Clifford Simak - Grotto of the Dancing Deer - And Other Stories

And the question and the fear raced within his brain.

There was no question of it: The bishop was the assassin who had been set upon his trail.

No man without a purpose, and a deadly purpose, walked these hills at night, in an autumn rain. And what was more, the bishop had been scarcely wet. He’d shaken his hat and the drops had fallen off, and he’d brushed at his cloak and after that both the hat and cloak were dry.

The bishop had been brought here, more than likely, in a hovering flier and let down, as other assassins probably likewise had been let down this very night in all of half a dozen places where a fleeing man might have taken shelter.

The bishop had been taken to the room just across the hall and under other circumstances, Paxton told himself, he might have sought conclusions with him there. He walked over to the fireplace and picked up the heavy poker and weighed it in his hand. One stroke of that and it would be all over.

But he couldn’t do it. Not in this house.

He put the poker back and walked over to the bed and picked up his cloak. Slowly he slid it on as he stood there, thinking, going over in his mind the happenings of the morning.

He had been at home, alone, and the phone had rung and Sullivan’s face had filled the visor—a face all puffed up with fright.

“Hunter’s out to get you,” Sullivan had said. “He’s sent men to get you.”

“But he can’t do that!” Paxton remembered protesting.

“Certainly he can,” said Sullivan. “It comes within the framework of the exercise. Assassination has always been a possibility…”

“But the exercise is finished!”

“Not so far as Hunter is concerned. You went a little far. You should have stayed within the hypothesis of the problem; there was no need to go back into Hunter’s personal affairs. You dug up things he thought no one ever knew. How did you do it, man?”

“I have my ways,” said Paxton. “And in a deal like this, everything was fair. He didn’t handle me exactly as if I were innocent.”

“You better get going,” Sullivan advised. “They must be almost there. I can’t get anyone there soon enough to help you.”

And it would have been all right, Paxton thought, if the flier had only held together.

He wondered momentarily if it had been sabotaged.

But be that as it may, he had flown it down and had been able to walk away from it and now, finally, here he was.

He stood irresolutely in the center of the room.

It went against his pride to flee for a second time, but there was nothing else to do. He couldn’t let this house become involved in the tag-end rough and tumble of his exercise.

And despite the poker, he was weaponless, for weapons on this now-peaceful planet were very few indeed—no longer household items such as once had been the case.

He went to the window and opened it and saw that the rain had stopped and that a ragged moon was showing through a scud of racing clouds.

Glancing down, he saw the roof of the porch beneath the window and he let his eye follow down the roof line. Not too hard, he thought, if a man were barefoot, and once he reached the edge there’d be a drop of not much more than seven feet.

He took off his sandals and stuffed them in the pocket of his cloak and started out the window. But, halfway out, he climbed back in again and walked to the door. Quietly he slid back the bolt. It wasn’t exactly cricket to go running off and leave a room locked up.

The roof was slippery with the rain, but he managed it without any trouble, inching his way carefully down the incline. He dropped into a shrub that scratched him up a bit, but that, he told himself, was a minor matter.

He put on his sandals and straightened up and walked rapidly away. At the edge of the woods, he stopped and looked back at the house. It stood dark and silent.

Once he got back home and this affair was finished, he promised himself, he’d write Nelson a long apologetic letter and explain it all.

His feet found the path and he followed it through the sickly half-light of the cloudy moon.

“Sir,” said a voice close beside him, “I see that you are out for a little stroll…”

Paxton jumped in fright.

“It’s a nice night for it, sir,” the voice went on quietly. “After a rain, everything seems so clean and cool.”

“Who is there?” asked Paxton, with his hair standing quite on edge.

“Why, it’s Pertwee, sir. Pertwee, the robot, sir.”

Paxton laughed a little nervously. “Oh, yes, I remember now. You’re Graham’s enemy.”

The robot stepped out of the woods into the path beside him.

“It’s too much, I suppose,” Pertwee said, “to imagine that you might be coming out to look at the battlefield.”

“Why, no,” said Paxton, grasping at a straw. “I don’t know how you guessed it, but that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’ve never heard of anything quite like it and I’m considerably intrigued.”

“Sir,” said the robot eagerly, “I’m entirely at your service. There is no one, I can assure you, who is better equipped to explain it to you. I’ve been in it from the very first with Master Graham and if you have any questions, I shall try to answer them.”

“Yes, I think there is one question. What is the purpose of it all?”

“Why, at first, of course,” said Pertwee, “it was simply an attempt to amuse a growing boy. But now, with your permission, sir. I would venture the opinion that it is a good deal more.”

“You mean a part of Continuation?”

“Certainly, sir. I know there is a natural reluctance among humankind to admit the fact, or to even think about it, but for a great part of Man’s history war played an important and many-sided role. Of all the arts that Man developed, there probably was none to which he devoted so much time and thought and money as he did to war.”

The path sloped down and there before them in the pale and mottled moonlight lay the battle bowl. “That bowl,” asked Paxton, “or whatever it might be that you have tipped over it? Sometimes you can just make it out and other times you miss it…”

“I suppose,” said Pertwee, “you’d call it a force shield, sir. A couple of the other robots worked it out. As I understand it, sir, it is nothing new—just an adaptation. There’s a time factor worked into it as an additional protection.”

“But that sort of protection…”

“We use TC bombs, sir—total conversion bombs. Each side gets so many of them and uses his best judgment and…”

“But you couldn’t use nuclear stuff in there!”

“As safe as a toy, sir,” said Pertwee gaily. “They are very small, sir. Not much larger than a pea. Critical mass, as you well understand, no longer is much of a consideration. And the yield in radiation, while it is fairly high, is extremely short-lived, so that within an hour or so…”

“You gentlemen,” said Paxton grimly, “certainly try to be entirely realistic.”

“Why, yes, of course we do. Although the operators are entirely safe. We’re in the same sort of position, you might say, as the general staff. And that is all right, of course, because the purpose of the entire business is to keep alive the art of waging war.”

“But the art…” Paxton started to argue, then stopped.

What could he say? If the race persisted in its purpose of keeping the old culture workable and intact in Continuation, then it must perforce accept that culture in its entirety.

War, one must admit, was as much a part of the human culture as were all the other more or less uniquely human things that the race was conserving here as a sort of racial cushion against a future need or use.

“There is,” confessed Pertwee, “a certain cruelty, but perhaps a cruelty that I, as a robot, am more alive to than would be the case with a human, sir. The rate of casualties among the robot troops is unbelievable. In a restricted space and with extremely high firepower, that would be the natural consequence.”