The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories

  I turned around and Mack was just behind me. He was rubbing his hands in satisfaction and his face was all lit up with smiles.

  “Pretty slick,” he said.

  I agreed with him, but I had some doubts that I could not quite express.

  “We’ll string up some lights,” said Mack, “so they can see it day and night and then we’ll have them pegged for good.”

  “You think they’ll stay with it?” I asked. “They won’t catch on?”

  “Not a chance.”

  I went down to my tent and poured myself a good stiff drink, then sat down in a chair in front of the tent.

  Some of the men were stringing cable and others were rigging up some batteries of lights and down in the cookshack I could hear Greasy singing, but the song was sad. I felt sorry for Greasy.

  Mack might be right, I admitted to myself. We might have built a trap that would cook the Shadows’ goose. If nothing else, the sheer fascination of all that motion might keep them stuck there. It had a hypnotic effect even for a human and one could never gauge what effect it might have on an alien mind. Despite the evident technology of the aliens, it was entirely possible that their machine technology might have developed along some divergent line, so that the spinning wheel and the plunging piston and the smooth fluid gleam of metal was new to them.

  I tried to imagine a machine technology that would require no motion, but such a thing was entirely inconceivable to me. And for that very reason, I thought, the idea of all this motion might be just as inconceivable to an alien intellect.

  The stars came out while I sat there and no one wandered over to gab and that was fine. I was just as satisfied to be left alone.

  After a time, I went into the tent, had another drink and decided to go to bed.

  I took off my coat and slung it on the desk. When it hit, there was a thump, and as soon as I heard that thump, I knew what it was. I had dropped Benny’s jewel into the pocket of the coat and had then forgotten it.

  I fished into the pocket and got out the jewel, fearing all the while that I had broken it. And there was something wrong with it – it had somehow come apart. The jewel face had come loose from the rest of it and I saw that the jewel was no more than a cover for a box-shaped receptacle.

  I put it on the desk and swung the jewel face open and there, inside the receptacle, I found myself.

  The statuette was nestled inside a weird piece of mechanism and it was as fine a piece of work as Greasy’s statuette.

  It gave me a flush of pride and satisfaction. Benny, after all, had not forgotten me!

  I sat for a long time looking at the statuette, trying to puzzle out the mechanism. I had a good look at the jewel and I finally figured out what it was all about.

  The jewel was no jewel at all; it was a camera. Except that instead of taking two-dimensional pictures, it worked in three dimensions. And that, of course, was how the Shadows made the models. Or maybe they were patterns rather than just models.

  I finished undressing and got into bed and lay on the cot, staring at the canvas, and the pieces all began to fall together and it was beautiful. Beautiful, that is, for the aliens. It made us look like a bunch of saps.

  The cones had gone out and watched the survey party and had not let it get close to them, but they had been ready for us when we came. They’d disguised the cones to look like something that we wouldn’t be afraid of, something perhaps that we could even laugh at it. And that was the safest kind of disguise that anyone could assume – something that the victim might think was mildly funny. For no one gets too upset about what a clown might do.

  But the Shadows had been loaded and they’d let us have it and apparently, by the time we woke up, they had us pegged and labeled.

  And what would they do now? Still stay behind their log, still keep watching us, and suck us dry of everything that we had to offer?

  And when they were ready, when they’d gotten all they wanted or all they felt that they could get, they’d come out and finish us.

  I was somewhat scared and angry and felt considerably like a fool and it was frustrating just to think about.

  Mack might kid himself that he had solved the problem with his flytrap out there, but there was still a job to do. Somehow or other, we had to track down these hiding aliens and break up their little game.

  Somewhere along the way, I went to sleep, and suddenly someone was shaking me and yelling for me to get out.

  I came half upright and saw that it was Carr who had been shaking me. He was practically gibbering. He kept pointing outside and babbling something about a funny cloud and I couldn’t get much more out of him.

  So I shucked into my trousers and my shoes and went out with him and headed for the hilltop at a run. Dawn was just breaking and the Shadows still were clustered around the flytrap and a crowd of men had gathered just beyond the flytrap and were looking toward the east.

  We pushed our way through the crowd up to the front and there was the cloud that Carr had been jabbering about, but it was a good deal closer now and was sailing across the plains, slowly and majestically, and flying above it was a little silver sphere that flashed and glittered in the first rays of the sun.

  The cloud looked, more than anything, like a mass of junk. I could see what looked like a derrick sticking out of it and here and there what seemed to be a wheel. I tried to figure out what it might be, but I couldn’t, and all the time it was moving closer to us.

  Mack was at my left and I spoke to him, but he didn’t answer me. He was just like Benny – he couldn’t answer me. He looked hypnotized.

  The closer that cloud came, the more fantastic it was and the more unbelievable. For there was no question now that it was a mass of machinery, just like the equipment we had. There were tractors and earthmovers and shovels and dozers and all the other stuff, and in between these bigger pieces was all sorts of little stuff.

