I had them, I thought. Thinking coldly and with calculation. With no anger. With no urgency. With no mercy in me. Mercy was a human trait made to balance revenge and now the balance had been wiped out and I had only hatred left.
How it might be done I did not know. I would not know until I had explored to the limit the capacity of the abilities that waited upon moulting. But I knew this: they would live out their lives in ever-mounting terror; they would seek for hiding places and there’d be no hiding places; each day they would face new horrors and their nerves would strain and their brains would turn to water, then congeal again to face another fear. They would be allowed, at times, a slender hope so the agony would be the greater when the tiny hope had failed. They would run in the hopeless circles of their panic, they would squeal with an insanity which would never reach the point where it might offer refuge, and while they might pray for surcease, I would most tenderly see that they stayed alive and capable of fear. Not just a few of them, but all of them, every stinking soul of them. And I would keep it up, I would never tire. I would never have enough, I would feed upon my hatred of them. It would be the breath of life to me. It would be my only purpose, taking the place of all the other purposes they had taken from me. It was the one last shred of humanity I had left and I would never let it go.
I hugged the hatred and thought of a thousand years. A long, long time. Empires totter, technologies change, religions shift their forms, social mores undergo revisions, ideas blossom and have their day and die, stars slide down just a little toward stellar death, light travels a hundredth of the way across the galaxy. So long a span of time that the mind of man quails before the prospect of it.
But not me. I do not quail before a thousand years.
I can use those thousand years. I can study the lobsters and see what makes them tick. I can learn their purposes, their philosophies, their dreams—learning all the things to strip away from them, giving them instead the things they fear and loathe and sicken at the sight and feel of.
I’ll enjoy it, every minute of it.
I am in no hurry.
I can wait.
The alien wind blows cool and sweet around Charlie Tierney as he sits drinking sunlight. He remembers and remembers, playing it over and over in his mind: a mind growing more acute every moment. He clings to the last vestige of his humanity, the greatest gift handed down to him from his ape ancestors: a desire for killing, torturing, never-ending revenge. He sits and is content in his hatred. It will sustain him.
It will keep him in check, as no bonds or fetters ever could.
The lobster creatures in their burrows understood that from the moment they rebuilt him. Necessary, yes, very necessary for Charlie Tierney to stay the thousand years, to evolve through those thousand years so they could evaluate the viability of what they had created, for their own purposes. But without something to distract him, with only the helplessness and despair of knowing he would never again be human, Charlie Tierney might have destroyed himself. And that they could not permit. The experiment had to run its course.
They had left him a distraction, something useless he could hold close to placate him while the evolutionary experiment ran its course. A thousand-year toy for an alert laboratory animal.
Charlie Tierney holds close the hatred, examines with pathological attention the concept of revenge. He can wait. He has a thousand years to grow until he can wreak revenge on the damned lobster things.
What he does not know is that even before he came to them, the lobster creatures had learned all there was to know about waiting. They had waited for a Charlie Tierney, and now they could wait for the results of the experiment.
And they had no need of thousand-year toys.
Small Deer
Originally published in the October 1965 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which by then had long supplanted Astounding as Cliff Simak’s main market, this story is one of those that really stuck in my youthful memory. That was because it scared the hell out of me …!
Willow Bend,
Wisconsin
June 23, 1966
Dr. Wyman Jackson,
Wyalusing College,
Muscoda, Wisconsin
My dear Dr. Jackson:
I am writing to you because I don’t know who else to write to and there is something I have to tell someone who can understand. I know your name because I read your book, ‘Cretaceous Dinosaurs,’ not once, but many times. I tried to get Dennis to read it, too, but I guess he never did. All Dennis was interested in were the mathematics of his time concept—not the time machine itself. Besides, Dennis doesn’t read too well. It is a chore for him.
Maybe I should tell you, to start with, that my name is Alton James. I live with my widowed mother and I run a fix-it shop. I fix bicycles and lawn mowers and radios and television sets—I fix anything that is brought to me. I’m not much good at anything else, but I do seem to have the knack of seeing how things go together and understanding how they work and seeing what is wrong with them when they aren’t working. I never had no training of any sort, but I just seem to have a natural bent for getting along with mechanical contraptions.
Dennis is my friend and I’ll admit right off that he is a strange one. He doesn’t know from nothing about anything, but he’s nuts on mathematics. People in town make fun of him because he is so strange and Ma gives me hell at times for having anything to do with him. She says he’s the next best thing to a village idiot. I guess a lot of people think the way that Ma does, but it is not entirely true, for he does know his math.
I don’t know how he knows it. He didn’t learn it at school and that’s for sure. When he got to be 17 and hadn’t got no farther than eighth grade, the school just sort of dropped him. He didn’t really get to eighth grade honest; the teachers after a while got tired of seeing him on one grade and passed him to the next. There was talk, off and on, of sending him to some special school, but it never got nowhere.
And don’t ask me what kind of mathematics he knew. I tried to read up on math once because I had the feeling, after seeing some of the funny marks that Dennis put on paper, that maybe he knew more about it than anyone else in the world. And I still think that he does—or that maybe he’s invented an entirely new kind of math. For in the books I looked through I never did find any of the symbols that Dennis put on paper. Maybe Dennis used symbols he made up, inventing them as he went along, because no one had ever told him what the regular mathematicians used. But I don’t think that’s it—I’m inclined to lean to the idea Dennis came up with a new brand of math, entirely.
There were times I tried to talk with Dennis about this math of his and each time he was surprised that I didn’t know it, too. I guess he thought most people knew about it. He said that it was simple, that it was plain as day. It was the way things worked, he said.
I suppose you’ll want to ask how come I understood his equations well enough to make the time machine. The answer is I didn’t. I suppose that Dennis and I are alike in a lot of ways, but in different ways. I know how to make contraptions work (without knowing any of the theory) and Dennis sees the entire universe as something operating mechanically (and him scarcely able to read a page of simple type).