Clifford Simak - The Ghost of a Model T - And Other Stories

He had put the card back carefully and had walked down to the village to seek out the realtor he’d seen the day before.

“But, Alden,” said the realtor, “with your mother gone and all, there is no reason for your staying. There is that job waiting in New York. You told me yesterday.”

“I’ve been here too long,” said Alden. “I am tied too close. I guess I’ll have to stay. The house is not for sale.”

“You’ll live there all alone? In that big house all alone?”

“There’s nothing else to do,” said Alden.

He had turned and walked away and gone back to the house to get the card out of the dresser drawer again.

He sat and studied the drawing that was on the face of it, a funny sort of drawing, no kind of drawing he had ever seen before, not done with ink or pencil nor with brush. What, in the name of God, he thought, had been used to draw it?

And the drawing itself? A many-pointed star? A rolled-up porcupine? Or a gooseberry, one of the prickly kind, many times enlarged?

It did not matter, he knew, neither how the drawing had been made, or the strange kind of stiff, silken fabric that made the card itself, or what might be represented in the drawing. The important thing was that, many years before, when he had been a child, he had sat beneath the tree and held out his hand to catch a falling leaf and had caught the card instead.

He carried the card over to a window and stared out at the garden. The great walnut tree still stood as it had stood that day, but it was not golden yet. The gold must wait for the coming of first frost and that might be any day.

He stood at the window, wondering if there’d be a butterfly this time, or if the butterfly were only part of childhood.

“It will be morning soon,” said Kitty. “I heard a bird. The birds are astir just before first light.”

“Tell me about this place,” said Alden.

“It is a sort of island,” Kitty told him. “Not much of an island. Just a foot or two above the water level. It is surrounded by water and by muck. They bring us in by heliocoptor and they let us down. They bring in food the same way. Not enough to feed us. Not enough of anything. There is no contact with them.”

“Men or robots? In the ship, I mean.”

“I don’t know. No one ever sees them. Robots, I’d suspect.”

“Not enough food, you say.”

She shook her head. “There is not supposed to be. That’s a part of Limbo. We’re not supposed to live. We fish, we gather roots and other things. We get along somehow.”

“And we die, of course.”

“Death comes to everyone,” she said. “To us just a little sooner.”

She sat crouched upon one of the lengths of wood that served as a chair and as the candle guttered, shadows chased across her face so that it seemed the very flesh of it was alive and crawling.

“You missed sleep on account of me,” he said.

“I can sleep any time. I don’t need much sleep. And, besides, when a new one comes…”

“There aren’t many new ones?”

“Not as many as there were. And there always is a chance. With each new one there’s a chance.”

“A chance of what?”

“A chance he may have an answer for us.”

“We can always run away.”

“To be caught and brought back? To die out in the swamp? That, Alden, is no answer.”

She rocked her body back and forth. “I suppose there is no answer.”

But she still held hope, he knew. In the face of all of it, she had kept a hope alive.

Eric once had been a huge man, but now he had shrunken in upon himself. The strength of him was there as it had always been, but the stamina was gone. You could see that, Alden told himself, just by looking at him.

Eric sat with his back against a tree. One hand lay in his lap and the other grubbed idly, with blunt and dirty fingers, at the short ground.

“So you’re bent on getting out?” he asked.

“He talked of nothing else,” said Kitty.

“You been here how long?”

“They brought me here last night. I was out on my feet. I don’t remember it.”

“You don’t know what it’s like.”

Alden shook his head. “I don’t intend to find out, either. I figure if I’m going, I’d best be going now before this place wears me down.”

“Let me tell you,” Eric said. “Let me tell you how it is. The swamp is big and we’re in the center of it. Doc came in from the north. He found out, some way, the location of this place, and he got hold of some old maps. Geologic survey maps that had been made years ago. He studied them and figured out the best way for getting in. He made it, partly because he was strong and healthy…but mostly it was luck. A dozen other men could try it, just as strong as he was, and all of them might be lost because they weren’t lucky. There are quicksand and alligators. There are moccasins and rattlesnakes. There is the killing heat. There are the insects and no water fit to drink.

“Maybe if you knew exactly the way to go you might manage it, but you’d have to hunt for the way to go. You’d have to work your way through the swamp and time after time you’d run into something that you couldn’t get through or over and have to turn back and hunt another way. You’d lose a lot of time and time would work against you.”

“How about food?”

“If you weren’t fussy, food would be no trouble. You could find food along the way. Not the right kind. Your belly might not like it. You’d probably have dysentery. But you wouldn’t starve.”

“This swamp,” asked Alden, “where is it?”

“Part in Mataloosa county. Part in Fairview. It’s a local Limbo. They all are local Limbos. There aren’t any big ones. Just a lot of little ones.”

Alden shook his head. “I can see this swamp from the windows of my house. I never heard of a Limbo being in it.”

“It’s not advertised,” said Eric. “It’s not put on maps. It’s not something you’d hear of.”

“How many miles? How far to the edge of it?”

“Straight line, maybe thirty, maybe forty. You’d not be traveling a straight line.”

“And the perimeter is guarded.”

“Patrols flying overhead. Watching for people in the swamp. They might not spot you. You’d do your best to stay under cover. But chances are they would. And they’d be waiting for you when you reached the edge.”

“And even if they weren’t,” Kitty said, “where would you go? A monitor would catch you. Or someone would spot you and report. No one would dare to help a refugee from Limbo.”

The tree beneath which Eric sat was a short distance from the collection of huddled huts that served as shelter for the inhabitants of Limbo.

Someone, Alden saw, had built up the community cooking fire and a bent and ragged man was coming up from the water’s edge, carrying a morning’s catch of fish. A man was lying in the shade of one of the huts, stretched out on a pallet. Others, both men and women, sat in listless groups.

The sun had climbed only part way up the eastern sky, but the heat was stifling. Insects buzzed shrilly in the air and high in the light blue sky birds were swinging in great and lazy circles.

“Doc would let us see his maps?”

“Maybe,” Eric said. “You could ask him.”

“I spoke to him last night,” said Alden. “He said it was insane.”

“He is right,” said Eric.

“Doc has funny notions,” Kitty said. “He doesn’t blame the robots. He says they’re just doing a job that men have set for them. It was men who made the laws. The robots do no more than carry out the laws.”

And Doc, thought Alden, once again was right.

Although it was hard to puzzle out the road by which man had finally come to his present situation. It was overemphasis again, perhaps, and that peculiar social blindness which came as the result of overemphasis.