“Me send brother,” N’Goni explained. “Remember got to work for Jap. No work, Jap mad. Kill family, maybe. So send brother. Tell him what to say.”
“So that’s why you ran out on me,” said Foster.
N’Goni grinned. “Me remember quick. Mad Jap, bad Jap.”
“They aren’t mad now,” said Foster. “They’re just plain scared to death.”
The base was a froth of smoke and flame and bellowing motors as the Yank planes crossed and criss-crossed it, sowing destruction. With guns and bombs, the Japs were being wiped out. “You sit,” said N’Goni. “You watch. Me, too.”
He hunkered down, grinning.
“Grand stand seat,” said Foster.
Courtesy
This story was first sent to Horace Gold of Galaxy Science Fiction in mid-September 1950, but after Gold rejected it, Cliff sent it to Fred Pohl, then apparently acting as Cliff’s agent. John W. Campbell Jr., purchased it via Pohl the following March, paying $225, and it was published in the August 1951 issue of Campbell’s magazine, Astounding Science Fiction.
“Courtesy” is a morality tale, one that I believe represents yet another aspect of Cliff Simak’s reactions to World War II, so recently ended: the need to avoid thinking, and acting, as if you’re a member of a superior race. Yet “Courtesy” represents a puzzle for Simak fans, for while it’s one of the few stories in which Cliff apparently used characters who would reappear in a later story—“Junkyard,” published in 1953—you will see that if the stories are related, they were, strangely, not written and published in the correct order. (It’s true that Cliff sometimes reused character names, but this is not one of those cases; it is clear that they were the same characters; I lean toward the idea that Cliff actually began “Junkyard” first, but there is absolutely no evidence to support that speculation.)
The serum was no good. The labels told the story.
Dr. James H. Morgan took his glasses off and wiped them carefully, cold terror clutching at his innards. He put the spectacles back on, probing at them with a thick, blunt finger to settle them into correct position. Then he took another look. He had been right the first time. The date on the serum consignment was a good ten years too old.
He wheeled slowly, lumbered a few ponderous steps to the tent flap and stood there, squat body framed in the triangular entrance, pudgy hands gripping the canvas on either side.
Outside, the fantastic lichen moors stretched to gray and bleak horizons. The setting sun was a dull red glow in the west—and to the east, the doctor knew, night already was beginning to close in, with that veil of purplish light that seemed to fall like a curtain upon the land and billow rapidly across it.
A chill wind blew out of the east, already touched with the frigidity of night, and twitched the canvas beneath the doctor’s fingers.
“Ah, yes,” said Dr. Morgan, “the merry moors of Landro.”
A lonely place, he told himself. Not lonely only in its barrenness nor in its alien wildness, but with an ingrained loneliness that could drive a man mad if he were left alone with it.
Like a great cemetery, he thought, an empty place of dead. And yet without the cemetery’s close association, without the tenderness and the inevitability of a cemetery. For a cemetery held in scared trust the husks of those who once had lived and this place was an emptiness that held no memory at all.
But not for long, said Dr. Morgan. Not for long now.
He stood looking at the barren slope that rose above the camp and he decided that it would make an eminently satisfactory cemetery.
All places looked alike. That was the trouble. You couldn’t tell one place from another. There were no trees and there were no bushes, just a fuzzy-looking scrub that grew here and there, clothing the naked land in splotches, like the ragged coat that a beggar wears.
Benny Falkner stopped on the path as it topped the rise and stood rigid with the fear that was mounting in him. Fear of the coming night and of its bitter cold, fear of the silent hills and the shadowed swales, and the more distant and yet more terrible fear of the little natives that might this very moment be skulking on the hillside.
He put up his arm and wiped the sweat off his brow with his tattered sleeve. He shouldn’t have been sweating, he told himself, for it was chilly now and getting colder by the minute. In another hour or two it would be cold enough to freeze a man unprotected in the open.
He fought down the terror that choked his throat and set his teeth a-chatter and for an instant stood stock-still to convince himself he was not panic-stricken.
He had been going east and that meant he must go west to reach the camp again. Although the catch was that he couldn’t be absolutely sure he had been going east all the time—he might have trended north a little or even wandered south. But the deviation couldn’t have been enough, he was sure, to throw him so far off that he could not spot the camp by returning straight into the west.
Sometime soon he should sight the smoke of the Earthmen’s camp. Any ridge, the next ridge, each succeeding hummock in the winding trail, he had assured himself, would bring him upon the camp itself. He would reach higher ground and there the camp would be, spread out in front of him, with the semicircle of white canvas gleaming in the fading light and the thin trail of smoke rising from the larger cook tent where Bat Ears Brady would be bellowing one of his obscene songs.
But that had been an hour ago when the sun still stood a good two hands high. He remembered now, standing on the ridge-top, that he had been a little nervous, but not really apprehensive. It had been unthinkable, then, that a man could get himself lost in an hour’s walk out of camp.
Now the sun was gone and the cold was creeping in and the wind had a lonely sound he had not noticed when the light was good.
One more rise, he decided. One more ridge, and if that is not the one, I’ll give up until morning. Find a sheltered place somewhere, a rock face of some sort that will give me some protection and reflect a campfire’s heat—if I can find anything with which to make a campfire.
He stood and listened to the wind moaning across the land behind him and it seemed to him there was a whimper in the sound, as if the wind were anxious, that it might be following on his track, sniffing out his scent.
Then he heard the other sound, the soft, padding sound that came up the hill toward him.
Ira Warren sat at his desk and stared accusingly at the paperwork stacked in front of him. Reluctantly he took some of the papers off the stack and laid them on the desk.
That fool Falkner, he thought. I’ve told them and I’ve told them that they have to stick together, that no one must go wandering off alone.
A bunch of babies, he told himself savagely. Just a bunch of drooling kids, fresh out of college, barely dry behind the ears and all hopped up with erudition, but without any common sense. And not a one of them would listen. That was the worst of it, not a one of them would listen.
Someone scratched on the canvas of the tent.
“Come in,” called Warren.
Dr. Morgan entered.
“Good evening, commander,” he said.
“Well,” said Warren irritably, “what now?”
“Why, now,” said Dr. Morgan, sweating just a little. “It’s the matter of the serum.”
“The serum?”
“The serum,” said Dr. Morgan. “It isn’t any good.”
“What do you mean?” asked Warren. “I have troubles, doctor. I can’t play patty-cake with you about your serum.”