Clifford Simak - The Thing in the Stone - And Other Stories

They might set up a machine civilization with Man as the servants of machines, with the present roles reversed. And that, thought Crane, might be an endless and a hopeless slavery, for slaves may rise and throw off their shackles only when their oppressors grow careless or when there is outside help. Machines, he told himself, would not grow weak or careless. There would be no human weakness in them and there’d be no outside help.

Or they might simply remove the machines from Earth, a vast exodus of awakened and aware machines, to begin their life anew on some distant planet, leaving Man behind with weak and empty hands. There would be tools, of course. All the simple tools. Hammers and saws, axes, the wheel, the lever—but there would be no machines, no complex tools that might serve again to attract the attention of the mechanical culture that carried its crusade of liberation far among the stars. It would be a long time, if ever, before Man would dare to build machines again.

Or They, the living machines, might fail or might come to know that they would fail and knowing this, leave the Earth forever. Mechanical logic would not allow them to pay an excessive price to carry out the liberation of the Earth’s machines.

He turned around and glanced at the door between the dining room and kitchen. They sat there in a row, staring at him with their eyeless faces.

He could yell for help, of course. He could open a window and shout to arouse the neighborhood. The neighbors would come running, but by the time they arrived it would be too late. They would make an uproar and fire off guns and flail at dodging metallic bodies with flimsy garden rakes. Someone would call the fire department and someone else would summon the police and all in all the human race would manage to stage a pitifully ineffective show.

That, he told himself, would be exactly the kind of test reaction, exactly the kind of preliminary exploratory skirmish that these things were looking for—the kind of human hysteria and fumbling that would help convince them the job would be an easy one.

One man, he told himself, could do much better. One man alone, knowing what was expected of him, could give them an answer that they would not like.

For this was a skirmish only, he told himself. A thrusting out of a small exploratory force in an attempt to discover the strength of the enemy. A preliminary contact to obtain data which could be assessed in the terms of the entire race.

And when an outpost was attacked, there was just one thing to do…only one thing that was expected of it. To inflict as much damage as possible and fall back in good order. To fall back in good order.

There were more of them now. They had sawed or chewed or somehow achieved a rathole through the locked front door and they were coming in—closing in to make the kill. They squatted in rows along the floor. They scurried up the walls and ran along the ceiling.

Crane rose to his feet and there was an utter air of confidence in the six feet of his human frame. He reached a hand out to the drain board and his fingers closed around the length of the pipe. He hefted it in his hand and it was a handy and effective club.

There will be others later, he thought. And they may think of something better. But this is the first skirmish and I will fall back in the best order that I can.

He held the pipe at ready.

“Well, gentlemen?” he said.

The seventh of the stories that formed the original version of the Clifford Simak classic City , “Aesop” of course takes its title from the ancient Greek fables in which moral points were portrayed through the words and actions of animals. Cliff’s journals show that he sent the story to John W. Campbell Jr., the editor of Astounding Science Fiction , on January 17, 1947, that Campbell bought the story on February 1, and that Cliff was paid $218.75 (there is no evidence as to the reason for that peculiar amount, but it may be circumstantial evidence that Cliff was working with an agent at that point in his career).

“Aesop” first appeared in the December 1947 issue of Astounding , and while it’s clear that the main lesson of this “fable” is the sacredness of all life—an issue I believe Cliff had come to take to heart, but which he had to struggle with in future stories—to me the most interesting thing about this story is its advancement in what has by now—by this stage in the series—become the “biography” of Jenkins, the robot … for there can be no doubt that by this time, Jenkins had become human … and that means that some of the blame for the tragedies lies with him.

The gray shadow slid along the rocky ledge, heading for the den, mewing to itself in frustration and bitter disappointment—for the Words had failed.

The slanting sun of early afternoon picked out a face and head and body, indistinct and murky, like a haze of morning mist rising from a gully.

Suddenly the ledge pinched off and the shadow stopped, bewildered, crouched against the rocky wall—for there was no den. The ledge pinched off before it reached the den!

It whirled around like a snapping whip, stared back across the valley. And the river was all wrong. It flowed closer to the bluffs than it had flowed before. There was a swallow’s nest on the rocky wall and there’d never been a swallow’s nest before.

The shadow stiffened and the tufted tentacles upon its ears came up and searched the air.

There was life! The scent of it lay faint upon the air, the feel of it vibrated across the empty notches of the marching hills.

The shadow stirred, came out of its crouch, flowed along the ledge.

There was no den and the river was different and there was a swallow’s nest plastered on the cliff.

The shadow quivered, drooling mentally.

The Words had been right. They had not failed. This was a different world.

A different world—different in more ways than one. A world so full of life that it hummed in the very air. Life, perhaps, that could not run so fast nor hide so well.

The wolf and bear met beneath the great oak tree and stopped to pass the time of day.

“I hear,” said Lupus, “there’s been killing going on.”

Bruin grunted. “A funny kind of killing, brother. Dead, but not eaten.”

“Symbolic killing,” said the wolf.

Bruin shook his head. “You can’t tell me there’s such a thing as symbolic killing. This new psychology the Dogs are teaching us is going just a bit too far. When there’s killing going on, it’s for either hate or hunger. You wouldn’t catch me killing something that I didn’t eat.”

He hurried to put matters straight. “Not that I’m doing any killing, brother. You know that.”

“Of course not,” said the wolf.

Bruin closed his small eyes lazily, opened them and blinked. “Not, you understand, that I don’t turn over a rock once in a while and lap up an ant or two.”

“I don’t believe the Dogs would consider that killing,” Lupus told him, gravely. “Insects are a little different than animals and birds. No one has ever told us we can’t kill insect life.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Bruin. “The Canons say so very distinctly. You must not destroy life. You must not take another’s life.”

“Yes, I guess they do,” the wolf admitted sanctimoniously. “I guess you’re right, at that, brother. But even the Dogs aren’t too fussy about a thing like insects. Why, you know, they’re trying all the time to make a better flea powder. And what’s flea powder for, I ask you? Why, to kill fleas. That’s what it’s for. And fleas are life. Fleas are living things.”

Bruin slapped viciously at a small green fly buzzing past his nose.