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

“You’ve taken precautions against someone stumbling into its field?”

“We’ve put a fence around it. Ordinarily, someone is watching to warn off stray visitors. But, as you know, we seldom have stray visitors. We’ll all go out and have a look at it tomorrow, first thing after breakfast.”

“Why not now?” asked Leonard.

“No reason,” said Old Prather, “but we wouldn’t be able to see much. We have no lights out there. However, if you wish—”

Leonard made a gesture of agreement. “Tomorrow’s soon enough,” he said.

“Another thing you may have been wondering about,” said Old Prather, “is how it got there. As I told you, the gardener found it. I said at first it fell, then corrected myself and said it had arrived. The correction was not quite an honest one. There is some evidence it fell—some broken branches in the birch clump that might have been broken when the thing plunged through the trees.”

“You say ‘fell,’” said Mary. “Fell from where?”

“We are not sure, but we do have a hypothesis. Something happened west of here a few nights ago. A plane was reported down. Out in the hills. A wild and tangled country, as you may remember. Several people saw it falling. Searchers were sent out, but now the story is that there never was a plane. The news reports indicate it might have been a meteorite, mistaken for a plane. It is fairly clear that someone stepped in and quickly hushed it up. I made a few discreet inquiries of friends in Washington, and the word seems to be that a spaceship fell. Not one of our ships. All of ours can be accounted for. The supposition is that it may have been an alien ship.”

“And you think the time machine fell off the alien ship,” said Leonard. “It was breaking up and—”

“But why would an alien ship carry a time machine?” asked Mary.

“Not a time machine,” I said. “A time engine. A drive that uses time as a source of energy.”

Unable to sleep, I let myself out to go for a walk. The moon had just risen above the eastern hills, shedding a sickly light that barely dispersed the dark.

I hadn’t been able to sleep. I had closed my eyes and tried, but then had been compelled to open them and stare up at the ceiling that was really not a ceiling, but just a square of darkness.

A time engine, I told myself. Time used as energy. Christ, then, I had been right! If it turned out that the thing in the clump of birch out there above the lake actually was an engine, then I had been right and all the others had been wrong. And, more than that, if time could be used as an energy, the universe lay open—not just the nearby stars, not just the galaxy, but the entire universe, everything that was. For if time could be manipulated—and to use it as a source of energy would mean that it would have to be capable of manipulation—then the distances of space would no longer count at all, would never need to be considered, and man could go anywhere he wished.

I looked up at the stars and I wanted to shout at them: Now we have you by the throat, now you are reachable, now your remoteness can no longer count with us. Your remoteness or the even more incredible remoteness of your sister stars that are so far that no matter how fiercely the fires may burn within them, we can catch no glimpse of them. Not even the dimmer stars, nor even the stars unseeable, are beyond our reach.

I wanted to yell at them, but of course I did not yell at them. You do not yell at stars. A star is too impersonal a thing to think of yelling at.

I walked down the driveway and followed a sidewalk that angled up the hill toward the observatory, and looking off to my left, I thought: Just over that little rise of ground in the clump of birch that stands above the pond. Trying to envision the cylinder that lay in the clump of birch, I wondered for the thousandth time if it might really be what I thought it was.

As I went around a curve in the winding walk, a man rose silently from a bench where he had been sitting. I stopped, somewhat startled by his sudden appearance; I had thought that at this time of night I would have been alone.

“Charley Spencer,” said the man. “Can it be Charley Spencer?”

“It could be,” I said. His face was in the shadow, and I could not make it out.

“I must apologize,” he said, “for intruding on your walk. I thought I was alone. You may not remember me. I am Kirby Winthrop.”

I went back through my memory, and a name came out of it. “But I do remember you,” I said. “You were a year or two behind me. I have often wondered what became of you.” Which was a lie, of course; I’d never thought of him.

“I stayed on,” he said. “There’s something about the place that gets into the blood. Doing some teaching. Mostly research. Old Prather pulled you in on the time machine?”

“Myself and some others,” I told him. “What do you know about it?”

“Nothing, really. It’s outside my field. I’m in cybernetics. That’s why I’m out here. I often come out on the hill, when it’s quiet, and think.”

“When it comes to cybernetics,” I told him, “I rank as fairly stupid.”

“It’s a wide field,” he said. “I’m working on intelligence.”

“Indeed,” I said.

“Machine intelligence,” he said.

“Can machines be intelligent?” I asked.

He said, “I rather think they can.”

“You’re making progress, then?”

“I have a theory I am working on,” he said.

“Well, that is fine,” I said. “I wish you all success.”

I sensed in him a hunger to talk, now that he had found someone new he could tell about his work; but I was not about to stand around with him out there in the night.

“I think I’ll turn back,” I said. “It’s getting chilly and maybe now I can get some sleep.”

I turned to go, and he said to me, “I’d like to ask you something, Charley. How many people have you ever told you got your education at Coon Creek?”

The question startled me, and I turned back to face him.

“That’s a funny question, Kirby.”

“Maybe so,” he said, “but how many have you?”

“As few as possible,” I said. I hesitated for a moment, waiting for him to speak, and when he didn’t, I said, “It was good to see you, Kirby,” and I headed back toward the hall.

But he called after me, and I swung around again.

“There is something else,” he said. “What do you know of the history of Coon Creek?”

“Not a thing,” I said. “I’m not even curious.”

“I was,” he said, “and I did some checking. Do you know there has never been a cent of public money in this place? And in all its history, it has never had a research grant. So far as I can find, it has never applied for one.”

“There is an endowment of some sort,” I said. “Someone by the name of Cramden, way back in the eighties. Cramden Hall is named for him.”

“That is right,” said Winthrop, “but there never was a Cramden. Someone put up the money in his name, but there never was a Cramden. No one by the name of Cramden.”

“Who was it, then?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t suppose it makes a great deal of difference now. Coon Creek is here and that is all that counts.”

I started off down the walk again, and this time he let me go.

Good to see you, I had told him, but it had not been good. I scarcely remembered the man—a name out of the past, a name without a face. And I still did not have the face, for his back had been toward the moon and I had not seen his face.

And all that silly talk about did I often mention Coon Creek and who had endowed the college. What had the man been getting at and why should he be so concerned? In any case, I told myself, it did not matter to me. I wasn’t going to be here long enough for it to matter to me.