Grotto of the Dancing Deer: And Other Stories

  “There’s nothing worth a dime in it so far,” said Hutch.

  I believed him on that score. Hutch could spot a dollar twenty miles away.

  I went down to the brig to see Doc. He was sober. Also unrepentant.

  “You outreached yourself this time,” he said. “That stuff isn’t yours to sell. There’s knowledge in that building that belongs to the Galaxy—for free.”

  I explained to him what had happened, how we’d found the silo was a university and how we were taking the courses on board for the human race after signing up for them all regular and proper. I tried to make it sound as if we were being big, but Doc wouldn’t buy a word of it.

  “You wouldn’t give your dying grandma a drink of water unless she paid you in advance,” he said. “Don’t give me any of that guff about service to humanity.”

  So I left him to stew in the brig a while and went up to my cabin. I was sore at Hutch and all burned up at Doc and my tail was dragging. I fell asleep in no time.

  The work went on for several days and we were almost finished.

  I felt pretty good about it. After supper, I climbed down the ladder and sat on the ground beside the ship and looked across at the silo. It still looked big and awesome, but not as big as that first day—because now it had lost some of its strangeness and even the purpose of it had lost some of its strangeness, too.

  Just as soon as we got back to civilization, I promised myself, we’d seal the deal as tight as possible. Probably we couldn’t legally claim the planet because the professors were intelligent and you can’t claim a planet that has intelligence, but there were plenty of other ways we could get our hooks into it for keeps.

  I sat there and wondered why no one came down to sit with me, but no one did, so finally I clambered up the ladder.

  I went down to the brig to have a word with Doc. He was still unrepentant, but he didn’t seem too hostile.

  “You know, Captain,” he said, “there have been times when I’ve not seen eye to eye with you, but despite that I’ve respected you and sometimes even liked you.”

  “What are you getting at?” I asked him. “You can’t soft-talk yourself out of the spot you’re in.”

  “There’s something going on and maybe I should tell you. You are a forthright rascal. You don’t even take the trouble to deny you are. You have no scruples and probably no morals, and that’s all right, because you don’t pretend to have. You are—”

  “Spit it out! If you don’t tell me what is going on, I’ll come in there and wring it out of you.”

  “Hutch has been down here several times,” said Doc, “inviting me to come up and listen to one of those recordings he is fooling with. Said it was right down my alley. Said I’d not be sorry. But there was something wrong about it. Something sneaky.” He stared round-eyed through the bars at me. “You know, Captain, Hutch was never sneaky.”

  “Well, go on!”

  “Hutch has found out something, Captain. If I were you, I’d be finding out myself.”

  I didn’t even wait to answer him. I remembered how Hutch had been acting, fiddling with his food and preoccupied, not talking very much. And come to think of it, some of the others had been acting strangely, too. I’d just been too busy to give it much attention.

  Running up the catwalks, I cussed with every step I took. A captain of a ship should never get so busy that he loses touch—he has to stay in touch all the blessed time. It had all come of being in a hurry, of wanting to get loaded up and out of there before something happened.

  And now something had happened. No one had come down to sit with me. There’d not been a dozen words spoken at the supper table. Everything felt deadly wrong.

  Pancake and Hutch had rigged up the chart room for the previewing chore and I busted into it and slammed the door and stood with my back against it. Not only Hutch was there, but Pancake and Frost as well and, in the machine’s bucket seat, a man I recognized as one of the engine gang.

  I stood for a moment without saying anything, and the three of them stared back at me. The man with the helmet on his head didn’t notice—he wasn’t even there.

  “All right, Hutch,” I said, “come clean. What is this all about? Why is that man previewing? I thought just you and—”

  “Captain,” said Frost, “we were about to tell you.”

  “You shut up! I am asking Hutch.”

  “Frost is right,” said Hutch. “We were all set to tell you. But you were so busy and it came a little hard …”

  “What is hard about it?”

  “Well, you had your heart all set to make yourself a fortune. We were trying to find a way to break it to you gentle.”

  I left the door and walked over to him.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, “but we still make ourselves a killing. There never was a time of day or night, Hutch, that I couldn’t beat your head in and if you don’t want me to start, you better talk real fast.”

  “We’ll make no killing, Captain,” Frost said quietly. “We’re taking this stuff back and we’ll turn it over to the authorities.”

  “All of you are nuts!” I roared. “For years, we’ve slaved and sweated, hunting for the jackpot. And now that we have it in our mitts, now that we can walk barefooted through a pile of thousand-dollar bills, you are going chicken on me. What’s—”

  “It’s not right for us to do it, sir,” said Pancake.

  And that “sir” scared me more than anything that had happened so far. Pancake had never called me that before.

  I looked from one to the other of them and what I saw in their faces chilled me to the bone. Every single one of them thought just the same as Pancake.

  “That orientation course!” I shouted.

  Hutch nodded. “It explained about honesty and honor.”

  “What do you scamps know about honesty and honor?” I raged. “There ain’t a one of you that ever drew an honest breath.”

