The Ghost of a Model T: And Other Stories

  Wampus and Lars had thought that there would be treasure here. And there was no certain treasure, no treasure revealed and waiting for the hands of men to take. He had thought of glory and there was no glory. He had thought of knowledge and without a shovel and some time there simply was no knowledge. No knowledge beyond the bare knowing that he had been right, that the city did exist.

  And yet there was certain other knowledge gained along the way. The knowledge that the seven types of the Venerables did still in fact exist, that from this existence the race might still continue despite the guns and snares and the greed and guile of Earthmen who had hunted Seven for its fifty thousand dollar pelt.

  Seven little creatures, seven different sexes. All of them essential to the continuance of the race. Six little creatures looking for the seventh and he had found the seventh. Because he had found the seventh, because he had been the messenger, there would be at least one new generation of the Venerables to carry on the race.

  What use, he thought, to carry on a race that had failed its purpose?

  He shook his head.

  You can’t play God, he said. You can’t presume to judge. There either is a purpose in all things or there’s no purpose in anything, and who is there to know?

  There either is purpose that I reached this city or there is no purpose. There is a purpose that I may die here or it is possible that my dying here will be no more than another random factor in the great machination of pure chance that moves the planets through their courses and brings a man homeward at the end of day.

  And there was another knowledge…the knowledge of the endless reaches and the savage loneliness that was the Martian wilderness. The knowledge of that and the queer, almost non-human detachment that it fused into the human soul.

  Lessons, he thought.

  The lesson that one man is an insignificant flyspeck crawling across the face of eternity. The lesson that one life is a relatively unimportant thing when it stands face to face with the over-riding reality of the miracle of all creation.

  He got up and stood at his full height and knew his insignificance and his humility in the empty sweep of land that fell away on every side and in the arching sky that vaulted overhead from horizon to horizon and the utter silence that lay upon the land and sky.

  Starving was a lonely and an awful business.

  Some deaths are swift and clean.

  But starving is not one of these.

  The seven did not come. Webb waited for them, and because he still felt kindly toward them, he found excuses for them. They did not realize, he told himself, how short a time a man may go without nourishment. The strange mating, he told himself, involving seven personalities, probably was a complicated procedure and might take a great deal more time than one usually associated with such phenomena. Or something might have happened to them, they might be having trouble of their own. As soon as they had worked it out, they would come, and they would bring him food.

  So he starved with kindly thoughts and with a great deal more patience than a man under dissimilar circumstances might be expected to.

  And he found, even when he felt the lassitude of under-nourishment creeping along his muscles and his bones, even when the sharp pangs of hunger had settled to a gnawing horror that never left him, even when he slept, that his mind was not affected by the ravages that his body was undergoing; that his brain, apparently, was sharpened by the lack of food, that it seemed to step aside from his tortured body and become a separate entity that drew in upon itself and knotted all its faculties into a hard-bound bundle that was scarcely aware of external factors.

  He sat for long hours upon a polished rock, perhaps part of that once proud city, which he found just a few yards from the tunnel mouth, and stared out across the sun-washed wilderness which stretched for miles toward a horizon that it never seemed to reach. He sought for purpose with a sharp-edged mind that probed at the roots of existence and of happenstance and sought to evolve out of the random factors that moved beneath the surface of the universe’s orderliness some evidence of a pattern that would be understandable to the human mind. Often he thought he had it, but it always slid away from him like quicksilver escaping from a clutching hand.

  If Man ever was to find the answer, he knew, it must be in a place like this, where there was no distraction, where there was a distance and a barrenness that built up to a vast impersonality which emphasized and underscored the inconsequence of the thinker. For if the thinker introduced himself as a factor out of proportion to the fact, then the whole problem was distorted and the equation, if equation there be, never could be solved.

  At first he had tried to hunt animals for food, but strangely, while the rest of the wilderness swarmed with vicious life that hunted timid life, the area around the city was virtually deserted, as if some one had drawn a sacred chalk mark around it. On his second day of hunting he killed a small thing that on Earth could have been a mouse. He built a fire and cooked it and later hunted up the sun-dried skin and sucked and chewed at it for the small nourishment that it might contain. But after that he did not kill a thing, for there was nothing to be killed.

  Finally he came to know the seven would not come, that they never had intended to come, that they had deserted him exactly as his two human companions had deserted him before. He had been made a fool, he knew, not once, but twice.

  He should have kept on going east after he had started. He should not have come back with seven to find the other six who waited at the canyon’s mouth.

  You might have made it to the settlements, he told himself. You just might have made it. Just possibly have made it.

  East. East toward the settlements.

  Human history is a trying…a trying for the impossible, and attaining it. There is no logic, for if humanity had waited upon logic it still would be a cave-living and an earth-bound race.

  Try, said Webb, not knowing exactly what he said.

  He walked down the hill again and started out across the wilderness, heading toward the east. For there was no hope upon the hill and there was hope toward the east.

