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

Doc chuckled. “I seem to keep forgetting about you. Wish the human race was like that. Then there wouldn’t be any need for chaps like me.”

“I’m glad you came,” Archie grated. “I like to talk to you. You never make me feel you’re trying to find out something.”

“He says that to get my goat,” snapped Boone.

“I wouldn’t let him do it,” Doc declared. To Archie he said: “I suppose it does get tiresome after a hundred years or so. But it doesn’t seem to have done much good. No one seems to have found out much about you.”

He swiveled the cigar across his face. “Maybe they tried too hard.”

“That,” said Archie, “might be true. You remind me of Masterson. You’re different from the ones who come out to watch me now.”

“You don’t like them?” Doc winked at Boone and Boone glowered back.

“Why should I like them?” asked Archie. “They regard me as a freak, a curiosity, something to be observed, an assignment to be done. Masterson thought of me as life, as a fellow entity. And so do you.”

“Why, bless my soul,” said Doc, “and so I do.”

“You don’t catch me pitying you,” Doc declared. “Sometimes I catch myself wishing I were you. I suspect I might enjoy your kind of philosophy.”

“The human race,” protested Archie, “couldn’t understand my philosophy. I doubt if I could explain it to them. The language doesn’t have the words. Just as I had a hard time understanding a lot of your Terrestrial philosophy and economics. I’ve studied your history and your economics and your political science. I’ve kept up with your current events. And sometimes, many times, it doesn’t make sense to me. Sometimes I think it’s stupid, but I try to tell myself that it may be because I don’t understand. I miss something, perhaps. Some vital quirk of mind, some underlying factor.”

Doc sobered. “I don’t think you miss much, Archie. A lot of the things we do are stupid, even by our own standards. We lack foresight so often.”

Doc lifted his eyes to the large oil portrait that hung on the wall above Boone’s desk, and he had quite forgotten Boone. From the portrait, kindly gray eyes smiled out of the face. The brows were furrowed, the wavy white hair looked like a silver crown.

“We need more men like him,” said Doc. “More men with vision.”

The portrait was of Masterson, the man who had discovered intelligent life existing in the great clouds of radon that hung over the vast beds of radium ore. Masterson had been more than a man of vision. He had been a genius and a glutton for work.

From the moment he had discerned, by accident, what he thought were lifelike properties in some radon he was studying, he had labored unceasingly with but one end in view. In this very laboratory he had carried out his life work, and there, in the lead-glass jar on the table, lay the end product—Archie.

Masterson had confined radon under pressure in a shielded jar equipped with a delicate system of controls. Failing time after time, never admitting defeat, he had taught the radon in the jar to recognize certain electrical impulses set up within the jar. And the radon, recognizing these impulses as intelligent symbols, finally had learned to manipulate the controls which produced the voice by which it spoke.

It had not been as easy as it sounded, however. It took many grueling years. For both Masterson and Archie were groping in the dark, working without comparable experience, without even a comparable understanding or a comparable mode of thinking. Two alien minds—

“Does it seem a long time, Archie?” Doc asked.

“That’s hard to say,” the speaker boomed. “Time doesn’t have a great deal of meaning to something that goes on and on.”

“You mean you are immortal?”

“No, perhaps not immortal.”

“But do you know?” snapped Doc.

Archie did, then, the thing which had driven observer after observer close to madness. He simply didn’t answer.

Silence thrummed in the room. Doc heard the click of sliding doors elsewhere in the dome, the low hum of powerful machinery.

“That’s the way he is,” yelled Boone. “That’s the way he always is. Shuts up like a clam. Sometimes I’d like to—”

“Break it up, Archie,” commanded Doc. “You don’t have to play dead with me. I’m not here to question you. I’m just here to pass the time of day. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“You might bring in the latest newspapers and read to me,” said Archie.

“That,” declared Doc, “would be a downright privilege.”

“But not the funnies,” cautioned Archie. “Somehow I can’t appreciate the funnies.”

Outside the dome, the week-long night had fallen and it was snowing again—great, white sheets driven by gusty blasts of wind. Not real snow, but paraformaldehyde, solidified formaldehyde. For that was the stuff of which the mighty cloud banks which forever shielded the planet from space was composed.

Harvey Boone, clad in space gear, stood on the barren ridge above the dome and looked down at the scene spread before his eyes.

There lay the dome, with the flicker of shadows playing over it as the great batteries of lamps set in the radium pits swung to and fro.

In the pits labored mighty machines—specialized machines operating with “radon brains,” using, in simplified form, the same principles of control as were used to communicate with Archie. Brains that could receive and understand orders, execute them through the medium of the machinery which they controlled—but which, unlike Archie, did not hold human knowledge accumulated over the course of a hundred years.

Here and there were men. Men incased in shining crystal armor to protect them against the hell’s brew that was Venus’ atmosphere. Carbon dioxide and not a trace of oxygen. Once there had been plenty of free oxygen, some water vapor. But the oxygen had gone to form carbon dioxide and formaldehyde, and the water vapor had combined to solidify the formaldehyde.

Harvey Boone shivered as a blast of hot wind swirled a blanket of solidified formaldehyde around him, shutting off the view. For a moment he stood isolated in a world of swirling white and through the whiteness something seemed to stalk him. Something that might have been fear, and yet more stark than fear, more subtle than panic, more agonizing than terror.

Boone was on the verge of cringing horror before the wind whipped the cloud of snow away. The gale hooted and howled at him. The dancing snow made ghostly patterns in the air. The banks of lights in the pits below weaved fantastically against the sweeping, wind-driven clouds of white.

Unaccountable panic gripped him tight. Mocking whispers danced along the wind. The rising wind shrieked malignantly and a burst of snow swished at him.

Harvey Boone screamed and ran, unseen terror trotting at his heels.

But the closing lock did not shut out the horror of the outdoors. It wasn’t something one could get rid of as easily as that.

Stripped of space gear, he found his hands were shaking.

“I need a drink,” he told himself.

In the laboratory he took the bottle out of his desk, tilted it.

A mocking laugh sounded behind him. Nerves on edge, he whirled about.

A face was leering at him from the glass jar on the table. And that was wrong. For there wasn’t any face. There wasn’t anything one could see inside the jar. Nothing but Archie—radon under pressure. One doesn’t see radon—not unless one looks at it through a spectroscope.

Boone passed his hand swiftly before his eyes and looked again. The face was gone.

Archie chortled at him. “I’m getting you. I almost got you then. You’ll crack up pretty soon. What are you waiting for? Why are you hanging on? In the end I’ll get you!”