They had materialized it for him and they’d told him he should drink it and he could remember the bitter taste it had left upon his tongue.
Kitty and Eric were standing in the doorway, staring at him, and he looked up from the vial and stared in their direction.
“Alden,” Kitty asked, “what has happened to you?”
He shook his head at her. “It’s all right,” he told her. “Nothing’s happened. They just aren’t there, is all.”
“Something happened,” she said. “You look younger by twenty years or more.”
He let the vial fall from his hand. He lifted his hands in front of him and in the light from overhead he saw that the wrinkles in the skin had disappeared. They were stronger, firmer hands. They were younger hands.
“It’s your face,” Kitty said. “It’s all filled out. The crow’s feet all are gone.”
He rubbed his palm along his jaw and it seemed to him that the bone was less pronounced, that the flesh had grown out to pad it.
“The fever,” he said. “That was it—the fever.”
For he remembered dimly. Not remembered, maybe, for perhaps he had never known. But he was knowing now. That was the way it had always worked. Not as if he’d learned a thing, but as if he’d remembered it. They put a thing into his mind and left it planted there and it unfolded then and crept upon him slowly.
And now he knew.
The cage was not a teacher. It was a device they had used to study man, to learn about his body and his metabolism and all the rest of it.
And then when they had known all that need be known, they had written the prescription and given it to him.
Young man, the robot in the barnyard had said to him. But he had not noticed. Young man, but he had too many other things to think about to notice those two words.
But the robot had been wrong.
For it was not only young.
Not young alone—not young for the sake of being young, but young because there was coursing in his body a strange alien virus, or whatever it might be, that had set his body right, that had tuned it up again, that had given it the power to replace old and aging tissue with new.
Doctors to the universe, he thought, that is what they were. Mechanics sent out to tinker up and renovate and put in shape the protoplasmic machinery that was running old and rusty.
“The fever?” Eric asked him.
“Yes,” said Alden. “And thank God, it’s contagious. You both caught it from me.”
He looked closely at them and there was no sign of it as yet, although Eric, it seemed, had begun to change. And Kitty, he thought, when it starts to work on her, how beautiful she’ll be! Beautiful because she had never lost a certain part of beauty that still showed through the age.
And all the people here in Willow Bend—they, too, had been exposed, as had the people who were condemned to Limbo. And perhaps the judge as well, the high and mighty face that had loomed so high above him. In a little while the fever and the healthy youthfulness would seep across the world.
“We can’t stay here,” said Eric. “The medics will be coming.”
Alden shook his head. “We don’t need to run,” he said. “They can’t hurt us now.”
For the medic rule was ended. There was now no need of medics, no need of little leagues, no need of health programs.
It would take a while, of course, for the people to realize what had happened to them, but the day would come when they would know for sure and then the medics could be broken down for scrap or used for other work.
He felt stronger than he’d ever felt. Strong enough, if need be, to walk back across the swamp to Limbo.
“We’d not got out of Limbo,” Kitty told him, “if it hadn’t been for you. You were just crazy enough to supply the guts we needed.”
“Please remember that,” said Alden, “in a few more days, when you are young again.”
No More Hides and Tallow
This story, which was published in the March 1946 issue of Lariat Story Magazine, features as a minor character the only Native American to appear in Cliff’s westerns— and it should be noted that this particular “Indian Joe” seems to have more in common with his namesake in “Huckleberry Finn”—a renegade who spent his time hanging out with white criminals—than with most of the stereotypical Indians in some westerns.
More importantly, though, this story reflects Cliff Simak’s constant efforts to push the envelopes of the genres he worked in. In this case, he used the western genre to demonstrate the effect of the American Civil War on the frontier economy. For some time after the war, there was virtually no market for the cattle that had run wild on the range while many of the men were away fighting. And the people struggling to make a living from cattle, who had no way to bring them to the northern and eastern markets, just killed the animals in order to ship the hides and tallow from Texas seaports—leaving the rest of the carcasses to rot. It was the idea of driving cattle north to meet up with a railroad that would begin to pump money back into the frontier economy.
Lieutenant Ned Benton pulled the buckskin to a halt, sat a little straighter in the saddle, as if by sitting thus he might push the horizon back, see a little farther.
For here was a thing that he had hungered for, a thing that he had dreamed about through four years of blood and sweat, fears and hunger, cold and heat. Dreamed it in the dust of Gettysburg and the early morning mists of Mississippi camps, through the eternity of march and counter-march, of seeming victory and defeat that at last was deadly certain. A thing that had been with him always through the years of misery and toil and bitterness he had served with the Army of the South.
For this at last was Benton land…Benton acres stretching far beneath the setting sun of Texas. Benton land and Benton cattle…and no more hides and tallow. For there were wonderful things astir in the new towns to the north, towns with strange names that had sprung up beyond the Missouri’s northward bend. Towns that wanted Texas cattle, not for hides and tallow, but for meat. Meat for the hungry east, meat that was worth good money.
He had heard about it before he crossed the Mississippi…about the great herds streaming northward, braving wind and storm and blizzards, crossing rivers, moving with a trail of dust that mounted in the sky like a marching banner. And it was no more than the start…for Texas was full of cattle. Half wild cattle that no one had paid much attention to except to kill for hides and tallow when there was need of money. Not much money…just enough to scrape by on, to maintain a half dignified poverty.
But that was changed now, for the herds were going north. Herds that spelled riches. Riches that would give the old folks the comforts they had always wanted, but had never talked about. Money for the house that he and Jennie had planned when he came home from the war. Money for the horses and the painted fence around the house….
He clucked to the buckskin and the animal moved forward, down the faint trail that ran through the knee high grass running like a moving sea, stirred by the wind across the swales.
Only a little while now, Benton told himself. Only a little while until I ride in on the ranch buildings. He shut his eyes, remembering them, as he had shut his eyes many times before in those long four years…seeing once again the great grey squared timber house beneath the cottonwoods, hearing the excited barking of old Rover, the frightened scuttering of the chickens that his mother kept.