Clifford Simak: Contraption

“After we get to be good friends,” said the thing to Johnny, “we can look at one another and it won’t matter then, for we’ll know what we are like inside and not pay attention to how we look outside.”

And Johnny, standing there, thought how they must look awful, not to want him to see them, and the thing said to him, “We would look awful to you. You look awful to us.”

“Maybe, then,” said Johnny, “it’s a good thing I can’t see in the dark.”

“You can’t see in the dark?” it asked, and Johnny said he couldn’t and there was silence for a while, although Johnny could hear it puzzling over how come he couldn’t see when it was dark.

Then it asked if he could do something else and he couldn’t even understand what it tried to say and finally it seemed to figure out that he couldn’t do whatever it had asked about.

“You are afraid,” said the thing. “There is no need to fear us.”

And Johnny explained that he wasn’t afraid of them, whatever they might be, because they were friendly, but that he was afraid of what might happen if Uncle Eb and Aunt Em should find he had sneaked out. So they asked him a lot about Uncle Eb and Aunt Em, and he tried to explain, but they didn’t seem to understand but seemed to think he was talking about government. He tried to explain how it really was, but he was pretty sure they didn’t understand at all.

Finally, being polite about it so he wouldn’t hurt their feelings, he said he had to leave, and since he’d stayed much longer than he’d planned, he ran all the way home.

He got into the house and up to bed all right and everything was fine, but the next morning Aunt Em found the matches in his pocket and gave him a lecture about the danger of burning down the barn. To reinforce the lecture she used a switch on his legs, and, try as hard as he could to be a man about it, she laid it on so hard that he jumped up and down and screamed.

He worked through the day weeding the garden and just before dark went to get the cows.

He didn’t have to go out of his way to go past the blackberry patch, for the cows were in that direction, but he knew well enough that if they hadn’t been, he’d have gone out of his way, for he’d been remembering all day the friendliness he’d found there.

It was still daylight this time, just shading into night, and he could see that the thing, whatever it might be, was not alive, but simply a hunk of metal, like two sauce dishes stuck together, with a rim running around its middle just like there’d be a rim if you stuck two dishes together. It looked like old metal that had been laying around for a long time and you could see where it was pitted like a piece of machinery will get when it stands out in the weather.

It had crushed a path for quite a ways through the blackberry thicket and had plowed up the ground for twenty feet or so, and, sighting back along the way it had come, Johnny could see where it had hit and smashed the top of a tall poplar.

It spoke to him, without words, the way it had the night before, with friendliness and fellowship, although Johnny wouldn’t know that last word, never having run across it in his schoolbooks.

It said, “You may look at us a little now. Look at us quick and then away. Don’t look at us steadily. Just a quick look and then away. That way you get used to us. A little at a time.”

“Where are you?” Johnny asked.

“Right here,” they said.

“Inside of there?” asked Johnny.

“Inside of here,” they said.

“I can’t see you, then,” said Johnny. “I can’t see through metal.” “He can’t see through metal,” said one of them.

“He can’t see when the star is gone,” said the other. “He can’t see us, then,” they said, the both of them. “You might come out,” said Johnny.

“We can’t come out,” they said. “We’d die if we came out.” “I can’t ever see you, then.”

“You can’t ever see us, Johnny.”

And he stood there, feeling terribly lonely because he could never see these friends of his.

“We don’t understand who you are,” they said. “Tell us who you are.

And because they were so kind and friendly, he told them who he was and how he was an orphan and had been taken in by his Uncle Eb and Aunt Em, who really weren’t his aunt and uncle. He didn’t tell them how Uncle Eb and Aunt Em treated him, whipping him and scolding him and sending him to bed without his supper, but this, too, as well as the things he told them, was there for them to sense and now there was more than friendliness, more than fellowship. Now there was compassion and something that was their equivalent of mother love.

“He’s just a little one,” they said, talking to one another.

They reached out to him and seemed to take him in their arms and hold him tight against them and Johnny went down on his knees without knowing it and held out his arms to the things that lay there among the broken bushes and cried out to them, as if there was something there that he might grasp and hold-some comfort that he had always missed and longed for and now finally had found. His heart cried out the thing that lie could not say, the pleading that would not pass his lips, and they answered him.

“No, we’ll not leave you, Johnny. We can’t leave you, Johnny.”

“You promise?” Johnny asked.

Their voices were a little grim. “We do not need to promise, Johnny. Our machine is broken and we cannot fix it. One of us is dying and the other soon will die.”

Johnny knelt there, with the words sinking into him, with the realization sinking into him, and it seemed more than he could bear that, having found two friends, they were about to die.

“Johnny,” they said to him.

“Yes,” said Johnny, trying not to cry.

“You will trade with us?”

“Trade?”

“A way of friendship with us. You give us something and we give you something.”

“But,” said Johnny. “But I haven’t…

Then he knew he had. He had the pocket knife. It wasn’t much, with its broken blade, but it was all he had.

“That is fine,” they said. “That is exactly right. Lay it on the ground, close to the machine.”

He took the knife out of his pocket and laid it against the machine and even as he watched something happened, but it happened so fast he couldn’t see how it worked, but, anyhow, the knife was gone and there was something in its place.

“Thank you, Johnny,” they said. “It was nice of you to trade with us.”

He reached out his hand and took the thing they’d traded him, and even in the darkness it flashed with hidden fire. He turned it in the paten of his hand and saw that it was some sort of jewel, many faceted, and that the glow came from inside of it and that it burned with many different colors.

It wasn’t until he saw how much light came from it that he realized how long he’d stayed and how dark it was and when he saw that he jumped to his feet and ran, without waiting to say goodbye.

It was too dark now to look for the cows and he hoped they had started home alone and that he could catch up with them and bring them in. He’d tell Uncle Eb that he’d had a hard time rounding them up. He’d tell Uncle Eb that the two heifers had broken out of the fence and he had to get them back. He’d tell Uncle Eb… he’d tell… he’d tell…

His breath gasped with his running and his heart was thumping so it seemed to shake him and fear rode on his shoulders-fear of the awful thing he’d done-of this final unforgivable thing after all the others, after not going to the spring to get the water, after missing the two heifers the night before, after the matches in his pocket.

He did not find the cows going home alone-he found them in the barnyard and he knew that they’d been milked and he knew he’d stayed much longer and that it was far worse than he had imagined.