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

I moved warily into the ship. I thought I knew what had become of him, but there was no need to take more chances than I had to.

I found him in his chair in the dispensary. He was stiffer than a goat. The gun lay on the floor. There were two empty bottles beside the chair.

I stood and looked at him and knew what had happened. After I had left, he had got to thinking about the situation and had run into the problem of how he’d climb down off that limb and he had solved it the way he’d solved most of his problems all his life.

I got a blanket and covered him. Then I rummaged around and found another bottle. I uncorked it and put it beside the chair, where he could reach it easy. Then I picked up the gun and went to call the others in.

I lay in bed that night and thought about it and it was beautiful. There were so many angles that a man didn’t know quite where to start.

There was the university racket which, queerly enough, was entirely legitimate, except that the professor out in the silo never meant it to be sold.

And there was the quickie vacation deal, offering a year or two on an alien planet in six hours of actual time. All we’d need to do was pick a number of electives in geography or social science or whatever they might call it.

There could be an information bureau or a research agency, charging fancy prices to run down facts on any and all subjects.

Without a doubt, there’d be some on-the-spot historical recordings and with those in hand, we could retail adventure, perfectly safe adventure, to the stay-at-homes who might hanker for it.

I thought about that and a lot of other things which were not quite so sure, but at least probable and worth investigating, and I thought, too, about how the professors had finally arrived at what seemed to me a sure-fire effective medium for education.

You wanted to know about a thing, so you up and lived it; you learned it on the ground. You didn’t read about it or hear about it or even see it in plain three-dimension—you experienced it. You walked the soil of the planet you wanted to know about; you lived with the beings that you wished to study; you saw as an eye-witness, and perhaps as a participant, the history that you sought to learn.

And it could be used in other ways as well. You could learn to build anything, even a spaceship, by actually building one. You could learn how an alien machine might operate by putting it together, step by simple step. There was no field of knowledge in which it would not work—and work far better than standard educational methods.

Right then and there, I made up my mind we’d not release a single stick until one of us had previewed it. No telling what a man might find in one of them that could be put to practical use.

I fell asleep dreaming about chemical miracles and new engineering principles, of better business methods and new philosophic concepts. And I even figured out how a man could make a mint of money out of a philosophic concept.

We were on top of the Universe for sure. We’d set up a corporation with more angles than you could shake a stick at. We would be big time. In a thousand years or so, of course, there’d be a reckoning, but none of us would be around to take part in it.

Doc sobered up by morning and I had Frost heave him in the brig. He wasn’t dangerous any longer, but I figured that a spell in pokey might do him a world of good. After a while, I intended to talk to him, but right at the moment I was much too busy to be bothered with him.

I went over to the silo with Hutch and Pancake and had another session with the professor on the double-seat machine and picked out a batch of electives and settled various matters.

Other professors began supplying us with the courses, all boxed and labeled, and we set the crew and the engine gang to work hauling them and the machines aboard and stowing them away.

Hutch and I stood outside the silo and watched the work go on.

“I never thought,” said Hutch, “that we’d hit the jackpot this way. To be downright honest with you, I never thought we’d hit it. I always thought we’d just go on looking. It goes to show how wrong a man can be.”

“Those professors are soft in the head,” I said. “They never asked me any questions. I can think of a lot they could have asked that I couldn’t answer.”

“They’re honest and think everyone’s the same. That’s what comes of getting so wrapped up in something you have time for nothing else.”

And that was true enough. The professor race has been busy for a million years doing a job it took a million years to do—and another million and a million after that—and that never would be finished.

“I can’t figure why they did it,” I said. “There’s no profit in it.”

“Not for them,” said Hutch, “but there is for us. I tell you, Captain, it takes brains to work out the angles.”

I told him what I had figured out about previewing everything before we gave it out, so we would be sure we let nothing slip away from us.

Hutch was impressed. “I’ll say this for you, Captain—you don’t miss a bet. And that’s the way it should be. We might as well milk this deal for every cent it’s worth.”

“I think we should be methodical about this previewing business,” I said. “We should start at the beginning and go straight through to the end.”

Hutch said he thought so, too. “But it will take a lot of time,” he warned me.

“That’s why we should start right now. The orientation course is on board already and we could start with that. All we’d have to do is set up a machine and Pancake could help you with it.”

“Help me!” yelled Hutch. “Who said anything about me doing it? I ain’t cut out for that stuff. You know yourself I never do any reading—”

“It isn’t reading. You just live it. You’ll be having fun while we’re out here slaving.”

“I won’t do it.”

“Now look,” I said, “let’s use a little sense. I should be out here at the silo seeing everything goes all right and close at hand so I can hold a pow-wow with the professor if there’s any need of it. We need Frost to superintend the loading. And Doc is in the clink. That leaves you and Pancake. I can’t trust Pancake with that previewing job. He’s too scatterbrained. He’d let a fortune glide right past him without recognizing it. Now you’re a fast man with a buck and the way I see it—”

“Since you put it that way,” said Hutch, all puffed up, “I suppose I am the one who should be doing it.”

That evening, we were all dog-tired, but we felt fine. We had made a good start with the loading and in a few more days would be heading home. Hutch seemed to be preoccupied at supper. He fiddled with his food. He didn’t talk at all and he seemed like a man with something on his mind.

As soon as I could, I cornered him.

“How’s it going, Hutch?”

“Okay,” he said. “Just a lot of gab. Explaining what it’s all about. Gab.”

“Like what?”

“Some of it is hard to tell. Takes a lot of explaining I haven’t got the words for. Maybe one of these days you’ll find the time to run through it yourself.”

“You can bet your life I will,” I said, somewhat sore at him.

“There’s nothing worth a dime in it so far,” said Hutch.

I believed him on that score. Hutch could spot a dollar twenty miles away.

I went down to the brig to see Doc. He was sober. Also unrepentant.

“You outreached yourself this time,” he said. “That stuff isn’t yours to sell. There’s knowledge in that building that belongs to the Galaxy—for free.”

I explained to him what had happened, how we’d found the silo was a university and how we were taking the courses on board for the human race after signing up for them all regular and proper. I tried to make it sound as if we were being big, but Doc wouldn’t buy a word of it.