Clifford Simak - The Big Front Yard and Other Stories

“But why?” asked Clyne. “Why did they have to do it?”

“Because,” said Spencer, “they didn’t know how to operate their own engines.”

“But if they didn’t know how to operate their engines, how could they run this one?”

“He’s got you there,” said Dyer. “That’s one that you can’t answer.”

“No, I can’t,” shrugged Warren. “But I wish I could, because then we’d have the answer ourselves.”

“How long ago,” asked Spencer, “would you say this ship landed here? How long would it take for a spaceship hull to rust?”

“It’s hard to tell,” Clyne answered. “It would depend on the kind of metal they used. But you can bet on this – any spaceship hull, no matter who might have built it, would be the toughest metal the race could fabricate.”

“A thousand years?” Warren suggested.

“I don’t know,” said Clyne. “Maybe a thousand years. Maybe more than that. You see this dust. That’s what’s left of whatever organic material there was in the ship. If the beings that landed here remained within the ship, they still are here in the form of dust.”

Warren tried to think, tried to sort out the chronology of the whole thing.

A thousand years ago, or thousands of years ago, a spaceship had landed here and had not got away.

They another spaceship landed, a thousand or thousands of years later, and it, too, was unable to get away. But it finally escaped when the crew robbed the first ship of its engines and substituted them for the ones that had brought it here.

Then years, or months, or days later, the Earth survey ship had landed here, and it, too, couldn’t get away – because the men who ran it couldn’t remember how to operate its engines.

He swung around and strode from the engine room, leaving the others there, following the path in the dust back to the shattered lock.

And just inside the port, sitting on the floor, making squiggles in the dust with an awkward finger, sat Briggs, who had gone back to the ship to get a length of rope.

“Briggs,” said Warren sharply. “Briggs, what are you doing here?”

Briggs looked up with vacant, laughing eyes.

“Go away,” he said.

Then he went back to making squiggles in the dust.

Doc Spears said, “Briggs reverted to childhood. His mind is wiped as clean as a one-year-old’s. He can talk, which is about the only difference between a child and him. But his vocabulary is limited and what he says makes very little sense.”

“He can be taught again?” asked Warren.

“I don’t know.”

“Spencer had a look at him. What does Spencer say?”

“Spencer said a lot,” Doc told him. “It adds up, substantially, to practically total loss of memory.”

“What can we do?”

“Watch him. See he doesn’t get hurt. After a while we might try re-education. He may even pick up some things by himself. Something happened to him. Whether whatever it was that took his memory away also injured his brain is something I can’t say for sure. It doesn’t appear injured, but without a lot of diagnostic equipment we don’t have, you can’t be positive.”

“There’s no sign of injury?”

“There’s not a single mark anywhere,” said Doc. “He isn’t hurt. That is, not physically. It’s only his mind that’s been injured. Maybe not his mind, either – just his memory gone.”

“Amnesia?”

“Not amnesia. When you have that, you’re confused. You are haunted by the thought that you have forgotten something. You’re all tangled up. Briggs isn’t confused or tangled. He seems to be happy enough.”

“You’ll take care of him, Doc? Kind of keep an eye on him?”

Doc snorted and got up and left.

Warren called after him. “If you see Bat Ears down there, tell him to come up.”

Doc clumped down the stairs.

Warren sat and stared at the blank wall opposite him.

First Mac and his crew had forgotten how to run the engines. That was the first sign of what was happening – the first recognizable sign – for it had been going on long before Mac found he’d forgotten all his engine lore.

The crew of investigators had lost some of their skills and their knowledge almost from the first. How else could one account for the terrible mess they’d made of the junkyard business? Under ordinary circumstances, they would have wrung some substantial information from the engine parts and the neatly stacked supplies. They had gotten information of a sort, of course, but it added up to nothing. Under ordinary circumstances, it should have added up to an extraordinary something.

He heard feet coming up the stairs, but the tread was too crisp for Bat Ears.

It was Spencer.

Spencer flopped into one of the chairs. He sat there opening and closing his hands, looking down at them with helpless anger.

“Well?” asked Warren. “Anything to report?”

“Briggs got into that first tower,” said Spencer. “Apparently he came back with the rope and found us gone, so he climbed up and threw a hitch around the capstone, then climbed down again and pulled it off. The capstone is lying on the ground, at the foot of the tower, with the rope still hitched around it.”

Warren nodded. “He could have done that. The capstone wasn’t too heavy. One man could have pulled it off.”

“There’s something in that tower.”

“You took a look?”

“After what happened to Briggs? Of course not. I posted a guard to keep everyone away. We can’t go monkeying around with the tower until we’ve thought a few things through.”

“What do you think is in there?”

“I don’t know,” said Spencer. “All I have is an idea. We know what it can do. It can strip your memory.”

“Maybe it’s fright that did it,” Warren said. “Something down in the tower so horrible …”

Spencer shook his head. “There is no evidence of fright in Briggs. He’s calm. Sits there happy as a clam, playing with his fingers and talking silly sentences – happy sentences. The way a kid would talk.”

“Maybe what he’s saying will give us a hint. Keep someone listening all the time. Even if the words don’t mean much …”

“It wouldn’t do any good. Not only is his memory gone, but even the memory of what took it away.”

“What do you plan to do?”

“Try to get into the tower,” said Spencer. “Try to find out what’s in there. There must be a way of getting at whatever is there and coming out okay.”

“Look,” Warren stated, “we have enough as it is.”

“I have a hunch.”

“This is the first time I’ve ever heard you use that word. You gents don’t operate on hunches. You operate on fact.”

Spencer put up an outspread hand and wiped it across his face.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me, Warren. I know I’ve never thought in hunches before. Perhaps because now I can’t help myself, the hunch comes in and fills the place of knowledge that I’ve lost.”

“You admit there’s been knowledge lost?”

“Of course I do,” said Spencer. “You were right about the junkyard. We should have done a better job.”

“And now you have a hunch.”

“It’s crazy,” said Spencer. “At least, it sounds crazy. That memory, that lost knowledge and lost skill went somewhere. Maybe there’s something in the tower that took it away. I have the silly feeling we might get it back again, take it back from the thing that has it.”

He looked challengingly at Warren. “You think I’m cracked.”

Warren shook his head. “No, not that. Just grasping at straws.”

Spencer got up heavily. “I’ll do what I can. I’ll talk with the others. We’ll try to think it out before we try anything.”