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

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Archie rumbled. “Maybe your race does deserve a break.”

“They aren’t such bad folks. And, anyhow,” Doc chuckled, “if they don’t like the way you do things they can turn their backs on you. If they don’t insist on radium, you have no hold on them. But if Radium, Inc., could beat you, there’d be no hope for them. They’d only fall deeper and deeper into slavery.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Archie grumbled. “You had the knowledge that would have broken me. You haven’t used it. You say you aren’t going to. Why not let it go at that?”

“If you were a man,” declared Doc, “I’d slap you down for that. I’m not trying to pose as a hero. There is something else.”

“Yes?”

“Look, Boone was the only man who stumbled on the clue. Even he, perhaps, didn’t realize all he had. But he might have. Given time, he certainly would have. But you killed him first. You had intended to all along as a means of escaping yourself. But his stumbling on the clue made you hurry up the job.”

“I was defending myself,” Archie declared.

“Those notes were dangerous,” said Doc. “They gave the human race an angle for attack.”

“But you destroyed the notes. I’m safe now.”

Doc shook his head. “No, Archie, you aren’t. For, you see, I know.”

“But you wouldn’t tell.”

“Oh, yes, I would,” said Doc. “I couldn’t help but tell. R.C.’s police have ways to make one talk. Slick ways. Unpleasant ways. I’m a psychologist. I should know. And they suspect I may know more than I’ve ever told. Chester was curious about Boone’s reports—”

“But if you had escaped with the others, you could have hidden—”

“Even then, there would have been the chance they would have found me,” Doc declared. “Just an outside chance—but in a thing like this you can’t take any chances at all.”

He walked across the room, picked up the heavy stool.

“This is the only way to do it, Archie. There’s no other thing to do. It’s the only way we can fool them—you and I.”

Archie’s voice was cold, mechanical. “You don’t have to do it that way, doctor. There are other ways.”

Doc chuckled. “Psychological effect, Archie. First Boone, now me. Makes you sinister. After two accidents like this no one will want to study you too much—or too closely.”

He weighed the heavy stool in his hand, getting the feel of it.

His cigar traveled across his face. He lifted the stool and crashed it down.

This story was named “Target Generation” when it was submitted, via the author’s agent, to Hugo Gernsback’s new magazine, Science-Fiction Plus , but in August 1953, after it appeared in the fifth issue of that publication under the title “Spacebred Generations,” Clifford D. Simak reversed that change for further appearances of the story, and I have done so for this collection, too.

As “Spacebred Generations,” the story appeared with four footnotes—none of which, I believe, were the author’s idea. Cliff Simak was not in the habit of inserting footnotes into his stories, which makes it significant that the only two stories by Simak to appear in that magazine both appeared with footnotes that did not read in any way like Cliff’s writing, and that most of those footnotes were deleted from subsequent anthology appearances of the stories. And that is particularly thought provoking when one considers the dreary content of the footnotes that accompanied this story: The first was a dreadful explanation of hydroponics, the second was about the importance of written records, the third about the feasibility of having a spaceship run automatically, and the fourth about educational devices. Although all four were signed “The Author,” I am convinced that they were written by Gernsback himself, so I have removed them for this publication. Believe me, you’d thank me for that.

As for the story itself, it may be the most thoughtful of all the generation-ship stories, dealing as it does with a potential problem that most such stories never considered: How do you prevent the passengers from feeling robbed and cheated of a normal life, from going mad with the knowledge that they are no more than carriers of life?

There had been silence—for many generations. Then the silence ended.

The Mutter came at “dawn.”

The Folk awoke, crouching in their beds, listening to the Mutter.

It had been spoken that one day would come the Mutter.

And that the Mutter would be the beginning of the End.

Jon Hoff awoke, and Mary Hoff, his wife.

They were the only two within their cubicle, for they had no children. They were not yet allowed a child. Before they could have a child—before there would be room for it—the elderly Joshua must die; and knowing this, they had waited for his death, guilty at their unspoken prayer that he soon must die—willing him to die so they might have a child.

The Mutter came and ran throughout the Ship. Then the bed in which Jon and Mary crouched spun upward from the floor and crashed against the wall, pinning them against the humming metal, while all the other furniture—chest and chairs and table—came crashing from floor to wall, where it came to rest, as if the wall suddenly had become the floor and the floor the wall.

The Holy Picture dangled from the ceiling, which a moment before had been the other wall, hung there for a moment, swaying in the air; then it, too, crashed downward.

In that moment the Mutter ended and there was silence once again—but not the olden silence, for although there was no sound one could reach out and pinpoint, there were many sounds—a feeling, if not a hearing, of the sounds of surging power, of old machinery stirring back to life, of an old order, long dormant, taking over once again.

Jon Hoff crawled out part way from beneath the bed, then straightened on his arms, using his back to lift the bed so his wife could crawl out, too. Free of the bed, they stood on the wall-that-had-become-a-floor and saw the litter of the furniture, which had not been theirs alone, but had been used and then passed down to them through many generations.

For there was nothing wasted; there was nothing thrown away. That was the law—or one of many laws—that you could not waste, that you could not throw away. You used everything there was, down to the last shred of its utility. You ate only enough food—no more, no less. You drank only enough water—no more, no less. You used the same air over and over again—literally the same air. The wastes of your body went into the converter to be changed into something that you, or someone else, would use again. Even the dead—you used the dead again. And there had been many dead in the long generations from the First Beginning. In months to come, some day perhaps not too distant now, Joshua would be added to the dead, would give over his body to the converter for the benefit of his fellow-folk, would return, finally and irrevocably, the last of all that he had taken from the community, would pay the last debt of all his debts—and would give Jon and Mary the right to have a child.

For there must be a child, thought John, standing there amidst the wreckage—there must be a child to whom he could pass on the Letter and the Reading.

There was a law about the Reading, too. You did not read because reading was an evil art that came from the Beginning and the Folk had, in the Great Awakening, back in the dimness of Far Past, ferreted out this evil among many other evils and had said it must not be.

So it was an evil thing that he must pass on, an evil art, and yet there was the charge and pledge—the charge his long-dead father had put upon him, the pledge that he had made. And something else as well: the nagging feeling that the law was wrong.