The door came open and the Sitter stood there, poised and beautiful and not the least surprised. It was, he thought, almost as if it had been expecting him.
And the other two of them, he saw, were sitting by the fireplace.
“Won’t you please come in?” the Sitter said. “We are so glad you decided to come back. The children all are gone. We can have a cozy chat.”
He came in and sat down in the chair again and perched the hat carefully on one knee.
Once again the children were running in the room and there was the sense of timelessness and the sound of laughter.
He sat and nodded, thinking, while the Sitters waited.
It was hard, he thought. Hard to make the words come right.
He felt again as he had felt many years ago, when the teacher had called upon him to recite in the second grade.
They were waiting, but they were patient; they would give him time.
He had to say it right. He must make them understand. He couldn’t blurt it out. It must be made to sound natural, and logical as well.
And how, he asked himself, could he make it logical?
There was nothing logical at all in men as old as he and Stuffy needing baby-sitters.
Tools
“Tools,” which was originally published in the July 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, and for which Clifford D. Simak was paid one hundred dollars, might have been awarded a Hugo or a Nebula if those awards had been around at the time. On the one hand, it represents one of the first of Cliff Simak’s many portrayals of non-human intelligence—a nuanced portrayal that succeeded in showing alien intelligence as both different from human concepts of intelligence and benign (at least at times). This is in keeping with an idea that Cliff would touch on in his City stories, written just a short time later: the notion that there may be intelligences so handicapped by their physical situations that they cannot communicate, and thus cannot learn and grow without help.
But the other major theme of this story, for which recognition is due, is its somewhat predictive portrayal of a solar system in which human beings are virtually enslaved by big business interests—in particular, the energy industry of the time—and their addiction to what energy gives them.
Venus had broken many men. Now it was breaking Harvey Boone, and the worst of it was that Boone knew it was breaking him and couldn’t do a thing about it.
Although it wasn’t entirely Venus. Partly it was Archie—Archie, the thing in the talking jar. Perhaps it wasn’t right calling Archie just a “thing.” Archie might have been an “it” or “they.” No one knew. In fact, no one knew much of anything about Archie despite the fact men had talked to him and studied him for almost a hundred years.
Harvey Boone was official observer for the Solar Institute, and his reports, sent back with every rocketload of radium that streaked out to Earth, were adding to the voluminous mass of data assembled on Archie. Data that told almost nothing at all.
Venus itself was bad enough. Men died when a suit cracked or radium shields broke down. Although that wasn’t the usual way the planet killed. Venus had a better—perhaps, more accurately—a worse way.
Any alien planet is hard to live on and stay sane. Strangeness is a word that doesn’t have much meaning until a man stands face to face with it and then it smacks him straight between the eyes.
Venus was alien—plus. One always had a sense that eyes were watching him, watching all the time. And waiting. Although one didn’t have the least idea what they were waiting for.
On Venus, something always stalked a man—something that trod just on the outer edge of shadow. A sense of not belonging, of being out of place, of being an intruder. A baffling psychological something that drove men to their deaths or to living deaths that were even worse.
Harvey Boone huddled on a chair in one corner of the laboratory, nursing a whiskey bottle, while Archie chuckled at him.
“Nerves,” said Archie. “Your nerves are shot to hell.”
Boone’s hand shook as he tilted the whiskey bottle up. His hate-filled eyes glared at the lead-glass jar even as he gulped.
Boone knew what Archie said was true. Even through his drink-fogged brain, the one fact stood out in bright relief—he was going crazy. He had seen Johnny Garrison, commander of the dome, watching him. And Doc Steele. Doc was the psychologist, and when Doc started watching one it was time to pull up and try to straighten oneself out. For Doc’s word was law. It had to be law.
A knock sounded on the door and Boone called out an invitation. Doc Steele strode in.
“Good morning, Boone,” he said. “Hello, Archie.”
Archie’s voice, mechanical and toneless, returned the greeting.
“Have a drink,” said Boone.
Doc shook his head, took a cigar from his pocket and with a knife cut it neatly in two. One half he stuck back in his pocket, the other half in his mouth.
“Don’t you ever light those things?” demanded Boone irritably.
“Nope,” Doc replied cheerfully. “Always dry-smoke them.”
He said to Archie: “How are you today, Archie?”
Despite its mechanical whir, Archie’s reply sounded almost querulous: “Why do you always ask me that, doctor? You know there’s nothing wrong with me. There never could be. I’m always all right.”
Doc chuckled. “I seem to keep forgetting about you. Wish the human race was like that. Then there wouldn’t be any need for chaps like me.”
“I’m glad you came,” Archie grated. “I like to talk to you. You never make me feel you’re trying to find out something.”
“He says that to get my goat,” snapped Boone.
“I wouldn’t let him do it,” Doc declared. To Archie he said: “I suppose it does get tiresome after a hundred years or so. But it doesn’t seem to have done much good. No one seems to have found out much about you.”
He swiveled the cigar across his face. “Maybe they tried too hard.”
“That,” said Archie, “might be true. You remind me of Masterson. You’re different from the ones who come out to watch me now.”
“You don’t like them?” Doc winked at Boone and Boone glowered back.
“Why should I like them?” asked Archie. “They regard me as a freak, a curiosity, something to be observed, an assignment to be done. Masterson thought of me as life, as a fellow entity. And so do you.”
“Why, bless my soul,” said Doc, “and so I do.”
“You don’t catch me pitying you,” Doc declared. “Sometimes I catch myself wishing I were you. I suspect I might enjoy your kind of philosophy.”
“The human race,” protested Archie, “couldn’t understand my philosophy. I doubt if I could explain it to them. The language doesn’t have the words. Just as I had a hard time understanding a lot of your Terrestrial philosophy and economics. I’ve studied your history and your economics and your political science. I’ve kept up with your current events. And sometimes, many times, it doesn’t make sense to me. Sometimes I think it’s stupid, but I try to tell myself that it may be because I don’t understand. I miss something, perhaps. Some vital quirk of mind, some underlying factor.”
Doc sobered. “I don’t think you miss much, Archie. A lot of the things we do are stupid, even by our own standards. We lack foresight so often.”
Doc lifted his eyes to the large oil portrait that hung on the wall above Boone’s desk, and he had quite forgotten Boone. From the portrait, kindly gray eyes smiled out of the face. The brows were furrowed, the wavy white hair looked like a silver crown.