The county agent shook his head. «Undoubtedly there was. Maybe the Eater was his pet. A man will risk his life to help a dog he loves. But, again, we don’t know. We’re trying to apply human logic to alien motives.»
«Look here,» challenged Chet, «if all this stuff you been dreaming up is true, what are we going to do about it?»
«Notify the proper authorities,» snapped the sheriff. «The state crime bureau. Maybe even the FBI, by cracky.»
«That’s right,» agreed the county agent. «We’ll have to watch. From now on, Earth can’t take chances. There may be others. Perhaps not masquerading as road shows, but in other ways. For what purpose we cannot be sure except that it bodes no good for Earth. Fifth column. Infiltration. Illegal immigration. Call it what you will. It has to be checked. We have to watch … we can’t take anything for granted anymore. Lord knows how long this has been going on … how many calamities really have been due to the work of things like these.»
Chet shuddered. «So help me, you got me goose pimples all over. I’ll never feel safe again.»
Slow feet shuffled toward the door. The three men tensed. Pop Hansen stumbled into the room. His liquor-muddled face stared at them.
«Say,» he blurted, «any of you guys seen this feller that has the Martian show?»
The sheriff bristled.
«What do you want of him?»
«Thought maybe I’d make a little deal.»
«A little deal?»
The old drunkard blinked.
«Yeah, a deal. I got a candy-striped elephant …»
The Marathon Photograph
It was not often that Cliff Simak wrote in the voice of a university professor; but in this case, it was appropriate to contrast the narrator with the ancient story that lay at the heart of its events.
You readers can of course read that old story, as told in the text, for yourselves. But I thought you might be interested to know that the old story was not made up by Cliff, but was an adaptation of a story that was hundred-year-old folklore when he heard it as a boy in southwestern Wisconsin. As Cliff told it to me, two soldiers who were stationed at a U.S. Army fort in that area had deserted, taking with them a payroll that had just arrived. The payroll consisted of a heavy load of silver dollars—there were no banks in the area, so that was how federal payrolls were met. One could see the temptation…
Alas, the story went on to say that the deserters, loaded down with the heavy coins, lost it all when they tried to canoe down the Mississippi, only to get caught in a whirlpool that sometimes formed where the Wisconsin River rushed into the Mississippi.
This story was written for inclusion in the original anthology Threads of Time: Three Original Novellas of Science Fiction, which was edited by Robert Silverberg and published by Thomas Nelson & Son in 1974.
—dww
There is no point in putting this account on paper. For me, a stolid professor of geology, it is an exercise in futility, eating up time that would be better spent in working on my long-projected, oft-delayed text on the Precambrian, for the purpose of which I still am on a two-quarter leave of absence, which my bank account can ill afford. If I were a writer of fiction I could make a story out of it, representing it as no more than a tale of the imagination, but at least with some chance of placing it before the public. If I were anything other than a dry-as-dust college professor. I could write it as a factual account (which, of course, it would be) and submit it to one of the so-called fact magazines that deal in raw sensationalism, with content on such things as treasure hunts, flying saucers, and the underground—and again with the good chance that it might see the light of print, with at least some of the more moronic readers according it some credence. But a college professor is not supposed to write for such media and most assuredly would feel the full weight of academic censure should he do so.
There always is, of course, the subterfuge of writing under an assumed name and changing the names of those who appear in the text, but even should I not shrink from this (which I do) it would offer only poor protection, since at least part of the story is known to many others and, accordingly, I could be identified quite easily.
Yet, in spite of all these arguments, I find that I must write down what happened. White paper covered with the squiggles of my penmanship may, after a fashion, serve the function of the confessional, lifting from my soul and mind the burden of a lonely knowledge. Or it may be that subconsciously I hope, by putting it down in a somewhat orderly fashion, to uncover some new understanding or some justification for my action which had escaped me heretofore. Anyone reading this—although I am rather certain no one ever will—must at once perceive that I have little understanding of those psychological factors that drive me to what must seem a rather silly task. Yet, if the book on the Precambrian is ever to be finished, it seems, this account must be finished first. The ghost of the future must be laid to rest before I venture into the past.
I find some trouble in determining where to start. My writing for academic journals, I realize, cannot serve as a model for this effort. But it does seem to me that the approach in any writing chore must be logical to some degree at least, and that the content must be organized in some orderly fashion. So it appears that a good place to start might be with the bears.
It had been a bad summer for the bears. The berry crop had failed and the acorns would not ripen until fall. The bears dug for roots, ripped open rotten logs to get at grubs and ants and other insects that might be hidden there, labored long and furiously to dig out mice and gophers, or tried, with minimal success, to scoop trout from the steams. Some of them, driven by their hunger, drifted out of the hills to nearby tiny towns or lurked in the vicinity of resorts, coming out at night from their hiding places to carry out raids upon garbage cans. These activities created a great furor, with the nightly locking and barring of doors and windows and an industrious oiling of guns. There was some shooting, with one scrawny bruin, a wandering dog, and a cow falling victims to the hunters. The Division of Wildlife of the State Conservation Department issued the kind of weighty, rather pompous warning that is characteristic of entrenched bureaucracy, recommending that bears be left alone; they were a hungry tribe, consequently out of temper, and could be dangerous.
The accuracy of the warning was borne out in a day or two by the death of Stefan, the caretaker at the Lodge back in the hills, only a half mile or less from the cabin that Neville Piper and I had built a dozen years or more ago, driving up from the university and working on it of weekends. It had taken, for all its modest proportions, a couple of years to build.
I realize that if I were a really skillful writer I’d go on with the story and in the course of telling it weave in all the background information. But I know that if I try it, I will be awkward at it; the writing of geological papers intended for scientific journals is not the kind of thing that trains one for that kind of writing craftmanship. So, rather than attempt it and get all tangled up, it might be a good idea to stop right here and write what I knew at that time about the Lodge.
Actually, I didn’t know too much about it, nor did anyone. Dora, who ran the Trading Post, a fanciful name for an old-fashioned general store that stood all by itself where the road into the hills branched off from the valley road, for years had carried deep resentment against the people who occasionally came to the Lodge because she had been able to learn almost nothing of them. About all that she knew was that they came from Chicago, although, when pressed upon the point, she wasn’t even sure of that. Dora knew almost all the summer visitors in the hills. I think that over the years she had come to think of them as family. She knew them by their first names and where they lived and how they made a living, plus any other information of interest that might be attached to them. She knew, for example, how for years I had been trying to write my book, and she was quite aware that not only was Neville a famous Greek historian, but that he also was widely known as a photographer of wildlife and nature. She had managed to get hold of three or four of those coffee-table books that had used some of Neville’s work and showed them to all comers. She knew all about the honors that had been conferred upon him for his photographic study of asters. She knew about his divorce and his remarriage and how that hadn’t worked out, either. And while her accounts of the subject may have been somewhat short of accuracy, they did not lack in detail. She knew I’d never married, and alternately she was enraged at me for my attitude, then sympathetic toward my plight. I never could decide whether it was her rage or her pity that incensed me most. After all, it was none of her damn business, but she made everything her business.