«Never saw anything like it in my life,» he declared. «How he made that ship go at all with half the plates ripped off is way beyond me.»
The dungareed mechanic sighted along the toes of his shoes, planted comfortably on the desk.
«Let me tell you, mister,» he declared, «the solar system never has known a pilot like him … never will again. He brought his ship down here with the instruments knocked out. Dead reckoning.»
«Wrote a great piece about him,» Billy said. «How he died in the best tradition of space. Stuff like that. The readers will eat it up. The way that ship let go he didn’t have a chance. Seemed to go out of control all at once and went heaving and bucking almost into Saturn. Then, blooey … that’s the end of it. One big splash of flame.»
The mechanic squinted carefully at his toes. «They’re still out there, messing around,» he said, «but they’ll never find him. When that ship blew up he was scattered halfway to Pluto.»
The inner lock swung open ponderously and a spacesuited figure stepped in.
They waited while he snapped back his helmet.
«Good evening, gentlemen,» said Oliver Meek.
They stared, slack-jawed.
Jones was the first to recover. «But it can’t be you! Your ship … it exploded!»
«I know,» said Meek. «I got out just before it went. Turned on my suit rocket full blast. Knocked me out. By the time I came to I was halfway out to the second Ring. Took me awhile to get back.»
He turned to the mechanic. «Maybe you have a secondhand suit you would sell me. I have to get rid of this one. Has some bugs in it.»
«Bugs? Oh, yes, I see. You mean something’s wrong with it.»
«That’s it,» said Meek. «Something’s wrong with it.»
«I got one I’ll let you have, free for nothing,» said the mechanic. «Boy, that was a swell game you played!»
«Could I have the suit now?» asked Meek. «I’m in a hurry to get away.»
Jones bounced to his feet. «But you can’t leave. Why, they think you’re dead. They’re out looking for you. And you won the cup … the cup as the most valuable team member.»
«I just can’t stay,» said Meek. He shuffled his feet uneasily. «Got places to go. Things to see. Stayed too long already.»
«But the cup …»
«Tell Gus I won the cup for him. Tell him to put it on that mantel piece. In the place he dusted off for it.»
Meek’s blue eyes shone queerly behind his glasses. «Tell him maybe he’ll think of me sometimes when he looks at it.»
The mechanic brought the suit. Meek bundled it under his arm, started for the lock.
Then turned back.
«Maybe you gentlemen …»
«Yes,» said Jones.
«Maybe you can tell me how many goals I made. I lost count, you see.»
«You made nine,» said Jones.
Meek shook his head. «Must be getting old,» he said. «When I was a kid I was a ten-goal man.»
Then he was gone, the lock swinging shut behind him.
The World That Couldn’t Be
The first mention of this story, in Clifford D. Simak’s journals, comes in a short entry for April 18, 1957, in which he merely states that he is starting the «Beast story.» By May 9 he had finished it and sent it to Horace Gold, now with the title «The Cytha.» «Got good ending,» Cliff said in his journal—and he was right.
The story appeared in the January 1958 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, and there is no indication in Cliff’s journals that he had anything to do with its second change of title.
—dww
The tracks went up one row and down another, and in those rows the vua plants had been sheared off an inch or two above the ground. The raider had been methodical; it had not wandered about haphazardly, but had done an efficient job of harvesting the first ten rows on the west side of the field.
Then, having eaten its fill, it had angled off into the bush—and that had not been long ago, for the soil still trickled down into the great pug marks, sunk deep into the finely cultivated loam.
Somewhere a sawmill bird was whirring through a log, and down in one of the thorn-choked ravines, a choir of chatterers was clicking through a ghastly morning song. It was going to be a scorcher of a day. Already the smell of desiccated dust was rising from the ground and the glare of the newly risen sun was dancing off the bright leaves of the hula-trees, making it appear as if the bush were filled with a million flashing mirrors.
Gavin Duncan hauled a red bandanna from his pocket and mopped his face.
«No, mister,» pleaded Zikkara, the native foreman of the farm. «You cannot do it, mister. You do not hunt a Cytha.»
«The hell I don’t,» said Duncan, but he spoke in English and not the native tongue.
He stared out across the bush, a flat expanse of sun-cured grass interspersed with thickets of hula-scrub and thorn and occasional groves of trees, criss-crossed by treacherous ravines and spotted with infrequent waterholes.
It would be murderous out there, he told himself, but it shouldn’t take too long. The beast probably would lay up shortly after its pre-dawn feeding and he’d overhaul it in an hour or two. But if he failed to overhaul it, then he must keep on.
«Dangerous,» Zikkara pointed out. «No one hunts the Cytha.»
«I do,» Duncan said, speaking now in the native language. «I hunt anything that damages my crop. A few nights more of this and there would be nothing left.»
Jamming the bandanna back into his pocket, he tilted his hat lower across his eyes against the sun.
«It might be a long chase, mister. It is the skun season now. If you were caught out there…»
«Now listen,» Duncan told it sharply. «Before I came, you’d feast one day, then starve for days on end; but now you eat each day. And you like the doctoring. Before, when you got sick, you died. Now you get sick, I doctor you, and you live. You like staying in one place, instead of wandering all around.»
«Mister, we like all this,» said Zikkara, «but we do not hunt the Cytha.»
«If we do not hunt the Cytha, we lose all this,» Duncan pointed out. «If I don’t make a crop, I’m licked. I’ll have to go away. Then what happens to you?»
«We will grow the corn ourselves.»
«That’s a laugh,» said Duncan, «and you know it is. If I didn’t kick your backsides all day long, you wouldn’t do a lick of work. If I leave, you go back to the bush. Now let’s go and get that Cytha.»
«But it is such a little one, mister! It is such a young one! It is scarcely worth the trouble. It would be a shame to kill it.»
Probably just slightly smaller than a horse, thought Duncan, watching the native closely.
It’s scared, he told himself. It’s scared dry and spitless.
«Besides, it must have been most hungry. Surely, mister, even a Cytha has the right to eat.»
«Not from my crop,» said Duncan savagely. «You know why we grow the vua, don’t you? You know it is great medicine. The berries that it grows cures those who are sick inside their heads. My people need that medicine—need it very badly. And what is more, out there»—he swept his arm toward the sky—«out there they pay very much for it.»
«But, mister…»
«I tell you this,» said Duncan gently, «you either dig me up a bush-runner to do the tracking for me or you can all get out, the kit and caboodle of you. I can get other tribes to work the farm.»
«No, mister!» Zikkara screamed in desperation.
«You have your choice,» Duncan told it coldly.
He plodded back across the field toward the house. Not much of a house as yet. Not a great deal better than a native shack. But someday it would be, he told himself. Let him sell a crop or two and he’d build a house that would really be a house. It would have a bar and swimming pool and a garden filled with flowers, and at last, after years of wandering, he’d have a home and broad acres and everyone, not just one lousy tribe, would call him mister.