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

Late in the afternoon the fever broke and she regained full consciousness.

“Where am I?” she asked, staring at the green-blackness of the swamp.

“Who are you?” she asked, and he tried to tell her. She did not remember him, or the swamp, or Limbo. He spoke to her of Eric and she did not remember Eric.

And that, he recalled, had been the way it had been with him. He had not remembered. Only over hours and days had it come back to him in snatches.

Was that the way it would be with her? Had that been the way it had been with Eric? Had there been no self-sacrifice, no heroism in what Eric did? Had it been a mere, blind running from the pit of horror in which he awoke to find himself?

And if all of this were true, whatever had been wrong with him, whatever caused the fever and forgetfulness, was then the same as had happened to Kitty and to Eric.

Was it, he wondered, some infection that he carried?

For if that were true, then it was possible he had infected everyone in Limbo.

He went on into the afternoon and his strength amazed him, for he should not be this strong.

It was nerve, he knew, that kept him going, the sheer excitement of being almost free of this vindictive swamp.

But the nerve would break, he knew. He could not keep it up. The nerve would break and the excitement would grow dull and dim and the strength would drain from him. He’d then be an aged man carrying an aged woman through a swamp he had no right to think he could face alone, let alone assume the burden of another human.

But the strength held out. He could feel it flowing in him. Dusk fell and the first faint stars came out, but the going now was easier. It had been easier, he realized, for the last hour or so.

“Put me down,” said Kitty. “I can walk. There’s no need to carry me.”

“Just a little while,” said Alden. “We are almost there.”

Now the ground was firmer and he could tell by the rasp of it against his trouser legs that he was walking in a different kind of grass—no longer the harsh, coarse, knife-like grass that few in the swamp, but a softer, gentle grass.

A hill loomed in the darkness and he climbed it and now the ground was solid.

He reached the top of the hill and stopped. He let Kitty down and stood her on her feet.

The air was clean and sharp and pure. The leaves of a nearby tree rustled in a breeze and in the east the sky was tinged with the pearly light of a moon.

Back of them the swamp, which they had beaten, and in front of them the clean, solid countryside that eventually would defeat them. Although eventually, Alden told himself, sounded much too long. In a few days, perhaps in a few hours, they would be detected and run down.

With an arm around Kitty’s waist to hold her steady as she walked, he went down the hill to eventual defeat.

The rattletrap pickup truck stood in the moonlit farmyard. There were no lights in the house that stood gaunt upon the hilltop. The road from the farmyard ran down a long, steep hill to join the main road a half mile or so away.

There would be no ignition key, of course, but one could cross the wires, then shove the truck until it started coasting down the hill. Once it was going, throw it into gear and the motor would crank over and start up.

“Someone will catch us, Alden,” Kitty told him. “There is no more certain way for someone to find out about us. Stealing a truck…”

“It’s only twenty miles,” said Alden. “That’s what the signpost said. And we can be there before there is too much fuss.”

“But it would be safer walking and hiding.”

“There is no time,” he said.

For he remembered now. It had all come back to him—the machine that he had built in the dining room. A machine that was like a second body, that was like a suit to wear. It was a two-way schoolhouse, or maybe a two-way laboratory, for when he was inside of it he learned of that other life and it learned of him.

It had taken years to build it, years to understand how to assemble the components that those others, or that other, had provided. All the components had been small and there had been thousands of them. He had held out his hand and thought hard of yellow leaves falling in the blue haze of autumn air and there had been another piece of that strange machine put into his hand.

And now it stood, untenanted, in that faded, dusky room and they would be wondering what had happened to him.

“Come on,” he said to Kitty, sharply. “There is no use in waiting.”

“There might be a dog. There might be a…”

“We will have to chance it.”

He ducked out of the clump of trees and ran swiftly across the moonlit barnyard to the truck. He reached it and wrenched at the hood and the hood would not come up.

Kitty screamed, just once, more a warning scream than fright, and he spun around. The shape stood not more than a dozen feet away, with the moonlight glinting off its metal and the Medic Disciplinary symbol engraved upon its chest.

Alden backed against the truck and stood there, staring at the robot, knowing that the truck had been no more than bait. And thinking how well the medics must know the human race to set that sort of trap—knowing not only the working of the human body but the human mind as well

Kitty said: “If you’d not been slowed up. If you’d not carried me…”

“It would have made no difference,” Alden told her. “They probably had us spotted almost from the first and were tracking us.”

“Young man,” the robot said, “you are entirely right. I have been waiting for you. I must admit,” the robot said, “that I have some admiration for you. You are the only ones who ever crossed the swamp. There were some who tried, but they never made it.”

So this was how it ended, Alden told himself, with some bitterness, but not as much, perhaps, as he should have felt. For there had been, he thought, nothing but a feeble hope from the first beginning. He had been walking toward defeat, he knew, with every step he’d taken—and into a hopelessness that even he admitted.

If only he had been able to reach the house in Willow Bend, that much he had hoped for, that much would have satisfied him. To reach it and let those others know he had not deserted.

“So what happens now?” he asked the robot. “Is it back to Limbo?”

The robot never had a chance to answer. There was a sudden rush of running feet, pounding across the farmyard.

The robot swung around and there was something streaking in the moonlight that the robot tried to duck, but couldn’t.

Alden sprang in a low and powerful dive, aiming for the robot’s knees. His shoulder struck on metal and the flying rock clanged against the breastplate of the metal man. Alden felt the robot, already thrown off balance by the rock, topple at the impact of his shoulder.

The robot crashed heavily to the earth and Alden, sprawling on the ground, fought upright to his feet.

“Kitty!” he shouted.

But Kitty, he saw, was busy.

She was kneeling beside the fallen robot, who was struggling to get up and in her hand she held the thrown rock, with her hand raised above the robot’s skull. The rock came down and the skull rang like a bell—and rang again and yet again.

The robot ceased its struggling and lay still, but Kitty kept on pounding at the skull.

“Kitty, that’s enough,” said another voice.

Alden turned to face the voice.

“Eric!” he cried. “But we left you back there.”

“I know,” said Eric. “You thought I had run back to Limbo. I found where you had tracked me.”

“But you are here. You threw the rock.”

Eric shrugged. “I got to be myself again. At first I didn’t know where I was or who I was or anything at all. And then I remembered all of it. I had to make a choice then. There really wasn’t any choice. There was nothing back in Limbo. I tried to catch up with you, but you moved too fast.”