Clifford Simak - New Folks' Home - And Other Stories

“If that is true,” said Decker, “we’ve brought it the first square meal it’s had in a long, long time. A thousand years. Maybe a million years. There is no fabricated metal here. How would it survive? Without stuff to eat, how would it live?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Waldron. “It might not be a metal-eating organism at all. It might be something else. Something in the atmosphere.”

“We tested the atmosphere.”

But, even as the words left his mouth, Decker saw how foolish they were. They had tested the atmosphere, but how could they have detected something they had never run across before? Man’s yardstick was limited—limited to the things he knew about, limited by the circle of his own experience. He guarded himself against the obvious and the imaginable. He could not guard himself against the unknowable or the unimaginable.

Decker rose and saw Jackson still standing by the pavilion pole, with the robot stretched at his feet.

“You have your answer,” he told the biochemist. “Remember that first day here? You talked with me in the lounge.”

Jackson nodded. “I remember, sir.”

And suddenly, Decker realized, the entire base was quiet.

A gust of wind came out of the jungle and rattled the canvas.

Now, for the first time since they had landed, he caught in the wind the alien smell of an alien world.

According to his journal, Clifford D. Simak sent this story to Astounding Science Fiction in January 1940, and it was accepted less two weeks later by John W. Campbell Jr., the editor who molded that magazine into one of the great forces in science fiction. His quick reaction speaks to a ringing endorsement. Campbell sent Cliff a check for $87.50 and published the story in the November 1940 issue of his magazine. In this tale, Cliff combined his coinciding newspaper background with the time travel idea from his very first published story, “The World of the Red Sun.” But in later years, he would describe “Sunspot Purge,” along with “Madness from Mars,” as “truly horrible examples of an author’s fumbling agony in the process of finding himself.” Since both of those stories carry the effectively portrayed emotional weight that Cliff had been seeking to bring to science fiction, I find that I do not fully agree with his self-analysis; and I believe that I am only seconding Campbell’s opinion. After all, he backed up his acceptance of the story with money. Nor was Cliff’s own assessment one of unalloyed disaster. Immediately following the quoted passage, he continued with this: “It is possible the discerning reader may discover in them some of the seeds of later writing, but I cringe at their being read.”

And in the back of my mind, I wonder how much this story resulted from Cliff’s perceptions about World War II, which was more than a year old when Cliff wrote this story (although the United States had not yet been dragged into it). Many commentators have come to believe that the “City” stories, which would begin to be written only a few years after “Sunspot Purge,” owed at least a portion of their genesis to Cliff’s reactions to the war; and it seems to me that such might explain the pessimism so evident here.

I was sitting around, waiting for the boy to bring up the first batch of papers from the pressroom. I had my feet up on the desk, my hat pulled down over my eyes, feeling pretty sick.

I couldn’t get the picture of the fellow hitting the sidewalk out of my mind. Twenty stories is a long way to jump. When he’d hit he’d just sort of spattered and it was very messy.

The fool had cavorted and pranced around up on that ledge since early morning, four long hours, before he took the dive.

Herb Harding and Al Jarvey and a couple of other Globe photographers had gone out with me, and I listened to them figure out the way they’d co-operate on the shots. If the bird jumped, they knew they’d each have just time enough to expose one plate. So they got their schedules worked out beforehand.

Al would take the first shot with the telescopic lens as he made the jump. Joe would catch him halfway down. Harry would snap him just before he hit, and Herb would get the moment of impact on the sidewalk.

It gave me the creeps, listening to them.

But anyhow, it worked and the Globe had a swell sequence panel of the jump to go with my story.

We knew the Standard, even if it got that sidewalk shot, wouldn’t use it, for the Standard claimed to be a family newspaper and made a lot of being a sheet fit for anyone to read.

But the Globe would print anything—and did. We gave it to ‘em red-hot and without any fancy dressing.

“The guy was nuts,” said Herb, who had come over and sat down beside me.

“The whole damn world is nuts,” I told him. “This is the sixth bird that’s hopped off a high building in the last month. I wish they’d put me down at the obit desk, or over on the markets, or something. I’m all fed up on gore.”

“It goes like that,” said Herb. “For a long time there ain’t a thing worth shooting. Then all hell breaks loose.”

Herb was right. News runs that way—in streaks. Crime waves and traffic-accident waves and suicide waves. But this was something different. It wasn’t just screwballs jumping off high places. It was a lot of other things.

There was the guy who had massacred his family and then turned the gun on himself. There was the chap who’d butchered his bride on their honeymoon. And the fellow who had poured gasoline over himself and struck a match.

All such damn senseless things.

No newsman in his right mind objects to a little violence, for that’s what news is made of. But things were getting pretty thick; just a bit revolting and horrifying. Enough to sicken even a hard-working legman who isn’t supposed to have any feelings over things like that.

Just then the boy came up with the papers, and, if I say so myself, that story of mine read like a honey. It should have. I had been thinking it up and composing it while I watched the bird teetering around up on that ledge.

The pictures were good, too. Great street-sale stuff. I could almost see old J.R. rubbing his hands together and licking his lips and patting himself on the back for the kind of a sheet we had.

Billy Larson, the science editor, strolled over to my desk and draped himself over it. Billy was a funny guy. He wore big, horn-rimmed spectacles, and he wiggled his ears when he got excited, but he knew a lot of science. He could take a dry-as-dust scientific paper and pep it up until it made good reading.

“I got an idea,” he announced.

“So have I,” I answered. “I’m going down to the Dutchman’s and take me on a beer. Maybe two or three.”

“I hope,” piped Herb, “that it ain’t something else about old Doc Ackerman and his time machine.”

“Nope,” said Billy, “it’s something else. Doc’s time machine isn’t so hot any more. People got tired of reading about it. I guess the old boy has plenty on the ball, but what of it? Who will ever use the thing? Everyone is scared of it.”

“What’s it this time?” I asked.

“Sunspots,” he said.

I tried to brush him off, because I wanted that beer so bad I could almost taste it, but Billy had an idea, and he wasn’t going to let me get away before he told me all about it.

“It’s pretty well recognized,” he told me, “that sunspots do affect human lives. Lots of sunspots and we have good times. Stocks and bonds are up, prices are high. Trade is good. But likewise, we have an increased nervous tension. We have violence. People get excited.”

“Hell starts to pop,” said Herb.