Clifford Simak - Dusty Zebra - And Other Stories

From where he sat he could look across the circle directly at the god-house with its open door. And staring at the black maw of the doorway, in which there was no hint of life or light, he wondered what was there and what might come out of it—or go into it. For he was certain that within the doorway lay the key to the enigma of the Googles and their retrogression, since it seemed that the god-house itself must have been erected in preparation for the retrogression. No Type 14 culture, he decided, could have erected it.

After the meal was over, the chief rose and made a short speech, telling them that he was glad the visitors could eat with the tribe that night, and that now they would have some entertainment. Then Hart stood up and made a speech, saying they were glad to be on Zan and that his men had come prepared to offer a small matter of entertainment in return, if the chief would care to see it. The chief said he and his people would. Then he clapped his hands as a signal and about a dozen Google girls came out and marched around in the center of the circle, going through a ritual figure, weaving and dancing without benefit of music. Sheldon saw that the Googles watched intently, but none of it made much sense to him, well-grounded as he was on alien ritual habits.

Finally it was over. One or two misguided Earthmen clapped, but quickly subsided into embarrassed silence when everyone else sat in deathly quiet.

Then a Google with a reed pipe— perhaps the very one, Sheldon thought, upon which Greasy had done his consultative engineering —squatted in the center of the circle and piped away with a weird inconsistency that would have put to shame even the squeakiest of Earthly bagpipers. It lasted for a long time and seemed to get nowhere but this time the ship’s crew, perhaps in relief at the ending, finally, of the number, whooped and clapped and yelled and whistled as if for an encore, although Sheldon was fairly sure they meant quite the opposite.

The chief turned to Sheldon and asked what the men were doing. Sheldon had a reasonably hard time explaining to him the custom of applause.

The two numbers, it turned out, were the sum total of the entertainment program whomped up by the Googles , and Sheldon would have liked to ask the chief if that was all the village could muster, a fact which he suspected, but he refrained from inquiring.

The ship’s crew took over, then.

The engine-room gang gathered together, with their arms around each other’s shoulders in the best barbershop tradition and sang half a dozen songs, with Greasy laboring away on the squeeze box to accompany them. They sang old songs of Earth, the songs all spacemen sing, with unshed tears brightening their eyes.

It wasn’t long before others of the crew joined in, and in less than an hour the ship’s entire complement was howling out the songs, beating the ground with the flats of their hands to keep time and flinging back their heads to yelp the Earth words into the alien sky.

Then someone suggested they should dance. One of the tube-men called the sets while Greasy humped lower over his squeeze box, pumping out “Old Dan Tucker” and “Little Brown Jug” and “The Old Gray Mare” and others of their kind.

Just how it happened Sheldon didn’t see, but all at once there were more sets. The Googles were dancing, too, making a few mistakes, but their Earthmen teachers guided them through their paces until they got the hang of it.

More and more of them joined in, and finally the entire village was dancing, even the chief, while Greasy pumped away, with the sweat streaming down his face. The Google with the reed pipe came over after a while and sat down beside Greasy. He seemed to have got the technique of how to make the music too, for his piping notes came out loud and clear, and he and Greasy hunkered there, playing away like mad while all the others danced. The dancers yelled and hollered and stamped the ground and turned cartwheels which were totally uncalled for and strictly out of place. But no one seemed to care.

Sheldon found himself beside the god-house. He and Hart were alone, pushed outward by the expanding dance space.

Said Hart: “Mister Co-ordinator, isn’t that the damnedest thing that you have ever seen.”

Sheldon agreed. “One thing you have to say about it: The party is a wingding.”

Greasy brought the news in the morning when Sheldon was having breakfast in his cubbyhole.

“They’ve dragged something out of that there god-house,” Greasy said.

“What is it, Greasy?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Greasy. “And I didn’t want to ask.”

“No,” said Sheldon, gravely. “No, I can appreciate you wouldn’t.”

“It’s a cube,” said Greasy. “A sort of latticework affair and it’s got shelves, like, in it, and it don’t make no sense at all. It looks something like them pictures you showed me in the book one time.”

“Diagrams of atomic structure?”

“That’s exactly it,” said Greasy. “Except more complicated.”

“What are they doing with it?”

“Just putting it together. And puttering around with it. I couldn’t tell exactly what they were doing with it.”

Sheldon mopped up his plate and shoved it to one side. He got up and shrugged into his coat. “Let’s go down and see,” he said.

There was quite a crowd of natives around the contraption when they arrived, and Sheldon and Greasy stood on the outskirts of the crowd, keeping quiet and saying nothing, being careful not to get in the way.

The cube was made of rods of some sort and was about twelve feet on each side, and the rods were joined together with a peculiar disc arrangement. The whole contraption looked like something a kid with a full-blown imagination might dream up with a super-tinker-toy set.

Within the cube itself were planes of glasslike material, and these, Sheldon noticed, were set with almost mathematical precision, great attention having been paid to the exact relationship between the planes.

As they watched, a heavy box was brought out of the god-house by a gang of Googles, who puffed and panted as they lugged it to the cube. They opened the box and took out several objects, carved of different materials, some wood, some stone, others of unfamiliar stuff. These they set in what appeared to be prescribed positions upon the various planes.

“Chess,” said Greasy.

“What?”

“Chess,” said Greasy. “It looks like they’re setting up a game of chess.”

“Could be,” said Sheldon, thinking, if it is a chess game, it is the wildest, most fantastic, toughest game I have ever seen.

“They got some screwy chess games, now,” said Greasy. “Fairy chess, they call it, with more squares to the board and more pieces, different than the ones you use just regular. Me, I never could rightly get the hang of even normal chess.”

The chief saw them and came over.

“We are very confident,” he said. “With the help you gave us, we can’t help but win.”

“That is gratifying,” Sheldon said.

“These other villages,” said the chief, “haven’t got a ghost. We have them pegged dead center. This will be three times, hand-running.”

“You are to be congratulated,” said Sheldon, wondering what it was all about.

“It’s been a long time,” said the chief.

“So it has,” said Sheldon, still very much at sea.

“I must go now,” said the chief. “We start now.”

“Wait a second,” Sheldon asked him. “You are playing a game?”

“You might call it that,” the chief admitted.

“With these other villages—all the other villages?”

“That’s right,” said the chief.