  A mile from the base of the hill, he fell. He staggered, falling and rising, for another mile. He crawled a hundred yards. It was there the seven found him.

  “Food!” he cried at them and he had a feeling that although he cried it in his mind there was no sound in his mouth. “Food! Water!”

  “We take care,” they said, and lifted him, holding him in a sitting position.

  “Life,” Seven told him, “is in many husks. Like nested boxes that fit inside each other. You live one and you peel it off and there’s another life.”

  “Wrong,” said Webb. “You do not talk like that. Your thought does not flow like that. There is something wrong.”

  “There is an inner man,” said Seven. “There are many inner men.”

  “The subconscious,” said Webb, and while he said it in his mind, he knew that no word, no sound came out of his mouth. And he knew now, too, that no words were coming out of Seven’s mouth, that here were words that could not be expressed in the patois of the desert, that here were thoughts and knowledge that could not belong to a thing that scuttled, fearsome, through the Martian wilderness.

  “You peel an old life off and you step forth in a new and shining life,” said Seven, “but you must know the way. There is a certain technique and a certain preparation. If there is no preparation and no technique, the job is often bungled.”

  “Preparation,” said Webb. “I have no preparation. I do not know about this.”

  “You are prepared,” said Seven. “You were not before, but now you are.”

  “I thought,” said Webb.

  “You thought,” said Seven, “and you found a partial answer. Well-fed, earth-bound, arrogant, there would have been no answer. You found humility.”

  “I do not know the technique,” said We
bb. “I do not…”

  “We know the technique,” Seven said. “We take care.”

  The hilltop where the dead city lay shimmered and there was a mirage on it. Out of the dead mound of its dust rose the pinnacles and spires, the buttresses and the flying bridges of a city that shone with color and with light; out of the sand came the blaze of garden beds of flowers and the tall avenues of trees and a music that came from the slender bell towers.

  There was grass beneath his feet instead of sand blazing with the heat of the Martian noon. There was a path that led up the terraces of the hill toward the wonder city that reared upon its heights. There was the distant sound of laughter and there were flecks of color moving on the distant streets and along the walls and through the garden paths.

  Webb swung around and the seven were not there. Nor was the wilderness. The land stretched away on every hand and it was not wilderness, but a breath-taking place with groves of trees and roads and flowing water courses.

  He turned back to the city again and watched the movement of the flecks of color.

  “People,” he said.

  And Seven’s voice, coming to him from somewhere, from elsewhere, said:

  “People from the many planets. And from beyond the planets. And some of your own people you will find among them. For you are not the first.”

  Filled with wonder, a wonder that was fading, that would be entirely faded before he reached the city, Webb started walking up the path.

  Wampus Smith and Lars Nelson came to the hill many days later. They came on foot because the wilderness wagon had broken down. They came without food except the little food they could kill along the way and they came with no more than a few drops of water sloshing in their canteens and there was no water to be found.

  There, a short distance from the foot of the hill, they found the sun-dried mummy of a man face downward on the sand and when they turned him over they saw who he was.

  Wampus stared across the body at Lars.

  “How did he get here?” he croaked.

  “I don’t know,” said Lars. “He never could have made it, not knowing the country and on foot. And he wouldn’t have traveled this way anyhow. He would have headed east, back to the settlements.”

  They pawed through his clothing and found nothing. But they took his gun, for the charges in their own were running very low.

  “What’s the use,” said Lars. “We can’t make it, Wampus.”

  “We can try,” said Wampus.

  Above the hill a mirage flickered…a city with shining turrets and dizzy pinnacles and rows of trees and fountains that flashed with leaping water. To their ears came the sound, or seemed to come, the sound of many bells.

  Wampus spat with lips that were cracked and dried, spat with no saliva in his mouth.

  “Them damn mirages,” he said. “They drive a man half crazy.”

  “They seem so close,” said Lars. “So close and real. As if they were someplace else and were trying to break through.”

  Wampus spat again. “Let’s get going,” he said.

  The two men turned toward the east and as they moved, they left staggering, uneven tracks through the sand of Mars.

  The Autumn Land

  Cliff Simak once called this story one of the few he wrote to order: he’d been asked for a story that could appear in the October 1971 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as a celebration of Cliff’s concurrent appearance as Guest of Honor at that year’s World Science Fiction Convention. And it would become one of his favorites among his stories. But it is, in a way, an extension of those Simak stories that featured people trying to find a way to flee some sort of societal collapse—and it’s haunted.

  —dww

  He sat on the porch, in the rocking chair, with the loose board creaking as he rocked. Across the street the old white-haired lady cut a bouquet of chrysanthemums in the never-ending autumn. Where he could see between the ancient houses to the distant woods and wastelands, a soft Indian-summer blue lay upon the land. The entire village was soft and quiet, as old things often are—a place constructed for a dreaming mind rather than a living being. It was an hour too early for his other old and shaky neighbor to come fumbling down the grass-grown sidewalk, tapping the bricks with his seeking cane. And he would not hear the distant children at their play until dusk had fallen—if he heard them then. He did not always hear them.

