Clifford Simak - New Folks' Home - And Other Stories

Jackson walked to the great curving window and looked out. “What does it look like, sir?” he asked.

Decker shrugged. “Another job,” he said. “Six weeks. Six months. Depends on what we find.”

Jackson sat down beside him. “This one looks tough,” he said. “Jungle worlds always are a bit meaner than any of the others.”

Decker grunted at him. “A job. That’s all. another job to do. Another report to file. Then they’ll either send out an exploitation gang or a pitiful bunch of bleating colonists.”

“Or,” said Jackson, “they’ll file the report and let it gather dust for a thousand years or so.”

“They can do anything they want,” Decker told him. “We turn it in. What someone else does with it after that is their affair, not ours.”

They sat quietly watching the six robots roll out the first of the packing cases, rip off its cover and unpack the seventh robot, laying out his various parts neatly in a row in the tramped-down, waist-high grass. Then, working as a team, with not a single fumble, they put No. 7 together, screwed his brain case into his metal skull, flipped up his energizing switch and slapped the breastplate home.

No. 7 stood groggily for a moment. He swung his arms uncertainly, shook his head from side to side. Then, having oriented himself, he stepped briskly forward and helped the other six heave the packing box containing No. 8 off the conveyor belt.

“Takes a little time this way,” said Decker, “but it saves a lot of space. Have to cut our robot crew in half if we didn’t pack them at the end of every job. They stow away better.”

He sipped at his highball speculatively. Jackson lit a cigarette.

“Someday,” said Jackson, “we’re going to run up against something that we can’t handle.”

Decker snorted.

“Maybe here,” insisted Jackson, gesturing at the nightmare jungle world outside the great curved sweep of the vision plate.

“You’re a romanticist,” Decker told him shortly. “In love with the unexpected. Besides that, you’re new. Get a dozen trips under your belt and you won’t feel this way.”

“It could happen,” insisted Jackson.

Decker nodded, almost sleepily. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe it could, at that. It never has, but I suppose it could. And when it does, we take it on the lam. It’s no part of our job to fight a last ditch battle. When we bump up against something that’s too big to handle, we don’t stick around. We don’t take any risks.”

He took another sip.

“Not even calculated risks,” he added.

The ship rested on the top of a low hill, in a small clearing masked by tall grass, sprinkled here and there with patches of exotic flowers. Below the hill a river flowed sluggishly, a broad expanse of chocolate-colored water moving in a sleepy tide through the immense vine-entangled forest.

As far as the eye could see, the jungle stretched away, a brooding darkness that even from behind the curving quartz of the vision plate seemed to exude a heady, musty scent of danger that swept up over the grass-covered hilltop. There was no sign of life, but one knew, almost instinctively, that sentiency lurked in the buried pathways and tunnels of the great tree-land.

Robot No. 8 had been energized and now the eight split into two groups, ran out two packing cases at a time instead of one. Soon there were twelve robots, and then they formed themselves into three working groups.

“Like that,” said Decker, picking up the conversation where they had left it lying. He gestured with his glass, now empty. “No calculated risks. We send the robots first. They unpack and set up their fellows. Then the whole gang turns to and uncrates the machinery and sets it up and gets it operating. A man doesn’t even put his foot on the ground until he has a steel ring around the ship to give him protection.”

Jackson sighed. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “Nothing can happen. We don’t take any chances. Not a single one.”

“Why should we?” Decker asked. He heaved himself out of the chair, stood up and stretched. “Got a thing or two to do,” he said. “Last minute checks and so on.”

“I’ll sit here for a while,” said Jackson. “I like to watch. It’s all new to me.”

“You’ll get over it,” Decker told him. “In another twenty years.”

In his office, Decker lifted a sheaf of preliminary reports off his desk and ran through them slowly, checking each one carefully, filing away in his mind the basic facts of the world outside.

He worked stolidly, wetting a big, blunt thumb against his outthrust tongue to flip the pages off the top of the next stack and deposit them, in not so neat a pile, to his right, face downward.

Atmosphere—Pressure slightly more than Earth. High in oxygen.

Gravity—A bit more than Earth.

Temperature—Hot. Jungle worlds always were. There was a breeze outside now, he thought. Maybe there’d be a breeze most of the time. That would be a help.

Rotation—Thirty-six hour day.

Radiation—None of local origin, but some hard stuff getting through from the sun.

He made a mental note: Watch that.

Bacterial and virus count—As usual. Lots of it. Apparently not too dangerous. Not with every single soul hypoed and immunized and hormoned to his eyebrows. But you never can be sure, he thought. Not entirely sure. No calculated risks, he had told Jackson. But here was a calculated risk and one you couldn’t do a single thing about. If there was a bug that picked you for a host and you weren’t loaded for bear to fight him, you took him on and did the best you could.

Life factor—Lot of emanation. Probably the vegetation, maybe even the soil, was crawling with all sorts of loathsome life. Vicious stuff, more than likely. But that was something you took care of as a matter of routine. No use taking any chances. You went over the ground even if there was no life—just to be sure there wasn’t.

A tap came on the door and he called out for the man to enter.

It was Captain Carr, commander of the Legion unit.

Carr saluted snappily. Decker did not rise. He made his answering salute a sloppy one on purpose. No use, he told himself, letting the fellow establish any semblance of equality, for there was no such equality in fact. A captain of the Legion simply did not rank with the commandant of a galactic survey party.

“Reporting, sir,” said Carr. “We are ready for a landing.”

“Fine, Captain. Fine.”

What was the matter with the fool? The Legion always was ready, always would be ready—that was no more than tradition. Why, then, carry out such an empty, stiff formality?

But it was the nature of a man like Carr, he supposed. The Legion, with its rigid discipline, with its ancient pride of service and tradition, attracted men like Carr, was a perfect finishing school for accomplished martinets.

Tin soldiers, Decker thought, but accomplished ones. As hard-bitten a gang of fighting men as the galaxy had ever known. They were drilled and disciplined to a razor’s edge, serum- and hormone-injected against all known diseases of an alien world, trained and educated in alien psychology and strictly indoctrinated with high survival characteristics which stood up under even the most adverse circumstances.

“We shall not be ready for some time, Captain,” Decker said. “The robots have just started their uncrating.”

“Very well,” said Carr. “We await your orders, sir.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Decker told him, making it quite clear that he wished he would get out. But when Carr turned to go, Decker called him back.

“What is it, sir?” asked Carr.

“I’ve been wondering,” said Decker. “Just wondering, you understand. Can you imagine any circumstances which might arise that the Legion could not handle?”