,” he said, “we’ll get those engines started. It tells right here …”

  He tried to read and couldn’t.

  He could understand the words all right and the symbols, but the sum of the words he read made little sense and the symbols none at all.

  He felt the sweat breaking out on him, running down his forehead and gathering in his eyebrows, breaking out of his armpits and trickling down his ribs.

  “What’s the matter, Chief?” asked Mac. “What’s the matter now?”

  Warren felt his body wanting to shake, straining every nerve to tremble, but it wouldn’t move. He was frozen stiff.

  “This is the engine manual,” he said, his voice cold and low. “It tells all about the engines – how they operate, how to locate trouble, how to fix them.”

  “Then we’re all right,” breathed Mac, enormously relieved.

  Warren closed the book.

  “No, we aren’t, Mac. I’ve forgotten all the symbols and most of the terminology.”

  “You what?”

  “I can’t read the book,” said Warren.

  VII

  “It just isn’t possible,” argued Spencer.

  “It’s not only possible,” Warren told him. “It happened. Is there any one of you who can read that book?”

  They didn’t answer him.

  “If there’s anyone who can,” invited Warren. “Step up and show us how.”

  Clyne said quietly, “There’s none of us can read it.”

  “And yet,” declared Warren, “an hour ago any one of you – any single one of you – probably would have bet his life that he not only could start the engines if he had to, but could take the manual if he couldn’t and figure how to do it.”

  “You’re right,” Clyne agreed. “We would have bet our lives. An hour ago we would have. It would have been a safe, sure bet.”

  “That’s what you think,” said Warren. “How do you know how long it’s been since you couldn’t read the manual?”

  “We don’t, of course,” Clyne was forced to admit.

  “There’s something more. You didn’t find the answer to th
e junkyard. You guessed an answer, but you didn’t find one. And you should have. You know damn well you should have.”

  Clyne rose to his feet. “Now see here, Warren …”

  “Sit down, John,” said Spencer. “Warren’s got us dead to rights. We didn’t find an answer and we know we didn’t. We took a guess and substituted it for the answer that we didn’t find. And Warren’s right about something else – we should have found the answer.”

  Under any other circumstances, Warren thought, they might have hated him for those blunt truths, but now they didn’t. They just sat there and he could see the realization seeping into them.

  Dyer finally said, “You think we failed out there because we forgot – just like Mac forgot.”

  “You lost some of your skills,” replied Warren, “some of your skills and knowledge. You worked as hard as ever. You went through the motions. You didn’t have the skill or knowledge any more, that’s all.”

  “And now?” asked Lang.

  “I don’t know.”

  “This is what happened to that other ship,” said Briggs emphatically.

  “Maybe,” Warren said with less conviction.

  “But they got away,” Clyne pointed out.

  “So will we,” promised Warren. “Somehow.”

  VIII

  The crew of that other, alien ship had evidently forgotten, too. But somehow or other they had blasted off – somehow or other they had remembered, or forced themselves to remember. But if it had been the simple matter of remembering, why had they rebuilt the engines? They could have used their own.

  Warren lay in his bunk, staring into the blackness, knowing that a scant two feet above his head there was a plate of steel, but he couldn’t see the steel. And he knew there was a way to start the engines, a simple way once you knew it or remembered it, but he couldn’t see that, either.

  Man experienced incidents, gathered knowledge, knew emotion – and then, in the course of time, forgot the incident and knowledge and emotion. Life was a long series of forgettings. Memories were wiped out and old knowledge dulled and skill was lost, but it took time to wipe it out or dull it or lose it. You couldn’t know a thing one day and forget it on the next.

  But here on this barren world, in some impossible way, the forgetting had been speeded up. On Earth it took years to forget an incident or to lose a skill. Here it happened overnight.

  He tried to sleep and couldn’t. He finally got up and dressed and went down the stairs, out the lock into the alien night.

  A low voice asked, “That you, Ira?”

  “It’s me, Bat Ears. I couldn’t sleep. I’m worried.”

  “You’re always worried,” said Bat Ears. “It’s an occu … occu …”

  “Occupational?”

  “That’s it,” said Bat Ears, hiccoughing just a little. “That’s the word I wanted. Worry is an occupational disease with you.”

  “We’re in a jam, Bat Ears.”

  “There’s been planets,” Bat Ears said, “I wouldn’t of minded so much being marooned on, but this ain’t one of them. This here place is the tail end of creation.”

  They stood together in the darkness with the sweep of alien stars above them and the silent planet stretching off to a vague horizon.

  “There’s something here,” Bat Ears went on. “You can smell it in the air. Them fancy-pants in there said there wasn’t nothing here because they couldn’t see nothing and the books they’d read said nothing much could live on a planet that was just rocks and moss. But, me, I’ve seen planets. Me, I was planet-checking when most of them was in diapers and my nose can tell me more about a planet than their brains all lumped together, which, incidentally, ain’t a bad idea.”

  “I think you’re right,” confessed Warren. “I can feel it myself. I couldn’t before. Maybe it’s just because we’re scared that we can feel it now.”