  In another five minutes, it was hovering almost over us and then slowly it began to lower. While we watched, it came down to the ground, gently, almost without a bump, even though there were a couple or three acres of it. Besides the big equipment, there were tents and cups and spoons and tables and chairs and benches and a case or two of whisky and some surveying equipment – there was, it seemed to me, almost exactly all the items there were in the camp.

  When it had all sat down, the little silver sphere came down, too, and floated slowly toward us. It stopped a little way away from us and Mack walked out toward it and I followed Mack. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Carr and Knight were walking forward, too.

  We stopped four or five feet from it and now we saw that the sphere was some sort of protective suit. Inside it sat a pale little humanoid. Not human, but at least with two legs and arms and a single head. He had antennae sprouting from his forehead and his ears were long and pointed and he had no hair at all.

  He let the sphere set down on the ground and we got a little closer and squatted down so we would be on a level with him.

  He jerked a thumb backward over his shoulder, pointing at the mass of equipment he’d brought.

  “Is pay.” he announced in a shrill, high, piping voice.

  We didn’t answer right away. We did some gulping first.

  “Is pay for what?” Knight finally managed to ask him.

  “For fun,” the creature said.

  “I don’t understand,” said Mack.

  “We make one of everything. We not know what you want, so we make one of all. Unfortunate, two lots are missing. Accident, perhaps.”

  “The models,” I said to the others. “That’s what he’s talking about. The models were patterns and the models from Greasy’s Shadow and from Benny –”

  “Not all,” the creature said. “The rest be right along.”

  “Now wait a minute,” said Carr. “Let us get this straight. You are paying
us. Paying us for what? Exactly what did we do for you?”

  Mack blurted out: “How did you make this stuff?”

  “One question at a time,” I pleaded.

  “Machines can make,” the creature said. “Knowing how, machines can make anything. Very good machines.”

  “But why?” asked Carr again. “Why did you make it for us?”

  “For fun,” the creature explained patiently. “For laugh. For watch. Is a big word I cannot –”

  “Entertainment?” I offered.

  “That is right,” the creature said. “Entertainment is the word. We have lot of time for entertainment. We stay home, watch our entertainment screen. We get tired of it. We seek for something new. You something new. Give us much interesting. We try to pay you for it.”

  “Good Lord!” exclaimed Knight. “I begin to get it now. We were a big news event and so they sent out all those cones to cover us. Mack, did you saw into that cone last night?”

  “We did,” said Mack. “As near as we could figure, it was a TV sender. Not like ours, of course – there would be differences. But we figured it for a data-sending rig,”

  I turned back to the alien in his shiny sphere. “Listen carefully,” I said. “Let’s get down to business. You are willing to keep on paying if we provide you entertainment?”

  “Gladly,” said the creature. “You keep us entertained, we give you what you want.”

  “Instead of one of everything, you will make us many of one thing?”

  “You show it to us,” the creature said. “You let us know how many.”

  “Steel?” asked Mack. “You can make us steel?”

  “No recognize this steel. Show us. How made, how big, how shaped. We make.”

  “If we keep you entertained?”

  “That right.” the creature said.

  “Deal?” I asked.

  “Deal,” the creature said.

  “From now on? No stopping?”

  “As long as you keep us happy.”

  “That may take some doing,” Mack told me.

  “No, it won’t,” I said.

  “You’re crazy!” Mack yelped. “They’ll never let us have them!”

  “Yes, they will,” I answered. “Earth will do anything to cinch this planet. And don’t you see, with this sort of swap, we’ll beat the cost. All Earth has to do is send out one sample of everything we need. One sample will do the trick. One I-beam and they’ll make a million of them. It’s the best deal Earth has ever made.”

  “We do our part,” the creature assured us happily. “Long as you do yours.”

  “I’ll get that order right off now,” I said to Mack. “I’ll write it up and have Jack send it out.”

  I stood up and headed back toward camp.

  “Rest of it,” the creature said, motioning over his shoulder.

  I swung around and looked.

  There was another mass of stuff coming in, keeping fairly low. And this time it was men – a solid press of men.

  “Hey!” cried Mack. “You can’t do that! That just isn’t right!”

  I didn’t need to look. I knew exactly what had happened. The aliens had duplicated not only our equipment, but the men as well. In that crowd of men were the duplicates of every one of us – everyone, that is, except myself and Greasy.

  Horrified as I might have been, outraged as any human would be, I couldn’t help but think of some of the situations that might arise. Imagine two Macks insisting on bossing the operation! Picture two Thornes trying to get along together!

  I didn’t hang around. I left Mack and the rest of them to explain why men should not be duplicated. In my tent, I sat down and wrote an imperative, high-priority, must-deliver order for five hundred peepers.

