The devil-men were ringed around the tractor, playing the purple beams on the machine. They stood stolidly, like statues, without a trace of emotion in their features.
The tractor was beginning to heat up. The air was becoming hot and the metal was warm to the touch.
The interior of the tractor suddenly flashed with a green burst of flame.
Yancey and Cabot wheeled about.
The brain mechanism was a mass of twisted wreckage.
“Blew up,” said Cabot. “Something in the purple rays. This is the end of us now if our time-casting didn’t work. We can’t even operate the time-mechanism without the brain.”
“Look here!” cried Cabot from a port.
Cameron and Yancey rushed to his side.
Swooping down toward the tractor was a black ship, an exact duplicate of the time machine of the devil-men.
Like an avenging meteor the black craft tore downward. From its nose flashes of green fire stabbed out viciously and living lightning bolts crashed among the devil-men.
Terrified, the devil-men tried to scurry out of reach, but the lightning bolts sought them out, caught them, burned them into cinders.
“A ship out of the future!” gasped Yancey. “Our radio worked!”
CHAPTER V
The Thrill-Hunters
Andy Smith spoke earnestly. “There’s just one thing,” he said. “We can’t go back to the fifty-sixth century. Steve and I stole this time-machine. Lucky for you fellows we did, because apparently no one else caught your radio message. But if we’re caught back there it means a life stretch on Mercury for us. Our machine is the second one ever stolen. The first one is over there.”
He nodded toward the devil-men’s machine, blasted on the hillside.
“Hell,” said Yancey, “what are we blabbering around about? We have a machine that will take us through time and space. Any place we want to go. There’s plenty of room for all of us. The ship’s loaded with treasure. Do we have to decide where to go? Why can’t we just skip around and stop wherever things look good to us? Like those Centaurians. Me, I don’t care whether I ever go back to the twentieth century. I didn’t leave anybody back there.”
“Just an old maid aunt,” Cabot spoke for himself. “And she didn’t approve of me. Figured I should have settled down and made more money—added to the family fortune. Thought hunting was silly.”
The four of them looked at Cameron. He grinned.
“I’d like to find out something about what the next couple three hundred thousand years have done in the way of science,” he admitted. “Maybe could pick up a few tricks. Skim the cream of the world’s science. Probably lots of ideas we could incorporate in the time-flier.”
“Wish we knew more about that time-brain,” mourned Smith. “But I can’t understand it. The fifty-sixth hasn’t anything like it. Our machines are run on an entirely different basis. Warping of world lines principle.”
They sat in silence for a moment. From the river came the roaring bellow of a mammoth bull.
“Say,” asked Yancey, “has anyone seen anything of One-Eye?”
“No,” said Cameron. “He must have hit for high timber when all the fireworks broke out.”
“By the way,” asked Steve Clark, “What are you going to do with Pascal’s body?”
“Leave it here,” suggested Yancey. “In the tractor. If we worked a million years we couldn’t erect a more suitable burial site. Shut the door and leave him there. With his time brain. No one else will ever build another. It was all in Pascal’s head. No notes, nothing. Just his brain. He told me he meant to write a book when he got around to it. We can’t take the body back to the twentieth century and deliver it to the authorities. Because nobody would believe us. They’d throw us in the can.”
“We might take it back and leave it somewhere on his premises for someone to find,” Cabot suggested.
Yancey shook his head.
“That would be senseless. Just stir up a lot of fuss. An autopsy and an inquest and Scotland Yard half nuts over a new mystery. Pascal would rather be left here.”
“I’m inclined to agree,” said Cameron.
“That’s settled then,” said Smith, getting to his feet. “What do you say we get started? We got lots of places to go.”
Clark laughed.
“You know,” he said, sweeping a hand toward the wrecked time-flier, “I get a big kick out of the way this Centaurian business turned out. For five hundred years those long-tailed gangsters just toured all over hell, robbing everything that looked like it was worth taking. Dragging it back into prehistoric time and hiding it away. And in the end all their work was done so that five Earthmen could use it to finance a life-time of time wandering.”
Andy Smith looked thoughtful.
“But,” he said, “the Centaurians must have been robbing for some purpose. They must have had something in mind. They amassed billions of dollars in treasure. For what reason? Not just for the love of it, surely. Not just to look at. Not just for the thrill of taking it. What were they going to do with it?”
“There,” said Cameron, “is one question that will never be answered.”
Old One-Eye squatted inside the time-tractor.
It was snowing outside, but the tractor provided an excellent shelter and One-Eye was well wrapped in furs and skins. In one corner of the tractor was plenty of food.
Wrapped to his ears in a great mastodon robe, One-Eye nodded sleepily. Life was pleasant for the old Neanderthaler. Pleasant and easy. For the tribe which had wandered into the valley and found him living in the shining cave had taken him for a god. As a result they brought him food and furs, weapons and other offerings, gifts to appease his wrath, to court his favor. For who could doubt that anyone but a god would live in a cave that glinted in the sunshine, a cave made of hard, smooth stone, beautifully shaped, a cave that had no draughts and was secure against the attack of any wild beast.