  “We never knew about it before,” said Pancake, “but we know about it now.”

  “It’s just propaganda! It’s just a dirty trick the professors played on us!”

  And it was a dirty trick. Although you have to admit the professors knew their onions. I don’t know if they figured us humans for a race of heels or if the orientation course was just normal routine. But no wonder they hadn’t questioned me. No wonder they’d made no investigation before handing us their knowledge. They had us stopped before we could even make a move.

  “We felt that since we had learned about honesty,” said Frost, “it was only right the rest of the crew should know. It’s an awful kind of life we’ve been living, Captain.”

  “So,” said Hutch, “we been bringing in the men, one by one, and orienting them. We figured it was the least that we could do. This man is about the last of them.”

  “A missionary,” I said to Hutch. “So that is what you are. Remember what you told me one night? You said you wouldn’t be a missionary no matter what they paid you.”

  “There’s no need of that,” Frost replied coldly. “You can’t shame us and you can’t bully us. We know we are right.”

  “But the money! What about the corporation? We had it all planned out!”

  Frost said: “You might as well forget it, Captain. When you take the course—”

  “I’m not taking any course.” My voice must have been as deadly as I felt, for not a one of them made a move toward me. “If any of you mealy-mouthed missionaries feel an urge to make me, you can start trying right now.”

  They still didn’t move. I had them bluffed. But there was no point in arguing with them. There was nothing I could do against that stone wall of honesty and honor.

  I turned my back on them and walked to the door. At the door, I stopped. I said to Frost: “You better turn Doc loose and give him the cure. Tell him it’s a
ll right with me. He has it coming to him. It will serve him right.”

  Then I shut the door behind me and went up the catwalk to my cabin. I locked the door, a thing I’d never done before.

  I sat down on the edge of the bunk and stared at the wall and thought.

  There was just one thing they had forgotten. This was my ship, not theirs. They were just the crew and their papers had run out long ago and never been renewed.

  I got down on my hands and knees and hauled out the tin box I kept the papers in. I went through it systematically and sorted out the papers that I needed—the title to the ship and the registry and the last papers they had signed.

  I laid the papers on the bunk and shoved the box out of the way and sat down again.

  I picked up the papers and shuffled them from one hand to the other.

  I could throw them off the ship any time I wished. I could take off without them and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, they could do about it.

  And what was more, I could get away with it. It was legal, of course, but it was a rotten thing to do. Now that they were honest men and honorable, though, they’d bow to the legality and let me get away with it. And in such a case, they had no one but themselves to thank.

  I sat there for a long time thinking, but my thoughts went round and round and mostly had to do with things out of the past—how Pancake had gotten tangled up in the nettle patch out in the Coonskin System and how Doc had fallen in love with (of all things) a tri-sexual being that time we touched at Siro and how Hutch had cornered the liquor supply at Munko, then lost it in a game that was akin to craps except the dice were queer little living entities that you had no control of, which made it tough on Hutch.

  A rap came at the door.

  It was Doc.

  “You all full of honesty?” I asked him.

  He shuddered. “Not me. I turned down the offer.”

  “It’s the same kind of swill you were preaching at me just a couple of days ago.”

  “Can’t you see,” asked Doc, “what it would do to the human race?”

  “Sure. It’ll make them honorable and honest. No one will ever cheat or steal again and it will be cozy …”

  “They’ll die of complicated boredom,” said Doc. “Life will become a sort of cross between a Boy Scout jamboree and a ladies sewing circle. There’ll be no loud and unseemly argument and they’ll be polite and proper to the point of stupefaction.”

  “So you have changed your mind.”

  “Not really, Captain. But this is the wrong way to go about it. Whatever progress the race has ever made has been achieved by the due process of social evolution. In any human advance, the villains and the rascals are as important as the forward-looking idealist. They are Man’s consciences and Man can’t get along without them.”

  “If I were you, Doc,” I said, “I wouldn’t worry so much about the human race. It’s a pretty big thing and it can take a lot of bumps. Even an overdose of honesty won’t hurt it permanently.”

  Actually, I didn’t give a damn. I had other things on my mind right then.

  Doc crossed the room and sat down on the bunk beside me. He leaned over and tapped the papers I still held in my hand.

  “You got it all doped out,” he said.

  I nodded bleakly. “Yeah.”

  “I thought you would.”

  I shot a quick glance at him. “You were way ahead of me. That’s why you switched over.”

  Doc shook his head emphatically. “No. Please believe me, Captain, I feel as bad as you do.”

  “It won’t work either way.” I shuffled the papers. “They acted in good faith. They didn’t sign aboard, sure. But there was no reason that they should have. It was all understood. Share and share alike. And that’s the way it’s been for too long to repudiate it now. And we can’t keep on. Even if we agreed to dump the stuff right here and blast off and never think of it again, we’d not get rid of it. It would always be there. The past is dead, Doc. It’s spoiled. It’s smashed and it can’t be put back together.”

  I felt like bawling. It had been a long time since I had felt that full of grief.

