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

He sat for long hours upon a polished rock, perhaps part of that once proud city, which he found just a few yards from the tunnel mouth, and stared out across the sun-washed wilderness which stretched for miles toward a horizon that it never seemed to reach. He sought for purpose with a sharp-edged mind that probed at the roots of existence and of happenstance and sought to evolve out of the random factors that moved beneath the surface of the universe’s orderliness some evidence of a pattern that would be understandable to the human mind. Often he thought he had it, but it always slid away from him like quicksilver escaping from a clutching hand.

If Man ever was to find the answer, he knew, it must be in a place like this, where there was no distraction, where there was a distance and a barrenness that built up to a vast impersonality which emphasized and underscored the inconsequence of the thinker. For if the thinker introduced himself as a factor out of proportion to the fact, then the whole problem was distorted and the equation, if equation there be, never could be solved.

At first he had tried to hunt animals for food, but strangely, while the rest of the wilderness swarmed with vicious life that hunted timid life, the area around the city was virtually deserted, as if some one had drawn a sacred chalk mark around it. On his second day of hunting he killed a small thing that on Earth could have been a mouse. He built a fire and cooked it and later hunted up the sun-dried skin and sucked and chewed at it for the small nourishment that it might contain. But after that he did not kill a thing, for there was nothing to be killed.

Finally he came to know the seven would not come, that they never had intended to come, that they had deserted him exactly as his two human companions had deserted him before. He had been made a fool, he knew, not once, but twice.

He should have kept on going east after he had started. He should not have come back with seven to find the other six who waited at the canyon’s mouth.

You might have made it to the settlements, he told himself. You just might have made it. Just possibly have made it.

East. East toward the settlements.

Human history is a trying…a trying for the impossible, and attaining it. There is no logic, for if humanity had waited upon logic it still would be a cave-living and an earth-bound race.

Try, said Webb, not knowing exactly what he said.

He walked down the hill again and started out across the wilderness, heading toward the east. For there was no hope upon the hill and there was hope toward the east.

A mile from the base of the hill, he fell. He staggered, falling and rising, for another mile. He crawled a hundred yards. It was there the seven found him.

“Food!” he cried at them and he had a feeling that although he cried it in his mind there was no sound in his mouth. “Food! Water!”

“We take care,” they said, and lifted him, holding him in a sitting position.

“Life,” Seven told him, “is in many husks. Like nested boxes that fit inside each other. You live one and you peel it off and there’s another life.”

“Wrong,” said Webb. “You do not talk like that. Your thought does not flow like that. There is something wrong.”

“There is an inner man,” said Seven. “There are many inner men.”

“The subconscious,” said Webb, and while he said it in his mind, he knew that no word, no sound came out of his mouth. And he knew now, too, that no words were coming out of Seven’s mouth, that here were words that could not be expressed in the patois of the desert, that here were thoughts and knowledge that could not belong to a thing that scuttled, fearsome, through the Martian wilderness.

“You peel an old life off and you step forth in a new and shining life,” said Seven, “but you must know the way. There is a certain technique and a certain preparation. If there is no preparation and no technique, the job is often bungled.”

“Preparation,” said Webb. “I have no preparation. I do not know about this.”

“You are prepared,” said Seven. “You were not before, but now you are.”

“I thought,” said Webb.

“You thought,” said Seven, “and you found a partial answer. Well-fed, earth-bound, arrogant, there would have been no answer. You found humility.”

“I do not know the technique,” said Webb. “I do not…”

“We know the technique,” Seven said. “We take care.”

The hilltop where the dead city lay shimmered and there was a mirage on it. Out of the dead mound of its dust rose the pinnacles and spires, the buttresses and the flying bridges of a city that shone with color and with light; out of the sand came the blaze of garden beds of flowers and the tall avenues of trees and a music that came from the slender bell towers.

There was grass beneath his feet instead of sand blazing with the heat of the Martian noon. There was a path that led up the terraces of the hill toward the wonder city that reared upon its heights. There was the distant sound of laughter and there were flecks of color moving on the distant streets and along the walls and through the garden paths.

Webb swung around and the seven were not there. Nor was the wilderness. The land stretched away on every hand and it was not wilderness, but a breath-taking place with groves of trees and roads and flowing water courses.

He turned back to the city again and watched the movement of the flecks of color.

“People,” he said.

And Seven’s voice, coming to him from somewhere, from elsewhere, said:

“People from the many planets. And from beyond the planets. And some of your own people you will find among them. For you are not the first.”

Filled with wonder, a wonder that was fading, that would be entirely faded before he reached the city, Webb started walking up the path.

Wampus Smith and Lars Nelson came to the hill many days later. They came on foot because the wilderness wagon had broken down. They came without food except the little food they could kill along the way and they came with no more than a few drops of water sloshing in their canteens and there was no water to be found.

There, a short distance from the foot of the hill, they found the sun-dried mummy of a man face downward on the sand and when they turned him over they saw who he was.

Wampus stared across the body at Lars.

“How did he get here?” he croaked.

“I don’t know,” said Lars. “He never could have made it, not knowing the country and on foot. And he wouldn’t have traveled this way anyhow. He would have headed east, back to the settlements.”

They pawed through his clothing and found nothing. But they took his gun, for the charges in their own were running very low.

“What’s the use,” said Lars. “We can’t make it, Wampus.”

“We can try,” said Wampus.

Above the hill a mirage flickered…a city with shining turrets and dizzy pinnacles and rows of trees and fountains that flashed with leaping water. To their ears came the sound, or seemed to come, the sound of many bells.

Wampus spat with lips that were cracked and dried, spat with no saliva in his mouth.

“Them damn mirages,” he said. “They drive a man half crazy.”

“They seem so close,” said Lars. “So close and real. As if they were someplace else and were trying to break through.”

Wampus spat again. “Let’s get going,” he said.

The two men turned toward the east and as they moved, they left staggering, uneven tracks through the sand of Mars.

Cliff Simak once called this story one of the few he wrote to order: he’d been asked for a story that could appear in the October 1971 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as a celebration of Cliff’s concurrent appearance as Guest of Honor at that year’s World Science Fiction Convention. And it would become one of his favorites among his stories. But it is, in a way, an extension of those Simak stories that featured people trying to find a way to flee some sort of societal collapse—and it’s haunted.