“Beats all hell,” he told Quinn, “how that feller gets along with women.”
JUNKYARD
Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction in May 1953, “Junkyard” fits neatly inside a particular subspecies of Simak stories – those starring what we might call “freebooters.” By this I mean stories in which human exploitation of the galaxy is being carried out not by human governmental agencies, but by the agents of commercial organizations, who are generally out to make a buck. In interstellar space, there are a lot of places a story with such a background can take you …
They had solved the mystery – with a guess, a very erudite and educated guess – but they didn’t know a thing, not a single thing, for certain. That wasn’t the way a planetary survey team usually did a job. Usually they nailed it down and wrung a lot of information out of it and could parade an impressive roll of facts. But here there was no actual, concrete fact beyond the one that would have been obvious to a twelve-year-old child.
Commander Ira Warren was worried about it. He said as much to Bat Ears Brady, ship’s cook and slightly disreputable pal of his younger days. The two of them had been planet-checking together for more than thirty years. While they stood at opposite poles on the table of organization, they were able to say to one another things they could not have said to any other man aboard the survey ship or have allowed another man to say to them.
“Bat Ears,” said Warren, “I’m just a little worried.”
“You’re always worried,” Bat Ears retorted. “That’s part of the job you have.”
“This junkyard business …”
“You wanted to get ahead,” said Bat Ears, “and I told you what would happen. I warned you you’d get yourself weighed down with worry and authority and pomp – pomp –”
“Pomposity?”
“That’s the word,” said Bat Ears. “That’s the word, exactly.”
“I’m not pompous,” Warren contradicted.
“No, you’re worried about his junkyard business. I got a bottle stowed away. How about a little drink?”
Warren waved away the thought. “Someday I’ll bust you wide open. Where you hide the stuff, I don’t know, but every trip we make …”
“Now, Ira! Don’t go losing your lousy temper.”
“Every trip we make, you carry enough dead weight of liquor to keep you annoyingly aglow for the entire cruise.”
“It’s baggage,” Bat Ears insisted. “A man is allowed some baggage weight. I don’t have hardly nothing else. I just bring along my drinking.”
“Someday,” said Warren savagely, “it’s going to get you booted off the ship about five light-years from nowhere.”
The threat was an old one. It failed to dismay Bat Ears.
“This worrying you’re doing,” Bat Ears said, “ain’t doing you no good.”
“But the survey team didn’t do the job,” objected Warren. “Don’t you see what this means? For the first time in more than a hundred years of survey, we’ve found what appears to be evidence that some other race than Man has achieved space flight. And we don’t know a thing about it. We should know. With all that junk out there, we’d ought to be able by this time to write a book about it.”
Bat Ears spat in contempt. “You mean them scientists of ours.”
The way he said “scientist” made it a dirty word.
“They’re good,” said Warren. “The very best there is.”
“Remember the old days, Ira?” asked Bat Ears. “When you was second looey and you used to come down and we’d have a drink together and …”
“That has nothing to do with it.”
“We had real men in them days. We’d get ourselves a club and go hunt us up some natives and beat a little sense into them and we’d get more facts in half a day than these scientists, with all their piddling around, will get in a month of Sundays.”
“This is slightly different,” Warren said. “There are no natives here.”
There wasn’t, as a matter of fact, much of anything on this particular planet. It was strictly a low-grade affair and it wouldn’t amount to much for another billion years. The survey, understandably, wasn’t too interested in planets that wouldn’t amount to much for another billion years.
Its surface was mostly rock outcroppings and tumbled boulder fields. In the last half million years or so, primal plants had gotten started and were doing well. Mosses and lichens crept into the crevices and crawled across the rocks, but aside from that there seemed to be no life. Although, strictly speaking, you couldn’t be positive, for no one had been interested in the planet. They hadn’t looked it over and they hadn’t searched for life; everyone had been too interested in the junkyard.
They had never intended to land, but had circled the planet, making routine checks and entering routine data in the survey record.
Then someone at a telescope had seen the junkyard and they’d gone down to investigate and had been forthrightly pitchforked into a maddening puzzle.
They had called it the junkyard and that was what it was. Strewn about were what probably were engine parts, although no one was quite sure. Pollard, the mech engineer, had driven himself to the verge of frenzy trying to figure out how to put some of the parts together. He finally got three of them assembled, somehow, and they didn’t mean a thing, so he tried to take them apart again to figure out how he’d done it. He couldn’t get them apart. It was about that time that Pollard practically blew his top.
The engine parts, if that was what they were, were scattered all over the place, as if someone or something had tossed them away, not caring where they fell. But off to one side was a pile of other stuff, all neatly stacked, and it was apparent even to the casual glance that this stuff must be a pile of supplies.
There was what more than likely was food, though it was a rather strange kind of food (if that was what it was), and strangely fabricated bottles of plastic that held a poison liquid, and other stuff that was fabric and might have been clothing, although it gave one the shudders trying to figure out what sort of creatures would have worn that kind of clothing, and bundles of metallic bars, held together in the bundles by some kind of gravitational attraction instead of the wires that a human would have used to tie them in bundles. And a number of other objects for which there were no names.
“They should have found the answer,” Warren said. “They’ve cracked tougher nuts than this. In the month we’ve been here, they should have had that engine running.”
“If it is an engine,” Bat Ears pointed out.
“What else could it be?”
“You’re getting so that you sound like them. Run into something that you can’t explain and think up the best guess possible and when someone questions you, you ask what else it could be. And that ain’t proof, Ira.”
“You’re right, Bat Ears,” Warren admitted. “It certainly isn’t proof and that’s what worries me. We have no doubt the junk out there is a spaceship engine, but we have no proof of it.”
“Nobody’s going to land a ship,” said Bat Ears testily, “and rip out the engine and just throw it away. If they’d done that, the ship would still be here.”
“But if that’s not the answer,” demanded Warren, “what is all that stuff out there?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m not even curious. I ain’t the one that’s worrying.”