Clifford Simak - The Big Front Yard and Other Stories

Warren said, “I’d put them on a planet just like this.”

“Let me give you the picture,” Spencer continued. “Some race is bent on trapping knowledge throughout the Galaxy. So they hunt up the little, insignificant, good-for-nothing planets where they can hide their traps. That way, with traps planted on strategically spaced planets, they sweep all space and there’s little chance that their knowledge traps ever will be found.”

“You think that’s what we’ve found here?” asked Clyne.

“I’m tossing you the idea,” said Spencer, “to see what you think of it. Now let’s hear your comments.”

“Well, the distance, for one thing –”

“What we have here,” said Spencer, “is mechanical telepathy hooked up with a recording device. We know that distance has little to do with the speed of thought waves.”

“There’s no other basis for this belief beyond speculation?” asked Warren.

“What else can there be? You certainly can’t expect proof. We don’t dare to get close enough to find out what this egg is. And maybe, even if we could, we haven’t got enough knowledge left in us to make an intelligent decision or a correct deduction.”

“So we guess again,” said Warren.

“Have you some better method?”

Warren shook his head. “No, I don’t think I have.”

Dyer put on a spacesuit, with a rope running from it to the pulley in the tripod set above the tower. He carried wires to connect to the studs. The other ends of the wires were connected to a dozen different instruments to see what might come over them – if anything.

Dyer climbed the tower and they lowered him down into the inside of the tower. Almost immediately, he quit talking to them, so they pulled him out.

When they loosened the spacesuit helmet and hinged it back, he gurgled and blew bubbles at them.

Old Doc gently led him back to sick bay.

Clyne and Pollard worked for hours designing a lead helmet with television installed instead of vision plates. Howard, the biologist, climbed inside the spacesuit and was lowered into the tower.

When they hauled him out a minute later, he was crying – like a child. Ellis hurried him after Old Doc and Dyer, with Howard clutching his hands and babbling between sobs.

After ripping the television unit out of the helmet, Pollard was all set to go in the helmet made of solid lead when Warren put a stop to it.

“You keep this up much longer,” he told them, “and we’ll have no one left.”

“This one has a chance of working,” Clyne declared. “It might have been the television lead-ins that let them get at Howard.”

“It has a chance of not working, too.”

“But we have to try.”

“Not until I say so.”

Pollard started to put the solid helmet on his head.

“Don’t put that thing on,” said Warren. “You’re not going anywhere you’ll be needing it.”

“I’m going in the tower,” Pollard said flatly.

Warren took a step toward him and without warning lashed out with his fist. It caught Pollard on the jaw and crumpled him.

Warren turned to face the rest of them. “If there’s anyone else who thinks he wants to argue, I’m ready to begin the discussion – in the same way.”

None of them wanted to argue. He could see the tired disgust for him written on their faces.

Spencer said, “You’re upset, Warren. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I know damned well what I’m doing,” Warren retorted. “I know there must be a way to get into that tower and get out again with some of your memory left. But the way you’re going about it isn’t the right way.”

“You know another?” asked Ellis bitterly.

“No, I don’t,” said Warren. “Not yet.”

“What do you want us to do?” demanded Ellis. “Sit around and twiddle our thumbs?”

“I want you to behave like grown men,” said Warren, “not like a bunch of crazy kids out to rob an orchard.”

He stood and looked at them and none of them had a word to say.

“I have three mewling babies on my hands right now,” he added. “I don’t want any more.”

He walked away, up the hill, heading for the ship.

Their memory had been stolen, probably by the egg that squatted in the tower. And although none of them had dared to say the thought aloud, the thing that all of them were thinking was that maybe there was a way to steal the knowledge back, to tap and drain all the rest of the knowledge that was stored within the egg.

Warren sat at his desk and held his head in his hands, trying to think.

Maybe he should have let them go ahead with what they had been doing. But if he had, they’d have kept right on, using variations of the same approach – and when the approach had failed twice, they should have figured out that approach was wrong and tried another.

Spencer had said that they’d lost knowledge and not known they had lost it, and that was the insidious part of the whole situation. They still thought of themselves as men of science, and they were, of course, but not as skilled, not as knowledgeable as they once had been.

That was the hell of it – they still thought they were.

They despised him now and that was all right with him. Anything was all right with him if it would help them discover a way to escape.

Forgetfulness, he thought. All through the Galaxy, there was forgetfulness. There were explanations for that forgetfulness, very learned and astute theories on why a being should forget something it had learned. But might not all these explanations be wrong? Might it not be that forgetfulness could be traced, not to some kink within the brain, not to some psychic cause, but to thousands upon thousands of memory traps planted through the Galaxy, traps that tapped and drained and nibbled away at the mass memory of all the sentient beings which lived among the stars?

On Earth a man would forget slowly over the span of many years and that might be because the memory traps that held Earth in their orbit were very far away. But here a man forgot completely and suddenly. Might that not be because he was within the very shadow of the memory traps?

He tried to imagine Operation Mind Trap and it was a shocking concept too big for the brain to grasp. Someone came to the backwoods planets, the good-for-nothing planets, the sure-to-be-passed-by planets and set out the memory traps.

They hooked them up in series and built towers to protect them from weather or from accident, and set them operating and connected them to tanks of nutrients buried deep within the soil. Then they went away.

And years later – how many years later, a thousand, ten thousand? – they came back again and emptied the traps of the knowledge they had gathered. As a trapper sets out traps to catch animals for fur, or a fisherman should set the pots for lobsters or drag the seine for fish.

A harvest, Warren thought – a continual, never-ending harvest of the knowledge of the Galaxy.

If this were true, what kind of race would it be that set the traps? What kind of trapper would be plodding the starways, gathering his catch?

Warren’s reason shrank away from the kind of race that it would be.

The creatures undoubtedly came back again, after many years, and emptied the traps of the knowledge they had snared. That must be what they’d do, for why otherwise would they bother to set out the traps? And if they could empty the traps of the knowledge they had caught, that meant there was some way to empty them. And if the trappers themselves could drain off the knowledge, so could another race.

If you could only get inside the tower and have a chance to figure out the way, you could do the job, for probably it was a simple thing, once you had a chance to see it. But you couldn’t get inside. If you did, you were robbed of all memory and came out a squalling child. The moment you got inside, the egg grabbed onto your mind and wiped it clean and you didn’t even know why you were there or how you’d got there or where you were.