Clifford Simak - Out of Their Minds

Seeing this, I remembered Gettysburg and from where I lay I knew I had not been doing any crawling. I was in the same place, or approximately the same place, I had been that afternoon when I had lurched to my feet as the Referee had thumbed his nose at me. The only crawling I had done had been in the feverish confusion of my mind.

I put a hand up to my head and found that a thick, greasy scab had formed on one side of toy skull. When I took my hand away I could feel the stickiness of my fingers. I struggled up onto my knees and stayed kneeling there a moment to take stock of myself. The side of my head, where I had touched it, was sore, but my mind seemed clear—I felt no fuzziness, no wooziness. And I seemed strong enough. A splinter of iron had barely touched me, I reasoned, breaking skin and peeling away some of the hair.

The Referee, I realized, had almost accomplished what he had intended and I was alive by the slightest fraction of an inch. Had the battle been fought, I wondered, for my sole benefit, for my entrapment only? Or was it something that went on at periodic intervals, a regularly scheduled show played out again and yet again, fated to be played out unendingly so long as the people on my earth showed interest and concern in Gettysburg?

I got to my feet and my legs were strong beneath me, although I had a most strange feeling in the middle of me, and as I stood there wondering about it, I realized that the strange feeling was no more than the simple one of hunger. The last time I had eaten had been the day before when Kathy and I had stopped for lunch just short of the Pennsylvania line. My yesterday, of course—I had no way of knowing how time ran here on this shattered hillside. The bombardment, I remembered, had started at least two hours too soon by the watch upon my wrist, although there was no general historical agreement as to the precise moment it had started. But certainly not before one o'clock. But that was something, I told myself, that probably had little bearing upon the situation here. In this lopsided world, the curtain could go up at any time the stage manager might wish.

I started walking up the hill and after no more than three strides my foot caught against something lying on the ground and I pitched forward across it, putting out my hands to catch myself so that I didn't fall flat upon my face. I got two fists full of gravel when I fell, but that wasn't the worst of it. The worst of it was when I twisted around to find out what I had fallen over. And as I gagged at the thought of it, I saw that there were others of them, a great many others of them scattered here where the two lines of contending men had met and fought it out and now were no more than loglike lumps, lying peacefully in the dark, with the slight wind fluttering tag ends of their clothing, perhaps to remind one they once had been alive.

Men, I thought—but, no, not men. Nothing for one to grieve over except, perhaps, in remembrance of another time when all of this had been for real and not a stupid dumb-show.

A different form of life, my old friend had speculated. A better form of life, perhaps. A development that was one of the points of significance" in the continuing evolutionary process. The force of thought, perhaps. The substance of abstract thought here snared and shaped and made to live and die (or pretend to be dead) and then, hi turn, to become a simple force again and again to be shaped and formed and made to live again, either in its present form or in another form.

It made no sense, I told myself. But, then, nothing ever bad made any sense. Fire had made no sense until a now unknown man had tamed it. A wheel had made no sense until someone dreamed it up. Atoms had made no sense until inquiring minds envisioned them and proved them (without actually understanding them) and atomic energy had made no sense until a strange fire had been lit at the University of Chicago and, later, a towering, fierce mushroom had blossomed in the desert.

If evolution were, as it seemed, a continuing process to bring about a life force which could live with, or cope with, its environment, then here, in such a flexible, malleable life form evolution must surely be close to a final achievement and a final glory. For here would be a life form which, because it was not essentially matter, but could become, theoretically at least, any form of matter, was able to adapt itself automatically to any environment, fit itself into any ecology.

But what was the sense of it, I asked myself, lying there upon the field of Gettysburg, with the dead men (dead men?) at my feet. Although, come to think of it, it might be far too early to be seeking for a purpose. The naked carnivorous ape that roamed Africa in hunting packs two million years, or more, ago, if he could have been observed by some intelligence, would have seemed to have far less purpose than the strange beings of this world.

I pushed myself to my feet again and went on up the slope, past the clump of trees, past the shattered cannon—and now I saw that there were many shattered cannons—until I reached the ridgetop and could look down the reverse slope.

The stage still was set, I saw. Campfires sparkled down the slope and south and east and from far off came the janglings of harness and the creaking sound of wagons on the move, or perhaps artillery. Down toward the Round Tops a mule began to bray.

Over all hung the brilliance of the summer stars, and this, I recalled, was a misreading of the script, for after that final charge up the fated slope there had been heavy rain and some of the wounded, helpless to move themselves, had been caught by a rising creek and drowned. It had been "cannon weather." So often had great storms followed on the heels of bitter battle that men in the ranks believed the rains were caused by heavy cannonading.

The near hillside was dotted by the dark, humped shapes of dead men and occasionally a dead horse, but there seemed to be no wounded, nor was there the sound of wounded, that pitiful moaning and crying that went on after every battle, sometimes punctuated by the unnerving shrieks of those few men who screamed. Surely, I told myself, all the wounded could not have been found and carried off by this time, and I wondered if there ever had been any wounded—if, perhaps, the script of fact and history might not have been edited and cleaned up a bit by the elimination of the wounded.

Looking at those dim figures humped upon the ground, I sensed the quiet and peace of them, the majesty of death. None lay distorted, all were decently composed, as if they might simply have lain down and gone to sleep. There was in them no agony and no pain. Even the horses were horses that had gone to sleep. None lay with bodies bloated by the gas of death, with legs outthrust grotesquely. The entire battlefield was polite and neat and orderly and, perhaps, a touch romantic. There was editing here, I knew, but not so much the editing of this world as the editing of mine. This had been the way the people who had lived at the time of Gettysburg had thought about this war, the way later generations also had thought of it after the years had stripped it of its harshness and brutality and horror, and had draped across it a chivalrous mantle, making of it a saga rather than a war.

I knew that it was wrong. I knew that this was not the way that it had been. But, standing there, I half forgot that it was nothing but a play and could only feel the gold-spangled glory and the glory-haunted melancholy.

The mule had quit his braying and somewhere a group about a campfire had begun to sing. Behind me the leaves were whispering in the clump of trees.

Gettysburg, I thought. I had been here in another time, on another world (or in another world, or of another world, whatever it might Be, or however it worked out) and had stood, on this very spot, and tried to imagine what it had been like, and now I saw—or, at least, I saw a part of it.