As the days went on, the valley and its mounds, the caves and their residue of a vanished culture seized upon my imagination, and it seemed to me that, in some mysterious manner, I grew closer to that extinct race and sensed at once its greatness and its tragedy. And the feeling grew as well that this frantic hunt of ours bordered on sacrilege and callous profanation of the dead.
Jimmy had not gone out with us a single day. He’d sit hunched over his ream of paper and he scribbled and revised and crossed out words and put in others. He’d get up and walk around in circles or pace back and forth and mumble to himself, then go back and write some more. He scarcely ate and he wouldn’t talk and he only slept a little. He was the very portrait of a Young Man in the Throes of Creation.
I got curious about it, wondering if, with all this agony and sweat, he might be at last writing something that was worth the effort. So, when he wasn’t looking, I sneaked out a page of it.
It was even worse than the goo he had written before.
That night I lay awake and looked up at the unfamiliar stars and surrendered myself to loneliness. Only, once I had surrendered, I found that I was not so lonely as I might have been—that somehow I had drawn comfort and perhaps even understanding from the muteness of the ruin-mounds and the shining wonder of the trove.
Finally I dropped asleep.
I don’t know what woke me. It might have been the wind or the sound of the waves breaking on the beach or maybe the chilliness of the night.
Then I heard it, a voice like a chant, solemn and sonorous, a throaty whisper in the dark.
I started up and propped myself on an elbow—and caught my breath at what I saw.
Jimmy was standing in front of Lulu, holding a flashlight in one hand, reading her his saga. His voice had a rolling quality, and despite the soggy words, there was a fascination in the tenor of his tone. It must have been so that the ancient Greeks read their Homer in the flare of torches before the next day’s battle.
And Lulu was listening. She had a face hung out and the tentacle which supported it was twisted to one side, so that her audio would not miss a single syllable, just as a man might cup his ear.
Looking at that touching scene, I began to feel a little sorry about the way we’d treated Jimmy. We wouldn’t listen to him and the poor devil had to read that tripe of his to someone. His soul hungered for appreciation and he’d got no appreciation out of either Ben or me. Merely writing was not enough for him; he must share it. He had to have an audience.
I put out a hand and shook Ben gently by the shoulder. He came storming up out of his blankets.
«What the hell is—»
«Sh-h-h!»
He drew in a whistling breath and dropped on one knee beside me.
Jimmy went on with his reading and Lulu, with her face cocked attentively, went on listening.
Part of the words came to us, wind-blown and fragmentary:
«Wanderer of the far ways between the two faces of eternity, True, forever, to the race that forged her,
«With the winds of alien space blowing in her hair, Wearing a circlet of stars as her crown of glory …»
Lulu wept. There was the shine of tears in that single, gleaming lens.
She grew another tentacle and there was a hand on the end of it and a handkerchief, a very white and lacy and extremely feminine hanky, was clutched within the hand.
She dabbed with the handkerchief at her dripping eye.
If she had had a nose, she undoubtedly would have blown it, delicately, of course, and very ladylike.
«And you wrote it all for me?» she asked.
«All for you,» said Jimmy. He was lying like a trooper. The only reason he was reading it to her was because he knew that Ben and I wouldn’t listen to it.
«I’ve been so wrong,» Lulu sighed.
She wiped her eye quite dry and briskly polished it.
«Just a second,» she said, very businesslike. «There’s something I must do.»
We waited, scarcely breathing.
Slowly the port in Lulu’s side came open. She grew a long, limber tentacle and reached inside the port and hauled Elmer out. She held him dangling.
«You lout!» she stormed at Elmer. «I take you in and stuff you full of phosphates. I get your dents smoothed out and I polish you all bright. And then what? Do you write sagas for me? No, you grow fat and satisfied. There’s no mark of greatness on you, no spark of imagination. You’re nothing but a dumb machine!»
Elmer just dangled at the end of Lulu’s tentacle, but his wheels were spinning furiously and I took that to mean that he was upset.
«Love!» proclaimed Lulu. «Love for the likes of us? We machines have better things to do—far better. There are the star-studded trails of space waiting for our tread, the bitter winds of foreverness blowing from the cloud banks of eternity, the mountains of the great beyond …»
She went on for quite a while about the challenge of the farther galaxies, about wearing a coronet of stars, about the dust of shattered time paving the road that led into the ultimate nothingness, and all of it was lifted from what Jimmy called a saga.
Then, when she was all through, she hurled Elmer down the beach and he hit the sand and skidded straight into the water.
We didn’t wait to see any more of it. We were off like sprinters. We hit the ramp full tilt and went up it in a leap and flung ourselves into our quarters.
Lulu slammed the port behind us.
«Welcome home,» she said.
I walked over to Jimmy and held out my hand. «Great going, kid. You got Longfellow backed clear off the map.»
Ben also shook his hand. «It was a masterpiece.»
«And now,» said Lulu, «we’ll be on our way.»
«Our way!» yelled Ben. «We can’t leave this planet. Not right away at least. There’s that city out there. We can’t go until—»
«Phooey on the city,» Lulu said. «Phooey on the data. We are off star-wandering. We are searching out the depths of silence. We are racing down the corridors of space with thunder in our brain—the everlasting thunder of a dread eternity.»
We turned and looked at Jimmy.
«Every word of it,» I said. «Every single word of it out of that muck he wrote.»
Ben took a quick step forward and grabbed Jimmy by his shirt front.
«Don’t you feel the urge,» Ben asked him, «don’t you feel a mighty impulse to write a lengthy ode to home—its comfort and its glory and all the other clichés?»
Jimmy’s teeth were chattering just a little.
«Lulu is a sucker,» Ben said, «for everything you write.»
I lifted a fist and let Jimmy smell of it.
«You better make it good,» I warned him. «You better write like you never wrote before.»
«But keep it sloppy,» Ben said. «That’s the way Lulu likes it.»
Jimmy sat down on the floor and began writing desperately.
Smoke Killer
Framed for the murder of his partner and two jumps ahead of a lynching, Danny Morgan’s only hope for salvation was a discarded tobacco sack. His story is probably the earliest of Clifford Simak’s published westerns (if nothing else, the style and language of the story shows that). I suspect this story was probably the one entitled «Killers Shouldn’t Smoke» when Cliff sent it out.
Originally sent to Wild West Weekly in February of 1943, only to be rejected there before finally being accepted by Lariat Story Magazine, it would see publication in the May 1944 issue of the latter magazine–which sold for twenty cents if purchased from a newsstand (but you could subscribe for $1.25 for a year). This is one of Cliff’s shorter westerns, which likely means that he did not get paid any large sum (most of his later westerns would be much longer).