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

Then I got to remembering how me and Betsy had understood each other and I carried that a little further, imagining how a man and machine might get to know one another so well, they could even talk together and how the man, even if he didn’t have hands, might help the machine to improve itself. And while it sounds somewhat far-fetched just telling it, thinking of it in the secrecy of one’s mind made it sound all right and it gave a sort of warm feeling to imagine that one could get to be downright personal friendly with machines.

When you come to think of it, it’s not so far-fetched, either.

Perhaps, I told myself, when I had gone into the tavern and had left the skunk bedded down in Betsy, the skunk might have looked her over and felt sorry for such a heap of junk, like you or I would feel sorry for a homeless cat or an injured dog. And maybe the skunk had set out, right then and there, to fix her up as best he could, probably cannibalizing some metal here and there, from places where it would not be missed, to grow the computer and the other extra pieces on her.

Probably he couldn’t understand, for the life of him, why they’d been left off to start with. Maybe, to him, a machine was no machine at all without those pieces on it. More than likely, he thought Betsy was just a botched-up job.

The guards began calling the skunk Stinky and that was a libel because he never stunk a bit, but was one of the best-mannered, even-tempered animals that I have ever been acquainted with. I told them it wasn’t right, but they just laughed at me, and before long the whole base knew about the name and everywhere we went they’d yell “Hi, Stinky” at us. He didn’t seem to mind, so I began to think of him as Stinky, too.

I got it figured out to my own satisfaction that maybe Stinky could have fixed up Betsy and even why he fixed up Betsy. But the one thing I couldn’t figure out was where he’d come from to start with. I thought on it a lot and came up with no answers except some foolish ones that were too much for even me to swallow.

I went over to see the colonel a couple of times, but the sergeants and the lieutenants threw me out before I could get to see him. So I got sore about it and decided not to go there any more until he sent for me.

One day, he did send for me and when I got there, the place was crowded with a lot of brass. The colonel was talking to an old gray-haired, eagle-beaked gent who had a fierce look about him and a rat-trap jaw and was wearing stars.

“General,” said the colonel, “may I introduce Stinky’s special friend?”

The general shook hands with me. Stinky, who was riding on my shoulder, purred at him.

The general took a good look at Stinky.

“Colonel,” he said, “I hope to God you’re right. Because if you aren’t and this business ever leaks, the Air Force goose is cooked. The Army and the Navy would never let us live it down and what Congress would do to us would be a crimson shame.”

The colonel gulped a little. “Sir, I’m sure I’m right.”

“I don’t know why I let myself get talked into this,” the general said. “It’s the most hare-brained scheme I have ever heard of.”

He had another squint at Stinky.

“He looks like a common skunk to me,” the general said.

The colonel introduced me to a bunch of other colonels and a batch of majors, but he didn’t bother with the captains if there were any there and I shook hands with them and Stinky purred at them and everything was cozy.

One of the colonels picked up Stinky, but he kicked up quite a fuss trying to get back to me.

The general said to me, “You seem to be the one he wants to be with.”

“He’s a friend of mine,” I explained.

“I be damned,” the general said.

After lunch, the colonel and the general came for me and Stinky and we went over to a hangar. The place had been cleared out and there was only one plane in it, one of the newer jets. There was a mob of people waiting for us, some of them military, but a lot of them were technicians in ordinary clothes or in dungarees. Some of them had clipboards tucked under their arms and some were carrying tools or what I imagined must be tools, although never before have I ever seen contraptions such as those. And there were different pieces of equipment scattered here and there.

“Now, Asa,” the colonel said to me, “I want you to get into that jet with Stinky.”

“And do what?” I asked.

“Just get in and sit. But don’t touch anything. You might get the detail all fouled up.”

It seemed a funny business and I hesitated.

“Don’t be afraid,” the general assured me. “There won’t nothing happen. You just get in and sit.”

So I did and it was a foolish business. I climbed up where the pilots sit and sat down in his seat and it was a crazy-looking place. There were instruments and gadgets and doodads all over. I was almost afraid to move for fear of touching one of them because God knows what might have happened if I had.

I got in and sat and I kept myself interested for a time by just looking at all the stuff and trying to figure out what it was for, but I never rightly got much of it figured out.

But finally I had looked at everything a hundred times and puzzled over it and there wasn’t anything more to do and I was awful bored. But I remembered all the money I was pulling down and the free drinking I was getting and I thought if a man just had to sit in a certain place to earn it, why, it was all right.

Stinky didn’t pay any attention to any of the stuff. He settled down in my lap and went to sleep, or at least he seemed to go to sleep. He took it easy, for a fact. Once in a while, he opened an eye or twitched an ear, but that was all he did.

I hadn’t thought much about it at first, but after I’d sat there for an hour or so, I began to get an idea of why they wanted me and Stinky in the plane. They figured, I told myself, that if they put Stinky in the ship, he might feel sorry for it, too, and do the same kind of job on it as he had done on Betsy. But if that was what they thought, they sure were getting fooled, for Stinky didn’t do a thing except curl up and go to sleep.

We sat there for several hours and finally they told us that we could get out.

And that is how Operation Stinky got off to a start. That is what they called all that foolishness. It does beat hell, the kind of names the Air Force can think up.

It went on like that for several days. Me and Stinky would go out in the morning and sit in a plane for several hours, then take a break for noon, then go back for a few hours more. Stinky didn’t seem to mind. He’d just as soon be there as anywhere. All he’d do would be curl up in my lap and in five minutes he’d be dozing.

As the days went on, the general and the colonel and all the technicians who cluttered up the hangar got more and more excited. They didn’t say a word, but you could see they were aching to bust out, only they held it back. And I couldn’t understand that, for as far as I could see, there was nothing whatsoever happening.

Apparently their work didn’t end when Stinky and I left. Evening after evening, lights burned in the hangar and a gang was working there and they had guards around three deep.

One day they pulled out the jet we had been sitting in and hauled in another and we sat in that and it was just the same as it had been before. Nothing really happened. And yet the air inside that hangar was so filled with tension and excitement, you could fairly light a fire with it.

It sure beat me what was going on.

Gradually the same sort of tension spread throughout the entire base and there were some funny goings-on. You never saw an outfit that was faster on its toes. A construction gang moved in and started to put up buildings and as soon as one of them was completed, machinery was installed. More and more people kept arriving until the base began to look like an anthill with a hotfoot.