One-Eye, dozing, dimly remembered the day when, curiously and idly jiggling at the door handle of the tractor, the handle moved in his hand and the door had swung smoothly open.
Henceforward the tractor had become One-Eye’s cave. In it he had lived through many summers and many snows. In it he would live out the rest of his days.
One-Eye remembered the strange friends who had come to him in this shining cave. They had gone, long ago. And One-Eye missed them. Vaguely he was lonesome for them. Many times he wished they might come back again.
The old Neanderthaler drew in his breath with a slobbering sigh. Perhaps some day they would. In the meantime, he kept close and jealous guard and maintained the proper respect to the one of them that had stayed behind, the one whose bones lay neatly arranged in one corner of the tractor.
But they had remembered One-Eye before they left, these other friends of his. Of that One-Eye was sure. Had they not left behind them, in the tractor, for him to find, the great shining stone which he had given them so long ago in exchange for the shining, keen-edged knife?
One-Eye slobbered pleasurably now as he looked at the stone, sparkling and flashing with hidden fire as it lay in the palm of his hand. One-Eye could not know that the stone had been left in the tractor accidentally, overlooked by the 20th and 56th century men before they left on their excursion into time. Not knowing this, One-Eye held close to him the thought that these friends of his had left behind a token … a token that some day, perhaps, they would return and sit around a fire with him and give him bones to gnaw and scratch his back where it itched the most.
Outside the wind howled dismally and the snow slanted down in a new fury. A blizzard raged over the Thames valley.
But One-Eye, snug in his furs, comfortable in his old age, a god to his contemporaries, played with a diamond the size of a man’s fist, unmindful of the weather.
Huddling Place
Originally published in
the July 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, “Huddling Place” is one of the best-known stories in the iconic volume City. It is the seed from which all the tragedy in the remaining stories in the series springs, and it brings to life Simak’s visions of talking dogs and robots. Simak himself felt that in creating those stories, he became a mature and accomplished writer.
—dww
The drizzle sifted from the leaden skies, like smoke drifting through the bare-branched trees. It softened the hedges and hazed the outlines of the buildings and blotted out the distance. It glinted on the metallic skins of the silent robots and silvered the shoulders of the three humans listening to the intonations of the black-garbed man, who read from the book cupped between his hands.
“For I am the Resurrection and the Life—”
The moss-mellowed graven figure that reared above the door of the crypt seemed straining upward, every crystal of its yearning body reaching toward something that no one else could see. Straining, as it had strained since that day of long ago when men had chipped it from the granite to adorn the family tomb with a symbolism that had pleased the first John J. Webster in the last years he held of life.
“And whosoever liveth and believeth in Me—”
Jerome A. Webster felt his son’s fingers tighten on his arm, heard the muffled sobbing of his mother, saw the lines of robots standing rigid, heads bowed in respect to the master they had served. The master who now was going home—to the final home of all.
Numbly, Jerome A. Webster wondered if they understood—if they understood life and death—if they understood what it meant that Nelson F. Webster lay there in the casket, that a man with a book intoned words above him.
Nelson F. Webster, fourth of the line of Websters who had lived on these acres, had lived and died here, scarcely leaving, and now was going to his final rest in that place the first of them had prepared for the rest of them—for that long line of shadowy descendants who would live here and cherish the things and the ways and the life that the first John J. Webster had established.
Jerome A. Webster felt his jaw muscles tighten, felt a little tremor run across his body. For a moment his eyes burned and the casket blurred in his sight and the words the man in black was saying were one with the wind that whispered in the pines standing sentinel for the dead. Within his brain remembrance marched—remembrance of a gray-haired man stalking the hills and fields, sniffing the breeze of an early morning, standing, legs braced, before the flaring fireplace with a glass of brandy in his hand.
Pride—the pride of land and life, and the humility and greatness that quiet living breeds within a man. Contentment of casual leisure and surety of purpose. Independence of assured security, comfort of familiar surroundings, freedom of broad acres.
Thomas Webster was joggling his elbow. “Father,” he was whispering. “Father.”
The service was over. The black-garbed man had closed his book. Six robots stepped forward, lifted the casket.
Slowly the three followed the casket into the crypt, stood silently as the robots slid it into its receptacle, closed the tiny door and affixed the plate that read:
NELSON F. WEBSTER
2034–2117
That was all. Just the name and dates. And that, Jerome A. Webster found himself thinking, was enough. There was nothing else that needed to be there. That was all those others had. The ones that called the family roll—starting with William Stevens, 1920–1999. Gramp Stevens, they had called him, Webster remembered. Father of the wife of that first John J. Webster, who was here himself—1951–2020. And after him his son, Charles F. Webster, 1980–2060. And his son, John J. II, 2004–2086. Webster could remember John J. II—a grandfather who had slept beside the fire with his pipe hanging from his mouth, eternally threatening to set his whiskers aflame.
