Clifford Simak - The Big Front Yard and Other Stories

He found the shoes on the floor at the end of the bed and sat down upon the bed to pull them on.

And his mind was racing on what he had to do.

He’d have to get some gasoline somehow and fill up the truck and stash an extra can or two into the back and he’d have to take some food and water and perhaps his sleeping bag. For he wasn’t coming back until he found his dog.

He got on his shoes and tied them, then went out into the living room. There was no one there, but there were voices in the kitchen.

He looked out the window and the desert lay outside, unchanged. The sun, he noticed, had climbed higher in the sky, but out in his front yard it still was forenoon.

He looked at his watch and it was six o’clock and from the way the shadows had been falling when he’d peered out of the bedroom window, he knew that it was 6:00 p.m. He realized with a guilty start that he must have slept almost around the clock. He had not meant to sleep that long. He hadn’t meant to leave Towser out there that long.

He headed for the kitchen and there were three persons there – Abbie and Henry Horton and a man in military garb.

“There you are,” cried Abbie merrily. “We were wondering when you would wake up.”

“You have some coffee cooking, Abbie?”

“Yes, a whole pot full of it. And I’ll cook up something else for you.”

“Just some toast,” said Taine. “I haven’t got much time. I have to hunt for Towser.”

“Hiram,” said Henry, “this is Colonel Ryan. National Guard. He has his boys outside.”

“Yes, I saw them through the window.”

“Necessary,” said Henry. “Absolutely necessary. The sheriff couldn’t handle it. The people came rushing in and they’d have torn the place apart. So I called the governor.”

“Taine,” the colonel said, “sit down. I want to talk with you.”

“Certainly,” said Taine, taking a chair. “Sorry to be in such a rush, but I lost my dog out there.”

“This business,” said the colonel, smugly, “is vastly more important than any dog could be.”

“Well, colonel, that just goes to show that you don’t know Towser. He’s the best dog I ever had and I’ve had a lot of them. Raised him from a pup and he’s been a good friend all these years –”

“All right,” the colonel said, “so he is a friend. But still I have to talk with you.”

“You just sit and talk,” Abbie said to Taine. “I’ll fix up some cakes and Henry brought over some of that sausage that we get out on the farm.”

The back door opened and Beasly staggered in to the accompaniment of a terrific metallic banging. He was carrying three empty five-gallon gas cans in one hand and two in the other hand and they were bumping and banging together as he moved.

“Say,” yelled Taine, “what is going on here?”

“Now, just take it easy,” Henry said. “You have no idea the problems that we have. We wanted to get a big gas tank moved through here, but we couldn’t do it. We tried to rip out the back of the kitchen to get it through, but we couldn’t –”

“You did what!”

“We tried to rip out the back of the kitchen,” Henry told him calmly. “You can’t get one of those big storage tanks through an ordinary door. But when we tried, we found that the entire house is boarded up inside with the same kind of material that you used down in the basement. You hit it with an axe and it blunts the steel –”

“But, Henry, this is my house and there isn’t anyone who has the right to start tearing it apart.”

“Fat chance,” the colonel said. “What I would like to know, Taine, what is that stuff that we couldn’t break through?”

“Now you take it easy, Hiram,” cautioned Henry. “We have a big new world waiting for us out there –”

“It isn’t waiting for you or anyone,” yelled Taine.

“And we have to explore it and to explore it we need a stockpile of gasoline. So since we can’t have a storage tank, we’re getting together as many gas cans as possible and then we’ll run a hose through here –”

“But, Henry –”

“I wish,” said Henry sternly, “that you’d quit interrupting me and let me have my say. You can’t even imagine the logistics that we face. We’re bottlenecked by the size of a regulation door. We have to get supplies out there and we have to get transport. Cars and trucks won’t be so bad. We can disassemble them and lug them through piecemeal, but a plane will be a problem.”

“You listen to me, Henry. There isn’t anyone going to haul a plane through here. This house has been in my family for almost a hundred years and I own it and I have a right to it and you can’t come in highhanded and start hauling stuff through it.”

“But,” said Henry plaintively, “we need a plane real bad. You can cover so much more ground when you have a plane.”

Beasly went banging through the kitchen with his cans and out into the living room.

The colonel sighed. “I had hoped, Mr. Taine, that you would understand how the matter stood. To me it seems very plain that it’s your patriotic duty to co-operate with us in this. The government, of course, could exercise the right of eminent domain and start condemnation action, but it would rather not do that. I’m speaking unofficially, of course, but I think it’s safe to say the government would much prefer to arrive at an amicable agreement.”

“I doubt,” Taine said, bluffing, not knowing anything about it, “that the right of eminent domain would be applicable. As I understand it, it applies to buildings and to roads –”

“This is a road,” the colonel told him flatly. “A road right through your house to another world.”

“First,” Taine declared, “the government would have to show it was in the public interest and that refusal of the owner to relinquish title amounted to an interference in government procedure and –”

“I think,” the colonel said, “that the government can prove it is in the public interest.”

“I think,” Taine said angrily, “I better get a lawyer.”

“If you really mean that,” Henry offered, ever helpful, “and you want to get a good one – and I presume you do – I would be pleased to recommend a firm that I am sure would represent your interests most ably and be, at the same time, fairly reasonable in cost.”

The colonel stood up, seething. “You’ll have a lot to answer, Taine. There’ll be a lot of things the government will want to know. First of all, they’ll want to know just how you engineered this. Are you ready to tell that?”

“No,” said Taine, “I don’t believe I am.”

And he thought with some alarm: They think that I’m the one who did it and they’ll be down on me like a pack of wolves to find out just how I did it. He had visions of the FBI and the state department and the Pentagon and, even sitting down, he felt shaky in the knees.

The colonel turned around and marched stiffly from the kitchen. He went out the back and slammed the door behind him.

Henry looked at Taine speculatively.

“Do you really mean it?” he demanded. “Do you intend to stand up to them?”

“I’m getting sore,” said Taine. “They can’t come in here and take over without even asking me. I don’t care what anyone may think, this is my house. I was born here and I’ve lived here all my life and I like the place and –”

“Sure,” said Henry. “I know just how you feel.”

“I suppose it’s childish of me, but I wouldn’t mind so much if they showed a willingness to sit down and talk about what they meant to do once they’d taken over. But there seems no disposition to even ask me what I think about it. And I tell you, Henry, this is different than it seems. This is not a place where we can walk in and take over, no matter what Washington may think. There is something out there and we better watch our step –”