  So Bright the Vision

  This story was probably completed early in 1955 under the title “Writ by Hand” before finally being sold to Leo Margulies at Fantastic Universe Science Fiction, to whom Cliff had been selling pieces the top-ranked markets rejected. Any critical mention that “So Bright the Vision” has received since being published in August 1956 has largely been due to comment on its vision of the writerly craft in a computerized future. And while such comment is both accurate and deserved, it completely overlooks the story’s criticisms of both the literary establishment in general and the science fiction establishment in particular: The machine, Cliff argued, was being allowed to set the norm for literature, which had the effect of setting up a pattern that would be deadly to good fiction.

  For all the seriousness of that subject, this story is just kind of fun, showing what can be done by an author willing to break out of the prevailing SF pattern of the fifties. And I remain – as I said in my comment in an earlier volume of these collections, on the story “Ogre” – utterly tickled by Cliff’s use of that story’s “life blanket” idea in the context of this story.

  —dww

  The showroom was in the decorous part of town, where Kemp Hart seldom found himself. It was a long way from his usual haunts and he was surprised to find that he had walked so far. In fact, he would not have walked at all if his credit had been good at the Bright Star bar where his crowd hung out.

  As soon as he realized where he was he knew he should turn around and walk rapidly away, for he was out of place in this district of swank publishers, gold-plated warrens and famous eateries. But the showroom held him. It would not let him go. He stood in front of it in all his down-at-heels unkemptness, one hand thrust in a pocket, fugitively rubbing between thumb and finger the two small coins that still remained to him.

  Behind the glass the machines were shining-wonderful, the sort of merchandise that belonged on this svelte and perfumed street. One machine in the corner of the showroom was bigger and shinier than the others and had about it a rare glint of competence. It had a massive keyboard for the feeding in of data and it had a hundred slots or so for the working tapes and films. It had a mood control calibrated more sensitively than any he had ever seen and in all probability a lot of other features that were not immediately apparent.

  With a machine such as that, Hart told himself, a man could become famous almost automatically and virtually overnight. He could write anything he wished and he would write it well and the doors of the most snooty of the publishers would stand open to him.

  But much as he might wish to, there was no use of going in to see it. There was nothing to be gained by even thinking about it. It was just something he could stand and look at from beyond the showroom’s glass.

  And yet, he told himself, he had a perfect right to go in and look it over. There was not a thing to stop him. Nothing, at least, beyond the sneer upon the salesman’s face at the sight of him – the silent, polite, well-disciplined contempt when he turned and slunk away.

  He looked furtively up and down the street and the street was empty. The hour was far too early for this particular street to have come to life, and it occurred to him that if he just walked in and asked to see the machine, it would be all right. Perhaps he could explain he did not wish to buy it, but just to look at it. Maybe if he did that they wouldn’t sneer at him. Certainly no one could object. There must be a lot of people, even rich and famous people, who only came to look.

  He edged along the showroom, studying the machines and heading for the door, telling himself that he would not go in, that it was foolish to go in, but secretly knowing that he would.

  He reached the door and opened it and stepped inside. The salesman appeared almost as if by magic.

  “The yarner in the corner,” Hart said. “I wonder if I might –”

  “Most certainly,” said the salesman. “If you’ll just come along with me.”

  In the corner of the showroom, the salesman draped his arm across the machine affectionately.

  “It is our newest model,” he said. “We call it the Class
ic, because it has been designed and engineered with but one thought in mind – the production of the classic. It is, we think, a vast improvement over our Best Seller Model, which, after all, is intended to turn out no better than best sellers – even though on occasion it has turned out certain minor classics. To be quite honest with you, sir, I would suspect that in almost every one of those instances, it had been souped up a bit. I am told some people are very clever that way.”

  Hart shook his head. “Not me. I’m all thumbs when it comes to tinkering.”

  “In that case,” said the salesman, “the thing for you to do is buy the best yarner that you can. Used intelligently, there’s virtually no limit to its versatility. And in this particular model the quality factor is much higher than in any of the others. Although naturally, to get the best results you must be selective in your character films and your narrative problem tapes. But that needn’t worry you. We have a large stock of tapes and films and some new mood and atmosphere fixers that are quite unique. They come fairly high, of course, but –”

  “By the way, just what is the price of this model?”

  “It’s only twenty-five thousand,” the salesman told him, brightly. “Don’t you wonder, sir, how it can be offered at so ridiculous a figure? The engineering that went into it is remarkable. We worked on it for ten full years before we were satisfied. And during those ten years the specifications were junked and redrawn time and time again to keep pace with our developmental research.”

  He slapped the shiny machine with a jubilant hand.

  “I can guarantee you, sir, that nowhere can you get a product superior to this. It has everything. Millions of probability factors have been built into it, assuring you of sure-fire originality. No danger of stumbling into the stereotype, which is not true at all with so many of the cheaper models. The narrative bank alone is capable of turning out an almost infinite number of situations on any particular theme and the character developer has thousands of points of reference instead of the hundred or so you find in inferior models. The semantics section is highly selective and sensitive and you must not overlook –”