Clifford Simak - A Death in the House - And Other Stories

Surely there could be nothing wrong in a humanity like that. Perhaps this was the very coin in which the Sitters paid for the childhood they had stolen.

If they had stolen it. For they might not have stolen it; they might merely have captured it and stored it.

And in such a case, then they had given free this new maturity and this new equality. And they had taken something which would have been lost in any event—something for which the human race had no use at all, but which was the stuff of life for the Sitter people.

They had taken youth and beauty and they had stored it in the house; they had preserved something that a human could not preserve except in memory. They had caught a fleeting thing and held it and it was there—the harvest of many years; the house was bulging with it.

Lamont Stiles, he wondered, talking in his mind to that man so long ago, so far away, how much did you know? What purpose was in your mind?

Perhaps a rebuke to the smugness of the town that had driven him to greatness. Perhaps a hope, maybe a certainty, that no one in Millville could ever say again, as they had said of Lamont Stiles, that this or that boy or girl would amount to nothing.

That much, perhaps, but surely not any more than that.

Donna had put her hand upon his arm, was tugging at his sleeve.

“Come on, Mr. Dean,” she urged. “You can’t stay standing here.”

They walked with him to the door and said good night and he went up the street at a little faster gait, it seemed to him, than he ordinarily traveled.

But that, he told himself quite seriously, was because now he was just slightly younger than he had been a couple of hours before.

Dean went on even faster and he didn’t hobble and he wasn’t tired at all, but he wouldn’t admit it to himself—for it was a dream, a hope, a seeking after that one never must admit. Until one said it aloud, there was no commitment to the hope, but once the word was spoken, then bitter disappointment lurked behind a tree.

He was walking in the wrong direction. He should be heading back for home. It was getting late and he should be in bed.

And he mustn’t speak the word. He must not breathe the thought.

He went up the walk, past the shrub-choked lawn, and he saw that the light still filtered through the drawn drapes.

He stopped on the stoop and the thought flashed through his mind: There are Stuffy and myself and old Abe Hawkins. There are a lot of us …

The door came open and the Sitter stood there, poised and beautiful and not the least surprised. It was, he thought, almost as if it had been expecting him.

And the other two of them, he saw, were sitting by the fireplace.

“Won’t you please come in?” the Sitter said. “We are so glad you decided to come back. The children all are gone. We can have a cozy chat.”

He came in and sat down in the chair again and perched the hat carefully on one knee.

Once again the children were running in the room and there was the sense of timelessness and the sound of laughter.

He sat and nodded, thinking, while the Sitters waited.

It was hard, he thought. Hard to make the words come right.

He felt again as he had felt many years ago, when the teacher had called upon him to recite in the second grade.

They were waiting, but they were patient; they would give him time.

He had to say it right. He must make them understand. He couldn’t blurt it out. It must be made to sound natural, and logical as well.

And how, he asked himself, could he make it logical?

There was nothing logical at all in men as old as he and Stuffy needing baby-sitters.

“Tools,” which was originally published in the July 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction , and for which Clifford D. Simak was paid one hundred dollars, might have been awarded a Hugo or a Nebula if those awards had been around at the time. On the one hand, it represents one of the first of Cliff Simak’s many portrayals of non-human intelligence—a nuanced portrayal that succeeded in showing alien intelligence as both different from human concepts of intelligence and benign (at least at times). This is in keeping with an idea that Cliff would touch on in his City stories, written just a short time later: the notion that there may be intelligences so handicapped by their physical situations that they cannot communicate, and thus cannot learn and grow without help.

But the other major theme of this story, for which recognition is due, is its somewhat predictive portrayal of a solar system in which human beings are virtually enslaved by big business interests—in particular, the energy industry of the time—and their addiction to what energy gives them.

Venus had broken many men. Now it was breaking Harvey Boone, and the worst of it was that Boone knew it was breaking him and couldn’t do a thing about it.

Although it wasn’t entirely Venus. Partly it was Archie—Archie, the thing in the talking jar. Perhaps it wasn’t right calling Archie just a “thing.” Archie might have been an “it” or “they.” No one knew. In fact, no one knew much of anything about Archie despite the fact men had talked to him and studied him for almost a hundred years.

Harvey Boone was official observer for the Solar Institute, and his reports, sent back with every rocketload of radium that streaked out to Earth, were adding to the voluminous mass of data assembled on Archie. Data that told almost nothing at all.

Venus itself was bad enough. Men died when a suit cracked or radium shields broke down. Although that wasn’t the usual way the planet killed. Venus had a better—perhaps, more accurately—a worse way.

Any alien planet is hard to live on and stay sane. Strangeness is a word that doesn’t have much meaning until a man stands face to face with it and then it smacks him straight between the eyes.

Venus was alien—plus. One always had a sense that eyes were watching him, watching all the time. And waiting. Although one didn’t have the least idea what they were waiting for.

On Venus, something always stalked a man—something that trod just on the outer edge of shadow. A sense of not belonging, of being out of place, of being an intruder. A baffling psychological something that drove men to their deaths or to living deaths that were even worse.

Harvey Boone huddled on a chair in one corner of the laboratory, nursing a whiskey bottle, while Archie chuckled at him.

“Nerves,” said Archie. “Your nerves are shot to hell.”

Boone’s hand shook as he tilted the whiskey bottle up. His hate-filled eyes glared at the lead-glass jar even as he gulped.

Boone knew what Archie said was true. Even through his drink-fogged brain, the one fact stood out in bright relief—he was going crazy. He had seen Johnny Garrison, commander of the dome, watching him. And Doc Steele. Doc was the psychologist, and when Doc started watching one it was time to pull up and try to straighten oneself out. For Doc’s word was law. It had to be law.

A knock sounded on the door and Boone called out an invitation. Doc Steele strode in.

“Good morning, Boone,” he said. “Hello, Archie.”

Archie’s voice, mechanical and toneless, returned the greeting.

“Have a drink,” said Boone.

Doc shook his head, took a cigar from his pocket and with a knife cut it neatly in two. One half he stuck back in his pocket, the other half in his mouth.

“Don’t you ever light those things?” demanded Boone irritably.

“Nope,” Doc replied cheerfully. “Always dry-smoke them.”

He said to Archie: “How are you today, Archie?”

Despite its mechanical whir, Archie’s reply sounded almost querulous: “Why do you always ask me that, doctor? You know there’s nothing wrong with me. There never could be. I’m always all right.”