  There were books to read, but he did not want to read them. He could go into the backyard and spade and rake the garden once again, reducing the soil to a finer texture to receive the seed when it could be planted—if it ever could be planted—but there was slight incentive in the further preparation of a seed bed against a spring that never came. Earlier, much earlier, before he knew about the autumn and the spring, he had mentioned garden seeds to the Milkman, who had been very much embarrassed.

  He had walked the magic miles and left the world behind in bitterness and when he first had come here had been content to live in utter idleness, to be supremely idle and to feel no guilt or shame at doing absolutely nothing or as close to absolutely nothing as a man was able. He had come walking down the autumn street in the quietness and the golden sunshine, and the first person that he saw was the old lady who lived across the street. She had been waiting at the gate of her picket fence as if she had known he would be coming, and she had said to him, “You’re a new one come to live with us. There are not many come these days. That is your house across the street from me, and I know we’ll be good neighbors.” He had reached up his hand to doff his hat to her, forgetting that he had no hat. “My name is Nelson Rand,” he’d told her. “I am an engineer. I will try to be a decent neighbor.” He had the impression that she stood taller and straighter than she did, but old and bent as she might be there was a comforting graciousness about her. “You will please come in,” she said. “I have lemonade and cookies. There are other people there, but I shall not introduce them to you.” He waited for her to explain why she would not introduce him, but there was no explanation, and he followed her down the time-mellowed walk of bricks with great beds of asters and chrysanthemums, a mass of color on either side of it.

  In the large, high-ceilinged living room, with its bay windows forming window seats, filled with massive furniture from another time and with a small blaze burning in the fireplace, she had shown him to a seat before a small table to one side of the fire and had sat down opposite him and poured the lemonade and passed the plate of cookies.

  “You must pay no attention to them,” she had told him. “They are all dying to meet you, but I shall not humor them.”

  It was easy to pay no attention to them, for there was no one there.

  “The Major, standing over there by the fireplace,” said his hostess, “with his elbow on the mantel, a most ungainly pose if you should ask me, is not happy with my lemonade. He would prefer a stronger drink. Please, Mr. Rand, will you not taste my lemonade? I assure you it is good. I made it myself. I have no maid, you see, and no one in the kitchen. I live quite by myself and satisfactorily, although my friends keep dropping in, sometimes more often than I like.”

  He tasted the lemonade, not without misgivings, and to his surprise it was lemonade and was really good, like the lemonade he had drunk when a boy at Fourth of July celebrations and at grade school picnics, and had never tasted since.

  “It is excellent,” he said.

  “The lady in blue,” his hostess said, “sitting in the chair by the window, lived here many years ago. She and I were friends, although she moved away some time ago and I am surprised that she comes back, which she often does. The infuriating thing is that I cannot remember her name, if I ever knew it. You don’t know it, do you?”

  “I am afraid I don’t.”

  “Oh, of course, you wouldn’t. I had forgotten. I forget so easily these days. You are a new arrival.”

/>   He had sat through the afternoon and drank her lemonade and eaten her cookies, while she chattered on about her nonexistent guests. It was only when he had crossed the street to the house she had pointed out as his, with her standing on the stoop and waving her farewell, that he realized she had not told him her name. He did not know it even now.

  How long had it been? he wondered, and realized he didn’t know. It was this autumn business. How could a man keep track of time when it was always autumn?

  It all had started on that day when he’d been driving across Iowa, heading for Chicago. No, he reminded himself, it had started with the thinnesses, although he had paid little attention to the thinnesses to begin with. Just been aware of them, perhaps as a strange condition of the mind, or perhaps an unusual quality to the atmosphere and light. As if the world lacked a certain solidity that one had come to expect, as if one were running along a mystic borderline between here and somewhere else.

  He had lost his West Coast job when a government contract had failed to materialize. His company had not been the only one; there were many other companies that were losing contracts and there were a lot of engineers who walked the streets bewildered. There was a bare possibility of a job in Chicago, although he was well aware that by now it might be filled. Even if there were no job, he reminded himself, he was in better shape than a lot of other men. He was young and single, he had a few dollars in the bank, he had no house mortgage, no car payments, no kids to put through school. He had only himself to support—no family of any sort at all. The old, hardfisted bachelor uncle who had taken him to raise when his parents had died in a car crash and had worked him hard on that stony, hilly Wisconsin farm, had receded deep into the past, becoming a dim, far figure that was hard to recognize. He had not liked his uncle, Rand remembered—had not hated him, simply had not liked him. He had shed no tears, he recalled, when the old man had been caught out in a pasture by a bull and gored to death. So now Rand was quite alone, not even holding the memories of a family.