Clifford Simak - New Folks' Home - And Other Stories

Decker lifted his arm and Waldron heard the sharp gasp of his indrawn breath. Slowly Decker raised his head and looked at the other man.

“My watch has stopped, too,” he said, and his voice was scarcely louder than a whisper.

For a moment they were graven images, shocked into immobility by a thing that should have been no more than an inconvenience. Then Waldron sprang erect from the table, whirled to face the men and robots.

“Assemble!” he shouted. “Back to the base. Quick!”

The men came running. The robots fell into place. The column marched away. The natives sat quietly in their doorways and watched them as they left.

Decker sat in his camp chair and listened to the canvas of the pavilion snapping softly in the wind, alive in the wind, talking and laughing to itself. A lantern, hung on a ring above his head, swayed gently, casting fleeting shadows that seemed at times to be the shadows of living, moving things. A robot stood stiffly and quietly beside one of the pavilion poles.

Stolidly, Decker reached out a finger and stirred the little pile of wheels and springs that lay upon the table.

Sinister, he thought. Sinister and queer.

The guts of watches, lying on the table. Not of two watches alone, not only his and Waldron’s watches, but many other watches from the wrists of other men. All of them silent, stilled in their task of marking time.

Night had fallen hours before, but the base still was astir with activity that was at once feverish and furtive. Men moved about in the shadows and crossed the glaring patches of brilliance shed by the batteries of lights set up by the robots many weeks before. Watching the men, one would have sensed that they moved with a haunting sense of doom, would have known as well that they knew, deep in their inmost hearts, that there was no doom to fear. No definite thing that one could put a finger on and say, this is the thing to fear. No direction that one might point toward and say, doom lies here, waiting to spring upon us.

Just one small thing.

Watches had stopped running. And that was a simple thing for which there must be some simple explanation.

Except, thought Decker, on an alien planet no occurrence, no accident or incident, can be regarded as a simple things for which a simple explanation must necessarily be anticipated. For the matrix of cause and effect, the mathematics of chance, may not hold true on an alien planet as they hold true on Earth.

There was one rule, Decker thought grimly. One rule: Take no chances. That was the one safe rule to follow, the only rule to follow.

Following it, he had ordered all field parties back to base, had ordered the crew to prepare the ship for emergency take-off, had alerted the robots to be ready at an instant to get the machines aboard. Even to be prepared to desert the machines and leave without them if circumstances should dictate that this was necessary.

Having done that, there was no more to do but wait. Wait until the field parties came back from their advance camps. Wait until some reason could be assigned to the failure of the watches.

It was not a thing, he told himself, that should be allowed to panic one. It was something to recognize, not to disregard. It was a circumstance that made necessary a certain number of precautions, but it was not a situation that should make one lose all sense of proportion.

You could not go back to Earth and say, “Well, you see, our watches stopped and so …”

A footstep sounded and he swung around in his chair. It was Jackson.

“What is it, Jackson?” Decker asked.

“The camps aren’t answering, sir,” said Jackson. “The operator has been trying to raise them and there is no answer. Not a single peep.”

Decker grunted. “Take it easy,” he said. “They will answer. Give them time.”

He wished, even as he spoke, that he could feel some of the assurance that he tried to put into his voice. For a second, a rising terror mounted in his throat and he choked it back.

“Sit down,” he said. “We’ll sit here and have a beer and then we’ll go down to the radio shack and see what’s doing.”

He rapped on the table. “Beer,” he said. “Two beers.”

The robot standing by the pavilion pole did not answer.

He made his voice louder. The robot did not stir.

Decker put his clenched fists upon the table and tried to rise, but his legs were suddenly cold and had turned unaccountably to water, and he could not raise himself.

“Jackson,” he panted, “go and tap that robot on the shoulder. Tell him we want beer.”

He saw the fear that whitened Jackson’s face as he rose and moved slowly forward. Inside himself, he felt the terror start and worry at his throat.

Jackson stood beside the robot and reached out a hesitant hand, tapped him gently on the shoulder, tapped him harder—and the robot fell flat upon its face!

Feet hammered across the hard-packed ground, heading for the pavilion.

Decker jerked himself around, sat foursquare and solid in his chair, waiting for the man who ran.

It was MacDonald, the chief engineer.

He halted in front of Decker and his hands, scarred and grimy with years of fighting balky engines, reached down and gripped the boards of the table’s edge. His seamy face was twisted as if he were about to weep.

“The ship, sir. The ship …”

Decker nodded, almost idly. “I know, Mr. MacDonald. The ship won’t run.”

MacDonald gulped. “The big stuff’s all right, sir. But the little gadgets … the injector mechanism … the—”

He stopped abruptly and stared at Decker. “You knew,” he said. “How did you know?”

“I knew,” said Decker, “that someday it would come. Not like this, perhaps. But in any one of several ways. I knew that the day would come when our luck would run too thin. I talked big, like the rest of you, of course, but I knew that it would come. The day when we’d covered all the possibilities but the one that we could not suspect, and that, of course, would be the one that would ruin us.”

He was thinking, the natives had no metal. No sign of any metal in their village at /Sall. Their dishes were soapstone, and they wore no ornaments. Their implements were stone. And yet they were intelligent enough, civilized enough, cultured enough, to have fabricated metal. For there was metal here, a great deposit of it in the western mountains. They had tried perhaps, many centuries ago, had fashioned metal tools and had them go to pieces underneath their fingers in a few short weeks.

A civilization without metal. A culture without metal. It was unthinkable. Take metal from a man and he went back to the caves. Take metal from a man and he was earthbound, and his bare hands were all he had.

Waldron came into the pavilion, walking quietly in the silence. “The radio is dead,” he said, “and the robots are dying like flies. The place is littered with them, just so much scrap metal.”

Decker nodded. “The little stuff, the finely fabricated, will go first,” he said. “Like watches and radio innards and robot brains and injector mechanisms. Next, the generators will go and we will have no lights or power. Then the machines will break down and the Legion’s weapons will be no more than clubs. After that, the big stuff, probably.”

“The native told us,” Waldron said, “when you talked to him. ‘You will never leave,’ he said.”

“We didn’t understand,” said Decker. “We thought he was threatening us and we knew that we were too big, too well guarded for any threat of his to harm us. He wasn’t threatening us at all, of course. He was just telling us.”

He made a hopeless gesture with his hands. “What is it?”

“No one knows,” said Waldron quietly. “Not yet, at least. Later, we may find out, but it won’t help us any. A microbe, maybe. A virus. Something that eats iron after it has been subjected to heat or alloyed with other metals. It doesn’t go for iron ore. If it did, that deposit we found would have been gone long ago.”