Webster’s eyes strayed to another plate. Mary Webster, the mother of the boy here at his side. And yet not a boy. He kept forgetting that Thomas was twenty now, in a week or so would be leaving for Mars, even as in his younger days he, too, had gone to Mars.
All here together, he told himself. The Websters and their wives and children. Here in death together as they had lived together, sleeping in the pride and security of bronze and marble with the pines outside and the symbolic figure above the age-greened door.
The robots were waiting, standing silently, their task fulfilled.
His mother looked at him.
“You’re head of the family now, my son,” she told him.
He reached out and hugged her close against his side. Head of the family—what was left of it. Just the three of them now. His mother and his son. And his son would be leaving soon, going out to Mars. But he would come back. Come back with a wife, perhaps, and the family would go on. The family wouldn’t stay at three. Most of the big house wouldn’t stay closed off, as it now was closed off. There had been a time when it had rung with the life of a dozen units of the family, living in their separate apartments under one big roof. That time, he knew, would come again.
The three of them turned and left the crypt, took the path back to the house, looming like a huge gray shadow in the mist.
A fire blazed in the hearth and the book lay upon his desk. Jerome A. Webster reached out and picked it up, read the title once again:
“Martian Physiology, With Especial Reference to the Brain” by Jerome A. Webster, M.D.
Thick and authoritative—the work of a lifetime. Standing almost alone in its field. Based upon the data gathered during those five plague years on Mars—years when he had labored almost day and night with his fellow colleagues of the World Committee’s medical commission, dispatched on an errand of mercy to the neighboring planet.
A tap sounded on the door.
“Come in,” he called.
The door opened and a robot glided in.
“Your whiskey, sir.”
“Thank you, Jenkins,” Webster said.
“The minister, sir,” said Jenkins, “has left.”
“Oh, yes. I presume that you took care of him.”
“I did, sir. Gave him the usual fee and offered him a drink. He refused the drink.”
“That was a social error,” Webster told him. “Ministers don’t drink.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know. He asked me to ask you to come to church sometime.”
“Eh?”
“I told him, sir, that you never went anywhere.”
“That was quite right, Jenkins,” said Webster. “None of us ever go anywhere.”
Jenkins headed for the door, stopped before he got there, turned around. “If I may say so, sir, that was a touching service at the crypt. Your father was a fine human, the finest ever was. The robots were saying the service was very fitting. Dignified like, sir. He would have liked it had he known.”
“My father,” said Webster, “would be even more pleased to hear you say that, Jenkins.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Jenkins, and went out.
Webster sat with the whiskey and the book and fire—felt the comfort of the well-known room close in about him, felt the refuge that was in it.
This was home. It had been home for the Websters since that day when the first John J. had come here and built the first unit of the sprawling house. John J. had chosen it because it had a trout stream, or so he always said. But it was something more than that. It must have been, Webster told himself, something more than that.
Or perhaps, at first, it had only been the trout stream. The trout stream and the trees and meadows, the rocky ridge where the mist drifted in each morning from the river. Maybe the rest of it had grown, grown gradually through the years, through years of family association until the very soil was soaked with something that approached, but wasn’t quite, tradition. Something that made each tree, each rock, each foot of soil a Webster tree or rock or piece of soil. It all belonged.
John J., the first John J., had come after the breakup of the cities, after men had forsaken, once and for all, the twentieth century huddling places, had broken free of the tribal instinct to stick together in one cave or in one clearing against a common foe or a common fear. An instinct that had become outmoded, for there were no fears or foes. Man revolting against the herd instinct economic and social conditions had impressed upon him in ages past. A new security and a new sufficiency had made it possible to break away.
The trend had started back in the twentieth century, more than two hundred years before, when men moved to country homes to get fresh air and elbow room and a graciousness in life that communal existence, in its strictest sense, never had given them.
And here was the end result. A quiet living. A peace that could only come with good things. The sort of life that men had yearned for years to have. A manorial existence, based on old family homes and leisurely acres, with atomics supplying power and robots in place of serfs.
Webster smiled at the fireplace with its blazing wood. That was an anachronism, but a good one—something that Man had brought forward from the caves. Useless, because atomic heating was better—but more pleasant. One couldn’t sit and watch atomics and dream and build castles in the flames.
Even the crypt out there, where they had put his father that afternoon. That was family, too. All of a piece with the rest of it. The somber pride and leisured life and peace. In the old days the dead were buried in vast plots all together, stranger cheek by jowl with stranger—
He never goes anywhere.
That is what Jenkins had told the minister.
And that was right. For what need was there to go anywhere? It all was here. By simply twirling a dial one could talk face to face with anyone one wished, could go, by sense, if not in body, anywhere one wished. Could attend the theater or hear a concert or browse in a library halfway around the world. Could transact any business one might need to transact without rising from one’s chair.
Webster reached out his hand and drank the whiskey, then swung to the dialed machine beside his desk.