  “They are different kind of men now,” I said. “They went and changed themselves and they’ll never be the same. Even if they could change back, it wouldn’t be the same.”

  Doc mocked me a little. “The race will build a monument to you. Maybe actually on Earth itself, with all the other famous humans, for bringing back this stuff. They’d be just blind enough to do it.”

  I got up and paced the floor. “I don’t want any monument. I’m not bringing it in. I’m not having anything more to do with it.”

  I stood there, wishing we had never found the silo, for what had it done for me except to lose me the best crew and the best friends a man had ever had?

  “The ship is mine,” I said. “That is all I want. I’ll take the cargo to the nearest point and dump it there. Hutch and the rest of them can carry on from there, any way they can. They can have the honesty and honor. I’ll get another crew.”

  Maybe, I thought, some day it would be almost the way it had been. Almost, but not quite.

  “We’ll go on hunting,” I said. “We’ll dream about the jackpot. We’ll do our best to find it. We’ll do anything to find it. We’ll break all the laws of God or Man to find it. But you know something, Doc?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Doc.

  “I hope we never find it. I don’t want to find another. I just want to go on hunting.” We stood there in the silence, listening to the fading echoes of those days we hunted for the jackpot.

  “Captain,” said Doc, “will you take me along?”

  I nodded. What was the difference? He might just as well.

  “Captain, you remember those insect mounds on Suud?”

  “Of course. How could I forget them?”

  “You know, I’ve figured out a way we might break into them. Maybe we should try it. There should be a billion …”

  I almost clobbered him.

  I’m glad now that I didn’t.

  Suud is where we’re headed.

  If Doc’s plan works out, we may hit that jackpot yet!

  Day of Truce

  Although “Day of Truce” originally appeared in the February 1963 issue of Galaxy Magazine, it is intriguing to note that a cryptic entry in one of the author’s journals, dated October of 1957, says, simply: “Did a lot of work on Kid War story.” It would be four and a half years before “Day of Truce” would be mailed out—so is this the story that cryptic notes references? If so, it would have been an extraordinary delay; getting the copy out was ground into old newspapermen like Clifford Simak.

  This is a disturbing story in many ways, and I find myself wondering if this is a sort of counterpoint to stories like “Neighbor.”

  —dww

  I

  The evening was quiet. There was no sign of the Punks. Silence lay heavily across the barren and eroded acres of the subdivision and there was nothing moving—not even one of the roving and always troublesome dog packs.

  It was too quiet, Max Hale decided.

  There should have been some motion and some noise. It was as if everyone had taken cover against some known and coming violence—another raid, perhaps. Although there was only one place against which a raid could possibly be aimed. Why should others care, Max wondered; why should they cower indoors, when they had long since surrendered?

  Max stood upon the flat lookout-rooftop of the Crawford stronghold and watched the streets to north and west. It was by one of these that Mr. Crawford would be coming home. No one could guess which one, for he seldom used the same road. It was the only way one could cut down the likelihood of ambush or of barricade. Although ambush was less frequent now. There were fewer fences, fewer trees and shrubs; there was almost nothing behind which one could
hide. In this barren area it called for real ingenuity to effect an ambuscade. But, Max reminded himself, no one had ever charged the Punks with lack of ingenuity.

  Mr. Crawford had phoned that he would be late and Max was getting nervous. In another quarter hour, darkness would be closing in. It was bad business to be abroad in Oak Manor after dark had fallen. Or, for that matter, in any of the subdivisions. For while Oak Manor might be a bit more vicious than some of the others of them, it still was typical.

  He lifted his glasses again and swept the terrain slowly. There was no sign of patrols or hidden skulkers. There must be watchers somewhere, he knew. There were always watchers, alert to the slightest relaxation of the vigilance maintained at Crawford stronghold.

  Street by street he studied the sorry houses, with their broken window panes and their peeling paint, still marked by the soap streaks and the gouges and the red-paint splashes inflicted years before. Here and there dead trees stood stark, denuded of their branches. Browned evergreens, long dead, stood rooted in the dusty yards—yards long since robbed of the grass that once had made them lawns.

  And on the hilltop, up on Circle Drive, stood the ruins of Thompson stronghold, which had fallen almost five years before. There was no structure standing. It had been leveled stone by stone and board by board. Only the smashed and dying trees, only the twisted steel fence posts marked where it had been.

  Now Crawford stronghold stood alone in Oak Manor. Max thought of it with a glow of pride and a surge of painful memory. It stood because of him, he thought, and he would keep it standing.

  In this desert it was the last oasis, with its trees and grass, with its summer houses and trellises, with the massive shrubbery and the wondrous sun dial beside the patio, with its goldfish-and-lily pond and the splashing fountain.

  “Max,” said the walkie-talkie strapped across his chest.

  “Yes, Mr. Crawford.”

  “Where are you located, Max?”

  “Up on the lookout, sir.”

  “I’ll come in on Seymour Drive,” said Mr. Crawford’s voice. “I’m about a mile beyond the hilltop. I’ll be coming fast.”