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

I laid the papers on the bunk and shoved the box out of the way and sat down again.

I picked up the papers and shuffled them from one hand to the other.

I could throw them off the ship any time I wished. I could take off without them and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, they could do about it.

And what was more, I could get away with it. It was legal, of course, but it was a rotten thing to do. Now that they were honest men and honorable, though, they’d bow to the legality and let me get away with it. And in such a case, they had no one but themselves to thank.

I sat there for a long time thinking, but my thoughts went round and round and mostly had to do with things out of the past—how Pancake had gotten tangled up in the nettle patch out in the Coonskin System and how Doc had fallen in love with (of all things) a tri-sexual being that time we touched at Siro and how Hutch had cornered the liquor supply at Munko, then lost it in a game that was akin to craps except the dice were queer little living entities that you had no control of, which made it tough on Hutch.

A rap came at the door.

It was Doc.

“You all full of honesty?” I asked him.

He shuddered. “Not me. I turned down the offer.”

“It’s the same kind of swill you were preaching at me just a couple of days ago.”

“Can’t you see,” asked Doc, “what it would do to the human race?”

“Sure. It’ll make them honorable and honest. No one will ever cheat or steal again and it will be cozy …”

“They’ll die of complicated boredom,” said Doc. “Life will become a sort of cross between a Boy Scout jamboree and a ladies sewing circle. There’ll be no loud and unseemly argument and they’ll be polite and proper to the point of stupefaction.”

“So you have changed your mind.”

“Not really, Captain. But this is the wrong way to go about it. Whatever progress the race has ever made has been achieved by the due process of social evolution. In any human advance, the villains and the rascals are as important as the forward-looking idealist. They are Man’s consciences and Man can’t get along without them.”

“If I were you, Doc,” I said, “I wouldn’t worry so much about the human race. It’s a pretty big thing and it can take a lot of bumps. Even an overdose of honesty won’t hurt it permanently.”

Actually, I didn’t give a damn. I had other things on my mind right then.

Doc crossed the room and sat down on the bunk beside me. He leaned over and tapped the papers I still held in my hand.

“You got it all doped out,” he said.

I nodded bleakly. “Yeah.”

“I thought you would.”

I shot a quick glance at him. “You were way ahead of me. That’s why you switched over.”

Doc shook his head emphatically. “No. Please believe me, Captain, I feel as bad as you do.”

“It won’t work either way.” I shuffled the papers. “They acted in good faith. They didn’t sign aboard, sure. But there was no reason that they should have. It was all understood. Share and share alike. And that’s the way it’s been for too long to repudiate it now. And we can’t keep on. Even if we agreed to dump the stuff right here and blast off and never think of it again, we’d not get rid of it. It would always be there. The past is dead, Doc. It’s spoiled. It’s smashed and it can’t be put back together.”

I felt like bawling. It had been a long time since I had felt that full of grief.

“They are different kind of men now,” I said. “They went and changed themselves and they’ll never be the same. Even if they could change back, it wouldn’t be the same.”

Doc mocked me a little. “The race will build a monument to you. Maybe actually on Earth itself, with all the other famous humans, for bringing back this stuff. They’d be just blind enough to do it.”

I got up and paced the floor. “I don’t want any monument. I’m not bringing it in. I’m not having anything more to do with it.”

I stood there, wishing we had never found the silo, for what had it done for me except to lose me the best crew and the best friends a man had ever had?

“The ship is mine,” I said. “That is all I want. I’ll take the cargo to the nearest point and dump it there. Hutch and the rest of them can carry on from there, any way they can. They can have the honesty and honor. I’ll get another crew.”

Maybe, I thought, some day it would be almost the way it had been. Almost, but not quite.

“We’ll go on hunting,” I said. “We’ll dream about the jackpot. We’ll do our best to find it. We’ll do anything to find it. We’ll break all the laws of God or Man to find it. But you know something, Doc?”

“No, I don’t,” said Doc.

“I hope we never find it. I don’t want to find another. I just want to go on hunting.” We stood there in the silence, listening to the fading echoes of those days we hunted for the jackpot.

“Captain,” said Doc, “will you take me along?”

I nodded. What was the difference? He might just as well.

“Captain, you remember those insect mounds on Suud?”

“Of course. How could I forget them?”

“You know, I’ve figured out a way we might break into them. Maybe we should try it. There should be a billion …”

I almost clobbered him.

I’m glad now that I didn’t.

Suud is where we’re headed.

If Doc’s plan works out, we may hit that jackpot yet!

Although “Day of Truce” originally appeared in the February 1963 issue of Galaxy Magazine , it is intriguing to note that a cryptic entry in one of the author’s journals, dated October of 1957, says, simply: “Did a lot of work on Kid War story.” It would be four and a half years before “Day of Truce” would be mailed out—so is this the story that cryptic notes references? If so, it would have been an extraordinary delay; getting the copy out was ground into old newspapermen like Clifford Simak.

This is a disturbing story in many ways, and I find myself wondering if this is a sort of counterpoint to stories like “Neighbor.”

The evening was quiet. There was no sign of the Punks. Silence lay heavily across the barren and eroded acres of the subdivision and there was nothing moving—not even one of the roving and always troublesome dog packs.

It was too quiet, Max Hale decided.

There should have been some motion and some noise. It was as if everyone had taken cover against some known and coming violence—another raid, perhaps. Although there was only one place against which a raid could possibly be aimed. Why should others care, Max wondered; why should they cower indoors, when they had long since surrendered?

Max stood upon the flat lookout-rooftop of the Crawford stronghold and watched the streets to north and west. It was by one of these that Mr. Crawford would be coming home. No one could guess which one, for he seldom used the same road. It was the only way one could cut down the likelihood of ambush or of barricade. Although ambush was less frequent now. There were fewer fences, fewer trees and shrubs; there was almost nothing behind which one could hide. In this barren area it called for real ingenuity to effect an ambuscade. But, Max reminded himself, no one had ever charged the Punks with lack of ingenuity.

Mr. Crawford had phoned that he would be late and Max was getting nervous. In another quarter hour, darkness would be closing in. It was bad business to be abroad in Oak Manor after dark had fallen. Or, for that matter, in any of the subdivisions. For while Oak Manor might be a bit more vicious than some of the others of them, it still was typical.