Clifford Simak - New Folks' Home - And Other Stories

Carr’s expression was a pure delight to see. “I’m afraid, sir, that I don’t understand your question.”

Decker sighed. “I didn’t think you would,” he said.

Before nightfall, the full working force of robots had been uncrated and had set up some of the machines, enough to establish a small circle of alarm posts around the ship.

A flame thrower burned a barren circle on the hilltop, stretching five hundred feet around the ship. A hard-radiations generator took up its painstaking task, pouring pure death into the soil. The toll must have been terrific. In some spots the ground virtually boiled as the dying life forms fought momentarily and fruitlessly to escape the death that cut them down.

The robots rigged up huge batteries of lamps that set the hilltop ablaze with a light as bright as day, and the work went on.

As yet, no human had set foot outside the ship.

Inside the ship, the robot stewards set up a table in the lounge so that the human diners might see what was going on outside the ship.

The entire company, except for the legionnaires, who stayed in quarters, had gathered for the meal when Decker came into the room.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said.

He strode to the table’s head and the others ranged themselves along the sides. He sat down and there was a scraping of drawn chairs as the others took their places.

He clasped his hands in front of him and bowed his head and parted his lips to say the customary words. He halted even as he was about to speak, and when the words did come they were different from the ones he had said by rote a thousand times before.

“Dear Father, we are Thy servants in an unknown land and there is a deadly pride upon us. Teach us humility and lead us to the knowledge, before it is too late, that men, despite their far traveling and their mighty works, still are as children in Thy sight. Bless the bread we are about to break, we beg Thee, and keep us forever in Thy compassion. Amen.”

He lifted his head and looked down the table. Some of them, he saw, were startled. The others were amused.

They wonder if I’m cracking, he thought. They think the Old Man is breaking up. And that may be true, for all I know. Although I was all right until this afternoon. All right until young Doug Jackson …

“Those were fine words, lad,” said Old MacDonald, the chief engineer. “I thank you for them, sir, and there is them among us who would do well to take some heed upon them.”

Platters and plates were being passed up and down the table’s length and there was the commonplace, homely clatter of silverware and china.

“This looks like an interesting world,” said Waldron, the anthropologist. “Dickson and I were up in observation just before the sun set. We thought we saw something down by the river. Some sort of life.”

Decker grunted, scooping fried potatoes out of a bowl onto his plate. “Funny if we don’t run across a lot of life here. The radiation wagon stirred up a lot of it when it went over the field today.”

“What Waldron and I saw,” said Dickson, “looked humanoid.”

Decker squinted at the biologist. “Sure of that?” he asked.

Dickson shook his head. “The seeing was poor. Couldn’t be absolutely sure. Seemed to me there were two or three of them. Matchstick men.”

Waldron nodded. “Like a picture a kid would draw,” he said. “One stroke for the body. Two strokes each for arms and legs. A circle for a head. Angular. Ungraceful. Skinny.”

“Graceful enough in motion, though,” said Dickson. “When they moved, they went like cats. Flowed, sort of.”

“We’ll know plenty soon enough,” Decker told them mildly. “In a day or two we’ll flush them.”

Funny, he thought. On almost every job someone popped up to report he had spotted humanoids. Usually there weren’t any. Usually it was just imagination. Probably wishful thinking, he told himself, the yen of men far away from their fellow men to find in an alien place a type of life that somehow seemed familiar.

Although the usual humanoid, once you met him in the flesh, turned out to be so repulsively alien that alongside him an octopus would seem positively human.

Franey, the senior geologist, said, “I’ve been thinking about those mountains to the west of us, the ones we caught sight of when we were coming in. Had a new look about them. New mountains are good to work in. They haven’t worn down. Easier to get at whatever’s in them.”

“We’ll lay out our first survey lines in that direction,” Decker told him.

Outside the curving vision plate, the night was alive with the blaze of the batteries of lights. Gleaming robots toiled in shining gangs. Ponderous machines lumbered past. Smaller ones scurried like frightened beetles. To the south, great gouts of flame leaped out and the sky was painted red with the bursts of a squad of flame throwers going into action.

“Chewing out a landing field,” said Decker. “A tongue of jungle juts out there. Absolutely level ground. Like a floor. Won’t take a great deal of work to turn it into a field.”

The stewards brought coffee and brandy and a box of good cigars. Decker and his men settled back into their chairs, taking life easy, watching the work going on outside the ship.

“I hate this waiting,” Franey said, settling down comfortably to his cigar.

“Part of the job,” said Decker. He poured more brandy into his coffee.

By dawn the last machines were set up and either had been moved out to their assigned positions or were parked in the motor pool. The flamers had enlarged the burned-over area and three radiation wagons were busy on their rounds. To the south, the airfield had been finished and the jets were lined up and waiting in a plumb-straight row.

Some of the robots, their work done for the moment, formed themselves in solid ranks to form a solid square, neat and orderly and occupying a minimum of space. They stood there in the square, waiting against the time when they would be needed, a motor pool of robots, a reservoir of manpower.

Finally the gangplank came down and the legionnaires marched out in files of two, with clank and glitter and a remorseless precision that put machines to shame. There were no banners and there were no drums, for these are useless things and the Legion, despite its clank and glitter, was an organization of ruthless efficiency.

The column wheeled and became a line and the line broke up and the platoons moved out toward the planet-head. There, machines and legionnaires and robots manned the frontier Earth had set up on an alien world.

Busy robots staked out and set up an open-air pavilion of gaudily-striped canvas that rippled in the breeze, placed tables and chairs beneath its shade, moved in a refrigerator filled with beer and with extra ice compartments.

It finally was safe and comfortable for ordinary men to leave the shelter of the ship.

Organization, Decker told himself—organization and efficiency and leaving not a thing to chance. Plug every loophole before it became a loophole. Crush possible resistance before it developed as resistance. Gain absolute control over a certain number of square feet of planet and operate from there.

Later, of course, there were certain chances taken; you just couldn’t eliminate them all. There would be field trips and even with all the precautions that robot and machine and legionnaire could offer, there would be certain risks. There would be aerial survey and mapping, and these, too, would have elements of chance, but with these elements reduced to the very minimum.

And always there would be the base, an absolutely safe and impregnable base to which a field party or a survey flight could retreat, from which reinforcements could be sent out or counter-action taken.