  “I felt it before I was scared.”

  “We should have looked around. That’s where we made our mistake. But there was so much work to do in the junkyard that we never thought of it.”

  “Mac took a little jaunt,” said Bat Ears. “Says he found some towers.”

  “He told me about them, too.”

  “Mac was just a little green around the gills when he was telling me.”

  “He told me he didn’t like them.”

  “If there was any place to run to, Mac would be running right now.”

  “In the morning,” Warren said, “we’ll go and see those towers.”

  IX

  They were towers, all right, and there were eight of them in line, like watchtowers that at one time had stretched across the planet, but something had happened and all the others had been leveled except the eight that were standing there.

  They were built of undressed native rock, crudely piled, without mortar and with little wedges and slabs of stone used in the interstices to make the stones set solid. They were the kind of towers that might have been built by a savage race and they had an ancient look about them. They were about six feet at the base and tapered slightly toward the top and each of them was capped by a huge flat stone with an enormous boulder placed upon the slab to hold it in its place.

  Warren said to Ellis, “This is your department. Take over.”

  The little archaeologist didn’t answer. He walked around the nearest tower and went up close to it and examined it. He put out his hands and acted as if he meant to shake the tower, but it didn’t shake.

  “Solid,” he said. “Well built and old.”

  “Type F culture, I would say,” guessed Spencer.

  “Maybe less than that. No attempt at an aesthetic effect – pure utility. But good craftsmanship.”

  Clyne said, “Its purpose is the thing. What were the towers built for?”

  “Storage space,” said Spencer.

  “A marker,” Lang contradicted. “A claim marker, a cache marker …”

  “We can find the purpose,” Warren said. “That is something we needn’t argue nor speculate about. All we have to do is knock off the boulder and lift the cap and have a look inside.”

  He strode up to the tower and started climbing it.

  It was an easy thing to climb, for there were niches in the stones and hand and toe holds were not too hard to find.

  He reached the top.

  “Look out below,” he yelled, and heaved at the boulder.

  It rolled and then slowly settled back. He braced himself and heaved again and this time it toppled. It went plunging off the tower, smashed to the ground, went rumbling down the slope, gathering speed, hitting other boulders in its path, zigzagging with the deflection of its course, thrown high into the air by the boulders that it hit.

  Warren said, “Throw a rope up to me. I’ll fasten it to the capstone and then we can haul it off.”

  “We haven’t got a rope,” said Clyne.

  “Someone run back to the ship and get one. I’ll wait here till he returns.”

  Briggs started back toward the ship.

  Warren straightened up. From the tower he had a fine view of the country and he swiveled slowly, examining it.

  Somewhere nearby, he thought, the men – well, not men, but the things that built these towers – must have had their dwelling. Within a mile or so there had been at one time a habitation. For the towers would have taken time in building and that meant that the ones who built them must have had at least a semi-permanent location.

  But there was nothing to see – nothing but tumbled boulder fields and great outcroppings and the blankets of primal plants that ran across their surfaces.

  What did they live on? Why were they here? What would have attracted them? What would have held them here?

  He halted in his pivoting, scarcely believing what he saw. Carefully he traced the form of it, making sure that the li
ght on some boulder field was not befuddling his vision.

  It couldn’t be, he told himself. It couldn’t happen three times. He must be wrong.

  He sucked in his breath and held it and waited for the illusion to go away.

  It didn’t go away. The thing was there.

  “Spencer,” he called. “Spencer, please come up here.”

  He continued watching it. Below him, he heard Spencer scrabbling up the tower. He reached down a hand and helped him.

  “Look,” Warren said, pointing. “What is that out there?”

  “A ship!” cried Spencer. “There’s another ship out there!”

  X

  The spaceship was old, incredibly old. It was red with rust; you could put your hand against its metal hide and sweep your hand across it and the flakes of rust would rain down upon the rock and your hand would come away painted with rust.

  The airlock once had been closed, but someone or something had battered a hole straight through it without opening it, for the rim was still in place against the hull and the jagged hole ran to the ship’s interior. For yards around the lock, the ground was red with violently scattered rust.

  They clambered through the hole. Inside, the ship was bright and shining, without a trace of rust, although there was a coating of dust over everything. Through the dust upon the floor was a beaten track and many isolated footprints where the owners of the prints had stepped out of the path. They were alien tracks, with a heavy heel and three great toes, for all the world like the tracks of a mighty bird or some long-dead dinosaur.

  The trail led through the ship back to the engine room and there the empty platform stood, with the engines gone.

  “That’s how they got away,” said Warren, “the ones who junked their engines. They took the engines off this ship and put them in their ship and then they took off.”

  “But they wouldn’t know –” argued Clyne.

  “They evidently did,” Warren interrupted bluntly.

  Spencer said, “They must have been the ones. This ship has been here for a long time – the rust will tell you that. And it was closed, hermetically sealed, because there’s no rust inside. That hole was punched through the lock fairly recently and the engines taken.”