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

The analyzer gurgled slightly and spat out its report.

Safe for humans, said the printed slip, adding a great deal of data about atmospheric composition, bacterial count, violet-ray intensity and many other things. But the one conclusion was enough.

Safe for humans.

Jon reached out his hand for the master switch in the center of the board.

“This is it,” he said. “This is the end of the thousand years.”

He turned the switch and the dials all clicked to zero. The needles found dead center. The song of power died out in the ship and there was the olden silence—the silence of long ago, of the time when the stars were streaks and the walls were floors.

Then they heard the sound.

The sound of human wailing—as an animal might howl.

“They are afraid,” said Mary. “They are scared to death. They won’t leave the Ship.”

And she was right, he knew. That was something that he had not thought of—that they would not leave the ship.

They had been tied to it for many generations. They had looked to it for shelter and security. To them the vastness of the world outside, the never-ending sky, the lack of a boundary of any sort at all, would be sodden terror.

Somehow or other they would have to be driven from the ship—literally driven from it, and the ship locked tight so they could not fight their way back in again. For the ship was ignorance and covering; it was a shell outgrown; it was the womb from which the race would be born anew.

Mary asked: “What will they do to us? I never thought of that. We can’t hide from them, nor…”

“Not anything,” said Jon. “They won’t do anything. Not while I have this.”

He slapped the gun at his side.

“But, Jon, this killing…”

“There won’t be any killing. They will be afraid and the fear will force them to do what must be done. After a time, maybe a long time, they will come to their senses, and then there will be no further fear. But to start with there is a need of…”

The knowledge stirred within his brain, the knowledge implanted there by the strange machine.

“Leadership,” he said. “That is what they’ll need…someone to lead them, to tell them what to do, to help them to work together.”

He thought bitterly: I thought that it had ended, but it hasn’t ended. Bringing down the ship was not enough. I must go on from there. No matter what I do, as long as I live, there will be no end to it.

There was the getting settled and the learning once again.

There were the books in the chest, he remembered, more than half the chest packed full of books. Basic texts, perhaps. The books that would be needed for the starting over.

And somewhere, too, instructions?

Instructions left with the books for a man like him to read and carry out?

INSTRUCTIONS TO BE PUT INTO EFFECT AFTER LANDING.

That would be the notation the envelope would carry, or another very like it, and he’d tear the envelope open and there would be folded pages.

Once before, in another letter, there had been folded pages.

And the second letter?

There would be one, he was sure.

“It was planned on Earth,” he said. “Every step was planned. They planned the great forgetting as the only way that humans could carry out the flight. They planned the heresy that handed down the knowledge. They made the ship so simple that anyone could handle it—anyone at all.

“They looked ahead and saw what was bound to happen. Their planning has been just a jump ahead of us every moment.”

He stared out the vision plate at the sweep of land, at the trees and grass and sky.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said, “if they figured out how to drive us off the ship.”

A loudspeaker came to life and talked throughout the ship, so that everyone might hear. Now hear this, it said, the old recording just a little scratchy. Now hear this. You must leave the ship within the next twelve hours. At the expiration of that time a deadly gas will be released inside the ship.

Jon reached out his hand to Mary.

“I was right,” he said. “They planned it to the last. They’re still that jump ahead of us.”

They stood there, the two of them, thinking of those people who had planned so well, who had thought so far ahead, who had known the problems and had planned against them.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Jon.”

“Yes?”

“Can we have children now?”

“Yes,” he said. “We can have children. Anyone who wishes may. On the ship there were so many of us. Now on this planet there are so few of us.”

“There is room,” said Mary. “Room to spare.”

He unlocked the control room door, carefully locked it behind him. They went down the darkened corridors.

The loudspeaker took u again: Now hear this. Now hear this. You must leave the ship…

Mary shrank against him and he felt the trembling of her body.

“Jon. Are we going out now? Are we going out?”

Frightened. Of course she was frightened.

He was frightened, too.

One does not slough off entirely the fears of generations even in the light of truth.

“Not right away,” he said. “I’ve got to look for something.”

But the time would come when they would have to leave the ship, step out into the frightening vastness of the planet—naked and afraid and shorn of the security of the enclosing shell that could be theirs no longer.

But when that time came, he would know what to do.

He was sure he would.

For when the men of Earth had planned so well, they would not have failed in the final moment to have left a letter of instructions for the starting over.

Not published until the January 1945 issue of Army-Navy Flying Stories , this story was actually written in the last half of 1942, at a time when the United States was finally beginning to recover from the disaster of Pearl Harbor. No editor is listed in the masthead of the magazine, but Cliff sent the story to Leo Margulies, the editor of a magazine called Air War , whose name would later appear in connection with a lot of post-war science fiction. The cover price of that issue of the magazine was ten cents, and Cliff received thirty dollars for the story. Hinging on a pilot’s psychology, the story is a bit unusual for its genre.

The Jap flat-top was a beautiful target. Little red eyes wrinkled all over it, sending up a storm of shrapnel that exploded and looked like puffs of black silk unfolding in the air.

Bill Jackson crouched behind his gun in the rear seat of the Avenger and wondered whether his luck would ever change. During three years of service on board one of Uncle Sam’s carriers—his luck, or rather, his lack of it—had become a legend.

Here he was again, right behind the eight-ball. As if it weren’t bad enough to be on the tail end of the attacking torpedo force, he had drawn Lieutenant Cabot Hart as pilot.

Not that Hart wasn’t a good pilot. He was. Jackson admitted there was nothing he could lay his finger on to justify his resentment for the man in the seat ahead. It rose from Hart’s unbending correctness, from his inhuman aloofness even in the rush of battle.

Other pilots sometimes shouted insults at the Japs, or yipped in exultation when they dived on the enemy. Hart never did any of these things. Somehow one was made to feel that Hart thought insulting a Jap or yipping when he loosed a bomb or strafed a gun crew was not quite correct.

Over the howling of the Avenger’s motor and the roaring of the guns below, came the dull crump of heavy bombs. That would be the land-based Fortresses from New Britain giving the destroyers a pasting.