Grandpa, I say, I want him to stop. I don’t want to hear. Don’t want him to go on saying what Janglefoot been saying.
But he pay me no attention. He go on saying.
Then, long, long ago, he say, they learn to go in space very, very fast. Faster than the light. Much faster than the light. They find other worlds. Better than the Earth. Much better worlds than this. Lot of ships to go in. Take little time to go there. So everybody go. Everyone but us. Folk like us, all over the world, are left behind. Smart ones go. Rich ones go. Hard workers go. We are left behind. We aren’t worth the taking. No one want us on this world. Have no use for us on others. They leave us behind, the misfits, the loafers, the poor, the crippled, the stupid. All over the world these kind are left behind. So when they all are gone, we move from shacks to houses the rich and smart ones lived in. No one to stop us from doing it. All of them are gone. They don’t care what we do. Not any more they don’t. We live in better houses, but we do not change. There is no use to change even if we could. We got you to take care of us. We have got it made. We don’t do a God damn thing. We don’t even learn to read. When words are read over my son’s grave, one of you will read them, for we do not know how to read.
Grandpa, I say. Grandpa, Grandpa. Grandpa. I feel crying all inside. He had done it now. He had took away the elegant. Took away the pride. He do what Janglefoot never could.
Now, say Grandpa, don’t take on that way. You got no reason to be prideful either. You and us we are the same. Just no God damn good. There were others of you and they took them along. But you they left behind. Because you were out of date. Because you were slow and awkward. Because you were heaps of junk. Because they had no need of you. They wouldn’t give you room. They left both you and us because neither of us was worth the room we took.
Doc came out of door fast and purposeful. He say to me I got work for you to do.
All the other people coming up the lawn, saying nothing, slow. I try to get out of chair. I can’t. For first time I can’t do what I want. My legs is turned to water.
Sam, say Grandpa, I am counting on you.
When he say that, I get up. I go down steps. I go out on lawn. No need for Doc tell me what to do. I done it all before.
I talk to other people. I give jobs to do. You and you dig grave. You and you make coffin. You and you and you and you run to other houses. Tell all the folk Uncle John is dead. Tell them come to funeral. Tell them funeral elegant. Much to cry, much to eat, much to drink. You get Preacher. Tell him fix sermon. You get Joshua to read the Bible. You and you and you go and help George make moonshine. Other folk be coming. Must be elegant.
All done. I walk down the lawn. I think on pride and loss. Elegant is gone. Shiny wonder gone. Pride is gone. Not all pride, however. Kind of pride remain. Hard and bitter pride. Grandpa say Sam sit down and talk. Grandpa say Sam I am counting on you. That is pride. Hard pride. Not soft and easy pride like it was before. Grandpa need me.
No one else will know. Grandpa never bring himself again to tell what he tell me. Secret between us. Secret born of sad. Life of others need not change. Go on thinking same. Janglefoot no trouble. No one believe Janglefoot if he talk forever. No one ever know that he tell the truth. Truth is hard to take. No one care except for what we have right now. We go on same.
Except I who know. I never want to know. I never ask to know. I try not to know. But Grandpa won’t shut up. Grandpa have to talk. Time come man will die if he cannot talk. Must make clean breast of it. But why to me? Because he love me most, perhaps. That is prideful thing.
But going down the lawn, I crying deep inside.
The Call from Beyond
This story originally appeared in Super Science Stories in May 1950, and a brief entry in one of Cliff’s mostly blank journals shows that he was paid $135 the same year for a story entitled “Flight to Pluto.” This is another of several Simak stories in which alien music plays a part, but the story appears to my eye to be a sort of homage to the works of H. P. Lovecraft, the master of tales of extradimensional horror—but with a touch of technology and several embedded themes that are pure Simak.
CHAPTER ONE
The Pyramid of Bottles
The pyramid was built of bottles, hundreds of bottles that flashed and glinted as if with living fire, picking up and breaking up the misty light that filtered from the distant sun and still more distant stars.
Frederick West took a slow step forward, away from the open port of his tiny ship. He shook his head and shut his eyes and opened them again and the pyramid was still there. So it was no figment, as he had feared, of his imagination, born in the darkness and the loneliness of his flight from Earth.
It was there and it was a crazy thing. Crazy because it should not be there, at all. There should be nothing here on this almost unknown slab of tumbling stone and metal.
For no one lived on Pluto’s moon. No one ever visited Pluto’s moon. Even he, himself, hadn’t intended to until, circling it to have a look before going on to Pluto, he had seen that brief flash of light, as if someone might be signaling. It had been the pyramid, of course. He knew that now. The stacked-up bottles catching and reflecting light.
Behind the pyramid stood a space hut, squatted down among the jagged boulders. But there was no movement, no sign of life. No one was tumbling out of entrance lock to welcome him. And that was strange, he thought. For visitors must be rare, if, indeed, they came at all.
Perhaps the pyramid really was a signaling device, although it would be a clumsy way of signaling. More likely a madman’s caprice. Come to think of it, anyone who was sufficiently deranged to live on Pluto’s moon would be a fitting architect for a pyramid of bottles.
The moon was so unimportant that it wasn’t even named. The spacemen, on those rare occasions when they mentioned it at all, simply called it “Pluto’s moon” and let it go at that.
No one came out to this sector of space any more. Which, West told himself parenthetically, is exactly why I came. For if you could slip through the space patrol you would be absolutely safe. No one would ever bother you.
No one bothered Pluto these days. Not since the ban had been slapped on it three years before, since the day the message had come through from the scientists in the cold laboratories which had been set up several years before that.
No one came to the planet now. Especially with the space patrol on guard … although there were ways of slipping through. If one knew where the patrol ships would be at certain times and build up one’s speed and shut off the engines, coasting on momentum in the shadow of the planet, one could get to Pluto.
West was near the pyramid now and he saw that it was built of whisky bottles. All empty, very empty, their labels fresh and clear.
West straightened up from staring at the bottles and advanced toward the hut. Locating the lock, he pressed the button. There was no response. He pressed it again. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the lock swung in its seat. Swiftly he stepped inside and swung over the lever that closed the outer lock, opened the inner one.
Dim light oozed from the interior of the hut and through his earphones West heard the dry rustle of tiny claws whispering across the floor. Then a gurgling, like water running down a pipe.