Clifford Simak - New Folks' Home - And Other Stories

He tried to define the words, tried to tell himself what he meant by two years old and one moment it seemed that he knew the meaning of it and then it escaped him.

The bat came again and he huddled close against the ground, shivering as he crouched. He lifted his eyes fearfully, darting glances here and there, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the looming house and it was a place he knew as refuge.

“House,” he said, and the word was wrong, not the word itself, but the way he said it.

He ran on trembling, unsure feet and the great door loomed before him, with the latch too high to reach. But there was another way, a small swinging door built into the big door, the sort of door that is built for cats and dogs and sometimes little children. He darted through it and felt the sureness and the comfort of the house about him. The sureness and the comfort—and the loneliness.

He found his second-best teddy bear, and, picking it up, clutched it to his breast, sobbing into its scratchy back in pure relief from terror.

There is something wrong, he thought. Something dreadfully wrong. Something is as it should not be. It is not the garden or the darkened bushes or the swooping winged shape that came out of the night. It is something else, something missing, something that should be here and isn’t.

Clutching the teddy bear, he sat rigid and tried desperately to drive his mind back along the way that would tell him what was wrong. There was an answer, he was sure of that. There was an answer somewhere; at one time he had recognized the need he felt and there had been no way to supply it—and now he couldn’t even know the need, could feel it, but he could not know it.

He clutched the bear closer and huddled in the darkness, watching the moonbeam that came through a window, high above his head, and etched a square of floor in brightness.

Fascinated, he watched the moonbeam and all at once the terror faded. He dropped the bear and crawled on hands and knees, stalking the moonbeam. It did not try to get away and he reached its edge and thrust his hands into it and laughed with glee when his hands were painted by the light coming through the window.

He lifted his face and stared up at the blackness and saw the white globe of the Moon, looking at him, watching him. The Moon seemed to wink at him and he chortled joyfully.

Behind him a door creaked open and he turned clumsily around.

Someone stood in the doorway, almost filling it—a beautiful person who smiled at him. Even in the darkness he could sense the sweetness of the smile, the glory of her golden hair.

“Time to eat, Andy,” said the woman. “Eat and get a bath and then to bed.”

Andrew Young hopped joyfully on both feet, arms held out—happy and excited and contented.

“Mummy!” he cried. “Mummy … Moon!”

He swung about with a pointing finger and the woman came swiftly across the floor, knelt and put her arms around him, held him close against her. His cheek against hers, he stared up at the Moon and it was a wondrous thing, a bright and golden thing, a wonder that was shining new and fresh.

On the street outside, Stanford and Riggs stood looking up at the huge house that towered above the trees.

“She’s in there now,” said Stanford. “Everything’s quiet so it must be all right.”

Riggs said, “He was crying in the garden. He ran in terror for the house. He stopped crying about the time she must have come in.”

Stanford nodded. “I was afraid we were putting it off too long, but I don’t see now how we could have done it sooner. Any outside interference would have shattered the thing he tried to do. He had to really need her. Well, it’s all right now. The timing was just about perfect.”

“You’re sure, Stanford?”

“Sure? Certainly I am sure. We created the android and we trained her. We instilled a deep maternal sense into her personality. She knows what to do. She is almost human. She is as close as we could come to a human mother eighteen feet tall. We don’t know what Young’s mother looked like, but chances are he doesn’t either. Over the years his memory has idealized her. That’s what we did. We made an ideal mother.”

“If it only works,” said Riggs.

“It will work,” said Stanford, confidently. “Despite the shortcomings we may discover by trial and error, it will work. He’s been fighting himself all this time. Now he can quit fighting and shift responsibility. It’s enough to get him over the final hump, to place him safely and securely in the second childhood that he had to have. Now he can curl up, contented. There is someone to look after him and think for him and take care of him. He’ll probably go back just a little further … a little closer to the cradle. And that is good, for the further he goes, the more memories are erased.”

“And then?” asked Riggs worriedly.

“Then he can proceed to grow up again.”

They stood watching, silently.

In the enormous house, lights came on in the kitchen and the windows gleamed with a homey brightness.

I, too, Stanford was thinking. Some day, I, too. Young has pointed the way, he has blazed the path. He had shown us, all the other billions of us, here on Earth and all over the Galaxy, the way it can be done. There will be others and for them there will be more help. We’ll know then how to do it better.

Now we have something to work on.

Another thousand years or so, he thought, and I will go back, too. Back to the cradle and the dreams of childhood and the safe security of a mother’s arms.

It didn’t frighten him in the least.

This story originally appeared in the July 1951 issue of Fantastic Adventures as “You’ll Never Go Home Again.” But the author’s journals suggest that Cliff Simak sent it to his agent under the title “Beachhead,” and that’s how it appeared in subsequent anthologies. Thus, the story was first copyrighted under the former name, but its appearance here is under that second name.

“This looks like an interesting world,” the anthropologist said.

There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could stop a human planetary survey party. It was a specialized unit created for and charged with one purpose only—to establish a bridgehead on an alien planet, to blast out the perimeters of that bridgehead and establish a base where there would be some elbow-room. Then hold that elbow-room against all comers until it was time to go.

After the base was once established, the brains of the party got to work. They turned the place inside out. They put it on tape and captured it within the chains of symbols they scribbled in their field books. They pictured it and wrote it and plotted it and reduced it to a neat assembly of keyed and symbolic facts to be inserted in the galactic files.

If there was life, and sometimes there was, they prodded it to get reaction. Sometimes the reaction was extremely violent, and other times it was much more dangerously subtle. But there were ways in which to handle both the violent and the subtle, for the legionnaires and their robots were trained to a razor’s edge and knew nearly all the answers.

There was nothing in the galaxy, so far known, that could stop a human survey party.

Tom Decker sat at ease in the empty lounge and swirled the ice in the highball glass, well contented, watching the first of the robots emerge from the bowels of the cargo space. They dragged a conveyor belt behind them as they emerged, and Decker, sitting idly, watched them drive supports into the ground and rig up the belt.

A door clicked open back of Decker and he turned his head.

“May I come in, sir?” Doug Jackson asked.

“Certainly,” said Decker.