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

“I killed him,” Kitty announced, defiantly. “I don’t care. I meant to kill him.”

“Not killed,” said Eric. “There’ll be others coming soon. He can be repaired.”

“Give me a hand with the hood on this truck,” said Alden. “We have to get out of here.”

Eric parked the rattletrap back of the house and Alden got out.

“Come along now,” he said.

The back door was unlocked, just as he had left it. He went into the kitchen and switched on the ceiling light.

Through the door that opened into the dining room, he could see the shadowy framework of the structure he had built.

“We can’t stay here too long,” said Eric. “They know we have the truck. More than likely they’ll guess where we were headed.”

Alden did not answer. For there was no answer. There was no place they could go.

Wherever they might go, they would be hunted down, for no one could be allowed to flaunt the medic statutes and defy the medic justice. There was no one in the world who would dare to help them.

He had run from Limbo to reach this place—although he had not known at the time what he was running to. It was not Limbo he had run from; rather, he had run to reach the machine that stood in the dining room just beyond this kitchen.

He went into the room and snapped on the light and the strange mechanism stood glittering in the center of the room.

It was a man-size cage and there was just room for him to stand inside of it. And he must let them know that he was back again.

He stepped into the space that had been meant to hold him and the outer framework and its mysterious attachments seemed to fold themselves about him.

He stood in the proper place and shut his eyes and thought of falling yellow leaves. He made himself into the boy again who had sat beneath the tree and it was not his mind, but the little boy mind that sensed the goldenness and blue, that smelled the wine of autumn air and the warmth of autumn sun.

He wrapped himself in autumn and the long ago and he waited for the answer, but there was no answer.

He waited and the goldenness slid from him and the air was no longer wine-like and there was no warm sunlight, but a biting wind that blew off some black sea of utter nothingness.

He knew—he knew and yet he’d not admit it. He stood stubbornly and wan, with his feet still in the proper place, and waited.

But even stubbornness wore thin and he knew that they were gone and that there was no use of waiting, for they would not be back. Slowly he turned and walked out of the cage.

He had been away too long.

As he stepped out of the cage, he saw the vial upon the floor and stooped to pick it up. He had sipped from it, he remembered, that day (how long ago?) when he had stepped back into the room after long hours in the cage.

They had materialized it for him and they’d told him he should drink it and he could remember the bitter taste it had left upon his tongue.

Kitty and Eric were standing in the doorway, staring at him, and he looked up from the vial and stared in their direction.

“Alden,” Kitty asked, “what has happened to you?”

He shook his head at her. “It’s all right,” he told her. “Nothing’s happened. They just aren’t there, is all.”

“Something happened,” she said. “You look younger by twenty years or more.”

He let the vial fall from his hand. He lifted his hands in front of him and in the light from overhead he saw that the wrinkles in the skin had disappeared. They were stronger, firmer hands. They were younger hands.

“It’s your face,” Kitty said. “It’s all filled out. The crow’s feet all are gone.”

He rubbed his palm along his jaw and it seemed to him that the bone was less pronounced, that the flesh had grown out to pad it.

“The fever,” he said. “That was it—the fever.”

For he remembered dimly. Not remembered, maybe, for perhaps he had never known. But he was knowing now. That was the way it had always worked. Not as if he’d learned a thing, but as if he’d remembered it. They put a thing into his mind and left it planted there and it unfolded then and crept upon him slowly.

And now he knew.

The cage was not a teacher. It was a device they had used to study man, to learn about his body and his metabolism and all the rest of it.

And then when they had known all that need be known, they had written the prescription and given it to him.

Young man, the robot in the barnyard had said to him. But he had not noticed. Young man, but he had too many other things to think about to notice those two words.

But the robot had been wrong.

For it was not only young.

Not young alone—not young for the sake of being young, but young because there was coursing in his body a strange alien virus, or whatever it might be, that had set his body right, that had tuned it up again, that had given it the power to replace old and aging tissue with new.

Doctors to the universe, he thought, that is what they were. Mechanics sent out to tinker up and renovate and put in shape the protoplasmic machinery that was running old and rusty.

“The fever?” Eric asked him.

“Yes,” said Alden. “And thank God, it’s contagious. You both caught it from me.”

He looked closely at them and there was no sign of it as yet, although Eric, it seemed, had begun to change. And Kitty, he thought, when it starts to work on her, how beautiful she’ll be! Beautiful because she had never lost a certain part of beauty that still showed through the age.

And all the people here in Willow Bend—they, too, had been exposed, as had the people who were condemned to Limbo. And perhaps the judge as well, the high and mighty face that had loomed so high above him. In a little while the fever and the healthy youthfulness would seep across the world.

“We can’t stay here,” said Eric. “The medics will be coming.”

Alden shook his head. “We don’t need to run,” he said. “They can’t hurt us now.”

For the medic rule was ended. There was now no need of medics, no need of little leagues, no need of health programs.

It would take a while, of course, for the people to realize what had happened to them, but the day would come when they would know for sure and then the medics could be broken down for scrap or used for other work.

He felt stronger than he’d ever felt. Strong enough, if need be, to walk back across the swamp to Limbo.

“We’d not got out of Limbo,” Kitty told him, “if it hadn’t been for you. You were just crazy enough to supply the guts we needed.”

“Please remember that,” said Alden, “in a few more days, when you are young again.”

This story, which was published in the March 1946 issue of Lariat Story Magazine , features as a minor character the only Native American to appear in Cliff’s westerns— and it should be noted that this particular “Indian Joe” seems to have more in common with his namesake in “Huckleberry Finn”—a renegade who spent his time hanging out with white criminals—than with most of the stereotypical Indians in some westerns.

More importantly, though, this story reflects Cliff Simak’s constant efforts to push the envelopes of the genres he worked in. In this case, he used the western genre to demonstrate the effect of the American Civil War on the frontier economy. For some time after the war, there was virtually no market for the cattle that had run wild on the range while many of the men were away fighting. And the people struggling to make a living from cattle, who had no way to bring them to the northern and eastern markets, just killed the animals in order to ship the hides and tallow from Texas seaports—leaving the rest of the carcasses to rot. It was the idea of driving cattle north to meet up with a railroad that would begin to pump money back into the frontier economy.